Albert Schweitzer
By THOMAS HODGKIN AD. LINDSAY, in his introduction to the late Professor ' Kraus's book on Albert Schweitzer, said: " Kraus .cannot abide Schweitzer's philosophy. He thinks Schweitzer imbued with all sorts of errors, Kantianism, Protestantism, and various other things, which to his devoted mind are sad wanderings; yet he sees Schweitzer's ' unparalleled greatness,' as he calls it, breaking through." And Lindsay, who wasn't worried by the " Kantianism, Protestantism, and various other things," saw it too. But what sort of a great man is Schweitzer ?
Partly it is the many-sidedness that attracts one. Schweitzer has this rare Leonardo-like quality. And the rarer it is the more admirable it becomes: most of us can't even do one thing properly. So it is all the more impressive when an international authority on organ-building (who objects to the electric bellows in modern organs as detrimental to tone) is able to say : " The [operation] I have had to perform most often is that for hernia. . . . The Negroes of Central Africa suffer much more often than white people from strangulated hernia. Our ancestors were well acquainted with this terrible method of dying, but we no longer see it in Europe, because every case is operated upon as soon as ever 'it is recognised. ' Let not the sun go down upon your hernia' is the maxim continually impressed upon medital students. But in Africa this terrible death is quite common."
Yet I doubt if it is really this capacity to take theology, music, medicine--and other arts—in his stride, in a world in which theologians, musicians and medicals normally practise a certain apartheid, that has moved people most. It is rather this simpler quality of knowing what you ought to do and then going and doing it. Possibly most of us are, like Schweitzer, Kantians at heart. But we either humbug ourselves into thinking that we don't know what we ought to do : or we humbug ourselves with arguments why, having regard to all the circumstances, after careful consideration, we regret that no useful purpose would be served, etc. . . . And Schweitzer is a stimulus because he was capable of behaving like a man and not like a Government Department So Schweitzer gave up University teaching and research— and this he minded 'a great deal : " Even today I cannot bear to look at the windows of the second lecture-room to the east of the entrance of the great University building, because it was there that I most often lectured." And because of his supposed theological unorthodoxy he was allowed, initially, to work for the Paris Missionary Society on the understanding that he " only wanted to be a doctor, and as to everything else-would be as mute as a fish." After spending six years taking the full medical course at Strasbourg (still lecturing on theology, working on St. Paul, editing Bach, serving as a curate, and undertaking concert tours in his spare time) he left Europe in the spring of 1913 with his wife to start the hospital at Lambarene, in Gabon.
Why Gabon '? Partly, no doubt, it was just that there was medical work to be done there. But one can't help thinking that conditions in Gabon—where disintegration and depopula- tion have gone further than elsewhere in Africa—had also something to do With it. Here African society was simply what was left after the ravages of the slave-trade, sleeping sickness and the timber concessions had done with it " How poor this territory is compared with the Gold Coast and the Cameroons. And poor because . . . it is so rich in valuable timber. The exploitation of the forests goes on at the expense of the cultivation of the means of life, and these have to be imported."
Gabon—Lambarene—was a special case of the general Dives-Lazarus situation with which Schweitzer was, and is, preoccupied. " What iS the meaning of the simple fact that this and that people has died out, that others are dying out, and that the condition of others is getting work and worse, as a result of their discovery by men who professed to be followers of Jesus ? . . . We and our civilisation are burdened really with a great debt. We are not free to confer benefits on these men, or not, as we please; it is our duty. Anything we give them is not benevolence but atonement.'
That, I think, is the essence of Schweitzer's position regarding Africa: which means that there is no room for Schweitzerismus pr Schweitzerolatry, or anything of that kind. And no one has any right to sleep more comfortably in his bed because of Lambarene : less comfortably rather. Schweitzer can only .pay his own debt—nobody else's. Yet this is a hard fate that tends to overtake these great men. Once they are canonised it becomes respectable to admire them, often for the wrong reasons. There are those who admire Schweitzer, yet hold the entirely un-Schweitzerian view that " we ought to be kind to these poor blacks ": just as there are those who admire another great European, who spent a large part of his life in Equatorial Africa, Savorgnan de Brazza, but would regard it as shocking and bad for prestige to enjoy the same equal and friendly relationships with Africans that Brazza enjoyed. But it is Schweitzer, not the Schweitzer-myth, that is important: `and that not just because of all these people in Gabon who are no longer suffering from hernia, malaria, jiggers and craw-, craw, but because of his idea of the necessity for a new relation between Europe and Africa, based upon Europeans fitting into African society and doing the specialised jobs that need to be done, caring about the job and not about power, a generation before Point Four, Technical Assistance, and all that.
And since it is the Nobel prize for peace that Albert Schweitzer has been awarded, it is worth remembering, as he once pointed out, that this is a subject about which Africans have their own ideas: " Ten men killed already in this war [the 1914-18 War] ! " said an old Pahouin. " Why then don't the tribes meet for a palaver ? How can they pay for all these dead men ? " For, with the natives, it is a rule that all who fall in a war, whether on the victorious or the defeated side, must be paid for by the other side.
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