254 



DISCOVERY 



latter. " The Melanesians," as Mr. Durrad, who has 

 served for many years in the Melanesian Mission 

 on Torres and Banks Islands, points out, " are ignorant 

 <of the real objects of clothing, and seem to look on it 

 more as a way of ornamenting the person than as 

 anything else. . . . European clothes are unnecessary 

 and are a source of disease. Moreover, they are \\orn 

 without any system of consistency. A man will wear, 

 perhaps, a flimsy loin-cloth and a hat. Another day, 

 a warmer one, he may appear in a shirt in addition. 

 On 3^et another occasion one sees him in a pair of 

 trousers only ; or, again, in trousers and waistcoat . 

 Or, if a full-blooded indentured workman, he appears 

 garbed in trousers, shirt, possiblv also a vest, a 

 dungaree jacket, and a hat. . . . The women wear 

 several laj-ers of skirts and often a sort of short bodice. 

 As a skirt becomes ragged another is superimposed, 

 while the rags beneath gradually rot off. Clothes are 

 worn till they cease to exist as recognisable garments." 

 Such descriptions make amusing enough reading, but 

 the effects of these practices are disastrous on islands 

 where 'dampness prevails for long periods of the j-ear. 

 The recruiting of labour by planters, which is nowadays 

 carried out voluntarily (except that " Frenchmen at 

 times use violence and craft to get recruits"), takes 

 men and women away from their tribes at the time of 

 life when they should be producing children, and for 

 this reason alone is one of the largest causes of depopu- 

 lation. Moreover, numbers of them never return. 

 This is especially the case ^\■ith the Torres Islanders, 

 who are enticed to go to plantations in the Southern 

 New Hebrides. " Kept in debt by their French 

 masters or tempted by alcohol, they are tied and 

 bound for term after term of service and can rarely 

 get free from the bonds which hold them." Perhaps 

 more important than all is the psychological effect of 

 this prolonged absence from their homes, which sends 

 them back only to be discontented with their old 

 surroundings after tasting the pleasures of civilisation, 

 and eventually to become a discordant and revolu- 

 tionary element in the communal life. 



***** 

 Here we come to what the late Dr. Rivers con- 

 sidered the most potent agent in the downfall of these 

 races — ^the psychological changes which we have not 

 been able to pre\-ent ourselves from forcing upon 

 them, or have forced upon them unwittingly, in the 

 past. " When Melanesia became subject to Europeans, 

 magistrates and missionaries were sent to rule and 

 direct the lives of the people. They found in existence 

 a number of institutions and customs which were, or 

 seemed to them to be, contrary to the principles of 

 morality. Such customs were usually forbidden with- 

 out any inquiry into their real nature, without know- 

 ledge of the part they took in native life, and without 



any attempt to discriminate between their good and 

 bad elements." The sudden stopping of head-hunting 

 in the Solomon Islands left so great a gap in the daily 

 interests of the natives that they very speedily lost 

 their virility. The discouragement by missionaries in 

 Fiji of the custom (which seemed to them incompatible 

 with the ideals of the Christian family) by which men 

 and women slept in different quarters, led to too free 

 intercourse between the sexes. Again, in the New 

 Hebrides a " highly complicated organisation arising 

 out of beliefs connected with the cult of dead ancestors " 

 was put an end to with disastrous results, in that it 

 formed a highly important part of the social and 

 economic life of the people. These and many other 

 factors have brought about a loss of interest in life 

 amongst the islanders which, as the late Dr. Rivers has 

 indicated, has sapped their vitality and been both a 

 direct and indirect influence in the process of depopula- 

 tion. 



^ -fC 3fC S|C ^ 



Professor Schweitzer has come to such similar con- 

 clusions on the problem of the relationships betweeen 

 the white and black races in Equatorial Africa that 

 there is no need to enumerate them. Neither book is 

 essentially pessimistic. The outlook is bad, but not 

 hopeless. Where Christianity has, for instance, been 

 carefully fostered in Melanesia so that it has not at 

 once destroyed the old religious traditions and cere- 

 monial, the people have embraced it with enthusiasm 

 and ha\-e regained, and even increased, their vitality. 

 In Africa, too, similar results have been obtained. 



Yet we have to face the facts and to realise that 

 the first shock of a far-advanced civilisation on primi- 

 tive and semi-primitive races is so great and destruc- 

 tive, unless carefully regulated, that it may result in 

 complete annihilation, let alone demoralisation. The 

 history of the world may be broadly viewed as a series 

 of these shocks, of these tides of superior civilisations 

 sweeping over and obliterating inferior ones. But we 

 hope that the time has at last come w'hen a superior 

 civilisation will find means of curbing its destructive- 

 ness. Some of the measures recommended by these 

 books are : a careful study bv officials, missionaries, 

 traders and residents, of the customs of the natives, 

 a gradual bringing into harmony of native customs 

 with European customs and Christianity, financial 

 encouragement of birth-production, more systematic 

 medical research and service, an encouragement of 

 interest in the economic life of the community, the 

 realisation by the white man that natives of tropical 

 countries cannot be overworked with impunity. To 

 sum up in the words of the late Dr. Rivers, " some- 

 thing must be done, and done quickly, to give the 

 native that renewed interest in life to which the health 

 of peoples is mainly due." 



