University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER III
THE AFRICAN AT HOME

SOME time during the latter part of 1899,
or the early part of 1900, I received through
the German Embassy, in Washington, a
letter saying that the German Colonial Society
wanted a number of students from Tuskegee to go
out to German West Africa to teach the natives how
to produce cotton by American methods.

While I had been a student at Hampton Institute,
Virginia, it was one of my ambitions, as it has been
the ambition of a great many other Negro students
before and since, to go out some day to Africa as a
missionary. I believed that I had got hold at
Hampton of a kind of knowledge that would be
peculiarly helpful to the Native Africans and I felt
that my interest in the people out there, vague and
indefinite as it was, would in some way or other help
and inspire me in the task of lifting them to a higher
plane of civilisation.

After I went to Tuskegee I gave up my ambition
of going to Africa. I had not been long there,
however, before I was convinced that I could, perhaps,
be of larger usefulness through the work I was

able to do in this country, by fitting, for the same
service I wanted to perform, Africans who came as
students to America, and by sending from Tuskegee
men and women trained in our methods, as teachers
and workers among the native peoples. The
request I received through the German Embassy
was, therefore, particularly welcome to me, for
it gave me an opportunity to realise, in a direct
way, the ambition I had never wholly lost
sight of.

A group of our best students was selected for this
African mission. They went out to Togoland, West
Africa, and began to establish stations in different
points in that colony, and then started in to grow
cotton, using the native labour as far as they were
able, but necessarily, at first, doing a large part of the
work themselves.

They met all sorts of difficulties. They found the
American cotton was not suited to African soil, and
were compelled to cross it with native varieties in
order to produce an hybrid type that possessed the
valuable qualities of both. They had considerable
difficulty, at first, with the native labourers. I
remember that John Robinson, one of the party who
remained to carry out the work after the others had
returned home, told me of an incident, which made
me see, in a way in which I had not been able to see
before, that the education of the native African in
the white man's civilisation must begin much farther

back and with much simpler matters than most of us
are likely to imagine.

Among the other things this party had taken out to
Africa was a wagon, which had been manufactured
by the students at Tuskegee. While this wagon was
being unloaded and put together, the native porters
looked on with interest, never having seen anything
that went on wheels before. After the wagon had
been loaded ready to start the attention of members
of the party was turned for a time in another
direction. When they came back to the wagon
they were greatly surprised to see that the natives
had unloaded and taken it apart, and were busily
engaged in fastening its wheels and other parts on
their heads, preparatory to carrying them, along with
the other goods, to their destination in the interior.
Mr. Robinson explained to them, through an interpreter,
the use of the wagon, and tried to show them
the advantage of it. They were interested in seeing
this curious machine of the white man work, but
they were quite positive in their conviction that the
good old-fashioned way of carrying everything on
their heads was the better. Now that roads have
been opened up and the natives have actually seen a
wagon worked, Mr. Robinson tells me they take it
as a hardship if they are asked to carry anything.

During the time this experiment in educating the
Native African was going on, I followed its progress,
through the accounts I received from students on

the ground and from the reports of the German
Colonial Society, with close attention and intense
interest. It was the nearest I had come, up to that
time, to anything like a practical and intimate
acquaintance with the African at home.

Among the first thing the Tuskegee students did
in Africa was to build for themselves comfortable
houses, to supply them with well made but simple
furniture, to put in these houses not only the necessities,
but some of the comforts of life. I was interested
to note that, within a few months the Natives
and, especially the women, had gotten the notion
that they wanted the same kind of houses and some
of the same kind of furniture. The women naturally
made their wants known to the men, and before these
students had been in Africa half a dozen years the
Natives in their vicinity had reached the point where,
with the training they had received and with the
desire they had gained for better homes to live in,
better tools to work with, and for all the other advantages
which the black man in America seemed to
possess over the black man in Africa, they were
performing about as satisfactory service as the same
class of human beings would have performed in any
other part of the world.

Native Africans have been sent from Africa to
Tuskegee. Our Tuskegee students have returned
from time to time and made their reports of
successes. Thus in a very vital and practical manner

has our institution become connected with the
progress and civilisation of our brethren in the
darker continent.

