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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 + + +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. + + + + + + +</pre> + + + + +<h1>THE BLACK MAN'S PLACE IN SOUTH AFRICA</h1> + +<h3>BY</h3> + +<h2>PETER NIELSEN.</h2> + +<h4>JUTA & CO., LTD.,</h4> + +<h5>CAPE TOWN. PORT ELIZABETH. UITENHAGE.</h5> + +<h5>JOHANNESBURG.</h5> + +<h5>1922</h5> + + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> +<h3><i>To</i></h3> + +<h4><i>MY MOTHER.</i></h4> + + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> +<h2>PREFACE.</h2> + + +<p>The reader has a right to ask what qualification the writer may have for +dealing with the subject upon which he offers his opinions.</p> + +<p>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> + +<p>P.N.<!-- Page 1 --></p> + + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> +<h2>THE BLACK MAN'S PLACE IN SOUTH AFRICA.</h2> + +<h3>THE QUESTION STATED.</h3> + + +<p>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 <!-- Page 2 -->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.</p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 3 -->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.</p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 4 -->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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + + +<h3>BODILY DIFFERENCES.</h3> + +<p>"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 sub<!-- Page 5 -->jection 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.</p> + +<p>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?</p> + +<p>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.<!-- Page 6 --> 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.</p> + +<p>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,<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1" /><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> and when, added to this, we +learn from other quarters that white women are, on the average, more +prognathous than white men,<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2" /><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> 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.<!-- Page 7 --></p> + +<p>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,<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3" /><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> +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.</p> + +<p>It is generally accepted that the African Natives have a bodily odour of +their own which is <i>sui generis</i> in that it is supposed to be different +from that of other human races. Some early travellers have compared <!-- Page 8 -->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."<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4" /><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> +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 <!-- Page 9 -->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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5" /><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> 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 <!-- Page 10 -->given to vehement +assertion than to careful enquiry.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<!-- Page 11 -->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.</p> + +<p>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.<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6" /><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a><!-- Page 12 --></p> + +<p>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 <i>microcephalic</i> +when below 1,350 cubic centimetres, such as those of the extinct +Tasmanians, Bushmen, Andamanese, Melanesians, Veddahs, and the Hill-men +of India; <i>mesocephalic</i>, those from 1,350 to 1,450 cubic centimetres, +comprising Negroes, Malays, American Indians, and Polynesians; and +<i>megacephalic</i>, 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.</p> + +<p>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 +<!-- Page 13 -->face of it to be well grounded. There are, however, certain relevant +facts which qualify this inference, and these must be briefly +considered.</p> + +<p>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.<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7" /><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a> Dr. Arthur Keith when +dealing with the so-called Piltdown skull in his book "The Antiquity of +Man" says to <!-- Page 14 -->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.<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8" /><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a></p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 15 -->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.</p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 16 -->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.</p> + +<p>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.<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9" /><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a><!-- Page 17 --></p> + +<p>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."<a name="FNanchor_10_10" id="FNanchor_10_10" /><a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a><!-- Page 18 --></p> + +<p>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."<a name="FNanchor_11_11" id="FNanchor_11_11" /><a href="#Footnote_11_11" class="fnanchor">[11]</a></p> + +<p>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.</p> + + +<h3>THE MIND OF THE NATIVE.</h3> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 19 -->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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>The idea that the evolution of the human intellect is a perpetually +progressive process by means of the constant use of the brain in <!-- Page 20 -->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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 21 -->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<a name="FNanchor_12_12" id="FNanchor_12_12" /><a href="#Footnote_12_12" class="fnanchor">[12]</a> 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.</p> + +<p>These observations must, of course, be submitted to strict examination +before science <!-- Page 22 -->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.</p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 23 -->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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>Seeing that universal education has only come about within the latter +part of the last <!-- Page 24 -->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.