It is sometimes said in travellers’ tales that Christianity does more harm than good among the African peoples. It seems at first to destroy their native virtues without building up new ones, to change external observances without giving real Christian character.

There is a certain amount of truth in this, and apart from the more mysterious causes—that first knowledge of the moral law tends, as St. Paul said, to multiply sin—there are many others not far to seek.

The real Africans, the negroes and the peoples called the Bantu, who are nearly negroes, covering the southern two-thirds of the continent, are essentially gregarious. In the village community, which was more or less uniform from the northern tropics to the Cape before the white man came and brought his individualism, there was a most strict community of life. There is a story of some European philanthropist who wrote to a Bishop in Africa offering to finance an orphanage. The missionaries laughed. There was not, and hardly is, in spite of all changes, an ‘orphan’ among the tribes. The children belonged to the community as much as to the father. Food was virtually pooled in this society; all the communty turned out, freely without payment, to build each other’s house, to hoe each other’s field, to herd each other’s cattle. It went to extremes when, as in some tribes, the chief’s relatives had to be buried with him, whether they happened to be dead or alive.