The Black Man's Place in South Africa — John Shaqi
The Black Man's Place in South AfricaNielsen, Peter, active 1922-1937
History
The Black Man's Place in South Africa
Nielsen, Peter, active 1922-1937
Black people -- South Africa
them the words that the ideas may come." A single illustration will show
my meaning. When the first Missionaries rendered the word "soul" into
Zulu by the word signifying "breath" in that language they simply
followed the example of their predecessors of antiquity who employed the
Latin _spiritus_, which also means "breath," for the same purpose,
namely, to convey to their hearers the idea of a breath-like or
ethereal something housed in, but separable from, the human body.
"The essence of language," said Aristotle, "is that it should be clear
and not mean." The raw Bantu material is ample for compliance with this
demand, and the process of development will not be as protracted as in
early Europe for it may be accomplished here, largely, by the simple
means of translating the words already thought out and provided in the
white man's language. In so far, then, as we attempt to measure the
mentality of the Natives by their language we find that they cannot be
relegated to a lower plane than that occupied by the uneducated
peasantry of Europe of a few decades ago.
Most people are prepared to believe that the primary psychical processes
are identical in all races, but many still profess to see a difference
in favour of the white man in what they call the higher faculties of the
mind. But the much-abused word "faculty" no longer bears the meaning
given to it by Locke and his followers who propounded a limitless brood
or set of faculties to correspond with every process discoverable by
introspection as taking place in the mind. In modern psychology the
word means simply a capacity for an ultimate, irreducible, or
unanalysable mode of thinking of, or being conscious of, objects.
Perception, for instance, is looked upon as the capacity for thinking of
a thing immediately at hand, and memory as a capacity for thinking again
of a certain material or abstract object. The mental power of
abstraction is no longer considered as a sort of separate function of
the mind but is regarded as the capacity for thinking of, say, whiteness
as apart from any particular white patch. But the notion that the white
man is endowed with a set of finer feelings and with special and higher
powers of abstraction than is the African Native is so generally
entertained that it will be convenient to make the necessary comparisons
in, more or less, the commonly accepted terms.
Those who look upon the Native as being in every way a more primitive
being than the European will naturally be disposed to believe that he is
more a creature of instincts than a man of reason, and they will expect
him to move in dependence upon certain fundamental intuitions where the
European goes guided by reason alone. I have found no evidence whatever
to support this supposition.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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