Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 289 pages of information about Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2.

Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 289 pages of information about Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2.
fanciful, as the white man in India is disposed to be.  One of them, for instance cured himself with a “fruit called a lemon” and an elk-hoof, from what he took to be poison, but what was possibly the effect of too much pease and pullet broth.  In “O Muata Cazembe “(pp. 65-66), we find that the Asiatic Portuguese attach great value to the hoof of the Nhumbo (A. gnu), they call it “unha de grabesta,” and use it even in the gotta-coral (epilepsy).

And yet many of these ecclesiastics, whom Lopez de Lima justly terms “fabulistas,” were industrious and sensible men, where religion was not concerned.  They carefully studied the country, its “situation, possessions, habitations, and clothing.”  They formed always outside their faith the justest estimate of their black fellow-creatures.  I cannot too often repeat Father Merolla’s dictum, “The reader may perceive that the negroes are both a malicious and subtle people that spend the most part of their time in circumventing and deceiving.”

Nor has spiritual despotism been confined to the Catholic missions in West Africa:  certain John Knoxes in the Old Calabar River have repeated, especially in the case of the king “young Eyo,” whom they excluded from communion, all the abuses and the errors of judgment of the seventeenth century with the modifications of the nineteenth.  And we must not readily endorse Dr. Livingstone’s professional opinion.  “In view of the desolate condition of this fine missionary field, it is more than probable that the presence of a few Protestants would soon provoke the priests, if not to love, to good works.”  Such is not the history of our propagandism about the Cape of Good Hope.  Dr. Gustav Fritsch ("The Natives of South Africa,” 1872), thus speaks of the missionary Livingstone, who must not be confounded with the great explorer Livingstone:  “A man who is borne onward by religious enthusiasm and a glowing ambition, without our being able to say which of these two levers works more powerfully in his soul.  Certain it is that he endured more labours and overcame more geographical difficulties than any other African traveller either before or after him; yet it is also sure that, on account of the defective natural-historical education of the author, and the indiscreet partisanship for the natives against the settlers, his works have spread many false views concerning South Africa.”  This, I doubt not, will be the verdict of posterity.  See “Anthropologia,” in which are included the Proceedings of the London Anthropological Society (inaugurated 22 January, 1873.  No. 1, October, 1873.  London:  Bailliere, Tindall, and Co.) The Review (pp. 89-102), bears the well-known initials J. B. D., and it is not saying too much that no man in England is so well fitted as Dr. Davis to write it.  I quote these passages without any feeling of disrespect for the memory of the great African explorer.  Truth is a higher duty even than generous appreciation of a heroic name, and the time will come when Negrophilism must succumb to Fact.

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Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.