West African studies

by Mary Henrietta Kingsley

The destruction of what is good in the Thirteenth century culture level, and the fact that when the Nineteenth century has had its way the main result is seedy demoralised natives, is the thing that must make all thinking men wonder if, after all, such work is from a high moral point of view worth the Nineteenth century doing. I so often think when I hear the progress of civilisation, our duty towards the lower races, &c., talked of, as if those words were in themselves Ju Ju, of that improving fable of the kind-hearted she-elephant, who, while out walking one day, inadvertently trod upon a partridge and killed it, and observing close at hand the bird’s nest full of callow fledglings, dropped a tear, and saying “I have the feelings of a mother myself,” sat down upon the brood. This is precisely what England representing the Nineteenth century is doing in Thirteenth century West Africa. She destroys the guardian institution, drops a tear and sits upon the brood with motherly intentions; and pesky warm sitting she finds it, what with the nature of the brood and the surrounding climate, let alone the expense of it. And what profit she is going to get out of such proceedings there, I own I don’t know. “Ah!” you say, “yes, it is sad, but it is inevitable.” I do not think it is inevitable, unless you have no intellectual constructive Statecraft, and are merely in that line an automaton. If you will try Science, all the evils of the clash between the two culture periods could be avoided, and you could assist these West Africans in their Thirteenth century state to rise into their Nineteenth century state without their having the hard fight for it that you yourself had. This would be a grand humanitarian bit of work; by doing it you would raise a monument before God to the honour of England such as no nation has ever yet raised to Him on Earth.

There is absolutely no perceivable sound reason why you should not do it if you will try Science and master the knowledge of the nature of the native and his country. The knowledge of native laws, religion, institutions, and State-form would give you the knowledge of what is good in these things, so that you might develop and encourage them; and the West African, having reached a Thirteenth century state, has institutions and laws which with a strengthening from the European hand would by their operation now stamp out the evil that exists under the native state. What you are doing now, however, is the direct contrary to this: you are destroying the good portion and thereby allowing what is evil, or imperfect, in it as in all things human, to flourish under your protection far more rankly than under the purely native Thirteenth century State-form, with Fetish as a state religion, it could possibly do.

I know, however, there is one great objection to your taking up a different line towards native races to that which you are at present following. It is one of those strange things that are in men’s minds almost without their knowing they are there, yet which, nevertheless, rule them. This is the idea that those Africans are, as one party would say, steeped in sin, or, as another party would say, a lower or degraded race. While you think these things, you must act as you are acting. They really are the same idea in different clothes. They both presuppose all mankind to have sprung from a single pair of human beings, and the condition of a race to-day therefore to be to its own credit or blame. I remember one day in Cameroons coming across a young African lady, of the age of twelve, who I knew was enjoying the advantages of white tuition at a school. So, in order to open up conversation, I asked her what she had been learning. “Ebberyting,” she observed with a genial smile. I asked her then what she knew, so as to approach the subject from a different standpoint for purposes of comparison. “Ebberyting,” she said. This hurt my vanity, for though I am a good deal more than twelve years of age, I am far below this state of knowledge; so I said, “Well, my dear, and if you do, you’re the person I have long wished to meet, for you can tell me why you are black.” “Oh yes,” she said, with a perfect beam of satisfaction, “one of my pa’s pa’s saw dem Patriark Noah wivout his clothes.” I handed over to her a crimson silk necktie that I was wearing, and slunk away, humbled by superior knowledge. This, of course, was the result of white training direct on the African mind; the story which you will often be told to account for the blackness and whiteness of men by Africans who have not been in direct touch with European, but who have been in touch with Muhammedan, tradition—which in the main has the same Semitic source—is that when Cain killed Abel, he was horrified at himself, and terrified of God; and so he carried the body away from beside the altar where it lay, and carried it about for years trying to hide it, but not knowing how, growing white the while with the horror and the fear; until one day he saw a crow scratching a hole in the desert sand, and it struck him that if he made a hole in the sand and put the body in, he could hide it from God, so he did; but all his children were white, and from Cain came the white races, while Abel’s children are black, as all men were before the first murder. The present way of contemplating different races, though expressed in finer language, is practically identical with these; not only the religious view, but the view of the suburban agnostic. The religious European cannot avoid regarding the races in a different and inferior culture state to his own as more deeply steeped in sin than himself, and the suburban agnostic regards them as “degraded” or “retarded” either by environment, or microbes, or both.

