Page:Morel-The Black Mans Burden.djvu/225

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
208
THE BLACK MAN'S BURDEN

is firmly established. It loses much of its fanaticism on African soil. It has been well said by a great African scholar, that Islam by its social and eugenic laws, "saves Africa alive." It is, in Africa, a social influence before anything else, and an influence which admittedly raises the Pagan to a higher level. It is a cultural force. It is at present the African's strongest bulwark against the de-racialising processes, which come in the wake of European intervention. The African has it in him to become a real Christian which, perhaps, the European under the present social system has not. Meantime, Islam is in Africa a preservative of racial self-respect. To pursue in Mohammedan Africa a truly African policy, reviving ancient centres of learning, binding the African peoples to their land in intensified bonds of reverence, heralding the dawn of an African renascence, raising African universities instead of African levies—here, indeed, would be a work worthy of great international minds. Perhaps when the restless and selfish individualism of Europe has given place to more generous and nobler concepts of human sociology; when much of what has passed for statesmanship in Europe, is seen to have been naught but the petty and vain preoccupations of vulgar minds; when the European peoples, emancipated from the social tyrannies which throttle their freedom and impair their vision are capable of gazing out upon wider horizons then, perhaps, the conditions will be born, out of which a policy of this kind may arise and endure.

Meantime, white rule is producing in the colonisable, and even in portions of the non-colonisable Continent a huge, landless, African proletariat under no restraint of tribal law; and with few political and fewer legal rights under the white man's law. So far as the colonisable area of the Continent is concerned, the phenomenon is assuming its greatest magnitude in South Africa. It is raising all kinds of currents and cross-currents of class feeling and race feeling, both of which must become intensified with the natural growth of the native population. In the South African Union the blacks outnumber the whites by over four to one now. The numerical preponderance of the black-man must, short of a general massacre, continue on an increasing scale. And with every year that passes the black population advances in