The Black Man's Place in South Africa by Peter Nielsen
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Peter Nielsen >> The Black Man\'s Place in South Africa
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Seeing that universal education has only come about within the latter
part of the last century it must be clear that the vast majority of the
present generation of educated Europeans are descended from people who
never had any of that education which so many people nowadays regard as
essential to the development and growth of the intellectual powers. But
although education has only recently become, in various degrees, common
to all white people, the light of learning has always been kept burning,
however dimly at times, in certain places and circles, and it may,
perhaps, be possible to find people to-day who are the descendants of
those favoured few who have enjoyed, during many unbroken generations,
the privilege of liberal education. Now let us assume that there are at
present a small number of such people in the forefront of the
intellectual activity of the day, and then let us ask ourselves whether
these leaders of thought who can claim long lineal descent from learned
ancestors show any mental capacity over and above that which is
displayed by those commoners who are also in the foremost ranks of
thought and science, but who cannot lay claim to such continuous
ancestral training.
If we admit the existence of two such separate classes to-day then the
answer must surely be that there is no mental difference discernible
between them. But I think we may safely conclude that there has been
very little of the kind of descent here presumed. It would be well-nigh
impossible to find people who could prove an unbroken lineage of
educated forbears going back more than four hundred years. During the
middle ages the monks of the Church were the chief and almost sole
depositories of education and learning, and as they were bound by their
vows to life-long celibacy there could be no transmission from them to
posterity of any of that increased capacity of brain which we are
supposing as having been acquired by each individual through his own
mental exertion. We know, of course, that there were frequent lapses
from the unnatural restraint imposed on these men so that some of them
may have propagated their kind, but such illegitimate offspring was not
likely to remain within the circle of learning and therefore could not
perpetuate the line. We of to-day know full well that the son of the
common labourer whose forefathers had no education can, with equality
of opportunity, achieve as much and travel as far in any field of mental
activity as can the scion of the oldest of our most favoured families.
There does not seem to have been any augmentation of human brain power
since written records of events were begun. Indeed it would seem rather
as if there had been in many places a decrease in intellectual capacity,
as when we compare the fellahin of modern Egypt with their great
ancestors whom they resemble so closely in physical appearance that
there can be little doubt about the purity of their descent. The same
may be said about the modern descendants of the people who created "the
glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome." And when we
consider the period of the Renaissance we cannot say that civilised man
of to-day is superior to those people who after centuries of stagnation
and general illiteracy were yet able to seize and develop the
long-forgotten wisdom and philosophy of antiquity.
To go still further back and to venture beyond the historical horizon
into the dim past when prehistoric man roamed over Europe is a task
manifestly beyond the powers of the ordinary layman, and here we must,
perforce, trust ourselves to the guidance of those students whose
training and special learning entitle them to speak with authority.
The so-called Piltdown skull which was discovered in 1912 is accepted as
representing the most ancient of human remains yet found in England, its
age being estimated at somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000 years. In
discussing the size and arrangement of the lobes and convolutions of the
brain which this cranium must have contained, Dr. Arthur Keith, who is
admittedly the highest authority on the subject to-day, makes the
following statement: "Unfortunately our knowledge of the brain, greatly
as it has increased of late years, has not yet reached the point at
which we can say after close examination of all the features of a brain
that its owner has reached this or that status. The statement which
Huxley made about the ancient human skull from the cave of Engis still
holds good of the brain: 'It might have belonged to a philosopher or
might have contained the thoughtless mind of a savage.' That is only
one side of our problem, there is another. Huxley's statement refers to
the average brain, which is equal to the needs of both the philosopher
and the savage. It does not in any way invalidate the truth that a small
brain with a simple pattern of convolutions is a less capable organ than
the large brain with a complex pattern. If then we find a fairly large
brain in the Piltdown man, with an arrangement and development of
convolutions not very unlike those of a modern man, we shall be
justified in drawing the conclusion that, so far as potential mental
ability is concerned, he has reached the modern standard. We must always
keep in mind that accomplishments and inventions which seem so simple to
us were new and unsolved problems to the pioneers who worked their way
up from a simian to a human estate."
In his concluding remarks upon this important find, Dr. Keith iterates
his opinion: "Although our knowledge of the human brain is
limited--there are large areas to which we can assign no definite
function--we may rest assured that a brain which was shaped in a mould
so similar to our own was one which responded to the outside world as
ours does. Piltdown man saw, heard, felt, thought and dreamt much as we
still do. If the eoliths found in the same bed of gravel were his
handiwork, then we can also say he had made a great stride towards that
state which has culminated in the inventive civilisation of the modern
western world."[13]
Professor Herbert Donaldson of the University of Chicago, gives it as
his opinion that "In comparing remote times with the present, or in our
own age, races which have reached distinction with those which have
remained obscure, it is by no means clear that the grade of civilisation
attained is associated with a corresponding enlargement in the nervous
system, or with an increase in the mental capabilities of the best
representatives of those communities."[14]
Now while the ordinary man is unable to pronounce judgment upon expert
opinion he is quite capable of understanding the main arguments upon
which the foregoing conclusions are based. We all realise the truth of
the old saying "Il n'y a que le premier pas qui coute." We all
appreciate the tremendous difficulty of taking the first step in the way
of discovery and invention. We know that to be the first to step forward
in an utterly new direction or venture; to be the first to work out,
without any guidance or previous education, the first principles,
however simple, in the doing, or thinking out of anything new, requires
a mental audacity and astuteness that predicate a brain capacity as
great as that which enables modern man to apply and develop the
accumulated knowledge available in the text-books of to-day. Dr. Alfred
Russell Wallace held strongly to this opinion. He could see no proof of
continuously increasing intellectual power; he thought that where the
greatest advance in intellect is supposed to have been made this might
be wholly due to the cumulative effect of successive acquisitions of
knowledge handed down from age to age by written or printed books; that
Euclid and Archimedes were probably the equals of any of our greatest
mathematicians of to-day; and that we are entitled to believe that the
higher intellectual and moral nature of man has been approximately
stationary during the whole period of human history. This great and
intrepid thinker states his view with characteristic incisiveness thus:
"Many writers thoughtlessly speak of the hereditary effects of strength
or skill due to any mechanical work or special art being continued
generation after generation in the same family, as amongst the castes of
India. But of any progressive improvement there is no evidence whatever.
Those children who had a natural aptitude for the work would, of course,
form the successors of their parents, and there is no proof of anything
hereditary except as regards this innate aptitude. Many people are
alarmed at the statement that the effects of education and training are
not hereditary, and think that if that were really the case there would
be no hope for improvement of the race; but close consideration will
show them that if the results of our education in the widest sense, in
the home, in the shop, in the nation, and in the world at large, had
really been hereditary, even in the slightest degree, then indeed there
would be little hope for humanity, and there is no clearer proof of this
than the fact that we have not _all_ been made much worse--the wonder
being that any fragment of morality, or humanity, or the love of truth
or justice for their own sakes still exists among us."[15]
I think the majority of thoughtful people will agree that these words
express their own observations. Every day we see how children have to be
taught to act and behave. We see continually how parents have to put
pressure on their children to make them accept and apply those moral
principles and mental valuations which have guided their lives and the
lives of thousands of generations before them. We know only too well
that children do not inherit the moral standards of right and wrong of
their parents, and that to establish these principles in the young is a
matter of protracted and often painful inculcation. The proved maxim
that honesty is the best policy is still being literally hammered into
the children of to-day who seem to find it no easier to follow the
better way than did the children of the past. If mental modifications
acquired by the parents were in any degree transmissible to the
offspring then there would be no need for this constant repetition of
the same process in every new generation.
The earliest indubitable man hitherto discovered was fully evolved when
first met with, he was _homo sapiens_. By means of his human
intelligence this frail, unspecialized being became in a sense the very
lord of creation, for instead of remaining, like the animals, entirely
subject to his surroundings he subjected his surroundings to himself. By
means of this intelligence man was enabled to break away from the
absolute rule of the law of natural selection which punishes with
extinction all those types that fail in fitness for survival in the
struggle for existence, so that, unlike the animals that die out when
their particular structure does not fit in with their environment, man
by means of his thinking brain was able to equip himself with parts of
his environment, and thus to become its master. The process of evolution
ceased to affect directly this creature who had a brain that could
think, and ever since that brain was given to him man has remained
unmoved and stationary above and apart from all other living things. All
this is implied in the command, "Be ye fruitful and multiply and
replenish the earth and subdue it."
But though man became almost emancipated from the direct servitude of
natural selection, he still is, and always will be, subject to the law
of heredity. Man is made up of a group of innate characters inherited
from a very mixed ancestry, these characters, being innate, are
transmissible to his offspring, but such characters as are acquired by
the parent through the direct influence of education or other
environment, not being innate are not transmissible to his children. But
in so far as a new development of latent and innate characters, through
the influence of the environment, may help or hinder certain types in
propagating themselves, the race may, perhaps, be modified through such
influence by the process of gradual elimination of the types that lack
the characters that prove to be of survival value in a particular
locality. This we may suppose might happen where a number of Europeans,
composed half of blondes and half of brunettes, come to live in a
tropical country, if it be proved that the comparative darkness of the
brunettes afford them better protection against inimical light and heat
than the fair skin of the blondes, so that the former would on the
average, enjoy better health and live longer, and therefore have more
children than the latter, whereby, in course of time, the appearance of
these people would be modified in respect of the general complexion of
their skin. This, it is easy to see, would not mean the acquisition of a
new and heritable means of protection, but only a development in each
individual of an already present innate character that happened to be
well fitted for survival in a certain climatic zone.
In order, therefore, to obtain any direct modification of the race in
the way of mental improvement the physical effect of education must be
such as to ensure longer life and with it, the concomitant chance of
greater fertility for those who are educated against those who are not,
so that the latter would tend to die out while the former would continue
to increase their numbers. In other words, education must prove to be
of survival value. Seeing that where education has increased most the
birth-rate has tended to decrease it seems clear that we cannot regard
continuous mental training as a favourable factor in the competition of
propagation of human varieties.
If then we accept the conclusion that the effects of individual
experience are not cumulatively hereditary we shall cease to cavil at
the fact that there has been no anatomical or structural progress in the
human body or brain since the time when men first became social and
civilised beings, that is to say, since they first began to work
together with their heads and hands, and we shall see that that which
was to be expected has always happened, in that, from the earliest
historical times to the present day, human life has been as the rolling
and unrolling of a carpet. Cycles of civilisations, all essentially
similar, have been evolved, one after another, to endure for a while and
then to fade away, leaving the raw material of human kind as it was from
the beginning. There is no evidence of any advancement in physique,
intellect or moral character. The leaders of mankind were the
law-givers, whether they were witch doctors, priests, chiefs, prophets
or kings, and they all sought to establish their laws by claiming
supernatural delegation and authority. With writing came the codes, and
when we compare the statutes of Hammurabi, who flourished about 2,200
years B.C., with those compiled by his successors, Moses, Solon,
Justinian and Napoleon, we find in them all evidence of the same mental
appreciation and capacity in dealing with the social conditions and
problems of their respective periods. The greatest products of art are
still met with in the sculptured forms of ancient Greece, those images
of serene beauty which may be imitated but not excelled. The reasoning
powers of the ancient philosophers who, long before Christ was born,
debated the still unanswered riddles of existence, when we compare the
paucity of data on which they had to work with the wealth of knowledge
now available, must be ranked as high as the intellectual ability of our
foremost thinkers of to-day. In mechanical proficiency the world has
indeed advanced to an astonishing extent, but the perfection of our
modern machinery means only a gradual and very recent advance upon
earlier methods and does not denote a corresponding development in the
mind itself. The Greeks had no machinery to speak of, neither had the
English in the days of Shakespeare and Newton, but who can doubt that
the engineers of those times would have been equal to the task of
understanding and applying the principles of modern mechanics had the
necessary books been available to them? We do not assume that because
the modern Germans excel as chemists they are therefore blessed with
higher reasoning ability than were the contemporaries of Socrates and
Plato who had no knowledge of the science of chemistry. The conclusion
forced upon us after a sober and impartial survey of the facts of
history is that, although the intellectual output of the world is always
increasing, the intellect itself remains unaltered. Knowledge, we see,
is after all, only descriptive, never fundamental. We can describe the
appearance and condition of a process, but not the way of it, and though
knowledge has come in rich abundance, wisdom still lingers.
The foregoing argument shows that the alleged mental superiority of the
European cannot be due to constant use or education, so that it now
becomes necessary for those who maintain that it nevertheless exists to
prove, not only that the white man's intellectual capacity is now
superior but to prove also that from the beginning it has always been
stronger and better than that of the African Native, or, in other words,
those who believe that the white race has inherent mental superiority
must prove innate inferiority in the mental make-up of the Native.
There is a more or less indefinite notion abroad that the Bantu
languages, as compared with those of Europe, are but poor and
ineffective vehicles for the conveyance of abstract ideas, wherefore the
capacity to form and entertain such ideas may be taken to be innately
inferior in the Native brain. That the language of a people embodies, so
to speak, in objective form the intellectual progress made by it is
certainly true, and it will be well, therefore, to state briefly the
actual and potential value of the Native speech as compared with that of
the whites.
