Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/288

 2 66 Reviews.

the whole of I\Ir. Kitching's book is a plea for the necessity of support for the mission, not forgetting to pass the hat round. The wrong wrought by books of this kind is all the greater, because those who are attacked do not know of the attack and have no opportunity of defending themselves.

In On the Backioaters of the Nile the Rev. A. L. Kitching tries to show up the wickedness of the black man ("half devil and half child"), and the necessity of improving him by sending out missionaries, who, he thinks, I am glad to say, ought to "worm their way somehow into the thoughts and feelings of those they are to teach." Mr. Kitching has been eminently unsuccessful in doing this. Although containing some interesting material, his book is nothing if not a requisitory against the black man. I generalise on purpose, for the author does not content himself with speaking evil of the natives he is particularly acquainted with, but provides us with general information of this kind : "the attitude of the African mind towards sickness and death is a com- pound of dread and fatalism, of fear and folly." As for the tribes that have given him hospitality, those who are naked " are purely animal, devoid of all self-consciousness, destitute of all sense of indecency," (which, he explains, means "what we should call modesty"); those who by the wearing of clothes show outward signs of decency and propriety " are no more moral than the frankly primitive Nilotic tribes." Mr. Kitching does not believe in the spirit of independence which still prevails among some of the natives, and expresses satisfaction that they are being " hammered into order." That this hammering goes with the robbing of the natives by the Baganda agents he admits. It is only "in the presence and under the heel of the white man that the devilish side of the African is kept under." He finds among them " the degradation of all motives to a dead level of blind selfishness," and gives as an example the case of a chief who "was quite willing to give you all he had that you required (I quote), pro- vided you were agreeable on your part to handing over any article he fancied among your possessions." Is this not the case all over the world? Nothing will satisfy Mr. Kitching; he complains thus of the chief on whose land, I hope with his permission, the mission was built : " Although he sometimes came to our services