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+Project Gutenberg's The Black Man's Place in South Africa, by Peter Nielsen
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
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+
+Title: The Black Man's Place in South Africa
+
+Author: Peter Nielsen
+
+Release Date: February 4, 2005 [EBook #14900]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BLACK MAN'S PLACE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Susan Skinner and the PG Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE BLACK MAN'S PLACE IN SOUTH AFRICA
+
+BY
+
+PETER NIELSEN.
+
+JUTA & CO., LTD.,
+
+CAPE TOWN. PORT ELIZABETH. UITENHAGE.
+
+JOHANNESBURG.
+
+1922
+
+
+
+
+_To
+
+MY MOTHER_.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+The reader has a right to ask what qualification the writer may have for
+dealing with the subject upon which he offers his opinions.
+
+The author of this book claims the qualifications of an observer who,
+during many years, has studied the ways and thoughts of the Natives of
+South Africa on the spot, not through interpreters, but at first hand,
+through the medium of their own speech, which he professes to know as
+well as the Natives themselves.
+
+P.N.
+
+
+
+
+THE BLACK MAN'S PLACE IN SOUTH AFRICA.
+
+THE QUESTION STATED.
+
+
+The white man has taken up the burden of ruling his dark-skinned fellows
+throughout the world, and in South Africa he has so far carried that
+burden alone, feeling well assured of his fitness for the task. He has
+seen before him a feeble folk, strong only in their numbers and fit only
+for service, a people unworthy of sharing with his own race the
+privileges of social and political life, and it has seemed right
+therefore in his sight that this people should continue to bend under
+his dominant will. But to-day the white man is being disturbed by signs
+of coming strength among the black and thriving masses; signs of the
+awakening of a consciousness of racial manhood that is beginning to find
+voice in a demand for those rights of citizenship which hitherto have
+been so easily withheld. The white people are beginning to ask
+themselves whether they shall sit still and wait till that voice becomes
+clamant and insistent throughout the land or whether they shall begin
+now to think out and provide means for dealing with those coming events
+whose shadows are already falling athwart the immediate outlook. The
+strong and solid feeling among the whites in the past against giving any
+political rights to the blacks however civilised they might be is not so
+strong or as solid as it was. The number is growing of those among the
+ruling race who feel that the right of representation should here also
+follow the burden of taxation, but while there are many who think thus,
+those who try to think the matter out in all its bearings soon come to
+apprehend the possibility that where once political equality has been
+granted social equality may follow, and this apprehension makes the
+thinking man pause to think again before he commits himself to a
+definite and settled opinion.
+
+Taking the civilisation of to-day to mean an ordered and advanced state
+of society in which all men are equally bound and entitled to share the
+burdens and privileges of the whole political and social life according
+to their individual limitations we ask whether the African Natives are
+capable of acquiring this civilisation, and whether, if it be proved
+that their capacity for progress is equal to that of the Europeans, the
+demand for full racial equality that must inevitably follow can in
+fairness be denied. This I take to be the crux of the Native Question in
+South Africa.
+
+Before we attempt to answer this question it is necessary to find out,
+if we can, in what ways the African differs from the European; for if it
+be found that there are radical and inherent differences between the two
+races of a kind that seem certain to remain unaltered by new influences
+and changed environment then the whites will feel justified in denying
+equality where nature herself has made it impossible, whereas if the
+existing difference be proved to be only outwardly acquired and not
+inwardly heritable then the coming demand for equality will stand
+supported by natural right which may not be ignored. The question, then,
+before us is this. Is the African Native equal to the European in mental
+and moral capacity or is he not? We must have an answer to this
+question, for we cannot assign to the Native his proper place in the
+general scheme of our civilisation till we know exactly what manner of
+man he is.
+
+We of to-day are rightly proud of our freedom from the sour
+superstitions and religious animosities of the past, but these
+hindrances to progress and general happiness were only dispelled by the
+light of scientific thought and clear reasoning. Let us then bring to
+bear that same blessed light upon our present enquiry into the reasons,
+real or fancied, for those prejudices of race and colour which we still
+retain, for it is only by removing the misconceptions and false notions
+that obscure our view that we can come to a clear understanding of the
+many complex issues that make up the great Native problem of Africa.
+
+
+BODILY DIFFERENCES.
+
+"That which distinguishes man from the beast," said Beaumarchais, "is
+drinking without being thirsty, and making love at all seasons," and he
+spoke perhaps truer than he knew, for the fact that man is not bound by
+seasons and is not in entire subjection to his environment is the
+cardinal distinction between him and the brutes. This distinction was
+won through man's possession of a thinking brain which caused or
+coincided with an upright carriage whereby his two hands were set free
+from the lowly service of mere locomotion to make fire and to fashion
+the tools wherewith he was enabled to control his environment instead of
+remaining like the animals entirely controlled by it. This wonderful
+brain also made possible the communication and tradition of his
+experiences and ideas through articulate speech by which means his
+successors in each generation were able to keep and develop the slowly
+spelt lessons of human life.
+
+Are the African Natives as far removed from the beasts as the Europeans,
+and do they share equally with the Europeans this great human
+distinction of ability to think?
+
+The belief, at, one time commonly held, that in morphological
+development and physical appearance the Bantu stand nearer in the scale
+of evolution to our common ape-like ancestors than do the white people
+does not seem to be warranted by facts. Careful investigations by
+trained observers all over the world have shown that the various simian
+features discernible in the anatomy of modern man are found fairly
+evenly distributed amongst advanced and backward races.
+
+The so-called prognathism of the Bantu has been cited as a racial mark
+denoting comparative nearness to the brutes, but when it is noted that
+anthropologists differ among themselves as to what constitutes this
+feature, whether it is to be measured from points above or below the
+nose or both, and when we are informed in some text books that while the
+negroes are prognathous, bushmen must be classed with Europeans as being
+the opposite, that is, orthognathous,[1] and when, added to this, we
+learn from other quarters that white women are, on the average, more
+prognathous than white men,[2] then the significance of this
+distinction, which in any case is not regarded as being relative to
+cranical capacity, is seen to be more apparent than real.
+
+Extreme hairiness of body, on the other hand, which might well be taken
+as a simian or vestigial character, is seldom met with in the Bantu, but
+is equally common among Europeans and Australian aboriginals and is
+found particularly developed in the Ainu of Japan. The texture also of
+the African's hair is less like that of the hair of the man-like apes
+than is the hair of the European. The proportions of the limbs of the
+Europeans seem, on the average, to be nearer to the supposed prototype
+of man than those of the Bantu. The specifically human development of
+the red lips is more pronounced in the African than in the European,[3]
+and if there is anything in what has been called the "god-like erectness
+of the human carriage" then it must be admitted that the Bantu women
+exhibit a straightness of form which may well be envied by the ladies of
+civilisation.
+
+It is generally accepted that the African Natives have a bodily odour of
+their own which is _sui generis_ in that it is supposed to be different
+from that of other human races. Some early travellers have compared it
+with the smell of the female crocodile, and many people believe it to be
+a racial characteristic denoting a comparatively humble origin and
+intended by nature as a signal or warning for the rest of human kind
+against close physical contact with the African race. A recent student
+of the Negro question in America gives it as his opinion that this odour
+is "something which the Negroes will have difficulty in living down."[4]
+To most Europeans this smell seems to be more or less unpleasant but it
+must not be forgotten that it does not seem to affect the large numbers
+of white men of all nationalities who have found and still find pleasure
+in continued and intimate intercourse with African women. It would seem
+as if highly "refined" Europeans are nowadays given to exaggerate the
+sensation produced on their over delicate olfactory nerves by the
+exhalations caused by perspiration through a healthy and porous skin. In
+many of the so-called Ladies' Journals published in England and America
+advertisements appear regularly vaunting chemical preparations for the
+disguising of the odour of perspiration which, it is alleged, mars the
+attractiveness of women. If this is so it would seem that the nostrils
+of the modern European are rather too easily offended by the natural
+smell of his kind. However this may be there is no evidence for
+believing that the African's bodily smell is more animal-like than that
+of any other race.
+
+If there is one thing which the white man of South Africa is sure about
+it is the comparative thickness of the "nigger skull," but this notion
+also would appear to be one of the many which have no foundation in
+fact.
+
+The opinion of medical men, based upon actual observation and
+measurement, is to the effect that there is no evidence to support the
+contention that the Native skull is thicker than that of the
+European.[5] That the thick, woolly hair of the Native may account for
+his supposed comparative invulnerability to head injuries has not
+occurred to the layman observer who is more often given to vehement
+assertion than to careful enquiry.
+
+The supposed arrest of the brain of the Bantu at the age of puberty
+owing to the closing of the sutures of the skull at an earlier age than
+happens with Europeans is another popular notion for which a sort of
+pseudo-scientific authority may be quoted from encyclopædias and old
+books of travel. The opinion of modern authorities on this subject is
+that those who say that the closure of the sutures of the skull
+determines brain growth would or should also say that the cart pulls the
+horse, for, if the sutures of the Native skull close at a somewhat
+earlier date in the average Native than in the average European then it
+simply means that the Native reaches maturity slightly earlier than the
+average white man.
+
+The loss of mental alertness which is said by some to be peculiar to the
+Natives at the time of puberty is very often met with in the European
+youth or girl at that period of life. Competent observers have of late
+years come to the conclusion that this supposed falling off in
+intelligence, in so far as it may differ in degree from what has so
+often been noticed in European boys and girls at that point of
+development, is due to psychological and not to physiological causes. It
+is realised that this lapse in mental power of concentration in European
+youth in the stage of early adolescence is prevented by the force of
+example and fear of parental and general reprobation coupled with
+unbroken school-discipline, all of which factors are as yet seldom
+present in the surroundings of the average Bantu boy or girl.
+
+The outward ethnic differentiæ of the Bantu are admittedly palpable and
+patent to everyone, but in the opinion of competent observers there is
+nothing in the anatomy of the black man to make him a lower beast than
+the man with the white skin. It is now seen that there is no apparent
+relation between complexion or skull shape and intelligence, but while
+this is so there appears to be a correlation between the size of the
+brain and the number of cells and fibres of which it is made up,
+although this correlation is so weak as to be difficult of
+demonstration.[6]
+
+The capacity of the normal human cranium varies from 1,000 cubic
+centimetres to 1,800 cubic centimetres, the mean capacity of female
+crania being 10 per cent. less than the mean of male crania. On this
+basis skulls are classified in the text books as being _microcephalic_
+when below 1,350 cubic centimetres, such as those of the extinct
+Tasmanians, Bushmen, Andamanese, Melanesians, Veddahs, and the Hill-men
+of India; _mesocephalic_, those from 1,350 to 1,450 cubic centimetres,
+comprising Negroes, Malays, American Indians, and Polynesians; and
+_megacephalic_, above 1,450 cubic centimetres, including Eskimos,
+Europeans, Mongolians, Burmese and Japanese. The mean capacity among
+Europeans is fixed at 1,500 cubic centimetres, and the average weight of
+the brain at 1,300 grams.
+
+These figures show that the skull capacity of the average European is
+larger than that of the average Negro, and as it seems plausible that
+the greater the central nervous system, the higher will be the faculty
+of the race, and the greater its aptitude for mental achievements, the
+conclusion that the European is superior in this respect seems on the
+face of it to be well grounded. There are, however, certain relevant
+facts which qualify this inference, and these must be briefly
+considered.
+
+The anthropologist Manouvrier measured thirty-five skulls of eminent
+white men and found them to be of an average capacity of 1,665 cubic
+centimetres as compared to 1,560 cubic centimetres general average
+derived from 110 ordinary individuals. On the other hand he found that
+the cranial capacity of forty-five murderers was 1,580 cubic
+centimetres, also superior to the general average. Professor Franz Boas,
+in discussing this experiment, says that most of the brain weights
+constituting the general series are obtained in anatomical institutes,
+and the individuals who find their way there are poorly developed on
+account of malnutrition and of life under unfavourable circumstances,
+while the eminent men represent a much better nourished class. As poor
+nourishment reduces the weight and size of the whole body, it will also
+reduce the size and weight of the brain.[7] Dr. Arthur Keith when
+dealing with the so-called Piltdown skull in his book "The Antiquity of
+Man" says to the same effect that the size of brain is a very imperfect
+index of mental ability in that we know that certain elements enter into
+the formation of the brain which take no direct part in our mental
+activity, so that a person who has been blessed with a great robust body
+and strong, massive limbs requires a greater outfit of mere tracts and
+nerve cells for the purposes of mere animal administration than the
+smaller person with trunk and limbs of a moderate size.[8]
+
+It seems fair, therefore, to assume that the brain-weights of big men of
+the Zulu, the Xosa and the Fingo tribes will be considerably above those
+of European women, but to conclude from this that the capacity of the
+big black man is higher than that of the average white woman would
+hardly be possible to-day. I would say here that I do not accept the
+suggestion, recently advanced, that the mental faculty of woman is
+qualitatively different from that of man. I hold that there is no
+difference of any kind between the intellectual powers of the male and
+female human being. The comparative lack of mental achievement on the
+part of women in the past I believe to have been due to a natural, and,
+as I think, wholesome feminine disinclination to take up intellectual
+studies and scientific pursuits that until recently have been deemed the
+prerogative of men, and not to any innate inferiority of the female
+brain.
+
+According to Professor Sollas, whose high authority cannot be disputed,
+the size of the brain when looked at broadly seems to be connected with
+the taxinomic rank of the race, but when we come to details the
+connection between cranial capacity and mental endowment becomes less
+obvious. The Eskimo, for instance, who is of short stature, has a
+cranial capacity of 1,550 cubic centimetres, thus surpassing some of the
+most civilised peoples of Europe, and yet no one of this race has so far
+startled the world with any kind of mental achievement. "The result,"
+says Professor Sollas, "of numerous investigations carried out during
+the last quarter of a century is to show that, within certain limits, no
+discoverable relation exists between the magnitude of the brain--or even
+its gross anatomy--and intellectual power," and he illustrates this
+statement by a list giving the cranial capacities and brain-weights of a
+number of famous men which shows that though Bismarck had a skull
+capacity of 1,965 cubic centimetres, Liebniz, who attained to the
+highest flights of genius, had a cranium measuring only 1,422 cubic
+centimetres.
