472 
BRITISH CENTRAL AFRICA 
Such is the Negro of South Central Africa. I have endeavoured to place 
before the reader an accurate summing up of his physical and mental character¬ 
istics. He is a fine animal, but in his wild state exhibits a stunted mind and a 
dull content with his surroundings which induces mental stagnation, cessation 
of all upward progress, and even of retrogression towards the brute. In some 
respects I think the tendency of the negro for several centuries past has been 
an actually retrograde one. As we come to read the unwritten history of 
Africa by researches into languages, manners, customs, traditions, we seem to 
see a backward rather than a forward movement going on for some thousand 
years past—a return towards the savage and even the brute. I can believe it 
possible that had Africa been more isolated from contact with the rest of the 
world, and cut off from the immigration of the Arab and the European, the 
purely negroid races, left to themselves, so far from advancing towards a higher 
type of humanity, might have actually reverted by degrees to a type no longer 
human, just as those great apes lingering in the dense forests of Western Africa, 
into which they are, relatively speaking, quite recent immigrants from Asia and 
Europe, have become in many respects degraded types that have known better 
days of larger brains and smaller tusks and stouter legs. Fortunately for the 
black man, in all his varieties but two or three of the most retrograde, he is not 
too far gone for recovery and for an upward turn upon the evolutionary path— 
a turn which, if resolutely followed, may with steady strides bring him upon a 
level at some future day with the white and yellow species of man. 
YOUNG AFRICA ” 
