British colonial officials proposed race-mixing with Indian settlers to cure Africans’ supposed deficiency.

Evidence

In 1894, Sir Harry Johnston, the first Commissioner of British Central Africa, broke through a particular barrier of racial theory by posing one solution to the otherwise hopeless future of the inferior races: “On the whole I think the admixture of yellow that the negro requires should come from India, and that Eastern Africa and British Central Africa should become the America of the Hindu. The mixture of the two races would give the Indian the physical development which he lacks, and he in his turn would transmit to his half negro offspring the industry, ambition, and aspiration towards a civilized life which the negro so markedly lacks.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1711

Categorization

• CANDY: The bizarrely precise eugenic arithmetic — ‘the America of the Hindu’ — is a jarring, tweetable historical curiosity.