XVIII. Race Emancipation: The Crux of the Matter

One of the most pathetic passages in the history of human thought is the remarkable work of an Ethiopian, “ The Souls of Black Folk,” written by the well-known thinker, W. P. B. Du Bois, of Atlanta, Ga., in the United States of America. It deals with a matter which has attracted the attention of all thinking men of modern times. European writers have dealt with the question, and so have African and American writers. But the particular standpoint of Mr. Du Bois is peculiar unto itself. It recalls the story of the Hebrew people ; but neither at the stage of actual enslavement, nor yet at the hour of emancipation. As yet, the people are roaming aimlessly in the wilderness, and the leaders, though having the promise, have but a glimmer of light to see distantly a day of deliverance possible. It is true twenty, thirty, years of the forty are past, and the full light may break some day all of a sudden; but even now the mighty arms of Moses must be upraised and supported lest the chosen people perish by the way. It has been said that Mr. Du Bois’ attitude toward the race question is a pathetic one. “ I am a problem,” our author would seem to say. Then presently follows the plaintive query : “ How does it feel to be a problem? ” To descend to particulars, he says : “ After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second sight in this American world — a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” Ah ! there’s the rub ! Poor Ethiopia I how sorely hath the iron of oppression entered into the very soul of thy erring children !

Now, self-consciousness obviously depends upon self-revelation after which comes self-realisation. But has the Ethiopian sojourning in America, and, for that matter, even in Liberia and in Sierra Leone ever realised himself? Has he RACE EMANCIPATION — THE CRUX. received that self-awakening which would move him, in the words of the prodigal, to exclaim, ‘ ‘ Alas me ! How many hired servants of my father’s have bread enough and to spare and I perish with hunger ? ” No, it has not yet occurred to him to arise and go to his Father, regardless of the taunts of the surly elder son. He perceives not yet that the Father is waiting to make a feast of rejoicing over the emancipation of his soul. No, he will not yet don the robe of sonship, nor suffer the ring, the symbol of a spiritual union and equality, to be placed upon his finger. Poor man ! Instead of the fatted calf, he still sits sulkily by the wayside over Jordan apples which presently turn into ashes in his mouth. Listen to his cry : “ Who shall deliver me from the burden of these unreconciled and irreconcilable strivings? ” Listen ! Not so long as he turns away from the Father’s house and elects to remain a slave in soul. To be a puzzle unto others is not to be a puzzle unto one’s self. The sphinx in the Temple of the Sphinx in ancient Egypt is a recumbent figure with the head of a lion, but with the features of King Chephron, the Master of Egypt, somewhere about 3960 b.c. Now, fancy Candace, Queen of Ethiopia, or Chephron, the Master of Egypt, being troubled with a double consciousness. Watch that symbolic, reposeful figure yonder, and you can but see one soul, one ideal, one striving, one line of a natural, rational progress. Look again, and you must agree that the idea of a double consciousness is absurd with these representative types. It is true that —

“ Bowed by the weight of centuries, he leans Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground ;

The emptiness of ages in his face,

And on his back the burden of the world.”

But, surely, to bear the burden of others, one should have thought, is honourable work, and the toiling one need not be a problem unto himself.

It is apparent that Mr. Du Bois writes from an American standpoint, surrounded by an American atmosphere. And, of course, it is not his fault, for he knows of no other. To be born an African in America, in that great commonwealth of dollars and the merciless aggrandisement of the individual, where the weak must look out for himself, and the cry of the innocent appeals not to him who rides triumphantly to fortune, is to be entangled in conditions which give no room for the assertion of the highest manhood. African manhood demands that the Ethiopian should seek not his opportunity, or ask for elbow room, from the white man, but that he should create the one or the other for himself.

