We have now reached the southern limit of Moslem activity in Africa, for
we are getting among native races who do not take kindly to asceticism
in any form, and beyond them are the sturdy white Christians of South
Africa. Curiously enough, there is a flourishing little colony of
Moslems at Salt River, the railway suburb of Cape Town, where imported
East Indian and Arab mechanics have settled. They muster about 7,000
souls and have founded a school to educate their children. An unbiassed
English resident states that they are far better citizens than native
Christians of the same class, owing to their temperate habits. Drink is
the undoubted curse of the non-Moslem African. In South Africa no native
in white employ can get alcoholic drink without the written authority of
his employer, but there are many illicit sources of supply. South
African colonists insist that the native Christians are the worst--this
should not be set down to Christianity, but to the civilisation which
goes with it, and, in place of Kaffir beer and such like home-fermented
brews of comparatively mild exhilarant character, introduces the
undisciplined native mind to the furious joys of trade fire-water.
Africa is the main battle-ground between Moslem and missionary, for it
is in that continent that the forces of Islam and Christianity are most
nearly balanced. The American Protestant Mission, which is, as we have
seen, one of the principal belligerents, complains loudly on behalf of
Christendom that in Africa especially our colonial administrations do
not give the support to Christian missions that Christian Governments
should.
Apart from the fact that we administer these countries in trust for
their indigenous population and have no right to thrust our own creed
upon them to the exclusion of any other with a sound system of ethics,
it can most cogently be urged that Islam is the only religion which
insists on total abstinence, and that seems to be the only way in which
the native African can avoid alcoholic excess.
I have in front of me a letter written by an American of Boston, Mass.,
to the _Spectator_ of February 15th, 1919. In it he alludes to a report
of the Committee for preventing the demoralisation of native races by
the liquor traffic which is said to be "making Africa a cesspool of
alcohol, and statistics show that in this devil's work Holland with her
gin and, I regret to say, the United States with its trade rum have been
the conspicuously worst offenders." The writer goes on to say that the
native races are morally and intellectually children, and that has been
recognised in the States where it is a penal offence to introduce
alcoholic drink within the Indian reservations.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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