144 I'TTrKK (>!• NATIVE KACE8 Ol' S. KHOJ)KSTA. 



virtues, were able to enforce stability on their fellows by savage 

 methods. It was the absolute moral virtues of Chaka and 

 Lobengula which made them so pre-eminent, and gave stability 

 to the nations they ruled. Whenever black races have come under 

 civilised or semi-civilised conditions, everything has proved the 

 utter lack of foundation for any such belief in intellectual develop- 

 ment resulting necessarily in moral development. With the 

 passing of the leadership of native thought from the possessors 

 of the moral strength to the possessors of intellectual strength, our 

 one plain duty is, create a miJieii favourable to the development of 

 moral virtues, add link upon link to the chain of Moi'al Social 

 Heredity. Stabilise. We have one factor in our favour, as 

 compared with the United States of America, in facing our 

 problem, the racial characteristic of saving, that I believe our 

 Rhodesian natives possess. 



I am a thorough-going believer in Benjamin Kidd's dictum 

 that the collective emotion of the mass is almost infinitely more 

 powerful than individual racial heredity, and that by a correct 

 apprehension of methods the whole life of a nation can be modified 

 in a very short space of time. Nations do change in their national 

 characteristics. Nations have in the past changed extraordinarily. 

 The French of 1890 and of 1910 were totallv unlike, and also 

 the Greeks of 1898 and the Greeks of 1912. 



Before going any further, I wish to draw attention to one 

 matter which is not generally appreciated. That is, the orienta- 

 tion of Southern Ehodesia in matters affecting natives. Usually 

 in Native Affairs we feel that our kinshij) is with the Union of 

 South Africa. We study their problems for tlie light they may 

 throw" upon ours, and probably vice verfM. This, I believe, is 

 wrong. 



Although in matters affecting Europeans we are for the most 

 part to be looked on as the most northern part of South Africa, 

 in native matters we are, I submit, more to be regarded as the 

 most southern part of Central Africa. The native problem in an 

 acute form similar to our native problem affects only portions of 

 the Union, e.g., Zululand, Kaffraria. It pervades the whole of 

 Ehodesia. In the Union the native, if not submerged, is at least 

 submersible. In Ehodesia he is not submersible, he is insistent. 

 In Ehodesia tlie native is more, the European less, in his proper 

 latitude — the bulk of Southern Ehodesia is in the tropics. The 

 mere fact that the major portion of the Union would be a perfectl.y 

 good country for the white man even without a native in it, 

 whereas the Ehodesian climate probably renders the black man an 

 absolute necessity to the white man, marks a deep gulf between 

 the two. It is possible that the passage of time and a policy of 

 laissez faire would clarify the native ])roblem in the south ; witli 

 us it would merely intensify it. In the Union, except in certain 

 secluded areas, the native will always be the helot of civic life, 

 which will centre in the Europeans almost exclusively. In 

 Ehodesia this cannot be. No, for common ground on native 

 affairs we must look to the noi'th. From a native point of view 

 the barriers on the south of Ehodesia are much more formidable 

 than those on the north, especially north of Mashonaland. The 

 Current of native life that flows to and fro between Southern 



