Alone in West Africa

by Mary Gaunt

And here we come to the great difficulty of a tropical dependency, the question that as yet is unanswered and unanswerable. What of the dark peoples we govern? They are a peasant people with a peasant people's faults and a peasant people's charm, but what of their future? The native untouched by the white man has a dignity and a charm that there is no denying; it seems a great pity he cannot be kept in that condition. The man on the first rung of civilisation has points about him, and on the whole one cannot help liking him, but the man who has gathered the rudiments of an education, as presented to men in an English school on the Coast, is, to my mind, about as disagreeable a specimen of humanity as it is possible to meet anywhere. He has lost the charming courtesy of the untutored savage, and replaced it by a horrible veneer of civilisation that is blatant and pompous; and it is only because I have met such men as Dr Blyden and Mr Olympia that I am prepared to admit that education can do something beyond spoiling a good thing. Between black and white there is that great, unbridgeable gulf fixed, and no man may cross it. The black men who attain to the higher plane are as yet so few and scattered that each must lead a life of utter intolerable loneliness, men centuries before their time, men burdened with knowledge like Galileo, men who must suffer like Galileo, for none may understand them, and the white man stands and must stand—it is inevitable—too far off even for sympathy.

All honour to those men who go before the pioneers; but for them, as far as we can see, is only bitterness.

The curious thing is that most people who have visited West Africa or any other tropical dependency will recognise these facts, and yet England continues to pour into Africa a continuous stream of missionaries. Why? For years Christianity has been taught on the Coast, and it is now a well-recognised fact that on the Coast dishonesty and vice are to be found, while the man from the interior is at least honest, healthy, and free from vice. I am not saying that religion as taught by the missionary has taught vice, but I am declaring emphatically that it has failed to keep the negro from it. Why encourage missionaries? As civilisation advances the native must be taught. Very well, let him pay for his own teaching, he will value it a great deal more; or, since the merchants want clerks and the white rulers want artisans, let them pay for the native to be taught. But very, very strongly do I feel, when I look at the comfortable, well-fed native of West Africa and the wastrel of the English streets, that the English who subscribe to missions are taking the bread from the children's table and throwing it to the dogs.

Hundreds and thousands of people are ready to give to missions, but I am very sure not a fraction of them have the very faintest conception of what they are giving to. Their idea is that they are giving to the poor heathen who are sunk in the deepest misery. Now there is not in all the length and breadth of Africa, I will venture to swear, one-quarter of the unutterable misery and vice you may see any day in the streets of London or any great city of the British Isles. There is not a tribe that has not its own system of morals and sees that they are carried out; there is not the possibility of a man, woman, or child dying of starvation in all West Africa while there is any food among the community. Can we say that of any town in England? What then are we trying to teach the native? Christianity. But surely a man's god is only such as his mind can appreciate; a high-class mind has a high-class god, a kindly mind a kindly god, and an evil mind an evil god. No matter whether we call that god Christ, or by any other name, he will have the attributes the mind that conceives him gives him; wherefore why worry?

Of course I know that a large number of people feel that religion comes from without and not from within, and a larger number still say as long as a mission is industrial it is a good thing, and to both of these I can only point out the streets and alleys and tenement houses of the towns of England. It seems to me the most appalling presumption on the part of any nation with such ghastly festering sores at its own heart to try and impose on any other people a code of morals, a system of ethics, a religion, if you will, until its own body is sweet and clean. An industrial mission is doubtless a good thing, but until there are no men clamouring for the post of sandwich-men in London, no women catering to a shameful traffic in Piccadilly, I think we should keep the money for our industrial missions at home.

Let us look the thing straight in the face. They talk of human sacrifices. Are there no human sacrifices in our own midst? We lie if we say there are none. Every day we who pride ourselves upon having been a Christian nation for the last thousand years condemn little children to a life of utter hopelessness, to a life the very thought of which, in connection with our own children, would make us hide our faces in shuddering horror. So if any man is appealed to to give to missions, I would have him look round and see that everyone in his immediate neighbourhood is beyond the need of help, that there are no ghastly creatures at his own gate that the heathen he is trying to convert would scorn to have at his side. Believe me, if Christianity is to justify itself there is not yet one crumb to spare from the children's table for the dogs that lie outside.

For the individual missionary I have—in many cases, I must have—a great respect. The trouble to my mind is that Christianity presented in so many guises must be a little confusing to the heathen. There are the Roman Catholics. They are pawns in the great game played by Rome; no individual counts. They have given themselves to the missionary service to teach the heathen, and they stay until they die or until they are too sick to be of further use in the land. Of course they are helpful, any life that is oblivious of self and is utterly devoted to others must needs be helpful, and they have my deepest respect, because never, never have I been called upon to sympathise with a Roman Catholic father or sister. They have given their lives, no man can do more, and all I can say is, I would prefer they gave it to the civilising of the submerged folks of their own nations than to civilising the black man.