Thoughts like these were stirring men’s minds when the Pan-African Conference met in the Gold Coast in the year 1905, at the invitation of the RACE EMANCIPATION — THE CRUX. Gold Coast Aborigines Eights Protection Society, that prototype of the kind of African National Assemblies which must be called into being in the near future for the solution of African questions. Among the distinguished speakers at the Conference was Kwamankra, and great was the impression which was created by the paper which he read upon Dr. Bly den’s great work upon “ African Life and Customs,” which is here recorded. Said he :

‘ ‘ I have followed, with keen interest, the series of articles on ‘ African Life and Customs ’ in the Sierra Leone Weekly News from the ever instructive pen of Dr. Blyden ; and, perhaps, the following thoughts, suggested by them, may be useful to the student of African problems, seeking for the conditions suitable for Race Emancipation.

“ I believe it was the learned doctor who first pointed out that Africa needs no redemption. But that she requires emancipation from the thraldom of foreign ideas inimical to racial development, few will doubt. What, indeed, can be more certain than that the African in the United States, in the West Indies, and in the mother country, East, West and South, has need to unlearn a good deal? But the unfortunate part of it is that the way out is at yet but dimly dawning even upon such as would otherwise be qualified to lead the masses. It becomes, therefore, the sacred duty of those who can see a little more clearly ahead to point the way. Hence it is that, in season and out of season, the warning voice of our grand old man is heard.

“ The African who comes to his brethren with a red-hot civilisation straight from Regent Circus, or the Boulevards of Paris, and cries anathema to all black folk who would not adopt his views or mode of life, is, perhaps, not the man who is, or can be, of much help in developing African life and African idiosyncracies along the line of natural and healthy development. That is, perhaps, the underlying teaching, if not the sum total of the teaching, of the series of articles now before us.

“ Africa seems destined for ever to be a land of mystery. When, in our modern way, we have demolished African strongholds, and, with the wantonness of an iconoclast, saved nothing to remind us of the artistic past and future possibilities of the people — nay, when we have laid out streets and encouraged shops to spring up mushroom-like here and there, we think we have solved the mystery of the gods, while, all the time, the heart of the matter is not reached. In many a forest glen they dwell in their tens and in their hundreds, but seldom in their thousands, undisturbed by the vulgar eye. Your cities are not their cities, your tinsel is not their gold. All RACE EMANCIPATION — THE CRUX. they ask for is for as little interference as possible. What can yon do with such a people, except to give them scope and room for natural development ?

‘ £ I am writing this on the verandah of a house in the main street of Kumasi. Where once stood the palace of the King, now stands an ugly coast building with dirty blinds and a dirtier shop below. But the men and the women are not changed. The type is pronounced; and as I watch them passing up and down in different groups, it is easy to see that the men and women, who walked the banks of the Nile in days of yore, are not far different from the remnants of the sons of Efua Kobi. As you see the new unfinished coast houses side by side of the frail impermanent, quadrangular compounds of the old type, the thought suggests itself to you that, after all, it is the intangible that matters. You see you enter one of these compounds, and you find but bare, open rooms, in the case of a Chief’s house, often supported by pillars. Where do these people actually live ? Where do they keep their treasures, and their household gods ? No one can tell you. But they are as safe as the golden stool itself is. Thus you arrive at the heart of these people, and you are inwardly persuaded that all the symbols of European authority, responsibility, and opportunity are more impermanent than the frail houses you see about you. How to reach the N heart of such a people would not be an uninteresting study. If you succeed, you have arrived at the heart of the principle which may be safely applied to healthy race development wheresoever necessary.

“ Once more, then, Ashanti is my type, for the reason that Ashanti is yet unspoilt by the bad methods of the missionary.

“ I remember once seeing Rev. Ramsay in Kumasi. He told me he had laboured in Ashanti off and on for forty years. I asked how many Ashantis he had in his church at Kumasi proper ? He said, thirty. His assistant corrected him and said fifty. I asked him how many in all Ashanti ? About two hundred. Not quite so many, his assistant concurring. Rev. Asare, the assistant, and his good wife are both Africans, who have adopted the European habit. I had visited the missionaries in my African costume. They agreed, including my African friends, that it was appropriate. I hope the object lesson was not without significance to the hopes of the success of their mission. But, however that may be, to-day the Ashanti goes unconcerned of the white man’s religion and of the white man’s ways, as ancient Egypt might have done.