+
+Dealing more particularly with the assumed relation between highly
+specialised mental faculties and the anatomy of the brain, as apart from
+its mere size, the same author cites the case of Dr. Georg Sauerwein,
+who was master of forty or fifty languages, and whose brain after his
+death at the age of 74 in December, 1904, was dissected by Dr. L. Stieda
+with the idea that, since it is known that the motor centre for speech
+is situated in what is called Broca's area, some connection between
+great linguistic powers and the size or complication of the frontal lobe
+might be found in this highly specialised brain, but the examination
+revealed nothing that could be correlated with Sauerwein's exceptional
+gift.[9]
+
+Professor R.R. Marett in his handbook on Anthropology says, in
+discussing the subject of race, "You will see it stated that the size of
+the brain cavity will serve to mark off one race from another. This is
+extremely doubtful, to put it mildly. No doubt the average European
+shows some advantage in this respect as compared, say, with the Bushmen.
+But then you have to write off so much for their respective types of
+body, a bigger body going in general with a bigger head, that in the end
+you find yourself comparing mere abstractions. Again, the European may
+be the first to cry off on the ground that comparisons are odious; for
+some specimens of Neanderthal man, in sheer size of brain cavity, are
+said to give points to any of our modern poets and politicians.... Nor,
+if the brain itself be examined after death, and the form and number of
+its convolutions compared, is this criterion of hereditary brain-power
+any more satisfactory. It might be possible in this way to detect the
+difference between an idiot and a person of normal intelligence, but not
+the difference between a fool and a genius."[10]
+
+In his book, "The Human Body," Dr. Keith, in dealing with racial
+characters, begs his readers to break away from the common habit of
+speaking and thinking of various races as high and low. "High and low,"
+he says, "refers to civilisation; it does not refer to the human
+body."[11]
+
+The foregoing authoritative opinions serve to show that the Bantu, as
+compared with other races, labour under no apparent physiological
+disabilities to hinder them in the process of mental development. Let us
+now consider in the light of modern psychology upon first-hand and
+reliable evidence the allegation of mental inferiority that is
+constantly brought against these people.
+
+
+THE MIND OF THE NATIVE.
+
+The white man has conquered the earth and all its dark-skinned people,
+and when he thinks of his continued success in the struggle for
+supremacy he feels that he has a right to be proud of himself and his
+race. He looks upon the black man as the fool of the human family who
+has failed in every way, whereas he, the lord of creation, has achieved
+the impossible, and this comparison which is so favourable to himself
+naturally leads him to set up achievement as the sole test of ability.
+If asked why the African Native has never accomplished anything at all
+comparable with the feats of the European or the Asiatic the average
+white man will answer, without hesitation, that it is because the Native
+has always lacked the necessary capacity.
+
+The average white man has a more or less vague notion that his own proud
+position at the top of human society is the result of the continuous and
+assiduous use of the brain by his forefathers in the struggle for
+existence under the rigorous conditions of a northern climate during
+thousands of generations by which constant exercise the mental faculty
+of his race grew and increased till it became, in course of time, a
+heritable intellectual endowment, whereas the Natives of Africa by
+failing always to make use of whatever brain power they might have been
+blessed with in the beginning have suffered a continuous loss of mental
+capacity.
+
+The idea that the evolution of the human intellect is a perpetually
+progressive process by means of the constant use of the brain in the
+pursuits of increasing civilisation towards the eventual attainment of
+god-like perfection is one that appeals strongly to the popular fancy,
+and its corollary, that those who fail during long periods to make full
+use of their mental equipment in the ways of advancing civilisation must
+gradually lose a part, if not the whole, of their original talents, is
+commonly accepted as being warranted by the teaching of modern science.
+
+But science, as a body, does not support the view that bodily characters
+and modifications acquired by an individual during his lifetime are
+transmissible to his offspring; in other words, science does not, as a
+body, accept the theory that the effects of use and disuse in the parent
+are inherited by his children. Modern science does not, indeed,
+definitely foreclose discussion of the subject, but what it says is that
+the empirical issue is doubtful with a considerable balance against the
+supposed inheritance of acquired characters.
+
+Very recently evidence has, indeed, been adduced to prove that
+"Initiative in animal evolution comes by stimulation, excitation and
+response in new conditions, and is followed by repetition of these
+phenomena until they result in structural modifications, transmitted and
+directed by selection and the law of genetics." The student who tenders
+this evidence is Dr. Walter Kidd[12] who claims that his observations of
+the growth of the hair of the harness-horse prove that the prolonged
+friction caused by the harness produces heritable effects in the pattern
+of the hairy coat of this animal. It is admitted by this observer that
+such momentary and acute stimuli as are involved in the mutilation of
+the human body by boring holes in the ears, knocking out teeth, and by
+circumcision, which practices have been followed by so-called savages
+during long ages, seldom, if ever, lead to inherited characters, but he
+maintains that the effect of prolonged friction by the collar on the
+hair on the under side of the neck of the harness-horse has produced
+marks or patterns in the same place on certain young foals born by these
+horses.
+
+These observations must, of course, be submitted to strict examination
+before science will pronounce its opinion. Meanwhile I may be allowed
+to cite what Dr. Kidd calls an "undesigned experiment," which to my mind
+goes far to prove that the effects of prolonged friction on the human
+body during many generations is not heritable. The custom followed by
+many Bantu tribes of producing in their women an elongation of the
+genital parts by constant manipulation must have been practiced during
+very many generations, certainly much longer than the comparatively
+recent harnessing of horses in England, for we know how tenaciously
+primitive people cling to their old customs, generation after
+generation, for thousands of years, and yet no instance has ever been
+noticed by these people, who are very observant in these matters, of any
+sign of such an inherited characteristic in any of their female
+children.
+
+The ordinary layman, though he may feel strongly interested in the
+problems of heredity and evolution, has seldom the leisure or the
+opportunity for the careful study of biological data, and he must
+therefore leave these to the specialists in scientific enquiry, but he
+is by no means precluded from using his own common-sense in drawing
+conclusions from the ordinary plain facts of life observable around him.
+It is when we come to consider this most important question in its
+bearing upon the mental side of the human being that the ordinary layman
+feels himself to be no less competent to form an opinion than the
+trained man of science.
+
+Is it possible, then, we ask, for the parent whose intellect has been
+developed through training in his lifetime to transmit to his children
+any portion of this acquired increment of mental capacity, or, putting
+the question in more concrete terms, is it possible for a parent to
+transmit to his offspring any part of that power to increase the size
+and quality of the brain which may be assumed to have resulted in his
+own case from mental exercise? The question must not be misunderstood.
+We do not ask whether clever parents do as a rule have clever children;
+what we want to know is whether the successive sharpening of the wits of
+generations of people does, or does not, eventually result in
+establishing a real and cumulative asset of mental capacity.
+
+Seeing that universal education has only come about within the latter
+part of the last century it must be clear that the vast majority of the
+present generation of educated Europeans are descended from people who
+never had any of that education which so many people nowadays regard as
+essential to the development and growth of the intellectual powers. But
+although education has only recently become, in various degrees, common
+to all white people, the light of learning has always been kept burning,
+however dimly at times, in certain places and circles, and it may,
+perhaps, be possible to find people to-day who are the descendants of
+those favoured few who have enjoyed, during many unbroken generations,
+the privilege of liberal education. Now let us assume that there are at
+present a small number of such people in the forefront of the
+intellectual activity of the day, and then let us ask ourselves whether
+these leaders of thought who can claim long lineal descent from learned
+ancestors show any mental capacity over and above that which is
+displayed by those commoners who are also in the foremost ranks of
+thought and science, but who cannot lay claim to such continuous
+ancestral training.
+
+If we admit the existence of two such separate classes to-day then the
+answer must surely be that there is no mental difference discernible
+between them. But I think we may safely conclude that there has been
+very little of the kind of descent here presumed. It would be well-nigh
+impossible to find people who could prove an unbroken lineage of
+educated forbears going back more than four hundred years. During the
+middle ages the monks of the Church were the chief and almost sole
+depositories of education and learning, and as they were bound by their
+vows to life-long celibacy there could be no transmission from them to
+posterity of any of that increased capacity of brain which we are
+supposing as having been acquired by each individual through his own
+mental exertion. We know, of course, that there were frequent lapses
+from the unnatural restraint imposed on these men so that some of them
+may have propagated their kind, but such illegitimate offspring was not
+likely to remain within the circle of learning and therefore could not
+perpetuate the line. We of to-day know full well that the son of the
+common labourer whose forefathers had no education can, with equality
+of opportunity, achieve as much and travel as far in any field of mental
+activity as can the scion of the oldest of our most favoured families.
+
+There does not seem to have been any augmentation of human brain power
+since written records of events were begun. Indeed it would seem rather
+as if there had been in many places a decrease in intellectual capacity,
+as when we compare the fellahin of modern Egypt with their great
+ancestors whom they resemble so closely in physical appearance that
+there can be little doubt about the purity of their descent. The same
+may be said about the modern descendants of the people who created "the
+glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome." And when we
+consider the period of the Renaissance we cannot say that civilised man
+of to-day is superior to those people who after centuries of stagnation
+and general illiteracy were yet able to seize and develop the
+long-forgotten wisdom and philosophy of antiquity.
+
+To go still further back and to venture beyond the historical horizon
+into the dim past when prehistoric man roamed over Europe is a task
+manifestly beyond the powers of the ordinary layman, and here we must,
+perforce, trust ourselves to the guidance of those students whose
+training and special learning entitle them to speak with authority.
+
+The so-called Piltdown skull which was discovered in 1912 is accepted as
+representing the most ancient of human remains yet found in England, its
+age being estimated at somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000 years. In
+discussing the size and arrangement of the lobes and convolutions of the
+brain which this cranium must have contained, Dr. Arthur Keith, who is
+admittedly the highest authority on the subject to-day, makes the
+following statement: "Unfortunately our knowledge of the brain, greatly
+as it has increased of late years, has not yet reached the point at
+which we can say after close examination of all the features of a brain
+that its owner has reached this or that status. The statement which
+Huxley made about the ancient human skull from the cave of Engis still
+holds good of the brain: 'It might have belonged to a philosopher or
+might have contained the thoughtless mind of a savage.' That is only
+one side of our problem, there is another. Huxley's statement refers to
+the average brain, which is equal to the needs of both the philosopher
+and the savage. It does not in any way invalidate the truth that a small
+brain with a simple pattern of convolutions is a less capable organ than
+the large brain with a complex pattern. If then we find a fairly large
+brain in the Piltdown man, with an arrangement and development of
+convolutions not very unlike those of a modern man, we shall be
+justified in drawing the conclusion that, so far as potential mental
+ability is concerned, he has reached the modern standard. We must always
+keep in mind that accomplishments and inventions which seem so simple to
+us were new and unsolved problems to the pioneers who worked their way
+up from a simian to a human estate."
+
+In his concluding remarks upon this important find, Dr. Keith iterates
+his opinion: "Although our knowledge of the human brain is
+limited--there are large areas to which we can assign no definite
+function--we may rest assured that a brain which was shaped in a mould
+so similar to our own was one which responded to the outside world as
+ours does. Piltdown man saw, heard, felt, thought and dreamt much as we
+still do. If the eoliths found in the same bed of gravel were his
+handiwork, then we can also say he had made a great stride towards that
+state which has culminated in the inventive civilisation of the modern
+western world."[13]
+
+Professor Herbert Donaldson of the University of Chicago, gives it as
+his opinion that "In comparing remote times with the present, or in our
+own age, races which have reached distinction with those which have
+remained obscure, it is by no means clear that the grade of civilisation
+attained is associated with a corresponding enlargement in the nervous
+system, or with an increase in the mental capabilities of the best
+representatives of those communities."[14]
+
+Now while the ordinary man is unable to pronounce judgment upon expert
+opinion he is quite capable of understanding the main arguments upon
+which the foregoing conclusions are based. We all realise the truth of
+the old saying "Il n'y a que le premier pas qui coûte." We all
+appreciate the tremendous difficulty of taking the first step in the way
+of discovery and invention. We know that to be the first to step forward
+in an utterly new direction or venture; to be the first to work out,
+without any guidance or previous education, the first principles,
+however simple, in the doing, or thinking out of anything new, requires
+a mental audacity and astuteness that predicate a brain capacity as
+great as that which enables modern man to apply and develop the
+accumulated knowledge available in the text-books of to-day. Dr. Alfred
+Russell Wallace held strongly to this opinion. He could see no proof of
+continuously increasing intellectual power; he thought that where the
+greatest advance in intellect is supposed to have been made this might
+be wholly due to the cumulative effect of successive acquisitions of
+knowledge handed down from age to age by written or printed books; that
+Euclid and Archimedes were probably the equals of any of our greatest
+mathematicians of to-day; and that we are entitled to believe that the
+higher intellectual and moral nature of man has been approximately
+stationary during the whole period of human history. This great and
+intrepid thinker states his view with characteristic incisiveness thus:
+"Many writers thoughtlessly speak of the hereditary effects of strength
+or skill due to any mechanical work or special art being continued
+generation after generation in the same family, as amongst the castes of
+India. But of any progressive improvement there is no evidence whatever.
