Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil
permanently skilled labor without also raising common labor, so, too, there can be no permanent uplift of American or European labor as long as African laborers are slaves.Secondly, this building of a new African State does not mean the
segregation in it of all the world's black folk. It is too late in the
history of the world to go back to the idea of absolute racial
segregation. The new African State would not involve any idea of a vast
transplantation of the twenty-seven million Negroids of the western
world, of Africa, or of the gathering there of Negroid Asia. The Negroes
in the United States and the other Americas have earned the right to
fight out their problems where they are, but they could easily furnish
from time to time technical experts, leaders of thought, and
missionaries of culture for their backward brethren in the new Africa.

With these two principles, the practical policies to be followed out in
the government of the new states should involve a thorough and complete
system of modern education, built upon the present government, religion,
and customary laws of the natives. There should be no violent tampering
with the curiously efficient African institutions of local
self-government through the family and the tribe; there should be no
attempt at sudden "conversion" by religious propaganda. Obviously
deleterious customs and unsanitary usages must gradually be abolished,
but the general government, set up from without, must follow the example
of the best colonial administrators and build on recognized, established
foundations rather than from entirely new and theoretical plans.

The real effort to modernize Africa should be through schools rather
than churches. Within ten years, twenty million black children ought to
be in school. Within a generation young Africa should know the essential
outlines of modern culture and groups of bright African students could
be going to the world's great universities. From the beginning the
actual general government should use both colored and white officials
and later natives should be worked in. Taxation and industry could
follow the newer ideals of industrial democracy, avoiding private land
monopoly and poverty, and promoting co-operation in production and the
socialization of income. Difficulties as to capital and revenue would be
far less than many imagine. If a capable English administrator of
British Nigeria could with $1,500 build up a cocoa industry of twenty
million dollars annually, what might not be done in all Africa, without
gin, thieves, and hypocrisy?

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