Unless Under White Direction They Will
Not Make A Slip, Nor Will They Put Rollers Under Her.
Watch again a
gang of natives trying to get a log of timber down into the river
from the
Bank, and you will see the same sort of thing - no idea of a
lever, or any thing of that sort - and remember that, unless under
white direction, the African has never made an even fourteenth-rate
piece of cloth or pottery, or a machine, tool, picture, sculpture,
and that he has never even risen to the level of picture-writing. I
am aware of his ingenious devices for transmitting messages, such as
the cowrie shells, strung diversely on strings, in use among the
Yoruba, but even these do not equal the picture-writing of the South
American Indians, nor the picture the Red Indian does on a raw elk
hide; they are far and away inferior to the graphic sporting
sketches left us of mammoth hunts by the prehistoric cave men.
This absence of mechanical aptitude is very interesting, though it
most likely has the very simple underlying reason that the
conditions under which the African has been living have been such as
to make no call for a higher mechanical culture. In his native
state he does not want to get heavy surf-boats into the sea; his own
light dug-out is easily slid down, he does not want to cut down
heavy timber trees, and get them into the river, and so on; but this
state is now getting disturbed by the influx of white enterprise,
and not only disturbed, but destroyed, and so he must alter his ways
or there will be grave trouble; but it is encouraging to remark that
the African is almost as teachable and as willing to learn
handicrafts as he is to assimilate other things, provided his mind
has not been poisoned by fallacious ideas, and the results already
obtained from the Krumen and the Accras are good. The Accras are
not such good workmen as they might be, because they are to a
certain extent spoilt by getting, owing to the dearth of labour,
higher wages and more toleration for indifferent bits of work than
they deserve, or their work is worth; but they have not yet fallen
under that deadly spell worked by so many of the white men on so
many of the black - the idea that it is the correct and proper thing
not to work with your own hands but to get some underling to do all
that sort of thing for you, while you read and write. This false
ideal formed by the native from his empirical observations of some
of the white men around him, has been the cause of great mischief.
He sees the white man is his ruling man, rich, powerful, and
honoured, and so he imitates him, and goes to the mission-school
classes to read and write, and as soon as an African learns to read
and write he turns into a clerk.
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