Hell's Playground (Classic Reprint)

The story has to do with primal conditions: savages and savagery. It lacks the niceties and embroideries and perfumes of civilization; it is crude and shocking, essentially so. It is a record of the debauching life of the African tropics; the methods of government; the duties and opportunities of the white trader; the nature of the negro sav ages; the almost hopeless problems of colonization and Christianization; and the demoralization which follows the unnatural imposition of the rule of one race over another. For centuries the West Coast of Africa has been the dumping ground for Europe sundesirables and so un healthy is the climate that life is one continuous battle for existence. The best class of white men are not attracted to it. The average white trader and government official, freed from all restraint, deprived of the society of white women and the commonest things to which civilization has accustomed them, breathing the atmosphere of sameness, stagnation and sensuality, early shed the veneer of civiliza tion. They revel in tyranny, licentiousness and brutality; they are a law unto themselves: a law of menace and destruc tion; they out-savage the very savage.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)

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