CIVILISATION AND THE NATIVE

Evening Post, Issue 52, 2 March 1935, Page 25

CIVILISATION AND THE NATIVE

Dr. .; Audrey Richards, lecturer in anthropology at the London School of Economics,-who has twice been out to Northern Khodesia and lived for about eighteen ■ months among ' the natives, addressed the Manchester' Luncheon Club recently on "The crocodile kings of Central Africa." ' ~

She explained that there were no longer any crocodile kings of Central Africa in the accepted sense. Central Africa was changing rapidly. When she first went out .in' 1930 she had to go the last four hundred; miles in a lorry from the railway, but when she came back in 1934 they could land in the: middle of the "bush" in an Imperial Airways machine.

The one-time crocodile king no longer wore his. robes of office, but shorts and a tennis shirt. She had sometimes sat in the hut of the paramount chief while he reclined on a European ;bed with a calabash pi beer at his side/and a. gigantic alarm clock, ' which he was always anxious to have . set by her watch. His one and only clerk was supposed to come into work by that clock and strike a gong when , he arrived. When she asked him why j 'the man did not also strike the gong ' when he left work, the chief replied, "The man always remembers when to knock off work. His difficulty is to remember when to begin." The anthropologist today. had 'to study a tribe as it was being affected1 by. modern conditions. She "knew'.'it•was said that there-were parts of Africa where the white man's foot had -never trod, but there was how no part v where the white man had never trod. !In the parts where he trod infrequent[ly the native villages were conservß-. ; live and clung to their old customs;

but in the modern villages near the white settlements the natives would do anything for money, and the women were crazy • for clothes. It was the anthropologist's task to try to assess the process of change that was going on. t

These crocodile kings had sacred powers. But to visualise them they must imagine beery old gentlemen, sitting rather sadly within their palisades, threatened by the old men of the tribe for not performing the right sacrifices and threatened by the fathers of the nearest mission with an unpleasant future if they did perform the sacrifices. The position of crocodile king was not now an enviable one. In the old days they derived their wealth from ivory and from the tribute they exacted'from other tribes; with war prohibited it must be realised that they had lost their main sources of income. The crocodile king earned nothing and he often had less... money than the average cook. The problem was to find out how the crocodile kings/ with their tremendous power, could be turned into successful civil servants in the modern State. At the copper mines., the natives came from villages of forty or fifty huts to live in huge compounds of 6000 to 7000 people in barrack-like rooms. They were dazzled by the white civilisation and often worked at mechanical tasks. Some of them ran back; many stayed ah* got used to it The anthropologist 'hoped that by the' study of the crocodile kings and the sources from which they derived their power information would be provided that would make more easy the process of change from one: civilisation .to another and prevent some of the disruptive effects of civilisation upon a primitive tribe.