THE PERIL OF AFRICA.
T"questions put by Sir Charles Dilke and Mr. Pease in the House of Commons about slavery in Zanzibar, and the answers of Mr. Curzon, given in detail in another column, make up together a very disagreeable incident. We do not for a moment believe that Mr. Curzon was shuffling, or that the Government was in any degree unwilling that the whole truth should reach the House of Commons. That kind of accusation, due really to party malice, is far too readily made just now, and only blinds average people to the true issue at stake. What we do believe is that the Government is indifferent ; that the Foreign Office fails altogether to perceive the importance of the question, not for philanthropic reasons, but for reasons of statesmanship ; and that owing to that want of perception it is far too willing to let the local authorities act on their own judgment in the matter. It does not see that a great and permanent policy is involved and spoiled when we tolerate slavery even for a month. Lord Salisbury and Mr. Curzon are, we do not doubt, quite willing to abolish slavery provided they can do it without risk, with- out exertion, and without asking the House of Commons for any money ; but they do not see why they should act in the matter as resolutely and as rapidly as they would in any other matter which involved a considerable political hope, or a serious political danger. Just compare, for example, their action on two matters of detail about which there is no dispute. They were told six weeks ago that documents establishing the existence in Mombassa of a practice of restoring fugitih slaves, were in London, and at their disposal. Yet they never asked to see them. On the other hand, the moment they under- stood from their own law officers that the practice was illegal, they prohibited it by telegraph. To break a British law seemed to them a serious matter, an offence against State discipline to be stopped at once ; but to keep on slavery was after all, in their opinion, comparatively a trivial thing, or at all events a thing to be prohibited by the slowest processes of departmental argument. We are sure that attitude of mind is unwise, and will once more try to state the reasons which in our judgment make energetic action against slavery expedient for any British Government.
We hold that the relation between this country and the negro races of the world may be made a source of great, cheap, and direct power. Those races will probably take civilisation very slowly, may, indeed, be centuries before they rise to the level of Bengalees or Chinese, while to the level of Europeans they, as races, will probably never attain. Their whole history for the past three thousand years shows that there is in them some deficiency of accumulating power, that when they have advanced they do not, if left to themselves, stay advanced, but have a tendency to " go Fantee," that is, to be charmed with the perfect freedom from restraint of savage and naked life. It will be most difficult to make of our new millions of negro subjects what we want to make of them, peasants like the agriculturists of India, willing to live quietly for centuries under white guidance, to pay heavy taxes, and to profit by a gradually increasing amount of intellectual train- ing. But their whole history for that long period shows also that they make, under trained officers, admirable soldiers, that they like soldiering, and that their impatience of civil order coexists with a great readiness to submit to a severe but kindly military discipline. That was the opinion of all the early Asiatic Sovereigns, who made of them household guards ; it was the opinion of the Arabs who conquered Northern Africa and Spain ; it was the opinion of Turkish soldiers like Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt, who had Turks to defeat; and it is the opinion to-day of men like General Kitchener, Sir Taubman Goldie, and the excellent officers who have raised and organised regiments in the West Indies. Thoroughly trained negroes are as good as Goorkhaa in the field, and for tropical service better than Europeans. They enlist so readily under Englishmen that we could at this moment raise an African Legion of twenty thousand men who would be as good as Xitchener's native regiments, and who would enable us, without unendurable expense, and without wasting our thin and costly white battalions, to hold all the vast provinces in tropical Africa which are passing into our hands, perhaps also to maintain a force in India which in its separateness might relieve the burden of the European army. All that is needed is to be sure that negro feeling is on the whole on our side. At present it is so. The negroes of the world are well aware that we hate slavery ; that, whatever the result, we are willing they should be free ; and that when we strike them—and we strike often, and sometimes savagely hard—we do it for ends other than pure hatred of black men. If we can but keep up that impression, can but convince the leaders of the really black races that among white men the rough and resolute English are the least intolerable, we may rule for centuries over fifty millions of black cultivators without an insurrection, and without debauching our own characters. But to do this we must convince them as fully as they are convinced of any law of Nature, that under our rule slavery instantly and finally ceases, that no man not