The people are weak and helpless, the black man does not know how to defend himself! Yet the most perfectly organized military machine the world has ever seen was developed among the Zulus and the desert Bedouins and other northern tribes have been known to charge successfully against European troops armed with machine-guns.
Africa has no convenient inland seas like the Baltic or our Great Lakes! Granted, but Lake Victoria is as large as Lake Superior, Tanganyika is as big as the Baikal Sea, Nyasa twice as big as Lake Ontario.
Africa has no mountains! But Kilimanjaro is 5000 feet higher than Mount Whitney, the highest peak of the United States and Ruwenzori, just north of the equator, is higher than Mont Blanc.
Then what is wrong with this continent: I don’t know. Everything is there, but nothing seems to be where it could possibly be of any use to anyone. The whole arrangement seems wrong. Even the Nile, which at least flows into a sea of great commercial importance, is hampered by its many cataracts. As for the Congo and the Niger, they have no comfortable access to the sea, while the Zambesi starts where the Orange River should end and the Orange River ends where the Zambesi should start.
Modern science may eventually make the desert bear fruit and drain the marshes. Modern science may find ways to cure the dysentery and the sleeping-sickness, which have wiped out entire countrysides in the Sudan and the Congo region, as modem science has set us free from yellow fever and malaria. Modern science may turn the high central and southern plateaus into a replica of the French Provence or the Italian Riviera. But the jungle is strong and persistent and the jungle has a handicap of millions of years. Let modern science relax but for a moment and the jungle and all its atrocities will be back at the white man’s throat and will throttle him and breathe its poisonous breath into his nostrils until he dies and is eaten by the hyenas and the ants.
Perhaps it is the lightless tropical forest which has put its dreadful stamp upon the whole African civilization. The desert may be frightening but the shimmering dark forest is terrifying. It is so full of life that it has become lifeless. The struggle for existence must proceed quietly lest the hunter himself become the hunted. And so day and night and night and day creation devours itself beneath the high roof of the listless leaves. The most harmless looking insect has the most deadly sting. The most beautiful flower carries its secret burden of poison. Every horn and hoof and beak and tooth is against every other horn and hoof and beak and tooth. The pulse-beat of existence is accompanied by the crunching of bones and the tearing asunder of soft brown skins.
I have tried to talk of these things with Africans. They laughed at me. Such was life. Life was either stark poverty or overwhelming abundance. There was no golden mean. One either froze or one roasted. One either drank coffee from golden cups with an Arab merchant in Mogador or one took a pot-shot at an old Hottentot woman. She was no good anyway. For this land of contrasts seems to do dreadful things to people. It warps their vision. It kills their susceptibilities to the finer things of life. The ceaseless carnage of the veldt and forest gets into their blood. And a quiet little mousy official, fresh from the stiff respectability of a slumbering Belgian village, turns into a monster who has women flogged to death because they failed to bring an extra pound of rubber; and they quietly smoked his after-dinner cigar while the insects devour some poor black devil, mutilated because he was in arrears with his ivory.
I am trying very hard not to be unfair. Other continents, too, have greatly contributed to the sum total of human cruelty and malevolence. But gentler forms walk across the countryside. Jesus preaches, Confucius teaches, Buddha implores, Mohammed sternly points to his harsh virtues. Africa “alone” has borne us no prophet. Other countries have been greedy and selfish but at times the spirit has conquered the flesh and they have gone forth upon some mighty pilgrimage, the purpose of which lay hidden far beyond the gates of Heaven.
The only sound of marching feet across the African desert and through the shrubs is that of flint-eyed Arabs in search of their human prey, of Dahomeyan Amazons, ready to pounce upon a sleeping village and steal the children of their neighbours to sell them into foreign slavery. In other parts of the world women ever since the beginning of time have tried to make themselves desirable in the eyes of their men that they might attract them and gain their favour. In Africa alone women have deliberately made themselves hideous that they might repel all those who should meet them unaware.
I might continue this bit of special pleading ad infinitum. But this book is getting much too long and so you had better try to find an answer for yourself.
People have been faced by the same perplexing question ever since they first gazed upon the useless grandeur of the Pyramids and looked suspiciously at the tracks that lost themselves in the sands of the distant desert. But none of them returned any the wiser.