XVIITHE CRITICS

Elsewhere I have represented theclimateas the theme of the Old Coaster whom the voyager meets after leaving Liverpool, or some other European port, for West Africa. He makes free use of all the adjectives that have usually been appropriated to the characterization of sin and death.

But I may not have said that the Old Coaster has what musicians call asub-theme. His sub-theme isMissions. The unity of his conversation is secured by the use of the same adjectives. If the missionary is coddled at home or foolishly praised, the severe and relentless criticism to which he is subjected after leaving Europe may be regarded as a providential discipline. According to the Old Coaster every evil that infests West Africa is due directly or indirectly to the missionary. I have heard him blamed for the Belgian atrocities of the Congo, and for the Hut Tax War of Sierra Leone, and even for the fatality of the climate. For, it is said, everybody knows that it is not malaria but quinine that kills the white man in Africa; the belief in quinine is simply fatuous, and its use is criminal; and the missionary alone is responsible. Rum, which is the only protection against malaria, would keep the traders alive, but sooner or later, following the example of the missionary, they take quinine and die.

These criticisms serve to while away the time, and do no harm unless there should be on board a smart traveller who is bent upon learning all about Africa from the deckof a steamer and then giving his knowledge to the world in a book. The Old Coaster (and the name often includes the captain and officers of the ship) is obsessed with the desire to impart information. The missionary has magazines through which his voice is heard: but the smart traveller is the Old Coaster’s opportunity and he makes the best of it and pours forth a volume of misinformation sufficient to fill the most capacious mental vacuum. The Old Coaster thus employed is not more than half malicious. He sometimes winks at a missionary standing by, as much as to say: “The joke’s on you.” He generally divides missionaries into two classes,deliberate impostorsandwell-meaning fools, generously assuming that the missionary present belongs to the latter class, so that the relation of good-fellowship on board is not necessarily disturbed by the anti-missionary acrimony.

One of these travelling critics was so wrought upon by the reported misdoings of missionaries and their destructive influence upon the religion and the morals of the natives that before he reached the Congo he went clean crazy—as witness the following from his book: “What religions furies with unholy rage have demolished those weird gods, and disturbed fervent but unobtruding piety in the exercise of its duties?” It may have been the result of going ashore without an umbrella. I never heard whether this man recovered; but let travellers take warning and not trifle with the dangers of the coast and the Old Coaster.

One is impressed by the bewildering inconsistency of the criticisms, so contradictory that if all were published no further answer would be necessary than to cite critic against critic. The more numerous class of critics contend that the native is so morally inferior that he cannot be improved; and a profession of Christian faith only adds to his heathen vices a more disgusting hypocrisy.The other class of critics, less numerous, but more intelligent and reputable, contend, on the contrary, that the native is all right as he is, his pristine morality becomes him; there is no need to improve him and we ought not to try.

Not long ago Prof. Frederick Starr after a brief visit to the Congo published his opinions in the ChicagoTribuneand made many strictures upon missionary work. He wrote under the rather complacent caption, “The truth about the Congo,” quite confident that his word and hasty observations were sufficient to discredit the hundreds who had gone before him, as able and as honest as himself, and who had lived many years in the Congo. Professor Starr confesses at the outset that he personally “dislikes the effort to elevate, civilize, and remake a people,” and that he “should prefer to leave the African as he was before the white contact.” It is his opinion that civilized folk have no right to change the customs, institutions or ideas of any tribe, even with the purpose of saving their souls. Such critics regard the African, not at all with a human and sympathetic interest, as a fellow man, capable of progress, and possibly endowed with an immortal soul; but with an esthetic and historical interest, as constituting a link between us and our ape-ancestry, an object to be appraised like a piece of antique art, not for its present or future use, but for the past. To change him shows a want of good taste and historical imagination, even if the change relieve his suffering and improve his morals; that were a small compensation if we thereby impoverish the variety of human types and leave the world less interesting to the connoisseur. Incidentally, Professor Starr denied categorically the reported atrocities of the Belgians in the Congo Free State. He had asked the Belgians themselves about the matter.

