These criticisms serve to while away the time, and do no harm unless there should be on board a smart traveller who is bent upon learning all about Africa from the deck of a steamer and then giving his knowledge to the world in a book. The Old Coaster (and the name often includes the captain and officers of the ship) is obsessed with the desire to impart information. The missionary has magazines through which his voice is heard: but the smart traveller is the Old Coaster’s opportunity and he makes the best of it and pours forth a volume of misinformation sufficient to fill the most capacious mental vacuum. The Old Coaster thus employed is not more than half malicious. He sometimes winks at a missionary standing by, as much as to say: “The joke’s on you.” He generally divides missionaries into two classes, deliberate impostors and well-meaning fools, generously assuming that the missionary present belongs to the latter class, so that the relation of good-fellowship on board is not necessarily disturbed by the anti-missionary acrimony.
One of these travelling critics was so wrought upon by the reported misdoings of missionaries and their destructive influence upon the religion and the morals of the natives that before he reached the Congo he went clean crazy—as witness the following from his book: “What religions furies with unholy rage have demolished those weird gods, and disturbed fervent but unobtruding piety in the exercise of its duties?” It may have been the result of going ashore without an umbrella. I never heard whether this man recovered; but let travellers take warning and not trifle with the dangers of the coast and the Old Coaster.
One is impressed by the bewildering inconsistency of the criticisms, so contradictory that if all were published no further answer would be necessary than to cite critic against critic. The more numerous class of critics contend that the native is so morally inferior that he cannot be improved; and a profession of Christian faith only adds to his heathen vices a more disgusting hypocrisy. The other class of critics, less numerous, but more intelligent and reputable, contend, on the contrary, that the native is all right as he is, his pristine morality becomes him; there is no need to improve him and we ought not to try.
Not long ago Prof. Frederick Starr after a brief visit to the Congo published his opinions in the Chicago Tribune and made many strictures upon missionary work. He wrote under the rather complacent caption, “The truth about the Congo,” quite confident that his word and hasty observations were sufficient to discredit the hundreds who had gone before him, as able and as honest as himself, and who had lived many years in the Congo. Professor Starr confesses at the outset that he personally “dislikes the effort to elevate, civilize, and remake a people,” and that he “should prefer to leave the African as he was before the white contact.” It is his opinion that civilized folk have no right to change the customs, institutions or ideas of any tribe, even with the purpose of saving their souls. Such critics regard the African, not at all with a human and sympathetic interest, as a fellow man, capable of progress, and possibly endowed with an immortal soul; but with an esthetic and historical interest, as constituting a link between us and our ape-ancestry, an object to be appraised like a piece of antique art, not for its present or future use, but for the past. To change him shows a want of good taste and historical imagination, even if the change relieve his suffering and improve his morals; that were a small compensation if we thereby impoverish the variety of human types and leave the world less interesting to the connoisseur. Incidentally, Professor Starr denied categorically the reported atrocities of the Belgians in the Congo Free State. He had asked the Belgians themselves about the matter.
In seeking to explain the wide-spread criticism of missions and of missionaries it ought to be frankly admitted that among missionaries there are misfits and occasional freaks whose misconduct scandalizes the well deserving. If we have any knowledge of human nature, and realize that in every society there are unworthy and false members, we should not even expect that the ranks of missionaries alone would be exempt. By denying a palpable fact we only exasperate our critics and lead them to doubt the sincerity of all instead of a very few. It is always wholesome to admit the truth, and indiscriminate praise is as foolish and misleading as wholesale criticism.
On one of my voyages to Africa a certain missionary was regarded as “the biggest liar on board.” What in the world ever attracted him to the mission field it were hard to imagine. Criticism of other and all missionaries was his favourite employment, especially when conversing with those who were hostile to the work. While we were anchored at Accra I heard him say to a trader, as he pointed ashore towards the splendid English mission: “That is where the missionaries take in heathen and turn out devils.” He did not stay long in the mission but he did considerable harm in a short time and created painful misunderstandings that were by no means removed by his departure. Imagine the position of a missionary placed perhaps alone with such a man, with no other companionship and no escape from his neighbourhood! Moreover the report of the missionary’s work, and even his reputation, depends upon the other man; he is therefore at his mercy. For the reputation of one who labours in a lonely and distant field may be indefinitely greater or less than he deserves. The man of whom I speak, after his return to America, figured in the police courts in New York City, where he was arrested on a very serious and odious charge. His record there is still accessible.
Well-meaning missionaries sometimes make themselves ridiculous in the eyes of white men by their attitude and manner towards the natives. I once witnessed such a scene, when a missionary standing on deck, in the presence of white men, conversed with a group of natives in a manner so unseemly and so silly that the comments of the white men were chiefly oaths and ribald laughter. When at last the natives after an hour on board were about to go ashore, one of them, a young savage about sixteen or seventeen years of age with scarcely a stitch of clothing on him, came to the missionary and said: “Me, I go for shore;” whereupon the missionary extended his hand and lifting his huge helmet exclaimed in a very loud voice accompanied by a sweeping bow: “Goodbye, sir; good-bye; and I’m happy to have met you, sir.”
The captain in a voice of thunder turned to me and said: “Who is that fool?” I have weakened the captain’s forceful language by omitting his expletive, which the average reader will easily supply.
More frequently, yet perhaps not often, the missionary errs in his attitude towards his worldly-minded fellow passengers on these long voyages—is unamiable, or indulges in moral strictures in a way that cannot possibly do good, and is calculated to create prejudice and antipathy.
I recall one Sunday when two army officers thought to kill time by playing ball on deck. Like others of their class, they regarded all civilians with contempt and missionaries with abhorrence. They were interesting when drunk, but extremely stupid when sober. A lady missionary came and sat down in her chair on the side of the deck where they were playing ball. As the man at the bat began to strike more vigorously the ball occasionally flew past the lady at an uncomfortably short distance. There were chairs on the other side of the deck where she could have been quite as comfortable, and there was only one place where there was room to play ball; but those men were breaking the Sabbath, and she must protest by staying there and looking righteous, that is to say, very cross. She was naturally modest as well as kind-hearted, and she remained there wholly from a sense of duty. She was a small, scanty person, with a prominent nose, and she sat bolt upright, her nose looking like an intentional target for the ball. Once when it whizzed past her one of the men said, “Aren’t you afraid you will get hit with this ball if you stay there?” It never seemed to occur to him that there was another alternative, namely, for them to stop playing.