Title: The Negro
Author: Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt), 1868-1963
Language: English
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THE NEGRO

W.E.B. Du Bois



New York: Holt, 1915

[Transcriber's Notes for e-book versions:

Hyphenation and accentuation are inconsistent, but are generally left as
found in the edition used for transcription. This edition may or may not
have completely replicated the 1915 edition of the book. Where changes
have been made, they are noted below. If you are using this book for
research, please verify any spelling or punctuation with another source.

A missing quotation mark was inserted at the beginning of this
paragraph: "It is difficult to imagine that Egypt should have obtained it
from Europe where the oldest find (in Hallstadt) cannot be of an earlier
period than 800 B.C., or from Asia, where iron is not known before 1000
B.C., and where, in the times of Ashur Nazir Pal, it was still used
concurrently with bronze, while iron beads have been only recently
discovered by Messrs. G.A. Wainwright and Bushe Fox in a predynastic
grave, and where a piece of this metal, possibly a tool, was found in the
masonry of the great pyramid."]



CONTENTS

     Preface
   I Africa
  II The Coming of Black Men
 III Ethiopia and Egypt
  IV The Niger and Islam
   V Guinea and Congo
  VI The Great Lakes and Zymbabwe
 VII The War of Races at Land's End
VIII African Culture
  IX The Trade in Men
   X The West Indies and Latin America
  XI The Negro in the United States
 XII The Negro Problems
     Suggestions for Further Reading


MAPS

The Physical Geography of Africa
Ancient Kingdoms of Africa
Races in Africa
Distribution of Negro Blood, Ancient and Modern



THE NEGRO



TO
A FAITHFUL HELPER
M.G.A.



PREFACE


The time has not yet come for a complete history of the Negro
peoples. Archæological research in Africa has just begun, and many
sources of information in Arabian, Portuguese, and other tongues are
not fully at our command; and, too, it must frankly be confessed,
racial prejudice against darker peoples is still too strong in so-called
civilized centers for judicial appraisement of the peoples of Africa.
Much intensive monographic work in history and science is needed
to clear mooted points and quiet the controversialist who mistakes
present personal desire for scientific proof.

Nevertheless, I have not been able to withstand the temptation to
essay such short general statement of the main known facts and their
fair interpretation as shall enable the general reader to know as men
a sixth or more of the human race. Manifestly so short a story must
be mainly conclusions and generalizations with but meager indication
of authorities and underlying arguments. Possibly, if the Public
will, a later and larger book may be more satisfactory on these points.

W.E. BURGHARDT DU BOIS.

New York City, Feb. 1, 1915.



[Illustration: The Physical Geography of Africa]



I AFRICA

                "Behold!
The Sphinx is Africa. The bond
Of Silence is upon her. Old
And white with tombs, and rent and shorn;
With raiment wet with tears and torn,
And trampled on, yet all untamed."

MILLER


Africa is at once the most romantic and the most tragic of continents. Its
very names reveal its mystery and wide-reaching influence. It is the
"Ethiopia" of the Greek, the "Kush" and "Punt" of the Egyptian, and the
Arabian "Land of the Blacks." To modern Europe it is the "Dark Continent"
and "Land of Contrasts"; in literature it is the seat of the Sphinx and
the lotus eaters, the home of the dwarfs, gnomes, and pixies, and the
refuge of the gods; in commerce it is the slave mart and the source of
ivory, ebony, rubber, gold, and diamonds. What other continent can rival
in interest this Ancient of Days?

There are those, nevertheless, who would write universal history and leave
out Africa. But how, asks Ratzel, can one leave out the land of Egypt and
Carthage? and Frobenius declares that in future Africa must more and more
be regarded as an integral part of the great movement of world history.
Yet it is true that the history of Africa is unusual, and its strangeness
is due in no small degree to the physical peculiarities of the continent.
With three times the area of Europe it has a coast line a fifth shorter.
Like Europe it is a peninsula of Asia, curving southwestward around the
Indian Sea. It has few gulfs, bays, capes, or islands. Even the rivers,
though large and long, are not means of communication with the outer
world, because from the central high plateau they plunge in rapids and
cataracts to the narrow coastlands and the sea.

The general physical contour of Africa has been likened to an inverted
plate with one or more rows of mountains at the edge and a low coastal
belt. In the south the central plateau is three thousand or more feet
above the sea, while in the north it is a little over one thousand feet.
Thus two main divisions of the continent are easily distinguished: the
broad northern rectangle, reaching down as far as the Gulf of Guinea and
Cape Guardafui, with seven million square miles; and the peninsula which
tapers toward the south, with five million square miles.

Four great rivers and many lesser streams water the continent. The
greatest is the Congo in the center, with its vast curving and endless
estuaries; then the Nile, draining the cluster of the Great Lakes and
flowing northward "like some grave, mighty thought, threading a dream";
the Niger in the northwest, watering the Sudan below the Sahara; and,
finally, the Zambesi, with its greater Niagara in the southeast. Even
these waters leave room for deserts both south and north, but the greater
ones are the three million square miles of sand wastes in the north.

More than any other land, Africa lies in the tropics, with a warm, dry
climate, save in the central Congo region, where rain at all seasons
brings tropical luxuriance. The flora is rich but not wide in variety,
including the gum acacia, ebony, several dye woods, the kola nut, and
probably tobacco and millet. To these many plants have been added in
historic times. The fauna is rich in mammals, and here, too, many from
other continents have been widely introduced and used.

Primarily Africa is the Land of the Blacks. The world has always been
familiar with black men, who represent one of the most ancient of human
stocks. Of the ancient world gathered about the Mediterranean, they formed
a part and were viewed with no surprise or dislike, because this world saw
them come and go and play their part with other men. Was Clitus the
brother-in-law of Alexander the Great less to be honored because he
happened to be black? Was Terence less famous? The medieval European
world, developing under the favorable physical conditions of the north
temperate zone, knew the black man chiefly as a legend or occasional
curiosity, but still as a fellow man--an Othello or a Prester John or an
Antar.

The modern world, in contrast, knows the Negro chiefly as a bond slave in
the West Indies and America. Add to this the fact that the darker races in
other parts of the world have, in the last four centuries, lagged behind
the flying and even feverish footsteps of Europe, and we face to-day a
widespread assumption throughout the dominant world that color is a mark
of inferiority.

The result is that in writing of this, one of the most ancient,
persistent, and widespread stocks of mankind, one faces astounding
prejudice. That which may be assumed as true of white men must be proven
beyond peradventure if it relates to Negroes. One who writes of the
development of the Negro race must continually insist that he is writing
of a normal human stock, and that whatever it is fair to predicate of the
mass of human beings may be predicated of the Negro. It is the silent
refusal to do this which has led to so much false writing on Africa and
of its inhabitants. Take, for instance, the answer to the apparently
simple question "What is a Negro?" We find the most extraordinary
confusion of thought and difference of opinion. There is a certain type in
the minds of most people which, as David Livingstone said, can be found
only in caricature and not in real life. When scientists have tried to
find an extreme type of black, ugly, and woolly-haired Negro, they have
been compelled more and more to limit his home even in Africa. At least
nine-tenths of the African people do not at all conform to this type, and
the typical Negro, after being denied a dwelling place in the Sudan, along
the Nile, in East Central Africa, and in South Africa, was finally given a
very small country between the Senegal and the Niger, and even there was
found to give trace of many stocks. As Winwood Reade says, "The typical
Negro is a rare variety even among Negroes."

As a matter of fact we cannot take such extreme and largely fanciful stock
as typifying that which we may fairly call the Negro race. In the case of
no other race is so narrow a definition attempted. A "white" man may be of
any color, size, or facial conformation and have endless variety of
cranial measurement and physical characteristics. A "yellow" man is
perhaps an even vaguer conception.

In fact it is generally recognized to-day that no scientific definition of
race is possible. Differences, and striking differences, there are between
men and groups of men, but they fade into each other so insensibly that we
can only indicate the main divisions of men in broad outlines. As Von
Luschan says, "The question of the number of human races has quite lost
its _raison d'être_ and has become a subject rather of philosophic
speculation than of scientific research. It is of no more importance now
to know how many human races there are than to know how many angels can
dance on the point of a needle. Our aim now is to find out how ancient and
primitive races developed from others and how races changed or evolved
through migration and inter-breeding."[1]

The mulatto (using the term loosely to indicate either an intermediate
type between white and black or a mingling of the two) is as typically
African as the black man and cannot logically be included in the "white"
race, especially when American usage includes the mulatto in the Negro
race.

It is reasonable, according to fact and historic usage, to include under
the word "Negro" the darker peoples of Africa characterized by a brown
skin, curled or "frizzled" hair, full and sometimes everted lips, a
tendency to a development of the maxillary parts of the face, and a
dolichocephalic head. This type is not fixed or definite. The color varies
widely; it is never black or bluish, as some say, and it becomes often
light brown or yellow. The hair varies from curly to a wool-like mass, and
the facial angle and cranial form show wide variation.

It is as impossible in Africa as elsewhere to fix with any certainty the
limits of racial variation due to climate and the variation due to
intermingling. In the past, when scientists assumed one unvarying Negro
type, every variation from that type was interpreted as meaning mixture of
blood. To-day we recognize a broader normal African type which, as
Palgrave says, may best be studied "among the statues of the Egyptian
rooms of the British Museum; the larger gentle eye, the full but not
over-protruding lips, the rounded contour, and the good-natured, easy,
sensuous expression. This is the genuine African model." To this race
Africa in the main and parts of Asia have belonged since prehistoric
times.

The color of this variety of man, as the color of other varieties, is due
to climate. Conditions of heat, cold, and moisture, working for thousands
of years through the skin and other organs, have given men their
differences of color. This color pigment is a protection against sunlight
and consequently varies with the intensity of the sunlight. Thus in Africa
we find the blackest men in the fierce sunlight of the desert, red pygmies
in the forest, and yellow Bushmen on the cooler southern plateau.

Next to the color, the hair is the most distinguishing characteristic of
the Negro, but the two characteristics do not vary with each other. Some
of the blackest of the Negroes have curly rather than woolly hair, while
the crispest, most closely curled hair is found among the yellow
Hottentots and Bushmen. The difference between the hair of the lighter and
darker races is a difference of degree, not of kind, and can be easily
measured. If the hair follicles of a China-man, a European, and a Negro
are cut across transversely, it will be found that the diameter of the
first is 100 by 77 to 85, the second 100 by 62 to 72, while that of the
Negro is 100 by 40 to 60. This elliptical form of the Negro's hair causes
it to curl more or less tightly.

There have been repeated efforts to discover, by measurements of various
kinds, further and more decisive differences which would serve as really
scientific determinants of race. Gradually these efforts have been given
up. To-day we realize that there are no hard and fast racial types among
men. Race is a dynamic and not a static conception, and the typical races
are continually changing and developing, amalgamating and differentiating.
In this little book, then, we are studying the history of the darker part
of the human family, which is separated from the rest of mankind by no
absolute physical line, but which nevertheless forms, as a mass, a social
group distinct in history, appearance, and to some extent in spiritual
gift.

We cannot study Africa without, however, noting some of the other races
concerned in its history, particularly the Asiatic Semites. The
intercourse of Africa with Arabia and other parts of Asia has been so
close and long-continued that it is impossible to-day to disentangle the
blood relationships. Negro blood certainly appears in strong strain among
the Semites, and the obvious mulatto groups in Africa, arising from
ancient and modern mingling of Semite and Negro, has given rise to the
term "Hamite," under cover of which millions of Negroids have been
characteristically transferred to the "white" race by some eager
scientists.

The earliest Semites came to Africa across the Red Sea. The Phoenicians
came along the northern coasts a thousand years before Christ and began
settlements which culminated in Carthage and extended down the Atlantic
shores of North Africa nearly to the Gulf of Guinea.

From the earliest times the Greeks have been in contact with Africa as
visitors, traders, and colonists, and the Persian influence came with
Cambyses and others. Roman Africa was bounded by the desert, but at times
came into contact with the blacks across the Sahara and in the valley of
the Nile. After the breaking up of the Roman Empire the Greek and Latin
Christians filtered through Africa, followed finally by a Germanic
invasion in 429 A.D.

In the seventh century the All-Mother, Asia, claimed Africa again for her
own and blew a cloud of Semitic Mohammedanism all across North Africa,
veiling the dark continent from Europe for a thousand years and converting
vast masses of the blacks to Islam. The Portuguese began to raise the veil
in the fifteenth century, sailing down the Atlantic coast and initiating
the modern slave trade. The Spanish, French, Dutch, and English followed
them, but as traders in men rather than explorers.

The Portuguese explored the coasts of the Gulf of Guinea, visiting the
interior kingdoms, and then passing by the mouth of the Congo proceeded
southward. Eventually they rounded the Cape of Good Hope and pursued their
explorations as far as the mountains of Abyssinia. This began the modern
exploration of Africa, which is a curious fairy tale, and recalls to us
the great names of Livingstone, Burton, Speke, Stanley, Barth,
Schweinfurth, and many others. In this way Africa has been made known to
the modern world.

The difficulty of this modern lifting of the veil of centuries emphasizes
two physical facts that underlie all African history: the peculiar
inaccessibility of the continent to peoples from without, which made it so
easily possible for the great human drama played here to hide itself from
the ears of other worlds; and, on the other hand, the absence of interior
barriers--the great stretch of that central plateau which placed
practically every budding center of culture at the mercy of barbarism,
sweeping a thousand miles, with no Alps or Himalayas or Appalachians to
hinder.

With this peculiarly uninviting coast line and the difficulties in
interior segregation must be considered the climate of Africa. While there
is much diversity and many salubrious tracts along with vast barren
wastes, yet, as Sir Harry Johnston well remarks, "Africa is the chief
stronghold of the real Devil--the reactionary forces of Nature hostile to
the uprise of Humanity. Here Beelzebub, King of the Flies, marshals his
vermiform and arthropod hosts--insects, ticks, and nematode worms--which
more than in other continents (excepting Negroid Asia) convey to the skin,
veins, intestines, and spinal marrow of men and other vertebrates the
microorganisms which cause deadly, disfiguring, or debilitating diseases,
or themselves create the morbid condition of the persecuted human being,
beasts, bird, reptile, frog, or fish."[2] The inhabitants of this land
have had a sheer fight for physical survival comparable with that in no
other great continent, and this must not be forgotten when we consider
their history.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Von Luschan: in _Inter-Racial Problems_, p. 16.

[2] Johnston: _Negro in the New World_, pp. 14-15.



II THE COMING OF BLACK MEN


The movements of prehistoric man can be seen as yet but dimly in the
uncertain mists of time. This is the story that to-day seems most
probable: from some center in southern Asia primitive human beings began
to differentiate in two directions. Toward the south appeared the
primitive Negro, long-headed and with flattened hair follicle. He spread
along southern Asia and passed over into Africa, where he survives to-day
as the reddish dwarfs of the center and the Bushmen of South Africa.