In seeking to explain the wide-spread criticism of missionsand of missionaries it ought to be frankly admitted that among missionaries there are misfits and occasional freaks whose misconduct scandalizes the well deserving. If we have any knowledge of human nature, and realize that in every society there are unworthy and false members, we should not even expect that the ranks of missionaries alone would be exempt. By denying a palpable fact we only exasperate our critics and lead them to doubt the sincerity of all instead of a very few. It is always wholesome to admit the truth, and indiscriminate praise is as foolish and misleading as wholesale criticism.

On one of my voyages to Africa a certain missionary was regarded as “the biggest liar on board.” What in the world ever attracted him to the mission field it were hard to imagine. Criticism of other and all missionaries was his favourite employment, especially when conversing with those who were hostile to the work. While we were anchored at Accra I heard him say to a trader, as he pointed ashore towards the splendid English mission: “That is where the missionaries take in heathen and turn out devils.” He did not stay long in the mission but he did considerable harm in a short time and created painful misunderstandings that were by no means removed by his departure. Imagine the position of a missionary placed perhaps alone with such a man, with no other companionship and no escape from his neighbourhood! Moreover the report of the missionary’s work, and even his reputation, depends upon the other man; he is therefore at his mercy. For the reputation of one who labours in a lonely and distant field may be indefinitely greater or less than he deserves. The man of whom I speak, after his return to America, figured in the police courts in New York City, where he was arrested on a very serious and odious charge. His record there is still accessible.

Well-meaning missionaries sometimes make themselves ridiculous in the eyes of white men by their attitude and manner towards the natives. I once witnessed such a scene, when a missionary standing on deck, in the presence of white men, conversed with a group of natives in a manner so unseemly and so silly that the comments of the white men were chiefly oaths and ribald laughter. When at last the natives after an hour on board were about to go ashore, one of them, a young savage about sixteen or seventeen years of age with scarcely a stitch of clothing on him, came to the missionary and said: “Me, I go for shore;” whereupon the missionary extended his hand and lifting his huge helmet exclaimed in a very loud voice accompanied by a sweeping bow: “Goodbye, sir; good-bye; and I’m happy to have met you, sir.”

The captain in a voice of thunder turned to me and said: “Who is that fool?” I have weakened the captain’s forceful language by omitting his expletive, which the average reader will easily supply.

More frequently, yet perhaps not often, the missionary errs in his attitude towards his worldly-minded fellow passengers on these long voyages—is unamiable, or indulges in moral strictures in a way that cannot possibly do good, and is calculated to create prejudice and antipathy.

I recall one Sunday when two army officers thought to kill time by playing ball on deck. Like others of their class, they regarded all civilians with contempt and missionaries with abhorrence. They were interesting when drunk, but extremely stupid when sober. A lady missionary came and sat down in her chair on the side of the deck where they were playing ball. As the man at the bat began to strike more vigorously the ball occasionally flew past the lady at an uncomfortably short distance. There were chairs on the other side of the deckwhere she could have been quite as comfortable, and there was only one place where there was room to play ball; but those men were breaking the Sabbath, and she must protest by staying there and looking righteous, that is to say, very cross. She was naturally modest as well as kind-hearted, and she remained there wholly from a sense of duty. She was a small, scanty person, with a prominent nose, and she sat bolt upright, her nose looking like an intentional target for the ball. Once when it whizzed past her one of the men said, “Aren’t you afraid you will get hit with this ball if you stay there?” It never seemed to occur to him that there was another alternative, namely, for them to stop playing.

She seemed not to hear, but looked more cross than ever, and appeared as if she wanted to get hit, so as to be a martyr to her principles; or at least so as to have a better reason for looking so cross. The captain came along and after contemplating for a moment the smiling levity of those worldly men and the contrasting acerbity of the Christian woman’s countenance, as she sat there keeping the Sabbath day holy, he went to the side and laughed overboard. At length a fellow missionary approached her and asked if she would go with him to the other side of the deck, adding that he wanted to talk with her on a matter of missionary interest. She was a real good woman with a mistaken sense of duty. We must surely seek to be amiable to people as we find them, and try to like people as they are. Such conduct is a source of irritation to those who indulge in it, and it inspires dislike and consequent criticism.

