3rd. Dahomé. From the plain and unvarnished account of this tyranny, which I am about to relate, may be estimated the amount of hopeless misery which awaited the African in Africa. And as it is unsatisfactory to point out a disease without suggesting a remedy, I will propose my panacea at the end of this essay.
We now cross the Equator and find ourselves among the great South African family. Their common origin is proved by their speech. Briefly to characterise their language, the place of our genders are taken by personal and impersonal forms, and all changes of words are made at the beginning, not, as with us, at the end. The Kaffir (Caffre race in South-east Africa) is evidently a mixed breed, and it has nearly annihilated the Bushmen and the Hottentots—the original lords of the land. There is a curious resemblance between the Coptic, or Old Egyptian, and the Hottentot tongues, which suggests that in the prehistoric ages one language extended from the Nile Valley to the Cape of Good Hope. The true negroes, distinguished by their long, ape-like head and projecting jaws, bowed shins and elongated heels and forearms, are all the tribes of Intertropical Africa
whose blood is unmixed. This is my definition; but of this point opinions differ.
And here we may stand to view the gleam of light which the future casts across the Dark Continent. Slowly but surely the wave of Moslem conquest rolls down towards the line. Every Moslem is a propagandist, and their traders, unlike ours, carry conversion with them. This fact European missionaries deny, because they do not like it: they would rather preach to heathens than to Moslems, whom Locke describes as unorthodox Christians. They even deny the superiority of El Islam, which forbids the pagan abominations of child-murder, human sacrifice, witch-burning, ordeal-poisons, and horrors innumerable. But we, who look forward to the advent of a higher law, of a nobler humanity, hail with infinite pleasure every sign of progress.
Philanthropists, whose heads are sometimes softer than their hearts, have summed up their opinion of slavery as the “sum of all villainies.” I look upon it as an evil, to the slaveholder even more than to the slave, but a necessary evil, or, rather, a condition of things essentially connected, like polygamy, with the progress of human society, especially in the tropics. The savage hunting tribes slave for themselves; they are at the bottom of the ladder. Advancing to agricultural and settled life, man must have assistants, hands, slaves. As population increases, commerce develops itself and free labour fills the markets; the slave and the serf are emancipated: they have done
their task; they disappear from the community, never more to return. Hence every nation, Hindu and Hebrew, English and French, have had slaves; all rose to their present state of civilisation by the “sum of all villainies.” And here, when owning slavery to be an evil, I must guard against being misunderstood. It is an evil to the white man: it is often an incalculable boon to the black. In the case of the negro it is life, it is comfort, it is civilisation; in the case of the white it has done evil by retarding progress, by demoralising society, and by giving rise to a mixed race.
And there is yet another point to be settled when speaking of the negro. In the United States every black man is a negro, or, to speak politely, a “cullard pussun.” Thus the noble races of Northern Africa and the half-Arab Moors, the Nubians and Abyssinians, and the fine Kaffir (Caffre) type of South-eastern Africa are confounded with the anthropoid of Sierra Leone, of the Guinea and of the Congo regions. The families first mentioned differ more from the true negro than they do from the white man.
My first visit to Gelele, then King of Dahomé, was in May and June, 1863. Already in 1861 I had proposed to restore those amicable relations which we had with his father Gezo; but my application was not accepted by the Government. On my return to the West African coast after a six weeks’ visit to England, the journey was made on my own responsibility, and it was not pleasant. I was alone—in
such matters negroes do not count as men—and four mortal days upon the Slave Coast lagoons, salt, miry rivers, rich only in mud, miasma, and mosquitoes, with drenching rains and burning suns playing upon a cramping canoe without awning, are unsatisfactory even to remember. Having reached Whydah, the seaport and slave-market of Dahomé, I procured a hammock, and in three days I arrived at Kana, a summer residency for the Court, distant 7,500 miles from Agbomé, the capital.
The human sacrifices called the “nago customs” had lately ended. Twelve men had lost their lives, and, dressed in various attire like reapers, dancers, and musicians, had been exposed on tall scaffolds of strong scantling. “C’est se moquer de l’humanité,” remarked to me the Principal of the French Mission at Whydah. But the corpses had been removed, and during my flying visit of five days nothing offensive was witnessed.