tribe, the Krumen— a tribe possessing no material difference
in make o f mind or body from hundreds of other tribes,
but which have merely been trained by white men in a
different way from other tribes— that there is room for grea
hope in the native labour supply ? And would not a very
hopeful outlook for West Africa regarding the labour question
B R I N G I N G I N R U B B E R — C O N G O .
be possible, if a régime of common sense were substituted for
our present one ? .
This is of course the missionary question— a question
which I feel, it is hopeless to attempt to speak of without
being gravely misunderstood, and which I therefore
would willingly shirk mentioning, but I am convinced that
the future of Africa is not to be dissociated from the future
o f its natives by the importation of yellow races or Hindoos |
and the missionary question is not to be dissociated from
the future of the African natives ; and so the subject must be
touched on ; and I preface my remarks by stating that I
have a profound personal esteem for several missionaries,
naturally, for it is impossible to know such men and
Women as Mr. and Mrs. Dennis Kemp, of the Gold Coast,
Mme. and M. Jacot, and Mme. and M. Forget, and
M. Gacon, and Dr. Nassau, of Gaboon, and many others
without recognising at once the beauty o f their natures, and
the nobility of their intentions. Indeed, taken as a whole,
the missionaries must be regarded as superbly brave, noble-
minded men who go and risk their own lives, and often those
of their wives and children, and definitely sacrifice their
personal comfort and safety to do what, from their point of
view, is their simple d u ty ; but it is their methods of working
that have produced in West Africa the results which all truly
interested in West Africa must deplore; and one is bound to
make an admission that goes against one’s insular prejudice—r
that the Protestant English missionaries have had most to do
with rendering the African useless.
The bad effects that have arisen from their teaching have
come primarily from the failure of the missionary to recognise
the difference between the African and themselves as being
a difference not of degree but of kind. I am aware that they
are supported in this idea by several eminent ethnologists;
but still there are a large number o f anatomical facts that
point the other way, and a far larger number still relating
to mental attributes, and I feel certain that a black man
is no more an undeveloped white man than a rabbit is
an undeveloped h a re ; and the mental difference between
the two races is very similar to that between men and
women among ourselves. A great woman, either mentally
or physically, will excel an indifferent man, but no woman
ever equals a really great man. The missionary; to the
African has done what my father found them doing to the
Polynesians— “ regarding the native minds as so many jugs
only requiring to be emptied o f the stuff which is in them
and refilled with the particular form of dogma he is engaged
in teaching, in order to make them the equals o f the white
races.” This form of procedure works in very various ways.
It eliminates those parts of the native fetish that were a
wholesome restraint on the African. The children in the
mission school are, be it granted, better than the children
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