"GOING FANTEE."
THE civilising of the dark races, of which work so much now falls to the lot of Englishmen, would be an easier as well as more satisfactory task if it were certain that they would always stay civilised ; but that is not a certainty at all. We do not know, that is, whether the moment independence were attained, and the severe pressure of white dominion withdrawn, there would not be a rapid reversion to lower ideals, or even to utter savagery. The lath Duke of Argyll always maintained in his thoughtful speculations on the sub- ject that the tendency in some races towards retrogression was as strong as the tendency towards progress, and was inclined to believe, though he could not scientifically prove, that certain tribes of savages were men who had survived as the detritus or rained fragments of higher civilisations. The evidence as to the permanent results of white control is still most imperfect, because the white and dark races have been in close contact for such very limited periods, but the little there is tends to raise doubts as to the truth of the optimistic view. The withdrawal of white ascendency in Spanish America has not been a complete success, the natives as a body, and with remarkable individual exceptions, having betrayed a dis- tinct tendency to sink back to their ancient level, though the revolting cruelties of Aztec Mexico have not been revived. The keenest observers in India doubt whether, if we withdrew, there would in fifty years be any trace left of our century of dominion either in the thoughts of the people or their ways of life. The missionaries say that "the time for independent native pastors has hardly yet arrived." The conviction of the people themselves resembles that of the keen observers, they regarding our reign as a passing cloud permitted for a moment to obscure the clear sky of Hindooism. We rather distrust comments upon negr o mental status, because the imitative habit of the negroes—which may, like the imitative ways of our own lower classes, be a method of stretching towards the light—and their abnormal vanity excite in the white man an irritation and scorn which disturb the equa.- nimity of his judgment. Still, the accounts of the emanci- pated slaves in the Southern States—allowing, we repeat, for remarkable exceptions — point to retrogression at least as clearly as to advance, especially in the general ideal of morality. About Hayti, the only negro State which was once ruled by white men, the observations of travellers are uniformly un- favourable, and this at considerable intervals of years. We confess we remain unconvinced by the stories of cannibalism, except possibly as prevailing for a moment after great droughts or other disasters affecting food; but the Haytian certainly tolerates Vaudooism, a foul variety of serpent worship brought no doubt from Africa, and exhibits to a full degree his ancient callous cruelty. The worst Roman Emperor would hardly have been capable of the conduct related by Mr. Prichard in "Where Black Rules White : Hayti" (A. Constable and Co., 12s.) of the able tyrant, the
Emperor" Christophe
"There seems to have been nothing to appeal to in this man's nature. Bravery, humility, all alike failed to touch him. He had no bowels of mercy. He was one day on the battlements with a youth, who, perhaps presuming on past favours, in some manner displeased him. The drop from those sheer walls is 2,000 ft. to the plain below. You are, of course, about to die,' said Christophe, but I will be kind to you. You shall have a choice of deaths. Either you throw yourself over here or the soldiers shall shoot you.' The young man chose to fling himself into space. But by a miracle he fell amongst some trees or bushes on the cliff-side, and so escaped with a broken arm. He gathered himself up somehow, and presented himself again before the Emperor. 'Your bidding has been done, sire,' he said. ' Yes, it has,' remark-ed Christophe, and I am very much interested to find that you survive. Oblige me by trying if you can do it again I There is, too, the curious evidence, known, we believe to every experienced white man in Africa, and, if we recollect aright, in Australia also, of the tendency of individuals who have been thoroughly trained in civilisation to "go Fantee," that is, to revert to the savagery of one of the most savage tribes. Mr. Grant Allen was supposed in London to have exaggerated the truth to absurdity in his story of the Rev. John Crowdy, but Lady Broome in this month's Cornhill relates a story of a Zulu girl which is nearly as sugges- tive. The authentication in this ease is perfect, for the girl lived in Lady Broome's own house, and her mistress would, it is obvious, have willingly recorded a very different story :— " I think, however, quite the most curious instance of the thin- ness of surface civilisation among these people came to me in the case of a young Zulu girl who had been early left an orphan and had been carefully trained in a clergyman's family. She was about sixteen years old when she came as my nursemaid, and was very plump and comely, with a beaming countenance, and the sweetest voice and prettiest manners possible. She had a great love of music, and performed harmoniously enough on an accor- dion as well as on several queer little pipes and reeds. She could speak, read, and write Dutch perfectly, as well as Zulu, and was nearly as proficient in English. She carried a little Bible always in her pocket, and often tried my gravity by dropping on one knee by my side whenever she caught me sitting down and alone, and beginning to read aloud from it. It was quite a new posses- sion, and she had not got beyond the opening chapters of Genesis, and delighted in the story of Dam and Eva,' as she called our first parents. She proved an excellent nurse and