POINTS OF VIEW.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 198, 22 August 1935, Page 18

POINTS OF VIEW.

THE ONLOOKER'S CASE.

MISSIONARY WORK

In last Wednesday's "Star," under the heading "Hands Off the Heathen," M. B. Soljak claims that the !ot of primitive races has been rendered worse by the interference of missionaries, that missions have paved the way for trade, leading to the introduction of disease, alcohol, etc., and that in some cases missionaries treated the natives cruelly. Can M.B.S. possibly believe that, if missionaries had never gone to primitive peoples, greed of gain would not have driven unscrupulous traders to these regions? The idea is absurd. A distinguished Bantu journalist and university professor, D. D. T. Jabavu, 8.A., writing on the service rendered by missionaries to his race says, "... the goocL thev have rendered to the Bantu . . .

cannot be reckoned. . . . They were the only friends among the white race upon whom we could count for better or worse. A mission station was always a bright beacon, a lighted window in the darkness." M. B. Soljak says these races have at least suited conditions to environment. What were the conditions? Livingstone, who knew, wrote, "Blood, blood, everywhere blood." Donald Fraser in "The Future of Africa , ' save: "Three hundred killed and buried with dead king, Cliaka's mother died, rivers said to have run blood; widows buried alive; men., slaughtered to stop plague; impossible to exaggerate evils of witchcraft, killed more than slave trade; secret societies involved youths and maidens in unrestrained vice, posturinge of loathsome obscenity . . . moral rottenness of school in which these little ones are trained; infanticide prevalent; murder of twins also; cannibalism in certain regions, wars to supply human flesh, sold in Congo markets; Fans cat instead of burying their dead; drunkenness all prevailing, whole villages drunk for days together." These facts could be amply substantiated by evidence from many trustworthy sources. In contrast note the following sentence taken from a speech by Dr. N. McLean in Glasgow in 1922: "The Livingstonia mission turned war into peace, cruelty into mercy and the cries of porisldng races into the psalms of thanksgiving along the shores of Lake Kyasa." Two pictures of the same region. Yet M.B.S. says "Hands off the Heathen." Regarding Australia, cruelty to natives was never the policy or the result of missions whatever individual missionaries may have done and the churches and missionaries have been and are leaders in the fight for better treatment of the aborigines. J-D.