All That I Wish To Urge
Regarding The African At Large Is That He Has Been Mismanaged Of
Late Years By The White Races.
The study of this question is a very
interesting one, but I have no space to enter into it here in
detail.
In my opinion - I say my own, I beg you to remark, only when
I am uttering heresy - this mismanagement has been a by-product of
the wave of hysterical emotionalism that has run through white
culture and for which I have an instinctive hatred.
I have briefly pointed out the evil worked by misdirected missionary
effort on the native mind, but it is not the missionary alone that
is doing harm. The Government does nearly as much. Whether it does
this because of the fear of Exeter Hall as representing a big voting
interest, or whether just from the tendency to get everything into
the hands of a Council, or an Office, to be everlastingly nagging
and legislating and inspecting, matters little; the result is bad,
and it fills me with the greatest admiration for my country to see
how in spite of this she keeps the lead. That she will always keep
it I believe, because I believe that it is impossible that this
phase of emotionalism - no, it is not hypocrisy, my French friends,
it is only a sort of fit - will last, and we shall soon be back in
our clear senses again and say to the world, "We do this thing
because we think it is right; because we think it is best for those
we do it to and for ourselves, not because of the wickedness of war,
the brotherhood of man, or any other notion bred of fear."
The way in which the present ideas acting through the Government do
harm in Africa are many. English Government officials have very
little and very poor encouragement given them if they push inland
and attempt to enlarge the sphere of influence, which their
knowledge of local conditions teaches them requires enlarging,
because the authorities at home are afraid other nations will say we
are rapacious landgrabbers. Well, we always have been, and they
will say it anyhow; and where after all is the harm in it? We have
acted in unison with the nations who for good sound reasons of their
own have cut down Portuguese possessions in Africa because we were
afraid of being thought to support a nation who went in for slavery.
I always admire a good move in a game or a brilliant bit of
strategy, and that was a beauty; and on our head now lie the affairs
of the Congo Free State, while France and Germany smile sweetly,
knowing that these affairs will soon be such that they will be able
to step in and divide that territory up between themselves without a
stain on their character - in the interests of humanity - the whole of
that rich region, which by the name of Livingstone, Speke, Grant,
Burton, and Cameron, should now be ours.
Then again in commercial competition our attitude seems to me very
lacking in dignity. We are now just beginning to know it is a
fight, and this commercial war has been going on since 1880 - since,
in fact, France and Germany have recovered from their war of 1870.
And if we are to carry on this commercial war with any hope of
success, we must abandon our "Oh! that's not fair; I won't play"
attitude - and above all we must have no more Government restrictions
on our foreign trade. In West Africa governmental restriction
settles, like dew in autumn, on the liquor traffic. It is a case of
give a dog a bad name and hang him. Moreover, raising the import
dues on liquor may bring into the Government a good revenue; but it
is a short-sighted policy - for the liquor is the thing there is the
best market for in West Africa. The natives have no enthusiasm
about cotton-goods, as they seem from some accounts to have in East
Central, and the supply of them they now get, and get cheap and
good, is as much as they require. And if the question of the
abstract morality of introducing clothes, or introducing liquor, to
native races, were fairly gone into, the results would be
interesting - for clothing native races in European clothes works
badly for them and kills them off. Indeed the whole of this
question of trade with the lower races is full of curious and
unexpected points. Speaking at large, the introduction of European
culture - governmental, religious, or mercantile - has a destructive
action on all the lower races; many of them the governmental and
religious sections have stamped right out; but trade has never
stamped a race out when dissociated from the other two, and it
certainly has had no bad effect in tropical Africa. With regard to
the liquor traffic, try and put yourself in the West African's
place. Imagine, for example, that you want a pair of boots. You go
into a shop, prepared to pay for them, but the man who keeps the
shop says, "My good friend, you must not have boots, they are
immoral. You can have a tin of sardines, or a pocket-handkerchief,
they are much better for you." Would you take the sardines or the
pocket-handkerchiefs? more particularly would you feel inclined to
take them instead of your desired boots if you knew there was a shop
in a neighbouring street where boots are to be had? And there is a
neighbouring shop-street to all our West Coast possessions which is
in the hands of either France or Germany.
I do not for a moment deny that the liquor traffic requires
regulation, but it requires more regulation in Europe than it does
in Africa, because Europe is more given to intoxication. In Africa
all that is wanted is that the spirit sent in should be wholesome,
and not sold at a strength over 45 degrees below proof.
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