Contact with the white man’s institutions of work, wages, and money usually leads to an interest in clothing. The demand from East Africa will some day add millions of yards of cotton cloth to the output of American mills.
The Kikuyus are highlanders and number more than a million. The men coat their bodies and fill their hair with rancid fat and coloured clay, giving themselves a weird appearance and a worse smell.
Cattle are the wealth of such tribes as the Masai, who own great numbers of them. The young men especially covet them, for cattle buy them brides. Sometimes the horns measure fifty-four inches from tip to tip.
I saw many Negroes at work in the fields. They were Kikuyus, and were really fine-looking fellows. They were clearing up new ground, chopping down the weeds with mattocks, and digging up the soil and turning it over. The sweat stood in beads upon their brows and backs and ran down their bare legs. I asked the priest what wages they got, and was told that they each received the equivalent of about five cents for a day of ten hours. I suggested to the reverend father that the pay was small, but he said that the natives could not earn more than that sum and even at those wages it was difficult to keep them at work.
I hear this same statement made everywhere. The English people here think that the native Africans are well enough paid at the rate of a half cent per hour or of a rupee per month. If you protest they will say that that sum is sufficient to supply all the wants of a black man and ask why he should be paid more. Think of it, ye American toilers who belong to our labour unions. Think of five cents a day for carrying bricks or stone, for chopping up ground under the eyes of a taskmaster, or for trotting along through the grass, hour after hour, with a load of sixty pounds on your head! Think of it, and you may get an idea of how the English white man here is carrying the black man’s burden! Indeed, as the Frenchman says, “it is to laugh!”