+Those children who had a natural aptitude for the work would, of course,
+form the successors of their parents, and there is no proof of anything
+hereditary except as regards this innate aptitude. Many people are
+alarmed at the statement that the effects of education and training are
+not hereditary, and think that if that were really the case there would
+be no hope for improvement of the race; but close consideration will
+show them that if the results of our education in the widest sense, in
+the home, in the shop, in the nation, and in the world at large, had
+really been hereditary, even in the slightest degree, then indeed there
+would be little hope for humanity, and there is no clearer proof of this
+than the fact that we have not _all_ been made much worse--the wonder
+being that any fragment of morality, or humanity, or the love of truth
+or justice for their own sakes still exists among us."[15]
+
+I think the majority of thoughtful people will agree that these words
+express their own observations. Every day we see how children have to be
+taught to act and behave. We see continually how parents have to put
+pressure on their children to make them accept and apply those moral
+principles and mental valuations which have guided their lives and the
+lives of thousands of generations before them. We know only too well
+that children do not inherit the moral standards of right and wrong of
+their parents, and that to establish these principles in the young is a
+matter of protracted and often painful inculcation. The proved maxim
+that honesty is the best policy is still being literally hammered into
+the children of to-day who seem to find it no easier to follow the
+better way than did the children of the past. If mental modifications
+acquired by the parents were in any degree transmissible to the
+offspring then there would be no need for this constant repetition of
+the same process in every new generation.
+
+The earliest indubitable man hitherto discovered was fully evolved when
+first met with, he was _homo sapiens_. By means of his human
+intelligence this frail, unspecialized being became in a sense the very
+lord of creation, for instead of remaining, like the animals, entirely
+subject to his surroundings he subjected his surroundings to himself. By
+means of this intelligence man was enabled to break away from the
+absolute rule of the law of natural selection which punishes with
+extinction all those types that fail in fitness for survival in the
+struggle for existence, so that, unlike the animals that die out when
+their particular structure does not fit in with their environment, man
+by means of his thinking brain was able to equip himself with parts of
+his environment, and thus to become its master. The process of evolution
+ceased to affect directly this creature who had a brain that could
+think, and ever since that brain was given to him man has remained
+unmoved and stationary above and apart from all other living things. All
+this is implied in the command, "Be ye fruitful and multiply and
+replenish the earth and subdue it."
+
+But though man became almost emancipated from the direct servitude of
+natural selection, he still is, and always will be, subject to the law
+of heredity. Man is made up of a group of innate characters inherited
+from a very mixed ancestry, these characters, being innate, are
+transmissible to his offspring, but such characters as are acquired by
+the parent through the direct influence of education or other
+environment, not being innate are not transmissible to his children. But
+in so far as a new development of latent and innate characters, through
+the influence of the environment, may help or hinder certain types in
+propagating themselves, the race may, perhaps, be modified through such
+influence by the process of gradual elimination of the types that lack
+the characters that prove to be of survival value in a particular
+locality. This we may suppose might happen where a number of Europeans,
+composed half of blondes and half of brunettes, come to live in a
+tropical country, if it be proved that the comparative darkness of the
+brunettes afford them better protection against inimical light and heat
+than the fair skin of the blondes, so that the former would on the
+average, enjoy better health and live longer, and therefore have more
+children than the latter, whereby, in course of time, the appearance of
+these people would be modified in respect of the general complexion of
+their skin. This, it is easy to see, would not mean the acquisition of a
+new and heritable means of protection, but only a development in each
+individual of an already present innate character that happened to be
+well fitted for survival in a certain climatic zone.
+
+In order, therefore, to obtain any direct modification of the race in
+the way of mental improvement the physical effect of education must be
+such as to ensure longer life and with it, the concomitant chance of
+greater fertility for those who are educated against those who are not,
+so that the latter would tend to die out while the former would continue
+to increase their numbers. In other words, education must prove to be
+of survival value. Seeing that where education has increased most the
+birth-rate has tended to decrease it seems clear that we cannot regard
+continuous mental training as a favourable factor in the competition of
+propagation of human varieties.
+
+If then we accept the conclusion that the effects of individual
+experience are not cumulatively hereditary we shall cease to cavil at
+the fact that there has been no anatomical or structural progress in the
+human body or brain since the time when men first became social and
+civilised beings, that is to say, since they first began to work
+together with their heads and hands, and we shall see that that which
+was to be expected has always happened, in that, from the earliest
+historical times to the present day, human life has been as the rolling
+and unrolling of a carpet. Cycles of civilisations, all essentially
+similar, have been evolved, one after another, to endure for a while and
+then to fade away, leaving the raw material of human kind as it was from
+the beginning. There is no evidence of any advancement in physique,
+intellect or moral character. The leaders of mankind were the
+law-givers, whether they were witch doctors, priests, chiefs, prophets
+or kings, and they all sought to establish their laws by claiming
+supernatural delegation and authority. With writing came the codes, and
+when we compare the statutes of Hammurabi, who flourished about 2,200
+years B.C., with those compiled by his successors, Moses, Solon,
+Justinian and Napoleon, we find in them all evidence of the same mental
+appreciation and capacity in dealing with the social conditions and
+problems of their respective periods. The greatest products of art are
+still met with in the sculptured forms of ancient Greece, those images
+of serene beauty which may be imitated but not excelled. The reasoning
+powers of the ancient philosophers who, long before Christ was born,
+debated the still unanswered riddles of existence, when we compare the
+paucity of data on which they had to work with the wealth of knowledge
+now available, must be ranked as high as the intellectual ability of our
+foremost thinkers of to-day. In mechanical proficiency the world has
+indeed advanced to an astonishing extent, but the perfection of our
+modern machinery means only a gradual and very recent advance upon
+earlier methods and does not denote a corresponding development in the
+mind itself. The Greeks had no machinery to speak of, neither had the
+English in the days of Shakespeare and Newton, but who can doubt that
+the engineers of those times would have been equal to the task of
+understanding and applying the principles of modern mechanics had the
+necessary books been available to them? We do not assume that because
+the modern Germans excel as chemists they are therefore blessed with
+higher reasoning ability than were the contemporaries of Socrates and
+Plato who had no knowledge of the science of chemistry. The conclusion
+forced upon us after a sober and impartial survey of the facts of
+history is that, although the intellectual output of the world is always
+increasing, the intellect itself remains unaltered. Knowledge, we see,
+is after all, only descriptive, never fundamental. We can describe the
+appearance and condition of a process, but not the way of it, and though
+knowledge has come in rich abundance, wisdom still lingers.
+
+The foregoing argument shows that the alleged mental superiority of the
+European cannot be due to constant use or education, so that it now
+becomes necessary for those who maintain that it nevertheless exists to
+prove, not only that the white man's intellectual capacity is now
+superior but to prove also that from the beginning it has always been
+stronger and better than that of the African Native, or, in other words,
+those who believe that the white race has inherent mental superiority
+must prove innate inferiority in the mental make-up of the Native.
+
+There is a more or less indefinite notion abroad that the Bantu
+languages, as compared with those of Europe, are but poor and
+ineffective vehicles for the conveyance of abstract ideas, wherefore the
+capacity to form and entertain such ideas may be taken to be innately
+inferior in the Native brain. That the language of a people embodies, so
+to speak, in objective form the intellectual progress made by it is
+certainly true, and it will be well, therefore, to state briefly the
+actual and potential value of the Native speech as compared with that of
+the whites.
+
+The living and the dead languages of the world have been classified by
+philologists into three main types of linguistic morphology; the
+isolating, like Chinese; the agglutinative, like Turkish and Bantu, and
+the inflective, like Latin. It was customary not long ago to look upon
+these three types as steps in a process of historical development, the
+isolating representing the most primitive form of speech at which it was
+possible to arrive, the agglutinative coming next in order as a type
+evolved from the isolating, and the inflective as the latest and
+so-called highest type of all. But since the matter has been carefully
+studied it has been admitted that there is no satisfactory evidence for
+believing in any evolution of linguistic types. English is now
+considered to be an isolating language in the making while Chinese is
+cited by authoritative European scholars as being a language which with
+the simplest possible means at its disposal can express the most
+technical or philosophical ideas with absolute freedom from ambiguity
+and with admirable conciseness and direction.[16]
+
+While I do not pretend to philological authority I do claim the ability
+to make a sound comparison between the main Bantu languages which I know
+and those European languages with which I happen to be familiar, and I
+have no hesitation in saying that though the Bantu types are not at
+present as fully developed in point of simplicity and preciseness as are
+the main languages of Europe they are, nevertheless, by reason of their
+peculiar genius, capable of being rapidly developed into as perfect a
+means for the expression of human thought as any of the European types
+of speech; they are astonishingly rich in verbs which make it easy to
+express motion and action clearly and vividly; the impersonal, or
+abstract article "it" is used exactly as in European languages, and the
+particular prefix provided in some of the Bantu types for the class of
+nouns which represent abstract conceptions makes it possible to increase
+the vocabularies in that direction _ad infinitum_. The Bantu types are
+not so-called holophrastic forms of primitive speech in which the
+compounding of expressions is said to take the place of the conveyance
+of ideas, nor are they made up of onomatopoetic, or interjectional
+expressions, if indeed such languages exist anywhere outside the heads
+of the half-informed. They are languages equal in potential capacity to
+any included in the main Indo-European group. Even now in their
+comparatively undeveloped state these languages are capable of
+expressing the subtleties of early philosophical speculation. I would
+not, for instance, feel daunted if I were set the task of translating
+into any of these main types, say, the dialectics of Socrates. To do
+this I would first reduce the more complex terms to such simple and
+common Anglo-Saxon words as when built together would give the same
+meaning, and then translate these into their Bantu equivalents. The
+substitution of Anglo-Saxon words for those of modern English would, no
+doubt, involve a good deal of repetition but the sense would be
+adequately rendered. I would proceed in the same way as the early
+teachers and writers who had to build up the language they used as they
+went along. The English indeed, have not built up their world-wide
+speech with their own materials but have, with characteristic
+acquisitiveness taken the combinations they wanted, ready made, mainly
+from Greek, Latin and French. How far and how well a Native would
+understand my presentation of metaphysical speculation would depend upon
+the degree of familiarity he might have acquired, through Missionary
+teaching or otherwise, with abstract notions in general. In my opinion
+the average "raw" Native would understand as well and as much as the
+average uneducated European peasant. Both would probably find my
+disquisition "sad stuff"; both would require time for that repetition of
+the words which is necessary to familiarise the mind with the
+unaccustomed ideas they represent; in both cases one would have to "give
+them the words that the ideas may come." A single illustration will show
+my meaning. When the first Missionaries rendered the word "soul" into
+Zulu by the word signifying "breath" in that language they simply
+followed the example of their predecessors of antiquity who employed the
+Latin _spiritus_, which also means "breath," for the same purpose,
+namely, to convey to their hearers the idea of a breath-like or
+ethereal something housed in, but separable from, the human body.
+
+"The essence of language," said Aristotle, "is that it should be clear
+and not mean." The raw Bantu material is ample for compliance with this
+demand, and the process of development will not be as protracted as in
+early Europe for it may be accomplished here, largely, by the simple
+means of translating the words already thought out and provided in the
+white man's language. In so far, then, as we attempt to measure the
+mentality of the Natives by their language we find that they cannot be
+relegated to a lower plane than that occupied by the uneducated
+peasantry of Europe of a few decades ago.
+
+Most people are prepared to believe that the primary psychical processes
+are identical in all races, but many still profess to see a difference
+in favour of the white man in what they call the higher faculties of the
+mind. But the much-abused word "faculty" no longer bears the meaning
+given to it by Locke and his followers who propounded a limitless brood
+or set of faculties to correspond with every process discoverable by
+introspection as taking place in the mind. In modern psychology the
+word means simply a capacity for an ultimate, irreducible, or
+unanalysable mode of thinking of, or being conscious of, objects.
+Perception, for instance, is looked upon as the capacity for thinking of
+a thing immediately at hand, and memory as a capacity for thinking again
+of a certain material or abstract object. The mental power of
+abstraction is no longer considered as a sort of separate function of
+the mind but is regarded as the capacity for thinking of, say, whiteness
+as apart from any particular white patch. But the notion that the white
+man is endowed with a set of finer feelings and with special and higher
+powers of abstraction than is the African Native is so generally
+entertained that it will be convenient to make the necessary comparisons
+in, more or less, the commonly accepted terms.
+
+Those who look upon the Native as being in every way a more primitive
+being than the European will naturally be disposed to believe that he is
+more a creature of instincts than a man of reason, and they will expect
+him to move in dependence upon certain fundamental intuitions where the
+European goes guided by reason alone. I have found no evidence whatever
+to support this supposition.
+
+The elementry instinct of self-preservation is no stronger in the Native
+than in the white man. Suicide is not at all uncommon among the Bantu. I
+have seen many instances of Natives who have shown a calm and
+philosophical disregard of death where life has seemed no longer
+desirable. This pre-eminently human prerogative--for no animal can rise
+to the conscious and deliberate destruction of itself--has often been
+exercised, as I have seen, by Natives in their sound and sober senses so
+as to preclude entirely that suggestion of temporary insanity which is
+so commonly accepted at coroner's inquests in England and elsewhere.
+
+The instinct of direction, the "bump of locality" as it is generally
+called, varies with the Natives as it does among the whites, and is no
+keener in the individual Native than in the individual white man. All
+the hunters and travellers I have met have confirmed the opinion I have
+myself formed from personal experience that by training his ordinary
+powers of observation and thereby developing his sense of locality and
+direction the average European is able, after a comparatively short
+time, to find his way in difficult country as well as the Natives, while
+some European hunters who have dispensed with Native guides and trackers
+have acquired the art of tracking game so well that they surpass even
+the local Natives themselves. "Veld-craft" is simply a matter of
+training the ordinary faculties of observation and memory for particular
+purposes, and the Native shows no such superiority in this respect as
+would naturally be expected from him if he were indeed better provided
+with animal instincts than the more civilised white man.
+
+The sexual instincts of the Natives seem in no wise different from those
+of other people. The African male, like the European male, is generally
+more amative than the female who is always more philoprogenitive than
+the man. But the notion is common that the Native male is more bestial
+when sexually excited than the white man in similar case, and this is
+taken to account for the fact that he is so often found guilty of crimes
+of violence against females of his own colour, and sometimes even
+against European women.
