And Would Not A Very Hopeful Outlook For West Africa
Regarding The Labour Question Be Possible, If A Regime 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 of 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 of 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 duty; 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 - 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 of 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 hare; 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 of 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 of 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.
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