Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil
Negroes of South and West Africa, of the West Indies, and of the United
States are just awakening to their shameful slavery. Is, then, this war
the end of wars? Can it be the end, so long as sits enthroned, even in
the souls of those who cry peace, the despising and robbing of darker
peoples? If Europe hugs this delusion, then this is not the end of world
war,--it is but the beginning!
We see Europe's greatest sin precisely where we found Africa's and
Asia's,--in human hatred, the despising of men; with this difference,
however: Europe has the awful lesson of the past before her, has the
splendid results of widened areas of tolerance, sympathy, and love among
men, and she faces a greater, an infinitely greater, world of men than
any preceding civilization ever faced.
It is curious to see America, the United States, looking on herself,
first, as a sort of natural peacemaker, then as a moral protagonist in
this terrible time. No nation is less fitted for this role. For two or
more centuries America has marched proudly in the van of human
hatred,--making bonfires of human flesh and laughing at them hideously,
and making the insulting of millions more than a matter of
dislike,--rather a great religion, a world war-cry: Up white, down
black; to your tents, O white folk, and world war with black and
parti-colored mongrel beasts!
Instead of standing as a great example of the success of democracy and
the possibility of human brotherhood America has taken her place as an
awful example of its pitfalls and failures, so far as black and brown
and yellow peoples are concerned. And this, too, in spite of the fact
that there has been no actual failure; the Indian is not dying out, the
Japanese and Chinese have not menaced the land, and the experiment of
Negro suffrage has resulted in the uplift of twelve million people at a
rate probably unparalleled in history. But what of this? America, Land
of Democracy, wanted to believe in the failure of democracy so far as
darker peoples were concerned. Absolutely without excuse she established
a caste system, rushed into preparation for war, and conquered tropical
colonies. She stands today shoulder to shoulder with Europe in Europe's
worst sin against civilization. She aspires to sit among the great
nations who arbitrate the fate of "lesser breeds without the law" and
she is at times heartily ashamed even of the large number of "new" white
people whom her democracy has admitted to place and power. Against this
surging forward of Irish and German, of Russian Jew, Slav and "dago" her
social bars have not availed, but against Negroes she can and does take
her unflinching and immovable stand, backed by this new public policy of
Europe. She trains her immigrants to this despising of "niggers" from
the day of their landing, and they carry and send the news back to the
submerged classes in the fatherlands.
* * * * *
All this I see and hear up in my tower, above the thunder of the seven
seas. From my narrowed windows I stare into the night that looms beneath
the cloud-swept stars. Eastward and westward storms are
breaking,--great, ugly whirlwinds of hatred and blood and cruelty. I
will not believe them inevitable. I will not believe that all that was
must be, that all the shameful drama of the past must be done again
today before the sunlight sweeps the silver seas.
If I cry amid this roar of elemental forces, must my cry be in vain,
because it is but a cry,--a small and human cry amid Promethean gloom?
Back beyond the world and swept by these wild, white faces of the awful
dead, why will this Soul of White Folk,--this modern Prometheus,--hang
bound by his own binding, tethered by a fable of the past? I hear his
mighty cry reverberating through the world, "I am white!" Well and good,
O Prometheus, divine thief! Is not the world wide enough for two colors,
for many little shinings of the sun? Why, then, devour your own vitals
if I answer even as proudly, "I am black!"
_The Riddle of the Sphinx_
Dark daughter of the lotus leaves that watch the Southern Sea!
Wan spirit of a prisoned soul a-panting to be free!
The muttered music of thy streams, the whisper of the deep,
Have kissed each other in God's name and kissed a world to sleep.
The will of the world is a whistling wind, sweeping a cloud-swept sky,
And not from the East and not from the West knelled that
soul-waking cry,
But out of the South,--the sad, black South--it screamed from
the top of the sky,
Crying: "Awake, O ancient race!" Wailing, "O woman, arise!"
And crying and sighing and crying again as a voice in the
midnight cries,--
But the burden of white men bore her back and the white world
stifled her sighs.
The white world's vermin and filth:
All the dirt of London,
All the scum of New York;
Valiant spoilers of women
And conquerers of unarmed men;
Shameless breeders of bastards,
Drunk with the greed of gold,
Baiting their blood-stained hooks
With cant for the souls of the simple;
Bearing the white man's burden
Of liquor and lust and lies!
Unthankful we wince in the East,
Unthankful we wail from the westward,
Unthankfully thankful, we curse,
In the unworn wastes of the wild:
I hate them, Oh!
I hate them well,
I hate them, Christ!
As I hate hell!
If I were God,
I'd sound their knell
This day!
Who raised the fools to their glory,
But black men of Egypt and Ind,
Ethiopia's sons of the evening,
Indians and yellow Chinese,
Arabian children of morning,
And mongrels of Rome and Greece?
