West African studies

Anything concerning West Africa written by M. le Comte C. de Cardi or Mr. John Harford, of Bristol, does not require apology and explanation; while anything written by me on this, or any subject, does. M. le Comte de Cardi possesses an unrivalled knowledge of the natives of the Niger Delta, gained, as all West Coasters know, by personal experience, and gained in a way whereby he had to test the truth of his ideas about these natives, not against things said concerning them in books, but against the facts themselves, for years; and depending on the accuracy of his knowledge was not a theory, but his own life and property. I have always wished that men having this kind of first-hand, well-tested knowledge regarding West Africa could be induced to publish it for the benefit of students, and for the foundation of a true knowledge concerning the natives of West Africa in the minds of the general public, feeling assured that if we had this class of knowledge available, the student of ethnology would be saved from many fantastic theories, and the general public enabled to bring its influence to bear in the cause of justice, instead of in the cause of fads. I need say nothing more regarding Appendix I.; it is a mine of knowledge concerning a highly developed set of natives of the true Negro stem, particularly valuable because, during recent years, we have been singularly badly off for information on the true Negro. It would not be too much to say that, with the exception of the important series of works by the late Sir A. B. Ellis, and a few others, so few that you can count them on the fingers of one hand, and Dr. Freeman's Ashanti and Jaman, published this year, we have practically had no reliable information on these, the most important of the races of Africa, since the eighteenth century. The general public have been dependent on the work of great East and Central African geographical explorers, like Dr. Livingstone, Mr. H. M. Stanley, Dr. Gregory, Mr. Scott Elliott, and Sir H. H. Johnston, men whose work we cannot value too highly, and whom we cannot sufficiently admire; but who, nevertheless, were not when describing Africans describing Negroes, but that great mixture of races existing in Central and East Africa whose main ingredient is Bantu. To argue from what you know about Bantus when you are dealing with Negroes is about as safe and sound as to argue from what you may know about Eastern Europeans when you are dealing with Western Europeans. Nevertheless, this fallacious method has been followed in the domain of ethnology and politics with, as might be expected, bad results. I am, therefore, very proud at being permitted by M. le Comte de Cardi to publish his statements on true Negroes; and I need not say I have in no way altered them, and that he is in no way responsible for any errors that there may be in the portions of this book written by me.

Mr. John Harford, the man who first[1] opened up that still little-known Qua Ibo river, another region of Negroes, also requires no apology. I am confident that the quite unconscious picture of a West Coast trader's life given by him in Appendix II. will do much to remove the fantastic notions held concerning West Coast traders and the manner of life they lead out there; and I am convinced that if the English public had more of this sort of material it would recognise, as I, from a fairly extensive knowledge of West Coast traders, have been forced to recognise, that they are the class of white men out there who can be trusted to manage West Africa.

I most sincerely wish that the whole of this book had been written by such men as the authors of Appendices I. and II. We are seriously in want of reliable information on West African affairs. It is a sort of information you can only get from resident white men, those who live in close touch with the natives, and who are forced to know the truth about them in order to live and prosper, and from scientific trained observers. The transient traveller, passing rapidly through such a region as West Africa, is not so valuable an informant as he may be in other regions of the Earth, where his observations can be checked by those of acknowledged authorities, and supplemented by the literature of the natives to whom he refers. For on West Africa, outside Ellis's region, there is no authority newer than the eighteenth century, and the natives have no written literature. You must, therefore, go down to Urstuff and rely only on expert observers, whose lives and property depend on their observing well, or whose science trains them to observe carefully.

Now of course I regard myself as one of the second class of these observers: did I not do so I would not dare speak about West Africa at all, especially in such company; but whatever I am or whatever I do, requires explanation, apology, and thanks.