Another source of criticism is the missionary magazines of the various societies engaged in missionary work. These magazines fall into the hands of the trader; and sometimes he finds a glowing account of the great work being done by Missionary A who happens to be his neighbour,and he is unable to reconcile the report with the work which he has seen with his own eyes. Usually his eyes are at fault. He is blind to spiritual values. There are old traders in Gaboon who do not know that there is a native Christian in the community.

But we cannot dismiss the whole matter in this cavalier manner, and I feel like adding that the missionary magazine, however necessary, is not an unmixed good. It is not good that a man should let his left hand know all that his right hand does. The missionary magazine reports to the world what the missionary chooses to write about his own work. If his letters are interesting and report large success they are eagerly sought and published; and he of course is not callously indifferent to his reputation. But, inasmuch as there are few or no witnesses but himself, the magazine puts a premium on egotism and immodesty; and it sometimes fosters a kind of spiritual impotence which needs the stimulus of publicity. One of the bravest and best missionaries it has ever been my privilege to know, the Rev. William Chambers Gault, was seldom mentioned in a missionary magazine and little known to the church at home, though he laboured for many long years in Africa and is buried there. Mr. Gault was incorrigibly modest.

But even with the utmost margin of excuse—admitting the foolishness of fulsome and indiscriminate praise; admitting that missionaries are mortal, and some few of themdesperatelymortal—it remains that the wholesale criticism and violent denunciation that one hears on the voyage is unjust and outrageous. We must look for the reason of it in the critics themselves—the non-missionary white men residing in Africa. And in themselves we will find reason enough.

First of all, many or most of these men, according to their own confession, are not men of personal faith inChrist, but men who deride the Gospel in which we believe. Of all those who have criticized missions, I have only known of one man who himself professed to be a Christian; his criticism was rather mild and was due more to what he had heard than what he had seen.

Carlyle has said: “Unbelief talking about belief is like a blind man discussing the laws of optics.” How can a man think it worth while to expend lives and money in preaching to the heathen a Gospel which he himself rejects? If the Gospel itself is foolishness those who preach it must be fools, and the greatest fools are those who preach it at the greatest sacrifice. What does cynicism know about enthusiasm? It was not “much learning,” but much Christianity, that made Paul seem mad to Festus. Manifestly the first question to ask the disbeliever in missions is whether he is also a disbeliever in Christianity and in Christ. It is really astonishing that so many critics of missions, and so many of their readers, should treat this latter question as entirely irrelevant.

Racial antipathy towards the black man is also a reason of hostility to missions. The intensity of this feeling where the inferior race is in the majority is surprising, even in men who in all their other relations are generous and considerate. In the opinion of many a white man in Africa the black man is little better than a beast, and they treat him accordingly. To speak of him as a brother man is to insult the white man.

This antipathy actually prefers that the black man should remain in his present degradation—perhaps to justify itself. It resents every effort to elevate him; and as it sees him actually rising to the moral level of the white man it is only intensified into hatred. One soon perceives that the object of the white man’s greatest aversion is not the lowest native, but the best. Thecritic may therefore be sincere when he declares that he can see no good in the native product of missions, for he is blinded by this special prejudice. Racial antipathy is much more marked in the government official than in the trader; yet even the traders when they live in communities often have a code of arrogant manners according to which they ostracize any of their number who may extend to the native a degree of social recognition.

This antipathy must necessarily be hostile to missionary work. For the work of the missionary implies that he regards the black man as a brother man; one who is also capable of moral elevation. He is not necessarily blind to the present degradation of the native; but he insists that he does not belong to the present, but to the future; that he is endowed with an immortal soul and the moral possibilities which immortality implies. He admits the worst but “sees the best that glimmers through the worst,” and “hears the lark within the songless egg.” And experience has justified his faith.

The missionary treats the native according to this belief, and as he rises gives him exactly the social place to which his character as an individual entitles him. He takes very little interest in the abstract question of equality, or whether the black man is inherently inferior and different in kind from the white man. But he believes that in Christian brotherhood there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither black nor white. This attitude and the behaviour which comports with it are obnoxious to many white men, and are inevitably a source of much hostility to missions.

To the impulse of racial antipathy there is often added that of angry passion unchecked by social restraints, and stimulated by the irritability of a malaria-infected temper.