Northward and eastward primitive man became broader headed and
straight-haired and spread over eastern Asia, forming the Mongolian type.
Either through the intermingling of these two types or, as some prefer to
think, by the direct prolongation of the original primitive man, a third
intermediate type of human being appeared with hair and cranial
measurement intermediate between the primitive Negro and Mongolian. All
these three types of men intermingled their blood freely and developed
variations according to climate and environment.

Other and older theories and legends of the origin and spread of mankind
are of interest now only because so many human beings have believed them
in the past. The biblical story of Shem, Ham, and Japheth retains the
interest of a primitive myth with its measure of allegorical truth,[3] but
has, of course, no historic basis.

The older "Aryan" theory assumed the migration into Europe of one dominant
Asiatic race of civilized conquerors, to whose blood and influence all
modern culture was due. To this "white" race Semitic Asia, a large part of
black Africa, and all Europe was supposed to belong. This "Aryan" theory
has been practically abandoned in the light of recent research, and it
seems probable now that from the primitive Negroid stock evolved in Asia
the Semites either by local variation or intermingling with other stocks;
later there developed the Mediterranean race, with Negroid
characteristics, and the modern Negroes. The blue-eyed, light-haired
Germanic people may have arisen as a modern variation of the mixed peoples
produced by the mingling of Asiatic and African elements. The last word on
this development has not yet been said, and there is still much to learn
and explain; but it is certainly proved to-day beyond doubt that the
so-called Hamites of Africa, the brown and black curly and frizzly-haired
inhabitants of North and East Africa, are not "white" men if we draw the
line between white and black in any logical way.

The primitive Negroid race of men developed in Asia wandered eastward as
well as westward. They entered on the one hand Burmah and the South Sea
Islands, and on the other hand they came through Mesopotamia and gave
curly hair and a Negroid type to Jew, Syrian, and Assyrian. Ancient
statues of Indian divinities show the Negro type with black face and
close-curled hair, and early Babylonian culture was Negroid. In Arabia the
Negroes may have divided, and one stream perhaps wandered into Europe by
way of Syria. Traces of these Negroes are manifest not only in skeletons,
but in the brunette type of all South Europe. The other branch proceeded
to Egypt and tropical Africa. Another, but perhaps less probable, theory
is that ancient Negroes may have entered Africa from Europe, since the
most ancient skulls of Algeria are Negroid.

The primitive African was not an extreme type. One may judge from modern
pygmy and Bushmen that his color was reddish or yellow, and his skull was
sometimes round like the Mongolian. He entered Africa not less than fifty
thousand years ago and settled eventually in the broad region between Lake
Chad and the Great Lakes and remained there long stretches of years.

After a lapse of perhaps thirty thousand years there entered Africa a
further migration of Asiatic people, Negroid in many characteristics, but
lighter and straighter haired than the primitive Negroes. From this
Mediterranean race was developed the modern inhabitants of the shores of
the Mediterranean in Europe, Asia, and Africa and, by mingling with the
primitive Negroes, the ancient Egyptians and modern Negroid races of
Africa.

As we near historic times the migrations of men became more frequent from
Asia and from Europe, and in Africa came movements and minglings which
give to the whole of Africa a distinct mulatto character. The primitive
Negro stock was "mulatto" in the sense of being not widely differentiated
from the dark, original Australoid stock. As the earlier yellow Negro
developed in the African tropics to the bigger, blacker type, he was
continually mingling his blood with similar types developed in temperate
climes to sallower color and straighter hair.

We find therefore, in Africa to-day, every degree of development in
Negroid stocks and every degree of intermingling of these developments,
both among African peoples and between Africans, Europeans, and Asiatics.
The mistake is continually made of considering these types as transitions
between absolute Caucasians and absolute Negroes. No such absolute type
ever existed on either side. Both were slowly differentiated from a common
ancestry and continually remingled their blood while the differentiating
was progressing. From prehistoric times down to to-day Africa is, in this
sense, primarily the land of the mulatto. So, too, was earlier Europe and
Asia; only in these countries the mulatto was early bleached by the
climate, while in Africa he was darkened.

It is not easy to summarize the history of these dark African peoples,
because so little is known and so much is still in dispute. Yet, by
avoiding the real controversies and being unafraid of mere questions of
definition, we may trace a great human movement with considerable
definiteness.

Three main Negro types early made their appearance: the lighter and
smaller primitive stock; the larger forest Negro in the center and on the
west coast, and the tall, black Nilotic Negro in the eastern Sudan. In the
earliest times we find the Negroes in the valley of the Nile, pressing
downward from the interior. Here they mingled with Semitic types, and
after a lapse of millenniums there arose from this mingling the culture of
Ethiopia and Egypt, probably the first of higher human cultures.

To the west of the Nile the Negroes expanded straight across the continent
to the Atlantic. Centers of higher culture appeared very early along the
Gulf of Guinea and curling backward met Egyptian, Ethiopian, and even
European and Asiatic influences about Lake Chad. To the southeast, nearer
the primitive seats of the earliest African immigrants and open to
Egyptian and East Indian influences, the Negro culture which culminated at
Zymbabwe arose, and one may trace throughout South Africa its wide
ramifications.

All these movements gradually aroused the central tribes to unrest. They
beat against the barriers north, northeast, and west, but gradually
settled into a great southeastward migration. Calling themselves proudly
La Bantu (The People), they grew by agglomeration into a warlike nation,
speaking one language. They eventually conquered all Africa south of the
Gulf of Guinea and spread their influence to the northward.

While these great movements were slowly transforming Africa, she was also
receiving influences from beyond her shores and sending influences out.
With mulatto Egypt black Africa was always in closest touch, so much so
that to some all evidence of Negro uplift seem Egyptian in origin. The
truth is, rather, that Egypt was herself always palpably Negroid, and from
her vantage ground as almost the only African gateway received and
transmitted Negro ideals.

Phoenician, Greek, and Roman came into touch more or less with black
Africa. Carthage, that North African city of a million men, had a large
caravan trade with Negroland in ivory, metals, cloth, precious stones, and
slaves. Black men served in the Carthaginian armies and marched with
Hannibal on Rome. In some of the North African kingdoms the infiltration
of Negro blood was very large and kings like Massinissa and Jugurtha were
Negroid. By way of the Atlantic the Carthaginians reached the African west
coast. Greek and Roman influences came through the desert, and the
Byzantine Empire and Persia came into communication with Negroland by way
of the valley of the Nile. The influence of these trade routes, added to
those of Egypt, Ethiopia, Benin, and Yoruba, stimulated centers of culture
in the central and western Sudan, and European and African trade early
reached large volume.

Negro soldiers were used largely in the armies that enabled the
Mohammedans to conquer North Africa and Spain. Beginning in the tenth
century and slowly creeping across the desert into Negroland, the new
religion found an already existent culture and came, not a conqueror, but
as an adapter and inspirer. Civilization received new impetus and a wave
of Mohammedanism swept eastward, erecting the great kingdoms of Melle, the
Songhay, Bornu, and the Hausa states. The older Negro culture was not
overthrown, but, like a great wedge, pushed upward and inward from Yoruba,
and gave stubborn battle to the newer culture for seven or eight
centuries.

Then it was, in the fifteenth century, that the heart disease of Africa
developed in its most virulent form. There is a modern theory that black
men are and always have been naturally slaves. Nothing is further from the
truth. In the ancient world Africa was no more a slave hunting ground than
Europe or Asia, and both Greece and Rome had much larger numbers of white
slaves than of black. It was natural that a stream of black slaves should
have poured into Egypt, because the chief line of Egyptian conquest and
defense lay toward the heart of Africa. Moreover, the Egyptians,
themselves of Negro descent, had not only Negro slaves but Negroes among
their highest nobility and even among their Pharaohs. Mohammedan
conquerors enslaved peoples of all colors in Europe, Asia, and Africa, but
eventually their empire centered in Asia and Africa and their slaves came
principally from these countries. Asia submitted to Islam except in the
Far East, which was self-protecting. Negro Africa submitted only
partially, and the remaining heathen were in small states which could not
effectively protect themselves against the Mohammedan slave trade. In this
wise the slave trade gradually began to center in Africa, for religious
and political rather than for racial reasons.

The typical African culture was the culture of family, town, and small
tribe. Hence domestic slavery easily developed a slave trade through war
and commerce. Only the integrating force of state building could have
stopped this slave trade. Was this failure to develop the great state a
racial characteristic? This does not seem a fair conclusion. In four great
centers state building began in Africa. In Ethiopia several large states
were built up, but they tottered before the onslaughts of Egypt, Persia,
Rome, and Byzantium, on the one hand, and finally fell before the
turbulent Bantu warriors from the interior. The second attempt at empire
building began in the southeast, but the same Bantu hordes, pressing now
slowly, now fiercely, from the congested center of the continent,
gradually overthrew this state and erected on its ruins a series of
smaller and more transient kingdoms.

The third attempt at state building arose on the Guinea coast in Benin and
Yoruba. It never got much beyond a federation of large industrial cities.
Its expansion toward the Congo valley was probably a prime cause of the
original Bantu movements to the southeast. Toward the north and northeast,
on the other hand, these city-states met the Sudanese armed with the new
imperial Mohammedan idea. Just as Latin Rome gave the imperial idea to the
Nordic races, so Islam brought this idea to the Sudan.

In the consequent attempts at imperialism in the western Sudan there
arose the largest of the African empires. Two circumstances, however,
militated against this empire building: first, the fierce resistance of
the heathen south made war continuous and slaves one of the articles of
systematic commerce. Secondly, the highways of legitimate African commerce
had for millenniums lain to the north. These were suddenly closed by the
Moors in the sixteenth century, and the Negro empires were thrown into the
turmoil of internal war.

It was then that the European slave traders came from the southwest. They
found partially disrupted Negro states on the west coast and falling
empires in the Sudan, together with the old unrest of over-population and
migration in the valley of the Congo. They not only offered a demand for
the usual slave trade, but they increased it to an enormous degree, until
their demand, added to the demand of the Mohammedan in Africa and Asia,
made human beings the highest priced article of commerce in Africa. Under
such circumstances there could be but one end: the virtual uprooting of
ancient African culture, leaving only misty reminders of the ruin in the
customs and work of the people. To complete this disaster came the
partition of the continent among European nations and the modern attempt
to exploit the country and the natives for the economic benefit of the
white world, together with the transplanting of black nations to the new
western world and their rise and self-assertion there.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] Ham is probably the Egyptian word "Khem" (black), the native name of
Egypt. In the original myth Canaan and not Ham was Noah's third son.

The biblical story of the "curse of Canaan" (Genesis IX, 24-25) has been
the basis of an astonishing literature which has to-day only a
psychological interest. It is sufficient to remember that for several
centuries leaders of the Christian Church gravely defended Negro slavery
and oppression as the rightful curse of God upon the descendants of a son
who had been disrespectful to his drunken father! Cf. Bishop Hopkins:
_Bible Views of Slavery_, p. 7.



III ETHIOPIA AND EGYPT


Having viewed now the land and movements of African people in main
outline, let us scan more narrowly the history of five main centers of
activity and culture, namely: the valleys of the Nile and of the Congo,
the borders of the great Gulf of Guinea, the Sudan, and South Africa.
These divisions do not cover all of Negro Africa, but they take in the
main areas and the main lines in development.

First, we turn to the valley of the Nile, perhaps the most ancient of
known seats of civilization in the world, and certainly the oldest in
Africa, with a culture reaching back six or eight thousand years. Like all
civilizations it drew largely from without and undoubtedly arose in the
valley of the Nile, because that valley was so easily made a center for
the meeting of men of all types and from all parts of the world. At the
same time Egyptian civilization seems to have been African in its
beginnings and in its main line of development, despite strong influences
from all parts of Asia. Of what race, then, were the Egyptians? They
certainly were not white in any sense of the modern use of that
word--neither in color nor physical measurement, in hair nor countenance,
in language nor social customs. They stood in relationship nearest the
Negro race in earliest times, and then gradually through the infiltration
of Mediterranean and Semitic elements became what would be described in
America as a light mulatto stock of Octoroons or Quadroons. This stock was
varied continually; now by new infiltration of Negro blood from the south,
now by Negroid and Semitic blood from the east, now by Berber types from
the north and west.

Egyptian monuments show distinctly Negro and mulatto faces. Herodotus, in
an incontrovertible passage, alludes to the Egyptians as "black and
curly-haired"[4]--a peculiarly significant statement from one used to the
brunette Mediterranean type; in another passage, concerning the fable of
the Dodonian Oracle, he again alludes to the swarthy color of the
Egyptians as exceedingly dark and even black. Æschylus, mentioning a boat
seen from the shore, declares that its crew are Egyptians, because of
their black complexions.

Modern measurements, with all their admitted limitations, show that in the
Thebaid from one-seventh to one-third of the Egyptian population were
Negroes, and that of the predynastic Egyptians less than half could be
classed as non-Negroid. Judging from measurements in the tombs of nobles
as late as the eighteenth dynasty, Negroes form at least one-sixth of the
higher class.[5]

Such measurements are by no means conclusive, but they are apt to be
under rather than over statements of the prevalence of Negro blood. Head
measurements of Negro Americans would probably place most of them in the
category of whites. The evidence of language also connects Egypt with
Africa and the Negro race rather than with Asia, while religious
ceremonies and social customs all go to strengthen this evidence.

The ethnic history of Northeast Africa would seem, therefore, to have been
this: predynastic Egypt was settled by Negroes from Ethiopia. They were of
varied type: the broad-nosed, woolly-haired type to which the word "Negro"
is sometimes confined; the black, curly-haired, sharper featured type,
which must be considered an equally Negroid variation. These Negroes met
and mingled with the invading Mediterranean race from North Africa and
Asia. Thus the blood of the sallower race spread south and that of the
darker race north. Black priests appear in Crete three thousand years
before Christ, and Arabia is to this day thoroughly permeated with Negro
blood. Perhaps, as Chamberlain says, "one of the prime reasons why no
civilization of the type of that of the Nile arose in other parts of the
continent, if such a thing were at all possible, was that Egypt acted as a
sort of channel by which the genius of Negro-land was drafted off into the
service of Mediterranean and Asiatic culture."[6]

To one familiar with the striking and beautiful types arising from the
mingling of Negro with Latin and Germanic types in America, the puzzle of
the Egyptian type is easily solved. It was unlike any of its neighbors and
a unique type until one views the modern mulatto; then the faces of
Rahotep and Nefert, of Khafra and Amenemhat I, of Aahmes and Nefertari,
and even of the great Ramessu II, become curiously familiar.

