The Black Man's Place in South Africa Part 2

I then asked her what it was that made her well. Was it the dancing or the profuse sweating which I had noticed? "The Spirit," she said, "made me well, he gave me to dance, the dancing made we sweat thereby cooling my body, and that made me well, it brought my heart back to its right place."

This clear expression of concatenated thought from a Native woman who had had no missionary tuition or other education of the Western kind shows to my mind sound reasoning capacity no less developed than that met with in Europeans generally.

Turning over my notes I select, at random, a few more instances to ill.u.s.trate my argument.

A Tebele youth of about twenty years of age, smooth-limbed and good looking, was charged some years ago in the Rhodesian High Court with the crime of abducting two young Native girls for his own immoral purposes.

I made a note of the chief part of his speech in his own defence at the time. This is what he said:

"I have the gift of singing and dancing, my father had it, and his father before him. When I sing and dance people forget their sorrows, and when I leave a kraal, singing as I go, the people follow me for the joy of my song, so that sometimes I have to drive them away. Now it is easy to drive away old men and women, but who can drive away two pretty girls like these that have been made to speak against me to-day? When I sang and danced at their kraal their father gave me a goat because I had made his heart white and glad, and his daughters followed me and joined in the play--and I am young! When I become old and can no longer sing and dance the girls will not follow me. Why should I not be merry while I may? I never said a word to these girls, they followed me, I did not call them. But now, if the white men who listen to my words feel doubtful about what I say, then I would ask the judge to allow me to show them here and now how I can dance and sing, and if, after hearing and seeing me do so, they still think I am to blame, then I have no more to say; I shall go to gaol with a broken heart, and silent."

The offer made by this African Apollo, I need not say, was not accepted, and he was found guilty and sentenced to a term of imprisonment with hard labour, but I remember that several of the jurymen expressed their astonishment afterwards at hearing so good a defence so pleasingly expressed by a raw Native youth who had never been to any kind of school.

On one occasion I had some trouble to make a Native complainant understand that the evidence upon which he relied was entirely hearsay and therefore of no avail against the man he wished to charge with a crime of theft. While talking an elderly Tebele arrived and I put the matter to him. He listened gravely and when I had finished he turned to the other and said:

"Have you not heard before that that which is heard only cannot be heard again in Court? You must bring witnesses who saw and heard themselves what you say has happened. The words of the man who says he heard the story from another is no testimony against a man when he is to be tried for a crime or a debt."

After writing down this crisp and explicit statement from a Native whom I knew to have had little or no intercourse with educated Europeans I asked the old man if he had ever heard the matter discussed in a European Court. He said he had not, and seemed surprised that I should consider his words worth putting down in a note-book.

When it is realised how few laymen amongst ourselves are able to grasp the distinction between admissible and inadmissible evidence in a Court of Law, and how few would be able to express themselves as clearly as did this old, so-called, heathen, then the instance is seen to be worth citing.

I remember a Native witchdoctor who in defending himself against a charge of alleged witchcraft practice spoke thus:

"The people you have heard to-day came to me and told me that they had had sickness and death at their kraal. I knew these people and I knew that there had been strife among them for a long time over the dividing of an inheritance. I threw the bones[18]--it is our way--and I told these people that the spirit of the old woman, who was the grand-mother of most of them, was angry because of the quarrelling that did not cease; I told them that the snakes, that is to say the ancestral spirits of these people, were angry at the noise of the quarrelling, and I told them to redeem their fault by killing a goat,--it is our way. And now it is said that I have done wrong. In what way have I done wrong? I have heard a white missionary say that the white man's G.o.d sends sickness to people when they sin, and that if the sinners leave off their evil ways then they become well and happy again, and I said the same to these people--and if they paid me ten s.h.i.+llings, why, do not the whites make payments to their priests?"

I might add, in parenthesis, that the argument advanced did not find favour with the magistrate on the bench who, like so many of his kind, had little knowledge of Bantu lore and languages, and who therefore could only perceive the letter of the law and not the human spirit behind the acts that const.i.tuted a breach of the white man's statute.

The Natives, like most of the white people, prefer not to think overmuch about death and whether there be life for us beyond the grave; like the vast majority of Europeans they prefer to take the superst.i.tions and beliefs of their forefathers for granted. Vague notions about ancestral and familiar spirits that emanate from the grave in the guise of snakes or other animals are accepted in the same spirit or traditional mood in which the doctrines and dogmas of the various religions of Europe are accepted by the bulk of white believers.

