Bionca Ellis smiled when in court recently on charges of stabbing a three-year-old to death.

“WE are prepared to believe that the African has almost no sensibility to suffering in others, nor compassion for them. Such refinements of the social spirit have never been developed among these peoples. [Alfred Burdon] Ellis thinks that their constant familiarity with bloody scenes of torture and death in connection with religious ceremonies or witchcraft executions, has rendered them exceptionally callous and pitiless in the presence of human agony and pain. The exhibition of sentiments of pity by white persons is a standing puzzle to them. After a description of some of the frightful cruelties practised upon war prisoners, Ellis tells that

‘the Ashantis were much surprised that the missionaries should exhibit any emotion at such spectacles; and, on one occasion when they went to give food to some starving children, the guards angrily drove them back.’ He adds further: ‘Nor is it to prisoners and aliens alone that such barbarity is exhibited by the northern tribes, for an equal indifference is shown to the sufferings of their own people. Servants or slaves, who may fall sick, are driven out into the bush to die or recover as best they may; and the infirm or helpless are invariably neglected, if not ill-treated. In the village of Abankoro the missionaries saw an orphan boy about five years old, who went about unnoticed and reduced to a skeleton. He was thus neglected because he could not speak, and was regarded as an idiot. He cried for joy when some food was given him, and the kindness of the missionaries to him astonished the people.’

“Such incidents might be cited almost without end from the various accounts of West Africa.

“The lowest level of unsocialized feeling and practice is seen in cannibalism, which once prevailed almost universally, but is now confined within certain tribes…”

—  Joseph Alexander Tillinghast, The Negro in Africa and America (1902)

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