The history of Egypt is a science in itself. Before the reign of the first
recorded king, five thousand years or more before Christ, there had
already existed in Egypt a culture and art arising by long evolution from
the days of paleolithic man, among a distinctly Negroid people. About 4777
B.C. Aha-Mena began the first of three successive Egyptian empires. This
lasted two thousand years, with many Pharaohs, like Khafra of the Fourth
Dynasty, of a strongly Negroid cast of countenance.

At the end of the period the empire fell apart into Egyptian and Ethiopian
halves, and a silence of three centuries ensued. It is quite possible that
an incursion of conquering black men from the south poured over the land
in these years and dotted Egypt in the next centuries with monuments on
which the full-blooded Negro type is strongly and triumphantly impressed.
The great Sphinx at Gizeh, so familiar to all the world, the Sphinxes of
Tanis, the statue from the Fayum, the statue of the Esquiline at Rome,
and the Colossi of Bubastis all represent black, full-blooded Negroes and
are described by Petrie as "having high cheek bones, flat cheeks, both in
one plane, a massive nose, firm projecting lips, and thick hair, with an
austere and almost savage expression of power."[7]

Blyden, the great modern black leader of West Africa, said of the Sphinx
at Gizeh: "Her features are decidedly of the African or Negro type, with
'expanded nostrils.' If, then, the Sphinx was placed here--looking out in
majestic and mysterious silence over the empty plain where once stood the
great city of Memphis in all its pride and glory, as an 'emblematic
representation of the king'--is not the inference clear as to the peculiar
type or race to which that king belonged?"[8]

The middle empire arose 3064 B.C. and lasted nearly twenty-four centuries.
Under Pharaohs whose Negro descent is plainly evident, like Amenemhat I
and III and Usertesen I, the ancient glories of Egypt were restored and
surpassed. At the same time there is strong continuous pressure from the
wild and unruly Negro tribes of the upper Nile valley, and we get some
idea of the fear which they inspired throughout Egypt when we read of the
great national rejoicing which followed the triumph of Usertesen III (c.
2660-22) over these hordes. He drove them back and attempted to confine
them to the edge of the Nubian Desert above the Second Cataract. Hemmed in
here, they set up a state about this time and founded Nepata.

Notwithstanding this repulse of black men, less than one hundred years
later a full-blooded Negro from the south, Ra Nehesi, was seated on the
throne of the Pharaohs and was called "The king's eldest son." This may
mean that an incursion from the far south had placed a black conqueror on
the throne. At any rate, the whole empire was in some way shaken, and two
hundred years later the invasion of the Hyksos began. The domination of
Hyksos kings who may have been Negroids from Asia[9] lasted for five
hundred years.

The redemption of Egypt from these barbarians came from Upper Egypt, led
by the mulatto Aahmes. He founded in 1703 B.C. the new empire, which
lasted fifteen hundred years. His queen, Nefertari, "the most venerated
figure of Egyptian history,"[10] was a Negress of great beauty, strong
personality, and of unusual administrative force. She was for many years
joint ruler with her son, Amenhotep I, who succeeded his father.[11]

The new empire was a period of foreign conquest and internal splendor and
finally of religious dispute and overthrow. Syria was conquered in these
reigns and Asiatic civilization and influences poured in upon Egypt. The
great Tahutmes III, whose reign was "one of the grandest and most eventful
in Egyptian history,"[12] had a strong Negroid countenance, as had also
Queen Hatshepsut, who sent the celebrated expedition to reopen ancient
trade with the Hottentots of Punt. A new strain of Negro blood came to the
royal line through Queen Mutemua about 1420 B.C., whose son, Amenhotep
III, built a great temple at Luqsor and the Colossi at Memnon.

The whole of the period in a sense culminated in the great Ramessu II, the
oppressor of the Hebrews, who with his Egyptian, Libyan, and Negro armies
fought half the world. His reign, however, was the beginning of decline,
and foes began to press Egypt from the white north and the black south.
The priests transferred their power at Thebes, while the Assyrians under
Nimrod overran Lower Egypt. The center of interest is now transferred to
Ethiopia, and we pass to the more shadowy history of that land.

The most perfect example of Egyptian poetry left to us is a celebration of
the prowess of Usertesen III in confining the turbulent Negro tribes to
the territory below the Second Cataract of the Nile. The Egyptians called
this territory Kush, and in the farthest confines of Kush lay Punt, the
cradle of their race. To the ancient Mediterranean world Ethiopia (i.e.,
the Land of the Black-faced) was a region of gods and fairies. Zeus and
Poseidon feasted each year among the "blameless Ethiopians," and Black
Memnon, King of Ethiopia, was one of the greatest of heroes.

"The Ethiopians conceive themselves," says Diodorus Siculus (Lib. III),
"to be of greater antiquity than any other nation; and it is probable
that, born under the sun's path, its warmth may have ripened them earlier
than other men. They suppose themselves also to be the inventors of divine
worship, of festivals, of solemn assemblies, of sacrifices, and every
religious practice. They affirm that the Egyptians are one of their
colonies."

The Egyptians themselves, in later days, affirmed that they and their
civilization came from the south and from the black tribes of Punt, and
certainly "at the earliest period in which human remains have been
recovered Egypt and Lower Nubia appear to have formed culturally and
racially one land."[13]

The forging ahead of Egypt in culture was mainly from economic causes.
Ethiopia, living in a much poorer land with limited agricultural
facilities, held to the old arts and customs, and at the same time lost
the best elements of its population to Egypt, absorbing meantime the
oncoming and wilder Negro tribes from the south and west. Under the old
empire, therefore, Ethiopia remained in comparative poverty, except as
some of its tribes invaded Egypt with their handicrafts.

As soon as the civilization below the Second Cataract reached a height
noticeably above that of Ethiopia, there was continued effort to protect
that civilization against the incursion of barbarians. Hundreds of
campaigns through thousands of years repeatedly subdued or checked the
blacks and brought them in as captives to mingle their blood with the
Egyptian nation; but the Egyptian frontier was not advanced.

A separate and independent Ethiopian culture finally began to arise during
the middle empire of Egypt and centered at Nepata and Meroe. Widespread
trade in gold, ivory, precious stones, skins, wood, and works of
handicraft arose.[14] The Negro began to figure as the great trader of
Egypt.

This new wealth of Ethiopia excited the cupidity of the Pharaohs and led
to aggression and larger intercourse, until at last, when the dread Hyksos
appeared, Ethiopia became both a physical and cultural refuge for
conquered Egypt. The legitimate Pharaohs moved to Thebes, nearer the
boundaries of Ethiopia, and from here, under Negroid rulers, Lower Egypt
was redeemed.

The ensuing new empire witnessed the gradual incorporation of Ethiopia
into Egypt, although the darker kingdom continued to resist. Both mulatto
Pharaohs, Aahmes and Amenhotep I, sent expeditions into Ethiopia, and in
the latter's day sons of the reigning Pharaoh began to assume the title of
"Royal Son of Kush" in some such way as the son of the King of England
becomes the Prince of Wales.

Trade relations were renewed with Punt under circumstances which lead us
to place that land in the region of the African lakes. The Sudanese tribes
were aroused by these and other incursions, until the revolts became
formidable in the fourteenth century before Christ.

Egyptian culture, however, gradually conquered Ethiopia where her armies
could not, and Egyptian religion and civil rule began to center in the
darker kingdom. When, therefore, Shesheng I, the Libyan, usurped the
throne of the Pharaohs in the tenth century B.C., the Egyptian legitimate
dynasty went to Nepata as king priests and established a theocratic
monarchy. Gathering strength, the Ethiopian kingdom under this dynasty
expanded north about 750 B.C. and for a century ruled all Egypt.

The first king, Pankhy, was Egyptian bred and not noticeably Negroid, but
his successors showed more and more evidence of Negro blood--Kashta the
Kushite, Shabaka, Tarharqa, and Tanutamen. During the century of Ethiopian
rule a royal son was appointed to rule Egypt, just as formerly a royal
Egyptian had ruled Kush. In many ways this Ethiopian kingdom showed its
Negro peculiarities: first, in its worship of distinctly Sudanese gods;
secondly, in the rigid custom of female succession in the kingdom, and
thirdly, by the election of kings from the various royal claimants to the
throne. "It was the heyday of the Negro. For the greater part of the
century ... Egypt itself was subject to the blacks, just as in the new
empire the Sudan had been subject to Egypt."[15]

Egypt now began to fall into the hands of Asia and was conquered first by
the Assyrians and then by the Persians, but the Ethiopian kings kept their
independence. Aspeluta, whose mother and sister are represented as
full-blooded Negroes, ruled from 630 to 600 B.C. Horsiatef (560-525 B.C.)
made nine expeditions against the warlike tribes south of Meroe, and his
successor, Nastosenen (525-500 B.C.) was the one who repelled Cambyses. He
also removed the capital from Nepata to Meroe, although Nepata continued
to be the religious capital and the Ethiopian kings were still crowned on
its golden throne.

From the fifth to the second century B.C. we find the wild Sudanese tribes
pressing in from the west and Greek culture penetrating from the east.
King Arg-Amen (Ergamenes) showed strong Greek influences and at the same
time began to employ the Ethiopian speech in writing and used a new
Ethiopian alphabet.

While the Ethiopian kings were still crowned at Nepata, Meroe gradually
became the real capital and supported at one time four thousand artisans
and two hundred thousand soldiers. It was here that the famous Candaces
reigned as queens. Pliny tells us that one Candace of the time of Nero had
had forty-four predecessors on the throne, while another Candace figures
in the New Testament.[16]

It was probably this latter Candace who warred against Rome at the time of
Augustus and received unusual consideration from her formidable foe. The
prestige of Ethiopia at this time was considerable throughout the world.
Pseudo-Callisthenes tells an evidently fabulous story of the visit of
Alexander the Great to Candace, Queen of Meroe, which nevertheless
illustrates her fame: Candace will not let him enter Ethiopia and says he
is not to scorn her people because they are black, for they are whiter in
soul than his white folk. She sent him gold, maidens, parrots, sphinxes,
and a crown of emeralds and pearls. She ruled eighty tribes, who were
ready to punish those who attacked her.

The Romans continued to have so much trouble with their Ethiopian frontier
that finally, when Semitic mulattoes appeared in the east, the Emperor
Diocletian invited the wild Sudanese tribe of Nubians (Nobadæ) from the
west to repel them. These Nubians eventually embraced Christianity, and
northern Ethiopia came to be known in time as Nubia.

The Semitic mulattoes from the east came from the highlands bordering the
Red Sea and Asia. On both sides of this sea Negro blood is strongly in
evidence, predominant in Africa and influential in Asia. Ludolphus,
writing in the seventeenth century, says that the Abyssinians "are
generally black, which [color] they most admire." Trade and war united the
two shores, and merchants have passed to and fro for thirty centuries.

In this way Arabian, Jewish, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman influences spread
slowly upon the Negro foundation. Early legendary history declares that a
queen, Maqueda, or Nikaula of Sheba, a state of Central Abyssinia, visited
Solomon in 1050 B.C. and had her son Menelik educated in Jerusalem. This
was the supposed beginning of the Axumite kingdom, the capital of which,
Axume, was a flourishing center of trade. Ptolemy Evergetes and his
successors did much to open Abyssinia to the world, but most of the
population of that day was nomadic. In the fourth century Byzantine
influences began to be felt, and in 330 St. Athanasius of Alexandria
consecrated Fromentius as Bishop of Ethiopia. He tutored the heir to the
Abyssinian kingdom and began its gradual christianization. By the early
part of the sixth century Abyssinia was trading with India and Byzantium
and was so far recognized as a Christian country that the Emperor
Justinian appealed to King Kaleb to protect the Christians in southwestern
Arabia. Kaleb conquered Yemen in 525 and held it fifty years.

Eventually a Jewish princess, Judith, usurped the Axumite throne; the
Abyssinians were expelled from Arabia, and a long period begins when as
Gibbon says, "encompassed by the enemies of their religion, the Ethiopians
slept for nearly a thousand years, forgetful of the world by whom they
were forgotten." Throughout the middle ages, however, the legend of a
great Christian kingdom hidden away in Africa persisted, and the search
for Prester John became one of the world quests.

It was the expanding power of Abyssinia that led Rome to call in the
Nubians from the western desert. The Nubians had formed a strong league of
tribes, and as the ancient kingdom of Ethiopia declined they drove back
the Abyssinians, who had already established themselves at Meroe.

In the sixth century the Nubians were converted to Christianity by a
Byzantine priest, and they immediately began to develop. A new capital,
Dongola, replaced Nepata and Meroe, and by the twelfth century churches
and brick dwellings had appeared. As the Mohammedan flood pressed up the
Nile valley it was the Nubians that held it back for two centuries.

Farther south other wild tribes pushed out of the Sudan and began a
similar development. Chief among these were the Fung, who fixed their
capital at Senaar, at the junction of the White and Blue Nile. When the
Mohammedan flood finally passed over Nubia, the Fung diverted it by
declaring themselves Moslems. This left the Fung as the dominant power in
the fifteenth century from the Three Cataracts to Fazogli and from the Red
Sea at Suakin to the White Nile. Islam then swept on south in a great
circle, skirted the Great Lakes, and then curled back to Somaliland,
completely isolating Abyssinia.

Between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries the Egyptian Sudan became a
congeries of Mohammedan kingdoms with Arab, mulatto, and Negro kings. Far
to the west, near Lake Chad, arose in 1520 the sultanate of Baghirmi,
which reached its highest power in the seventh century. This dynasty was
overthrown by the Negroid Mabas, who established Wadai to the eastward
about 1640. South of Wadai lay the heathen and cannibals of the Congo
valley, against which Islam never prevailed. East of Wadai and nearer the
Nile lay the kindred state of Darfur, a Nubian nation whose sultans
reigned over two hundred years and which reached great prosperity in the
early seventeenth century under Soliman Solon.

Before the Mohammedan power reached Abyssinia the Portuguese pioneers had
entered the country from the east and begun to open the country again to
European knowledge. Without doubt, in the centuries of silence, a
civilization of some height had flourished in Abyssinia, but all authentic
records were destroyed by fire in the tenth century. When the Portuguese
came, the older Axumite kingdom had fallen and had been succeeded by a
number of petty states.

The Sudanese kingdoms of the Sudan resisted the power of the Mameluke beys
in Egypt, and later the power of the Turks until the nineteenth century,
when the Sudan was made nominally a part of Egypt. Continuous upheaval,
war, and conquest had by this time done their work, and little of ancient
Ethiopian culture survived except the slave trade.

The entrance of England into Egypt, after the building of the Suez Canal,
stirred up eventually revolt in the Sudan, for political, economic, and
religious reasons. Led by a Sudanese Negro, Mohammed Ahmad, who claimed to
be the Messiah (Mahdi), the Sudan arose in revolt in 1881, determined to
resist a hated religion, foreign rule, and interference with their chief
commerce, the trade in slaves. The Sudan was soon aflame, and the able
mulatto general, Osman Digna, aided by revolt among the heathen Dinka,
drove Egypt and England out of the Sudan for sixteen years. It was not
until 1898 that England reëntered the Sudan and in petty revenge
desecrated the bones of the brave, even if misguided, prophet.

