little of anything else. Our own methods of instruction have
not been of any real help to the African, because what he
wants teaching is how to work. Bishop Ingram would have
been able to write a more cheerful and hopeful book than his
Sierra Leone after 100 Years, if the Sierra Leonians had
had a thorough grounding in technical culture, suited to the
requirements of their country, instead of the ruinous instruction
they have been given, at the cost of millions of money,
and hundreds of good, if ill-advised, white men’s lives. For
it is possible for a West African native to be made by
European culture into a very good sort of man, not the same
sort of man that a white man is, but a man a white man can
shake hands with and associate with without any loss of self-
respect. It is by no means necessary, however, that the
African should have any white culture at all to become a
decent member of society at large. Quite the other way
about, for the percentage of honourable and reliable men
among the bushmen is higher than among the educated
men.
I do not believe that the white race will ever drag the black
up to their own particular summit in the mountain range
of civilisation. Both polygamy and slavery are, for divers
reasons, essential to the well-being of Africa— at any rate for
those vast regions of it which are agricultural, and these two
institutions will necessitate the African having a summit to
himself. Only— alas ! for the energetic reformer— the African
is not keen on mountaineering in the civilisation range. He
prefers remaining down below and being comfortable. He is
not conceited about this ; he admires the higher culture very
much, and the people who inconvenience themselves by going
in for it— but do it himself? NO. And if he is dragged up
into the higher regions of a self-abnegatory religion, six times
in ten he falls back damaged, a morally maimed man, into
his old swampy country fashion valley.
APPENDIX II
D ISE A SE IN W E ST A FR IC A
GREAT as is the delay and difficulty placed in the way
of the development of the immense natural resources of
West Africa by the labour problem, there is another cause
of delay to this development greater and more terrible by far
— namely, the deadliness of the climate. “ Nothing hinders
a man, Miss Kingsley, half so much as dying,” a friend said to
me the other day, after nearly putting his opinion to a practical
test. Other parts of the world have more sensational outbreaks
of death from epidemics of yellow fever and cholera,
but there is no other region in the world that can match West
Africa for the steady kill, kill, kill that its malaria works on the
white men who come under its influence.
Malaria you will hear glibly talked o f ; but what malaria
means and consists of you will find few men ready to attempt to
tell you, and these few by no means of a tale. It is very strange
that this terrible form of disease has not attracted more
scientific investigators, considering the enormous mortality
it causes throughout the tropics and sub-tropics. A few years
since, when the peculiar microbes of everything from measles
to miracles were being “ isolated,” several bacteriologists
isolated the malarial microbe, only unfortunately they did not all
isolate the same one. A rfcumd of the various claims of these
microbes is impossible here, and whether one of them was the
true cause, or whether they all have an equal claim to this
position, is not yet clear ; for malaria, as far as I have seen or
read of it seems to be not so much one distinct form of fever
as a group of fevers— a genus, not a species. Many things
point to this being the case ; particularly the different forms
so called malarial poisoning takes in different localities. This
subject may be also subdivided and complicated by going
into the controversy as to whether yellow fever is endemic on
the West Coast or not. That it has occurred there from time