But
There Is Nowadays A New Factor In His Relationship With The White
Races - The Factor Of Domestic Control.
I do not think the African
will survive this and flourish, if it is to be of the nature that
the present white ideas aim to make it.
But, on the other hand, I
do not believe that he will be called upon to try, for under the
present conditions white control will not become very thorough; and
in the event of an European war, governmental attention will be
distracted from West Africa, and the African will then do what he
has done several times before when the white eye has been off him
for a decade or so, - sink back to his old level as he has in Congo
after the Jesuits tidied him up, and as he must have done after his
intercourse with the Phoenicians and Egyptians. The travellers of a
remote future will find him, I think, still with his tom-tom and his
dug-out canoe - just as willing to sell as "big curios" the debris of
our importations to his ancestors at a high price. Exactly how much
he will ask for a Devos patent paraffin oil tin or a Morton's tin, I
cannot imagine, but it will be something stiff - such as he asks
nowadays for the Phoenician "Aggry" beads. There will be then as
there is now, and as there was in the past, individual Africans who
will rise to a high level of culture, but that will be all for a
very long period. To say that the African race will never advance
beyond its present culture-level, is saying too much, in spite of
the mass of evidence supporting this view, but I am certain they
will never advance above it in the line of European culture. The
country he lives in is unfitted for it, and the nature of the man
himself is all against it - the truth is the West Coast mind has got
a great deal too much superstition about it, and too little of
anything else. Our own methods of instruction have not been of any
real help to the African, because what he wants teaching is how to
work. Bishop Ingram would have been able to write a more cheerful
and hopeful book than his Sierra Leone after 100 Years, if the
Sierra Leonians had had a thorough grounding in technical culture,
suited to the requirements of their country, instead of the ruinous
instruction they have been given, at the cost of millions of money,
and hundreds of good, if ill-advised, white men's lives. For it is
possible for a West African native to be made by European culture
into a very good sort of man, not the same sort of man that a white
man is, but a man a white man can shake hands with and associate
with without any loss of self-respect. It is by no means necessary,
however, that the African should have any white culture at all to
become a decent member of society at large.
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