I have found among the Bantu the same child-like faith in all that is proclaimed by traditional authority about things supernatural, and I have found also among them the same hesitation or inability to believe without questioning in all that is laid down in the name of tradition that we see among ourselves. The will to believe is temperamental and general, but the unbeliever is found among the Bantu as well as everywhere else.

I remember that I asked a raw Native once what he thought about the after-life in which so many white and black people professed to believe.

He answered: "The white people are a clever race; they see many things in their books; perhaps they can see even beyond death. I do not say that they are liars, as some of our people sometimes say. They may know these things, I do not. All I know is that when I die this breath that is now in me so that I am able to think and speak will leave my body which then must be put away in the ground: I think that will be the end of me--but, not quite, for there,"--here he pointed to his infant son who was toddling about in the strong sunlight--"there in him, my son,"

and his voice grew tender as he spoke, "I shall live on because he is part of me, my life is in him; I cannot die altogether so long as he lives, but if he should die and not leave a son to carry on my life, then should I die the death utterly."

I recollect that when I wrote these clear words of an honest doubter there came to mind the old Arab saying: "Whosoever leaveth no male hath no memory," which is but a confession of that sense of doubt that has haunted the minds of men of all races and at all times while the people as a whole have professed their hope and belief in a life everlasting.

I discussed the matter of polygamy with a Native youth one day, and made a note of his argument. He said:

"In our district the young women are beginning to go against the man who wants more than one wife. I have a young wife, and when I talk to her about taking a second wife she says that she will not suffer it. She says that the white people do well in that the man and his wife grow old together, whereas we Natives, as she says, we are like the cattle in the kraal; we do not behave like human beings. But to this I answered that our fathers and mothers taught us that one wife by herself cannot be happy and comfortable because when she falls sick, as women often do, there is no one to help her, whereas when a man has two or more wives they can help and nurse one another, they need not be sad or unhappy. I think our fathers way is the good way and I shall follow it, but I know there will be trouble because of the new thoughts my wife has taken from the white people."

Now I do not say that these instances show any remarkable intelligence or power of thinking, but I do say that they show sound level-headed reasoning just like the common sense reasoning from cause and effect which we find in the average European, and that they show, moreover, that the same types of mental disposition and capacity are found in black and white alike.

It would indeed be easy for me to continue giving instances like these to show the essential sameness of the nature of the minds of the black and white people, but I must consider the weight of my book and the readers patience. I have refrained from pointing to those Natives who have proved their scholastic capabilities at various universities and colleges because it is generally surmised that these men are exceptional or that their success is due to a highly developed imitative faculty coupled with a strong memory, with which it is fas.h.i.+onable to credit the successful Native student, and I have advisedly confined myself to instances drawn from the everyday life and thought of the normal and uneducated Native people.

I have lived amongst the Bantu for nearly thirty years and I have studied them closely, and I have come to the conclusion that there is no Native mind distinct from the common human mind. The mind of the Native is the mind of all mankind; it is not separate or different from the mind of the European or the Asiatic any more than the mind of the English is different from that of the Scotch or Irish people. The English way of speaking differs from that of the French, but there is no reason for thinking that the mind of the two people differs in any way whatever. The languages of the world are many but the mind of the world is one.

There are, I know, some white men who talk knowingly about a Native mind which they allege to be unlike their own, a mind of whose strange anfractuosities they profess a special knowledge, but these people must not be taken seriously. They are always half-educated men, suffering, as Cardinal Newman said, from that haziness of intellectual vision which is so common among all those who have not had a really good education.

These people pretend to a knowledge which is impossible, seeing that we can only know and understand the minds of other people by a.s.suming that they are like our own so that if we postulate a Native mind different from our own it must of necessity remain unknowable by us, for what is psychology but the power of understanding others from our understanding of ourselves?

The judge on the bench and the priest in the confessional follow the thoughts and feelings of the minds they have to deal with, not by virtue of any special power of divination, but simply by judging their fellow-men's way of thinking and feeling to be even as their own.

The truth of the matter is that all men think in the same way, but not always about the same things. There is no such thing as an inherent racial mind but there are different national and racial cultures lasting sometimes for centuries, like that of China, and some times only for a generation, like that of modern Germany. But these differences are temporary and outward and not inwardly heritable. The difference between the mind of the philosopher and the plough-boy is one not of kind, not even of degree, but of content. The things that occupy the mind of the peasant farmer are not the same that fill the mind of the university don, but if the respective environments of the two types had been reversed the professor might have thought about manure and the farmer about metaphysics. And this holds good also of nations and races.

