I Have Got
Myself So Entangled With Facts That I Cannot Follow This Plan, And
Therefore Am Compelled To Think Polygamy For The African Is Not An
Unmixed Evil; And That At The Present Culture-Level Of The African
It Is Not To Be Eradicated.
This arises from two reasons; the first
is that it is perfectly impossible for one African woman to do
The
work of the house, prepare the food, fetch water, cultivate the
plantations, and look after the children attributive to one man.
She might do it if she had the work in her of an English or Irish
charwoman, but she has not, and a whole villageful of African women
do not do the work in a week that one of these will do in a day.
Then, too, the African lady is quite indifferent as to what extent
her good man may flirt with other ladies so long only as he does not
go and give them more cloth and beads than he gives her; and the
second reason for polygamy lies in the custom well-known to
ethnologists, and so widely diffused that one might say it was
constant throughout all African tribes, only there are so many of
them whose domestic relationships have not been carefully observed.
As regards the drink traffic - no one seems inclined to speak the
truth about it in West Africa; and what I say I must be understood
to say only about West Africa, because I do not like to form
opinions without having had opportunities for personal observation,
and the only part of Africa I have had these opportunities in has
been from Sierra Leone to Angola; and the reports from South Africa
show that an entirely different, and a most unhealthy state of
affairs exists there from its invasion by mixed European
nationalities, with individuals of a low type, greedy for wealth.
West African conditions are no more like South African conditions
than they are like Indian. The missionary party on the whole have
gravely exaggerated both the evil and the extent of the liquor
traffic in West Africa. I make an exception in favour of the late
superintendent of the Wesleyan mission on the Gold Coast, the Rev.
Dennis Kemp, who had enough courage and truth in him to stand up at
a public meeting in Liverpool, on July 2nd, 1896, and record it as
his opinion that, "the natives of the Gold Coast were remarkably
abstemious; but spirits were, 'he believed,' of no benefit to the
natives, and they would be better without them." I have quoted the
whole of the remark, as it is never fair to quote half a man says on
any subject, but I do not agree with the latter half of it, and the
Gold Coast natives are not any more abstemious, if so much so, as
other tribes on the Coast. I have elsewhere {493} attempted to show
that the drink-traffic is by no means the most important factor in
the mission failure on the West Coast, but that it has been used in
an unjustifiable way by the missionary party, because they know the
cry against alcohol is at present a popular one in England, and it
has also the advantage of making the subscribers at home regard the
African as an innocent creature who is led away by bad white men,
and therefore still more interesting and more worthy, and in more
need of subscriptions than ever.
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