The Black Man's Place in South Africa by Peter Nielsen

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"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."

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