Consider, for instance, the German people who before the rise of Bismarck were looked upon as a nation of peaceful peasants and _Gelerhten_, "_ces bons Allemands_," in contemporary French parlance, and how they became within a few years through being made to think constantly about their own national supremacy, a race of ruthless warriors that terrorised and nearly conquered Europe in the Great World War. The mind of the German race had not been changed, but the main business of that mind had been changed through the imposition on the growing ma.s.ses of a new ideal, the ideal of dominion in the hands of the German people.

The difference between the mental status of the white man and the Native is the same as that which we notice between the man who has had a liberal education and the man who has not, and it lies mainly in the fact that the one is given to introspection, a.n.a.lysis and criticism whereas the other, whether he be a European peasant or a Bantu herdsman, looks outward, takes things for granted and asks no questions, so that with the Bantu as with the illiterate European, the primitive thoughts and ways of their forefathers are held good enough by their sons, but this does not preclude the latent potentiality in both for the understanding and acquisition of new thoughts and ways once the shackles of conservatism have been loosened and cast aside.

In his thinking about the things he knows the black man comes to the same conclusion as the white man when he thinks about the same things.

The black man does not think about electricity or the differential calculus because he knows nothing about these matters, neither, and for the same reason, does the European peasant wherever he may still be found in his primitive state. It has been alleged in America and in South Africa that Negro and Bantu children, when compared with European children in both countries, show not only comparative slowness in the study of arithmetic, but that they are on the whole less accurate in their work, and this I readily believe, for the reason that the home surroundings of the black children are seldom as favourable to the development of speed and exactness as they are among Europeans. It is not considered "good form" among Natives to do things in a hurry, slowness is regarded as essential to good manners; moreover the craving for speed and exact.i.tude is everywhere a feature of high-pressure city life rather than of life in the country. The town artisan of to-day must be quick and accurate, whereas the agricultural labourer is found satisfactory so long as he is a steady worker, and the home atmosphere of the two types is bound to be affected by these considerations. The home atmosphere of the ordinary Bantu family in process of acquiring the ways of Western civilisation will be more like that of the agricultural labourer than of the town artisan or shopkeeper, and it is conceded on every hand that the home influence has a direct and important bearing on the children's progress in school. Take as an example the children of the back-veld Dutch in South Africa. I have been told by many of their teachers that the difficulty in teaching these children is not so much to make them work as to rouse them to a sense of the importance of speed and accuracy, and yet we often see children from this cla.s.s growing into men and women of very high intellectual ability.

There are also some who think that the Native has no great capacity for mechanics and engineering generally, but I have seen so many instances of mechanical resourcefulness and inventiveness in Natives who have only had a superficial acquaintance with machinery that I cannot doubt that with technical education like that given to European apprentices they will attain to proficiency equal to that of the whites.

I do not profess the knowledge of a pedagogue in these matters. I speak simply from an insight gained through many years of observation and study at first hand. I have listened to thousands of old Native men of many different tribes in my time, I have heard them speak their inmost thoughts, not through interpreters--who ever learned anything through an interpreter?--I have studied these people in and out of Court, officially and privately, in their kraals and in the veld during many years, and I say that I can find nothing whatever throughout the whole gamut of the Native's conscious life and soul to differentiate him from other human beings in other parts of the world. In his sense of sorrow and of humour, in his moral intuitions, in his percipience of proportion and in all the subtle elements that go to make up the mental const.i.tution of modern man, I see no difference in him from the European variety which to-day stands at the highest point of human achievement, but I freely confess that the African Native has so far shown a lack of that will to think a.n.a.lytically and critically which in the civilised man is the result of a continuous discontent with things as they are, a discontent which has urged him up to his present plane of racial supremacy.

But the reason for the fact that the African Natives have never thought as hard and as long as the ancient and modern peoples of other lands lies not, I think, in a lack of inherent capacity but in a lack of opportunity, the meaning of which now comes to be considered.

ACHIEVEMENT.

We have now come to the point where an answer must be given to the question: If the African Natives are on the whole endowed with a mental capacity equal to that possessed by the Europeans why have they never achieved any civilisation at all comparable with those cultures which have been successively set up by the people of Europe, Asia and Ancient America?

If we take it for granted that the Africans have never achieved a civilisation similar to those that date back beyond the limits of history, a premiss by no means a.s.sured seeing that there are signs of cycles of civilisations coming before those of which we have written or monumental records and of whose ethnic origin there is no certain knowledge, then the question may appear to have no other answer than the a.s.sumed lack of inherent capacity in the black race, but let us consider the matter closely.