“ What is religion? If it is that which links back the finite to the infinite, the material to the spiritual, the temporal to the eternal — that which RACE EMANCIPATION — THE CRUX. inspires an unfaltering faith in a life beyond the grave, then, I maintain, that the African, in his system of philosophy, gives place to none.

‘ ‘ Hark ! What are those suggestive words I catch from the so-called Fetish chant that the priest, called to attend a dying man, is humming in a low, doleful voice !

£ Midan, Nyami, Kwiaduampon,

Midan, Nyami , Kwiadu,

Nyami ama, Nyami ama Nyavii na wama mi alcom !’

Meaning :

* On God I depend, the impregnable Rock ;

On God I depend, the impregnable Rock.

God has given, God has given,

God has given me the priesthood.’

I have loosely rendered the word c Kiviaduampon ’ as ‘ the impregnable rock,’ but etymologically, it conveys the idea of ‘ the ever faithful God.’

“ Now, when, in the face of all this you tell the so-called pagan that he will not end well, that he is the devil’s own, he listens curiously, and wonders whether you can mean all you say. His attitude henceforth is a defensive one, seldom antagonistic. Henceforth he only asks to be let alone. And yet people wonder that so-called spiritual work makes such little headway in these parts. And the land had rest forty years. Do

n 2 you not see the purport of it all? It has not pleased the gods to disturb her. Leave her in peace, the slumbering sphinx, until the God of Ethiopia wakes her up ! For it is not so much religion that she wants as knowledge — knowledge that will enable her to explain to the waiting world the faith that is in her and the reason of her being.

“ According to Dr. Freeman, in his History of Europe, the word pagan originally meant a countryman, and, by extension, a worshipper of false gods. Well, Paul, before the application of the phrase, spoke of a temple with the inscription £ to the unknown God,’ whom men ignorantly worshipped. Evident, therefore, it is that a pagan is not necessarily a worshipper of false gods. Even Marcus Aurelius persecuted the Christians; yet it is conceivable that had he lived in a later age, he would have set his philosophical sayings in terms of Christianity.

“ If Christ and God are one, those who worship God ignorantly, worship Christ ignorantly, and it were better for the many to worship in spirit and in truth that which they know fully, but as it were through a glass darkly, rather than don the intellectual garb which ends in questioning the Divinity of Christ, and by parity of reasoning, according to the theologians, the Divinity of God.

C£ In the philosophy of the West African there RACE EMANCIPATION — THE CRUX. is no reason why Christ should not be God. For to him man is half God and half man. But a thin veil divides the finite from the infinite, and when Death pulls aside the curtain, there is no knowing what one shall be. Indeed, it is conceivable that paganism, scientifically interpreted, may place the Christ on a higher pedestal than Christianity has yet done. What the unspoilt educated African feels he wants is, rest — rest to think out his own thoughts, and to work out his own salvation.

‘ ‘ Have we, who advocate these views, lost faith in Christianity ? It does not follow. It was Dr. Blyden who wrote in the ‘ Significance of Liberia ’ these remarkable words : . . . . ‘ I am sure

that Christianity, as conceived and modified in Europe and America, with its oppressive hierarchy, its caste prejudices and limitations, its pecuniary burdens and exactions, its injurious intermeddling in the harmless and useful customs of alien peoples, is not the Christianity of Christ. But I am sure, also, that the Christianity of Christ is no cunningly devised fable, no ignis fatuus, to disappear in darkness and confusion. I am sure that its spirit will ultimately prevail in the proceedings of men ; that the knowledge of the Lord shall cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. I am sure that Jesus, upon whom is the spirit of the Lord, because He hath anointed Him to preach the gospel to the poor, to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captive, the recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised ; I am sure that this

“ Jesus shall reign where’er the sun Doth his successive journeys run! ”

