Among both, and throughout all the bushmen tribes in West Africa, however, this deep affection is the same; next to the mother comes the sister to the African, and this matter has a bearing politically.
There is little doubt that there exists a distrustful feeling towards white culture. Up to our attempt to enforce direct taxation it was only a distrustful feeling that a few years careful, honest handling would have disposed of. Since our attempt there is no doubt there is something approaching a panicky terror of white civilisation in all the native aristocracies and property owners. It is not, I repeat, to be attributed to Fetish priests. Certainly, on the whole, it is not attributable to a dislike of European customs or costumes; it is the reasonable dislike to being dispossessed alike of power and property in what they regard as their own country. A considerable factor in this matter is undoubtedly the influence of the women—the mothers of Africa. Just as your African man is the normal man, so is your African woman the normal woman. I openly own that if I have a soft spot in my feelings it is towards African women; and the close contact I have lived in with them has given rise to this, and, I venture to think, made me understand them. I know they have their faults. For one thing they are not so religiously minded as the men. I have met many African men who were philosophers, thinking in the terms of Fetish, but never a woman so doing. Be it granted that on the whole they know more about the details of Fetish procedure than the men do. Yet though frightened of them all, a blind faith in any mortal Ju Ju they do not possess. Your African lady is artful with them, not philosophic, possibly because she has other things to do what with attending to the children,
