Onjoga’s own town instead of being one of the worst became one of the best towns on the Gaboon. In the early days when I first visited it the characteristic sound which greeted me as I approached it (usually in the early night) was perhaps the bitter cry of a woman who was being tortured for witchcraft; or the uncouth howling of a leopard-man whom women and children may not see lest they die; or the weird wail of their mourning for the dead; or the noise of war-drums and the savage shouts of warriors who were keeping an expected enemy warned that they were on the watch. Such were the sounds that ascended in the darkness like the smoke of their torment. A few years later, in that town one would hear every evening at a regular hour the people, young and old, singing hymns, and singing them as they ought to be sung, from the heart. Nor was there any cry of torture, nor any howl of a leopard-man, nor beating of war-drums, nor any other sound that would strike fear into the heart or quench the laughter of children at play.

XVI
MISSIONS AND SOCIAL PROGRESS[[1]]

The “untutored child of nature” whom we meet in the pages of Rousseau and Cooper, the “noble savage” of sentimental fiction, is not the savage of missionary literature.

Henry George, while repudiating the sentimental view, contrasts the personal independence of the savage with the dependence of the labourer of civilization whose skill is specialized until his labour becomes but an infinitesimal part of the varied processes which are required to supply even the commonest wants. The following is Mr. George’s attractive picture of the savage:

“The aggregate produce of the labour of a savage tribe is small, but each member is capable of an independent life. He can build his own habitation, hew out or stitch together his own canoe, make his own clothing, manufacture his own weapons, snares, tools and ornaments. He has all the knowledge of nature possessed by his tribe—knows what vegetable productions are fit for food, where they may be found; knows the habits and resorts of beasts, fishes and insects; can pilot himself by the sun or the stars, by the turning of blossoms or the mosses on the trees; is in short capable of supplying all his wants. He may be cut off from his fellows and still live.”[[2]]

[2]. Progress and Poverty, p. 256.

SEVERAL STRIDES TOWARD CIVILIZATION.
A Group of Bulu.

This personal independence is a fact and it is one that appeals strongly to the imagination of those who see the savage at a distance and who think of him only as primitive, instead of savage. His state seems closely akin to that social condition, described by an ancient poet, in which law, commerce, literature, science and religion are not specialized, but implicit in the daily life of each individual. Man loves the exercise of liberty for its own sake, regardless of aim and consequence. It seems to be a condition of manhood—of moral spontaneity and development. But the personal independence of the savage (when we see him not with the imagination but with the eyes) is the expression of his brute selfishness. Even his wife has no share in it; nor anybody else if he can help it; for the desire for liberty is but a step from the desire for power. There is no word in his vocabulary to express the idea of justice. And when we pass from his social condition to the inward man, himself, we find him the victim of a thousand abject fears and cruel tyrannies that enslave him.

Mr. George L. Bates, a naturalist, who spent several years among the Fang and gave me both sympathy and assistance in missionary work, tells a story of a Fang feud, the last incident of which took place a few months before I left Africa. I repeat the story told by Mr. Bates, almost in his own words: