“AFRICA FOR AFRICANS”

Evening Star, Issue 19658, 10 September 1927, Page 9

“AFRICA FOR AFRICANS”

PLEA FOR THE NATIVE A temperate and well-informed plea for freedom and justice for the . native- African tribesman is made by Mr Arthur S. Cripps in ‘An Africa for Africans.’ Mr Cripps, says ' ‘Public Opinion,’ has passed many years among the natives of Mashonaiand, and he says in the course of his book: “1 believe in the racial worth of native Africa, and I- long to see that racial worth given a chance.” i'o the sincerity of the author’s views Mr Phillip Kerr pays tribute in a preface, which wo quote;— “ The outstanding merit of this book is that it is written by one who loves the native African as a fellow human being. Many are fond of him as a Servant. Many fear and dislike him as a menace. Very few love him for himself. • “ The testimony to the native’s inner nature and capacities of one who loves him is probably worth more than, all the measurements of anthropologists or the analyses of those surface appearances on which prejudice feeds: if love is sometimes blind to defects, it alone sees through the hidden qualities within. Mr Cripps is satisfied, after twenty-three years’ residence in Africa, that the native has the full qualities of manhood within him, and his plea is that he should bo given the opportunity to develop those qualities on his own lines free frdhi perpetual dependence on the white man and from the dominating aggressiveness of our modern civilisation, which incorporation as a mere wage-earner in an industrial society implies. “ Mr Cripps may be a little unsympathetic to modern civilisation. I thiuk> lie prefers the medieval to tho primitive or the modern saint: St. Francis to St. Paul or Abraham Lincoln. Personally, I believe that modern democratic civilisation, even modern capitalism, has done more to lift the mass of men and women into independence and self-respect and to give them that competence with which they can afford to. think of something other than the satisfaction .of urgent physical needs than medieval civilisation was able to do. .What is needed now is not to destroy it or turn it back, but to purify and ennoble it by saving people from making prosperity an end m itself, and by putting back into it that quiet and peace-giving love of spiritul things which is tho true end of the civilised life. For all its drab aspects, I think the modern Britain can be made into something nobler and better than ever medieval Britain could have been. The uujversal simple life on the land, which attracts so many idealists, is only practical where there is more land than people to use it, and paternal government to protect its inhabitants from invasion, economic as well as political, from without. “ I do not share, therefore, Mr Cripps’s half-expressed longing that Africa should be left for Africans alone. White and black have an immense deal to give to one another, and, if they can each rise to their opportunities, Africa will contain a better and happier community than if they each struggled along in isolation.

“Hut Mr Cripps is unquestionably right in his zeal that enough land, good land, should he set aside for native uso in those Highlands of Africa which arc destined to bo colonised by white men, while there is yet time. There is real danger, if this is not done, that the whole native peoples will bo depressed by economic forces into a quasi-servilc proletariat ministering to a white aristocracy, a result which can only corrupt both black and white, multiply _ poor whites and poor black,s\ and end _in revolution and the breaking up of laws. The real protection against this possibility is to give the native ample land on which to develop on lines of his own choosing,, to adopt such of the white man’s ways as he finds good, and to reject the rest, to preserve and develop what is good in hjs own customs and life instead of having it forcibly crushed out by transplantation, and above ail to preserve that peculiar selfrespect and freedom which comes from being independent owners of the soil, owning no man as master. “ I would go further. There is now a movement everywhere in Africa towards the self-government for the white. It seems to me essential that when responsibility is transferred to a local legislature that legislature should from the start represent all the races settled in the country. _ In no other way is it possible to avoid the creation of an oligarchy with a vested interest in the maintenance of its own exclusive political power—-perhaps the most fruitful course of injustice to the one race and of degeneration in .the other. “Opinions differ as to the way in which Cecil Rhodes’s formula. ‘Equal rights for all civilised men,’ should be applied. Some cling to the Cape franchise—to the system of high qualifications for the individual voter, but without any differentiation on the score of race aiid color. Some may prefer the system of communal representation whereby each community votes for its own representatives. In any case, for the present the native in Central African legislatures would' have to he represented by whjte men nominated by the Governor. But what is essential is that from the beginning the political structure of these new and rapidly growing communities should ho such as to represent in some way nil sections of the community, leaving its development to be moulded later by the light of experience.”