the coast towns and to the Devil: neither he nor the respectable old ladies of his tribe approve of this. Then again they know that the young men of their people who have thoroughly allied themselves to white culture look down on their relations in the African culture state. They call the ancestors of their tribe "polygamists," as if it were a swear-word, though they are a thousand times worse than polygamists themselves: and they are ashamed of their mothers. It is a whole seething mass of stuff all through and I would not mention it were it not that it is a factor in the formation of anti-white-culture opinion among the mass of the West Africans, and that it causes your West African bush chief to listen to the old woman whom you may see crouching behind him, or you may not see at all, but who is with him all the same, when she says, "Do not listen to the white man, it is bad for you." He knows that the interpreter talking to him for the white man may be a boughten man, paid to advertise the advantages of white ways; and he knows that the old woman, his mother, cannot be bought where his interest is concerned: so he listens to her, and she distrusts white ways.
I am aware that there is now in West Africa a handful of Africans who have mastered white culture, who know it too well to misunderstand the inner spirit of it, who are men too true to have let it cut them off in either love or sympathy from Africa,—men that, had England another system that would allow her to see them as they are, would be of greater use to her and Africa than they now are; but I will not name them: I fight a lone fight, and wish to mix no man, white or black, up in it, or my heretical opinions. That handful of African men are now fighting a hard enough fight to prevent the distracted,