+
+It must be borne in mind that before the white man came the Natives,
+like the peasants in many European countries not long ago, conducted
+their courtship and love-making with a show of violence which seemed to
+them right and proper. The idea, indeed, that any self-respecting Native
+girl could yield herself to a lover without, at least, a semblance of
+physical resistance, leading to her more or less forcible capture by the
+man, would have seemed, and still seems, distinctly improper to the
+majority of Native women in their raw state. But since the European code
+was set up Native women have not been slow in making use of its
+protection, and, as I have seen, have not infrequently abused that
+protection by alleging rape or assault where their own action in
+simulating flight and resistance served, as they well knew it would, to
+stimulate passion and pursuit.
+
+In considering crimes of violence against white women it must also be
+remembered that the Native "house-boy" who works in constant and close
+physical contact with his European mistress and her daughters is exposed
+to sexual excitation which very few European youths are called upon to
+withstand. But crimes of this kind are indeed common enough among the
+lower orders in Europe and America, and are particularly frequent among
+men who have to live for a long time in unnatural abstinence from
+natural intercourse with the opposite sex, and who then find themselves
+in new surroundings giving opportunities for the gratification of their
+natural desires, but without having at the same time the restraining
+influences of their home life to help them to overcome the temptations
+to which they are exposed. The seaports of Europe and America, and the
+Great War furnish too many sad examples of sexual ferocity by white men
+to allow us to think that they are in this respect inherently superior
+to the men of other races.
+
+The maternal instinct is manifested in the same manner and degree in the
+women of both people. I have often asked Native women whether it would
+be possible for any mother among them to distinguish her own new-born
+baby from a supposed "changeling" of the same sex and of the same
+general appearance, and the answer has always been negative. The Native
+and the white woman alike would continue to cherish the substituted
+child exactly as they would have cherished the issue of their own
+bodies. The desire to bear children is the same in all normally
+constituted women irrespective of colour or race, and there is no sign
+of any special instinct for identification in the Native woman, such as
+the sense of smell, which is found in all the higher animals.
+
+There are some students who think that most of the emotions of man are
+but the survivals of instinctive habit. Be this as it may, the sexual
+attraction which is commonly called love certainly seems to be
+essentially instinctive whereas friendship and parental and filial
+devotion, when continued throughout life, seem to be emotions that
+depend largely upon association and conscious intelligence. Every
+natural mother will sacrifice herself for her offspring while it is
+young but the tender feeling which continues in her breast towards the
+child after it has grown up is sustained by association, or, where the
+child is continually absent, by conscious intelligence in the form of
+considerations of conventional approbation which in time merge into a
+habit or a sense of duty which is hardly recognised as such. Many white
+people think that although the average Native mother is capable of the
+greatest devotion for her young children she is incapable of the love
+which a white mother feels for her children even after they have ceased
+to depend upon her care. This, I think, is wrong. I have seen many
+instances of elderly Native women who have cherished their grown up
+children to the last with every sign of motherly affection.
+
+Joy and sorrow, love and hatred, hope and fear, these are the
+fundamental emotions of human kind. Can any difference be detected
+between these feelings in the two races?
+
+No one who knows him will say that the Native's capacity for the "joy of
+life unquestioned" is less than that of the average white man. Most
+Natives are born lovers of song and music, and attain easily to
+technical proficiency in the art of harmony. The æsthetic sense is
+present in the average Native as it is in the average European and in
+both is easily overlooked when not stimulated and developed by education
+and culture. That the Natives, as a whole, feel the sorrows of life and
+death as keenly as do the people of other races will be readily admitted
+by all who know them well, although their way of showing their sorrow
+may differ from those prescribed by the canons of conduct of other
+communities. It is assumed by many that love, "the grand passion," has
+been brought to a finer point, as it were, among the white people than
+anywhere else, and it may well be that monogamy is conducive to the
+growth of a higher and purer form of sexual reciprocity than is possible
+under the polygamous system of the Natives and other peoples. The
+monogamous marriage, though based on sexual attraction in the first
+instance, tends to become, as the man and the woman grow older, a union
+of souls, so to speak, more or less independent of the sexual element
+itself. The close and continued association of one man and one woman of
+compatible temperaments no doubt brings about a state of mutual
+intimacy, dependence and devotion which can hardly be possible in a
+polygamous household. But on the other hand may fairly be cited the
+frequent instances, familiar to all, of widows and widowers among
+Europeans who, despite their repeated and quite honest protestations of
+undying and undivided love for the first "one and only" mate,
+nevertheless find speedy consolation in a second marriage in which
+undying and whole-hearted love for the second "one and only" spouse is
+again declared and accepted in all sincerity. The phenomenon of "falling
+in love," as it is commonly called, is not peculiar to white people. I
+have known many cases where the love-sick Native swain has travelled
+hundreds of miles and suffered great hardships in order to reach or
+recover the one woman of his choice though other women, no less
+desirable, were ready to be had for the asking at his home. The converse
+is even more commonly seen. Native women are remarkably like white
+women. They look upon marriage as their proper and natural function in
+life, but they are not all of them willing to marry according to
+parental instructions; there is the same proportion of self-willed
+damsels among them as among the whites, who by obdurately refusing to
+enter into the marriages arranged for them cause pain and trouble to
+their well-meaning parents.
+
+Jealousy, especially from the female side, is an ever-present source of
+trouble and unhappiness among the Natives. The length to which a jealous
+Native wife will go in winning back the affections of an errant husband
+is often extraordinary, though the ways and means she adopts differ but
+little from those practised by the superstitious and credulous peasantry
+in Europe less than a hundred years ago.
+
+While no one will deny the African Native a capacity for feeling anger
+equal to that of the white man when provoked by insult and injury there
+are many who believe that he is constitutionally incapable of sustaining
+that feeling of hatred which in the European so often leads to
+premeditated and prepared revenge. This notion is, no doubt, derivable
+from the fact that a Native seldom shows any open vindictiveness against
+a European employer by whom he has been insulted or unjustly punished,
+but this fact may, I think, be otherwise accounted for. The white man's
+prestige, backed up as it is by the established powers of law and order,
+makes the attempt at revenge by a Native a difficult and risky
+undertaking and, furthermore, there is to be considered the spirit of
+traditional submissiveness which at all times and in all places marks
+the attitude of the slave or serf towards his master. One has only to
+remember the many accounts of abject resignation by the peasants of
+France and the moujiks of Russia before the revolutions that changed the
+order of the past in those countries. No such considerations affect the
+Native where his anger and hatred are directed against one or more of
+his own colour. The records of the South African courts are replete with
+instances of cattle-maiming, arson, poisoning and other crimes proved to
+have been motived solely by feelings of revenge.
+
+Courage and fear are feelings that depend upon conditions that seem to
+be fairly evenly distributed all over the world, and where the virtue of
+courage in the form of pugnacity is comparatively lacking, as amongst
+the bulk of the population of India, other forms thereof are met with,
+such as that wonderful contempt of a painful death by burning which was
+so often displayed by the widows of that country in following their
+ancient custom of _suttee_. The average white man feels assured that no
+race can be compared in bravery with his own, and that within that race
+no nation can be found equal in courage to the one to which he belongs.
+This is a form of elemental patriotism common to all communities, but
+those who have shared the dangers of flood and field with African
+Natives often testify to acts of sublime courage by Native soldiers,
+hunters and miners in the face of real and appreciated danger under
+circumstances which show that the Natives as a whole are no less capable
+than the white people of conquering instinctive fear and of sacrificing
+the individual self when great demands are made. I am not speaking now
+of what is commonly called mob-courage. Natives have been known to go
+through fire and water alone as well as white men.
+
+Is there any difference of kind or degree in the moral sense of the two
+races? In the prevailing view of authoritative students morality is
+emotional and not intellectual in its origin, and the warrant of right
+doing is attributed not to some hypothetical objective standard, but to
+the whisperings of an inner conscience, an innate subjective mental
+state, independent of environment and education. Differences,
+undoubtedly, exist as to the acts or omissions which are approved or
+disapproved by the moral feeling in the two races respectively, but the
+feeling is the same. The feelings which prompt a Native woman to condemn
+barrenness in other women is the same as that which makes the average
+European lady look upon immodesty as a sign of immorality. The
+difference is objective, not subjective; it is in the outlook but not in
+the inner sense. That immorality is rife amongst Natives no one who
+knows them well will deny, but neither can putanism amongst the whites
+be denied. Before the white man came the very robust moral sense of the
+Natives made them put down theft and, sometimes, adultery, with a
+thoroughness which is apparently impossible amongst the most civilised
+white people to-day. Now that Western civilisation is spreading over the
+land the difference in the moral outlook of the two peoples tends to
+decrease; with the savage vices go the savage virtues, and soon there
+will be no difference at all.
+
+Having found no difference between the senses, instincts and inner
+feelings of the two races we come now to consider the oft-alleged
+difference in what is popularly called _pure intellect_ in favour of the
+white man. Is there such a thing as pure intellect or pure rationality?
+Obviously there is not. The thought that we call abstract is fashioned
+in the same way as the thought that is formed by the recognition of
+similarities between concrete objects. The abstract thought has its
+source like all other forms of thought in the organic and emotional
+structure of the individual, and it is, indeed, only by pointing to
+instances that we can define what we mean by an abstract idea. But many
+people still think that the white race is gifted with a special faculty
+for thinking about general attributes as apart from the particular
+objects in which the abstracted attributes may be concretely perceived.
+There is no foundation in fact for this presumption. The Natives have no
+difficulty in finding words wherewith to abstract the general essence
+from a plurality of facts or instances; their vocabulary is as apt and
+as extensive for this purpose as that which suffices for the mental or
+spiritual needs of the bulk of European people, indeed, the capacity for
+abstracting the general nature and character from the particular
+experience or emotion into pithy expressions by way of simile or
+metaphor that admirably convey the perceived generalisation is as highly
+evolved in the Native as in any other human variety.[17]
+
+I think that the magistrates, native commissioners, police officers,
+missionaries, farmers, miners, and traders in South Africa who have had
+first-hand experience of dealing with raw Natives will agree with me
+that in sound reasoning ability, as applied to matters with which he is
+familiar, the Native is no whit below the white man. It would be easy
+for me to give hundreds of instances that have come under my own
+observation of arguments stated and deductions made by Natives who were
+innocent of all European education that would show a capacity for mental
+analysis and clear ratiocination equal to that of the educated European,
+but I have to consider the reader's patience and will therefore confine
+myself to a few illustrations taken at random from a number that were
+written down by me at the time of observation. I may say here that my
+translation into English has been made with the most scrupulous regard
+to exactness so as to avoid the possibility of importing into the words
+used a fuller meaning than that which was actually present in the
+speaker's own mind.
+
+In the Northern part of Matabeleland, not far from the Zambesi river,
+lives a tribe called Bashankwe who follow a custom of marriage known
+locally as "ku garidzela" which is in effect a rendering of personal
+service, in the doing of such primitive husbandry as there obtains by
+the prospective son-in-law for the parent of the girl chosen instead of
+paying for her a consideration in money or cattle as is done by most of
+the Natives in South Africa. It is a practice similar to the custom
+which may be supposed to have been general in Palestine when Jacob
+served for Rachel in the days of the Hebrew patriarchs. Sometime ago I
+discussed the nature and present incidence of this custom with a chief
+named Sileya of those parts, a wholly untutored Native. A point brought
+up for settlement was the validity, under the present _régime_, of the
+claim for compensation that under their law might be brought by a
+rejected "garidzela" lover for the value of the work done by him during
+his period of service when, at the end of such service, he found the
+girl unwilling to marry him. I had explained to the chief that the white
+man's government would always set its face against any custom whereby it
+might be possible for the parents to pledge their daughters in marriage,
+and had pointed out that this particular custom was for that reason not
+viewed with favour by the authorities. To this Sileya replied: "If you,
+the Government, will make it plain that the man who finds himself
+refused by the girl for whom he has been serving can claim compensation
+for the work he has done then the fathers will become more careful than
+they now are and they will refuse to accept the young man's services
+save where the girl is old enough to consent for herself, for no man
+likes to give up what he has won and held, and in this manner our old
+custom will not go against the way of the Government." This reply, which
+I have Englished almost literally, is typical of the Native form of
+argumentation and it shows good all-round thinking ability; it is not a
+particular instance of special intelligence, but a fair example of
+average Native perspicacity.
+
+A few months ago, while discussing with some elderly Matabele Natives
+the subject of miscegenation in South Africa generally one of the old
+men voiced the opinion of the meeting thus:
+
+"White people do what they like, they take what they like, and when they
+like certain girls they take them, and what can we say? And, after all,
+why should they not do so? Everything belongs to them, we are their
+people, our girls belong to them, the white people only take what is
+theirs to take."
+
+"But," I interpolated, "white men do not take the girls away from you,
+it is the girls themselves who leave their own kind and go to the white
+men."
+
+"No," he replied, "I say they take the girls because they know as well
+as we do that women--all women--will always go where they can live with
+ease and have plenty and be without work, and this they can do when they
+go to the white man, whereas with us they must work. Therefore I say
+that the white men take the girls away from us, but I do not say that
+they do wrong so long as they only play with them and have no children
+by them, for it is the manner of all the world that men and women come
+together and no law can be made to stop them from doing so, but the
+white men do wrong when they allow the black women to have children by
+them because such children grow up without proper homes, and that is
+very sad and wrong."
+
+I think the average white man, whatever his own opinion may be on this
+matter, will acknowledge that there is clear thought and strong
+common-sense in the old man's dictum, and this old man is an ordinary
+raw Native, without any European education.
+
+My good friend, Mahlabanyane, is a typical Tebele of the old school. In
+his youth he accompanied the hunter Selous on many wanderings, and he
+never tires of telling of the ways and habits of the game and wild
+animals he has seen and shot. One day he told me that he had observed
+all the wild animals of Rhodesia, big and small, and that he had
+examined them all after they had been killed. He had come to the
+conclusion, he said, that many of the bigger animals were related to
+one another in some wonderful way, and that they had probably come out
+of the earth, all alike, and had then afterwards become different, "as
+people do when they separate and live always by themselves away from
+other people," he added.
