106 PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS SECTION E. 



Native in mentality there are certainly some Natives who are 

 superior to the average European, and many who are superior to 

 the lowest twenty-five per cent, of the European population. This 

 fact proves the artificiality and impossibility of ultimate survival 

 of a strict colour bar and is pregnant with trouble for us whites 

 in the future. 



If we are right in our surmise of the comparative mentality 

 of the Natives, it follows that sublimation of original nature will 

 be more difficult for Natives than for Europeans, and that to 

 expect the same standard of personal morality, truthfulness, and 

 gratitude (to select traits in which the black man is said to be 

 wanting) is hardly fair, since the mass of the Native people, and 

 certainly the servant class, from which we mostly make our infer- 

 ences, is so little removed from a barbarian environment. The 

 extraordinary fascination which the Old Testament has for Natives, 

 evidenced so tragically at Bulhoek, should remind us that we are 

 dealing with a people whose environment has produced a mental 

 outlook which is many years behind our own. With the Native 

 as with any primitive people, the emotions count more than the 

 intellect, so that justice must be simpler, punishment more suit- 

 able, rewards more immediate, and sympathy more practical, if we 

 are to deal psychologically with them. 



The theory of the arrested mental development of Natives at 

 puberty, to which the taking but irrational and misleading name 

 of "mental saturation" has been given, and which the writer 

 attempted to investigate in a former paper submitted to this Asso- 

 ciation, is being steadily refuted by the increasing number of 

 Natives who take advanced, or at least post-puberty, courses in 

 our educational institutions, but there seems a good deal of prac- 

 tical experience from this country to support McDougall's inter- 

 esting theory that the inability to sublimate elementary passions 

 and especially the sex instinct is responsible for a great deal of 

 non-achievement on the part of primitive peoples. Here, again, 

 restricted experiences and a narrow environment make it difficult 

 to inculcate in our black people the ideals which lift a nation. 



A vigorous attack on the much praised musical ability of the 

 Bantu was made in the Report of the Superintendent of Education 

 in Natal for 1919 by Mr. Percival R. Kirby, now Professor of 

 Music in the University College, Johannesburg. Mr. Kirby is 

 pessimistic about the teaching of music in the Native institutions 

 of Natal, and feels that "the teachers are fighting against heredi- 

 tary predispositions that are practically impossible to eradicate" 

 for the so-called "natural harmony of the Zulu is no more natural 

 to him than the European clothes which he wears, and it usually 

 fits him as well as they do." Mr. Kirby says that up to the 

 present he has never yet heard a set of even the simplest har- 

 monies sung by a Zulu choir sufficiently well in tune to satisfy a 

 cultured European musical ear. I have been hoping that some 

 European or Native would comment on this iconoclastic criticism, 

 but so far I have seen nothing in reply. 