Some time ago in looking through the pages of
some magazine or book of science, I ran across a
statement that, when men first began to study the
stars systematically and with telescopes, they discovered
a certain class of errors in their calculations
which were due to the personality of the observers.
One man's brain, acting quicker, would record the
stars as moving more rapidly; another would record
them as moving more slowly than their actual
movements. It became necessary, therefore, in
order to make the calculations correct, to study and
take account of these personal aberrations.

It has occurred to me, in the course of my reading
about the African peoples, that it would contribute
much to the accuracy of our knowledge, if some study
were made of the sort of errors that creep into our
observations of human beings. Important as it is
that we should have a correct knowledge of the stars,
it is more important that we should have an accurate
knowledge of men. For instance, I have noticed that
a man born and reared in the Southern states
invariably looks upon the Negro with different eyes
from the man born and reared in the Northern
states. In their reports and interpretations of the
simplest facts they are often widely divergent in their
views. Even when they agree with each other about

the Negro, for instance, it has often seemed to me
that their agreement was due to a misunderstanding.

Frequently amusing situations occur in the discussion
of the Negro. Many of these have occurred
in my presence. It seldom occurs, for instance, when
I am travelling on a train that the discussion
does not turn on the question as to what is the
physical, moral, and mental effect on the individual
when he is of mixed blood. One man will argue
very seriously that there should be no mixture of
blood, for the reason that he is quite sure that wherever
there is a mixture it results in a weakened
individual, bodily, mentally, morally. Within ten
or fifteen minutes another man will begin, in the
absence of the first, to discuss the same subject and
will, in an equally serious and positive manner,
state that wherever in all history the Negro has been
able to accomplish anything of value to the world
it had been because he had some tincture of white
blood in his veins.

During these discussions I am sometimes reminded
of an incident that occurred during my early boyhood,
which, because it illustrates a phase in the development
of the Negro in America, I may be permitted
to mention it here. Very soon after the days of
slavery and even before the public school system had
been organised, there arose in the community a
discussion among our people as to whether the world
was round or flat. It lasted for several days, and

divided the community into two pretty stubborn
factions. During the discussion a coloured man
came along, a school teacher, who had very little
actual learning, and made application to open a
school. The question as to whether the world was
flat or round was submitted to him, or rather he was
asked how he would treat the question in the schoolroom,
and he replied that he was prepared to teach
either "flat," "round," or just as the individual
family requested.

The continual discussion of the Negro often
reminds me, as I have stated, of this story. The
Negro question or the Negro himself seems able to
be accommodated to almost any and every shade
of opinion. That explains how two men with
diametrically opposite views sometimes come to an
agreement about the Negro; one thinks he should be
flat and not round, the other thinks he should be
round and not flat; but both agree that there is
something wrong with him.

If it is difficult for people of the same race to understand
one another when they are talking about things
in regard to which their experience has been different,
it is still more difficult for one race to pass judgment
upon another, particularly when these races differ
so widely from one another as the white man and
the Negro. Dr. Franz Boas has called attention to
this difficulty in a paper before the American Association
of Science. "As the white race is the civilised

race," he says, "every deviation from the white type
is considered as the characteristic feature of a lower
type; . . . the greater the difference between
the intellectual, emotional and moral processes and
those found in our civilisation, the harsher the
judgment of the people."[1]

Under these circumstances it is natural enough
that the black man, who is furthest removed physically
from the white man, should suffer more than
others from the sort of prejudice Professor Boas describes.
With the possible exception of the Jew, no
race has ever been subjected to criticisms so
searching and candid, to state it mildly, as the Negro.
And yet I
have found that those who have known and understood
the Negro best, have usually been kindest in
their judgment of him and most hopeful of his future.

For instance, the late Miss Kingsley, an Englishwoman,
who seems to have entered deeper into
the mind of the West African than most others,
says of the West Coast Negro:

Concerning the affection which the African has
for his mother, Miss Kingsley quotes the Rev.
Leigh ton Wilson.

Mr. Wilson was born and educated in South
Carolina. In 1834 he went to Africa as a missionary
and remained there for eighteen years, in close
contact with the civilisation of the forefathers of the
present American Negroes. He was among the first
missionaries to Africa. He remained in the active
service of the Southern Presbyterian Church until
his death in 1886. While in Africa he studied the
languages and reduced the native tongue of some of
the tribes to writing. He says:

Mr. Wilson points out that the Africans of the
Grain Coast have long since risen above the hunting
life; they have fixed habitations, cultivate the soil
for means of subsistence, have herds of domestic
animals, construct for themselves houses which are
sufficient to protect them alike from the scorching
heat of the sun and the chilly damps of the night;
they show a turn for the mechanical arts, and in the
fabrication of implements of warfare and articles of
ornament they display surprising skill.

"As we see them in their native country," he
continues, "they show none of that improvidence
or want of foresight for which they have almost
become proverbial in this country, which shows that
circumstances have made them what they are in this
respect. They plant their crops with particular
reference to the seasons of the year, and they store
away provisions for their future wants with as much
regularity as any people in the world, so that times
of scarcity and want are less frequent among them

than among others who pretend to a much higher
degree of civilisation."

Referring to the farms of the Kru people, the
tribes from which the seamen of the West Coast
are drawn, Mr. Wilson says:

Of the mechanical skill of the neighbouring
Ashanti people, whose territory is in the English
Gold Coast colony, Mr. Wilson tells us, "that they
manufacture gold ornaments of various kinds and
many of them of much real taste. They fabricate
swords, agricultural implements, wooden stools, and
cotton cloths of beautiful figures and very substantial
texture."[4]

From time to time, as Tuskegee graduates have
returned from the various stations in Africa in which
they have been at work, they have brought back with
them specimens of native workmanship in iron,
wood and leather. I have frequently been impressed
with the beauty of some of the designs that native
craftsmen have worked out upon their spears and in
their homespun cotton cloth. The leather tanned
by some of these native tanners is often surprisingly

beautiful in colour, design and finish. Some of
the specimens of the native handicrafts have been
placed on exhibition in the museum at Tuskegee, and
in one or two cases we have been able to reproduce
in our classes in basketry the shapes and designs of
some of these native articles.

"Nothing, perhaps," says Professor Franz Boas,
"is more encouraging than a glimpse of the artistic
industries of the native African. A walk through
the African museums of Paris and London and
Berlin is a revelation. I wish you could see the
sceptres of African kings, carved of hardwood and
representing artistic form; or the dainty basketry
made by the people of the Kongo River and of the
region of the Great Lakes of the Nile, or the grass
mats of their beautiful patterns.

"Even more worthy of our admiration," he
continues, "is the work of the blacksmith who
manufactures symmetrical lance heads, almost a
yard long, or axes inlaid with copper and decorated
with filligree. Let me also mention in passing the
bronze castings of Benin and the West Coast of
Africa, which, although perhaps due to Portuguese
influences, have so far excelled in technique any
European work, that they are even now almost
inimitable."[5]

The blacksmith seems to occupy a very important
place in the social life of Africa. Travellers have

found these smiths at work in the most remote and
inaccessible parts of the continent, where they may
be seen collecting the native iron and copper ores;
smelting and reducing them, and then working them
in their primitive forges, into hoes, knives, spear and
arrow heads, battle-axes, wood-working tools, rings
and hatchets.

Just as everywhere in the Southern states to-day,
especially in the country districts, at the crossroads,
or near the country store, one finds the Negro black
smith, so, in some of the remote regions in Africa,
every village has, according to its size, from one to
three blacksmiths. Each smith has an apprentice
and his art is a craft secret most zealously guarded.

