If this be true, the sum total of the process of civilization would be a Caucasian civilization, and a Negro, and an Indian, no matter how much each contributed to the other in the fashioning of his own. Would it not be a great loss to the culture of the human family, if all the races were to lose their predominant characteristics, and were to be reduced to a dead medium level? But, thank God, this is impossible, in spite of the seeming ambition of the Anglo-Saxon to Anglo-Saxonize all peoples, and of the Teuton to Teutonize the world. Statesmen may have been sometimes unfortunate in applying the canon of “self-determination”; but it has its place, in creation, a place which the God of infinite variety has sanctioned.
A glance now, momentary but very earnestly thoughtful, toward the concrete fruits of the Christian Mission to Africa, will throw another ray of light upon our own Mission at home. The picture drawn by close and sympathetic observers is something like the moving picture of a continuous drama. In the beginning, the converted, tutored Negroes were much like children with a new toy among playmates with none. Artificially trained and educated, moulded in a strange pattern, they stood aloof from, and above, their less fortunate old-time fellows, or else reverted to the old type. Vain and prideful in their new attainments, they looked down with contempt upon the uninitiated. This, of course, was not always so; but it was, perhaps, the natural first consequence of a rapid change and too quickly acquired distinction among their own people.
Exceptions there were among the Europeanized Africans, enough to encourage hope of the better day. Some there were who would “no more have dropped their store clothes and gone cannibalizing than we would.” And the new day slowly came through the gamut of recurring improvements and relapses which characterizes human progress in every race. There were the isolated leaders, the greater in their day because fashioned without a racial mould, to become by God’s grace the ensigns for the gradual gathering of their several peoples.
“Men of large mould, like the Rev. Thomas J. Marshall, of Porto Novo, who was born in one of the blackest spots in darkest Africa, and who has been instrumental in leading a whole people into the knowledge and practice of Christianity; the Rev. Jacob Anaman, a native minister of the Gold Coast, who has been made a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society; Sir Samuel Lewis, Mayor of Freetown, a native of Sierra Leone, who, in 1893, was appointed a companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George, and was recently distinguished by the Order of Knighthood—the first pure Negro on whom such honor has been conferred. He is an exemplary follower of the Christ. And Bishop Crowther, the first of his race to be called to that sacred office, whose story is known to all the world. Following in his footsteps we have, at the present time, Bishop Phillips and Oluwole, two excellent and worthy natives connected with the Church Missionary Society of the Church of England.” And last, there is to be added to this list, Bishop Theophilus Momolu Gardiner, of Liberia, a native Bushman, recently consecrated and charged with the sacred mission of leading his heathen tribe to the foot of the Cross.
These isolated leaders have been and are becoming the forerunners of the many lesser who must be born out of the uplifted population of their tribes. For until the whole population is so far elevated that the few exceptional real leaders are the spontaneous fruit of the tribal tree, real and permanent progress has not yet been made. But then there will be leadership indeed, because it will be recognized as the result of the native Christian life. Such leadership, in fullest sympathy with the life from which it sprang, will arouse enthusiasm, and, in the Master’s name and power, draw all men to Him.
Chapter II
THE NEGRO IN LIBERIA
In the previous chapter, attention was called briefly to the effect, upon the negro races in Africa, of contact with the whites. It was seen that, while the efforts of Christian explorers and missionaries have resulted locally in good to these backward races in their own land, the benefits have been vastly more than offset by the widespread horrors of the white slave-trader and exploiter, and by the harm resulting from the introduction of the liquor and the vices of the white man. But how does it fare with the Negro when his contact with the white race is elsewhere than in Africa? Or what is the result when the Negro in Africa is given an opportunity for self-development under more or less favorable conditions and with only helpful contact with the whites? Of the former condition, the United States accords of course the most illuminating example, while the free colony of Liberia gives the best answer to our second inquiry. These, together with the negro republics of the Island of Haiti will prove the surest guides in our study of what can be made of the Negro and what he can make of himself under varying degrees of contact with the white race; therefore, before turning to our main subject of study, we will consider the Negro in Liberia and in Haiti.
On the west coast of Africa, just where the enormous back-head of the continent makes its turn upward, lies the little republic of Liberia. Along this upward waterline of the head, it stretches for about five hundred miles, from the Ivory Coast to Sierra Leone, while its other boundary lines run irregularly into the interior, enclosing an area of 41,000 square miles.
In 1816, the American Colonization Society was organized for the purpose of establishing a home, in the land of their forefathers, for the American Negroes who had regained their freedom. Hence the name Liberia, which was given to the small area at first acquired from the natives and later much enlarged. Jehudi Ashmun, an American, is credited with the actual founding of the colony in 1823.
The first, and perhaps the only, motive of the Society was to fulfill what they regarded as their solemn duty to the freed Negroes, and to do this in a way which they thought ought to be most agreeable to the Negroes themselves. No thought, apparently, was given to the tribes who would be neighbors of the new colonists. In the many years since the founding of the little Republic, the population of American Negroes has reached only the small aggregate of from 14,000 to 15,000, living in coastal regions. Contrary to expectations in America (and very likely also in Liberia), of a spontaneous movement of Negroes to Liberia after their emancipation, less than 2,000 have availed themselves, since the Civil War, of the privilege of returning to the land of their fathers. The balance of the population is made up of some 40,000 natives—some of them Christians—upon or within reach of the coast, and at least a million more who possess the interior. The greater part of these last are still savages, a few are Christians, while many have embraced the Mohammedan religion.