Meantime this Mahdist revolt had delayed England's designs on Abyssinia,
and the Italians, replacing her, attempted a protectorate. Menelik of
Shoa, one of the smaller kingdoms of Abyssinia, was a shrewd man of
predominantly Negro blood, and had been induced to make a treaty with the
Italians after King John had been killed by the Mahdists. The exact terms
of the treaty were disputed, but undoubtedly the Italians tried by this
means to reduce Menelik to vassalage. Menelik stoutly resisted, and at the
great battle of Adua, one of the decisive battles of the modern world, the
Abyssinians on March 1, 1896, inflicted a crushing defeat on the Italians,
killing four thousand of them and capturing two thousand prisoners. The
empress, Taitou, a full-blooded Negress, led some of the charges. By this
battle Abyssinia became independent.

Such in vague and general outline is the strange story of the valley of
the Nile--of Egypt, the motherland of human culture and

"That starr'd Ethiop Queen that strove To set her beauty's praise above
The sea nymphs."

FOOTNOTES:

[4] [Greek: "autos de eikasa têde kai hote melanchroes eisi kai
oulotriches."] Liber II, Cap. 104.

[5] Cf. Maciver and Thompson: _Ancient Races of the Thebaid_.

[6] _Journal of Race Development_, I, 484.

[7] Petrie: _History of Egypt_, I, 51, 237.

[8] _From West Africa to Palestine_, p. 114.

[9] Depending partly on whether the so-called Hyksos sphinxes belong to
the period of the Hyksos kings or to an earlier period (cf. Petrie, I,
52-53, 237). That Negroids largely dominated in the early history of
western Asia is proven by the monuments.

[10] Petrie: _History of Egypt_, II, 337.

[11] Chamberlain: _Journal of Race Development_, April, 1911.

[12] Petrie: _History of Egypt_, II, 337.

[13] Reisner: _Archeological Survey of Nubia_, I, 319.

[14] Hoskins declares that the arch had its origin in Ethiopia.

[15] Maciver and Wooley: _Areika_, p. 2.

[16] Acts VIII, 27.



IV THE NIGER AND ISLAM


The Arabian expression "Bilad es Sudan" (Land of the Blacks) was applied
to the whole region south of the Sahara, from the Atlantic to the Nile. It
is a territory some thirty-five hundred miles by six hundred miles,
containing two million square miles, and has to-day a population of
perhaps eighty million. It is thus two-thirds the size of the United
States and quite as thickly settled. In the western Sudan the Niger plays
the same role as the Nile in the east. In this chapter we follow the
history of the Niger.

The history of this part of Africa was probably something as follows:
primitive man, entering Africa from Arabia, found the Great Lakes, spread
in the Nile valley, and wandered westward to the Niger. Herodotus tells of
certain youths who penetrated the desert to the Niger and found there a
city of black dwarfs. Succeeding migrations of Negroes and Negroids pushed
the dwarfs gradually into the inhospitable forests and occupied the Sudan,
pushing on to the Atlantic. Here the newcomers, curling northward, met the
Mediterranean race coming down across the western desert, while to the
southward the Negro came to the Gulf of Guinea and the thick forests of
the Congo valley. Indigenous civilizations arose on the west coast in
Yoruba and Benin, and contact of these with the Mediterranean race in the
desert, and with Egyptian and Arab from the east, gave rise to centers of
Negro culture in the Sudan at Ghana and Melle and in Songhay, Nupe, the
Hausa states, and Bornu.

The history of the Sudan thus leads us back again to Ethiopia, that
strange and ancient center of world civilization whose inhabitants in the
ancient world were considered to be the most pious and the oldest of men.
From this center the black originators of African culture, and to a large
degree of world culture, wandered not simply down the Nile, but also
westward. These Negroes developed the original substratum of culture which
later influences modified but never displaced.

We know that Egyptian Pharaohs in several cases ventured into the western
Sudan and that Egyptian influences are distinctly traceable. Greek and
Byzantine culture and Phoenician and Carthaginian trade also penetrated,
while Islam finally made this whole land her own. Behind all these
influences, however, stood from the first an indigenous Negro culture. The
stone figures of Sherbro, the megaliths of Gambia, the art and industry of
the west coast are all too deep and original evidences of civilization to
be merely importations from abroad.

Nor was the Sudan the inert recipient of foreign influence when it came.
According to credible legend, the "Great King" at Byzantium imported
glass, tin, silver, bronze, cut stones, and other treasure from the Sudan.
Embassies were sent and states like Nupe recognized the suzerainty of the
Byzantine emperor. The people of Nupe especially were filled with pride
when the Byzantine people learned certain kinds of work in bronze and
glass from them, and this intercourse was only interrupted by the
Mohammedan conquest.

To this ancient culture, modified somewhat by Byzantine and Christian
influences, came Islam. It approached from the northwest, coming
stealthily and slowly and being handed on particularly by the Mandingo
Negroes. About 1000-1200 A.D. the situation was this: Ghana was on the
edge of the desert in the north, Mandingoland between the Niger and the
Senegal in the south and the western Sahara, Djolof was in the west on the
Senegal, and the Songhay on the Niger in the center. The Mohammedans came
chiefly as traders and found a trade already established. Here and there
in the great cities were districts set aside for these new merchants, and
the Mohammedans gave frequent evidence of their respect for these black
nations.

Islam did not found new states, but modified and united Negro states
already ancient; it did not initiate new commerce, but developed a
widespread trade already established. It is, as Frobenius says, "easily
proved from chronicles written in Arabic that Islam was only effective in
fact as a fertilizer and stimulant. The essential point is the
resuscitative and invigorative concentration of Negro power in the service
of a new era and a Moslem propaganda, as well as the reaction thereby
produced."[17]

Early in the eighth century Islam had conquered North Africa and converted
the Berbers. Aided by black soldiers, the Moslems crossed into Spain; in
the following century Berber and Arab armies crossed the west end of the
Sahara and came to Negroland. Later in the eleventh century Arabs
penetrated the Sudan and Central Africa from the east, filtering through
the Negro tribes of Darfur, Kanem, and neighboring regions. The Arabs were
too nearly akin to Negroes to draw an absolute color line. Antar, one of
the great pre-Islamic poets of Arabia, was the son of a black woman, and
one of the great poets at the court of Haroun al Raschid was black. In the
twelfth century a learned Negro poet resided at Seville, and Sidjilmessa,
the last town in Lower Morocco toward the desert, was founded in 757 by a
Negro who ruled over the Berber inhabitants. Indeed, many towns in the
Sudan and the desert were thus ruled, and felt no incongruity in this
arrangement. They say, to be sure, that the Moors destroyed Audhoghast
because it paid tribute to the black town of Ghana, but this was because
the town was heathen and not because it was black. On the other hand,
there is a story that a Berber king overthrew one of the cities of the
Sudan and all the black women committed suicide, being too proud to allow
themselves to fall into the hands of white men.

In the west the Moslems first came into touch with the Negro kingdom of
Ghana. Here large quantities of gold were gathered in early days, and we
have names of seventy-four rulers before 300 A.D. running through
twenty-one generations. This would take us back approximately a thousand
years to 700 B.C., or about the time that Pharaoh Necho of Egypt sent out
the Phoenician expedition which circumnavigated Africa, and possibly
before the time when Hanno, the Carthaginian, explored the west coast of
Africa.

By the middle of the eleventh century Ghana was the principal kingdom in
the western Sudan. Already the town had a native and a Mussulman quarter,
and was built of wood and stone with surrounding gardens. The king had an
army of two hundred thousand and the wealth of the country was great. A
century later the king had become Mohammedan in faith and had a palace
with sculptures and glass windows. The great reason for this development
was the desert trade. Gold, skins, ivory, kola nuts, gums, honey, wheat,
and cotton were exported, and the whole Mediterranean coast traded in the
Sudan. Other and lesser black kingdoms like Tekrou, Silla, and Masina
surrounded Ghana.

In the early part of the thirteenth century the prestige of Ghana began to
fall before the rising Mandingan kingdom to the west. Melle, as it was
called, was founded in 1235 and formed an open door for Moslem and Moorish
traders. The new kingdom, helped by its expanding trade, began to grow,
and Islam slowly surrounded the older Negro culture west, north, and east.
However, a great mass of the older heathen culture, pushing itself upward
from the Guinea coast, stood firmly against Islam down to the nineteenth
century.

Steadily Mohammedanism triumphed in the growing states which almost
encircled the protagonists of ancient Atlantic culture. Mandingan Melle
eventually supplanted Ghana in prestige and power, after Ghana had been
overthrown by the heathen Su Su from the south.

The territory of Melle lay southeast of Ghana and some five hundred miles
north of the Gulf of Guinea. Its kings were known by the title of Mansa,
and from the middle of the thirteenth century to the middle of the
fourteenth the Mellestine, as its dominion was called, was the leading
power in the land of the blacks. Its greatest king, Mari Jalak (Mansa
Musa), made his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, with a caravan of sixty
thousand persons, including twelve thousand young slaves gowned in figured
cotton and Persian silk. He took eighty camel loads of gold dust (worth
about five million dollars) to defray his expenses, and greatly impressed
the people of the East with his magnificence.

On his return he found that Timbuktu had been sacked by the Mossi, but he
rebuilt the town and filled the new mosque with learned blacks from the
University of Fez. Mansa Musa reigned twenty-five years and "was
distinguished by his ability and by the holiness of his life. The justice
of his administration was such that the memory of it still lives."[18] The
Mellestine preserved its preëminence until the beginning of the sixteenth
century, when the rod of Sudanese empire passed to Songhay, the largest
and most famous of the black empires.

The known history of Songhay covers a thousand years and three dynasties
and centers in the great bend of the Niger. There were thirty kings of the
First Dynasty, reigning from 700 to 1335. During the reign of one of these
the Songhay kingdom became the vassal kingdom of Melle, then at the height
of its glory. In addition to this the Mossi crossed the valley, plundered
Timbuktu in 1339, and separated Jenne, the original seat of the Songhay,
from the main empire. The sixteenth king was converted to Mohammedanism in
1009, and after that all the Songhay princes were Mohammedans. Mansa Musa
took two young Songhay princes to the court of Melle to be educated in
1326. These boys when grown ran away and founded a new dynasty in Songhay,
that of the Sonnis, in 1355. Seventeen of these kings reigned, the last
and greatest being Sonni Ali, who ascended the throne in 1464. Melle was
at this time declining, other cities like Jenne, with its seven thousand
villages, were rising, and the Tuaregs (Berbers with Negro blood) had
captured Timbuktu.

Sonni Ali was a soldier and began his career with the conquest of Timbuktu
in 1469. He also succeeded in capturing Jenne and attacked the Mossi and
other enemies on all sides. Finally he concentrated his forces for the
destruction of Melle and subdued nearly the whole empire on the west bend
of the Niger. In summing up Sonni Ali's military career the chronicle says
of him, "He surpassed all his predecessors in the numbers and valor of his
soldiery. His conquests were many and his renown extended from the rising
to the setting of the sun. If it is the will of God, he will be long
spoken of."[19]

Sonni Ali was a Songhay Negro whose father was a Berber. He was succeeded
by a full-blooded black, Mohammed Abou Bekr, who had been his prime
minister. Mohammed was hailed as "Askia" (usurper) and is best known as
Mohammed Askia. He was strictly orthodox where Ali was rather a scoffer,
and an organizer where Ali was a warrior. On his pilgrimage to Mecca in
1495 there was nothing of the barbaric splendor of Mansa Musa, but a
brilliant group of scholars and holy men with a small escort of fifteen
hundred soldiers and nine hundred thousand dollars in gold. He stopped and
consulted with scholars and politicians and studied matters of taxation,
weights and measures, trade, religious tolerance, and manners. In Cairo,
where he was invested by the reigning caliph of Egypt, he may have heard
of the struggle of Europe for the trade of the Indies, and perhaps of the
parceling of the new world between Portugal and Spain. He returned to the
Sudan in 1497, instituted a standing army of slaves, undertook a holy war
against the indomitable Mossi, and finally marched against the Hausa. He
subdued these cities and even imposed the rule of black men on the Berber
town of Agades, a rich city of merchants and artificers with stately
mansions. In fine Askia, during his reign, conquered and consolidated an
empire two thousand miles long by one thousand wide at its greatest
diameters; a territory as large as all Europe. The territory was divided
into four vice royalties, and the system of Melle, with its
semi-independent native dynasties, was carried out. His empire extended
from the Atlantic to Lake Chad and from the salt mines of Tegazza and the
town of Augila in the north to the 10th degree of north latitude toward
the south.

It was a six months' journey across the empire and, it is said, "he was
obeyed with as much docility on the farthest limits of the empire as he
was in his own palace, and there reigned everywhere great plenty and
absolute peace."[20] The University of Sankore became a center of learning
in correspondence with Egypt and North Africa and had a swarm of black
Sudanese students. Law, literature, grammar, geography and surgery were
studied. Askia the Great reigned thirty-six years, and his dynasty
continued on the throne until after the Moorish conquest in 1591.

Meanwhile, to the eastward, two powerful states appeared. They never
disputed the military supremacy of Songhay, but their industrial
development was marvelous. The Hausa states were formed by seven original
cities, of which Kano was the oldest and Katsena the most famous. Their
greatest leaders, Mohammed Rimpa and Ahmadu Kesoke, arose in the fifteenth
and early sixteenth centuries. The land was subject to the Songhay, but
the cities became industrious centers of smelting, weaving, and dyeing.
Katsena especially, in the middle of the sixteenth century, is described
as a place thirteen or fourteen miles in circumference, divided into
quarters for strangers, for visitors from various other states, and for
the different trades and industries, as saddlers, shoemakers, dyers, etc.

Beyond the Hausa states and bordering on Lake Chad was Bornu. The people
of Bornu had a large infiltration of Berber blood, but were predominantly
Negro. Berber mulattoes had been kings in early days, but they were soon
replaced by black men. Under the early kings, who can be traced back to
the third century, these people had ruled nearly all the territory between
the Nile and Lake Chad. The country was known as Kanem, and the pagan
dynasty of Dugu reigned there from the middle of the ninth to the end of
the eleventh century. Mohammedanism was introduced from Egypt at the end
of the eleventh century, and under the Mohammedan kings Kanem became one
of the first powers of the Sudan. By the end of the twelfth century the
armies of Kanem were very powerful and its rulers were known as "Kings of
Kanem and Lords of Bornu." In the thirteenth century the kings even dared
to invade the southern country down toward the valley of the Congo.

