Now There Is No Immediate Use For
Clerks In Africa, Certainly No Room For Further Development In This
Line Of Goods.
What Africa wants at present, and will want for the
next 200 years at least, are workers, planters, plantation hands,
miners, and seamen; and there are no schools in Africa to teach
these things or the doctrine of the nobility of labour save the
technical mission-schools.
Almost every mission on the Coast has
now a technical school just started or having collections made at
home to start one; but in the majority of these crafts such as
bookbinding, printing, tailoring, etc., are being taught which are
not at present wanted. Still any technical school is better than
none, and apart from lay considerations, is of great religious value
to the mission indirectly, for there are many instances in mission
annals of a missionary receiving great encouragement from the
natives when he first starts in a district. At first the converts
flock in, get baptised in batches, go to church, attend school, and
adopt European clothes with an alacrity and enthusiasm that
frequently turns their devoted pastor's head, but after the lapse of
a few months their conduct is enough to break his heart. Dressing
up in European clothes amuses the ladies and some of the young men
for a long time, in some cases permanently, but the older men and
the bolder youths soon get bored, and when an African is bored - and
he easily is so - he goes utterly to the bad. It is in these places
that an industrial mission would be so valuable to the spiritual
cause, for by employing and amusing the largely preponderating lower
faculties of the African's mind, it would give the higher faculties
time to develop. I have frequently been told when advocating
technical instruction, that there are objections against it from
spiritual standpoints, which, as my own views do not enable me to
understand them, I will not enter into. Also several authorities,
not mission authorities alone, state with ethnologists that the
African is incapable of learning, except during the period of
childhood.
Prof A. H. Keane says - "their inherent mental inferiority, almost
more marked than their physical characters, depends on physiological
causes by which the intellectual faculties seem to be arrested
before attaining their normal development"; and further on, "We must
necessarily infer that the development of the negro and white
proceeds on different lines. While with the latter the volume of
the brain grows with the expansion of the brain-pan; in the former
the growth of the brain is on the contrary arrested by the premature
closing of the cranial sutures, and lateral pressure of the frontal
bone." {504} You will frequently meet with the statement that the
negro child is as intelligent, or more so, than the white child, but
that as soon as it passes beyond childhood it makes no further
mental advance. Burton says: "His mental development is arrested,
and thenceforth he grows backwards instead of forwards." Now it is
nervous work contradicting these statements, but with all due
respect to the makers of them I must do so, and I have the comfort
of knowing that many men with a larger personal experience of the
African than these authorities have, agree with me, although at the
same time we utterly disclaim holding the opinion that the African
is a man and a brother.
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