The question asked depends upon the proposition that achievement is the sole test of capacity or, in other words, that achievement must necessarily follow capacity, and this is a proposition by no means free from doubt. It is plain that a desire to achieve is a condition precedent to achievement but it is equally plain that there may well be ability without ambition. The question why civilisation has not followed apparent capacity may with equal propriety be asked about races whose mental abilities have never been doubted. Consider, for instance, two such widely separated races as the Red Indians of our own times and the Northmen who roamed over the seas in the days of Alfred the Great.

The North American Indians, though they achieved no civilisation to be compared with the cultures of Mexico and Peru, yet conserved a very high degree of initiative in other directions. According to competent observers, these people have shown a capacity for wiliness and a power of divination of the obscured workings of nature and of the human mind which have never been surpa.s.sed elsewhere. That the high moral and mental status of these people is fully recognised by their European successors is proved by the fact that many Americans in high stations to-day actually boast of having in their veins the blood of the North American Indian. And yet these highly gifted people had not when Columbus discovered America attained to the knowledge of iron. Despite the advantages of a most favourable environment and a stimulating climate, the Red Indians were in point of mechanical development behind the earliest Bantu; they had no iron implements, no tillage and no settled or permanent abodes, and whatever may have been the cause of their lack of development, the fact remains that there was no achievement despite undeniable capacity.

The early Scandinavians who lived in a state of barbarism ages before and long after Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, Greece and Rome developed their various civilisations, furnish another ill.u.s.tration of the fact that there may well be capacity without accomplishment, for no one can doubt the keenness of the minds of these people who have advanced to the front ranks of human endeavour. These rude sea-rovers must have lived in what is generally supposed to have been a most stimulating climate during long ages while other races in Southern Europe and in Asia built up mighty civilisations within environments that seem to have been far less incitative of progress.

Although the broad facts of history are known to us the causes that have contributed in the past to keep down some races while other peoples who were no better endowed or situated rose to the greatest heights of human effort cannot be stated with certainty. It is easy to cite the circ.u.mstances that are commonly conjectured as accounting for the origin and growth of civilisation, such as soil, climate and geographical position, but it is equally easy to point to times and places when and where great civilisations have arisen under conditions that have concurred elsewhere with miserable stagnation in rude barbarism.

Climate is, perhaps, the factor which is most generally condescended upon as being the chief of the causes that contribute to that collective accomplishment which we call civilisation, but the connection between the two things is far from clear, indeed it seems to be often negatived by actual facts. Seeing, for instance, that the easy fruition of desire which is possible in tropical and sub-tropical lat.i.tudes does away with the idea of necessity as the mother of invention in those parts of the world it becomes difficult to see how tool-using man, who is generally supposed to have originated somewhere in the warm belts, came to take the first and the most difficult steps in the upward progress where there was so little, if any, incentive to that sustained effort and concentration of the mind which is required for the thinking out of the most difficult of all thoughts, the first principles of any art or craft. Why, we may well ask, should the primitive African have worried about cultivating the soil where edible roots and berries abounded? Why should he have bothered about making fire where there was no need of artificial warmth or for the cooking of food? Why should he have cudgeled his brains to fas.h.i.+on weapons and to contrive snares for the killing of game of which he was in no more need than his vegetarian cousins, the anthropoid apes? Why should there have been progress where the environment provided no stimuli therefore, in other words, why should primitive man have moved forward where indulgent nature allowed him to stand still?

If we believe, with Darwin and other students, that our primitive ancestors emerged from somewhere within the warm zones, we cannot avoid the difficulty of reconciling that supposition with the theory that civilisation is in the first instance the result of a stimulating environment. If on the other hand, we surmise that _h.o.m.o sapiens_ originated in the colder parts of the world we still have to account for the fact that his further progress was made not in those parts but in warmer lat.i.tudes where a genial climate afforded no apparent provocation for continued effort in the way of invention and general development.

It would seem that the innate tendency to conservatism latent in man, the disposition to leave things as they are and to stick to the familiar devil rather than fly to unknown G.o.ds, is in itself sufficient to account for those lapses in ma.s.s-achievement and those long periods of stagnation which mark the course of mankind everywhere. We see how Egypt hovered for centuries on the brink of the discovery of the alphabet but never attained thereto. The exponents of the so-called "pulsatory hypothesis" can hardly claim that a change in the climate will explain the fact seeing that the neighbouring people were able to accomplish this great feat under very similar climatic conditions. We see how China developed a wonderful civilisation while the Western world lay steeped in barbarism, and then went to sleep till now. The size of that great country made possible always the friction between people coming from widely separated localities, which we believe to be conducive to progress, and the climate and general environment seems to have been no less favourable than in Europe and America. We see how the Arabs made great conquests and enriched the world with many patient and accurate observations and then came to a standstill and remained as they are to-day in serene contentment, strangers to the very idea of progress.

