222 
SAVAGE SUDAN 
return to their mother, but he said, ‘Woman, the white 
child is my son and he shall rule over the black one, 
and the black one shall be bought and sold by him.’ 
Then to enable the white man to gain the pre-eminence, 
God gave him many useful weapons and inventions such 
as are found in the house of the white man. The 
Shilluks think that the white man has been able to 
rule the black only because God favoured him and gave 
these machines to him. They also think that God’s 
prejudice was unjust. 
“The utter inconsequence of all this, its half-held, 
half-interrupted lines of thought illustrate the mentality 
of the savage—childish, often irrelevant, yet never wholly 
illogical. To me there seems an ever lurking suggestion, 
alike in their beliefs and in their personal bearing, of 
latent possibilities of development-—gradual and pro¬ 
tracted though such must necessarily be. Splendidly 
equipped physically, the Shilluks and other Nilotic 
aborigines are certainly not devoid of potential mental 
cultivation. In these tribes we have, in short, a vast 
human reserve of ‘ raw material ’ capable of manufacture, 
degree by degree and process by process, into a finished 
article of value. 
“ Fancy may picture singular little half-seen analogies 
between these primitive Shilluk traditions and some of 
our own scriptural records. Thus Man’s deception of 
the Creator in order to obtain the spear promised to 
the buffalo recalls the incident of Jacob stealing Esau’s 
birthright by a similar trick. Then the impersonation of 
the Deity in human form as Nikawng seems to shadow 
a sort of inflection of the Incarnation. No sort of 
parallel, however, is traceable in the vulture story. A 
vulture, as we know it, has surely no personal qualifica¬ 
tions to practise as a handle-maker ? Except such 
instances, and allowing for the fabulous (such as an 
oribi giving birth to an elephant or a hippopotamus), the 
Shilluk zoology follows the lines of observed Nature.” 