<!-- Page 25 --></p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 26 -->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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>To go still further back and to venture beyond the historical horizon +into the dim past when prehistoric man roamed over<!-- Page 27 --> 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.</p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 28 -->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."</p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 29 -->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."<a name="FNanchor_13_13" id="FNanchor_13_13" /><a href="#Footnote_13_13" class="fnanchor">[13]</a></p> + +<p>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."<a name="FNanchor_14_14" id="FNanchor_14_14" /><a href="#Footnote_14_14" class="fnanchor">[14]</a></p> + +<p>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 conclu<!-- Page 30 -->sions 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 <!-- Page 31 -->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 <!-- Page 32 -->indeed there +would be little hope for humanity, and there is no clearer proof of this +than the fact that we have not <i>all</i> 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."<a name="FNanchor_15_15" id="FNanchor_15_15" /><a href="#Footnote_15_15" class="fnanchor">[15]</a></p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 33 -->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.</p> + +<p>The earliest indubitable man hitherto discovered was fully evolved when +first met with, he was <i>homo sapiens</i>. 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, <!-- Page 34 -->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."</p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 35 -->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.</p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 36 -->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.</p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 37 -->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 <!-- Page 38 -->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.<!-- Page 39 --></p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.<!-- Page 40 --></p> + +<p>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.<a name="FNanchor_16_16" id="FNanchor_16_16" /><a href="#Footnote_16_16" class="fnanchor">[16]</a><!-- Page 41 --></p> + +<p>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 <i>ad infinitum</i>. 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, <!-- Page 42 -->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, <!-- Page 43 -->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 <i>spiritus</i>, which also means "breath," for the same purpose, +namely, to convey to their hearers the idea of a breath-like or +<!-- Page 44 -->ethereal something housed in, but separable from, the human body.</p> + +<p>"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.</p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 45 -->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.</p> + +<p>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<!-- Page 46 --> +European goes guided by reason alone. I have found no evidence whatever +to support this supposition.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 47 -->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.</p> + +<p>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.<!-- Page 48 --></p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<!-- Page 49 -->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.</p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 50 -->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.</p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 51 -->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.</p> + +<p>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?</p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 52 -->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<!-- Page 53 --> +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.<!-- Page 54 --></p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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, <!-- Page 55 -->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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>suttee</i>. The average white man feels assured that no +race can be <!-- Page 56 -->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.</p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 57 -->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.</p> + +<p>Having found no difference between the senses, instincts and inner +feelings of the <!-- Page 58 -->two races we come now to consider the oft-alleged +difference in what is popularly called <i>pure intellect</i> 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 +<!-- Page 59 -->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.<a name="FNanchor_17_17" id="FNanchor_17_17" /><a href="#Footnote_17_17" class="fnanchor">[17]</a></p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 60 -->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.</p> + +<p>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 <i>régime</i>, of the +claim for compensation that under their <!-- Page 61 -->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 +<!-- Page 62 -->particular instance of special intelligence, but a fair example of +average Native perspicacity.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<p>"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."</p> + +<p>"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."</p> + +<p>"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 <!-- Page 63 -->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."</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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, <!-- Page 64 -->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.</p> + +<p>"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."</p> + +<p>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.<!-- Page 65 --></p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 66 -->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.</p> + +<p>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."</p> + +<p>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."</p> + +<p>This clear expression of concatenated thought from a Native woman who +had had <!-- Page 67 -->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.</p> + +<p>Turning over my notes I select, at random, a few more instances to +illustrate my argument.