+
+"Look at the elephant, the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus and the wild
+pig," he said, "they must at one time have been one kind; their teeth
+are alike, and none of them chew the cud. I think they must be cousins
+to one another, and, one time, perhaps, they were brothers."
+
+Leaving aside the question of the absolute correctness of the old man's
+observation there can be no doubt that we have here a thinker who, being
+struck with the physiological similarity of some animals is attempting
+to account for the fact, and does so along the lines of Darwin and his
+predecessors, but without any of the facts and theories that were
+recorded before they began their labours. I asked the old fellow if he
+had ever heard Selous talk about this matter, and he said he had not;
+the idea, he said, had come out of his own head.
+
+One day a Zambesi woman whose husband, a petty chief, was awaiting trial
+for murder at my station, sent word to me asking for permission to dance
+that night in the compound. Surmising that there was a religious motive
+behind this request I gave my consent, and afterwards watched the
+dancing for an hour or so.
+
+The element of rhythm in sound and movement has always been one of the
+chief means of exciting and expressing religious exaltation as well as
+sexual passion, and the two emotions merge easily in all primitive
+people whether they be the half-civilised moujiks of Russia, or the
+frequenters of modern "Revival Meetings," or the naked Batonka on the
+banks of the Zambesi. The Batonka, indeed, are particularly fond of
+dancing to the beat of the ubiquitous drum.
+
+The woman, who was accompanied by a few of her female friends, danced
+with unusual grace, and her movements were remarkably free from erotic
+incitation. Holding a pair of gourds in which little stones rattled not
+unmusically, like castanets, she gyrated in the moonlight and pirouetted
+on her toes with such lightness and elegance that my curiosity was
+roused, and the next morning I had her brought to my office and asked
+her to account, if she could, for the marked difference between her way
+of dancing and that of the rest of her people.
+
+This is what she said: "I was very sad and my whole body was heavy. I
+felt ill, so I asked that I might be allowed to dance. Dancing always
+does me good when I feel unwell. I did not learn to dance in the way I
+do from anyone. I think the Great Spirit gave to me the gift of dancing,
+the power came down on me when I was a child. I have never seen
+Europeans or Arabs dancing. I have never seen an Arab dancing woman. I
+dance my way because the Spirit gave it to me to do so."
+
+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
+illustrate 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 God 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 shillings, 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 constituted 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 superstitions 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 fashionable 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 assuming 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 masses 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, analysis 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 exactitude 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 class 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
+constitution 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 analytically 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 assured 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 assumed 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 surpassed 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 illustration 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
+circumstances 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 latitudes 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 fashion 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 _homo 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 latitudes 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 gods, is in itself sufficient to
+account for those lapses in mass-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 rushing 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 circumstances 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 hoary 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
+circumstances, 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 assumed 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 harass 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 noblest 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]
+
+Recent study has indeed dissipated that fascinating idyl about the old
+race of tall, blond Aryans as the originators of our present
+civilisation, for it has been shown that the so-called Aryan
+civilisation was inferior in many ways to the primitive culture of
+neolithic times, and it can now hardly be doubted that our classical
+civilisation is of Mediterranean origin though Aryanised in speech. It
+is now generally accepted that history points not to Scandinavia and
+Germany, but to the lands lying round the Mediterranean Sea as
+furnishing the matrix out of which civilisation has sprung. It is to the
+South rather than to the North, to the early people of Egypt, Palestine,
+Greece and Rome, and not to the primitive inhabitants of Scandinavia and
+Germany, that we must look for those great men whose intellect and
+character were strong enough to overcome the natural conservatism of
+their times. The mind of the early white men of the North never soared
+higher than a valhalla peopled with puerile deities and blood-stained
+warriors whereas the swarthy thinkers of the South discovered the unseen
+God, invented art and philosophy and developed law and government. And
+though the Church proclaims the highest of all born leaders, Christ
+himself, to be the very son of God, yet was he a native of Palestine and
+not a fair-haired, blue-eyed Teuton as represented by mediæval painters
+of Germany and Holland.
+
+It is no doubt true that the invaders and the immigrants have often
+achieved more in their new surroundings than in their homelands, as the
+Moors in Spain and the Irish in America, but it must not be forgotten
+that the civilisation which the new-comers have enriched by virtue of
+their new found freedom from home conservatism has not been of their
+making; they may have added thereto but they did not beget it; the
+spade-work, which is the hardest part, had been done before they
+arrived.
+
+Looking, round the world to-day we see clearly that race is not the
+determining factor in contemporary progress. In Japan we see a people,
+admittedly not white, who until yesterday were stagnating under a system
+of childish feudalism, now developing at a great pace a culture similar
+with and not inferior to that of modern Europe, while in Western Ireland
+we see white people living in a state of sloth and squalor below that of
+many "raw" Bantu tribes in South Africa. These facts show that any race,
+white black, or yellow, may be kept down simply by the forces of
+conservatism, chief among which is priestcraft operating through
+prejudice and superstition in the name of religion. To say this is not
+to cavil at the priests of any particular time or creed. We must have
+priests as well as prophets. The prophet of a new faith begins his
+mission by breaking the images of the priests before him and is
+succeeded by his own priests who set up new images and dogmas wherewith
+to conserve the new-found creed until it in turn becomes too old when,
+in the never-ceasing course of evolution, the law of variation bids a
+new prophet arise. The priest must needs be to preserve the world from
+the anarchy of too many reformers, but his power, if long continued,
+tends to inhibit the divine spirit of discontent which makes for human
+advancement. It is the priest's duty to preserve the old and to hinder
+the new, and when he finds he can no longer ignore the new inventions
+that are made around him he will at most accept the new learning as a
+means only to preserve the old order whose servant he is. The founder of
+the Society of Jesus enjoined his followers: "Let us all think in the
+same way, let us all speak in the same manner, if possible," and it is
+reported of him that he said that were he to live five hundred years he
+would always repeat "no novelties in theology, in philosophy or logic,
+not even in grammar." In Africa priestcraft, in its primitive form of
+witchcraft, has continued for unnumbered ages to perpetuate the
+elementary creed of ancestor worship whose chief article is that the
+ways of the fathers must remain the ways of the children, and that to
+depart from the old and established order is sinful and wicked, and
+under this baneful authority progress has been impossible.
+
+But although the heavy conservatism enforced by this primitive cult has
+smothered initiative during many centuries it does not follow that the
+mind and character of the African people have been impaired thereby
+beyond the life of each generation. The mental sloth in which the
+Western world lay steeped during the dark ages before the Reformation
+did not become a heritable defect. But apart from the question of the
+possibility of the transmission of acquired characters we have the fact
+that within the scope of his daily life the conservative and uncivilised
+African has to face and solve as many difficult problems as the
+civilised European in his different surroundings. That these problems
+are made up of elements differing from those that constitute the
+problems of the civilised man in his daily avocation proves only a
+difference of content, not of difficulty. The mental strain involved in
+leading the so-called simple life of the so-called savage is, on the
+whole, no less intense than that suffered by the civilised man in
+maintaining his civilised existence. In the all-surrounding air of
+superstition and mutual suspicion in which the African moves and has his
+being he requires cunning to circumvent the cunning of his fellows,--and
+very deep cunning it sometimes is,--so deep, indeed, that the
+intellectual European has difficulty in following the dark and devious
+ways thereof. Vigilance and resourcefulness, careful observation,
+prudence, forethought, caution, judicious apprizement of character and
+intelligent calculation of probabilities are required for the planning
+of the primitive African's daily campaign against the forces of darkness
+with which he is surrounded, and to carry out these plans he must have
+courage, firmness of will and self-control in no less measure than the
+average European city-dweller. To avoid the ever-present chance of being
+found guilty of witchcraft, which in the past meant always death, the
+African has had to develop the faculty of lying to a high point of
+efficiency, and no one who knows him will contend that he is inferior to
+the European in this respect. The natural education of the Natives
+include the art of lying as the education of Spartan boys included the
+practice of larceny. Lying, we know, develops the memory, for a good
+memory is essential to successful lying. Some of the ruses and
+stratagems thought out by Natives fleeing from the king's wrath or the
+witch doctor's doom, of which I have heard from the Natives themselves,
+have seemed to me to be in subtilty of design and in daring of execution
+as admirable as any that may be found in contemporary detective fiction,
+while the fortitude with which defeat and death has been accepted by
+some of the unfortunate fugitives would evoke admiration in the least
+impressionable of men. I say therefore that those who deny to the
+Africans the capacity for sustained collective and purposive effort of
+mind and body because these qualities have so far not been shown by them
+in the building up of a civilisation of their own must consider the fact
+that the nations which to-day lead the world in all the ways of
+civilisation remained for thousands of years without leaders and without
+achievement while the people who now lag behind produced those mighty
+men that led and paved the way to the great civilisations of the past,
+and I think that we must recognise in that fact a lesson to teach us
+that present inferiority is no proof of permanent inability, wherefore
+it may well be that the Natives of Africa will some day rise and compete
+with their present overlords in the mastery of all the arts and crafts
+of a modern state.
+
+"But," says the white South African, voicing the general opinion, "this
+is all very well; the Native may have the brains, but he does not, even
+now when he has the chance of proving himself, show the same capacity
+for strenuous and continued effort that the white man has shown. He
+cannot stand alone; if left to himself he will sink back rapidly into
+savagery."
+
+That the South African Natives are still in a stage where they cannot
+stand alone, so that if left entirely to their own devices they would
+lapse back into barbarism, is not, I agree, open to doubt. But would not
+the same fate overtake any nation or community, regardless of race, if
+it were completely cut off from all outside help and influence. The
+civilised Romans who conquered Britain in the early Christian era, no
+doubt, looked upon the primitive Britons as a feeble folk when compared
+with themselves, but the erstwhile slaves have since demonstrated their
+capacity for developing a civilisation utterly beyond the imagination of
+their foreign masters. Rome was not built in a day. The rearing of
+Western civilisation required many centuries, and it can hardly be
+doubted that if the early builders of the great cultures had been left
+in isolation instead of being stimulated continually from without
+through foreign learning and influence neither Ancient Rome nor Modern
+Europe would have come into being. Isolation has always and everywhere
+been followed by stagnation and regression and there is no reason for
+expecting the Natives of South Africa to furnish an exception to the
+universal rule.
+
+That the average Native is lazy no one who knows him will deny. He is
+certainly no less lazy than the average European work-man who must be
+compelled by economic pressure to do hard labour. The rough and menial
+work of the world has always been done through some sort of compulsion,
+either slavery or some kind of economic coaction, for it is not in human
+nature, white or black, to work hard at uncongenial tasks unless
+superior force in some shape or other supplies the driving power. The
+manual workers of Europe are forced by the economic conditions under
+which they live to do the heavy and rough work that has to be
+done--there are very few, even among white men, who like rough work for
+its own sake--and when we consider how small are the wants of the
+average South African Native we are often surprised that he works as
+hard as he does. The common expression "As lazy as a kaffir" is
+counterbalanced by the equally common saying used about a white man who
+works hard at anything "He works like a nigger," which suggests that
+there is not much difference between the two races in this respect.
+
+Nevertheless the mental attitude of the average Native undoubtedly
+enables him to enjoy laziness more than the average European whose early
+habits have been formed by different influences. Primitive man is a lazy
+man whatever race he may belong to, and civilisation, which has often
+been helped on by direct slavery, is indeed itself a system of slavery,
+under which the toilers are driven to their tasks by the goad of
+necessity. The fact that many Native youths frequently leave their
+studies before completing the prescribed course, with the entry "Left
+school tired" against their names, is often cited as showing that the
+capacity of the Native for sustained mental effort is not as great as
+that of the average European, but here, again, it must be remembered
+that the general conditions and home influences under which the bulk of
+European boys grow up tend to keep them at their studies whereas the
+Native school boy is not fortified by similar support. The dread of
+becoming an "unemployable" through lack of education, which is a
+forcible spur to effort in both parents and children among the whites,
+is not felt by the Natives who can always find work to do at wages that
+will satisfy their ordinary wants, and, moreover, the Native's chance of
+gaining profit and preferment through being well educated are still few
+in South Africa, so that where there is neither penalty for failure nor
+reward for success we cannot expect more effort than we find. When
+education becomes as general in South Africa as it is among the people
+of Europe then it will be possible to institute fair comparisons.
+Education is the discoverer of ability and without the opportunity it
+gives genius will languish and die unknown, as said that acute observer
+of human nature, Machiavelli, in speaking about the leaders of
+antiquity, "Without opportunity their powers of mind would have been
+extinguished and without those powers the opportunity would have come in
+vain."[20]
+
+Assuming that the capacity for acquiring Western education and
+civilisation is no greater in the American Negroes than in the Bantu we
+may note the opinion of a recent student of the race question in
+America, as being in point here. In his book "Children of the Slaves,"
+Mr. Stephen Graham says "The fact is, Negrodom has to a great extent
+qualified to vote. Half the population is sunk in economic bondage and
+illiteracy, but the other half has more than average capacity for
+citizenship."[21]
+
+The opinion so often expressed in South Africa that "Education is a kind
+of thing that doesn't agree with the Nigger" is born of the same feeling
+that animated the power-holding minorities against the illiterate
+majorities in Europe not many years ago, and, in justice to the
+minorities, it must be conceded that the effect of education upon the
+masses has always been disturbing and often disastrous.
