Robert H. Milligan

“ In the morning looking from the mission-house one may see the bay covered with white sails like a flock of sea-gulls—the sails of the Fang canoes bringing food to the market. This is surely the best fortune that can fall to any people in West Africa. While it still gives opportunity for their trade instinct, it turns them to agriculture, the most wholesome of all occupations for such a people. It keeps them at home, provides healthful work, extends opportunity to all and distributes prosperity. ”

“ On this boulevard are the trading-houses, French, Portuguese, German and English. The buildings are nearly all white, including the iron roofs; but some of them have roofs of red tile. There are many beautiful trees. The houses are only half visible through screens of foliage; and along the walks every unsightly thing, every deserted building or decaying hut is overgrown with vines of delicate beauty and the wildest profusion of scarlet, purple and lavender flowers.
The beach is strewn with logs of African mahogany of great value, which the traders are preparing to ship. ”

“ The view from the veranda of the mission house at Baraka is a scene of magic beauty. The joyous lavishness of colour excludes from the mind the thought of the deadly serpent and the relentless fever-fiend that stealthily glide within the shadows. The long hillside sloping to the beach is half covered with mangoes and palms, oleander and orange-trees, and the graceful plumes of the bamboo that wave to and fro and tumble in the breeze like children at play. ”

“ Of all those who have criticized missions, I have only known of one man who himself professed to be a Christian; his criticism was rather mild and was due more to what he had heard than what he had seen.
Carlyle has said: “Unbelief talking about belief is like a blind man discussing the laws of optics.” How can a man think it worth while to expend lives and money in preaching to the heathen a Gospel which he himself rejects? If the Gospel itself is foolishness those who preach it must be fools, and the greatest fools are those who preach it at the greatest sacrifice. ”

“ With the increasing wind and the straining of the whole canoe I felt that something must soon happen by way of climax. The only question was whether the collapse, when it came, would be particular or general. Suddenly a gust of wind was followed by a crash. The boom was gone, the sheet broken, the sail torn. A passing wave drenched us and almost swamped the canoe. Then I plied the saucepan diligently, while Ndong Koni dexterously managed the canoe—for we were in the trough of the sea—and Ndong Bisia and the other man, using the ball of twine, made a new sheet and tied the torn sail. ”

“ In the intervals of the storm, and mingling with it, there came the sound of a dirge, the hopeless death-wail, from a village close by, where the poor natives were mourning for one of their number who had died that day, a young man at whose bed I had stood a few hours earlier, the only son of a heart-broken mother. Those who have always known the words of One who brought life and immortality to light cannot realize the heathen view of death, and the abysmal darkness of the invisible world. ”

“ One day long ago, when a fellow missionary and myself were together in the Bulu interior, a native young man, in response to our inquiry, expressed the African belief that the rainbow is a snake. It has the power—which many men also have—of making itself invisible. The missionary, reflecting that superstition is simply ignorance of nature and nature’s laws, resolved to undertake immediately the boy’s education. The sun was shining brightly, and the missionary, having sent the native to fetch a bucket of water, told him that he himself would then and there make a rainbow. ”

“ Every success enhances his reputation; and if he is very clever he will even convert failure into success. If a man return a fetish and tell him it has failed—that his goods have been stolen, his hens have not laid, his wives have eloped, or his canoe has capsized with him—the doctor will not usually dispute the failure, but will discover the reason, and more than ever impress his customer with his skill and knowledge. Sometimes as soon as he looks at it he will say that it is dead; that the spirit has escaped from it and it may as well be thrown away. ”

“ However it may be, we who have lived long among the Africans, and without the distemper of racial prejudice, do invariably find that our ideas, or our standards, gradually undergo such a change that the African face appears to us in varying degrees of beauty, much as that of the white; beauty which at first we did not see. Even the nose, which bears a striking resemblance to the ace of clubs, at length, with custom, ceases to appear ugly, and seems the absolutely proper nose for the African physiognomy. ”

“ On my part, it was my knowledge of Lolo that first inspired me with a strong desire for a school, and enabled me to realize what a moral factor a school of such boys might become in transforming the life of the people. The African baby is a beautiful, solemn-eyed little creature, who looks out at the world as if he were undecided whether to stay. About half of them decide not to stay. The African baby is cunning and bright, but it seldom cries, and it is not given to play nearly as much as the white child. As the child grows older he cheers up. ”