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<p>"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 <!-- Page 68 -->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."</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<!-- Page 69 -->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:</p> + +<p>"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."</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.<!-- Page 70 --></p> + +<p>I remember a Native witchdoctor who in defending himself against a +charge of alleged witchcraft practice spoke thus:</p> + +<p>"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<a name="FNanchor_18_18" id="FNanchor_18_18" /><a href="#Footnote_18_18" class="fnanchor">[18]</a>—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 <!-- Page 71 -->they paid me ten shillings, why, do not the whites make +payments to their priests?"</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 72 -->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.</p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 73 -->should die and not leave a son to carry on my life, +then should I die the death utterly."</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>I discussed the matter of polygamy with a Native youth one day, and made +a note of his argument. He said:</p> + +<p>"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, <!-- Page 74 -->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."</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 75 -->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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 +<!-- Page 76 -->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?</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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, <!-- Page 77 -->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 +<i>Gelerhten</i>, "<i>ces bons Allemands</i>," 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 imposi<!-- Page 78 -->tion on the +growing masses of a new ideal, the ideal of dominion in the hands of the +German people.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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, <!-- Page 79 -->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 <!-- Page 80 -->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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>I do not profess the knowledge of a pedagogue in these matters. I speak +simply from an insight gained through many years of <!-- Page 81 -->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.<!-- Page 82 --></p> + +<p>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.</p> + + +<h3>ACHIEVEMENT.</h3> + +<p>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?</p> + +<p>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, <!-- Page 83 -->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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 84 -->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.</p> + +<p>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 accom<!-- Page 85 -->plishment, 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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>Climate is, perhaps, the factor which is most generally condescended +upon as being <!-- Page 86 -->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 <!-- Page 87 -->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?</p> + +<p>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 <i>homo sapiens</i> +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.</p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 88 -->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 <!-- Page 89 -->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:</p> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span>"A flaming coal<br /></span> +<span>Lit at the stars and sent<br /></span> +<span>To burn the sin of patience from her soul,<br /></span> +<span>The scandal of content."<br /></span> +</div></div> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 90 -->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.</p> + +<p>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.<!-- Page 91 --></p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 92 -->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."</p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 93 -->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 <!-- Page 94 -->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."<a name="FNanchor_19_19" id="FNanchor_19_19" /><a href="#Footnote_19_19" class="fnanchor">[19]</a></p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 95 -->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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>Looking, round the world to-day we see clearly that race is not the +determining factor in contemporary progress. In Japan we <!-- Page 96 -->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 <!-- Page 97 -->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.</p> + +<p>But although the heavy conservatism enforced by this primitive cult has +smothered initiative during many centuries it does not <!-- Page 98 -->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 <!-- Page 99 -->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 <!-- Page 100 -->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 over<!-- Page 101 -->lords in the mastery of all the arts and crafts +of a modern state.</p> + +<p>"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."</p> + +<p>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.<!-- Page 102 --> 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.</p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 103 -->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.</p> + +<p>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 +<!-- Page 104 -->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 <!-- Page 105 -->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."<a name="FNanchor_20_20" id="FNanchor_20_20" /><a href="#Footnote_20_20" class="fnanchor">[20]</a></p> + +<p>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."<a name="FNanchor_21_21" id="FNanchor_21_21" /><a href="#Footnote_21_21" class="fnanchor">[21]</a></p> + +<p>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.<!-- Page 106 --></p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 107 -->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.</p> + +<p>The Native is no more able to withstand the enervating effects of +isolation than the<!-- Page 108 --> 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.