Meantime great things were happening in the world beyond the desert, the
ocean, and the Nile. Arabian Mohammedanism had succumbed to the wild
fanaticism of the Seljukian Turks. These new conquerors were not only
firmly planted at the gates of Vienna, but had swept the shores of the
Mediterranean and sent all Europe scouring the seas for their lost trade
connections with the riches of India. Religious zeal, fear of conquest,
and commercial greed inflamed Europe against the Mohammedan and led to the
discovery of a new world, the riches of which poured first on Spain.
Oppression of the Moors followed, and in 1502 they were driven back into
Africa, despoiled and humbled. Here the Spaniards followed and harassed
them and here the Turks, fighting the Christians, captured the
Mediterranean ports and cut the Moors off permanently from Europe. In the
slow years that followed, huddled in Northwest Africa, they became a
decadent people and finally cast their eyes toward Negroland.

The Moors in Morocco had come to look upon the Sudan as a gold mine, and
knew that the Sudan was especially dependent upon salt. In 1545 Morocco
claimed the principal salt mines at Tegazza, but the reigning Askia
refused to recognize the claim.

When the Sultan Elmansour came to the throne of Morocco, he increased the
efficiency of his army by supplying it with fire arms and cannon.
Elmansour determined to attack the Sudan and sent four hundred men under
Pasha Djouder, who left Morocco in 1590. The Songhay, with their bows and
arrows, were helpless against powder and shot, and they were defeated at
Tenkadibou April 12, 1591. Askia Ishak, the king, offered terms, and
Djouder Pasha referred them to Morocco. The sultan, angry with his
general's delay, deposed him and sent another, who crushed and
treacherously murdered the king and set up a puppet. Thereafter there were
two Askias, one under the Moors at Timbuktu and one who maintained himself
in the Hausa states, which the Moors could not subdue. Anarchy reigned in
Songhay. The Moors tried to put down disorder with a high hand, drove out
and murdered the distinguished men of Timbuktu, and as a result let loose
a riot of robbery and decadence throughout the Sudan. Pasha now succeeded
pasha with revolt and misrule until in 1612 the soldiers elected their own
pasha and deliberately shut themselves up in the Sudan by cutting off
approach from the north.

Hausaland and Bornu were still open to Turkish and Mohammedan influence
from the east, and the Gulf of Guinea to the slave trade from the south,
but the face of the finest Negro civilization the modern world had ever
produced was veiled from Europe and given to the defilement of wild
Moorish soldiers. In 1623 it is written "excesses of every kind are now
committed unchecked by the soldiery," and "the country is profoundly
convulsed and oppressed."[21] The Tuaregs marched down from the desert and
deprived the Moors of many of the principal towns. The rest of the empire
of the Songhay was by the end of the eighteenth century divided among
separate Moorish chiefs, who bought supplies from the Negro peasantry and
were "at once the vainest, proudest, and perhaps the most bigoted,
ferocious, and intolerant of all the nations of the south."[22] They lived
a nomadic life, plundering the Negroes. To such depths did the mighty
Songhay fall.

As the Songhay declined a new power arose in the nineteenth century, the
Fula. The Fula, who vary in race from Berber mulattoes to full-blooded
Negroes, may be the result of a westward migration of some people like the
"Leukoæthiopi" of Pliny, or they may have arisen from the migration of
Berber mulattoes in the western oases, driven south by Romans and Arabs.

These wandering herdsmen lived on the Senegal River and the ocean in very
early times and were not heard of until the nineteenth century. By this
time they had changed to a Negro or dark mulatto people and lived
scattered in small communities between the Atlantic and Darfur. They were
without political union or national sentiment, but were all Mohammedans.
Then came a sudden change, and led by a religious fanatic, these despised
and persecuted people became masters of the central Sudan. They were the
ones who at last broke down that great wedge of resisting Atlantic
culture, after it had been undermined and disintegrated by the American
slave trade.

Thus Islam finally triumphed in the Sudan and the ancient culture combined
with the new. In the Sudan to-day one may find evidences of the union of
two classes of people. The representatives of the older civilization dwell
as peasants in small communities, carrying on industries and speaking a
large number of different languages. With them or above them is the ruling
Mohammedan caste, speaking four main languages: Mandingo, Hausa, Fula, and
Arabic. These latter form the state builders. Negro blood predominates
among both classes, but naturally there is more Berber blood among the
Mohammedan invaders.

Europe during the middle ages had some knowledge of these movements in the
Sudan and Africa. Melle and Songhay appear on medieval maps. In literature
we have many allusions: the mulatto king, Feirifis, was one of Wolfram von
Eschenbach's heroes; Prester John furnished endless lore; Othello, the
warrior, and the black king represented by medieval art as among the three
wise men, and the various black Virgin Marys' all show legendary knowledge
of what African civilization was at that time doing.

It is a curious commentary on modern prejudice that most of this splendid
history of civilization and uplift is unknown to-day, and men confidently
assert that Negroes have no history.

FOOTNOTES:

[17] Frobenius: _Voice of Africa_, II, 359-360.

[18] Ibn Khaldun, quoted in Lugard, p. 128.

[19] Quoted in Lugard, p. 180.

[20] Es-Sa 'di, quoted by Lugard, p. 199.

[21] Lugard, p. 373.

[22] Mungo Park, quoted in Lugard, p. 374.



V GUINEA AND CONGO


One of the great cities of the Sudan was Jenne. The chronicle says "that
its markets are held every day of the week and its populations are very
enormous. Its seven thousand villages are so near to one another that the
chief of Jenne has no need of messengers. If he wishes to send a note to
Lake Dibo, for instance, it is cried from the gate of the town and
repeated from village to village, by which means it reaches its
destination almost instantly."[23]



From the name of this city we get the modern name Guinea, which is used
to-day to designate the country contiguous to the great gulf of that
name--a territory often referred to in general as West Africa. Here,
reaching from the mouth of the Gambia to the mouth of the Niger, is a
coast of six hundred miles, where a marvelous drama of world history has
been enacted. The coast and its hinterland comprehends many well-known
names. First comes ancient Guinea, then, modern Sierra Leone and Liberia;
then follow the various "coasts" of ancient traffic--the grain, ivory,
gold, and slave coasts--with the adjoining territories of Ashanti,
Dahomey, Lagos, and Benin, and farther back such tribal and territorial
names as those of the Mandingoes, Yorubas, the Mossi, Nupe, Borgu, and
others.

Recent investigation makes it certain that an ancient civilization existed
on this coast which may have gone back as far as three thousand years
before Christ. Frobenius, perhaps fancifully, identified this African
coast with the Atlantis of the Greeks and as part of that great western
movement in human culture, "beyond the pillars of Hercules," which
thirteen centuries before Christ strove with Egypt and the East. It is, at
any rate, clear that ancient commerce reached down the west coast. The
Phoenicians, 600 B.C., and the Carthaginians, a century or more later,
record voyages, and these may have been attempted revivals of still more
ancient intercourse.

These coasts at some unknown prehistoric period were peopled from the
Niger plateau toward the north and west by the black West African type of
Negro, while along the west end of the desert these Negroes mingled with
the Berbers, forming various Negroid races.

Movement and migration is evident along this coast in ancient and modern
times. The Yoruba-Benin-Dahomey peoples were among the earliest arrivals,
with their remarkable art and industry, which places them in some lines of
technique abreast with the modern world. Behind them came the Mossi from
the north, and many other peoples in recent days have filtered through,
like the Limba and Temni of Sierra Leone and the Agni-Ashanti, who moved
from Borgu some two thousand years ago to the Gold and Ivory coasts.

We have already noted in the main the history of black men along the
wonderful Niger and seen how, pushing up from the Gulf of Guinea, a
powerful wedge of ancient culture held back Islam for a thousand years,
now victorious, now stubbornly disputing every inch of retreat. The center
of this culture lay probably, in oldest times, above the Bight of Benin,
along the Slave Coast, and reached east, west, and north. We trace it
to-day not only in the remarkable tradition of the natives, but in stone
monuments, architecture, industrial and social organization, and works of
art in bronze, glass, and terra cotta.

Benin art has been practiced without interruption for centuries, and Von
Luschan says that it is "of extraordinary significance that by the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a local and monumental art had been
learned in Benin which in many respects equaled European art and developed
a technique of the very highest accomplishment."[24]

Summing up Yoruban civilization, Frobenius concluded that "the technical
summit of that civilization was reached in the terra-cotta industry, and
that the most important achievements in art were not expressed in stone,
but in fine clay baked in the furnace; that hollow casting was thoroughly
known, too, and practiced by these people; that iron was mainly used for
decoration; that, whatever their purpose, they kept their glass beads in
stoneware urns within their own locality, and that they manufactured both
earthen and glass ware; that the art of weaving was highly developed among
them; that the stone monuments, it is true, show some dexterity in
handling and are so far instructive, but in other respects evidence a
cultural condition insufficiently matured to grasp the utility of stone
monumental material; and, above all, that the then great and significant
idea of the universe as imaged in the Templum was current in those
days."[25]

Effort has naturally been made to ascribe this civilization to white
people. First it was ascribed to Portuguese influence, but much of it is
evidently older than the Portuguese discovery. Egypt and India have been
evoked and Greece and Carthage. But all these explanations are
far-fetched. If ever a people exhibited unanswerable evidence of
indigenous civilization, it is the west-coast Africans. Undoubtedly they
adapted much that came to them, utilized new ideas, and grew from contact.
But their art and culture is Negro through and through.

Yoruba forms one of the three city groups of West Africa; another is
around Timbuktu, and a third in the Hausa states. The Timbuktu cities have
from five to fifteen hundred towns, while the Yoruba cities have one
hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants and more. The Hausa cities are many
of them important, but few are as large as the Yoruba cities and they lie
farther apart. AH three centers, however, are connected with the Niger,
and the group nearest the coast--that is, the Yoruba cities--has the
greatest numbers of towns, the most developed architectural styles, and
the oldest institutions.

The Yoruba cities are not only different from the Sudanese in population,
but in their social relations. The Sudanese cities were influenced from
the desert and the Mediterranean, and form nuclei of larger surrounding
monarchial states. The Yoruba cities, on the other hand, remained
comparatively autonomous organizations down to modern times, and their
relative importance changed from time to time without developing an
imperialistic idea or subordinating the group to one overpowering city.

This social and industrial state of the Yorubas formerly spread and
wielded great influence. We find Yoruba reaching out and subduing states
like Nupe toward the northward. But the industrial democracy and city
autonomy of Yoruba lent itself indifferently to conquest, and the state
fell eventually a victim to the fanatical Fula Mohammedans and was made a
part of the modern sultanate of Gando.

West of Yoruba on the lower courses of the Niger is Benin, an ancient
state which in 1897 traced its twenty-three kings back one thousand years;
some legends even named a line of sixty kings. It seems probable that
Benin developed the imperial idea and once extended its rule into the
Congo valley. Later and also to the west of the Yoruba come two states
showing a fiercer and ruder culture, Dahomey and Ashanti. The state of
Dahomey was founded by Tacondomi early in the seventeenth century, and
developed into a fierce and bloody tyranny with wholesale murder. The king
had a body of two thousand to five thousand Amazons renowned for their
bravery and armed with rifles. The kingdom was overthrown by the French in
1892-93. Under Sai Tutu, Ashanti arose to power in the seventeenth
century. A military aristocracy with cruel blood sacrifices was formed. By
1816 the king had at his disposal two hundred thousand soldiers. The
Ashanti power was crushed by the English in the war of 1873-74.

In these states and in later years in Benin the whole character of
west-coast culture seems to change. In place of the Yoruban culture, with
its city democracy, its elevated religious ideas, its finely organized
industry, and its noble art, came Ashanti and Dahomey. What was it that
changed the character of the west coast from this to the orgies of war and
blood sacrifice which we read of later in these lands?

There can be but one answer: the slave trade. Not simply the sale of men,
but an organized traffic of such proportions and widely organized
ramifications as to turn the attention and energies of men from nearly all
other industries, encourage war and all the cruelest passions of war, and
concentrate this traffic in precisely that part of Africa farthest from
the ancient Mediterranean lines of trade.

We need not assume that the cultural change was sudden or absolute.
Ancient Yoruba had the cruelty of a semi-civilized land, but it was not
dominant or tyrannical. Modern Benin and Dahomey showed traces of skill,
culture, and industry along with inexplicable cruelty and
bloodthirstiness. But it was the slave trade that turned the balance and
set these lands backward. Dahomey was the last word in a series of human
disasters which began with the defeat of the Askias at Tenkadibou.[26]

From the middle of the fifteenth to the last half of the nineteenth
centuries the American slave trade centered in Guinea and devastated the
coast morally, socially, and physically. European rum and fire arms were
traded for human beings, and it was not until 1787 that any measures were
taken to counteract this terrible scourge. In that year the idea arose of
repatriating stolen Negroes on that coast and establishing civilized
centers to supplant the slave trade. About four hundred Negroes from
England were sent to Sierra Leone, to whom the promoters considerately
added sixty white prostitutes as wives. The climate on the low coast,
however, was so deadly that new recruits were soon needed. An American
Negro, Thomas Peters, who had served as sergeant under Sir Henry Clinton
in the British army in America, went to England seeking an allotment of
land for his fellows. The Sierra Leone Company welcomed him and offered
free passage and land in Sierra Leone to the Negroes of Nova Scotia. As a
result fifteen vessels sailed with eleven hundred and ninety Negroes in
1792. Arriving in Africa, they found the chief white man in control there
so drunk that he soon died of delirium tremens. John Clarkson, however,
brother of Thomas Clarkson, the abolitionist, eventually took the lead,
founded Freetown, and the colony began its checkered career. In 1896 the
colony was saved from insurrection by the exiled Maroon Negroes from
Jamaica. After 1833, when emancipation in English colonies took place,
severer measures against the slave trade was possible and the colony began
to grow. To-day its imports and exports amount to fifteen million dollars
a year.

Liberia was a similar American experiment. In 1816 American
philanthropists decided that slavery was bound to die out, but that the
problem lay in getting rid of the freed Negroes, of which there were then
two hundred thousand in the United States. Accordingly the American
Colonization Society was proposed this year and founded January 1, 1817,
with Bushrod Washington as President. It was first thought to encourage
migration to Sierra Leone, and eighty-eight Negroes were sent, but they
were not welcomed. As a result territory was bought in the present
confines of Liberia, December 15, 1821, and colonists began to arrive. A
little later an African depot for recaptured slaves taken in the
contraband slave trade, provided for in the Act of 1819, was established
and an agent was sent to Africa to form a settlement. Gradually this
settlement was merged with the settlement of the Colonization Society, and
from this union Liberia was finally evolved.

The last white governor of Liberia died in 1841 and was succeeded by the
first colored governor, Joseph J. Roberts, a Virginian. The total
population in 1843 was about twenty-seven hundred and ninety, and with
this as a beginning in 1847 Governor Roberts declared the independence of
the state. The recognition of Liberian independence by all countries
except the United States followed in 1849. The United States, not wishing
to receive a Negro minister, did not recognize Liberia until 1862.