I am sure, also, that all counterfeits, however bright or real they look, must vanish as the truth appears. We should not be discouraged because the system bearing the name of Christ makes no progress on this Continent — that it lingers, halts, and limps on the threshold of the great opportunity. Jesus is lame. He has been wounded in the house of his friends. We must bind up his wounds. Treading in the footsteps of our immortal countryman, we must bear the Cross after Jesus. We must strip him of the useless, distorting, and obstructive habiliments by which he has been invested by the materialising sons of Japhet. Let Him be lifted up as he really is, that He may be seen, pure and simple, by the African, and He will draw all men unto Him ! ’

“ The broader outlook upon religion is the lot of the careless Ethiopian. He need not necessarily see God except through Christ, but is, withal, so Catholic that he can speak of the universal

‘ Strife that won our life With the incarnate Son of God.’ RACE EMANCIPATION — THE CRUX. “ A significant marriage took place in Sierra Leone in March of the present year. A highly cultured African gentleman was married to a Mohammedan lady. Of this lady the Weekly News of 21st March, 1908, says :

* There has been no attempt to unmake her, no inducement to make her alter the religion of her fathers or her native dress.’ I

remember overhearing an argument in a railway carriage between two educated Africans as to the effect of such marriages. They were both Sierra Leone men; and the sore point with one of the controversialists was as to how her ladyship would be received at Government House, or how she would receive at home the friends of her lord and master. Here you have the two warring elements in national development : ‘ What is it that the white man expects me to do? What is it that I am called upon in reason and by nature to do ? ’ Between these two the manhood of the race is throttled and sacrificed on the altar of convenience.

“ Now, what appears remarkable in Sierra Leone would not be remarkable on the Gold Coast, where it is common for educated men to mate with less privileged women. And the reason, founded on common sense, is not far to seek. Between the African woman who, collecting firewood in a plantation, overpowered by nature, brings her little one into the world, soothes it, and carries it safely home with her load and the African lady who talks of going home, meaning Europe, to be confined, there is a mighty difference. The latter is the product of an effete system of training, and it and the system will perish out of hand. The former has a foundation in character that will bear the weight of the ages as far as African life and work are concerned.

“ With respect to marriage a great blunder has been committed by the meddlesome missionaries, namely, ‘ that of forcing a life of hypocrisy upon those whom they compass earth and sea to get into the fold. Whereas the average so-called convert was, before he came into the church, living a fairly decent, open, life in his marital relations, embracing Christianity invariably meant for him adopting subterfuges and chicanery to cover up the way of the old life, which not all the spiritual graces could help him to brush aside.’

“ There is a vulgar way of approaching the question of polygamy; there is the scientific way; and lastly there is the spiritual way. It may appear strange to the average man that there is a spiritual side to polygamy. Yet on second thought it must be so. In this, as in other matters, evil be to him who evil thinks.

“ The crux of the educational question, as it affects the African, is that Western methods denationalise him. He becomes a slave to foreign RACE EMANCIPATION— TIIE CRUX. ways of life and thought. He will desire to be a slave no longer. So far is this true that the moment the unspoilt educated African shows initiative and asserts an individuality, his foreign mentor is irritated by the phenomenon. In September, 1905, public events on the Gold Coast led me to write in the local press as follows : ‘ We feel, secondly, that the educated native is unduly maligned for party purposes. It is the same cry as the educated Welsh, Irish, or Scotch. In any case, it is a childish cry — a sign of weakness. Does a native cease to be a native when once he is educated? .... But for the educated native, where would the unsophisticated native be ? Hence the weakness of the cry — the shibboleth of the ‘ educated native.5 Heaven grant that the educated nahive may never be wanting in his duty to his less privileged brethren, or betray their trust in him.5

‘ ‘ But let there be no mistake about the matter. The foregoing strictly applies to the unspoilt cultured African. The other type is no good to anybody. The superfine African gentleman, who, at the end of every second or third year, talks of a run to Europe, lest there should be a nervous breakdown, may- be serious or not, but is bound in time to be refined off the face of the African continent.