+
+Speaking now from my own experience I can say that I have found no
+ill-effects from education in Natives; on the contrary, I have found, as
+a rule, that the Native who has had an ordinary school education is
+generally more amenable to precept and admonition than the raw kaffir
+though less bovinely submissive and therefore more resentful of
+indignities offered to him. The fact that the educated kaffir comes more
+often in the way of committing theft and dishonesty than his illiterate
+brother is in itself sufficient to account for the not unduly large
+number of theftuous crimes with which he is credited as a class; but on
+the other hand, the propensity in the primitive male that leads to
+sexual assaults upon women is undoubtedly checked and lessened by
+education and school-discipline. Education will bring out and give scope
+to all that is good and all that is bad in the Native as it has done
+with the white man. If the Natives have not sunk to those depths of
+infamy which are disclosed daily in the criminal courts of Europe and
+America it is not because of want of the usual percentage of criminally
+disposed people among them but because of want of education and
+opportunity. Commercial immorality and developed swindling are
+impossible without a commerce, but the cupidity that begets these forms
+of vice is not lacking amongst the Natives and waits only for the
+opportunities which developed commerce affords. The potential capacity
+for criminality and immorality is indeed no less among the Natives than
+among Europeans. Theft, arson, murder and rape are the most common forms
+of crime committed by the Natives to-day because the opportunities for
+perpetrating systematic fraud are as yet few among them. Unnatural
+immorality is common enough in the kraals and in the "compounds," for
+the Natives have their "perverts" as well as the whites. At the Native
+"beer-drinks" crapulous lewdness is as common as it is in the bucolic
+orgies of European peasantry. There is no "Native" innocence nor is
+there any "Native" vice, the virtue and the vice, the capacity and the
+character of the Native are the human qualities and failings that are
+common to mankind.
+
+The Native is no more able to withstand the enervating effects of
+isolation than the European, he is no more anxious to work hard for
+small wages, no more and no less capable of honesty and thrift, no more
+and no less endowed with human virtue, no more and no less cursed with
+the vices of the world, no more human and no less divine than is his
+master, the white man.
+
+When Machiavelli asserts in general of men that "they are ungrateful,
+fickle, false, cowards, covetous, and as long as you succeed they are
+yours entirely; they will offer you their blood, property, life and
+children--when the need is far distant; but when it approaches they turn
+against you." He thought, no doubt, of white men only, but to me his
+appreciation of the baser side of human nature seems no less applicable
+to the black people of South Africa, and when, on the other hand,
+Shakespeare declaims:
+
+     "What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in
+     faculty!"
+
+he also, we may be sure, thought of his own kind, but to me, again, the
+beautiful words, which usage cannot cheapen, express the wonder I have
+often felt at the wealth of imagery, the mental grasp, the wisdom and
+the natural dignity in very many untutored natives I have met with, and
+it is this experience which makes me believe that the present difference
+between the Europeans and the Native race is one of degree and not of
+kind, and that, in the fullness of time, achievement will follow the
+latent genius with which, as I hold, nature has endowed, in equal degree
+with ourselves, the great Bantu branch of the human family.
+
+Yet I am no encomiast of the Natives, for I know them to be no better
+than other people, but search as I may, I cannot find that Native
+character which is alleged to be inherently different from the white
+man's character. Did not Mark Twain find, as the most conspicuous result
+of his travels, that "there is a good deal of human nature everywhere,"
+and is it not true that human nature is everywhere the same?
+
+We are far too apt to exaggerate both in our disparagement and in our
+praise of backward people. Many people still think, if they think at
+all, of the South African Native as a being of the kind imagined by
+Hobbes when he wrote: "Man in his natural state is towards man as a
+wolf," and, on the other hand, there are still many who regard him,
+after the fancy of Rousseau, as a sort of primitive man-child existing
+in a state of natural innocence from which he is being driven by the
+corrupting influence of the civilised invaders. But all this is wrong.
+The Native is not a savage. Even before the whites came to South Africa
+the Bantu lived in social order under a political system in which the
+principles of constitutionalism were clearly recognised. To-day the
+Bantu are simply a race of barbarians in various stages of transition
+from a crude civilisation to a highly developed civilisation, and we
+shall do well to remember that the process of transition which we are
+now witnessing is one in which individual mistakes and failures will be
+more conspicuous, though no more significant, than the general advance.
+
+
+MISCEGENATION.
+
+If it is true that the human nature of the Bantu is no whit different
+from the human nature of the Europeans then it is a fair question to
+ask why the two races should not be able to live together in liberty,
+equality and fraternity as people of one nation or body politic. It is
+because human nature is governed by laws which, unlike the laws of
+mathematics, cannot be laid down with certainty that we find ourselves
+unable to give a positive answer to this question. The human nature of
+the whites, like the human nature of all races that have been
+predominant before, is swayed by the feelings of pride and prejudice
+that arise through differences of complexion, physical appearance and
+bodily odour, as well as the difference in racial achievement, and these
+essentially human feelings, if they remain as strong as they now are in
+South Africa, will render impossible the fraternity that implies the
+liberty to intermarry, so that there arises for our consideration a
+second question, namely, whether without full fraternity and social
+equality the two races may yet live together in the land in political
+liberty and equality.
+
+We observe from the earliest times a rhythmic play, as it were, of
+opposite forces that tends, alternately, to build up and to break down
+and mingle human races, but of the laws that underlie and govern these
+forces we know little or nothing. On the one hand we see how man has
+always and everywhere shown what the advocates of so-called racial
+purity have called "a perverse predisposition to mismate" which has made
+it exceedingly difficult to classify existing human varieties. On the
+other hand we see throughout nature how a pronounced disparity between
+varieties of the same species engenders an aversion from one another of
+the different varieties which seems to arise, in men and animals alike,
+through the instinct of sexual jealousy which is probably bound up with
+the primary instinct of self-preservation. Those people who profess
+belief in the inherent superiority of a particular race naturally look
+upon the tendency towards race-blending as a perverse proclivity, while
+those who think that all men are potentially equal regard it as a
+wholesome instinct provided by nature to counteract the feebleness and
+infertility which cause the dying-out of the race that becomes too
+pure.
+
+Racial antipathy seems to depend in the degree of its strength upon the
+degree of physical disparity between given races. In the so-called Latin
+races of to-day, prejudice against black people is certainly weaker than
+in the blond races of Northern Europe. Is this aversion a matter of
+absolute instinct or is it an acquired social characteristic and as such
+liable to change? I think the answer must be that this racial repugnance
+is not naturally inherent in children, nor in women towards the men of a
+different kind, nor in men towards the women of another race, but that
+it arises naturally and spontaneously and, in this sense, instinctively,
+through the feeling of jealousy which is caused, in both men and women,
+by fear of losing their natural mates to rivals of both sexes from
+another and disparate race.
+
+White children who grow up together with Native children certainly have
+no instinctive feeling against their black playfellows; they have to be
+taught to look down upon and keep away from the companions of their
+childhood, a fact which no candid observer will deny. It is also a
+truism of history that the fair-skinned women of a conquered country,
+as a rule, will yield themselves easily to the swarthy barbarians who
+have killed or overcome their husbands and brothers. The many women who
+in British seaports, and in the German towns that were recently occupied
+by French coloured troops, have lived and cohabited with African men
+have proved by so doing that they have had no instinctive racial sense
+of hostility against black men. It has been stated by independent and
+competent witnesses, who are corroborated by German newspapers of good
+standing, that the black troops have a very marked attraction for a
+large number of German women, and that the German men hate the black men
+because the German women do not.[22] The fact that white women in South
+Africa and in the Southern States of America never associate with black
+men does not, I think, prove that they are controlled by instinctive
+racial or sexual aversion but rather that women, as a whole, are, by
+reason of their physical inability to dispute with men the ultimate
+ratio of all order that lies in brute force, thoroughly amenable to the
+rule of social conventions imposed upon them by their jealous masters. I
+say this because we see that the aversion that has been inculcated from
+without tends to disappear wherever the man-established conventions
+lapse or cease to govern either through the comparatively small numbers
+of black men being insufficient in certain localities to cause fear in
+the white men living there, as in some seaport towns, or through the
+temporary break-down of the customary standards of society brought about
+by war and revolution, as in those parts of Germany that were recently
+garrisoned by coloured soldiers.
+
+Nature having cast upon the male the duty of winning and holding the
+females of his species it is easy to see why the racial feelings of
+jealousy and ill-will are more positive and more active in the man than
+in the woman, and this explains, as far as these things can be
+explained, why white men will allow themselves to cohabit freely with
+black women to whom they feel naturally attracted but will "see red" and
+commit murder as soon as they find a black man attempting to gain the
+favour of a woman of their own colour. "Un adolescent aime toutes les
+femmes" say the French, and it is generally accepted that man is by
+nature more inclined to polygamy than woman is towards polyandry, still
+man and woman are both swayed and motived by the same elemental jealousy
+that is born of fear of losing something valued; the emotion which
+Descartes has so well defined as "une espèce de crainte qui se rapport
+au désir qu'on a de se conserver la possession de quelque bien."
+
+It is, no doubt, true that the thinking white woman, no less than the
+thinking white man, is led to feel dismay and even resentment against
+the Natives by apprehension of the possibility of danger to white
+civilisation through fusion of white and black, but this is a feeling
+caused by intelligent appreciation rather than by instinctive
+apprehension, and as such liable to be dispelled by argument tending to
+show that no real danger threatens. During a recent agitation against
+miscegenation in Rhodesia a number of letters written by white women
+appeared in the press from which it was easy to gather that the chief
+concern of the writers was not the possible degradation of the whites,
+though this was not overlooked, but rather the simple fact that some
+white men were cohabiting with black women to the prejudice of the
+matrimonial chances of eligible women of their own race.
+
+But it is unwise to dogmatise in the realms of social and racial
+psychology; we have not yet discovered the means for analysing with
+precision the subtle elements of the human soul. I have used the word
+instinct here in the sense given to it by William James, who defines it
+as "the faculty of acting in such a way as to produce certain ends
+without foresight of the ends, and without previous education in the
+performance," but when we reflect upon the transitoriness of human
+instincts, as compared with those of animals, and recognise that the
+human instincts are, as James also says, implanted in us for the sake of
+giving rise to habits, and then to fade away, we see how difficult it is
+to draw a line between the instinctive and the acquired or habitual mood
+or feeling.
+
+If we believe that racial antipathy is caused by the feeling of jealousy
+that arises instinctively, so to speak, from man's inner nature, then it
+is safe to say that it will last as long as the substance from which it
+springs, and as long as the racial difference which provokes it remains,
+but this belief is not firmly established in the general mind. The
+whites, as a whole, feel far from sure about the permanence of their
+cherished pride and prejudice of race; they are, more or less
+consciously afraid that the antipathy upon which they rely may become
+weakened and eventually dissipated by close contact of the two races in
+places where economic pressure has reduced both to the same level of
+life. We shall do well to remember the words of Renan when we try to
+estimate the truth of this matter, "La verité consiste dans les
+nuances," for both estimates may be true; the racial instinct may have
+to yield here and there to the superior force of economic pressure, and
+may yet in the main prove powerful enough to prevent the contact that
+tends to render it of no effect.
+
+The racial feeling which we are considering is undoubtedly much stronger
+at present in the whites than in the Bantu, but there is reason to
+believe that the awakening desire for racial self-assertion which we
+call pride of race will grow and increase in the Bantu as it has done
+in the Negroes in the Southern States of America, and elsewhere. General
+education, so far from hindering the growth of nationalism and racialism
+seems in some sort to subserve and foster that growth; witness the
+strident self-assertion of the newly-constituted little nations in
+Europe, and the cult of "Nationalism" in South Africa to-day. It is
+natural for birds of feather to flock together and screech together, and
+in the same way throughout mankind particular groups of people tend
+naturally to keep together and to marry among themselves separately from
+the rest of the community by which they happen to be surrounded, and
+this ethnic instinct, if so it may be called, is seen to operate even
+where, as among the Italian immigrants in America, there is no great
+racial difference between them and the Native-born inhabitants, and,
+much more markedly, in the Southern States of America where, according
+to a recent observer, the present tendency is not towards but away from
+miscegenation, so that the ultimate blending of colour is not likely to
+take place there in the course of nature.[23]
+
+The normal Native man does not hanker after white women, and the normal
+Native woman is not, as a rule, anxious to mate with a white man, but
+this normal disposition is apt to be disturbed by the familiarity which
+is bred by the close contact that occurs in towns and other centres. It
+is not, therefore, safe to deny the possibility that with advancing
+industrialism in congested areas there will be some white women ready to
+marry or cohabit with Native men who are either in positions of relative
+superiority or in possession of more money than their white
+fellow-workers or neighbours, making it possible for them to outbid
+these in the providing of comparative ease and luxury, which things have
+always appealed strongly to women of all races. Yet I think that those
+who prophesy the speedy merging of the two races in South Africa do not
+give sufficient weight to the fact of the collective consciousness of a
+racial entity which, being strongly established in the European section,
+is also being fostered and increased in the Natives by the civilisation
+which is now spreading among them, so that it seems reasonable to expect
+that the European aversion from racial blending will be reciprocated
+from the Native side more and more as time goes on, and that this
+reciprocal feeling will go far towards keeping the two races
+biologically intact. I think, therefore, that despite the conditions
+that conduce to miscegenation, the factor of the growing and reciprocal
+desire in both races to remain ethnically separate will gain the day.
+
+Many people think that the coloured people in South Africa, who are most
+numerous in the vicinity of Cape Town, but are also scattered all over
+the country, will form, as it were, a bridge between the two sections of
+the population for their eventual coalescence. But when this conclusion
+is closely examined it is seen to rest on debatable premises, for it is
+admitted that by far the greater part of the miscegenation that is now
+going on is between white men and coloured or black women and not
+between coloured or black men and white women, from which it follows, as
+has been pointed out by Boas,[24] that, as the numbers of children born
+does not depend upon the numbers of men but upon the numbers of women,
+the result will be a bleaching of the black element, here and there,
+and not a darkening of the whites in South Africa.
+
+Statistics have, indeed, been quoted which show that between the year
+1904 and the year 1911 the coloured population increased in the Cape
+Province by fifteen per cent, while the total population increased by
+only six and a half per cent., but these figures do not show how much of
+the coloured increase is due to propagation among coloured people
+themselves and how much to unions between white men and coloured women.