Can it be said that mental capacity and collective will-power were lacking in any of these people? On the contrary, it is admitted that they were possessed of mental powers as great as those of the restless Europeans of to-day who are rus.h.i.+ng onward in a ceaseless pursuit of change, a pursuit made possible only by continuous victory over the forces of conservatism, and this victory, as I think, is gained not through the outward circ.u.mstances of climate and geographical surroundings, but through a "divine discontent" which is kindled, we know not how, in the leaders of the world, regardless of time and place, as says the poet of one whom he hails as the deliverer of his country:

"A flaming coal Lit at the stars and sent To burn the sin of patience from her soul, The scandal of content."

It is this inward fire rather than any outward pressure that prompts the captive spirit to break loose from the fetters of the unmoving giant, custom, the greatest of all tyrants, who grows stronger as he grows older. The difficulty of reversing the ways and conditions that have been induced from birth is tremendous, and progress has never been possible without breaking away, always at great risk to the innovators, the stoned prophets of all ages, from the powerful grip of h.o.a.ry and hallowed custom, which is the essence of conservatism. Initiative implies the breaking of the commandment which enjoins everyone to honour his father and mother that he may live long in the land, a sanction which entails continued adherence to the ancestral ways and ideas, and which, being rooted in instinctive fear of innovation, has power over us all.

Progress, then, has everywhere been the result, in the beginning, of individual initiative in men who were possessed of the power of personality, the "born" leaders of the world who, whether they figured as chiefs or kings, witchdoctors or priests, prophets or lawgivers, were all reformers in their various ways. We see how these restless spirits have appeared everywhere at irregular intervals, not only in localities favoured by nature, but often in the most unlikely places, and there is no reason for thinking that this sporadic cropping up of new leaders will ever cease.

But although we believe that progress has been started always and everywhere by the efforts of reformers that have occurred as spontaneous variations from the dead level of their fellows independent of time and circ.u.mstances, we need not deny the effect of environment, especially the effect of an inimical environment, upon a new movement after it has been started, and it may well be that the physical disadvantages of the great "dark" continent may have made difficult, if not impossible, in the past that meeting and friction of different cultures which seem to be essential to the birth of intellectual life, so that here the admitted isolation of the inhabitants during many centuries may have served to squelch initiative and foster stagnation. Nevertheless the influence of environment must not be over-rated for we see that general contentment with resulting inertia have existed for untold ages in places where now the sounds and shocks of daily progress reverberate in a thousand fields of civilised activity without any change being discernible either in the bodily or mental calibre of the people themselves, and this must surely teach us that it is not incapacity nor yet unfavourable physical environment, but that, more than anything else, it is the dead weight of human conservatism that holds down a nation or a race to its particular level; that it is the human element in the general milieu that determines human development, a lesson that has been well summed up in the Chinese aphorism "A man is more like the age he lives in than he is like his father and mother."

Some years ago a theory was advanced which a.s.sumed the presence from the beginning of an inherently superior race of blond Europeans who, it was supposed, left their lairs in the North from time to time to hara.s.s and conquer essentially inferior people in the South whom they innervated through intermarriage with their superior mentality, and thereby succeeded in rearing those mighty civilisations that waned and fell when the "blue" blood of the invaders became absorbed and lost in the old autochthonous streams. Apart from the lack of cogent evidence this theory, if it may be so called, is unsatisfactory in that it does not explain why these putative super-men failed to establish within their own stimulating environment any of those great cultures that were set up in places and under climatic conditions which are supposed to have been far less provocative to progress. To-day the theories of Gobineau and Houston Chamberlain who both held up the Teutons as being at all times the greatest and n.o.blest of human kind, do not impress the non-Teuton part of the world, nor do the later apostles of the more recent "Nordic"

race faith, like Madison Grant, and others of his school, succeed in persuading thinking men and women that the Scandinavians and the English are the only people that ever could initiate and sustain great civilisations. The fact that great civilisations have been built up and are now being developed by people who were and are neither blond nor Nordic makes it impossible to believe these pretensions to exclusive racial genius and merit. "All the talk," says Professor Flinders Petrie, "about Nordic supremacy is vanity when we look at the facts in Europe.

Dark Iberians and Picts, Asiatics, Gaels and Celts, are the basis of our peoples. Further, it is in the time of stress and difficulty that the older stocks come again to the top. The majority of the men of power among the Allies have not been fair Nordics but dark men of the underlying races."[19]