Ah, well!
And they that raised the boasters
Shall drag them down again,--
Down with the theft of their thieving
And murder and mocking of men;
Down with their barter of women
And laying and lying of creeds;
Down with their cheating of childhood
And drunken orgies of war,--
down
down
deep down,
Till the devil's strength be shorn,
Till some dim, darker David, a-hoeing of his corn,
And married maiden, mother of God,
Bid the black Christ be born!
Then shall our burden be manhood,
Be it yellow or black or white;
And poverty and justice and sorrow,
The humble, and simple and strong
Shall sing with the sons of morning
And daughters of even-song:
Black mother of the iron hills that ward the blazing sea,
Wild spirit of a storm-swept soul, a-struggling to be free,
Where 'neath the bloody finger-marks thy riven bosom quakes,
Thicken the thunders of God's Voice and lo! a world awakes!
III
THE HANDS OF ETHIOPIA
"_Semper novi quid ex Africa_," cried the Roman proconsul, and he voiced
the verdict of forty centuries. Yet there are those who would write
world history and leave out of account this most marvelous of
continents. Particularly today most men assume that Africa is far afield
from the center of our burning social problems and especially from our
problem of world war.
Always Africa is giving us something new or some metempsychosis of a
world-old thing. On its black bosom arose one of the earliest, if not
the earliest, of self-protecting civilizations, which grew so mightily
that it still furnishes superlatives to thinking and speaking men. Out
of its darker and more remote forest fastnesses came, if we may credit
many recent scientists, the first welding of iron, and we know that
agriculture and trade flourished there when Europe was a wilderness.
Nearly every human empire that has arisen in the world, material and
spiritual, has found some of its greatest crises on this continent of
Africa, from Greece to Great Britain. As Mommsen says: "It was through
Africa that Christianity became the religion of the world." In Africa
the last flood of Germanic invasions spent itself within hearing of the
last gasp of Byzantium, and it was through Africa that Islam came to
play its great role of conqueror and civilizer.
With the Renaissance and the widened world of modern thought Africa came
no less suddenly with her new-old gift. Shakespeare's "Ancient Pistol"
cries:
A foutre for the world and worldlings base!
I speak of Africa and golden joys!
He echoes a legend of gold from the days of Punt and Ophir to those of
Ghana, the Gold Coast, and the Rand. This thought had sent the world's
greed scurrying down the hot, mysterious coasts of Africa to the Good
Hope of gain, until for the first time a real world-commerce was born,
albeit it started as a commerce mainly in the bodies and souls of men.
The present problem of problems is nothing more than democracy beating
itself helplessly against the color bar,--purling, seeping, seething,
foaming to burst through, ever and again overwhelming the emerging
masses of white men in its rolling backwaters and held back by those who
dream of future kingdoms of greed built on black and brown and yellow
slavery.
The indictment of Africa against Europe is grave. For four hundred years
white Europe was the chief support of that trade in human beings which
first and last robbed black Africa of a hundred million human beings,
transformed the face of her social life, overthrew organized government,
distorted ancient industry, and snuffed out the lights of cultural
development. Today instead of removing laborers from Africa to distant
slavery, industry built on a new slavery approaches Africa to deprive
the natives of their land, to force them to toil, and to reap all the
profit for the white world.
It is scarcely necessary to remind the reader of the essential facts
underlying these broad assertions. A recent law of the Union of South
Africa assigns nearly two hundred and fifty million acres of the best of
natives' land to a million and a half whites and leaves thirty-six
million acres of swamp and marsh for four and a half-million blacks. In
Rhodesia over ninety million acres have been practically confiscated. In
the Belgian Congo all the land was declared the property of the state.
Slavery in all but name has been the foundation of the cocoa industry in
St. Thome and St. Principe and in the mines of the Rand. Gin has been
one of the greatest of European imports, having increased fifty per
cent. in ten years and reaching a total of at least twenty-five million
dollars a year today. Negroes of ability have been carefully gotten rid
of, deposed from authority, kept out of positions of influence, and
discredited in their people's eyes, while a caste of white overseers and
governing officials has appeared everywhere.
Naturally, the picture is not all lurid. David Livingstone has had his
successors and Europe has given Africa something of value in the
beginning of education and industry. Yet the balance of iniquity is
desperately large; but worse than that, it has aroused no world protest.
A great Englishman, familiar with African problems for a generation,
says frankly today: "There does not exist any real international
conscience to which you can appeal."
Moreover, that treatment shows no certain signs of abatement. Today in
England the Empire Resources Development Committee proposes to treat
African colonies as "crown estates" and by intensive scientific
exploitation of both land and labor to make these colonies pay the
English national debt after the war! German thinkers, knowing the
tremendous demand for raw material which would follow the war, had
similar plans of exploitation. "It is the clear, common sense of the