204 
BRITISH CENTRAL AFRICA 
sent to the Lovedale Institute in South Africa, and Robert Ntundulima and 
Joseph Evangel to Scotland ; and of the great things which were to be expected 
from the raising up of a native Pastorate. Then this student will in the later 
“ nineties ” visit British Central Africa and it will gradually dawn on him that 
this disreputable scoundrel, living with and constantly beating four wives, and 
so often inebriated with native forms of alcohol that he is continually in the 
police courts, is Simpson Chokabwino; or that this lying “ capitao ” who is 
brought before a magistrate charged with defrauding his employer (a coffee 
planter) by a forged bill is Joseph Evangel. Perhaps Robert Ntundulima may 
be found to have settled in douce sloth, though still a church goer with one 
wife, but with all religious enthusiasm dead and an expensive education wasted 
on market gardening. 
At the present moment although missionaries have been at work in British 
Central Africa since 1875, the numbers of real, sincere, believing, professing 
Christians amongst their native adherents are relatively small. The Universities 
Mission may count 300, the Church of Scotland 400, and the Free Church 
Mission 500, because the missionaries themselves are grown far honester than 
their predecessors of the “ forties ” and “ fifties ” and are very careful not to 
confuse converts with adherents and scholars, therefore in their returns they 
only give the actual number of baptised and confirmed Christians, but this 
in no way gauges the real results of their work. 1 Their scholars may be 
numbered by the thousand though those scholars may not be sufficiently 
advanced in their religious belief to be baptised ; and their adherents—that 
is to say, all the surrounding natives who more or less follow their advice and 
are benefited by the example of the mission in striving to live peacefully and 
decently—number thousands more. Even if the actual religious results of so 
much labour and expenditure of lives and wealth seem inadequate it is 
consoling to reflect on the immense service which missionary enterprise has 
rendered to Africa and to the world at large. When the history of the great 
African states of the future comes to be written, the arrival of the first 
missionary will with many of these new nations be the first historical event 
in their annals, allowing for the matter of fact and realistic character of 
historical analysis in the 21st century. This pioneering propagandist will 
nevertheless assume somewhat of the character of a Ouetzalcoatl—one of those 
strange half-mythical personalities which figure in the legends of old American 
empires ; the beneficent being who introduced arts and manufactures, imple¬ 
ments of husbandry, edible fruits, medical drugs, cereals, domestic animals. 
To missionaries rather than to traders or government officials many districts 
of tropical Africa owe the introduction of the orange, lime, and mango, of 
the cocoanut-palm, the cacao-bean and the pine apple. Improved breeds of 
poultry and pigeons, many useful vegetables, and beautiful garden flowers have 
been and are being taken further and further into the poorly-endowed regions 
of barbarous Africa by these emissaries of Christianity. It is they too who 
in many cases have first taught the natives carpentry, joinery, masonry, 
tailoring, cobbling, engineering, book-keeping, printing, and European cookery ; 
to say nothing of reading, writing, arithmetic and a smattering of general 
1 In other parts of Africa, principally British possessions, large numbers of nominal Christians exist, 
hut their religion is discredited by numbering amongst its adherents all the drunkards, liars, rogues, and 
unclean livers. Among the natives in or near European settlements in one of the oldest of our West 
African possessions all the unrepentant Magdalenes of the chief city are professing Christians, and I 
remember when visiting the place referred to in 1888 seeing a black Messalina going to church in pomp, 
clad in a white silk dress and followed by a train of negro admirers. 