One day during a sea voyage a white man was telling anumber of us how the native workman ought to be managed. Addressing a missionary he said: “You missionaries make a great mistake in being kind to the native workman. To let him know that you value him is to spoil him; to praise him is to make him impudent; to trust him is to make him a thief. The proper way to manage him is never to speak to him without swearing; and to curse him even when he does his best. They are all misbegotten sons of rum-puncheons, whose highest idea of heaven is idleness and drink. They hate us all, and the only way to get any service out of them is to use the club. Every man who has ever worked for me bears the mark of my club, and some of them I have maimed for life. It is the only way to get the brutes to do anything.”

The missionary replied: “I believe every word that you say in regard to your treatment of the native. But this much at least is to be said for my method, as against yours, that mine is a complete success, and yours a complete failure, even according to your own confession. Most men do not brag about their failures, nor try to teach others what they themselves have not yet learned. In spite of kicks and curses you do not get the natives to work. One must conclude, therefore, that you like kicking and cursing more than you like success. Now my method succeeds to the extent that I usually get from the native all the service for which I pay him; and, besides, they have nursed me when I was sick; and they have vied with each other in protecting me from the sun by day and storms by night; they have exposed themselves to danger for my sake, and they have even saved my life at the extremest peril of their own. But would you therefore exchange your method for mine? No; not even for the sake of success.”

But the worst cruelty of the foreigner towards thenative results from the union of trade and government—when the government official is also a trader. This is what happened in the miserable Congo Free State, when the king of the Belgians became the king of traders. The concession system of the Belgians was afterwards introduced into the French Congo. But at length a voice was heard that had long been silent, and De Brazza, rival of Stanley and founder of the French Congo, came forth from his well-earned retirement, and France was stirred with the eloquence of a great man’s indignation. The result was that the worn-out explorer himself was appointed the head of a commission that was sent to investigate the conditions in those parts of the French Congo in which the concession system was in operation. De Brazza died at Dakar on his return, a martyr to his efforts for justice and humanity in Africa. But his report was already written, in which he charged M. Gentil, Commissioner General of the French Congo, with maladministration and great cruelty towards the natives. He reported a number of natives flogged to death with knotted whips. He stated that on one occasion, at the colonial office at Bangui, in order to force the natives to bring trade produce—called taxes—fifty-eight women and ten children were taken and held as prisoners and that within five weeks forty-seven of these died of starvation. Is it any wonder that to certain white men the usual methods of the missionary seem very slow and ineffective?

The missionary is the champion of the helpless native against the white man’s cruelty, and if he sometimes oversteps the limit of discretion, as is often said (though I do not know of a single instance), his excessive zeal is at least on the side of justice and humanity, and it is also in behalf of the weak against the strong. The government official seldom burns down native towns forpastime in the community where there is a missionary. When remonstrance is unavailing the missionary will at length report the matter to a higher official, and even the highest. And if such cruelty be general and atrocities abound, he even carries his remonstrance to the governments of Europe, or appeals to the civilized world, as he has done in regard to the Belgian Congo.

Again, there is no doubt that the particular vices which so many white men practice in Africa are a source of estrangement between them and the missionaries and a reason for hostility and consequent criticism of missions.

It is easy to be uncharitable and even unjust when writing on this subject. The contrast between theselfishmotives of the trader and the unselfish motives of the missionary has been overworked. It is not necessarily greed for gold that takes the trader to Africa, but often a perfectly honourable ambition. Besides, I have known traders who went to Africa chiefly because it offered the most immediate opportunity in sight for them to help out at home when younger brothers and sisters were to be educated and the family was in straitened circumstances. The pity is that they did not know the subtlety of the temptations awaiting them. They were strong enough to live up to their moral standards, but they did not see that those standards themselves would imperceptibly be lowered. Yet this is what happens.

