Chapter II: Part 2

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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?

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 aesthetic 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 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 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.

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.

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, 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.

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 _suttee_. The average white man feels assured that no race can be 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.

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 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.

Having found no difference between the senses, instincts and inner feelings of the two races we come now to consider the oft-alleged difference in what is popularly called _pure intellect_ 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 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.[17]

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 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.

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 _regime_, of the claim for compensation that under their 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 particular instance of special intelligence, but a fair example of average Native perspicacity.

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:

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

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.

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, 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.

"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."

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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."

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."

This clear expression of concatenated thought from a Native woman who had had 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.

Turning over my notes I select, at random, a few more instances to illustrate my argument.

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:

"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 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."

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.

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 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:

"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."

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.

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.

I remember a Native witchdoctor who in defending himself against a charge of alleged witchcraft practice spoke thus:

"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[18]--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 they paid me ten shillings, why, do not the whites make payments to their priests?"

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.

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.

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 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.

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 should die and not leave a son to carry on my life, then should I die the death utterly."

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.

I discussed the matter of polygamy with a Native youth one day, and made a note of his argument. He said:

"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, 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."

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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?

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.

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, 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 _Gelerhten_, "_ces bons Allemands_," 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 imposition on the growing masses of a new ideal, the ideal of dominion in the hands of the German people.

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.

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, 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 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.

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.

I do not profess the knowledge of a pedagogue in these matters. I speak simply from an insight gained through many years of 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.

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.

ACHIEVEMENT.

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?

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, 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.

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.

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 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.

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 accomplishment, 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.

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.

Climate is, perhaps, the factor which is most generally condescended upon as being 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 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?

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 _homo sapiens_ 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.

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 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 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:

"A flaming coal
Lit at the stars and sent
To burn the sin of patience from her soul,
The scandal of content."

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 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.

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.

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 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."