superstition and mutual suspicion in which the African moves and has his
being he requires cunning to circumvent the cunning of his fellows,--and
very deep cunning it sometimes is,--so deep, indeed, that the
intellectual European has difficulty in following the dark and devious
ways thereof. Vigilance and resourcefulness, careful observation,
prudence, forethought, caution, judicious apprizement of character and
intelligent calculation of probabilities are required for the planning
of the primitive African's daily campaign against the forces of darkness
with which he is surrounded, and to carry out these plans he must have
courage, firmness of will and self-control in no less measure than the
average European city-dweller. To avoid the ever-present chance of being
found guilty of witchcraft, which in the past meant always death, the
African has had to develop the faculty of lying to a high point of
efficiency, and no one who knows him will contend that he is inferior to
the European in this respect. The natural education of the Natives
include the art of lying as the education of Spartan boys included the
practice of larceny. Lying, we know, develops the memory, for a good
memory is essential to successful lying. Some of the ruses and
stratagems thought out by Natives fleeing from the king's wrath or the
witch doctor's doom, of which I have heard from the Natives themselves,
have seemed to me to be in subtilty of design and in daring of execution
as admirable as any that may be found in contemporary detective fiction,
while the fortitude with which defeat and death has been accepted by
some of the unfortunate fugitives would evoke admiration in the least
impressionable of men. I say therefore that those who deny to the
Africans the capacity for sustained collective and purposive effort of
mind and body because these qualities have so far not been shown by them
in the building up of a civilisation of their own must consider the fact
that the nations which to-day lead the world in all the ways of
civilisation remained for thousands of years without leaders and without