I had stumbled upon Wells at about the same time that I began reading Bernard Shaw. While I admired Shaw for the hammering logic of his prefaces and his sparkling wit, I liked in H.G. Wells those qualities I like in Dickens—the sentimental serving of his characters with a vast sauce of provincial humor.
During my residence in London I had followed Wells's popular Outline of History as it appeared in instalments, and upon returning to America I read in the published volume the instalments that I had missed.
If it is worth recording, I may say here that I took a violent prejudice against Mr. Wells's History. I felt something flippant in the style and I did not like Mr. Wells's attitude toward colored people in general and Africa and Negroes in particular. In the League of Free Nations book he put out in 1918 he said: "Africa is the great source upon which our modern comforts and conveniences depend.... The most obvious danger of Africa is the militarization of the black.... The Negro makes a good soldier, he is hardy, he stands the sea and he stands the cold...."
I suppose the average white reader will exclaim: "And what's wrong with that? It is wise and sane and humanitarian." But he should remember that I am Negro and think that the greatest danger of Africa is not the militarization of the black, but the ruthless exploitation of the African by the European. There is also something to be said in favor of native comforts and conveniences. Before the arrival of the European with gunpowder the African was accustomed to protecting his rights with arrow and spear. Now, against modern civilization, he must needs learn the use of modern methods and weapons. The liberal apologists of the European grip on Africa may be very unctious and sentimental about native rights. But the conditions indicate that if the natives must survive, they must themselves learn and practice the art of self-protection.
Mr. Wells always seems to be shouting about his unusually scientific mind. Yet I must confess that I was shocked by the plan of his large tome outlining world history. Because it appears there as if Africa and Africans have not been of enormous importance in world history. Mr. Wells mentions Africa in his language-formation section and leaves Africa there as if nothing more developed. One learns more of Africa from earlier historians than Mr. Wells, who did not know so much about science. Herodotus gives us some remarkable information that he acquired by traveling four hundred years before Jesus Christ. And Ptolemy, the Egyptian geographer, has rendered a remarkable description of Central Africa in the second century after Christ, although I learned as a school boy that it was discovered by David Livingstone. And as late as the fifteenth century, in the high tide of the European renaissance, Leo the African adventured below the Sahara to give the world historical facts about the Negro nations.
Mr. Wells gives a large outline of the nations of Europe and a not-so-large one of the nations of Asia. He makes no mention of the great Negro nations of Western Africa and the Western Sudan before and after the Moslem invasion; of the Negroid nations of Songhoy and Ghana, Fezzan and Timbuctu, Yoruba and Benin, Ashanti and Dahomey, which were arrested in their growth and finally annihilated by the slave traffic and European imperialism, nor of the Senegalese who played a dominant part in the history of Morocco and the conquest of Spain.
Yes indeed, Africa and its blacks are of foundational importance in the history of the world, ancient and modern, and in the creating of European civilization. However, Mr. Wells's ignoring of the African civilizations in his Outline of History may be deliberate. In his marvelous World of William Clissold, he speculates whether the Negro could participate in "common citizenship in a world republic." Says he: "The Negro is the hardest case ... yet ... in the eighteenth century he was the backbone of the British navy...." It is entirely too funny to think—seven years after the appallingly beastly modern white savagery of 1914-18—of Mr. Wells naïvely wondering whether the Negro is capable of becoming a civilized citizen of a world republic. He cites the precedent of Negroes in his British navy. He might have gone farther back and mentioned the Negro contingent in the army of Xerxes the Great (when Britons were savages) and about which Herodotus so glowingly writes.
But even if Mr. Wells likes to take a popular crack at history, he is none the less a first-rate novelist in the tradition of Charles Dickens and I don't think he imagines himself a historian any more than I do, so one must be tolerant if his Outline has the earmarks of a glorified Research Magnificent.
Also, I did not like Mr. Wells's inspired articles on the Naval Conference. Paradoxically, I found myself sympathizing with the Daily Mail, which rebuked him for his offensive against Japan. Mr. Wells injected much violent prejudice into what should have been unbiased reporting. While Mr. Wells was outlining history, he might have reserved a little of his English sentimentality for Japan, from the knowledge that Japan might not have been a "yellow peril" today if the white powers hadn't broken open her door and forced their civilization upon her.
Wells's little Liberator reception was a question-time picnic for the Liberator collaborators—especially for the ladies, to whom Wells is exceptionally attractive. They asked him many questions about the war and the peace and the aftermath, about Russia and Europe, Japan and America and universal peace. Mr. Wells smilingly and slickly disposed of all problems to the satisfaction of all.