I openly and honestly own I sincerely detest touching on this race question. For one thing, Science has not finished with it; for another, it belongs to a group of subjects of enormous magnitude, upon which I have no opinion, but merely feelings, and those of a nature which I am informed by superior people would barely be a credit to a cave man of the palæolithic period. My feelings classify the world’s inhabitants into Englishmen, by which I mean Teutons at large, Foreigners, and Blacks. Blacks I subdivide into two classes, English Blacks and Foreign Blacks. English Blacks are Africans. Foreign Blacks are Indians, Chinese, and the rest. Of course, everything that is not Teutonic is, to put it mildly, not up to what is; and equally, of course, I feel more at home with and hold in greater esteem the English Black: a great, strong Kruman, for example, with his front teeth filed, nothing much on but oil, half a dozen wives, and half a hundred jujus, is a sort of person whom I hold higher than any other form of native, let the other form dress in silk, satin, or cashmere, and make what pretty things he pleases. This is, of course, a general view; but I am often cornered for the detail view, whether I can reconcile my admiration for Africans with my statement that they are a different kind of human being to white men. Naturally I can, to my own satisfaction, just as I can admire an oak tree or a palm; but it is an uncommonly difficult thing to explain. All I can say is, that when I come back from a spell in Africa, the thing that makes me proud of being one of the English is not the manners or customs up here, certainly not the houses or the climate; but it is the thing embodied in a great railway engine. I once came home on a ship with an Englishman who had been in South West Africa for seven unbroken years; he was sane, and in his right mind. But no sooner did we get ashore at Liverpool, than he rushed at and threw his arms round a postman, to that official’s embarrassment and surprise. Well, that is just how I feel about the first magnificent bit of machinery I come across: it is the manifestation of the superiority of my race.

In philosophic moments I call superiority difference, from a feeling that it is not mine to judge the grade in these things. Careful scientific study has enforced on me, as it has on other students, the recognition that the African mind naturally approaches all things from a spiritual point of view. Low down in culture or high up, his mind works along the line that things happen because of the action of spirit upon spirit; it is an effort for him to think in terms of matter. We think along the line that things happen from the action of matter upon matter. If it were not for the Asiatic religion we have accepted, it is, I think, doubtful whether we should not be far more materialistic in thought-form than we are. This steady sticking to the material side of things, I think, has given our race its dominion over matter; the want of it has caused the African to be notably behind us in this, and far behind those Asiatic races who regard matter and spirit as separate in essence, a thing that is not in the mind either of the Englishman or the African. The Englishman is constrained by circumstances to perceive the existence of an extra material world. The African regards spirit and matter as undivided in kind, matter being only the extreme low form of spirit. There must be in the facts of the case behind things, something to account for the high perception of justice you will find in the African, combined with an inability to think out a pulley or a lever except under white tuition. Similarly, taking the true Negro States, which are in its equivalent to our Thirteenth century, it accounts for the higher level of morals in them than you would find in our Thirteenth century; and I fancy this want of interest and inferiority in materialism in the true Negro constitutes a reason why they will not come into our Nineteenth century, but, under proper guidance could attain to a Nineteenth century state of their own, which would show a proportionate advance. The simile of the influence of the culture of Rome, or rather let us say the culture of Greece spread by the force of Rome, upon Barbarian culture is one often used to justify the hope that English culture will have a similar effect on the African. This I do not think is so. It is true the culture of Rome lifted the barbarians from what one might call culture 9 to culture 17, but the Romans and the barbarians were both white races. But you see now a similar lift in culture in Africa by the influence of Mohammedan culture, for example in the Hausa States and again in the Western Soudan, where there is no fundamental race difference.