“ He cannot easily be killed with work; but isolation will kill him quickly. The old men sit in the palaver-house all their spare time (that is, all the time between naps and meals) entertaining and amazing the younger generation with the narration of their past exploits—how many women have gladly eloped with them, how many others they have captured, how many enemies they have killed in war, and how they have fought wild animals with unheard-of bravery. ”

“ In Africa virtue is almost identified with courage, and power is worshipped. Woman, therefore, who in all lands represents the gentler virtues—compassion, devotion, patience—is contemptible; and the child also; for where power is worshipped feebleness can have no claim. Woman, thus relegated to a place of inferiority and contempt, sinks to a lower level of degradation than the man. Cruelty is the characteristic of the men; licentiousness, of the women.
But notwithstanding the imperfection of his ideal the African is essentially moral. He knows the difference between right and wrong ”

“ Even cannibalism, regarded as the lowest reach of degradation, is not only a natural consequence of fetishism, but is one of its logical forms. I doubt whether, among the Fang, it is ever practiced on the mere impulse of hunger. It is rather the last desperate resort of fear seeking fetish protection. The strongest protection against an enemy in war is to eat one of their number. After that the enemy can do no harm and need not be feared; unless (always this same dreadful qualification) —unless some traitor in one’s own town should break the spell even of this fetish by witchcraft. ”

“ It means that all those who sincerely offer it, however great the contrast of their history and traditions, are a community, united by the stronger bonds of aims and ideals. It means that they have a vision of a united race of mankind; a vision of all nations drawn into one common brotherhood in commerce, government and religion, and that they believe in the abounding adequacy of the Gospel of Christ for its realization. Society resounds with the cry of the oppressed and the dissonance of human passion ”

“ There are only one or two things that the African will work for; that is to say there are only one or two things that he wants.
He will work to earn a dowry in order to marry; especially if he has in mind some particular woman as the prospective wife. Month after month he will labour and even for a year or two he will engage in the hardest work. But just as the white master is about to reverse his opinion of the whole black race and proclaim that they are the greatest workers in the world the man completes the amount of the dowry, and immediately he quits. ”

“ The greatest is no more than human; the lowest is no less. This dying man tells how that some weeks past, having gone on a journey to a certain town forty miles north, and during the night having wondered what his friends at home might be doing, he thought he would visit Gaboon, leaving his body while his spirit alone travelled through the air. ”

“ And how shall we convey this idea to the degraded mind of the African?
Of course we should change his idea of nature if we could persuade him of God’s unity, and that nature, therefore, is the product of a single mind; His spirituality, and that He is therefore present everywhere, in nature and the hearts of men; His holiness, and that God and nature are therefore on the side of righteousness; His love, and that God and nature are therefore benevolent and sympathetic with man. But to talk to the African about God’s attributes is to speak in an unknown tongue. ”

“ But my deepest sympathy and highest praise must be for those who have gone to Africa not for gold, but at the sacrifice of gold and other interests; who left home and social pleasures not indifferently and impatient of restraint, but with tears and aching hearts, that they might carry the Gospel of peace to the most miserable of human beings; whom they are not ashamed to call brethren. ”

“ The belief is the more impressive because it is directly contradicted by the facts of experience. Fire burns the innocent; the lightning-stroke is no respecter of persons; the fury of the tornado is not partial to the good. And yet the belief persists. It persists because of the irrepressible instinct that wrong-doing deserves punishment, and that somewhere at the heart of the universe there is a moral power that connects guilt and retribution.
The same instinct accounts for the sleepless Nemesis and the whips and scorpions of the Furies of ancient mythology. ”

“ In nothing else does the African reveal his essentially moral nature more than in his immediate recognition and acceptance of the character of Jesus as the human ideal; although it is an ideal that traverses all his former conceptions, that subverts those ideas which are the basis of his dearest social customs, and condemns utterly that conduct which has been his very boast. Jesus is so immediately understood by the African that we are often asked whether Jesus was a black man. He is understood by every tribe and nation, because He unites in Himself the ideals of all. ”