In a recent book,The Basis of Ascendancy, the author, Mr. Edgar Gardner Murphy, speaking of the small proportion (as it seems to him) of the nation’s brains which the Southern white man of the United States supplies as compared with the New Englander, sets forth most earnestly the danger to the white man in the Southern states of contact with the low standards of an inferior race. The significant fact, Mr. Murphy says, is not the mere pressure of a lower racial standard, but the white man’scumulative modification of his own standards of self-criticism and self-direction:

“Through the conditions of his familiar contact with less highly developed habits of efficiency, with forms of will more immature than his, he is deprived of that bracing and corrective force, resident in the standard of his peers, which, manifesting itself within every personal world as one of the higher forms of social coöperation, is, in fact, the moral equivalent of competition. He may sin and not die. His more exacting expectations of himself are not echoed from without. Of himself, as he would prefer to see himself, there is no spiritual mirror. The occasional tendency to take himself at his second best is socially unchecked, and both his powers and his inclinations tend to assume the forms of approximation imposed by a life of habitual relationship with a mind lower than his own.

“To say that the stronger tends to become brutal because the weaker is brutal, or slovenly because the weaker is slovenly, is to touch the process only on its surface. The deeper fact is not that of imitation, nor yet that of contagion. It is that tragedy of recurrent accommodations, of habitual self-adjustment to lower conceptions of life and to feebler notions of excellence, which is nothing less than education in its descending and contractive forms.”

This is incomparably more true in Africa than it ever has been or ever can be in the Southern states. The worst of the remote possibilities which Mr. Murphy describes are fully realized in Africa. The velocity of the process is accelerated by the depressing effect of the climate.

The missionary too is more or less sensible of this influence upon himself; but he is guarded by the fact that his very purpose in Africa is to introduce and teach his own standards to the natives and he is constantly occupiedin pointing out the superiority of his own and the inferiority of theirs. Moreover any definite accommodation to native standards would mean disgrace and failure; to other white men it means neither. Indeed the white man, other than the missionary, who proposes to maintain the home standards in Africa will sometimes find himself ostracized by his fellows.

The use of rum by the natives the missionary is bound to denounce and within the membership of the church it is absolutely forbidden. But in doing this the missionary by implication reflects very seriously upon many white men. For the excessive drinking of the majority of white men in Africa, with its appalling consequences, is so well known that there is no need to exploit it. And when the native connected with the mission church refuses either to drink rum or to sell it, thereby professing moral superiority to those white men, the latter are exasperated. And shall the missionary not teach the native the strict observance of the seventh commandment because the white man so flagrantly violates it? The discord arising from this source is greatly aggravated by the fact that so many girls educated in mission schools are enticed by the extraordinary temptations of the white men to a life that the missionary, if he be true to his Christian standards, must condemn; for the girls of the mission are the most intelligent and attractive.

These various reasons are ample explanation of the hostility to missions and the consequent criticisms that are heard all along the coast, and which are occasionally disseminated over the world by some writer who has made a brief stay in Africa and who is so ignorant of the whole subject of missions that it ought not to require much discretion to be silent.

Those who condemn missions on sociological grounds—who, like Professor Starr, think that civilized folk haveno right to change the customs, institutions or ideas of any tribe, even with the purpose of saving their souls—are easily answered. For not only does such a view utterly repudiate the claim of Christ to be the world’s Saviour—the “Light of the world,” to which every man and nation has a right—but it is also contrary to the accepted principles of sociology. It is untrue and unscientific to say that the social structure of any given people has been fashioned by the people themselves, and therefore meets their needs; and that progressive changes must be brought about by the people themselves without the introduction of outside elements. The student of social evolution knows that the social structure is not always fashioned by the people themselves: it is sometimes altered radically by conquest. Neither does it always meet the people’s needs. The first need of a people is bread; and wherever the population is pressing too hard against the means of subsistence, as in India and China, with their recurring famines, there is a sure sign of weakness and defect in the social structure. Neither is it true that progressive changes must be brought about by the people themselves; for there may be social evils—impediments to progress, or tendencies to degeneration—which can only be corrected by the introduction of new ethical elements from without. Mohammedanism, a foreign religion, has become perfectly naturalized in a large portion of Africa, and our critics—most of them—vie with each other in proclaiming the good it has wrought. The spread of Buddhism in the Orient introduced new ideals. Christianity, originating in the Orient, brought new ideals to Europe. In Japan many of the elements worked out by Western civilization have been adopted and naturalized.