+When it is noted that in the year 1911 the European increase over the
+year 1904 in the whole Union of South Africa was 14.28 per cent., and
+that of all non-European elements only 15.12 per cent., it will be seen
+that although the black increase is on a larger basis it hardly
+justifies alarm over an imagined flood of overwhelming coloured numbers.
+
+If the coloured increase is due chiefly to propagation among the
+coloured people themselves then it forms a good argument against those
+who assert that the half-caste is relatively inclined to sterility,
+while if the increase is found to be due to cohabitation of white men
+with coloured women then it is a fair illation that the coloured section
+is in process of absorption by the whites. This assumed process of
+absorption will, no doubt, entail the presence of a certain, even a
+large, number of coloured people for many generations to come, but this
+number will grow smaller, and not greater, as time goes on because there
+is no reason to doubt that the white women of South Africa, as a whole,
+will refrain in the future as they have refrained in the past from
+cohabiting with black men, so that the observed tendency towards the
+diffusion of the coloured element back into the parent streams will be
+allowed to continue.
+
+But let us for a moment look calmly, and as far as possible without
+prejudice, at the people who in South Africa are said to furnish the
+awful example of the alleged evil of the crossing of white and black.
+The fact that the denunciation of these people is based on opposite and
+contradictory arguments shows that it is not the result of clear
+thinking. On the one side it is vehemently asserted that the coloured
+man is a physiological misfit, a sort of hybrid unfit for the society
+of either white or black and an alleged relative sterility of his kind
+is advanced as proof of this assertion. On the other side it is said,
+with equal vehemence, that the coloured people are mongrels, unfit to
+mingle with the pure parental breeds, and that this is proved by their
+excessive fecundity. The coloured people are also accused of being
+inferior in physical constitution when compared with either of the
+parent races, and therefore undesirable.
+
+My own observations, corroborated by the opinions of many other
+observers, leads me to believe that the fecundity of the coloured people
+is neither greater nor less than that of other people--white, black or
+yellow--whose birthrate is not artificially restricted, and that their
+general physical constitution, when not undermined by disease or stunted
+by underfeeding, is as strong as that of any other human variety. The
+great naturalist, Wallace, has insisted that some degree of difference
+favours fertility, but that a little more tends to infertility, and by
+applying this hypothesis to the facts as I have observed them I am led
+to believe that there is no biological difference between the Bantu and
+the European of a degree sufficient to produce any difference, one way
+or the other, in the fertility of the offspring of the two races, but
+proper statistics, continued over several generations, will, of course,
+be required to prove or disprove this conclusion.
+
+The gravest, and, as I think, the most unjust of the many charges
+brought against these people by an unthinking public, is that the
+half-caste, wherever he is found, partakes of all the vices but of none
+of the virtues of his parents. When we remember that in the towns of
+South Africa the coloured people of necessity form the class that in the
+nature of things is peculiarly exposed to the temptations of
+prostitution and crime, then it becomes a matter for wonder that these
+people are as good and as law-abiding as indeed they are. People who
+know South Africa will admit that the coloured girl is from childhood
+exposed to the temptation of loose-living far more than either the
+Native girl in the kraal or the European girl in her home, and that the
+coloured boys and youths, by reason of the lack of the right kind of
+home-influence, which is the result of the unfavourable position in
+life of the bulk of their parents, naturally gravitate towards the
+levels where it becomes difficult to avoid crime. But despite all these
+adverse conditions that press so heavily against them the coloured
+people of South Africa, taken as a whole, stand justified of the
+calumnies uttered against them. The coloured people as a whole are not
+behind the whites in anything except in the lack of opportunity for
+education and self-improvement, a lack caused not by themselves, but by
+their inimical surroundings.
+
+That many of the coloured people are immoral and shiftless need not be
+denied; the same may be said about the "poor whites," who as a class
+perplex well-meaning legislators, but neither of these proved
+accusations give reason for thinking that either of these classes is
+inherently inferior to their more favourably-placed fellow-beings. We
+must always remember the tremendous handicap of being reared in the
+depressing surroundings of sloth and squalor. I have seen hundreds of
+poor whites--as white as any blond German could wish to be--who seemed
+utterly unfit for the complexities of civilised life, but I have also
+seen many of the children of these people who, after being removed from
+their home surroundings, have risen to positions of usefulness and
+trust, in which they have earned reputations for integrity and capacity.
+The trenchant saying of a British working-man is in point, "Treat a man
+like a dog and he will behave like a dog," and the corollary is equally
+true, that if you treat a man as a man he will, as a rule, rise and quit
+himself like a man.
+
+The familiar cry that once white blood is diluted with black it is "all
+up" with our civilisation is not convincing when we remember that the
+ground-work of this civilisation was built up by races that were not
+"pure white"; that the white civilisation during the dark ages sank to a
+very low level through no dilution of African blood, and that it was a
+mixed race, the Moors, who brought back into Europe the lost principles
+of Aristotelian science on which the crumbling structure of European
+culture was rebuilt. To believe that the people of Asia and of Africa
+may be capable of attaining to Western civilisation, but that the
+offspring produced by the crossing of these races with whites will not
+have the necessary capacity therefor is to me impossible. So far from
+being deterrent to mental growth it would seem that an infusion of
+African blood in the European serves rather to increase mental capacity;
+at any rate, those who know South Africa well will not deny that an
+unmistakable tincture of African blood in a white family is often
+associated with marked intellectual ability. Against this concession it
+has indeed been alleged that, while it must be admitted that a small
+admixture of black blood in a white race enriches it, a small admixture
+of white blood in a black race degrades it, but this fanciful notion has
+not been supported by scientific data. The truth of the matter is that
+as the blacks are the underdogs, the half-breed becomes a racial and
+social bastard, as indeed he is openly named in South Africa, a man
+condemned before he is tried, handicapped from birth in a way that would
+drag down and keep under most of those who shout loudest about their
+racial superiority. It is his condition and not his nature that keeps
+the coloured man underneath.
+
+To the man who in face of the facts of history and of to-day believes
+that all we have of civilisation we owe to the Teutonic or to the
+Nordic type of man, and that nothing good can ever come out of coloured
+Nazareths, the possibility of the whites in South Africa becoming
+browned by the selective agency of tropical light or by an infusion of
+African blood, no doubt, seems an evil to be prevented at any cost, but
+those who, like myself, have seen coloured women working in their homes
+as thriftily and self-sacrificingly as the best of our own women, and
+coloured men labouring steadily against heavy odds to improve their
+condition, have become convinced that the coloured people of South
+Africa suffer under no inherent disabilities when compared with the
+whites, and for this reason we cannot join in the general wail over a
+predicted evil which we regard as exaggerated in itself and not,
+moreover, likely to happen. I would not, however, be taken to advocate
+the inter-breeding of white and black. Those who have witnessed the
+misery and suffering which the coloured people have to endure for being
+coloured will welcome any fair means of preventing miscegenation in
+South Africa. Proscriptive legislation has been advocated by both the
+detractors and the defenders of the half-breed, as a means of
+preventing what both schools, for their different reasons, regard as
+wrong and undesirable, but I cannot agree that it can ever be right or
+expedient to penalise and make criminal a natural act which under
+existing conditions is in many places unavoidable.
+
+There can be no doubt that the evil of miscegenation in South Africa has
+been greatly exaggerated, both in respect of its nature and its extent,
+but, nevertheless, so long as the racial prejudice of the white man
+remains as strong as it is to-day--and there is nothing to show that it
+is likely to decrease in the future--so long will it be the duty of all
+good citizens to discourage by persuasion and precept the production of
+children for whom the ruling race has no love and little pity. Even
+those among the whites who, in a spirit of good will and tolerance urge
+that the coloured people should receive preferential treatment because
+of the white blood which is in them, cannot escape having their point of
+view warped by their racial prepossession, for, surely, it is not
+because of a man's class or colour that he is treated as a man to-day
+but because of his being a civilised member of a civilised community.
+Nevertheless, the day when civilisation shall be the sole qualification
+for full membership of the civilised community of South Africa is not
+yet.
+
+I say, therefore, in answer to the question whether, without the full
+fraternity which seems impossible here, the white and the black races
+may not live together in South Africa in political liberty and equality,
+that the trend of events leads to the belief that the established pride
+of race of the whites, and the growing pride of race among the Natives
+will conduce to voluntary separation wherever this is possible, and that
+in this way the coming generations will contrive to live territorially
+separate under a common governance, founded upon political equality and
+liberty.
+
+
+CONCLUSION.
+
+The evidence before us leads inevitably to the conclusion that there is
+nothing in the mental constitution, or in the moral nature of the South
+African Native, to warrant his relegation to a place of inferiority in
+the land of his birth, but the same evidence also leads to the
+conclusion that the racial antipathy which prevails to-day will remain
+unaffected by this admission, seeing that this racial animosity is
+caused not by alleged mental disparity but by unalterable physical
+difference between the two races.
+
+It is important that this distinction be grasped for it goes to the root
+of the matter. It is the marked physical dissimilarity of the black man
+that rouses the fear and jealousy of the white man, and not any inherent
+mental inferiority in him. And we must take human nature as we find it,
+inscrutable and immutable as it is; wherefore we must reckon with, and
+not hastily condemn, the imponderable purpose of a fundamental instinct
+which is older than speech and deeper than thought, so that, although we
+admit that this racial antipathy is not justified by logical reasoning,
+we may nevertheless recognise it as a feeling grounded in man's inner
+nature--in his heart, so to speak--hardening it against other men whom
+he feels he cannot receive and entreat as brothers; in other words, we
+may say that this feeling is not the result of ratiocination but of
+forces that are deeper and more elemental than reason; that it is a
+hardening of heart rather than a mental conviction, in which sense we
+may apply the words of Pascal "Le caeur a ses raisons que la raison ne
+connait pas."
+
+Now if I am right in thinking that this racial feeling is engendered
+instinctively by physical dissimilarity only then we may not expect it
+to be removed or even lessened by the increased and general advancement
+of the Natives, for although we may hope that the whites will gradually
+come to recognise the abstract justice of the civilised Natives' claim
+to full racial equality we must, at the same time, remember that the
+increasing competition of the black man in every walk of life is bound
+to bring into play and accentuate the natural race prejudice of the
+white man whereby the tolerance and good feeling that might otherwise
+result from a growing recognition of the civilised Natives' mental and
+moral worth will be more than negatived. The present state of affairs in
+the Southern States of America is a warning against easy optimism in
+this respect. We must expect clashing and growing ill-will rather than
+social serenity to be the outcome of a continued policy of drift.
+
+To condemn the wrong of repression would to-day be like preaching to the
+converted. Most people now admit that the Africans are entitled, no less
+than the Europeans, to develop themselves as far and as fully as they
+can, but the question remains how they can be allowed to do so without
+intensifying present antipathy on both sides. Parallelism is a word that
+has been used a great deal of late to signify an attitude of mind, as I
+take it, rather than a definite policy or plan of action, through which
+it is hoped that separate scope for civilised activity and development
+may be given to the Natives on lines parallel to those along which the
+whites pursue their separate course, but without any forced territorial
+separation of the two people. Metaphor of this kind is undoubtedly
+useful to the political speaker in that it enables him to be apt without
+being exact, and thereby frees him from the possibility of being pinned
+down to a stated position, but in serious discussion exactness rather
+than aptness is desired, and to the thinking man the figure of speech,
+by which the notion of two lines running always parallel without meeting
+is applied to the course of development of two races living together in
+one country, is not convincing.
+
+This idea of parallelism is based on the presumption that the ruling
+race can so rule itself that by the mere exercise of its collective
+will-power it can refuse always to mix socially with the growing numbers
+of civilised Natives living and working in the same localities, and
+thereby--in a manner not yet explained--avoid always the clashing and
+ill-will that seems inseparable from the close contact of two dissimilar
+races competing against one another in one country. The advice offered
+from afar is that the whites should allow the Natives equal
+opportunities with themselves in all the ways of civilised activity,
+but--should not invite them home to dinner. Being based on an
+unwarranted presumption parallelism here begs the question, for it is
+precisely the ability of the ruling race to follow this counsel of
+perfection that is in doubt. It is easy to urge that the Europeans must
+maintain their position in South Africa as "a benevolent aristocracy of
+ability," but we want to know how this can be done. A recent contributor
+to the general question of colour has stated that the true conception
+of the inter-relation of white and black races should be "complete
+uniformity in ideals, absolute equality in the paths of knowledge and
+culture, equal opportunity for those who strive, equal admiration for
+those who achieve; in matters social and racial a separate path, each
+pursuing his own inherited traditions, preserving his own race-purity
+and race-pride; equality in things spiritual; agreed divergence in the
+physical and material."[25] But, again, we want to know how this
+abstract conception is to be put into actual practice in this world of
+things as they are.
+
+I have said that the Natives do not hanker after intimate social
+intimacy with the whites, but this does not mean that the civilised
+black man who has risen to the economic and educational level of the
+European remains indifferent whenever his claim to ordinary social
+recognition is denied or ignored. He would not, indeed, be human if he
+did not feel hurt whenever he is slighted and treated with contempt by
+people from whom he differs only in his physical appearance and colour.
+In one of his essays, dealing with Native matters, Professor Jabavu, a
+Native, describes how "high" feeling arose among the Native teachers and
+boys in a certain training institution in South Africa at which he had
+been invited to lecture because he was not allowed to see the inside of
+the European principal's house, despite the fact that he had ten years
+of English university life behind him.[26] Such feeling is only natural
+and must tend always to create ill-will, and, knowing how strong is the
+convention of the whites against social recognition of the educated
+Native, we must expect increased bitterness in the future, rather than
+growing good-will.
