AFRICA IN AMERICA AND AMERICA IN AFRICA.
We are glad to print the following letter, from an intelligent friend in New England, to a member of our Executive Committee:
My Dear Sir:
I have received and read with interest the paper you have sent me in relation to Africa and the colored people.
It has seemed to me a very remarkable indication of God’s recognition of His promise, “Ethiopia shall stretch out her hands,” that the two great events of recent years——the abolition of American slavery, and the brilliant explorations and discoveries in Africa, which have become epochs in history——have occurred nearly simultaneously; and the higher education of the colored young men and women seems to have progressed in relative proportion to the further opening up of Africa, with its immense population, suffering, dying for the Word of Life.
The climate of tropical Africa, taken as a whole, is evidently fatal to the white man. There is a region about those large interior lakes, though under the equator, which from its altitude (4,600 feet above the ocean level) at the Victoria Nyanza, is represented by Mr. Stanley to be salubrious. But the climate, even in this most highly favored part of the African continent, is enervating and ultimately destructive to the life of the white man. The missions upon the West Coast of Africa have been conducted for the past hundred years at a fearful sacrifice of the lives of white missionaries.
We may not forecast events for the Providence of God to follow. We do our duty when we faithfully perform the work He assigns us. But I cannot exclude the thought from my mind, that sometime at the proper time, the children of Africa now natives of our own country, must be prepared by education and the Spirit of God to go with hearts of love, laden with the Gospel of Peace, to their own race in Africa, and elevate them from their degradation and barbarity, to the liberty wherewith Christ maketh free.
I feel deeply the wrongs which have been perpetrated upon poor, suffering, abused, down-trodden, defenceless Africa. Her country has been the foraging field for the violent, the cruel and bloody-minded for centuries. A dim light now dawns upon it. The slave trade is nearly, perhaps quite suppressed. A million of philanthropic hearts are beating high with earnest desire to repair the wrongs which inhumanity has inflicted upon it. God grant that the sun of righteousness may soon arise upon that benighted land.
The American Missionary Association is doing a noble work in the schools it has inaugurated for the education of colored young men and women to be teachers and missionaries, and should receive increased subscriptions from our New England States.