The fetish folk of West Africa

by Robert H. Milligan

She seemed not to hear, but looked more cross than ever, and appeared as if she wanted to get hit, so as to be a martyr to her principles; or at least so as to have a better reason for looking so cross. The captain came along and after contemplating for a moment the smiling levity of those worldly men and the contrasting acerbity of the Christian woman’s countenance, as she sat there keeping the Sabbath day holy, he went to the side and laughed overboard. At length a fellow missionary approached her and asked if she would go with him to the other side of the deck, adding that he wanted to talk with her on a matter of missionary interest. She was a real good woman with a mistaken sense of duty. We must surely seek to be amiable to people as we find them, and try to like people as they are. Such conduct is a source of irritation to those who indulge in it, and it inspires dislike and consequent criticism.

Another source of criticism is the missionary magazines of the various societies engaged in missionary work. These magazines fall into the hands of the trader; and sometimes he finds a glowing account of the great work being done by Missionary A who happens to be his neighbour, and he is unable to reconcile the report with the work which he has seen with his own eyes. Usually his eyes are at fault. He is blind to spiritual values. There are old traders in Gaboon who do not know that there is a native Christian in the community.

But we cannot dismiss the whole matter in this cavalier manner, and I feel like adding that the missionary magazine, however necessary, is not an unmixed good. It is not good that a man should let his left hand know all that his right hand does. The missionary magazine reports to the world what the missionary chooses to write about his own work. If his letters are interesting and report large success they are eagerly sought and published; and he of course is not callously indifferent to his reputation. But, inasmuch as there are few or no witnesses but himself, the magazine puts a premium on egotism and immodesty; and it sometimes fosters a kind of spiritual impotence which needs the stimulus of publicity. One of the bravest and best missionaries it has ever been my privilege to know, the Rev. William Chambers Gault, was seldom mentioned in a missionary magazine and little known to the church at home, though he laboured for many long years in Africa and is buried there. Mr. Gault was incorrigibly modest.

But even with the utmost margin of excuse—admitting the foolishness of fulsome and indiscriminate praise; admitting that missionaries are mortal, and some few of them desperately mortal—it remains that the wholesale criticism and violent denunciation that one hears on the voyage is unjust and outrageous. We must look for the reason of it in the critics themselves—the non-missionary white men residing in Africa. And in themselves we will find reason enough.

First of all, many or most of these men, according to their own confession, are not men of personal faith in Christ, but men who deride the Gospel in which we believe. Of all those who have criticized missions, I have only known of one man who himself professed to be a Christian; his criticism was rather mild and was due more to what he had heard than what he had seen.

Carlyle has said: “Unbelief talking about belief is like a blind man discussing the laws of optics.” How can a man think it worth while to expend lives and money in preaching to the heathen a Gospel which he himself rejects? If the Gospel itself is foolishness those who preach it must be fools, and the greatest fools are those who preach it at the greatest sacrifice. What does cynicism know about enthusiasm? It was not “much learning,” but much Christianity, that made Paul seem mad to Festus. Manifestly the first question to ask the disbeliever in missions is whether he is also a disbeliever in Christianity and in Christ. It is really astonishing that so many critics of missions, and so many of their readers, should treat this latter question as entirely irrelevant.

Racial antipathy towards the black man is also a reason of hostility to missions. The intensity of this feeling where the inferior race is in the majority is surprising, even in men who in all their other relations are generous and considerate. In the opinion of many a white man in Africa the black man is little better than a beast, and they treat him accordingly. To speak of him as a brother man is to insult the white man.

This antipathy actually prefers that the black man should remain in his present degradation—perhaps to justify itself. It resents every effort to elevate him; and as it sees him actually rising to the moral level of the white man it is only intensified into hatred. One soon perceives that the object of the white man’s greatest aversion is not the lowest native, but the best. The critic may therefore be sincere when he declares that he can see no good in the native product of missions, for he is blinded by this special prejudice. Racial antipathy is much more marked in the government official than in the trader; yet even the traders when they live in communities often have a code of arrogant manners according to which they ostracize any of their number who may extend to the native a degree of social recognition.

This antipathy must necessarily be hostile to missionary work. For the work of the missionary implies that he regards the black man as a brother man; one who is also capable of moral elevation. He is not necessarily blind to the present degradation of the native; but he insists that he does not belong to the present, but to the future; that he is endowed with an immortal soul and the moral possibilities which immortality implies. He admits the worst but “sees the best that glimmers through the worst,” and “hears the lark within the songless egg.” And experience has justified his faith.

The missionary treats the native according to this belief, and as he rises gives him exactly the social place to which his character as an individual entitles him. He takes very little interest in the abstract question of equality, or whether the black man is inherently inferior and different in kind from the white man. But he believes that in Christian brotherhood there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither black nor white. This attitude and the behaviour which comports with it are obnoxious to many white men, and are inevitably a source of much hostility to missions.