Besides, the let alone policy for Africa even if it were rational is hopelessly late. Foreign trade and governmenthave long been established and show no sign of withdrawing. And the question is whether we shall send to Africa our civilization, with all its burden of new demands and moral responsibilities, without disclosing to its primitive and childlike people that which alone supports our material civilization and enables us to bear its moral weight—that which is deepest and best in our thought and life.

One of unusual gifts and attainments, who in all probability would have occupied a position of great influence in the church in America if he had remained at home, after labouring more than forty years in Africa, speaks thus of the temporal benefits consequent upon the spread of Christianity:

“For the feeling with which I was impressed on my very first contact with the miseries of the sociology of heathenism, entirely aside from its theology and any question of salvation in a future life, has been steadily deepened into conviction that, even if I were not a Christian, I still ought to, and would, do and bear and suffer whatever God has called or allowed me to suffer or bear or do since 1861 in my proclamation of His Gospel, simply for the sake of the elevation of heathen during their present earthly life from the wrongs sanctioned by or growing out of their religion.”[3]

3. Rev. Robert Hamill Nassau, D. D.,Fetishism in West Africa, p. 26.

But to this apologetic the missionary adds his confident belief that the Christian faith affects not only the Africans’ redemption from “the miseries of the sociology of heathenism,” but also and chiefly the salvation of their souls; for he has seen the evidence in the lives of many who have been morally transformed by the power of a new and transcendent hope. Christian missions have made high claims, but their self-estimate has been justified by their achievement.

When I was on the voyage to Africa for the first time it chanced that Miss Mary H. Kingsley, the famous English traveller and writer, had just made one of her journeys down the West Coast and her name was in everybody’s mouth. Expressions of opinion were remarkable for lack of moderation, and oscillated between extremes of praise and criticism. When I went to Africa the second time Miss Kingsley had finished her travels on the coast and written her books, with their strong indictment of missions. I was amazed at the frequency and assurance with which Miss Kingsley was everywhere quoted. The captain of the steamer upon which I travelled knew her books almost by heart. He could repeat whole pages; which he did with as much reverence as if he were quoting fromScience and Health. He had no doubt but that she had dealt the final death-blow to missions, and that the era of missionary activity was already drawing to an inglorious close by reason of her indictment. The captain himself seemed to feel real bad about it.

Some years have passed since Miss Kingsley wrote; but she is quoted as much as ever, especially in England.The African Societywas founded as a memorial to her, and the organ of this society,The African Society Journal, bears a medallion portrait of her on its title-page. In short, in English trade circles Miss Kingsley is a kind of religious cult.

Besides being a remarkably clever woman and a brilliant writer, she had the prestige of a great name, being the niece of Charles Kingsley and the daughter of George Kingsley; a name of such historical significance in the Church of England that we should naturally expect Miss Kingsley to be in intellectual and moral sympathy with the Christian religion. Such however is by no means the case. She avows herdisbelief in Christianity and frankly tells us that Spinoza is the exponent of her creed,[4]which is therefore pure pantheism. God does not transcend nature; nor is He separable from it. Moreover, Miss Kingsley does not hold this opinion dispassionately. For instance, the effort to draw moral inspiration from our relation to a personal God (which she chooses to call “emotionalism”), she tells us she regards with “instinctive hatred.”[5]

4.West African Studies, p. 112.

5.Travels in West Africa, p. 506.

With such views Miss Kingsley finds, when she comes to the study of fetishism, that she half believes in it herself, and she is reluctant to speak against it. She says: “It is a most unpleasant thing for any religious-minded person to speak of a religion unless he either profoundly believes or disbelieves in it. For if he does the one he has the pleasure of praise; if he does the other, he has the pleasure of war, but the thing in between these is the thing that gives neither pleasure; it is like quarrelling with one’s own beloved relations. Thus it is with fetish and me!”[6]

6.West African Studies, p. 113.

We need not be surprised, then, when Miss Kingsley frankly says: “I am unsympathetic, for reasons of my own, with Christian missions.”[7]

7.Travels in West Africa, p. 214.

And not only was there a want of intellectual sympathy with the Christian religion, but a want of moral sympathy as well.

