THE INTERNATIONAL QUARTERLY September-December MDCCCCIII BLACK AND WHITE IN AFRICA JOHN M. ROBERTSON LONDON I. N the whole history of mankind, thus far, the relations of forward I and backward races have subsisted without control from scientific thought. No science of such relations yet exists. In other words, the "crucible of the races" is still boiled by the elemental fires of animal instinct and calculating egoism, as in the time when the old empires of Asia and Egypt, Carthage and Rome, exploited peoples as peoples exploit nature. Latterly, indeed, there is more counterplay than anciently of the force of sympathy, though that was perhaps never wholly lacking. A Mesopotamian emperor would be apt to have some care for the well being of peoples embodied in his realm, and extortionate Roman governors were liable to impeachment in the public interest, in both republican and imperial days. In the modern world, however, the special machinery of Christian missions has set up a more constant pressure of sympathy with conquered races, from the Spanish American conquests onwards. Still, this counterplay of the forces of egoism and sympathy has never evolved a science of the subject in hand, and the pressures of philanthropy are obviously weak as against the steady energy of self-seeking among colonists, frontiersmen, and ruling castes of aliens of the “inferior” races. Any one who has noted attentively the general tone of such classes towards the indigenes must have been struck by its primeval egoism. As Copyright, 1903, Frederick A. Richardson, all rights reserved. the Aryans in ancient India spoke of the peoples they found there, as the Saxons regarded the Welsh, so do many westerners in North America ca speak of the remnants of redskins; and many colonists in Australia of the black fellows; and most colonists in South Africa of the Kaffirs. There is usually no willingness to believe that the question may be regarded from two sides. I have heard an Arizona man of fair culture, and otherwise of gentleman-like instincts and good sense, speak of the Comanches, without heat and with calm conviction, as worthy only to be treated like wolves. In New Zealand the reduction of the relation of white and Maori to a footing of constitutional politics has latterly modified conditions, but the testimony of Professor Gilbert Murray as to the feeling of white towards black in Australia holds good of contemporary times : "Not to speak of strange and unpleasant dealings with black women, I myself knew well one man who told me he had shot blacks at sight. I have met a man who boasted of having spilt poisoned meal along a road near a black fellows' camp, in order to get rid of them like rats. My brother was the guest of a man in Queensland who showed him a particular bend of a river where he had once, as a jest, driven a black family, man, woman, and children, into the water among a shoal of crocodiles. My father has described to me his fruitless efforts to get men punished in New South Wales in old days for offering hospitality to blacks and giving them poisoned meat. I received, while first writing these notes, a newspaper from Perth, giving an account of the trial of some Coolgardie miners for beating to death with heavy bits of wood a black woman and boy who had been unable to show them the way. The bodies were found with the shoulder blades in shivers; and the judge observed that such cases were getting too common! These atrocities are not necessarily the work of isolated and extraordinary villains. Two of the men mentioned above were good men rather than bad. Nor have I mentioned the worst class of outrages. Putting murderous outrages entirely aside, one finds that the everyday tone of colonists towards the colored races implies the normality of physical violence. And the tone is becoming more and more familiar in England. Last summer, walking on a Surrey road, downhill, I heard perforce a snatch of talk between two passing cyclists, who were slowly ascending. Said one, apparently retailing recent military experience in South Africa, "If it's a Kaffir, he'll take a good thrashing and be all the better for it, but if it's a Cape boy, you may do him a serious injury." The speaker had the air and accent of a "gentleman," and he was thus laying down the rule that a beating so brutal as to be dangerous to a Hottentot may be administered usefully to the stronger Kaffir. This is a standing creed at the Cape. Sometimes the physical side of the doctrine is overlaid by the ethical, as in the teaching of Professor James (1) Essay in Liberalism and the Empire, 1900, pp. 153-4 |