+
+The thinking white man, who would fain be just to every one, is
+perplexed by two conflicting emotions. He feels that the clean-living,
+law-abiding, educated Native is a man not inferior to himself whom he
+therefore ought to recognise as a fellow-citizen, but whenever he sees
+this fellow-citizen aspiring or laying claim to the social recognition
+that involves contact with white women he is filled instantly with wrath
+which he cannot justify to himself and yet cannot suppress. It is easy
+to see that where instead of common courtesy and mutual recognition from
+one another of two sections of a community, constant irritation and
+ill-will result, there the existence of the whole is threatened with
+disaster. Under such conditions we must expect, not parallel progress,
+but strife and enmity; not peace, but a sword.
+
+The Jews may be cited to show how a separate and peculiar people may be
+able to live together with other races without either clashing with or
+being assimilated by these but we must remember that the ethnic
+difference between the Jews and Europeans are too slight to sustain
+serious and lasting race-antipathy. Parallelism, when applied to the
+Native problem of South Africa, is clearly nothing more than the old,
+plan-less drift continued in the pious hope that human nature will
+sooner or later change into something better than what it is to-day. But
+human nature will not change. We must never leave passion out of
+account. If we recognise love we must recognise hate also as a moving
+force of mankind. Neither must we overlook vanity and arrogance. The
+white man, being human, will not cease to be vain and ambitious, he
+will not cease to feel the hatred that comes from the fear of losing
+possession of his mates, and possession is the natural man's definition
+of love. Where there is a sense of possession there will also be
+jealousy and hate, and it will only be by securing the white man in his
+sense of racial integrity that peace and good-will can be made to last.
+
+Territorial separation of the home-life of the two races is the only way
+by which parallel development can take place. Some of the Native leaders
+who have opposed this policy have done so in the belief that their
+people might eventually be able to prove and enforce their claim to full
+racial equality, but they have not realised that this claim will be
+denied always on physical grounds, and not on considerations of moral
+worth. These leaders mean well but they do not see well. Smarting under
+the pain of their treatment they do not perceive that the real issue is
+one of unalterable physical disparity.
+
+The hardships and disabilities under which the educated Native suffers
+in the Northern Provinces of the Union and in Rhodesia are patent and
+serious. It is hard that a civilised man may not travel in his own
+country without a "certificate"; it is hard that he must do only rough
+or menial, but always ill-paid, work when he is capable of doing skilled
+and well-paid labour; it is hard that when he is allowed to do skilled
+labour he cannot claim the wages of a skilled labourer; it is hard to be
+denied always the privileges of a civilised existence for which he has
+proved himself fit and worthy; it is hard to be treated always as an
+inferior and an alien in the land of his fathers; all this is hard,
+but--'tis the law, written and unwritten, made and enforced by the
+dominant race, and there is no reason to think it will be made less hard
+as the pressure of black competition increases.
+
+But if good and ample land can be set aside in the various territories
+of spacious South Africa in which the Natives can live and move without
+let or hindrance; in which they can do what work they like for
+themselves and for their own people; in which they can engage, according
+to their individual desires, in all kinds of trades and commerce without
+the prohibition of the white man's colour-bar; in which they can earn
+the wages that are governed by the laws of supply and demand only; in
+which they can build up after their own fashion courts of law and
+political councils for themselves; in which, _in fine_ they can live and
+work out their own salvation, unhurried and unworried by strange and
+impatient masters, then, surely, the Natives of South Africa will have
+gained a great gain, far greater than any they can ever hope to win by
+pitting their undeveloped strength against the organised resistance of
+the whites.
+
+The policy of territorial separation, which is now part of the law of
+the Union of South Africa,[27] is the only policy that will make
+possible a home existence for the Natives in their own homeland, for we
+know that, however educated and however worthy the civilised Native may
+become, he cannot hope to find a home, or to feel at home, among the
+whites. Rightly or wrongly, the whites have banged, bolted and barred
+their doors against the blacks, and neither moral worth nor educational
+qualifications will serve to open them. But in their own areas the
+Natives will have their own homes and their own home-life, without which
+human existence is indeed miserable. Those among them who long for the
+privilege of private ownership will be able to acquire land in freehold
+in localities set aside therefor, while those who cling to the old ways
+will be allowed to continue as before under their old system of communal
+land tenure.
+
+With freedom of movement and action under a minimum of European
+supervision and control the Natives will, in their own areas, have full
+opportunity and scope for the development of a home-civilisation of
+their own along lines similar to, if not identical with, those by which
+the Europeans follow their separate ways. It is a heroic plan, and it
+will demand great sacrifice from both peoples, but who can doubt that
+the end will be worth the effort? The Natives may in some places have to
+leave the land where their ancestors are buried, and the whites will, in
+many places, have to accept the price of expropriation for land and
+houses hallowed and made precious by effort and memories, but the great
+general gain at the end will undoubtedly be worth all that must be
+surrendered now. This policy is the only one that holds out hope of
+peace and happiness for both races. If the fears and objections that are
+being raised by a few Natives and by individual Europeans here and there
+are allowed to frustrate this, the only practical plan so far devised,
+the future generations of both white and black in South Africa will
+assuredly curse the day their fathers wavered and failed to make the
+only just and fair provision that could be made.
+
+To those, who for religious reasons feel doubtful about the
+righteousness of a plan that denies to the Natives the privilege of
+social equality which is implied in the ideal of the brotherhood of man,
+I would quote the words of Paul who, when speaking at Athens of the
+separation of the sons of Adam, said that God "hath made of one blood
+all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath
+determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their
+habitations,"[28] for, whether we take this statement to be the inspired
+utterance of a holy apostle, or simply the reasoned opinion of an acute
+observer, we must admit that the words convey the experience of the ages
+that races which are physically dissimilar tend naturally, and
+therefore, rightly, to dwell apart within their respective racial
+boundaries.
+
+Some people have professed to be afraid that the territorial separation
+of the two races will tend to consolidate the Natives, and thereby
+foster animosity towards the whites which may eventually lead to open
+war, but this fear seems to have no ground in reason, because it is not
+proposed, nor, indeed, would it be physically possible, to segregate the
+Natives by themselves in one great area. On the contrary, it is proposed
+to dispose of the Natives, as far as possible, according to present
+geographical and tribal conditions, in several and separate territories,
+so that race-consolidation of a kind inimical to the whites will
+naturally be less likely to occur where the Natives live as separate
+tribes, speaking their different languages, than where, as in the
+Southern States of America, the Negroes have English as a common medium
+for the expression of a common race-interest.
+
+Other people, again, are in doubt as to whether the Natives, as a whole,
+approve of this policy by which their future existence is to be shaped
+and determined. The answer is contained in the words of Sir William
+Beaumont, in his report of the findings of the Native Lands Commission,
+which gathered evidence from all concerned in 1916, where he says "The
+great mass of the Native population in all parts of the Union are
+looking to the Act (the Act providing for territorial separation) to
+relieve them in two particulars--the first is to give them more land for
+their stock, and the second is to secure to them fixity of tenure."[29]
+Regarding the Natives of Rhodesia I am able to say that all the elderly
+Native men with whom I have spoken about this subject--and I have
+conversed with a large number--agree that the policy, as outlined in the
+Native Lands Act and the Native Affairs Act of 1920, as I have explained
+it to them, is good and sound.
+
+It is true that certain prominent Natives of the educated class have
+protested strongly against this policy, but it is not true that these
+men have spoken on behalf of the Natives as a whole; indeed, it is safe
+to say that the vast bulk of the Natives of South Africa have even now
+no clear knowledge of the legislation that has been made recently in the
+pursuance of this policy. The protests that have been made from the
+Native side, moreover, have been directed against the hardship caused
+through harshness in carrying out the Act in certain places, and against
+the relative smallness of the areas proposed for Native occupation, and
+not against the principle itself, and there can be no doubt that the
+statement quoted from the Report of the Native Lands Commission conveys
+the true feeling of the large majority of the Natives.
+
+These are some of the objections that have been raised to the policy of
+territorial separation, but the gravest danger to the successful working
+of that policy remains to be mentioned. It is the possibility that the
+cupidity of the whites may lead them to remove their black neighbour's
+landmarks in the event of the discovery of new fields of gold or other
+valuable minerals within the Native areas. The danger of such a lapse
+from the righteousness that exalteth a nation can only be averted by the
+constant exercise of the public conscience of the whites themselves.
+
+No reasonable person will expect that this policy will do away entirely
+with all the little troubles that arise from the clashing of opposite
+racial interests. In the white areas the Native, who can come there only
+as a labourer or visitor, not as a settler, will remain subordinate to
+the whites, but his unavoidable competition in trade and industry may
+nevertheless lead to friction now and then, and the continuance of the
+present pin-prick policy of enforcing humiliating pass-laws and similar
+racial restrictions will certainly lead to trouble. But if tolerance and
+honesty prevail in our councils we shall be able to adjust and settle
+the many questions that are bound to arise from time to time through the
+juxtaposition in the industrial field of the two immiscible elements.
+
+But I must come to an end. I have tried to show that there is good
+reason for accepting the Bantu as the equals of Europeans in every
+respect save past achievement, but that because of unalterable physical
+disparity, and not because of any mental inequality, the whites and the
+blacks cannot live in peace and good-will together in one place,
+wherefore it follows, as a necessary conclusion, that territorial
+separation is the only way to lasting peace and happiness in South
+Africa. I say, therefore, that the black man's place in his own country
+must be assigned not below, nor above, but apart from that of the white
+man, for that which nature has made separate man may not join together.
+I have endeavoured also to show that there is good reason for believing
+the Bantu to be no less capable of adopting and adapting Western
+civilisation than other races which in the past have risen from rude
+barbarism to high culture, but here I admit that the full proof of my
+belief must be given by the Natives themselves.
+
+The difficulties in the way are many and serious, but if we of the
+power-holding race remain true to the great principles of justice and
+fairness which have guided our forefathers in their upward path we shall
+not go astray. So long as we remember the lesson of history voiced in
+the saying of the Romans "As many slaves so many enemies" we shall
+refrain from the means of repression which have always reacted adversely
+on the repressors; we shall realise that we cannot set artificial
+barriers in the way of the civilised Native if he proves that he has the
+capacity for going higher and the will to try, and we shall learn to
+treat him, not as a slave, nor as a child, nor yet as a brother in the
+house, but as a man. The Natives can in fairness demand no more, the
+whites can in fairness yield no less.
+
+
+
+
+
+_Printed by_ CAPE TIMES, LTD., _Cape Town_.--S6420.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+FOOTNOTES
+
+
+[1] Article on Anthropology in Nelson's Encyclopædia. The "gnathic
+index" is said to show that Europeans and Bushmen are orthognathous.
+
+[2] "Man and Woman" by Havelock Ellis.
+
+[3] "The Mind of Primitive Man" by Franz Boas.
+
+[4] "Children of the Slaves" by Stephen Graham.
+
+[5] "Anthropological Notes on Bantu Natives from Portuguese East Africa"
+by C.D. Maynard, F.R.C.S.E., Statistician and Clinician to the South
+African Institute for Medical Research, and G.A. Turner, M.B., B.Ch.,
+Aberdeen D.P.H., Medical Officer to the Witwatersrand Native Labour
+Association.
+
+[6] "The Growth of the Brain" by H.H. Donaldson, Professor of Neurology
+in the University of Chicago.
+
+[7] "The Mind of Primitive Man" by Franz Boas.
+
+[8] "The Antiquity of Man" by Arthur Keith, M.D., LL.D., F.R.C.S.,
+F.R.S.
+
+[9] "Ancient Hunters" by W.J. Sollas, D.De., LL.D., Professor of Geology
+and Palæontology in the University of Oxford.
+
+[10] "Anthropology" by R.R. Marett.
+
+[11] "The Antiquity of Man" by Arthur Keith, M.D.
+
+[12] "Initiative in Evolution" by Walter Kidd, M.D., F.R.S.E.
+
+[13] "The Antiquity of Man" by Arthur Keith, M.D.
+
+[14] "The Growth of the Brain" by H.H. Donaldson.
+
+[15] "Social Environment and Moral Progress" by Alfred Russell Wallace,
+O.M., D.C.L., Oxon.
+
+[16] "The Varieties of Human Speech" by Edward Sapier, in Smithsonian
+Institute Report for 1912.
+
+[17] "730 Sechuana Proverbs" by Solomon T. Plaatje.
+
+[18] "Throwing the Bones" is the usual form of divination practised by
+the Natives in Rhodesia.
+
+[19] "What is Civilisation." Article by Professor W.M. Flinders Petrie,
+in the _Contemporary Review_ for January, 1921.
+
+[20] "The Prince" by Niccolo Machiavelli.
+
+[21] "Children of the Slaves" by Stephen Graham.
+
+[22] _Der Christliche Pilger_ of 9th May, 1920, and _Volklinger
+Nachrichten_ of 14th June, 1920.
+
+[23] "Children of the Slaves" by Stephen Graham.
+
+[24] "The Mind of Primitive Man" by Franz Boas.
+
+[25] "The Colour Problem" by Sir F.D. Lugard, in _Edinburgh Review_ for
+April, 1921.
+
+[26] "The Black Problem" by Professor D.D.G. Jabaou.
+
+[27] When General Smuts introduced his Native Affairs Bill in the Union
+Parliament in May, 1920, he said, _inter alia_, that he hoped that under
+a policy of territorial separation, which was now the law of the land,
+it would be possible to carry out the idea of parallel institutions for
+the Natives by means of which they could deal with their own concerns.
+In the course of his speech General Smuts also said "the Pass laws do
+the Whites no good and are intolerable to the Natives." The Native
+Affairs Act of 1920 provides for the establishment of a permanent Native
+Affairs Commission, and for the Creation of local Native Councils or
+conferences of Native Chiefs and other representatives for the
+discussion of all questions affecting the interests of the Natives. In
+explaining the nature and scope of this Act the Prime Minister said that
+more study and investigation, and more consultation with the Natives
+were required before it could be said that the areas suggested by the
+Beaumont Commission were fair and proper.
+
+[28] Acts 17--26.
+
+[29] Native Lands Commission. Minute by Sir W.H. Beaumont.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Black Man's Place in South Africa
+by Peter Nielsen
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