CORRESPONDENCE.
THE NEGRO FUTURE.
nro VIE EDITOR Or TM/ "SPECTATOR.] Sin,—Permit me to encroach upon your time with a slight remonstrance—not a contradiction, mind—regarding your keen-sighted article in the Spectator of December 7th. No one is more convinced than I am that the African races are inferior to the English, French, German, and Latin races, but as the accounts of my travels that are now appearing are not my own accounts, I do not like to think I have done anything to bring the African into further disrepute. I do not place him below the other coloured races ; possibly because I have never lived among, nor attempted to understand, the Eastern races ; and possibly, because I have lived among, and attempted to understand, the Africans. Certainly the so- called Hamitic races have never produced an even four- teenth-rate sculpture, picture, machine, tool, piece of cloth, or pottery ; neither have they ever risen to the level of picture-writing, let alone a written character, and I am per- sonally acquainted, to the point of exasperation, with their cryptic, complicated ways of communicating ideas with strings of cowries and pieces of leaf and stick. Only the other day I had to steer a course with a chart made of bits of plantain-leaf of different breadths, denoting the size of the villages I was to pass through, and placed at intervals that denoted the distance between the vil- lages. I do not say I did well with that chart, but I have done quite as badly with the best Admiralty one. But these ingenious devices do not equal the rock-writing of the South Americans, the pictures the Red Indian paints on a raw elk- hide, and are infinitely below those spirited sporting sketches of mammoth hunts, &ea left us by the Cave men. In mental and moral affairs the African is by no means so strikingly inferior as he is in handicrafts ; he has both a sense of justice and honour, not much worn by daily use, and very easily eliminated by a course of Christian teaching ; but it is there, and if you know the way, you can rouse it, and make it work.. In rhetoric he excels, and for good temper and patience he- compares favourably with any set of human beings. The worst of his personal sins is sloth. This chiefly arises from his not having anything to do in a definite up-to-time way, for he is happy and industrious when under good white direction. No one who has been on the coast can fail to have- noticed the Kroo boys singing and dancing and laughing over their often heavy work. The cooper, and the car- penter, and their fellow-countryman from Accra, the cook,. are far happier than the Africans in the bush,—yea, even, the cook, whose conscience should be a burden to him, on account of the manslaughters he has committed with his abiding greasiness. Of course you will point out their customs; but I must say, in spite of what I have beard and seen, that I do not consider the West African cruel. One must remember that in their culture there are no prisons, or hospitals, or workhouses, no regular police force,.
In the matter of their sacrificial rites, I think one should try and understand the underlying ideas before one thinks- harshly. The feeling, for example, regarding the importance- of burial rites is quite Greek in its intensity. Given a duly educated native of the Niger Delta, I am sure he would grasp. the true inwardness of his Alcestis far and away better than any living European can. To provide a proper burial for a. dead relative means to them providing for that relative es happy after-life, and so to do is the surviving iaegro's greatest duty. Its only rival in his mind is the desire to avoid having a funeral for himself ; and even this passion goes under in the mind of a good negro, and he will risk his own life to carry out what he considers as his duty to the dead, even when he is well aware that the killing of slaves will mean hanging for him when "them big Consul" knows of it.
The greatest horrors on the coast arise out of the belief in witchcraft. Toleration means indifference with all men, I believe; and the negro and Bantu, are not indifferent about their subjects. If you put yourself in his place I think your will own it is difficult to be so when you believe that a person, whom you also believe you have found out and got hold of, has. been placing a live crocodile or a catawnmpns of some kind in your own or your mother's or brother's inside so as to eat- up valuable viscera. The African equivalent to our punitive processes are club, knife, fire, water, poison, or lash, and you
logically have as much right to regard my friend, the West African chief, as a brute for employing them, as you have because he uses brass bars, heads of tobacco, &c., in lien of sixpenny pieces. It is deplorably low of him I know, to be not, from an abstract point of view, bad. I freely own and regard the Africans as fools of the first water, for their habit of believing in things in the hearty way they do. Still we feel that way sometimes even towards English people who do mot believe in what we believe.
I dare not openly defend his cannibalism, and will only remark that the true negroes, the natives of the Niger Delta, for example, are never culinary cannibals, but always do it from religions motives. It is not so with the Bantu, and whenever you find among them a cannibal tribe, you will End a superior tribe, like the Fangs and the Mannema, for -example. You most justly say there is no reason why the African should not have risen to the Asiatic level; but I liuttsb say they are affected by malaria. The fever-swamps -of West Africa are the-graves of an unknown number of saccesaive tribes who have come down from the interior. The people in the interior frequently tell me that there is a certain air that comes from the sea that kills men. They are right, save that it does not come from the sea, but from the grand swamp-forests that fringe the continent on its western side. I think you are a little hard on the West Coast climate in baying that it is no worse than Siam. Surely Siam does not viietly blot out white men's lives all the time, and then every three or five years have an epidemic—not imported—that can make a clearance of nine men out of eleven in ten days, and then go back to its steady killing-off as if nothing had lappened ? The experiment of governing a bit of Africa with perfect calmness, and steady justice to the natives, only tempered now and then with sympathetic mercy, with no -" recoil from diabolical severity," and with never a trace of -the old severity itself, is being tried by Sir Claude MacDonald in the Niger Coast Protectorate. It has been in working -order for several years now, and if Africa does not rise under -this "fairly tried influence of the higher race," Africa will only have herself to blame. My opinion is not hopeful; but eve shall see.
Forgive me for detaining you so long ; but I wanted to say, as you had done me the honour of mentioning me, that I do not believe the African to be brutal, or degraded, or cruel. I know from wide experience with him that he is often grateful and faithful, and by no means the drunken idiot his so-called friends, the Protestant missionaries, are anxious, as an excuse for their failure in dealing with him, to make him out.
MARY H. KINGSLEY.
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