Miss Kingsley says: “An American magazine the other day announced, in a shocked way, that I could evidently ‘swear like a trooper.’ I cannot think where it got the idea from.”[8]Ican. And I venture the simple guess that the editor had read Miss Kingsley’s books—for instance, the interestingprefacetoWest African Studies.

8.West African Studies, p. 299.

But there are several more serious phases of this want of sympathy with the spirit of Christianity which would militate against Miss Kingsley’s competence as a critic of missions, namely, her avowed belief inslavery, inpolygamy, and in theliquor traffic. Miss Kingsley, after contending that domestic slavery is “for divers reasons essential to the well-being of Africa,” appends the following opinion in a foot-note: “I am of the opinion that the suppression of the export slave trade to the Americas was a grave mistake.”[9]Even more vehemently does Miss Kingsley defend native polygamy; and still more vehemently the liquor traffic.

9.Travels in West Africa, p. 514.

We are grateful for the perfect frankness with which she expresses her views on these three subjects, as it makes it an easier task to discredit her opinion on Christian missions; for, in this day and generation, to believe in these three social evils of Africa and at the same time to believe in missions were impossible. If these are not evils it is a foregone conclusion that the missionary, who is fighting them to the death, is doing more harm than good, is wasting both blood and money, and is at the best a “well-meaning fool.”

Miss Kingsley assures us that she went to Africa in the belief that the missionary represented everything that was good and the trader everything that was evil. But on shipboard, long before she reached Africa, when Miss Kingsley was mistaken for a missionary she thought it the greatest joke of modern times—and I rather agree with her. This is the one joke that she repeats with infinite laughter every time that it occurs. Her laughter of course measures her inward sense of utter incongruity and want of sympathy. Her fellow passengers knew her attitude before she reached the first African port.

Another marked feature about Miss Kingsley’s books is the author’s want of sympathy for the sufferings of the natives, and her want of pity when they bleed under the cruel lash of the white man. Though written by a woman, they are books without tears.

For instance, a story of heartrending wrong and suffering was told me by a trader of Fernando Po, who, although he had been on the coast for years, and, one would think, had been hardened by cruel sights, was yet deeply affected as he related it. I was able to verify it afterwards. It was a story of the cruelty of Portuguese planters to certain Krumen, whom by a false contract they enticed to San Thomé Island and then compelled them to remain and labour on the coco plantations as slaves. The conduct of the Portuguese in Africa justifies the opinion of the Kruman, who says: “God done make white man and God done make black man but dem debil done make Portuguee.” These enslaved Krumen, watching their opportunity, after two years escaped from San Thomé in canoes by night. They did not know that they were one hundred and fifty miles from the mainland, and they hoped that by some unforeseen means they might reach their own country. They all perished; most of them by hunger and thirst. After many days one or two canoes drifted to Fernando Po. In these the men were still alive—but scarcely alive, and they died after being rescued.

This story Miss Kingsley tells, in substance, though in abridged form, and with no comment except the following apology for the Portuguese: “My Portuguese friends assure me that there never was a thought of permanently detaining the boys, and that they were only just keeping them until other labourers arrived to take their place on the plantation. I quite believe them, for I have seen too much of the Portuguese in Africa to believe that theywould in a wholesale way be cruel to natives.”[10]Surely the quality of Miss Kingsley’s charity is not strained! I scarcely know a white man in West Africa who would offer any apology for those men, or who would call them his “friends.” If the poor Krumen had been captured, Miss Kingsley’s friends would probably have flogged them to death. As a matter of fact, there are always a number of escaped slaves leading a wretched existence in the deep forest of San Thomé. And the Portuguese have been known to go hunting them as we would hunt wild animals. They sometimes find them hiding in the tops of the tall trees, and it is considered uncommonly fine sport to shoot them in the trees and bring them crashing to the ground.

10.Travels in West Africa, p. 49.

