Appendix
The Republic of Liberia
No agency has yet been tried for Africa’s regeneration which promises so much and is capable of so much for the permanent welfare of the people as the method of the American Colonisation Society in the establishment of Liberia. All other efforts from abroad may be classified under two heads—the disorganising and the corrective. The work of one set of foreigners is to introduce the agencies of helpfulness; of the other, the instruments of mental and moral degradation. The missionary represents the one; the trader the other. In districts subject only to Pagan rule, the traders really govern the country. Everything is made to subserve the interest of their trade. They appeal to the cupidity of ignorant chiefs, and fix the standard of morality. The missionary is helpless.
European colonies, though existing for a higher purpose, and though under their protection and stimulus the missionary can do an unmolested and even apparently aggressive work, yet, in such colonies, the measure of progress allowed to the natives must be limited, seeing that the power and prestige of the Europeans and the promotion of European interests must be made the first consideration.
The United States, then, have furnished Africa with the most effective instrument of unlimited progress and development in the Republic of Liberia. The basis of the Liberian political life is the American Constitution and Laws. But the earlier legislators of the new State very soon discovered that American precedents, in not a few important respects, would have to be set aside; and it is creditable to their statesmanship that they were able to introduce with prudence such modifications into the American system as made it applicable to their new circumstances and practicable for their purposes. Their successors are finding more and more that as they advance into the continent and develop national life new modifications will be necessary. These must take place if there is normal growth—if the nation is to be the true expression of the race. The friends of Liberians abroad cannot help the in to national or racial expression. They must fight their own battles and achieve their own victories, if they are not to be overawed, depressed and overcome, not so much by the merits and virtues as by the vices and failings of foreigners, whose literature they read and whose commodities they purchase.
The theory upon which Liberia was founded has thus far stood the test. It is a theory with definite practical consequences, which every one who is earnest in the desire for African regeneration and acquainted with the facts must accept, and which no one in these days, however antagonistic to the Negro in exile, will strenuously oppose.
In the European colonies along the coast there may be the evidences of material prosperity, but it proceeds with the heavy and crushing indifference of the car of Juggernaut, and, like the conductors of that ponderous vehicle, it looks upon the possible destruction of individuals as no serious evil; as possibly for their own good and for the advancement of the cause. There is no recognition, therefore, of the fact that there are hearts that feel, no notice taken of sensibilities that may be rudely lacerated, no effort to nurse the well- spring of a nobler life within. The native is, as a rule, simply the victim of an unsympathetic apparatus of political and commercial machinery.
In Liberia matters are entirely different. The people, with all the drawbacks incident to their necessarily isolated life, have the legislative control of at least five hundred miles of coast, and of an indefinite interior. They recognise the necessity—the prime necessity—of the moral and religious emotions. Their minds are strengthened and expanded by the wide and glorious prospects which their independent nationality and the vast continent on which they live with its teeming millions of their blood relations open before them; and they stretch out their hands to the United States for the return of their exiled brethren, to increase their civilised and Christian force. They ask for greater educational and religious facilities. They could have greater material prosperity; but they look upon the life as more than meat, and the body as more than raiment. For more than half a century they have resisted the appeals of Europeans for an indiscriminate trade in the country, and have thus kept an extensive region both on the coast and in the interior in a virgin state waiting for their brethren from abroad, who will know how to protect themselves against the influence of a vicious foreign trade, and who will be able to introduce in a regular and healthful form the blessings of freedom and civilisation. As an example of the work in promotion of a genuine Christian civilisation which Liberia, as an independent nation, whoso laws are final, has the power of performing, see the recent law enacted against Sabbath-breaking, which applies only to the seaboard and to the proceedings of foreign vessels (African Repository) July, 1887). You would understand the import of this fact and its bearing upon Christianity in this country if you could see how all along the coast out of Liberia the Sabbath is disregarded by foreign traders, while the missionaries look helplessly on. In course of time, Liberia will banish the traffic in spirits from the whole of her domain; and in this effort she will be sustained by the great Mohammedan trading community on the east and north.
European colonies, though existing for a higher purpose, and though under their protection and stimulus the missionary can do an unmolested and even apparently aggressive work, yet, in such colonies, the measure of progress allowed to the natives must be limited, seeing that the power and prestige of the Europeans and the promotion of European interests must be made the first consideration.
