Present Conditions in Liberia Under Investigation by Schwab

The following extracts, dealing with "George Schwab and the Peabody Museum Expedition to Liberia" are reprinted from an article in the current Harvard Alumni Bulletin by E. A. Hooton, associate professor of Anthropology at the Peabody Museum.

...Liberia is a large country, ruled by a few thousand Negroes, the descendants of immigrant freedmen from the United States. This handful of Americo-Liberians struggles to maintain a European civilization in the unhealthy lowlands along the coast, and has nominal control over many savage native tribes in the hinterland. The country is completely undeveloped and the outlook from every point of view has been, until very recently, most disheartening.

In the past two years, however, the Firestone Rubber Co. has obtained a concession for the establishment of rubber plantations within the republic. This will mean the opening up of the whole area, the establishment of a great industry, and the employment of thousands of natives who have had hitherto little or no contact with civilization. The inevitable result of such an enterprise will be the development of the economic resources of the country and a profound modification in the primitive culture of its savage population. Almost invariably, industrialization of a country inhabited by primitive people has resulted in the destruction of their native culture and not infrequently of the native population itself, which is not immunized against white man's diseases and white man's civilization.

Obviously it was most important that some experienced and competent investigator should attempt to find out, before these natives became submerged in industrialism, their varying capacities for absorbing European civilization without being poisoned by it.

Mr. and Mrs. Schwab arrived in Monrovia early in January of last year and remained in the field for eight months. Soon cases of unique ethnological specimens began to arrive in Cambridge, and the mails brought great albums of photographic film, reports, and anthropometric records.

Mr. Schwab's report upon the administration of the native peoples by the Liberian government and upon the capacity of these peoples for civilization and their availability for labor in foreign development of the country is not destined for publication. It constitutes, however, one of the most interesting and valuable anthropological documents I have ever read. Some of his observations may be summarized here.

The view that Liberia is "the white man's grave" is, in Mr. Schwab's opinion, wholly erroneous. He says, "During our seven months constant travelling in Liberia, with almost daily change of water, living largely off the country, under constant exposure to whatever 'dangers' to health there might be, we did not have a single day's illness." However, because of the complete ignorance of the natives of hygiene, and the fact that there are only three physicians in the whole hinterland, the population is likely to decrease rather than to increase. Mr. Schwab thinks that the country may once have held a million inhabitants but that 800,000 would now be a liberal estimate.

In his opinion the natives of Liberia are of a type superior to those found in many parts of Africa. He comments upon the relative insensibility-to-pain characteristic of these blacks and believes that in general their olfactory, visual, and auditory senses are not more keenly developed than those of whites. He discusses the "mobility of character" of the primitive Negro--"an inconsistency of impressions and sentiments, which only touch the consciousness without leaving there anything else but a fleeting imprint." The emotions of the Liberian native, his sentiments, his regard for truth, his loyalty, his conception of justice, and his capacity for work are dealt with in detail. Schwab says that the Negro is not lazy. "He is merely unoccupied because he has no imperious motive forcing him to work more than he does... His supreme joy is to impress others, even if only for an instant, and for this he will work long and hard... A chief we knew insisted on having a motorcycle. The boy who was to run it for him knew how to start it, but little about how to guide or stop or care for it. They started off anad before they had run a hundred yards hit a tree, wrecking the machine beyond repair. When regrets were expressed he replied that it did not matter, since now everyone knew that he had had a motorcycle which would run."

Among the tangible results of the Schwab expedition are eighteen cases of ethnological specimens, about 500 negatives depicting various phases of native life, and 440 complete anthropometric records pertaining to the natives of ten different tribes. The monograph, which will be published after analysis of the field work, will, of course, be the most valuable contribution of the expedition to science.