The African in Transition

Extract

In these days, when it is fashionable to pay lip-service to what everyone calls democracy, one hears a good deal of verbal by-play with Rousseau’s phrase ‘All men are born equal’. No greater fallacy than that has ever been reiterated with more determined disregard of obvious truth. No matter how bitter it is, the fact remains that none of us has been born equal to anyone. Individually, we all enter and remain in this world either richer or poorer, cleverer or duller, stronger or weaker, quicker or slower, than everyone with whom we come into contact in our daily lives. This inequality of endowment stares us in the face even more conspicuously when we consider nationalities than it does on the plane of purely personal relationships. And nowhere in the international sphere does it stand out more clearly than when white men and black stand side by side amid the cataclysmic changes now taking place in Africa.

Today we live in an era when, throughout that continent, hitherto unsophisticated peoples are forming themselves into national organizations, which, although rudimentary and experimental by Western standards, will ultimately exert a very considerable influence upon our own national interests by their participation and possibly their opposition, vote for vote, in the great council chambers of the world.

It is therefore necessary for us to know something of the physical and mental heritage of African peoples in general, that our future relations with them, whether in commerce, in politics, in academics or in the mission field, may be conducted at least with understanding, if not with agreement.