No sooner was the independence of Liberia announced than England and
France began a long series of aggressions to limit her territory and
sovereignty. Considerable territory was lost by treaty, and in the effort
to get capital to develop the rest, Liberia was saddled with a debt of
four hundred thousand dollars, of which she received less than one hundred
thousand dollars in actual cash. Finally the Liberians turned to the
United States for capital and protection. As a result the Liberian customs
have been put under international control and Major Charles Young, the
ranking Negro officer in the United States army, with several colored
assistants, has been put in charge of the making of roads and drilling a
constabulary to keep order in the interior.

To-day Liberia has an area of forty thousand square miles, about three
hundred and fifty miles of coast line, and an estimated total population
of two million of which fifty thousand are civilized. The revenue amounted
in 1913 to $531,500. The imports in 1912 were $1,667,857 and the exports
$1,199,152. The latter consisted chiefly of rubber, palm oil and kernels,
coffee, piassava fiber, ivory, ginger, camwood, and arnotto.

Perhaps Liberia's greatest citizen was the late Edward Wilmot Blyden, who
migrated in early life from the Danish West Indies and became a prophet of
the renaissance of the Negro race.

Turning now from Guinea we pass down the west coast. In 1482 Diego Cam of
Portugal, sailing this coast, set a stone at the mouth of a great river
which he called "The Mighty," but which eventually came to be known by the
name of the powerful Negro kingdom through which it flowed--the Congo.

We must think of the valley of the Congo with its intricate interlacing of
water routes and jungle of forests as a vast caldron shut away at first
from the African world by known and unknown physical hindrances. Then it
was penetrated by the tiny red dwarfs and afterward horde after horde of
tall black men swirled into the valley like a maelstrom, moving usually
from north to east and from south to west.

The Congo valley became, therefore, the center of the making of what we
know to-day as the Bantu nations. They are not a unified people, but a
congeries of tribes of considerable physical diversity, united by the
compelling bond of language and other customs imposed on the conquered by
invading conquerors.

The history or these invasions we must to-day largely imagine. Between two
and three thousand years ago the wilder tribes of Negroes began to move
out of the region south or southeast of Lake Chad. This was always a land
of shadows and legends, where fearful cannibals dwelt and where no
Egyptian or Ethiopian or Sudanese armies dared to go. It is possible,
however, that pressure from civilization in the Nile valley and rising
culture around Lake Chad was at this time reënforced by expansion of the
Yoruba-Benin culture on the west coast. Perhaps, too, developing culture
around the Great Lakes in the east beckoned or the riotous fertility of
the Congo valleys became known. At any rate the movement commenced, now by
slow stages, now in wild forays. There may have been a preliminary
movement from east to west to the Gulf of Guinea. The main movement,
however, was eastward, skirting the Congo forests and passing down by the
Victoria Nyanza and Lake Tanganyika. Here two paths beckoned: the lakes
and the sea to the east, the Congo to the west. A great stream of men
swept toward the ocean and, dividing, turned northward and fought its way
down the Nile valley and into the Abyssinian highlands; another branch
turned south and approached the Zambesi, where we shall meet it again.

Another horde of invaders turned westward and entered the valley of the
Congo in three columns. The northern column moved along the Lualaba and
Congo rivers to the Cameroons; the second column became the industrial and
state-building Luba and Lunda peoples in the southern Congo valley and
Angola; while the third column moved into Damaraland and mingled with
Bushman and Hottentot.

In the Congo valley the invaders settled in village and plain, absorbed
such indigenous inhabitants as they found or drove them deeper into the
forest, and immediately began to develop industry and political
organization. They became skilled agriculturists, raising in some
localities a profusion of cereals, fruit, and vegetables such as manioc,
maize, yams, sweet potatoes, ground nuts, sorghum, gourds, beans, peas,
bananas, and plantains. Everywhere they showed skill in mining and the
welding of iron, copper, and other metals. They made weapons, wire and
ingots, cloth, and pottery, and a widespread system of trade arose. Some
tribes extracted rubber from the talamba root; others had remarkable
breeds of fowl and cattle, and still others divided their people by crafts
into farmers, smiths, boat builders, warriors, cabinet makers, armorers,
and speakers. Women here and there took part in public assemblies and were
rulers in some cases. Large towns were built, some of which required hours
to traverse from end to end.

Many tribes developed intelligence of a high order. Wissmann called the Ba
Luba "a nation of thinkers." Bateman found them "thoroughly and
unimpeachably honest, brave to foolhardiness, and faithful to each other
and to their superiors." One of their kings, Calemba, "a really princely
prince," Bateman says would "amongst any people be a remarkable and indeed
in many respects a magnificent man."[27]

These beginnings of human culture were, however, peculiarly vulnerable to
invading hosts of later comers. There were no natural protecting barriers
like the narrow Nile valley or the Kong mountains or the forests below
Lake Chad. Once the pathways to the valley were open and for hundreds of
years the newcomers kept arriving, especially from the welter of tribes
south of the Sudan and west of the Nile, which rising culture beyond kept
in unrest and turmoil.

Against these intruders there was but one defense, the State. State
building was thus forced on the Congo valley. How early it started we
cannot say, but when the Portuguese arrived in the fifteenth century,
there had existed for centuries a large state among the Ba-Congo, with its
capital at the city now known as San Salvador.

The Negro Mfumu, or emperor, was eventually induced to accept
Christianity. His sons and many young Negroes of high birth were taken to
Portugal to be educated. There several were raised to the Catholic
priesthood and one became bishop; others distinguished themselves at the
universities. Thus suddenly there arose a Catholic kingdom south of the
valley of the Congo, which lasted three centuries, but was partially
overthrown by invading barbarians from the interior in the seventeenth
century. A king of Congo still reigns as pensioner of Portugal, and on the
coast to-day are the remains of the kingdom in the civilized blacks and
mulattoes, who are intelligent traders and boat builders.

Meantime the Luba-Lunda people to the eastward founded Kantanga and other
states, and in the sixteenth century the larger and more ambitious realm
of the Mwata Yamvo. The last of the fourteen rulers of this line was
feudal lord of about three hundred chiefs, who paid him tribute in ivory,
skins, corn, cloth, and salt. His territory included about one hundred
thousand square miles and two million or more inhabitants. Eventually this
state became torn by internal strife and revolt, especially by attacks
from the south across the Congo-Zambesi divide.

Farther north, among the Ba-Lolo and the Ba-Songo, the village policy
persisted and the cannibals of the northeast pressed down on the more
settled tribes. The result was a curious blending of war and industry,
artistic tastes and savage customs.

The organized slave trade of the Arabs penetrated the Congo valley in the
sixteenth century and soon was aiding all the forces of unrest and
turmoil. Industry was deranged and many tribes forced to take refuge in
caves and other hiding places.

Here, as on the west coast, disintegration and retrogression followed, for
as the American traffic lessened, the Arabian traffic increased. When,
therefore, Stanley opened the Congo valley to modern knowledge, Leopold II
of Belgium conceived the idea of founding here a free international state
which was to bring civilization to the heart of Africa. Consequently there
was formed in 1878 an international committee to study the region. Stanley
was finally commissioned to inquire as to the best way of introducing
European trade and culture. "I am charged," he said, "to open and keep
open, if possible, all such districts and countries as I may explore, for
the benefit of the commercial world. The mission is supported by a
philanthropic society, which numbers nobleminded men of several nations.
It is not a religious society, but my instructions are entirely of that
spirit. No violence must be used, and wherever rejected, the mission must
withdraw to seek another field."[28]

The Bula Matadi or Stone Breaker, as the natives called Stanley, threw
himself energetically into the work and had by 1881 built a road past the
falls to the plateau, where thousands of miles of river navigation were
thus opened. Stations were established, and by 1884 Stanley returned armed
with four hundred and fifty "treaties" with the native chiefs, and the new
"State" appealed to the world for recognition.

The United States first recognized the "Congo Free State," which was at
last made a sovereign power under international guarantees by the Congress
of Berlin in the year 1885, and Leopold II was chosen its king. The state
had an area of about nine hundred thousand square miles, with a population
of about thirty million.

One of the first tasks before the new state was to check the Arab slave
traders. The Arabs had hitherto acted as traders and middlemen along the
upper Congo, and when the English and Congo state overthrew Mzidi, the
reigning king in the Kantanga country, a general revolt of the Arabs and
mulattoes took place. For a time, 1892-93, the whites were driven out, but
in a year or two the Arabs and their allies were subdued.

Humanity and commerce, however, did not replace the Arab slave traders.
Rather European greed and serfdom were substituted. The land was
confiscated by the state and farmed out to private Belgian corporations.
The wilder cannibal tribes were formed into a militia to prey on the
industrious, who were taxed with specific amounts of ivory and rubber, and
scourged and mutilated if they failed to pay. Harris declares that King
Leopold's regime meant the death of twelve million natives.

"Europe was staggered at the Leopoldian atrocities, and they were terrible
indeed; but what we, who were behind the scenes, felt most keenly was the
fact that the real catastrophe in the Congo was the desolation and murder
in the larger sense. The invasion of family life, the ruthless destruction
of every social barrier, the shattering of every tribal law, the
introduction of criminal practices which struck the chiefs of the people
dumb with horror--in a word, a veritable avalanche of filth and immorality
overwhelmed the Congo tribes."[29]

So notorious did the exploitation and misrule become that Leopold was
forced to take measures toward reform, and finally in 1909 the Free State
became a Belgian colony. Some reforms have been inaugurated and others may
follow, but the valley of the Congo will long stand as a monument of shame
to Christianity and European civilization.

FOOTNOTES:

[23] Quoted in Du Bois: _Timbuktu_.

[24] Von Luschan: _Verhandlungen der berliner Gesellschaft für
Anthropologie_, etc., 1898.

[25] Frobenius: _Voice of Africa_, Vol. I.

[26] Cf. p. 58.

[27] Keane: _Africa_, II, 117-118.

[28] _The Congo_, I, Chap. III.

[29] Harris: _Dawn in Africa_.



VI THE GREAT LAKES AND ZYMBABWE


We have already seen how a branch of the conquering Bantus turned eastward
by the Great Lakes and thus reached the sea and eventually both the Nile
and South Africa.

This brought them into the ancient and mysterious land far up the Nile,
south of Ethiopia. Here lay the ancient Punt of the Egyptians (whether we
place it in Somaliland or, as seems far more likely, around the Great
Lakes) and here, as the Egyptians thought, their civilization began. The
earliest inhabitants of the land were apparently of the Bushman or
Hottentot type of Negro. These were gradually pushed southward and
westward by the intrusion of the Nilotic Negroes. Five thousand years
before Christ the mulatto Egyptians were in the Nile valley below the
First Cataract. The Negroes were in the Nile valley down as far as the
Second Cataract and between the First and Second Cataracts were Negroes
into whose veins Semitic blood had penetrated more or less. These mixed
elements became the ancestors of the modern Somali, Gala, Bishari, and
Beja and spread Negro blood into Arabia beyond the Red Sea. The Nilotic
Negroes to the south early became great traders in ivory, gold, leopard
skins, gums, beasts, birds, and slaves, and they opened up systematic
trade between Egypt and the Great Lakes.

The result was endless movement and migration both in ancient and modern
days, which makes the cultural history of the Great Lakes region very
difficult to understand. Three great elements are, however, clear: first,
the Egyptian element, by the northward migration of the Negro ancestors of
predynastic Egypt and the southern conquests and trade of dynastic Egypt;
second, the Semitic influence from Arabia and Persia; third, the Negro
influences from western and central Africa.

The migration of the Bantu is the first clearly defined movement of modern
times. As we have shown, they began to move southward at least a thousand
years before Christ, skirting the Congo forests and wandering along the
Great Lakes and down to the Zambesi. What did they find in this land?

We do not know certainly, but from what we do know we may reconstruct the
situation in this way: the primitive culture of the Hottentots of Punt had
been further developed by them and by other stronger Negro stocks until it
reached a highly developed culture. Widespread agriculture, and mining of
gold, silver, and precious stones started a trade that penetrated to Asia
and North Africa. This may have been the source of the gold of the Ophir.

The state that thus arose became in time strongly organized; it employed
slave labor in crushing the hard quartz, sinking pits, and carrying
underground galleries; it carried out a system of irrigation and built
stone buildings and fortifications. There exists to-day many remains of
these building operations in the Kalahari desert and in northern Rhodesia.
Five hundred groups, covering over an area of one hundred and fifty
thousand square miles, lie between the Limpopo and Zambesi rivers. Mining
operations have been carried on in these plains for generations, and one
estimate is that at least three hundred and seventy-five million dollars'
worth of gold had been extracted. Some have thought that the older
workings must date back to one or even three thousand years before the
Christian era.

"There are other mines," writes De Barros in the seventeenth century,[30]
"in a district called Toroa, which is otherwise known as the kingdom of
Butua, whose ruler is a prince, by name Burrow, a vassal of Benomotapa.
This land is near the other which we said consisted of extensive plains,
and those ruins are the oldest that are known in that region. They are all
in a plain, in the middle of which stands a square fortress, all of
dressed stones within and without, well wrought and of marvelous size,
without any lime showing the joinings, the walls of which are over
twenty-five hands thick, but the height is not so great compared to the
thickness. And above the gateway of that edifice is an inscription which
some Moorish [Arab] traders who were there could not read, nor say what
writing it was. All these structures the people of this country call
Symbaoe [Zymbabwe], which with them means a court, for every place where
Benomotapa stays is so called."

Later investigation has shown that these buildings were in many cases
carefully planned and built fortifications. At Niekerk, for instance, nine
or ten hills are fortified on concentric walls thirty to fifty feet in
number, with a place for the village at the top. The buildings are forts,
miniature citadels, and also workshops and cattle kraals. Iron implements
and handsome pottery were found here, and close to the Zambesi there are
extraordinary fortifications. Farther south at Inyanga there is less
strong defense, and at Umtali there are no fortifications, showing that
builders feared invasion from the north.

These people worked in gold, silver, tin, copper, and bronze and made
beautiful pottery. There is evidence of religious significance in the
buildings, and what is called the temple was the royal residence and
served as a sort of acropolis. The surrounding residences in the valley
were evidently occupied by wealthy traders and were not fortified. Here
the gold was received from surrounding districts and bartered with
traders.

As usual there have been repeated attempts to find an external and
especially an Asiatic origin for this culture. So far, however,
archeological research seems to confirm its African origin. The
implements, weapons, and art are characteristically African and there is
no evident connection with outside sources. How far back this civilization
dates it is difficult to say, a great deal depending upon the dating of
the iron age in South Africa. If it was the same as in the Mediterranean
regions, the earliest limit was 1000 B.C.; it might, however, have been
much earlier, especially if, as seems probable, the use of iron originated
in Africa. On the other hand the culmination of this culture has been
placed by some as late as the modern middle ages.

