Quite The Other Way
About, For The Percentage Of Honourable And Reliable Men Among The
Bushmen Is Higher Than Among The Educated Men.
I do not believe that the white race will ever drag the black up to
their own particular summit
In the mountain range of civilisation.
Both polygamy and slavery {514} are, for divers reasons, essential
to the well-being of Africa - at any rate for those vast regions of
it which are agricultural, and these two institutions will
necessitate the African having a summit to himself. Only - alas! for
the energetic reformer - the African is not keen on mountaineering in
the civilisation range. He prefers remaining down below and being
comfortable. He is not conceited about this; he admires the higher
culture very much, and the people who inconvenience themselves by
going in for it - but do it himself? NO. And if he is dragged up
into the higher regions of a self-abnegatory religion, six times in
ten he falls back damaged, a morally maimed man, into his old swampy
country fashion valley.
CHAPTER XXII. DISEASE IN WEST AFRICA.
Great as is the delay and difficulty placed in the way of the
development of the immense natural resources of West Africa by the
labour problem, there is another cause of delay to this development
greater and more terrible by far - namely, the deadliness of the
climate. "Nothing hinders a man, Miss Kingsley, half so much as
dying," a friend said to me the other day, after nearly putting his
opinion to a practical test. Other parts of the world have more
sensational outbreaks of death from epidemics of yellow fever and
cholera, but there is no other region in the world that can match
West Africa for the steady kill, kill, kill that its malaria works
on the white men who come under its influence.
Malaria you will hear glibly talked of; but what malaria means and
consists of you will find few men ready to attempt to tell you, and
these few by no means of a tale. It is very strange that this
terrible form of disease has not attracted more scientific
investigators, considering the enormous mortality it causes
throughout the tropics and sub-tropics. A few years since, when the
peculiar microbes of everything from measles to miracles were being
"isolated," several bacteriologists isolated the malarial microbe,
only unfortunately they did not all isolate the same one. A resume
of the various claims of these microbes is impossible here, and
whether one of them was the true cause, or whether they all have an
equal claim to this position, is not yet clear; for malaria, as far
as I have seen or read of it seems to be not so much one distinct
form of fever as a group of fevers - a genus, not a species. Many
things point to this being the case; particularly the different
forms so called malarial poisoning takes in different localities.
This subject may be also subdivided and complicated by going into
the controversy as to whether yellow fever is endemic on the West
Coast or not.
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