The living and the dead languages of the world have been classified by
philologists into three main types of linguistic morphology; the
isolating, like Chinese; the agglutinative, like Turkish and Bantu, and
the inflective, like Latin. It was customary not long ago to look upon
these three types as steps in a process of historical development, the
isolating representing the most primitive form of speech at which it was
possible to arrive, the agglutinative coming next in order as a type
evolved from the isolating, and the inflective as the latest and
so-called highest type of all. But since the matter has been carefully
studied it has been admitted that there is no satisfactory evidence for
believing in any evolution of linguistic types. English is now
considered to be an isolating language in the making while Chinese is
cited by authoritative European scholars as being a language which with
the simplest possible means at its disposal can express the most
technical or philosophical ideas with absolute freedom from ambiguity
and with admirable conciseness and direction.[16]
While I do not pretend to philological authority I do claim the ability
to make a sound comparison between the main Bantu languages which I know
and those European languages with which I happen to be familiar, and I
have no hesitation in saying that though the Bantu types are not at
present as fully developed in point of simplicity and preciseness as are
the main languages of Europe they are, nevertheless, by reason of their
peculiar genius, capable of being rapidly developed into as perfect a
means for the expression of human thought as any of the European types
of speech; they are astonishingly rich in verbs which make it easy to
express motion and action clearly and vividly; the impersonal, or
abstract article "it" is used exactly as in European languages, and the
particular prefix provided in some of the Bantu types for the class of
nouns which represent abstract conceptions makes it possible to increase
the vocabularies in that direction _ad infinitum_. The Bantu types are
not so-called holophrastic forms of primitive speech in which the
compounding of expressions is said to take the place of the conveyance
of ideas, nor are they made up of onomatopoetic, or interjectional
expressions, if indeed such languages exist anywhere outside the heads
of the half-informed. They are languages equal in potential capacity to
any included in the main Indo-European group. Even now in their
comparatively undeveloped state these languages are capable of
expressing the subtleties of early philosophical speculation. I would
not, for instance, feel daunted if I were set the task of translating
into any of these main types, say, the dialectics of Socrates. To do
this I would first reduce the more complex terms to such simple and
common Anglo-Saxon words as when built together would give the same
meaning, and then translate these into their Bantu equivalents. The
substitution of Anglo-Saxon words for those of modern English would, no
doubt, involve a good deal of repetition but the sense would be
adequately rendered. I would proceed in the same way as the early
teachers and writers who had to build up the language they used as they
went along. The English indeed, have not built up their world-wide
speech with their own materials but have, with characteristic
acquisitiveness taken the combinations they wanted, ready made, mainly
from Greek, Latin and French. How far and how well a Native would
understand my presentation of metaphysical speculation would depend upon
the degree of familiarity he might have acquired, through Missionary
teaching or otherwise, with abstract notions in general. In my opinion
the average "raw" Native would understand as well and as much as the
average uneducated European peasant. Both would probably find my
disquisition "sad stuff"; both would require time for that repetition of
the words which is necessary to familiarise the mind with the
unaccustomed ideas they represent; in both cases one would have to "give
them the words that the ideas may come." A single illustration will show
my meaning. When the first Missionaries rendered the word "soul" into
Zulu by the word signifying "breath" in that language they simply
followed the example of their predecessors of antiquity who employed the
Latin _spiritus_, which also means "breath," for the same purpose,
namely, to convey to their hearers the idea of a breath-like or
ethereal something housed in, but separable from, the human body.
"The essence of language," said Aristotle, "is that it should be clear
and not mean." The raw Bantu material is ample for compliance with this
demand, and the process of development will not be as protracted as in
early Europe for it may be accomplished here, largely, by the simple
means of translating the words already thought out and provided in the
white man's language. In so far, then, as we attempt to measure the
mentality of the Natives by their language we find that they cannot be
relegated to a lower plane than that occupied by the uneducated
peasantry of Europe of a few decades ago.
Most people are prepared to believe that the primary psychical processes
are identical in all races, but many still profess to see a difference
in favour of the white man in what they call the higher faculties of the
mind. But the much-abused word "faculty" no longer bears the meaning
given to it by Locke and his followers who propounded a limitless brood
or set of faculties to correspond with every process discoverable by
introspection as taking place in the mind. In modern psychology the
word means simply a capacity for an ultimate, irreducible, or
unanalysable mode of thinking of, or being conscious of, objects.
Perception, for instance, is looked upon as the capacity for thinking of
a thing immediately at hand, and memory as a capacity for thinking again
of a certain material or abstract object. The mental power of
abstraction is no longer considered as a sort of separate function of
the mind but is regarded as the capacity for thinking of, say, whiteness
as apart from any particular white patch. But the notion that the white
man is endowed with a set of finer feelings and with special and higher
powers of abstraction than is the African Native is so generally
entertained that it will be convenient to make the necessary comparisons
in, more or less, the commonly accepted terms.
Those who look upon the Native as being in every way a more primitive
being than the European will naturally be disposed to believe that he is
more a creature of instincts than a man of reason, and they will expect
him to move in dependence upon certain fundamental intuitions where the
European goes guided by reason alone. I have found no evidence whatever
to support this supposition.
The elementry instinct of self-preservation is no stronger in the Native
than in the white man. Suicide is not at all uncommon among the Bantu. I
have seen many instances of Natives who have shown a calm and
philosophical disregard of death where life has seemed no longer
desirable. This pre-eminently human prerogative--for no animal can rise
to the conscious and deliberate destruction of itself--has often been
exercised, as I have seen, by Natives in their sound and sober senses so
as to preclude entirely that suggestion of temporary insanity which is
so commonly accepted at coroner's inquests in England and elsewhere.
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