The Best Men Among These Are
Lawyers, Doctors, And Merchants, And I Have Known Many Ladies Of
Africa Who Have
Risen to an equal culture level with their lords.
On the West African seaboard you do not find the Bantu
Equally
advanced, except among the M'pongwe, and I am persuaded that this
tribe is not pure Bantu but of Negro origin. The educated blacks
that are not M'pongwe on the Bantu coast (from Cameroons to
Benguela), you will find are Negroes, who have gone down there to
make money, but this class of African is the clerk class, and we are
now concerned with the labourer. The African's own way of doing
anything mechanical is the simplest way, not the easiest, certainly
not the quickest: he has all the chuckle-headedness of that
overrated creature the ant, for his head never saves his heels.
Watch a gang of boat-boys getting a surf boat down a sandy beach.
They turn it broadside on to the direction in which they wish it to
go, and then turn it bodily over and over, with structure-straining
bumps to the boat, and any amount of advice and recriminatory
observations to each other. Unless under white direction they will
not make a slip, nor will they put rollers under her. Watch again a
gang of natives trying to get a log of timber down into the river
from the bank, and you will see the same sort of thing - no idea of a
lever, or any thing of that sort - and remember that, unless under
white direction, the African has never made an even fourteenth-rate
piece of cloth or pottery, or a machine, tool, picture, sculpture,
and that he has never even risen to the level of picture-writing.
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