Samuel P. Verner, like the Rev. Leighton Wilson,
a Southern white man and missionary of the
Southern Presbyterian church, says in his book,
"Pioneering in Central Africa," of these African
blacksmiths:

Mr. Verner's mission station was in the Kongo
Free State, on the upper courses of the Kasai, in
the heart of savage Africa where the people have
never been touched by the influences of either the
European or Mohammedan civilisations. Speaking

of the carving and wood working of some of these
tribes, Mr. Verner says:

Throughout West Africa, wherever the European
has not established his trading factory, the native
market is an institution which is a constant source
of surprise to travellers. These markets are the
native clearing houses for the produce of the soil
and the fabricated articles of the land. They are
generally the centre of the trading operations of a
district ranging from ten to thirty miles. Here will
be seen vegetables and fruit, poultry, eggs, live pigs,
goats, salt of their manufacture, pottery of their own
make, strips of cloth, grass-woven mats, baskets
and specimens of embroidery and art work, besides
numberless other articles of various sorts and
kinds which are essential to African comfort and well
being. From the small group of native merchants
who travel with their wares within a radius of
thirty or fifty miles, to the large caravans of the Hausa
traders who cross the Desert of Sahara, and at times
reach the Eastern and Western confines of the
continent, everywhere in Africa the black man is a
trader.

Among the more primitive tribes the village markets
are confined to two or three hundred buyers or sellers,
but in the greater markets like that of Kano and
Upper Nigeria, twenty or thirty thousand traders
will be gathered together at certain seasons of the
year. It is an interesting fact, as indicating the
African's interest in trade, that in many tribes the
market place is considered sacred ground, and, in
order that trade may be carried on there without
interruption, no strife is permitted within its
precincts.

Professor Boas, writing in 1904, said:

It may be safely said that the primitive Negro community
with its fields that are tilled with iron and wooden implements,
with its domestic animals, with its smithies, with its expert woodcarvers,
is a model of thrift and industry, and compares favourably
with the conditions of life among our own ancestors.[6]

It is just as true in America, as it is in Africa, that
those who know the Negro intimately and best have
been, as a rule, kindest and most hopeful in their
judgments of him. This may seem strange to those
who get their notion of the Southern white man's
opinion of the Negro, from what they see in the
press and hear from the platform, during the heat of a

political campaign, or from the utterances of men who,
for one reason or another, have allowed themselves
to become embittered. Southern opinion of the
Negro, particularly as it finds expression in the press
and on the platform, is largely controversial. It has
been influenced by the fact that for nearly a hundred
years the Negro has been the football in a bitter
political contest, and there are a good many Southern
politicians who have acquired the habit of berating
him. The Negro, in the South, has had very
little part in this controversy, either before or since
the war, but he has had a chance to hear it all, and
it has often seemed to me, if, after all that has taken
place, the Negro is still able to discuss his situation
calmly, the white man should be able to do so
also. But that is another matter.

Nineteen times out of twenty, I suppose, a stranger
coming South, who inquires concerning the Negro
from people he meets on the train or on the highways,
will get from these men pretty nearly the same
opinion he has read in the newspapers or heard in
political speeches. These criticisms of the Negro
have been repeated so often that people have come
to accept and repeat them again without reflection.
The thing that shows this to be true is, that the very
men who denounced all Negroes will very likely
before the conversation is ended tell of one, and
perhaps, half a dozen individual Negroes in whom
they have the greatest confidence.

A Southern white man may tell you, with the
utmost positiveness, that he never knew a single
Negro who would not steal—except one. Every
white man knows one Negro who is all right—a
model of honesty, industry, and thrift—and if he
tries to remember, he will think of other Negroes in
whom he has the greatest confidence, and for whom
he has a very genuine respect. Considering that
there are a good many more white people in the
South than there are Negroes, it seems to follow,
logically, that in spite of what one hears about the
Negro in general, there are a good many individual
Negroes who are pretty well thought of by their
white neighbours.

It is well to take into consideration, also, that
when Southern people express their confidence and
their respect for an individual black man, they are
speaking of one whom they know: on the contrary,
when they denounce in general terms the weakness
and the failure of the Negro race, they have in mind a
large number of whom they know a great deal less.

I do not mean to suggest that there is no justification
for the criticism of the Negro that one often hears
in the South. I have never thought or said that
the Negro in America was all that he should be. It
does seem to me, however, that the Negro in the
United States has done, on the whole, as well as he
was able, and as well as, under all the circumstances,
could be reasonably expected.