In both English and Mohammedan Berber influence on the African there is another factor, apart from race difference; namely, that the two higher cultures are in a healthier state than that of Rome was at the time it mastered the barbarian mind; in both cases the higher culture has the superior war force.

This seems to me simply to lay upon us English for the sake of our honour that we keep clean hands and a cool head, and be careful of Justice; to do this we must know what there is we wish to wipe out of the African, and what there is we wish to put in, and so we must not content ourselves by relying materially on our superior wealth and power, and morally on catch phrases. All we need look to is justice. Love for our fellow-man, pity, charity, mercy, we need not bother our heads about, so long as we are just. These things are of value only when they are used as means whereby we can attain justice. It is no use saying that it matters to a Teuton whether the other race he deals with is black, white, yellow—I can quite conceive that we should look down on a pea-green form of humanity if we had the chance. Naturally, I think this shows a very proper spirit. I should be the last to alter any of our Teutonic institutions to please any race; but when it comes to altering the institutions of another race, not for the reason even of pleasing ourselves but merely on the plea that we don’t understand them, we are on different ground. If those ideas and institutions stand in the way of our universal right to go anywhere we choose and live as honest gentlemen, we have the power-right to alter them; but if they do not we must judge them from as near a standard of pure Justice as we can attain to.

There are many who hold murder the most awful crime a man can commit, saying that thereby he destroys the image of his Maker; I hold that one of the most awful crimes one nation can commit on another is destroying the image of Justice, which in an institution is represented more truly to the people by whom the institution has been developed, than in any alien institution of Justice; it is a thing adapted to its environment. This form of murder by a nation I see being done in the destruction of what is good in the laws and institutions of native races. In some parts of the world, this murder, judged from certain reasonable standpoints, gives you an advantage; in West Africa, judged from any standpoint you choose to take, it gives you no advantage. By destroying native institutions there, you merely lower the moral of the African race, stop trade, and the culture advantages it brings both to England and West Africa. I again refer you to the object lesson before you now, the hut tax war in Sierra Leone. Awful accusations have been made against the officers and men who had the collecting of this tax. In the matter of the native soldiery, there is no doubt these accusations are only too well founded, but the root thing was the murder of institutions. The worst of the whole of this miserable affair is that a precisely similar miserable affair may occur at any time in any of our West African Crown Colonies—to-morrow, any day,—until you choose to remove the Crown Colony system of government.

It has naturally been exceedingly hard for men who know the colony and the natives, with the experience of years in an unsentimental commercial way, to keep civil tongues in their heads while their interests were being wrecked by the action of the government; but whether or no the white officers were or were not brutal in their methods we must presume will be shown by Sir David Chalmers’s report. I am unable to believe they were. But there is no manner of doubt that outrages have been committed, disgraceful to England, by the set of riff-raff rascal Blacks, who had been turned out by, or who had run away from, the hinterland tribes down into Sierra Leone Colony, and there been turned, by an ill-informed government, into police, and sent back with power into the very districts from which they had, shortly before, fled for their crimes. I entirely sympathise, therefore, with the rage of Liverpool and Manchester, and of every clear-minded common-sense Englishman who knows what a thing the hut tax war has been. And I want common-sense Englishmen to recognise that a system capable of such folly, and under which such a thing could happen in an English possession, is a system that must go. For a system that gets short of money, from its own want of business-like ability, and then against all expert advice goes and does the most unscientific thing conceivable under the circumstances, to get more, is a thing that is a disgrace to England. Yet the Sierra Leone Colony was capable of this folly, and the people in London were capable of saying to Liverpool and Manchester, that no difficulty was expected from the collection of the tax. If this is so in our oldest colony, what reason have we to believe that in the others we are safer? Any of them, in combination with London, may to-morrow go and do the most unscientific thing conceivable, and disgrace England, in order to procure more local revenue, and fail at that.