Page:Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons (IA travelsinwestafr00kingrich).pdf/731

 American Indians. Whaling captains, and seamen of all sorts and nationalities have dropped in on him "frequent and free." He has absorbed all sorts of doctrine from religious sects; cotton goods, patent medicines, foreign spirits, and—as the man who draws up the Lagos Annual Colonial Report poetically observes—twine, whisky, wine, and woollen goods. Yet the West Coast African is here with us by the million—playing on his tom-tom, paddling his dug-out canoe, living in his palm leaf or mud hut, ready and able to stand more "white man stuff." Save for an occasional habit of going raving or melancholy mad when educated for the ministry, and dying when he, and more particularly she, is shut up in the broiling hot, corrugated-iron school-room with too many clothes on, and too much headwork to do, he survives in a way which I think you will own is interesting, and which commands my admiration and respect. But there is nowadays a new factor in his relationship with the white races—the factor of domestic control. I do not think the African will survive this and flourish, if it is to be of the nature that the present white ideas aim to make it. But, on the other hand, I do not believe that he will be called upon to try, for under the present conditions white control will not become very thorough; and in the event of a European war, governmental attention will be distracted from West Africa, and the African will then do what he has done several times before when the white eye has been off him for a decade or so,—sink back to his old level as he has in Kacongo after the Jesuits tidied him up, and as he must have done after his intercourse with the Phœnicians and Egyptians. The travellers of a remote future will find him, I think, still with his tom-tom in his dug-cut canoe—just as willing to sell as "big curios" the débris of our importations to his ancestors at a high price. Exactly how much he will ask for a Devos patent paraffin oil tin or a Morton's tin, I cannot imagine, but it will! be something stiff—like he asks nowadays for the Phœnician "Aggry" beads. There will be then as there is now, and as there was in the past, individual Africans who will rise to a high level of culture, but that will be all for a very long period. To say that the African race will never advance beyond its present culture-level, is saying too much, in spite of the mass of evidence supporting this view, but I am certain he will never advance above it in the line of European culture. The country he lives in is unfitted for it, and the nature of the man himself is all against it—the truth is the West Coast mind has got a great deal tog much superstition about it, and too