a Magistrate can inflict pain amounting to torture, and that their women are safe, alike from Europeans and their own countrymen, from any seduction that is not persuasive. Those are the three cardinal rules, and those who believe that the negroes are careless about them are ignorant of what they say to the few officials and travellers whom they trust, of facts like their feeling about the Arab slave-dealers, and of occurrences like the recent uprising in the Congo Free State, which has ended, it is reported, in the massacre of at least part of Baron Dhanis's followers. Negroes hate violent oppres sion, and especially oppression which means for them lives of toil under the lash without wages, just as much as the remainder of mankind do. It seems to us- that while we are annexing such vast regions, entire kingdoms bigger than France, and while we are com- plaining that we literally cannot get white soldiers in sufficient numbers, to ignore such a source of military power as this is not statesmanship. Apart altogether- from Christianity or humanity, or the common honesty which, as it seems to us, slavery destroys, and reasoning as an able Mameluke Emir might or a sensible Turkish Pasha, we cannot but pronounce the policy of tolerating slavery in Africa pure folly. For our own interest, apart from that of negroes, it should end, at once, and as dramatically as possible, wherever our flag flies upon that continent. Every negro should know that our flag, what- ever else it meant, meant everywhere, at once, and without delay, that he was at liberty to work or abstain from working at his own discretion, that he could not be flogged at the will of any individual, and that he could fix the rate of his own wages. We need the quiet acquiescence of the negro millions in our superiority. They are perfectly willing to acknowledge that the superiority exists, they do not even wish to give the white men orders, but they want to be assured that the new rulers, in return for obedience and taxes, will leave them reasonably free to lead their lives without pain or terror other than those which come to them, as to the animals, from disease, hunger, or the irresistible tyrannies of Nature.
There is another reason for invariably and quickly abolishing slavery in Africa, which will not, perhaps, weigh with statesmen so heavily as the first one ; but it is one which will in the end greatly influence the ordinary com- munity, as yet hardly conscious of the facts. The average white man who goes to Africa, suffers in character there, the brutal side of him being apparently relieved of restraint to an unexpected degree. Whether the climate irritates him, or the submissiveness of the people invites tyranny,. or the difference between the negro and the European diminishes the sense of a common humanity, is not as yet convincingly proved, but the fact is proved that a spirit of tyranny rapidly develops itself. The white man grows in Africa not only too despotic, despotic in a degree which he does not reach in Asia, but callous to sufferings whia• bring him no advantage in a way that is hardly to be accounted for. Even when he inflicts no needless or capricious suffering himself, he will endure its infliction by others without a trace of the indignation which he would feel in Europe, and with no inclination to sacrifice himself in order to prevent it. He learns to believe that the negro must be kept down, which up to a point may be true and for the negro's own benefit ; that he has no rights as a citizen, which is false ; and that he can be governed or trained or utilised only by the infliction of pain, which is a denial that he is a human being. With the exception of some great officials and some missionaries, we rarely if ever meet a returned African colonist who is not at heart convinced that the negro must be governed by the crack of the whip, who can bear the notion of leaving him to settle his own wage in open market, or who would endure to see him invested with a practical and applicable remedy against any violent wrong. That temper leads to indiscipline, to impatience of law, to a belief that force, and force alone, is the true arbiter of disputes. It is a temper which makes government from a distance excessively difficult, and it is a temper which State toleration of slavery seems to the colonist to justify. If the State does not care energetically to protect the negro, why should the indi- vidual care ? The black man has no rights as a slave, why should he have any as a labourer? It is absolutely necessary, if we are to hold Africa, to keep this feeling down, and while slavery is tolerated to keep it down is for the State so rank an hypocrisy as to invite contempt. Nothing either good or great will be done in Africa except under the leadership of white men, and in allowing slavery we are debauching the character of our only effi- cient instruments. Why should they be so much better than the State, or tolerate in employes a resistance which the State in the case of slaves makes a criminal offence ? We hold that for the sake of our own military power, and of the character of our own white caste in our tropical Colonies, Parliament should expand the law which forbids the rendition of slaves into a law which declares the hold- ing of slaves to be everywhere under the British flag, in any class of British subjects, a penal offence.
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