What was it that overthrew this civilization? Undoubtedly the same sort of
raids of barbarous warriors that we have known in our day. For instance,
in 1570 there came upon the country of Mozambique, farther up the coast,
"such an inundation of pagans that they could not be numbered. They came
from that part of Monomotapa where is the great lake from which spring
these great rivers. They left no other signs of the towns they passed but
the heaps of ruins and the bones of inhabitants." So, too, it is told how
the Zimbas came, "a strange people never before seen there, who, leaving
their own country, traversed a great part of this Ethiopia like a scourge
of God, destroying every living thing they came across. They were twenty
thousand strong and marched without children or women," just as four
hundred years later the Zulu impi marched. Again in 1602 a horde of people
came from the interior called the Cabires, or cannibals. They entered the
kingdom of Monomotapa, and the reigning king, being weak, was in great
terror. Thus gradually the Monomotapa fell, and its power was scattered
until the Kaffir-Zulu raids of our day.[31]

The Arab writer, Macoudi, in the tenth century visited the East African
coast somewhere north of the equator. He found the Indian Sea at that time
frequented by Arab and Persian vessels, but there were no Asiatic
settlements on the African shore. The Bantu, or as he calls them, Zenji,
inhabited the country as far south as Sofala, where they bordered upon the
Bushmen. These Bantus were under a ruler with the dynastic title of
Waklimi. He was paramount over all the other tribes of the north and could
put three hundred thousand men in the field. They used oxen as beasts of
burden and the country produced gold in abundance, while panther skin was
largely used for clothing. Ivory was sold to Asia and the Bantu used iron
for personal adornment instead of gold or silver. They rode on their oxen,
which ran with great speed, and they ate millet and honey and the flesh of
animals.

Inland among the Bantu arose later the line of rulers called the
Monomotapa among the gifted Makalanga. Their state was very extensive,
ranging from the coast far into the interior and from Mozambique down to
the Limpopo. It was strongly organized, with feudatory allied states, and
carried on an extensive commerce by means of the traders on the coast. The
kings were converted to nominal Christianity by the Portuguese.

There are indications of trade between Nupe in West Africa and Sofala on
the east coast, and certainly trade between Asia and East Africa is
earlier than the beginning of the Christian era. The Asiatic traders
settled on the coast and by means of mulatto and Negro merchants brought
Central Africa into contact with Arabia, India, China, and Malaysia.

The coming of the Asiatics was in this wise: Zaide, great-grandson of Ali,
nephew and son-in-law of Mohammed, was banished from Arabia as a heretic.
He passed over to Africa and formed temporary settlements. His people
mingled with the blacks, and the resulting mulatto traders, known as the
Emoxaidi, seem to have wandered as far south as the equator. Soon other
Arabian families came over on account of oppression and founded the towns
of Magadosho and Brava, both not far north of the equator. The first town
became a place of importance and other settlements were made. The
Emoxaidi, whom the later immigrants regarded as heretics, were driven
inland and became the interpreting traders between the coast and the
Bantu. Some wanderers from Magadosho came into the Port of Sofala and
there learned that gold could be obtained. This led to a small Arab
settlement at that place.

Seventy years later, and about fifty years before the Norman conquest of
England, certain Persians settled at Kilwa in East Africa, led by Ali, who
had been despised in his land because he was the son of a black Abyssinian
slave mother. Kilwa, because of this, eventually became the most important
commercial station on the East African coast, and in this and all these
settlements a very large mulatto population grew up, so that very soon the
whole settlement was indistinguishable in color from the Bantu.

In 1330 Ibn Batuta visited Kilwa. He found an abundance of ivory and some
gold and heard that the inhabitants of Kilwa had gained victories over the
Zenji or Bantu. Kilwa had at that time three hundred mosques and was
"built of handsome houses of stone and lime, and very lofty, with their
windows like those of the Christians; in the same way it has streets, and
these houses have got terraces, and the wood-work is with the masonry,
with plenty of gardens, in which there are many fruit trees and much
water."[32] Kilwa after a time captured Sofala, seizing it from Magadosho.
Eventually Kilwa became mistress of the island of Zanzibar, of Mozambique,
and of much other territory. The forty-third ruler of Kilwa after Ali was
named Abraham, and he was ruling when the Portuguese arrived. The latter
reported that these people cultivated rice and cocoa, built ships, and had
considerable commerce with Asia. All the people, of whatever color, were
Mohammedans, and the richer were clothed in gorgeous robes of silk and
velvet. They traded with the inland Bantus and met numerous tribes,
receiving gold, ivory, millet, rice, cattle, poultry, and honey.

On the islands the Asiatics were independent, but on the main lands south
of Kilwa the sheiks ruled only their own people, under the overlordship of
the Bantus, to whom they were compelled to pay large tribute each year.

Vasco da Gama doubled the Cape of Good Hope in 1497 and went north on the
east coast as far as India. In the next ten years the Portuguese had
occupied more than six different points on that coast, including
Sofala.[33]

Thus civilization waxed and waned in East Africa among prehistoric
Negroes, Arab and Persian mulattoes on the coast, in the Zend or Zeng
empire of Bantu Negroes, and later in the Bantu rule of the Monomotapa.
And thus, too, among later throngs of the fiercer, warlike Bantu, the
ancient culture of the land largely died. Yet something survived, and in
the modern Bantu state, language, and industry can be found clear links
that establish the essential identity of the absorbed peoples with the
builders of Zymbabwe.

So far we have traced the history of the lands into which the southward
stream of invading Bantus turned, and have followed them to the Limpopo
River. We turn now to the lands north from Lake Nyassa.

The aboriginal Negroes sustained in prehistoric time invasions from the
northeast by Negroids of a type like the ancient Egyptians and like the
modern Gallas, Masai, and Somalis. To these migrations were added attacks
from the Nile Negroes to the north and the Bantu invaders from the south.
This has led to great differences among the groups of the population and
in their customs. Some are fierce mountaineers, occupying hilly plateaus
six thousand feet above the sea level; others, like the Wa Swahili, are
traders on the coast. There are the Masai, chocolate-colored and
frizzly-haired, organized for war and cattle lifting; and Negroids like
the Gallas, who, blending with the Bantus, have produced the race of
modern Uganda.

It was in this region that the kingdom of Kitwara was founded by the Galla
chief, Kintu. About the beginning of the nineteenth century the empire was
dismembered, the largest share falling to Uganda. The ensuing history of
Uganda is of great interest. When King Mutesa came to the throne in 1862,
he found Mohammedan influences in his land and was induced to admit
English Protestants and French Catholics. Uganda thereupon became an
extraordinary religious battlefield between these three beliefs. Mutesa's
successor, Mwanga, caused an English bishop to be killed in 1885,
believing (as has since proven quite true) that the religion he offered
would be used as a cloak for conquest. The final result was that, after
open war between the religions, Uganda was made an English protectorate in
1894.

The Negroes of Uganda are an intelligent people who had organized a
complex feudal state. At the head stood the king, and under him twelve
feudal lords. The present king, Daudi Chua, is the young grandson of
Mutesa and rules under the overlordship of England.

Many things show the connection between Egypt and this part of Africa. The
same glass beads are found in Uganda and Upper Egypt, and similar canoes
are built. Harps and other instruments bear great resemblance. Finally the
Bahima, as the Galla invaders are called, are startlingly Egyptian in
type; at the same time they are undoubtedly Negro in hair and color.
Perhaps we have here the best racial picture of what ancient Egyptian and
upper Nile regions were in predynastic times and later.

Thus in outline was seen the mission of The People--La Bantu as they
called themselves. They migrated, they settled, they tore down, and they
learned, and they in turn were often overthrown by succeeding tribes of
their own folk. They rule with their tongue and their power all Africa
south of the equator, save where the Europeans have entered. They have
never been conquered, although the gold and diamond traders have sought to
debauch them, and the ivory and rubber capitalists have cruelly wronged
their weaker groups. They are the Africans with whom the world of
to-morrow must reckon, just as the world of yesterday knew them to its
cost.

FOOTNOTES:

[30] Quoted in Bent: _Ruined Cities of Mashonaland_, pp. 203 ff.

[31] Cf. "Ethiopia Oriental," by J. Dos Santos, in Theal's _Records of
South Africa_, Vol. VII.

[32] Barbosa, quoted in Keane, II, 482.

[33] It was called Sofala, from an Arabic word, and may be associated with
the Ophir of Solomon. So, too, the river Sabi, a little off Sofala, may be
associated with the name of the Queen of Sheba, whose lineage was supposed
to be perpetuated in the powerful Monomotapa as well as the Abyssinians.



VII THE WAR OF RACES AT LAND'S END


Primitive man in Africa is found in the interior jungles and down at
Land's End in South Africa. The Pygmy people in the jungles represent
to-day a small survival from the past, but a survival of curious interest,
pushed aside by the torrent of conquest. Also pushed on by these waves of
Bantu conquest, moved the ancient Abatwa or Bushmen. They are small in
stature, yellow in color, with crisp-curled hair. The traditions of the
Bushmen say that they came southward from the regions of the Great Lakes,
and indeed the king and queen of Punt, as depicted by the Egyptians, were
Bushmen or Hottentots.

Their tribes may be divided, in accordance with their noticeable artistic
talents, into the painters and the sculptors. The sculptors entered South
Africa by moving southward through the more central portions of the
country, crossing the Zambesi, and coming down to the Cape. The painters,
on the other hand, came through Damaraland on the west coast; when they
came to the great mountain regions, they turned eastward and can be traced
as far as the mountains opposite Delagoa Bay. The mass of them settled
down in the lower part of the Cape and in the Kalahari desert. The
painters were true cave dwellers, but the sculptors lived in large
communities on the stony hills, which they marked with their carvings.

These Bushmen believed in an ancient race of people who preceded them in
South Africa. They attributed magic power to these unknown folk, and said
that some of them had been translated as stars to the sky. Before their
groups were dispersed the Bushmen had regular government. Tribes with
their chiefs occupied well-defined tracts of country and were subdivided
into branch tribes under subsidiary chiefs. The great cave represented the
dignity and glory of the entire tribe.

The Bushmen suffered most cruelly in the succeeding migrations and
conquests of South Africa. They fought desperately in self-defense; they
saw their women and children carried into bondage and they themselves
hunted like wild beasts. Both savage and civilized men appropriated their
land. Still they were brave people. "In this struggle for existence their
bitterest enemies, of whatever shade of color they might be, were forced
to make an unqualified acknowledgement of the courage and daring they so
invariably exhibited."[34]

Here, to a remote corner of the world, where, as one of their number said,
they had supposed that the only beings in the world were Bushmen and
lions, came a series of invaders. It was the outer ripples of civilization
starting far away, the indigenous and external civilizations of Africa
beating with great impulse among the Ethiopians and the Egyptian mulattoes
and Sudanese Negroes and Yorubans, and driving the Bantu race southward.
The Bantus crowded more and more upon the primitive Bushmen, and probably
a mingling of the Bushmen and the Bantus gave rise to the Hottentots.

The Hottentots, or as they called themselves, Khoi Khoin (Men of Men),
were physically a stronger race than the Abatwa and gave many evidences of
degeneration from a high culture, especially in the "phenomenal
perfection" of a language which "is so highly developed, both in its rich
phonetic system, as represented by a very delicately graduated series of
vowels and diphthongs, and in its varied grammatical structure, that
Lepsius sought for its affinities in the Egyptian at the other end of the
continent."

When South Africa was first discovered there were two distinct types of
Hottentot. The more savage Hottentots were simply large, strong Bushmen,
using weapons superior to the Bushmen, without domestic cattle or sheep.
Other tribes nearer the center of South Africa were handsomer in
appearance and raised an Egyptian breed of cattle which they rode.

In general the Hottentots were yellow, with close-curled hair, high cheek
bones, and somewhat oblique eyes. Their migration commenced about the end
of the fourteenth century and was, as is usual in such cases, a scattered,
straggling movement. The traditions of the Hottentots point to the lake
country of Central Africa as their place of origin, whence they were
driven by the Bechuana tribes of the Bantu. They fled westward to the
ocean and then turned south and came upon the Bushmen, whom they had only
partially subdued when the Dutch arrived as settlers in 1652.

The Dutch "Boers" began by purchasing land from the Hottentots and then,
as they grew more powerful, they dispossessed the dark men and tried to
enslave them. There grew up a large Dutch-Hottentot class. Indeed the
filtration of Negro blood noticeable in modern Boers accounts for much
curious history. Soon after the advent of the Dutch some of the
Hottentots, of whom there were not more than thirty or forty thousand, led
by the Korana clans, began slowly to retreat northward, followed by the
invading Dutch and fighting the Dutch, each other, and the wretched
Bushmen. In the latter part of the eighteenth century the Hottentots had
reached the great interior plain and met the on-coming outposts of the
Bantu nations.

The Bechuana, whom the Hottentots first met, were the most advanced of the
Negro tribes of Central Africa. They had crossed the Zambesi in the
fourteenth or fifteenth century; their government was a sort of feudal
system with hereditary chiefs and vassals; they were careful
agriculturists, laid out large towns with great regularity, and were the
most skilled of smiths. They used stone in building, carved on wood, and
many of them, too, were keen traders. These tribes, coming southward,
occupied the east-central part of South Africa comprising modern
Bechuanaland. Apparently they had started from the central lake country
somewhere late in the fifteenth century, and by the middle of the
eighteenth century one of their great chiefs, Tao, met the on-coming
Hottentots.

The Hottentots compelled Tao to retreat, but the mulatto Gricquas arrived
from the south, and, allying themselves with the Bechuana, stopped the
rout. The Gricquas sprang from and took their name from an old Hottentot
tribe. They were led by Kok and Barends, and by adding other elements they
became, partly through their own efforts and partly through the efforts of
the missionaries, a community of fairly well civilized people. In
Gricqualand West the mulatto Gricquas, under their chiefs Kok and
Waterboer, lived until the discovery of diamonds.

The Griquas and Bechuana tribes were thus gradually checking the
Hottentots when, in the nineteenth century, there came two new
developments: first, the English took possession of Cape Colony, and the
Dutch began to move in larger numbers toward the interior; secondly, a
newer and fiercer element of the Bantu tribes, the Zulu-Kaffirs, appeared.
The Kaffirs, or as they called themselves, the Amazosas, claimed descent
from Zuide, a great chief of the fifteenth century in the lake country.
They are among the tallest people in the world, averaging five feet ten
inches, and are slim, well-proportioned, and muscular. The more warlike
tribes were usually clothed in leopard or ox skins. Cattle formed their
chief wealth, stock breeding and hunting and fighting their main pursuits.
Mentally they were men of tact and intelligence, with a national religion
based upon ancestor worship, while their government was a patriarchal
monarchy limited by an aristocracy and almost feudal in character. The
common law which had grown up from the decisions of the chiefs made the
head of the family responsible for the conduct of its branches, a village
for all its residents, and the clan for all its villages. Finally there
was a paramount chief, who was the civil and military father of his
people. These people laid waste to the coast regions and in 1779 came in
contact with the Dutch. A series of Dutch-Kaffir wars ensued between 1779
and 1795 in which the Dutch were hard pressed.

