The only African blacks who have really assimilated the civilizing influence so far as my personal observation goes are those of the West Coast. Some of the inhabitants of Sierra Leone will illustrate what I mean. Scores have gone to Oxford and Cambridge and have become doctors, lawyers and competent civil servants. They resemble the American Negro more than any others in Africa. This parallel even goes to their fondness for using big words. I saw hundreds of them holding down important clerical positions in the Belgian Congo where they are known as "Coast-men," because they come from the West Coast.
I had an amusing experience with one when I was on my way out of the Congo jungle. I sent a message by him to the captain of the little steamboat that took me up and down the Kasai River. In this message I asked that the vessel be made ready for immediate departure. The Coast-man, whose name was Wilson—they all have English names and speak English fluently—came back and said:
"I have conveyed your expressed desire to leave immediately to the captain of your boat. He only returns a verbal acquiescence but I assure you that he will leave nothing undone to facilitate your speedy departure."
He said all this with such a solemn and sober face that you would have thought the whole destiny of the British Empire depended upon the elaborateness of his utterance.
To return to the matter of unrest, all the concrete happenings that I have related show that the authority of the white man in Africa is still resented by the natives. It serves to emphasize what Mr. Lothrop Stoddard, an eminent authority on this subject, so aptly calls "the rising tide of colour." We white people seldom stop to realize how overwhelmingly we are outnumbered. Out of the world population of approximately 1,700,000,000 persons (I am using Mr. Stoddard's figures), only 550,000,000 are white.
A colour conflict is improbable but by no means impossible. We have only to look at our own troubles with the Japanese to get an intimate glimpse of what might lurk in a yellow tidal wave. The yellow man humbled Russia in the Russo-Japanese War and he smashed the Germans at Kiao Chow in the Great War. The fact that he was permitted to fight shoulder to shoulder with the white man has only added to his cockiness as we have discovered in California.
Remember too that the Germans stirred up all Islam in their mad attempt to conquer the world. The Mohammedan has not forgotten what the Teutonic propagandists told him when they laid the cunning train of bad feeling that precipitated Turkey into the Great War. These seeds of discord are bearing fruit in many Near Eastern quarters. One result is that a British army is fighting in Mesopotamia now. A Holy War is merely the full brother of the possible War of Colour. In East Africa the Germans used thousands of native troops against the British and Belgians. The blacks got a taste, figuratively, of the white man's blood and it did his system no good.
Throughout the globe there are 150,000,000 blacks and all but 30,000,000 of them are south of the Sahara Desert in Africa. They lack the high mental development of the yellow man as expressed in the Japanese, but even brute force is not to be despised, especially where it outnumbers the whites to the extent that they do in South Africa. I am no alarmist and I do not presume to say that there will be serious trouble. I merely present these facts to show that certainly so far as affecting production and economic security in general is concerned, the native still provides a vexing and irritating problem, not without danger.
The Union of South Africa is keenly alive to this perplexing native situation. Its policy is what might be called the Direct Rule, in which the whole administration of the country is in the hands of the Europeans and which is the opposite of the Indirect Rule of India, for example, which recognizes Rajahs and other potentates and which permits the brown man to hold a variety of public posts.
The Government of the Cape Colony is becoming convinced that Booker Washington's idea is the sole salvation of the race. That great leader maintained that the hope for the Negro in the United States and elsewhere lay in the training of his hands. Once those hands were skilled they could be kept out of mischief. I recall having discussed this theory one night with General Smuts at Capetown and he expressed his hearty approval of it.