Miss Kingsley disliked any and every change that threatened to improve the native and thus to mar the picturesque wildness of his savage state. She is perfectly consistent with her anti-mission views when she tells us the kind of native that she admires, as follows: “A great, strong Kruman, for example, with his front teeth filed, nothing much on but oil, half a dozen wives, and half a hundred jujus [fetishes], is a sort of person whom I hold higher than any other form of native.”[11]Well, it is proverbial that tastes differ; but the missionary thinks that, as compared with this, the Christian ideal is higher and nobler. Miss Kingsley informs us (through the words of another whom she quotes with approval) of the treatment received, at the hands of these same Krumen, by shipwrecked and half-drowned passengers cast helpless upon the shore: “If you get ashore you don’t save the things you stand up in—the natives strip you.” “Of course they are cannibals; they are all cannibals when they get a chance.”[12]And this is the sort of person whom Miss Kingsley holds “higher than any other form of native”!

11.West African Studies, p. 385.

12.Ibid., p. 42.

A CONTRAST.Anyoroguli, a Christian woman of Gaboon.

WOMEN OF THE INTERIOR RETURNING FROM THE GARDENS WITH CASSAVA AND FIREWOOD.

That the native Christians should inspire aversion is exactly what we should expect; and yet we are scarcely prepared for the inveterate animosity, the almost fierce hostility, that she everywhere reveals when she comes in contact with a native Christian. Miss Kingsley’s attacks upon the African Christians are the most unworthy of all the things she has said. To give a single instance, I would refer to her story told inTravels in West Africa(p. 557) of a night which she spent in the house of a Bible teacher of the Basle Mission. Two mission teachers, together with a great many others, came into the room. The teachers, she says, “lounge around and spit in all directions.” Next morning again, she says, “the mission teachers get in with my tea, and sit and smoke and spit, while I have my breakfast. Give me the cannibal Fang!”

Are we to conclude that cannibalism in Miss Kingsley’s opinion is a less grievous offense against society than smoking and spitting? For that matter, cannibals spit too. And I should think they would! And, then, were the other natives who were present, the untutored savages, not smoking and spitting? It may be regarded as certain that they were smoking if they had tobacco; and whether or not they were smoking I am sure they were spitting; for that nasty habit is racial and continental. Even white men in Africa contract the habit; and, what’s more, theyscratch: they spit and scratch—the effect perhaps of the climate. I have known a few native Christians who neither smoke nor spit; but I have not known a savage, either man or woman, who did not do both. Why, then, single out these two poor boys from the rest of the company? And why visit upon their heads all the odium of a racial habit? If, at the instance of thepreaching of the Gospel, they have left off cannibalism, and killing, and adultery, and stealing, and lying, I think they will scarcely be damned for spitting; and I am sure they will leave that off too before they enter heaven.

I well know the manners of native boys who have been in the mission long enough to become teachers. They have an instinct for good manners. It would be far easier to criticize their morals than their manners. At this same place Miss Kingsley sent an attendant to ask the teacher for wood to make a fire. The attendant returned and said that the teacher would not give him wood unless it was paid for. Knowing the cordial hospitality and eager attention that would be given to a white woman by any and every mission teacher that I have met in Africa, I am compelled, from the extraordinary behaviour of this teacher, to doubt whether Miss Kingsley was a gracious guest. But we need not remain in doubt; for Miss Kingsley, while she was the guest of this teacher, in a mission house, had with her a demijohn of rum, which she dispensed to the natives in pay and barter, as was her custom everywhere; and it is more than possible that the teacher’s message that his wood was for sale was a moral protest, not only against the violation of hospitality, but also against the violation of those moral and religious principles to which his life and honour were committed, and upon which depended, as he sincerely believed, the salvation of his people.

It would be my duty to show that Miss Kingsley received most of her so-called facts directly from the traders, and that all that came under her own observation she saw through the medium of their opinions. But Miss Kingsley has forestalled the necessity by the following frank confession: “All I know that is true regarding West Africa, I owe to the traders.”[13]Miss Kingsley must havefelt that she owed an enormous debt of gratitude to the traders: for through two large volumes she sings a continual pæan to the trader’s praise. I might by the citation of facts within my own knowledge show that in some instances Miss Kingsley was mistaken; but I have not the least disposition to do so. For the life of the trader on the far-away beaches of West Africa is so cheerless and loveless—sometimes, indeed, an unremitting and lonely fight with temptation, fever, delirium and death—that sympathy is more becoming than criticism.

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