The United States, then, have furnished Africa with the most effective instrument of unlimited progress and development in the Republic of Liberia. The basis of the Liberian political life is the American Constitution and Laws. But the earlier legislators of the new State very soon discovered that American precedents, in not a few important respects, would have to be set aside; and it is creditable to their statesmanship that they were able to introduce with prudence such modifications into the American system as made it applicable to their new circumstances and practicable for their purposes. Their successors are finding more and more that as they advance into the continent and develop national life new modifications will be necessary. These must take place if there is normal growth—if the nation is to be the true expression of the race. The friends of Liberians abroad cannot help the in to national or racial expression. They must fight their own battles and achieve their own victories, if they are not to be overawed, depressed and overcome, not so much by the merits and virtues as by the vices and failings of foreigners, whose literature they read and whose commodities they purchase.
The theory upon which Liberia was founded has thus far stood the test. It is a theory with definite practical consequences, which every one who is earnest in the desire for African regeneration and acquainted with the facts must accept, and which no one in these days, however antagonistic to the Negro in exile, will strenuously oppose.
In the European colonies along the coast there may be the evidences of material prosperity, but it proceeds with the heavy and crushing indifference of the car of Juggernaut, and, like the conductors of that ponderous vehicle, it looks upon the possible destruction of individuals as no serious evil; as possibly for their own good and for the advancement of the cause. There is no recognition, therefore, of the fact that there are hearts that feel, no notice taken of sensibilities that may be rudely lacerated, no effort to nurse the well- spring of a nobler life within. The native is, as a rule, simply the victim of an unsympathetic apparatus of political and commercial machinery.
In Liberia matters are entirely different. The people, with all the drawbacks incident to their necessarily isolated life, have the legislative control of at least five hundred miles of coast, and of an indefinite interior. They recognise the necessity—the prime necessity—of the moral and religious emotions. Their minds are strengthened and expanded by the wide and glorious prospects which their independent nationality and the vast continent on which they live with its teeming millions of their blood relations open before them; and they stretch out their hands to the United States for the return of their exiled brethren, to increase their civilised and Christian force. They ask for greater educational and religious facilities. They could have greater material prosperity; but they look upon the life as more than meat, and the body as more than raiment. For more than half a century they have resisted the appeals of Europeans for an indiscriminate trade in the country, and have thus kept an extensive region both on the coast and in the interior in a virgin state waiting for their brethren from abroad, who will know how to protect themselves against the influence of a vicious foreign trade, and who will be able to introduce in a regular and healthful form the blessings of freedom and civilisation. As an example of the work in promotion of a genuine Christian civilisation which Liberia, as an independent nation, whoso laws are final, has the power of performing, see the recent law enacted against Sabbath-breaking, which applies only to the seaboard and to the proceedings of foreign vessels (African Repository) July, 1887). You would understand the import of this fact and its bearing upon Christianity in this country if you could see how all along the coast out of Liberia the Sabbath is disregarded by foreign traders, while the missionaries look helplessly on. In course of time, Liberia will banish the traffic in spirits from the whole of her domain; and in this effort she will be sustained by the great Mohammedan trading community on the east and north.
Now, here is an instrument—indigenous, sympathetic and permanent—for the aggressive work of the American Church. If American Christians will deal with this question earnestly and wisely, they can in a few years revolutionise the Nigritian countries. America possesses the elements—the human instruments—now needed for the work in Africa, and they are anxious to come. This desire of the Negroes for emigration to the fatherland is sometimes said to be exaggerated by colonisationists; but I find in The Church at Home and Abroad the following from Rev. H. N. Payne, Field Secretary of the Freedmen’s Board:--
“ Much as the coloured people are attached to the places where they grew up, thousands of them would gladly go to Arkansas, to Texas, or to any other place where they would better their condition; bnt they cannot raise the money to emigrate, and must stay and suffer where they are.”
Now here is disinterested testimony, put not half as strongly as the facts warrant. The any other place is Africa; and if these hapless creatures do not name Africa in the utterance of their tearful longings, it is because thousands do not dream that there is any possibility of ever getting to this distant country. I found, during my travels in the South, in 1882, that hundreds were turning their faces to Arkansas and Texas, who had never heard of Liberia or of the American Colonisation Society.
