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384
THE CLASH OF CULTURES
chap.

have sprung from a single pair of human beings, and the condition of a race to-day therefore to be to its own credit or blame. I remember one day in Cameroons coming across a young African lady, of the age of twelve, who I knew was enjoying the advantages of white tuition at a school. So, in order to open up conversation, I asked her what she had been learning. "Ebberyting," she observed with a genial smile. I asked her then what she knew, so as to approach the subject from a different standpoint for purposes of comparison. "Ebberyting," she said. This hurt my vanity, for though I am a good deal more than twelve years of age, I am far below this state of knowledge; so I said, "Well, my dear, and if you do, you're the person I have long wished to meet, for you can tell me why you are black." "Oh yes," she said, with a perfect beam of satisfaction, "one of my pa's pa's saw dem Patriark Noah wivout his clothes." I handed over to her a crimson silk necktie that I was wearing, and slunk away, humbled by superior knowledge. This, of course, was the result of white training direct on the African mind; the story which you will often be told to account for the blackness and whiteness of men by Africans who have not been in direct touch with European, but who have been in touch with Muhammedan, tradition—which in the main has the same Semitic source is that when Cain killed Abel, he was horrified at himself, and terrified of God; and so he carried the body away from beside the altar where it lay, and carried it about for years trying to hide it, but not knowing how, growing white the while with the horror and the fear; until one day he saw a crow scratching a hole in the desert sand, and it struck him that if he made a hole in the sand and put the body in, he could hide it from God, so he did; but