You may remember that after my return from a second sojourn in West Africa, when I had been to work at fetish and fresh-water fishes, I published a word-swamp of a book about the size of Norie's Navigation. Mr. George Macmillan lured me into so doing by stating that if I gave my own version of the affair I should remove misconceptions; and if I did not it was useless to object to such things as paragraphs in American papers to the effect that "Miss Kingsley, having crossed the continent of Africa, ascended the Niger to Victoria, and then climbed the Peak of Cameroon; she is shortly to return to England, when she will deliver a series of lectures on French art, which she has had great opportunities of studying." Well, thanks to Mr. Macmillan's kindness, I did publish a sort of interim report, called Travels in West Africa. It did not work out in the way he prophesied. It has led to my being referred to as "an intrepid explorer," a thing there is not the making of in me, who am ever the prey of frights, worries, and alarms; and its main effect, as far as I am personally concerned, has been to plunge me further still in debt for kindness from my fellow creatures, who, though capable of doing all I have done and more capable of writing about it in really good English, have tolerated that book and frequently me also, with half-a-dozen colds in my head and a dingy temper. Chief among all these creditors of mine I must name Mrs. J. R. Green, Mrs. George Macmillan, and Miss Lucy Toulmin Smith; but don't imagine that they or any other of my creditors approve of any single solitary opinion I express, or the way in which I express it. It is merely that I have the power of bringing out in my fellow-creatures, white or black, their virtues, in a way honourable to them and fortunate for me.

I must here also acknowledge the great debt of gratitude I owe to Mr. John Holt, of Liverpool. A part of my work lies in the affairs of the so-called Bubies of Fernando Po, and no one knows so much about Fernando Po as Mr. Holt. He has also been of the greatest help to me in other ethnological questions, and has permitted me to go through his collections of African things most generously. It is, however, idle for me to attempt to chronicle my debt to Mr. Holt, for in every part of my work I owe him much. I do not wish you to think he is responsible for any of it, but his counsels have ever been on the side of moderation and generosity in adverse criticism. I honestly confess I believe I am by nature the very mildest of critics; but Mr. Holt and others think otherwise; and so, although I have not altered my opinions, I have restrained from publishing several developments of them, in deference to superior knowledge.

I am also under a debt of gratitude to Professor Tylor. He also is not involved in my opinions, but he kindly permits me to tell him things that I can only "tell Tylor"; and now and again, as you will see in the Fetish question, he comes down on me with a refreshing firmness; in fact, I feel that any attempt at fantastic explanations of West African culture will not receive any encouragement from him; and it is a great comfort to a mere drudge like myself to know there is some one who cares for facts, without theories draping them.

I will merely add that to all my own West Coast friends I remain indebted; and that if you ever come across any one who says I owe them much, you may take it as a rule that I do, though in all my written stuff I have most carefully ticketed its source.

I now turn to the explanation and apology for this book, briefly. Apology for its literary style I do not make. I am not a literary man, only a student of West Africa. I am not proud of my imperfections in English. I would write better if I could, but I cannot. I find when I try to write like other people that I do not say what seems to me true, and thereby lose all right to say anything; and I am more convinced, the more I know of West Africa--my education is continuous and unbroken by holidays,--that it is a difficult thing to write about, particularly when you are a student hampered on all sides by masses of inchoate material, unaided by a set of great authors to whose opinions you can refer, and addressing a public that is not interested in the things that interest you so keenly and that you regard as so deeply important.

In my previous book I most carefully confined myself to facts and arranged those facts on as thin a line of connecting opinion as possible. I was anxious to see what manner of opinion they would give rise to in the minds of the educated experts up here; not from a mere feminine curiosity, but from a distrust in my own ability to construct theories. On the whole this method has worked well. Ethnologists of different theories have been enabled to use such facts as they saw fit; but one of the greatest of ethnologists has grumbled at me, not for not giving a theory, but for omitting to show the inter-relationship of certain groups of facts, an inter-relationship his acuteness enabled him to know existed. Therefore I here give the key to a good deal of this inter-relationship by dividing the different classes of Fetishism into four schools. In order to do this I have now to place before you a good deal of material that was either crowded out of the other work or considered by me to require further investigation and comparison. As for the new statements I make, I have been enabled to give them this from the constant information and answers to questions I receive from West Africa. For the rest of the Fetish I remain a mere photographic plate.

Regarding the other sections of this book, they are to me all subsidiary in importance to the Fetish, but they belong to it. They refer to its environment, without a knowledge of which you cannot know the thing. What Mr. Macmillan has ticketed as Introductory--I could not find a name for it at all--has a certain bearing on West African affairs, as showing the life on a West Coast boat. I may remark it is a section crowded out of my previous book; so, though you may not be glad to see it here, you must be glad it was not there.