Men tell us that there are no possibilities for the black men, that missionary work in Africa is a waste of time, money, and life. So certain disciples spoke of waste when the alabaster box was broken and the precious ointment poured out. True, the African heathen are very far down in the horrible pit and the miry clay—there have been centuries of sinking. Pen can not tell the sin and the ignorance of them. Even the inspired penman in the first chapter of Romans did not overstate the situation for the Bulu. The native life by itself is shocking. The native unwritten law is eye for eye, and tooth for tooth; at the death of any man of repute, the custom has been to require atonement for the occurrence by human sacrifices, especially of women charged with the crime of witchcraft; women and little girls are bought and sold as goats, or gambled away. Aside from local restraints, governmental or Gospel, it is in the main true; every man is a liar, thief, murderer, adulterer, and every woman a slave and harlot by compulsion of circumstances and custom. O, the pity of this seething mass of helpless depravity!
African House with Wall and Roof Combined,
But can these people be made anything of? Yes, if history can be repeated, and if first-fruits are any prophecy, and if the Gospel is the power of God unto salvation. The native is not a bunch of avoirdupois without brains or backbone in his intellectual and moral anatomy. Under the dirt and nakedness of these black skins there is much to appeal to and develop.
Observation of how the natives, shut entirely off from the world for centuries, and groping in the dim light of nature, meet some of the necessities of life, begets hope for them. A man cuts down a plantain, extracts the fiber, dries it, and twists a strong, neat cord; then he is potter, forming a symmetrical clay pot for water, food, oil; with a jack-knife he carves a cane of ebony or new gun-stock; without nail or saw, he builds a house with parts fitly joined together. He is blacksmith, constructing his bellows and making his charcoal and sometimes digging his ore, and produces an ax, a hoe, knife, pin, or spear. He sings a senseless ditty, and has made the instrument, less or more musical, on which he plays the accompaniment. The native woman weaves her fishing-net, and is at home cooking the many products of her garden. The children in the streets build playhouses and throw the spear skilfully; they draw pictures upon the bark walls of the houses, or upon their own bodies, of all sorts of beasts, birds, reptiles, and have a keen sense of the ludicrous. The missionary who examines these products of the natives’ hand and mind is probably amused, but impressed with the practical and artistic sense which they represent. If the natives can do so many things so well without training, what might they not do with instruction, with higher ideals and nobler motives, and a broader field placed before them?
The average native is nobody’s fool. The European learns, by humiliating experience, to look out for him in bargaining. He is a keen observer, has a good memory, and is not lacking in imagination, tho probably more imitative and mechanical than constructive and original. He loses his head in an emergency, and being of excitable temperament, quickly flies off on a tangent. He is full of surprises that delight or puzzle, and of disappointments that distress or amuse. But he can be taught, and wants to be. He admits his ignorance, and is a docile learner and willing follower into new fields of thought and enterprise.
The native children in school learn quickly and retain well. Boys have been reading the Gospels within a year from the time of knowing that there is an alphabet. Many a boy can tell in his own words, with accuracy and fulness, many of the sayings of Christ, His miracles and parables, circumstances and purpose of birth, crucifixion and resurrection, as well as rehearse teachings and doings of the apostles. The boys and girls, in capacity and progress, compare well with children of similar opportunities in the home land. Many are diamonds in the rough, pearls in the mud—but they absorb like sponges.
The children have a desire to learn. Hungry people do not reach out for food with more eagerness than that with which the boys have been seen to scramble for a scrap of paper or fragment of book, printed in their own speech. They are glad to work thirty-seven hours to buy a primer. In this interior work the time is passed when pupils need to be begged or banged to come to school, and thought they were doing the missionaries a favor by coming. The advantages of knowing how to read and write, and of decorum and manly character, have become advertized and recognized, so that a kind of love of learning has set in, and there is competition for a place in the ranks.