Now, ought not the Church, in contemplating the magnitude of the work in Africa, to consider whether this superfluous energy might not be utilised? Here, at least, is the physical basis of a great moral and physical superstructure. Do not go about lamenting your incapacity to help Africa when you have with you the elements of effective assistance, but which, on account of its apparent insignificance, you despise. Remember Longfellow’s baffled and disheartened artist:--
Then a voice cried, “ Rise, O Master;
From the burning brand of oak
Shape the thought that stirs within thee!”
And the startled artist woke--
Woke, and from the smoking embers
Seized and quenched the glowing wood;
And therefrom he carved an image,
And he saw that it was good.
O thou sculptor, painter, poet!
Take this lesson to thy heart:
That is best which lieth nearest;
Shape from that thy work of art.
Do not wait until you have trained the Negroes up to your ideal—in your peculiar modes of thinking. You cannot make them Anglo-Saxons. You never will make them so in spirit and possibilities, if I interpret the providence of God aright. The Hebrews in Egypt remained illiterate and ignorant, though surrounded for four hundred years by the splendours of a brilliant civilisation. That civilisation was not for them, though they had, by providential direction, been brought into contact with it. It was not suited to the peculiar work for which they were destined. So the children of Africa among you have in them the possibilities of a great work in the Fatherland. Remove them from the pressure in your country to the freedom and congeniality of their ancestral home, and so open a wider sphere, for the play and development of their social, moral, and spiritual nature. It is not the best plan to rely upon college training to fit them for work in Africa.
The fugitive Hebrew slaves, without the learning of the schools, received the law for their guidance—found the truth for their race —in the solitudes of the desert. In Africa, the merest rudiments of Western learning will have more power upon the Negro than the highest culture in America. There is something in the atmosphere, in the sunshine, the clouds, the rain, the flowers, the music of the birds, that makes the a b c of your culture more valuable to him than all the metaphysics and philosophy you can possibly give him in America.
In contrasting the results of the methods of his Mohammedan teachers upon the Negro with those produced upon him by the efforts of his Christian guides and instructors, one is reminded of the old story of Falconnet, a vain French artist, who was once lecturing a class of students on the horse of Marcus Aurelius. For a time he was critical and captious, pointing out little faults of detail and contrasting them with a more perfect anatomical model of his own. But at last the spirit of the artist overcame professional jealousy, and he exclaimed, “ After all, gentlemen, that ugly horse lives, and mine is dead.” Something of the same feeling comes over the thoughtful observer as he studies the results of the two religious systems upon the African. The Christian Negro, equipped with all the apparatus of the schools, appears at a disadvantage by the side of his Mohammedan brother. The training of the latter is admitted to be faulty and imperfect, but he is at home in Africa and dominant in the land of his fathers. After all, the ugly horse is alive.
“ Much as the coloured people are attached to the places where they grew up, thousands of them would gladly go to Arkansas, to Texas, or to any other place where they would better their condition; bnt they cannot raise the money to emigrate, and must stay and suffer where they are.”
Now here is disinterested testimony, put not half as strongly as the facts warrant. The any other place is Africa; and if these hapless creatures do not name Africa in the utterance of their tearful longings, it is because thousands do not dream that there is any possibility of ever getting to this distant country. I found, during my travels in the South, in 1882, that hundreds were turning their faces to Arkansas and Texas, who had never heard of Liberia or of the American Colonisation Society.
Now, ought not the Church, in contemplating the magnitude of the work in Africa, to consider whether this superfluous energy might not be utilised? Here, at least, is the physical basis of a great moral and physical superstructure. Do not go about lamenting your incapacity to help Africa when you have with you the elements of effective assistance, but which, on account of its apparent insignificance, you despise. Remember Longfellow’s baffled and disheartened artist:--
Then a voice cried, “ Rise, O Master;
From the burning brand of oak
Shape the thought that stirs within thee!”
And the startled artist woke--
Woke, and from the smoking embers
Seized and quenched the glowing wood;
And therefrom he carved an image,
And he saw that it was good.
O thou sculptor, painter, poet!
Take this lesson to thy heart:
That is best which lieth nearest;
Shape from that thy work of art.