“ There is no sound so well known in Africa, and none that so haunts the memory in after years, as the mourning dirge, in which with united voices they chant their sorrow for the dead—their despair and desolation ”

“ His first lessons on nature the African learns not from science, but directly from Jesus. Jesus multiplies the loaves, and the value of the miracle for the African, and for us, is not the wonder of it, but the lesson that it is God who gives us our daily bread. Jesus stills the storm on Galilee and thus teaches that the Father is present in all storms and always rules the sea and the wind, which are not under the control of demons. Jesus heals the leper, and we learn His power over all disease, and that a loving will afflicts and heals. ”

“ Frequent storms of unrestrained passion give to the face of the woman of middle age a permanent expression of weakness and dissipation. She is the victim of so much oppression and cruel wrong that one would like to depict her as innocent; for it is human nature to attribute virtue to those who suffer. But it most be confessed that the African woman is at least as degraded as the man. ”

“ It is always a question to what extent the fetish-doctor is a conscious hypocrite. He usually begins practice by exploiting some particular fetish in which he really believes and whose power he has proved. Finding the trade lucrative he invents other fetishes upon the same principle—for there is a principle, that is to say, there is always some apparent relation between the ingredients of a fetish and the purpose for which it is designed. If some of his first fetishes should be successful and gain him a reputation he may come to believe in his own power. ”

“ The whole world is embraced in our daily thought and interest. The African, unless he lives by a river, knows nothing of the world beyond the farthest village to which he has walked. Not even the invention of the wheel has reached him. The civilized man has made nature supplement himself; has made himself swifter than the swiftest of animals and stronger than the strongest, and has multiplied a thousandfold the product of his labour. In order to disseminate the benefits of this increasing conquest of nature there arises a demand for skilled labour ”

“ Of course the authority of custom in Africa serves to check personal tyranny and to modify the principle that might is right. It thus prevents society from going backward; but it also prevents it from going forward; a thousand years are as a day. Mobility is a condition of progress.
A more radical difference between the civilized man and the African than any we have yet mentioned is that of work. It is not merely a contrast between actual work and idleness, but a contrast of attitudes that constitutes this difference. ”

“ And it is the mark of nobleness to volunteer the lowest service, the greatest spirit only attaining to humility. Nay, God is God, because He is the servant of all.... All honest men are daily striving to earn their bread by their industry. And who is this who tosses his empty head at this blessing in disguise, and calls labour vile, and insults the workman at his daily toil? ”

“ But if he should die there are sure to be charges of witchcraft, and suspicion is likely to fall first on any who did not come to sympathize, the supposition being that they were kept away by a sense of guilt.
The low wail of mourning starts as soon as it appears that the sick one is dying, although he may still be conscious. Then when the death is announced there is a great outburst of cries and shrieks, accompanied by frantic actions of grief and protest. But this wild outburst soon subsides into the regular wail of the mourning dirge.
The mother is always the chief mourner. ”

“ A man may punish his wife for any misdemeanour or neglect of duty; and many of them bear upon their backs ugly scars and wounds inflicted by the sword of an enraged husband. However abused, it is vain for her to appeal to the town; for it is the town of the husband’s family, and she is the stranger. And, besides, the saying among them is that you must never tell a woman that she is right, lest she despise her husband.
A source of injustice, in the case of polygamy, is the influence of the head-wife ”

“ Sir Harry Johnston, in The Civilization of Africa, has this to say in regard to the fatal adaptability of the Negro to a condition of slavery:
“The Negro in general is a born slave. He is possessed of physical strength, docility, cheerfulness of disposition, a short memory for sorrows and cruelties, and an easily aroused gratitude for kindness and just dealing. He does not suffer from homesickness to the overbearing extent that afflicts other peoples torn from their homes, and, provided he is well fed, he is easily made happy. ”

“ The African is further demoralized by his idea of man’s destiny. He believes in a future life. I never encountered a doubt on this subject. But his belief is not ennobling, nor a source of moral inspiration. Death is an unmitigated evil, and the dead are always wishing to be back in the flesh. The future does not hold rewards or punishments for the good or evil of the present life; nor has present goodness any future advantage. There, as here, to have a great many wives and plenty to eat are chief factors in happiness. ”