And now I come to the question of questions : ‘ How may the West African be trained so as to preserve his national identity and race instincts ? ’

“As a precautionary measure, I would take care to place the educational seminary in a region far beyond the reach of the influence of the coast. If I were founding a national University for the Gold Coast and for Ashanti, I would make a suitable suburb of Kumasi the centre. But why do I speak of a national University? For the simple reason that you cannot educate a people unless you have a suitable training ground. A Tuskegee Institute is very useful in its way, but where would you get the teachers unless you drew them from the ranks of the University trained men? And since even the teachers must be first locally trained, the highest training ground becomes a necessity.

“ I would found in such a University a Chair for History; and the kind of history that I would teach would be universal history with particular reference to the part Ethiopia has played in the affairs of the world. I would lay stress upon the fact that while Rameses II. was dedicating temples to ‘ the God of gods and secondly to his own glory,’ the God of the Hebrews had not yet appeared unto Moses in the burning bush; that Africa was the cradle of the world’s systems and philosophies, and the nursing mother of its religions. In short, that Africa has nothing RACE EMANCIPATION — THE CRUX. to be ashamed of of its place among the nations of the earth. I would make it possible for this seat of learning to be the means of revising erroneous current ideas regarding the African; of raising him in self-respect ; and of making him an efficient co-worker in the uplifting of man to nobler effort.

“ Then I should like to see professorships for the study of the Fanti, Hausa, and Yoruba languages. The idea may seem odd upon the first view. But if you are inclined to regard it thus, I can only point to the examples of Ireland and Denmark, who have found the vehicle of a national language much the safest and most natural way of national conservancy and evolution. If the Dane and Irish find it expedient in Europe, surely the matter is worthy of consideration by the African. Says Mr. James O’Hannay, writing on the work of the Irish League and the influence of a national language in the November, 1905, number of the Independent Review, at pages 311 and 312 : ‘ Our history, our customs, our characters are unintelligible to us until we know it. Character, for instance, is the result of inheritance and environment; and there is no more subtly influential environment than the language we speak. If these two are in opposition, if a people inherits a Celtic spirit *and grows up in an Anglo-Saxon atmosphere, with the English language on its lips, what kind of character will result? It is likely that a people tossed in this cross sideway of contradictions will tend to develop inconsistencies of character — amazing force rendered useless by recurring spasms of weakness, brilliant intellectual capacity sterilised by inability to grasp the conditions of material progress, and so forth.’

“If you want a further support to this view, you have it laid down in an interview with Mr. A. G. Fraser (Trinity College, Oxford), the Principal of Trinity College, Kandy, Ceylon. Says the Times reporter : ‘ He laid special stress on the importance of conducting the training given in Indian Colleges on a vernacular basis rather than through the medium of English, as is too often the case at present. The system existing in most missionary and Government schools tends distinctly to separate those thus educated from their own race. He advocated education almost on Japanese lines, i.e., thorough teaching of English as a subject and literature, but the teaching of science, engineering, medicine, etc., through the medium of the vernacular, and not of English — with a complete connection between the village school and the central college.’

‘ ‘ Moreover, I Avould make this seat of learning so renowned and attractive that students from the United States, the West Indies, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, as well as from Lagos and the Gambia, would flock to it. And they would come to this RACE EMANCIPATION — THE CRUX. Mecca — this alma mater of national conservancy,, not in top hat and broad cloth, but in the sober garb in which the Romans conquered the material world, and in which we may conquer the spiritual world.

“ Now, it is easy to see that the graduates that such a school will turn out will be men — no effete, mongrel, product of foreign systems.

“ When three or four years back I had the pleasure of accompanying Dr. Blyden to the Royal Academy, he drew my particular attention to a famous picture, representing the wolf and the lamb as dwelling together, etc. After we had both drunk in the beauty of portraiture for a while, he gravely remarked :

£ And a little child shall lead them — that is Africa.’ I was struck by the allusion, and I still think there is a deal in the reflection. But it has since struck me also, that it is not the spoilt educated African that may be expected to help in the regenerative work of the world. The unspoilt son of the tropics, nursed in a tropical atmosphere, favourable to the growth of national life, he it is who may show us the way.

“ The voice of the ancient universal God goes forth once more, who will go for us, who will show us any good? May there be a full, free, and hearty response from the sons of Ethiopia in the four quarters of the globe.”