Remember, You Must Always Have
Your Original Material - Carefully Noted Down At The Time Of
Occurrence - With You, So That You May Say In Answer To His Why?
Because Of This, And This, And This.
However good may be the outfit for your work that you take with you,
you will have, at first, great difficulty in realising that it is
possible for the people you are among really to believe things in
the way they do.
And you cannot associate with them long before you
must recognise that these Africans have often a remarkable mental
acuteness and a large share of common sense; that there is nothing
really "child-like" in their form of mind at all. Observe them
further and you will find they are not a flighty-minded, mystical
set of people in the least. They are not dreamers, or poets, and
you will observe, and I hope observe closely - for to my mind this is
the most important difference between their make of mind and our
own - that they are notably deficient in all mechanical arts: they
have never made, unless under white direction and instruction, a
single fourteenth-rate piece of cloth, pottery, a tool or machine,
house, road, bridge, picture or statue; that a written language of
their own construction they none of them possess. A careful study
of the things a man, black or white, fails to do, whether for good
or evil, usually gives you a truer knowledge of the man than the
things he succeeds in doing.
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