The fetish folk of West Africa

by Robert H. Milligan

To the impulse of racial antipathy there is often added that of angry passion unchecked by social restraints, and stimulated by the irritability of a malaria-infected temper.

One day during a sea voyage a white man was telling a number of us how the native workman ought to be managed. Addressing a missionary he said: “You missionaries make a great mistake in being kind to the native workman. To let him know that you value him is to spoil him; to praise him is to make him impudent; to trust him is to make him a thief. The proper way to manage him is never to speak to him without swearing; and to curse him even when he does his best. They are all misbegotten sons of rum-puncheons, whose highest idea of heaven is idleness and drink. They hate us all, and the only way to get any service out of them is to use the club. Every man who has ever worked for me bears the mark of my club, and some of them I have maimed for life. It is the only way to get the brutes to do anything.”

The missionary replied: “I believe every word that you say in regard to your treatment of the native. But this much at least is to be said for my method, as against yours, that mine is a complete success, and yours a complete failure, even according to your own confession. Most men do not brag about their failures, nor try to teach others what they themselves have not yet learned. In spite of kicks and curses you do not get the natives to work. One must conclude, therefore, that you like kicking and cursing more than you like success. Now my method succeeds to the extent that I usually get from the native all the service for which I pay him; and, besides, they have nursed me when I was sick; and they have vied with each other in protecting me from the sun by day and storms by night; they have exposed themselves to danger for my sake, and they have even saved my life at the extremest peril of their own. But would you therefore exchange your method for mine? No; not even for the sake of success.”

But the worst cruelty of the foreigner towards the native results from the union of trade and government—when the government official is also a trader. This is what happened in the miserable Congo Free State, when the king of the Belgians became the king of traders. The concession system of the Belgians was afterwards introduced into the French Congo. But at length a voice was heard that had long been silent, and De Brazza, rival of Stanley and founder of the French Congo, came forth from his well-earned retirement, and France was stirred with the eloquence of a great man’s indignation. The result was that the worn-out explorer himself was appointed the head of a commission that was sent to investigate the conditions in those parts of the French Congo in which the concession system was in operation. De Brazza died at Dakar on his return, a martyr to his efforts for justice and humanity in Africa. But his report was already written, in which he charged M. Gentil, Commissioner General of the French Congo, with maladministration and great cruelty towards the natives. He reported a number of natives flogged to death with knotted whips. He stated that on one occasion, at the colonial office at Bangui, in order to force the natives to bring trade produce—called taxes—fifty-eight women and ten children were taken and held as prisoners and that within five weeks forty-seven of these died of starvation. Is it any wonder that to certain white men the usual methods of the missionary seem very slow and ineffective?

The missionary is the champion of the helpless native against the white man’s cruelty, and if he sometimes oversteps the limit of discretion, as is often said (though I do not know of a single instance), his excessive zeal is at least on the side of justice and humanity, and it is also in behalf of the weak against the strong. The government official seldom burns down native towns for pastime in the community where there is a missionary. When remonstrance is unavailing the missionary will at length report the matter to a higher official, and even the highest. And if such cruelty be general and atrocities abound, he even carries his remonstrance to the governments of Europe, or appeals to the civilized world, as he has done in regard to the Belgian Congo.

Again, there is no doubt that the particular vices which so many white men practice in Africa are a source of estrangement between them and the missionaries and a reason for hostility and consequent criticism of missions.

It is easy to be uncharitable and even unjust when writing on this subject. The contrast between the selfish motives of the trader and the unselfish motives of the missionary has been overworked. It is not necessarily greed for gold that takes the trader to Africa, but often a perfectly honourable ambition. Besides, I have known traders who went to Africa chiefly because it offered the most immediate opportunity in sight for them to help out at home when younger brothers and sisters were to be educated and the family was in straitened circumstances. The pity is that they did not know the subtlety of the temptations awaiting them. They were strong enough to live up to their moral standards, but they did not see that those standards themselves would imperceptibly be lowered. Yet this is what happens.

In a recent book, The Basis of Ascendancy, the author, Mr. Edgar Gardner Murphy, speaking of the small proportion (as it seems to him) of the nation’s brains which the Southern white man of the United States supplies as compared with the New Englander, sets forth most earnestly the danger to the white man in the Southern states of contact with the low standards of an inferior race. The significant fact, Mr. Murphy says, is not the mere pressure of a lower racial standard, but the white man’s cumulative modification of his own standards of self-criticism and self-direction:

“Through the conditions of his familiar contact with less highly developed habits of efficiency, with forms of will more immature than his, he is deprived of that bracing and corrective force, resident in the standard of his peers, which, manifesting itself within every personal world as one of the higher forms of social coöperation, is, in fact, the moral equivalent of competition. He may sin and not die. His more exacting expectations of himself are not echoed from without. Of himself, as he would prefer to see himself, there is no spiritual mirror. The occasional tendency to take himself at his second best is socially unchecked, and both his powers and his inclinations tend to assume the forms of approximation imposed by a life of habitual relationship with a mind lower than his own.

“To say that the stronger tends to become brutal because the weaker is brutal, or slovenly because the weaker is slovenly, is to touch the process only on its surface. The deeper fact is not that of imitation, nor yet that of contagion. It is that tragedy of recurrent accommodations, of habitual self-adjustment to lower conceptions of life and to feebler notions of excellence, which is nothing less than education in its descending and contractive forms.”