Nigeria : $b Its peoples and its problemsMorel, E. D. (Edmund Dene)
History
Nigeria : $b Its peoples and its problems
Morel, E. D. (Edmund Dene)
Ethnology -- Nigeria; Nigeria -- Description and travel
The second class is to be met with among the ranks of those who, by
striking at slavery and abuse, have rendered enormous benefit to the West
African, but who were also unwittingly responsible for fastening upon his
neck a heavy yoke, and who, not only with no motive of self-interest,
but, on the contrary, with the most generous desire to minister to his
welfare, are to-day in danger of ministering to his undoing. It is not
easy to affix any particular label to those influences which, in the
political field, contributed so powerfully in handing over the Congo to
Leopold II. (afterwards strenuously co-operating in freeing its peoples
from his grasp) and in placing two million West Africans in Liberia under
the pettily tyrannous incompetence of a handful of American Blacks. They
are partly educational, partly philanthropic, partly religious. The
basis of sentiment animating them appears to be that a kindness is being
done to the West African by the bestowal upon him of European culture,
law, religion and dress, and that, having thus unmade him as an African,
those responsible are in duty bound to support the product of their
own creation in its automatic and inevitable revolt against authority,
whether represented by the Native Ruler or by the European Administrator.
In the form it at present takes, and in the circumstances too often
accompanying it, this is not a kindness but a cruel wrong.
Let me try to make my meaning perfectly clear in regard to this latter
case. I make no attack upon any organization or body. I criticize the
trend of certain influences, and I willingly admit, as all must do, even
those who most dread their effects, that these influences have their
origin in centres imbued with genuine altruism. Also that of one side of
them nothing but good can be said—the destructive side, the side which
is ever prepared to respond to the call of human suffering. Neither do
I suggest that education can, or should be, arrested. I simply lay down
this double proposition. First, that educational and allied influences,
whose combined effect is to cause the West African to lose his racial
identity, _must_ produce unhappiness and unrest of a kind which is not
susceptible of evolving a compensating constructive side. Secondly, that
in no period of time which can be forecast, will the condition of West
African society permit of the _supreme_ governing power being shared
by both races, although short of the casting vote, so to speak, policy
should everywhere be directed towards consolidating and strengthening
Native authority.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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