MISSIONARIES 
20 I 
missionary household I have already described, should stay at a station of the 
Universities Mission in Central Africa or with any of the Roman Catholic 
Fathers, he will have very pleasant experiences, though they may be of a 
different nature. The good Fathers of the Roman Catholic Church, and 
the Anglican priests from our two great Universities, will entertain him with a 
whole-hearted hospitality, though he will not perhaps enter so much into their 
private lives as with the married Protestant missionary. In the case of the 
Anglican missionaries he will derive more the impression that he is staying at a 
college, a college where there is very plain living and high thinking. With the 
Roman Catholics the food is thoroughly good, well cooked and appetising, and 
all reproach of luxury removed from it when it is understood that it is almost 
all of local production and due to the energy and husbandry of the Fathers 
and their pupils. I repeat, there is something very suggestive of the English 
public-school about the Anglican missionaries. Athletics bulk largely and 
wholesomely in their curriculum. Their boy pupils are soon taught to play 
football and cricket, and to use the oar rather than the paddle; but it cannot 
be truthfully said that these missionaries keep a good table or care sufficiently 
for their creature comforts. Their houses are often of poor construction, untidy 
and unattractive: it is obvious that they are under no care of womankind. 
The missionary snatches his meals hastily, scarcely tasting what goes down his 
throat. On his untidy bureau there will be at one and the same time the newest 
philosophical treatise from England and an ugly tin teapot of over-stewed tea. 
But I shall not continue my criticisms in this respect, as these missionaries are 
now much of the same opinion as myself on the subject of the sheer necessity 
of comfort, if one intends to lead a healthy life in Africa, and I believe 
steps are now being taken to supply each University Mission Station with one 
or more lay brothers who will attend to household cares. 
I have made many allusions to missionary hospitality. Missionaries and the 
Portuguese are alike in this respect. As a people the Portuguese are the most 
hospitable I know in any part of the globe’s surface, showing their hospitality as 
a kind of instinct alike to friend and enemy. The missionary, in the same way, 
regards hospitality as a sacred duty. No matter whether his guest is disposed 
to cavil at his work or to sympathise with it he gives him the best he has, and 
often more than he himself can afford ; and too frequently the return both to 
the Portuguese settler or official and to the missionary is thankless abuse, or 
ridicule, on the part of the passing traveller. I have known explorers who owed 
their lives and the success of their journeys and the saving of a vast amount 
of expenditure to Portuguese officials, planters or traders, who helped them by 
the way. When they returned to Europe, however, it was only to dilate on all 
that was defective in the Portuguese system of government, or faulty in the 
characteristics of the race. Likewise how many travellers and sportsmen have 
lived for weeks light-heartedly at the expense of a missionary or of a series 
of missionaries, and then have taken the earliest opportunity of sneering at 
them and spreading calumnious reports as to their mode of life. I remember 
an instance of this in one who is now dead and therefore shall be nameless. 
He had visited the French priests at Bagamoyo, on the East Coast of Africa. 
Wishing to do him honour as an explorer and an Englishman, the good Fathers 
concerted together, and agreed to sacrifice their last bottle of champagne (kept 
as an occasional medicine) in his honour. What was the result ? He returned 
to Europe and said, “ Those missionaries live like fighting-cocks, they drink 
champagne every day.” 