It was not unusual, particularly in the early part
of the last century, to find among the slaves men
who could read and write Arabic and were learned
in the lore of the Koran. W. B. Hodgson, a Southern
slave holder, published in 1857 a paper in which
he gave an account of a Negro slave who had translated
the gospel of John into Negro dialect, using
"the letters of the Koran, the book of his first religious
instruction, in transcribing the gospel, the book
of his second instruction and conversion, and in the
adopted dialect of his land of captivity." Most of
the slaves came from what were known as the pagan
tribes of the coast. In spite of the fact that so large
a proportion of the slaves came from these interior
tribes it was not until Mungo Park made his famous
first journey to the interior of the Soudan in 1795
that the Western world knew anything definite
about that region. The eminent German traveller
and scholar, Dr. Henry Barth, first reached the
famous commercial city of Kano in 1850, and until
1900 it was said not more than five Europeans had
ever visited that city. The accounts that travellers
give of the region and the people present a picture
of African life so different from that of the coast cities
that I am tempted to quote at some length from these
descriptions.

Several peoples, of strikingly different characteristics,
contributed to form the several loosely connected
states which now form the British Colony of Northern

Nigeria, of which Kano is the principal city.
The most important and interesting of these are the
Hausas and the Fulahs or Fellani, as they are sometimes
called. The Fulahs are noted for their military
spirit; the Hausas for their commercial enterprise.
One has a light complexion and the other is dark.

The Fulahs are an equestrian people, with a
cavalry armed with lances and swords. They are
zealous Mohammedans with a knowledge how to
"divide and govern." Their independent character
is described by the proverbial saying that "a Fulah
man slave will escape or kill his master, and that a
Fulah girl slave will rule the harem or die." The
Hausas are superior to the Fulahs in the arts of
peace. They are possessed of unusual industry,
judgment and intelligence and have a considerable
degree of literary taste. The Hausas carry on the
internal trade of the North and Central Soudan.
They are well clothed and have many well built
cities with population sometimes of from twenty
to sixty thousand. Barth, in describing Kano,
which is, perhaps, to West Africa, what Chicago is
to the United States, tells us that he mounted on
horseback, "rode for several hours round all the
inhabited quarters, enjoying at his leisure from the
saddle the manifold scenes of public and private
life, of comfort and happiness, of luxury and misery,
of industry and indolence, which were exhibited in
the streets, the market places, and in the interior of

the courtyards." Here he saw "a row of shops
filled with articles of native and foreign produce
with buyers and sellers in every variety of figure,
complexion, and dress." Now an "open terrace of
clay with a number of dye-pots and people busily
employed in various processes of their handicraft;
here a man stirring the juice and mixing with indigo
some colouring wood in order to give it the desired
tint, there another drawing a shirt from the dye-pot,
there two men beating a well-dyed shirt"; further
on, "a blacksmith busy with his tools in making a
dagger, a spear or the more useful ornaments of
husbandry," and, in another place, "men and women
hanging up their cotton thread for weaving."

The market of Kano, said to be the largest in
Africa, is celebrated for its cotton cloth and leather
goods. Traditions of Kano go back over a thousand
years. It is surrounded by walls of sun-dried clay
from twenty to thirty feet high and fifteen miles in
circumference.

The greatest chieftain that ever ruled in West
Africa, Mohammed Askia, lived in Kano. He
became ruler in 1492 and held sway over a region
probably as large as the German Empire. Barth
tells us that Mohammed Askia was an example of
the highest degree to which Negroes have attained in
the way of political administration and control.
His dynasty, which was entirely of native descent, is
the more remarkable if we consider that this Negro

king was held in the highest esteem and veneration
by the most learned and rigid Mohammedans. Not
only did he consolidate and even extend his empire,
but went in 1495 on a pilgrimage to Mecca accompanied
by 1,500 armed men, 1,000 on foot and 500 on
horseback, and founded there a charitable institution.
He extended his conquests far and wide from what
is now the centre of Nigeria, westward almost to
the borders of the Atlantic Ocean and northward to
the south of Morocco. Askia governed the subjected
tribes with justice and equity. Everywhere
within the borders of his extensive dominions his
rule spread well-being and comfort.[7]

The career of Mohammed Askia is possibly the
best example of the influence of Mohammedanism
on that portion of Africa from which our American
slaves were taken.