The African Does Not Fade Away Like A Flower Before The
White Man - Not In The Least.
Look at the increase of the native in
the Cape territory; look at what he has stood on the West Coast.
Christopher Columbus visited him before he discovered the American
Indians.
Whaling captains, and seamen of all sorts and
nationalities have dropped in on him "frequent and free." He has
absorbed all sorts of doctrine from religious sects; cotton goods,
patent medicines, foreign spirits, and - as the man who draws up the
Lagos Annual Colonial Report poetically observes - twine, whisky,
wine, and woollen goods. Yet the West Coast African is here with us
by the million - playing on his tom-tom, paddling his dug-out canoe,
living in his palm leaf or mud hut, ready and able to stand more
"white man stuff." Save for an occasional habit of going raving or
melancholy mad when educated for the ministry, and dying when he,
and more particularly she, is shut up in the broiling hot,
corrugated-iron school-room with too many clothes on, and too much
headwork to do, he survives in a way which I think you will own is
interesting, and which commands my admiration and respect. 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.
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