</p> + +<p>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:</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>"What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in + faculty!"</p></div> + +<p>he also, we may be sure, thought of his own kind, but to me, again, the +beautiful words, which usage cannot cheapen, express the <!-- Page 109 -->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.</p> + +<p>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?</p> + +<p>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<!-- Page 110 --> 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.</p> + + +<h3>MISCEGENATION.</h3> + +<p>If it is true that the human nature of the Bantu is no whit different +from the human <!-- Page 111 -->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.</p> + +<p>We observe from the earliest times a rhythmic play, as it were, of +opposite forces <!-- Page 112 -->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.<!-- Page 113 --></p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 114 -->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.<a name="FNanchor_22_22" id="FNanchor_22_22" /><a href="#Footnote_22_22" class="fnanchor">[22]</a> 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 <!-- Page 115 -->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.</p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 116 -->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."</p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 117 -->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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 118 -->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.</p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 119 -->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.<a name="FNanchor_23_23" id="FNanchor_23_23" /><a href="#Footnote_23_23" class="fnanchor">[23]</a><!-- Page 120 --></p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 121 -->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.</p> + +<p>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,<a name="FNanchor_24_24" id="FNanchor_24_24" /><a href="#Footnote_24_24" class="fnanchor">[24]</a> that, as the numbers of children born +does not depend upon the numbers of men but upon the numbers of women, +the <!-- Page 122 -->result will be a bleaching of the black element, here and there, +and not a darkening of the whites in South Africa.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 123 -->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.</p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 124 -->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.</p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 125 -->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.</p> + +<p>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 un<!-- Page 126 -->favourable 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.</p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 127 -->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.</p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 128 -->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.</p> + +<p>To the man who in face of the facts of history and of to-day believes +that all we <!-- Page 129 -->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 +<!-- Page 130 -->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.</p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 131 -->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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + + +<h3>CONCLUSION.</h3> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 132 -->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.</p> + +<p>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; <!-- Page 133 -->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."</p> + +<p>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.<!-- Page 134 --></p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 135 -->of two races living together in +one country, is not convincing.</p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 136 -->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."<a name="FNanchor_25_25" id="FNanchor_25_25" /><a href="#Footnote_25_25" class="fnanchor">[25]</a> 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.</p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 137 -->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.<a name="FNanchor_26_26" id="FNanchor_26_26" /><a href="#Footnote_26_26" class="fnanchor">[26]</a> 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.</p> + +<p>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 can<!-- Page 138 -->not 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.</p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 139 -->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.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>The hardships and disabilities under which the educated Native suffers +in the Northern Provinces of the Union and in Rhodesia are <!-- Page 140 -->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.</p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 141 -->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, <i>in fine</i> 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.</p> + +<p>The policy of territorial separation, which is now part of the law of +the Union of South Africa,<a name="FNanchor_27_27" id="FNanchor_27_27" /><a href="#Footnote_27_27" class="fnanchor">[27]</a> is the only policy that will make +<!-- Page 142 -->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.</p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 143 -->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.</p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 144 -->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,"<a name="FNanchor_28_28" id="FNanchor_28_28" /><a href="#Footnote_28_28" class="fnanchor">[28]</a> 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.</p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 145 -->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.</p> + +<p>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."<a name="FNanchor_29_29" id="FNanchor_29_29" /><a href="#Footnote_29_29" class="fnanchor">[29]</a><!-- Page 146 --> +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.</p> + +<p>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.<!-- Page 147 --></p> + +<p>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.</p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 148 -->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.</p> + +<p>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 <!-- Page 149 -->of my +belief must be given by the Natives themselves.