My Share When I Drop In On
This State Of Mutual Recrimination Is To Get Myself Into Hot Water
With Both Parties.
The missionary thinks me misguided for regarding
the African's goings-on as part of the make of the man,
And the
trader regards me as a soft-headed idiot when I state that it is not
the missionary's individual blame that a lamb recently acquired from
the fold has gone down the primrose path with the trust, or the rum.
Shade of Sir John Falstaff! what a life this is!
The two things to which the missionary himself ascribes his want of
success are polygamy and the liquor traffic. Now polygamy is, like
most other subjects, a difficult thing to form a just opinion on, if
before forming the opinion you make a careful study of the facts
bearing on the case. It is therefore advisable, if you wish to
produce an opinion generally acceptable in civilised circles, to
follow the usual recipe for making opinions - just take a prejudice
of your own, and fix it up with the so-called opinion of that class
of people who go in for that sort of prejudice too. I have got
myself so entangled with facts that I cannot follow this plan, and
therefore am compelled to think polygamy for the African is not an
unmixed evil; and that at the present culture-level of the African
it is not to be eradicated. This arises from two reasons; the first
is that it is perfectly impossible for one African woman to do the
work of the house, prepare the food, fetch water, cultivate the
plantations, and look after the children attributive to one man.
She might do it if she had the work in her of an English or Irish
charwoman, but she has not, and a whole villageful of African women
do not do the work in a week that one of these will do in a day.
Then, too, the African lady is quite indifferent as to what extent
her good man may flirt with other ladies so long only as he does not
go and give them more cloth and beads than he gives her; and the
second reason for polygamy lies in the custom well-known to
ethnologists, and so widely diffused that one might say it was
constant throughout all African tribes, only there are so many of
them whose domestic relationships have not been carefully observed.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 645 of 705
Words from 178021 to 178432
of 194943
