Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/287

 Reviews. 265

seeing him in the true hght. To choose as an example the greatest African traveller, Livingstone, it cannot be denied that, although he recognises in his writings all the generous help he has received from the natives, his strong religious bias always prevents him from rendering full justice to his black friends. But he was not to blame ; it wanted a woman, and a woman of Mary Kings- ley's eminence and delicacy of feeling, to discover the soul of the negro and to find out that his way of thinking was so characteristic of his race that it could not be compared to that of any other. To those who have travelled in Africa and lived with the black man, IVesi African Studies opened a new world, a world of great beauty, a world which not infrequently takes possession of him that penetrates it, and then the European begins to think black. A brilliant example of this is the author of At the Back of the Black Mans Mind. But it is not necessary to be so fully affected; many have learned from Mary Kingsley how to sympathise with the negro and to judge him according to his own merits and not according to a standard of our own.

Thetwobooks before me are excellent examples of pre-Kingsleyan and post-Kingsleyan literature. Mr. A. L. Kitching is a mission- ary who, if he has ever read Mary Kingsley, has never grasped her spirit. He is one of those false apostles who never tire of report- ing to us the darker sides of negro life, accentuating the shadows, so as to make the picture entirely distorted. This tendency to blacken the character of the negro has been too much in promi- nence lately, and the reader ought to be warned only to accept with the greatest reserve information from these prejudiced sources. On the other hand, we have the book of Messrs. Gouldsbury and Sheane, which is post-Kingsleyan ; the two officials who have written it belong to the class of men of which this country ought to be prouder than of her victorious generals ; they are obviously men who love and understand the natives among whom they live and who, quite justly, enjoy the sympathy and the friendship of the negroes they have to govern. One may disagree with some of their views, — (I, for example, cannot see the employment of the natives in the mines in the rosy light in which it appears to the authors), — but one is always sure that they state their case as they think it ought to be stated in all fairness to the black man, whereas

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