Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [65]
From physical examination he observed that, while their bodies were better suited to African weather than those of white men, black people were shorter, less stable, with ‘inferior eyesight, cruder tastes and less developed sensibilities’. Yet at birth there was hardly any difference: ‘young Negro children are nearly as intelligent as European children; but the older they grow the less intelligent they become. They exhibit when young, an animal liveliness for play and tricks far surpassing the European child.’ Hunt then leaped to the conclusion that the ‘incapacity’ of Africans was the consequence of puberty – the African’s brain simply stopped growing earlier than the brain of a European. As the skull settled and assumed recognizably African characteristics, the space available for the development of the brain shrank. ‘This premature union of the bones of the skull may give a clue to much of the mental inferiority which is seen in the Negro race.’ This did not put the African right at the bottom of the heap, for in slavery he had demonstrated a tremendous capacity for work, which made him not entirely beyond the possibility of redemption. But ‘the analogies are far more numerous between the Negro and apes than between the European and apes … the Negro is inferior intellectually to the European … [and] can only be humanised and civilised by Europeans’.
When Hunt delivered his crackpot confection to a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, ‘my statement of the simple facts was received with such loud hisses that you would have thought the room had nearly been filled with a quantity of Eve’s tempters instead of her amiable descendants’. What had especially incited the abuse was his defence of slavery. ‘Our Bristol and Liverpool merchants’, he said, had, ‘perhaps, helped to benefit the race when they transplanted some of them to America’. He insisted he was not suggesting a restoration of the slave trade, which was plainly evil. But it was evil only because it was indiscriminate. What, he wanted to know, was wrong with giving Africa the opportunity to export ‘her worthless or surplus population’? The catcalls and hisses demonstrate the depth of popular commitment to a more humane set of values. Hunt’s pernicious nonsense struck at Britain’s main moral cause in the world, did not gain widespread support and is interesting only for the light it throws on how thoughtful Britons struggled to find a way of comprehending the moral justification for the empire. Much more common was a belief within missionary organizations of a ‘hierarchy of civilisation’ which acknowledged that some foreign cultures – notably in countries like Japan – although different from Britain’s, were nonetheless of ‘the highest international rank’. Next on the ladder came comparatively sophisticated societies ‘under Christian rule or influence’, like India. The indigenous peoples of ‘low civilisation’ which had not yet been brought under European rule or influence were at the bottom of the tree.
Yet a genuine affection for Africa and Africans could be seen in the Church of Scotland missionary who built the extraordinary church in Blantyre, David Clement Scott. He preferred, he said, to think of Christ taking upon himself ‘the form of Africa [which] bears the sins of the world’s rulers’, and asked, ‘How long are we as a nation going to lay our selfishness, our meanness, our falsehoods, our lusts, yea, and the whole burden of our sins upon this Lamb of God?’ Often this concern for indigenous peoples expressed itself in a conviction that Africans were ‘child-like’. The term