</p> + +<p>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.</p> + + +<h5><i>Printed by</i> CAPE TIMES, LTD., <i>Cape Town</i>.—S6420.</h5> + + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + + +<h2>FOOTNOTES</h2> + + +<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1" /><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Article on Anthropology in Nelson's Encyclopædia. The +"gnathic index" is said to show that Europeans and Bushmen are +orthognathous.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2" /><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> "Man and Woman" by Havelock Ellis.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3" /><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> "The Mind of Primitive Man" by Franz Boas.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4" /><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> "Children of the Slaves" by Stephen Graham.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5" /><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> "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.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6" /><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> "The Growth of the Brain" by H.H. Donaldson, Professor of +Neurology in the University of Chicago.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7" /><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> "The Mind of Primitive Man" by Franz Boas.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8" /><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> "The Antiquity of Man" by Arthur Keith, M.D., LL.D., +F.R.C.S., F.R.S.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9" /><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> "Ancient Hunters" by W.J. Sollas, D.De., LL.D., Professor +of Geology and Palæontology in the University of Oxford.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_10" id="Footnote_10_10" /><a href="#FNanchor_10_10"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> "Anthropology" by R.R. Marett.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_11" id="Footnote_11_11" /><a href="#FNanchor_11_11"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> "The Antiquity of Man" by Arthur Keith, M.D.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_12" id="Footnote_12_12" /><a href="#FNanchor_12_12"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> "Initiative in Evolution" by Walter Kidd, M.D., F.R.S.E.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_13_13" id="Footnote_13_13" /><a href="#FNanchor_13_13"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> "The Antiquity of Man" by Arthur Keith, M.D.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_14_14" id="Footnote_14_14" /><a href="#FNanchor_14_14"><span class="label">[14]</span></a> "The Growth of the Brain" by H.H. Donaldson.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_15_15" id="Footnote_15_15" /><a href="#FNanchor_15_15"><span class="label">[15]</span></a> "Social Environment and Moral Progress" by Alfred Russell +Wallace, O.M., D.C.L., Oxon.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_16_16" id="Footnote_16_16" /><a href="#FNanchor_16_16"><span class="label">[16]</span></a> "The Varieties of Human Speech" by Edward Sapier, in +Smithsonian Institute Report for 1912.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_17_17" id="Footnote_17_17" /><a href="#FNanchor_17_17"><span class="label">[17]</span></a> "730 Sechuana Proverbs" by Solomon T. Plaatje.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_18_18" id="Footnote_18_18" /><a href="#FNanchor_18_18"><span class="label">[18]</span></a> "Throwing the Bones" is the usual form of divination +practised by the Natives in Rhodesia.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_19_19" id="Footnote_19_19" /><a href="#FNanchor_19_19"><span class="label">[19]</span></a> "What is Civilisation." Article by Professor W.M. Flinders +Petrie, in the <i>Contemporary Review</i> for January, 1921.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_20_20" id="Footnote_20_20" /><a href="#FNanchor_20_20"><span class="label">[20]</span></a> "The Prince" by Niccolo Machiavelli.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_21_21" id="Footnote_21_21" /><a href="#FNanchor_21_21"><span class="label">[21]</span></a> "Children of the Slaves" by Stephen Graham.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_22_22" id="Footnote_22_22" /><a href="#FNanchor_22_22"><span class="label">[22]</span></a> <i>Der Christliche Pilger</i> of 9th May, 1920, and <i>Volklinger +Nachrichten</i> of 14th June, 1920.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_23_23" id="Footnote_23_23" /><a href="#FNanchor_23_23"><span class="label">[23]</span></a> "Children of the Slaves" by Stephen Graham.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_24_24" id="Footnote_24_24" /><a href="#FNanchor_24_24"><span class="label">[24]</span></a> "The Mind of Primitive Man" by Franz Boas.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_25_25" id="Footnote_25_25" /><a href="#FNanchor_25_25"><span class="label">[25]</span></a> "The Colour Problem" by Sir F.D. Lugard, in <i>Edinburgh +Review</i> for April, 1921.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_26_26" id="Footnote_26_26" /><a href="#FNanchor_26_26"><span class="label">[26]</span></a> "The Black Problem" by Professor D.D.G. Jabaou.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_27_27" id="Footnote_27_27" /><a href="#FNanchor_27_27"><span class="label">[27]</span></a> When General Smuts introduced his Native Affairs Bill in +the Union Parliament in May, 1920, he said, <i>inter alia</i>, 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.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_28_28" id="Footnote_28_28" /><a href="#FNanchor_28_28"><span class="label">[28]</span></a> Acts 17—26.</p></div> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_29_29" id="Footnote_29_29" /><a href="#FNanchor_29_29"><span class="label">[29]</span></a> Native Lands Commission. Minute by Sir W.H. Beaumont.</p></div> + + + + + + + + + +<pre> + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Black Man's Place in South Africa +by Peter Nielsen + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BLACK MAN'S PLACE *** + +***** This file should be named 14900-h.htm or 14900-h.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + https://www.gutenberg.org/1/4/9/0/14900/ + +Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Susan Skinner and the PG Online +Distributed Proofreading Team. + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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