thoroughly trustworthy ; the children were devoted to her, especially the baby, who learned to speak Zulu before English, and to throw a reed assegai as soon as he could stand firmly on his little fat legs. I brought her to England after she had been about a year with me, and she adapted herself marvellously and unhesitatingly to the conditions of a civilisation far beyond what she had ever dreamed of . A friend of mine chanced to be returning to Natal, and proposed that I should spare my Zulu nurse to her. Her husband's magistracy being close to where Maria's tribe dwelt, it seemed a good opportunity for Melia ' to return to her own country; so of course I let her go, begging my friend to tell me how the girl got on. The parting from the little boys was a heart-breaking scene, nor was Italia at all comforted by the fine clothes all my friends insisted on giving her. Not even a huge Gainaborough hat garnished with giant poppies could console her for leaving her 'little chieftain;' but it was at all events some- thing to send her off so comfortably provided for, and with two large boxes of good clothes. In the course of a few months I received a letter from my friend, who was then settled in her up-country home, but her story of Maria's doings seemed well- nigh incredible, though perfectly true. All had gone well on the voyage and so long as they remained at Durban and Maritzburg ; but as soon as the distant settlement was reached, Maria's kins- men came around her and began to claim some share in her pros- perity. Free fights were of constant occurrence, and in one of them Maria, using the skull of an ox as a weapon, broke her sister's leg. Soon after that she returned to the savage life she had not known since her infancy, and took to it with delight. I don't know what became of her clothes, but she had presented herself before my friend clad in an old sack and with necklaces of wild animals' teeth, and proudly announced she had just been married with cows '—thus showing how completely her Chris- tianity had fallen away from her, and she had practically returned, on the first opportunity, to the depth of that savagery from which she had been taken before she could even remember it. I soon lost all trace of her, but Mali' s story has always remained in my mind as an amazing instance of the strength of raarbastisot.*
The causes of such reversions, which indicate, we repeat, a general tendency to reversion when onoe the white authority is withdrawn, are, we conceive, twofold. One is that we underrate the immense burden in the way of self-control, habits, and obediences which Western civilisation lays upon its subjects, a burden which 'includes, first, a strict moral law which it has taken centuries to drive into our own people– they have hardly imbibed it fully yet, as we see whenever for any reason restraint is withdrawn—secondly, a political law curiously unsuited to any but white temperaments ; and, thirdly, a ceremonial law involving dress, food, education, worship, methods of courtship, subjects of conversation, in fact, the whole details of life from the greatest to the most minute. The moment that burden is felt, the man who has not been trained for generations to endure it, or is not whipped into endurance by opinion, begins to desire to throw It off, and to be independent of it ; reverts, in fact, to savagery, as being, if there is no white control, less burdensome and more agreeable. It was Midhat Pasha, we remember, one of the ablest Turks who ever lived, who pronounced European social etiquettes to be absolutely unendurable and fatal to any true enjoyment of social life. The other cause is not so certain, but it appears to us to exist. We white men can only use our own Christian civilisation as our instrument for raising the inferior races, and it is at least possible that other civilisations equally Christian might exist vrhich might suit them much better, but which they are not allowed to develop freely. The object Of our training of the' dark peoples is always to produce a type; that type is, from the conditions, necessarily ours; and it is at least possible that there are, and ought to be, many types all equally acceptable to the higher powers. There is no better type among civilised men than that of the English minister of any Church, but no dark man in the world, if left to himself for a genera- tion, will, even if he retains the faith in its purity, be exactly like that.
And, lastly, we are all in an absurd hurry. We forget that the dark men of the second generation are not converts at all either to Christianity or civilisation, but persons with strong inherited tendencies born under a system both of thought and manners which is at variance with those tendencies. They are no more dominated by their creed than our own masses, and no more worshippers of our civilisation-than the white " beach-combers " of the Pacific. It takes generations to make of the descendants of converts real Christians—that is, Christians whose ideal never changes whatever their con- duct may be—and to make them feel the burden of civilisa- tion a source of strength. Why should an " instructed " Zulu be so much better than an instructed Anglo-Saxon, or Wend, or Hun, who remained often for centuries a fierce bar- barian with a veneer of Christianity and civilisation ? The veneer thickened gradually, but the underlying nature often burst out, and so it will be with the Zulu and the negro. We must be patient for generations, never withdraw our influence while we can retain it, and retain confidence that, though this is not the path of progress we should have followed, it is the one which throughout history Providence has adopted. You can no more make a civilised people in a year than you can make a tree.
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