PREFACE
“In the realm of the unknown, Africa is the absolute,” said Victor Hugo. Since the time of Hugo the civilized world has become better acquainted with African geography; but the Africans themselves are still a people unknown.
A certain noted missionary, while on furlough in America, after delivering a masterly and brilliant lecture on Africa to an audience of coloured people, gave an opportunity for persons in the audience to ask him questions pertaining to the subject. He was rather abashed when an elderly negro, who had been deeply interested in the lecture, called out: “Say, Mistah S., is they any colo’ed folks ovah thah?” Most people know that there are a goodly number of “colo’ed folks” in Africa; but the knowledge of the majority extends only to the colour of the skin. And if in this book I endeavour to make the Africans known as they really are, it is because I believe that they are worth knowing.
In the generation that has passed since the books of Du Chaillu were the delight of boys—old boys and young—the African has received but scant sympathy in literature. Du Chaillu had the mind of a scientist and the heart of a poet. He never understated the degradation of the African nor exaggerated his virtues, but he recognized in him the raw material out of which manhood is made. He realized that the African, like ourselves, is not a finality, but a possibility—“the tadpole of an archangel,” as genius has phrased it. But, then, Du Chaillu lived among the Africans long enough to speak theirlanguage, to forget the colour of their skin, and to know them, mind and heart, as no passing traveller or casual observer can possibly know them.
In more recent books the African is usually and uniformly presented as physically ugly, mentally stupid, morally repulsive, and never interesting. This is by no means my opinion of the African. Kipling’s characterization, “half child, half devil,” is very apt. But what in the world is more interesting than children—except devils?
This book is an attempt to exhibit the human nature of the African, to the end that he may be regarded not merely as a being endowed with an immortal soul and a candidate for salvation, but as a man whose present life is calculated to awaken our interest and sympathy; a man with something like our own capacity for joy and sorrow, and to whom pleasure and pain are very real; who bleeds when he is pricked and who laughs when he is amused; a man essentially like ourselves, but whose beliefs and whose circumstances are so remote from any likeness to our own that as we enter the realm in which he lives and moves and has his being we seem to have been transported upon the magic carpet of the Arabian fable, away from reality into a world of imagination—a wonderland, where things happen without a cause and nature has no stability, where the stone that falls downwards to-day may fall upwards to-morrow, where a person may change himself into a leopard and birds wear foliage for feathers, where rocks and trees speak with articulate voice and animals moralize as men—a world running at random and haphazard, where everything operates except reason and where credulity is only equalled by incredulity. Elsewhere it is the unexpected that happens: in Africa it is the unexpected that we expect.
A knowledge of the jungle folk of Africa will include some acquaintance with their jungle home, their dailylife, their work, their amusements, their social customs, their folk-lore, their religion, and, among the rest, it will include their response to missionary effort. Of these several subjects, those which receive scant treatment in this book will be more fully presented in a second book on Africa, which is now in course of preparation.
I have avoided generalizations and abstractions, in the belief that the concrete and the personal would be not only more interesting but also more informing. This book is, therefore, in the main, a narration of the particular incidents of my own experience and observation during seven years in Africa; incidents, many of which, at their occurrence, moved me either to laughter or to tears, and sometimes both in alternation. For, nowhere else in the world does tragedy so often end in comedy, and comedy in tragedy.
I am indebted to Mr. Harry D. Salveter for his kindness in furnishing me with many photographic illustrations, including the best of my collection.
Robert H. Milligan.
New York.