Do not wait until you have trained the Negroes up to your ideal—in your peculiar modes of thinking. You cannot make them Anglo-Saxons. You never will make them so in spirit and possibilities, if I interpret the providence of God aright. The Hebrews in Egypt remained illiterate and ignorant, though surrounded for four hundred years by the splendours of a brilliant civilisation. That civilisation was not for them, though they had, by providential direction, been brought into contact with it. It was not suited to the peculiar work for which they were destined. So the children of Africa among you have in them the possibilities of a great work in the Fatherland. Remove them from the pressure in your country to the freedom and congeniality of their ancestral home, and so open a wider sphere, for the play and development of their social, moral, and spiritual nature. It is not the best plan to rely upon college training to fit them for work in Africa.
The fugitive Hebrew slaves, without the learning of the schools, received the law for their guidance—found the truth for their race —in the solitudes of the desert. In Africa, the merest rudiments of Western learning will have more power upon the Negro than the highest culture in America. There is something in the atmosphere, in the sunshine, the clouds, the rain, the flowers, the music of the birds, that makes the a b c of your culture more valuable to him than all the metaphysics and philosophy you can possibly give him in America.
In contrasting the results of the methods of his Mohammedan teachers upon the Negro with those produced upon him by the efforts of his Christian guides and instructors, one is reminded of the old story of Falconnet, a vain French artist, who was once lecturing a class of students on the horse of Marcus Aurelius. For a time he was critical and captious, pointing out little faults of detail and contrasting them with a more perfect anatomical model of his own. But at last the spirit of the artist overcame professional jealousy, and he exclaimed, “ After all, gentlemen, that ugly horse lives, and mine is dead.” Something of the same feeling comes over the thoughtful observer as he studies the results of the two religious systems upon the African. The Christian Negro, equipped with all the apparatus of the schools, appears at a disadvantage by the side of his Mohammedan brother. The training of the latter is admitted to be faulty and imperfect, but he is at home in Africa and dominant in the land of his fathers. After all, the ugly horse is alive.
If Christians in America will trust to the healing and restorative power of Nature, and will help the thousands to migrate to Africa, and then, under the influence of the earth and sky and sea of the ancestral home, will further assist them with elementary schools and plain Gospel preaching, and with tools for mechanical and agricultural work, Africa will soon lift up her head.
The methods generally pursued, apart from the principle of the Liberian enterprise, will never cause Christianity to penetrate the interior with any hope of bringing the tribes under its sway. Of another thing I am not much less assured, that Mohammedanism —unless Liberia is strengthened and stimulated by an increase of civilised population and schools—will extend its influence to the sea along the whole of Upper Guinea, and will control the indigenous tribes. This it will do with the countenance and support of European governments, dependent for their revenues upon a trade largely under the control of the sober and energetic Moslems.
The religion of Arabia has the advantage of numbers in its work in Africa. The religion of America may also have this advantage, if the Church there will get near enough to the unsophisticated Negro to understand bis broken utterances about Africa. Dr. Ellinwood told the General Assembly at Omaha that “ the Mohammedan College in the little African state of Tripoli, with one thousand students, sends to the interior not less than three hundred missionaries every year; and the great Azar in Cairo, with ten thousand students, sends to the Moslem mission fields not less than two thousand a- year.”
The Nigritian Mohammedans are wonderful propagandists. Half scholars, half merchants, they are devoted to trade, literature and religion; they are also pilgrims and adventurers. You will find them in every important city on the coast; and in the interior they haunt the busy centres of trade and lead in all the places of popular devotion. They have in their favour certain elements of truth—enough to make them grow and thrive. The Koran appears to the cursory and superficial reader self-contradictory, dull—a tissue of incoherent rhapsodies; “ but it is impregnated with a few grand ideas, which stand out strongly from the whole. On the St. Paul’s River one frequently sees huge trees standing on high banks overhanging the stream, with just enough root in the soil to hold them, but growing in all the luxuriance of the trees in the fertile valley or on the rich mountain side. These river-side trees are a picture of Islam. It is a mighty tree standing on apparently very little soil, but soil enough to hold it. Every rising tide seems to threaten its downfall, but the water recedes; freshets come and go, and leave it more firmly rooted in the earth than before. It is a power to be reckoned with, then, in all attempts to evangelise Africa; and no isolated missionary effort can resist the organised force it brings.
