14 president's address. 



butes of a civilisation, while in the same period other peoples have 

 progressed in one direction or another. He has directed none of 

 the forces of Nature to his advantage, nor has he discovered any 

 of Nature's secrets and moulded them to his needs. As Mr. 

 Putnam Weale, in "The Conflict of Colour," says: "The black 

 man has given nothing to the world. He has never made a nation. 

 He belongs to nothing but a subject race. He has no architecture 

 of his own, no art, no history, no real religion, unless animism 

 be a religion. His hands have reared no enduring monuments 

 save where they have been forcibly directed by the energies of 

 other races." In this respect the Negro is far below and altogether 

 apart from the coloured peoples of India, China and Japan, who 

 have evolved high civilisations of their own. We have much to 

 learn from them, but the Negro contributes little or nothing to 

 the world's stock of knowledge; of all the great races, his has 

 given the least evidence of originative and constructive powers. 



Yet though the power of originality may not be in the Negro, 

 there is much to indicate that under favourable conditions he 

 possesses to a high degree the capacity for assimilating the attain- 

 ments of others. And for this his state of mental negation is in 

 his favour. He starts his racial history afresh on coming into 

 contact with the white and, bringing nothing with him, he has 

 nothing to give up; there is nothing to be displaced; his mind is 

 open and receptive; he accepts implicitly once he understands. 

 The representatives of the race who have risen to professional rank 

 may be taken as evidence of the possibilities of absorption, but we 

 have yet to discover that they are capable of conducting original 

 investigation or are in any ways inventive. From these examples 

 there is no reason to suppose that, given the opportunity, the black 

 cannot assimilate the full measure of the white man's acquirements, 

 that is, all that the white man has gained during his centuries of 

 progressive effort. 



Religious beliefs and practices are perhaps the most deep- 

 seated of all the attributes of a people, vet those of the Negro are 

 held but loosely. The Rev. Henri A. Junod in his Presidential 

 Address befoi'e the Anthropological Section last year remarked : 

 "The Christian God very easily supplants the ancestral god in 

 his prayers. . . . The Christian religion is bound to conquer the 

 Bantu in a comparatively short time." Tins was written after 

 thirty years of experience of the native. The whole attitude of 

 the Negro in South Africa towards the white man is one of 

 dependence and receptiveness. He practically gives up all he has 

 and takes up the white man's religion, education, customs and 

 mode of life. He has but little independence and initiative in 

 measures which make for progress. This reliance and absence of 

 any constructiveness is strikingly revealed in books written bv the 

 native dealing with his own problems, such as "Native Life in 

 South Africa." bv Sol. T. Plaatje. and "The Bantu." bv S. M. 

 Molema O920), and others bv Jabavu. Contrast the African 

 Negro with the people of Japan. The latter had evolved a high 

 civilisation of their own. Yet on coming into contact with the 



