The Bad Effects That Have Arisen From Their Teaching Have Come
Primarily From The Failure Of The Missionary To Recognise The
Difference Between The African And Themselves As Being A Difference
Not Of Degree But Of Kind.
I am aware that they are supported in
this idea by several eminent ethnologists; but still there are a
Large number of anatomical facts that point the other way, and a far
larger number still relating to mental attributes, and I feel
certain that a black man is no more an undeveloped white man than a
rabbit is an undeveloped hare; and the mental difference between the
two races is very similar to that between men and women among
ourselves. A great woman, either mentally or physically, will excel
an indifferent man, but no woman ever equals a really great man.
The missionary to the African has done what my father found them
doing to the Polynesians - "regarding the native minds as so many
jugs only requiring to be emptied of the stuff which is in them and
refilled with the particular form of dogma he is engaged in
teaching, in order to make them the equals of the white races."
This form of procedure works in very various ways. It eliminates
those parts of the native fetish that were a wholesome restraint on
the African. The children in the mission school are, be it granted,
better than the children outside it in some ways; they display great
aptitude for learning anything that comes in their way - but there is
a great difference between white and black children.
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