Bishop Taylor has recognised this important fact, and he is endeavouring to demonstrate the feasibility and necessity of colonics for the greater and ultimate success of mission work in Africa. He has recently wisely adopted Liberia as a base and strategic point for his operations, where, protected in his rear by a regular government in sympathy with his work, he will not be subject to the intrusion of the many conflicting influences to which he is exposed in the Congo country.
Shall Liberia, for the want of a generous and far-sighted sympathy, be compelled to linger in the unhealthy regions of the coast, circumscribed in the field of her operations, and paralysed by physical and moral malaria, while thousands of possible agents of an effective work, within and beyond her borders, wander uselessly about your country, asking, “ Who will show us any good?”
In the great speech of Dr. Ellinwood before the Assembly, so full of the philosophy and the results and the hopes of foreign missions, not one word is said of the work in Africa, or of the future of this continent. Perhaps she is so near America, in the millions of her representatives there, that she is regarded as a part of the home mission field. Then deal with her as a part of your household, and remember the apostolic estimate of the man who fails to provide for his own household.
ED. W. BLYDEN.
The methods generally pursued, apart from the principle of the Liberian enterprise, will never cause Christianity to penetrate the interior with any hope of bringing the tribes under its sway. Of another thing I am not much less assured, that Mohammedanism —unless Liberia is strengthened and stimulated by an increase of civilised population and schools—will extend its influence to the sea along the whole of Upper Guinea, and will control the indigenous tribes. This it will do with the countenance and support of European governments, dependent for their revenues upon a trade largely under the control of the sober and energetic Moslems.
The religion of Arabia has the advantage of numbers in its work in Africa. The religion of America may also have this advantage, if the Church there will get near enough to the unsophisticated Negro to understand bis broken utterances about Africa. Dr. Ellinwood told the General Assembly at Omaha that “ the Mohammedan College in the little African state of Tripoli, with one thousand students, sends to the interior not less than three hundred missionaries every year; and the great Azar in Cairo, with ten thousand students, sends to the Moslem mission fields not less than two thousand a- year.”
The Nigritian Mohammedans are wonderful propagandists. Half scholars, half merchants, they are devoted to trade, literature and religion; they are also pilgrims and adventurers. You will find them in every important city on the coast; and in the interior they haunt the busy centres of trade and lead in all the places of popular devotion. They have in their favour certain elements of truth—enough to make them grow and thrive. The Koran appears to the cursory and superficial reader self-contradictory, dull—a tissue of incoherent rhapsodies; “ but it is impregnated with a few grand ideas, which stand out strongly from the whole. On the St. Paul’s River one frequently sees huge trees standing on high banks overhanging the stream, with just enough root in the soil to hold them, but growing in all the luxuriance of the trees in the fertile valley or on the rich mountain side. These river-side trees are a picture of Islam. It is a mighty tree standing on apparently very little soil, but soil enough to hold it. Every rising tide seems to threaten its downfall, but the water recedes; freshets come and go, and leave it more firmly rooted in the earth than before. It is a power to be reckoned with, then, in all attempts to evangelise Africa; and no isolated missionary effort can resist the organised force it brings.
Bishop Taylor has recognised this important fact, and he is endeavouring to demonstrate the feasibility and necessity of colonics for the greater and ultimate success of mission work in Africa. He has recently wisely adopted Liberia as a base and strategic point for his operations, where, protected in his rear by a regular government in sympathy with his work, he will not be subject to the intrusion of the many conflicting influences to which he is exposed in the Congo country.
Shall Liberia, for the want of a generous and far-sighted sympathy, be compelled to linger in the unhealthy regions of the coast, circumscribed in the field of her operations, and paralysed by physical and moral malaria, while thousands of possible agents of an effective work, within and beyond her borders, wander uselessly about your country, asking, “ Who will show us any good?”
In the great speech of Dr. Ellinwood before the Assembly, so full of the philosophy and the results and the hopes of foreign missions, not one word is said of the work in Africa, or of the future of this continent. Perhaps she is so near America, in the millions of her representatives there, that she is regarded as a part of the home mission field. Then deal with her as a part of your household, and remember the apostolic estimate of the man who fails to provide for his own household.
ED. W. BLYDEN.
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