In 1806 the English took final possession of Cape Colony. At that time
there were twenty-five thousand Boers, twenty-five thousand pure and mixed
Hottentots, and twenty-five thousand slaves secured from the east coast.
Between 1811 and 1877 there were six Kaffir-English wars. One of these in
1818 grew out of the ignorant interference of the English with the Kaffir
tribal system; then there came a terrible war between 1834 and 1835,
followed by the annexation of all the country as far as the Kei River. The
war of the Axe (1846-48) led to further annexation by the British.

Hostilities broke out again in 1856 and 1863. In the former year,
despairing of resistance to invading England, a prophet arose who advised
the wholesale destruction of all Kaffir property except weapons, in order
that this faith might bring back their dead heroes. The result was that
almost a third of the nation perished from hunger. Fresh troubles occurred
in 1877, when the Ama-Xosa confederacy was finally broken up, and to-day
gradually these tribes are passing from independence to a state of mild
vassalage to the British.

Meantime the more formidable part of the Zulu-Kaffirs had been united
under the terrible Chief Chaka. He had organized a military system, not a
new one by any means, but one of which we hear rumors back in the lake
regions in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. McDonald says, "There
has probably never been a more perfect system of discipline than that by
which Chaka ruled his army and kingdom. At a review an order might be
given in the most unexpected manner, which meant death to hundreds. If the
regiment hesitated or dared to remonstrate, so perfect was the discipline
and so great the jealousy that another was ready to cut them down. A
warrior returning from battle without his arms was put to death without
trial. A general returning unsuccessful in the main purpose of his
expedition shared the same fate. Whoever displeased the king was
immediately executed. The traditional courts practically ceased to exist
so far as the will and action of the tyrant was concerned." With this army
Chaka fell on tribe after tribe. The Bechuana fled before him and some
tribes of them were entirely destroyed. The Hottentots suffered severely
and one of his rival Zulu tribes under Umsilikatsi fled into Matabililand,
pushing back the Bechuana. By the time the English came to Port Natal,
Chaka was ruling over the whole southeastern seaboard, from the Limpopo
River to Cape Colony, including the Orange and Transvaal states and the
whole of Natal. Chaka was killed in 1828 and was eventually succeeded by
his brother Dingan, who reigned twelve years. It was during Dingan's reign
that England tried to abolish slavery in Cape Colony, but did not pay
promptly for the slaves, as she had promised; the result was the so-called
"Great Trek," about 1834, when thousands of Boers went into the interior
across the Orange and Vaal rivers.

Dingan and these Boers were soon engaged in a death struggle in which the
Zulus were repulsed and Dingan replaced by Panda. Under this chief there
was something like repose for sixteen years, but in 1856 civil war broke
out between his sons, one of whom, Cetewayo, succeeded his father in 1882.
He fell into border disputes with the English, and the result was one of
the fiercest clashes of Europe and Africa in modern days. The Zulus fought
desperately, annihilating at one time a whole detachment and killing the
young prince Napoleon. But after all it was assagais against machine guns,
and the Zulus were finally defeated at Ulundi, July 4, 1879. Thereupon
Zululand was divided among thirteen semi-independent chiefs and became a
British protectorate.

[Illustration: Ancient Kingdom of Africa]

Since then the best lands have been gradually reoccupied by a large number
of tribes--Kaffirs from the south and Zulus from the north. The tribal
organization, without being actually broken up, has been deprived of its
dangerous features by appointing paid village headmen and transforming the
hereditary chief into a British government official. In Natal there are
about one hundred and seventy tribal chiefs, and nearly half of these have
been appointed by the governor.

Umsilikatsi, who had been driven into Matabililand by the terrible Chaka
in 1828 and defeated by the Dutch in 1837, had finally reestablished his
headquarters in Rhodesia in 1838. Here he introduced the Zulu military
system and terrorized the peaceful and industrious Bechuana populations.
Lobengula succeeded Umsilikatsi in 1870 and, realizing that his power was
waning, began to retreat northward toward the Zambesi. He was finally
defeated by the British and native forces in 1893 and the land was
incorporated into South Central Africa.

The result of all these movements was to break the inhabitants of
Bechuanaland into numerous fragments. There were small numbers of mulatto
Gricquas in the southwest and similar Bastaards in the northwest. The
Hottentots and Bushmen were dispersed into groups and seem doomed to
extinction, the last Hottentot chief being deposed in 1810 and replaced by
an English magistrate. Partially civilized Hottentots still live grouped
together in their kraals and are members of Christian churches. The
Bechuana hold their own in several centers; one is in Basutoland, west of
Natal, where a number of tribes were welded together under the far-sighted
Moshesh into a modern and fairly well civilized nation. In the north part
of Bechuanaland are the self-governing Bamangwato and the Batwana, the
former ruled by Khama, one of the canniest of modern rulers in Africa.

Meantime, in Portuguese territory south of the Zambesi, there arose Gaza,
a contemporary and rival of Chaka. His son, Manikus, was deputed by
Dingan, Chaka's successor, to drive out the Portuguese. This Manikus
failed to do, and to escape vengeance he migrated north of the Limpopo.
Here he established his military kraal in a district thirty-six hundred
and fifty feet above the sea and one hundred and twenty miles inland from
Sofala. From this place his soldiery nearly succeeded in driving the
Portuguese out of East Africa. He was succeeded by his son, Umzila, and
Umzila's brother, Guzana (better known as Gungunyana), who exercised for a
time joint authority. Gungunyana was finally overthrown in November, 1895,
captured, and removed to the Azores.

[Illustration: Races in Africa]

North of the Zambesi, in British territory, the chief role in recent times
has been played by the Bechuana, the first of the Bantu to return
northward after the South African migration. Livingstone found there the
Makolo, who with other tribes had moved northward on account of the
pressure of the Dutch and Zulus below, and by conquering various tribes
in the Zambesi region had established a strong power. This kingdom was
nearly overthrown by the rebellion of the Barotse, and in 1875 the Barotse
kingdom comprised a large territory. To-day their king, Lewanika, rules
directly and indirectly fifty thousand square miles, with a population
between one and two and a half million. They are under a protectorate of
the British.

In Southwest Africa, Hottentot mulattoes crossing from the Cape caused
widespread change. They were strong men and daring fighters and soon
became dominant in what is now German Southwest Africa, where they fought
fiercely with the Bantu Ova-Hereros. Armed with fire arms, these Namakwa
Hottentots threatened Portuguese West Africa, but Germany intervened,
ostensibly to protect missionaries. By spending millions of dollars and
thousands of soldiers Germany has nearly exterminated these brave men.

Thus we have between the years 1400 and 1900 a great period of migration
up to 1750, when Bushmen, Hottentot, Bantu, and Dutch appeared in
succession at Land's End. In the latter part of the eighteenth century we
have the clash of the Hottentots and Bechuana, followed in the nineteenth
century by the terrible wars of Chaka, the Kaffirs, and Matabili. Finally,
in the latter half of the nineteenth century, we see the gradual
subjection of the Kaffir-Zulus and the Bechuana under the English and the
final conquest of the Dutch. The resulting racial problem in South Africa
is one of great intricacy.

To the racial problem has been added the tremendous problem of modern
capital brought by the discovery of gold and diamond mines, so that the
future of the Negro race is peculiarly bound up in developments here at
Land's End, where the ship of the Flying Dutchman beats back and forth on
its endless quest.

FOOTNOTES:

[34] Stowe: Native Races of South Africa, pp. 215-216.



VIII AFRICAN CULTURE


We have followed the history of mankind in Africa down the valley of the
Nile, past Ethiopia to Egypt; we have seen kingdoms arise along the great
bend of the Niger and strive with the ancient culture at its mouth. We
have seen the remnants of mankind at Land's End, the ancient culture at
Punt and Zymbabwe, and followed the invading Bantu east, south, and west
to their greatest center in the vast jungle of the Congo valleys.

We must now gather these threads together and ask what manner of men these
were and how far and in what way they progressed on the road of human
culture.

That Negro peoples were the beginners of civilization along the Ganges,
the Euphrates, and the Nile seems proven. Early Babylon was founded by a
Negroid race. Hammurabi's code, the most ancient known, says "Anna and Bel
called me, Hammurabi the exalted prince, the worshiper of the gods; to
cause justice to prevail in the land, to destroy the wicked, to prevent
the strong from oppressing the weak, to go forth like the sun over the
black-head race, to enlighten the land, and to further the welfare of the
people." The Assyrians show a distinct Negroid strain and early Egypt was
predominantly Negro. These earliest of cultures were crude and primitive,
but they represented the highest attainment of mankind after tens of
thousands of years in unawakened savagery.

It has often been assumed that the Negro is physically inferior to other
races and markedly distinguishable from them; modern science gives no
authority for such an assumption. The supposed inferiority cannot rest on
color,[35] for that is "due to the combined influences of a great number
of factors of environment working through physiological processes," and
"however marked the contrasts may be, there is no corresponding difference
in anatomical structure discoverable."[36] So, too, difference in texture
of hair is a matter of degree, not kind, and is caused by heat, moisture,
exposure, and the like.

The bony skeleton presents no distinctly racial lines of variation.
Prognathism "presents too many individual varieties to be taken as a
distinctive character of race."[37] Difference in physical measurements
does not show the Negro to be a more primitive evolutionary form.
Comparative ethnology to-day affords "no support to the view which sees in
the so-called lower races of mankind a transition stage from beast to
man."[38]

Much has been made of the supposed smaller brain of the Negro race; but
this is as yet an unproved assumption, based on the uncritical measurement
of less than a thousand Negro brains as compared with eleven thousand or
more European brains. Even if future measurement prove the average Negro
brain lighter, the vast majority of Negro brain weights fall within the
same limits as the whites; and finally, "neither size nor weight of the
brain seems to be of importance" as an index of mental capacity. We may,
therefore, say with Ratzel, "There is only one species of man. The
variations are numerous, but do not go deep."[39]

To this we may add the word of the Secretary of the First Races Congress:
"We are, then, under the necessity of concluding that an impartial
investigator would be inclined to look upon the various important peoples
of the world as to all intents and purposes essentially equal in
intellect, enterprise, morality, and physique."[40]

If these conclusions are true, we should expect to see in Africa the
human drama play itself out much as in other lands, and such has actually
been the fact. At the same time we must expect peculiarities arising from
the physiography of the land--its climate, its rainfall, its deserts, and
the peculiar inaccessibility of the coast.

Three principal zones of habitation appear: first, the steppes and deserts
around the Sahara in the north and the Kalahari desert in the south;
secondly, the grassy highlands bordering the Great Lakes and connecting
these two regions; thirdly, the forests and rivers of Central and West
Africa. In the deserts are the nomads, and the Pygmies are in the forest
fastnesses. Herdsmen and their cattle cover the steppes and highlands,
save where the tsetse fly prevents. In the open forests and grassy
highlands are the agriculturists.

Among the forest farmers the village is the center of life, while in the
open steppes political life tends to spread into larger political units.
Political integration is, however, hindered by an ease of internal
communication almost as great as the difficulty of reaching outer worlds
beyond the continent. The narrow Nile valley alone presented physical
barriers formidable enough to keep back the invading barbarians of the
south, and even then with difficulty. Elsewhere communication was all too
easy. For a while the Congo forests fended away the restless, but this
only temporarily.

On the whole Africa from the Sahara to the Cape offered no great physical
barrier to the invader, and we continually have whirlwinds of invading
hosts rushing now southward, now northward, from the interior to the coast
and from the coast inland, and hurling their force against states,
kingdoms, and cities. Some resisted for generations, some for centuries,
some but a few years. It is, then, this sudden change and the fear of it
that marks African culture, particularly in its political aspects, and
which makes it so difficult to trace this changing past. Nevertheless
beneath all change rests the strong substructure of custom, religion,
industry, and art well worth the attention of students.

Starting with agriculture, we learn that "among all the great groups of
the 'natural' races, the Negroes are the best and keenest tillers of the
ground. A minority despise agriculture and breed cattle; many combine both
occupations. Among the genuine tillers the whole life of the family is
taken up in agriculture, and hence the months are by preference called
after the operations which they demand. Constant clearings change forests
to fields, and the ground is manured with the ashes of the burnt thicket.
In the middle of the fields rise the light watch-towers, from which a
watchman scares grain-eating birds and other thieves. An African
cultivated landscape is incomplete without barns. The rapidity with which,
when newly imported, the most various forms of cultivation spread in
Africa says much for the attention which is devoted to this branch of
economy. Industries, again, which may be called agricultural, like the
preparation of meal from millet and other crops, also from cassava, the
fabrication of fermented drinks from grain, or the manufacture of cotton,
are widely known and sedulously fostered."[41]

Bücher reminds us of the deep impression made upon travelers when they
sight suddenly the well-attended fields of the natives on emerging from
the primeval forests. "In the more thickly populated parts of Africa these
fields often stretch for many a mile, and the assiduous care of the Negro
women shines in all the brighter light when we consider the insecurity of
life, the constant feuds and pillages, in which no one knows whether he
will in the end be able to harvest what he has sown. Livingstone gives
somewhere a graphic description of the devastations wrought by slave
hunts; the people were lying about slain, the dwellings were demolished;
in the fields, however, the grain was ripening and there was none to
harvest it."[42]

Sheep, goat, and chickens are domestic animals all over Africa, and Von
Franzius considers Africa the home of the house cattle and the Negro as
the original tamer. Northeastern Africa especially is noted for
agriculture, cattle raising, and fruit culture. In the eastern Sudan, and
among the great Bantu tribes extending from the Sudan down toward the
south, cattle are evidences of wealth; one tribe, for instance, having so
many oxen that each village had ten or twelve thousand head. Lenz (1884),
Bouet-Williaumez (1848), Hecquard (1854), Bosman (1805), and Baker (1868)
all bear witness to this, and Schweinfurth (1878) tells us of great cattle
parks with two to three thousand head and of numerous agricultural and
cattle-raising tribes. Von der Decken (1859-61) described the paradise of
the dwellers about Kilimanjaro--the bananas, fruit, beans and peas, cattle
raising with stall feed, the fertilizing of the fields, and irrigation.
The Negroid Gallas have seven or eight cattle to each inhabitant.
Livingstone bears witness to the busy cattle raising of the Bantus and
Kaffirs. Hulub (1881) and Chapman (1868) tell of agriculture and fruit
raising in South Africa. Shutt (1884) found the tribes in the southwestern
basin of the Congo with sheep, swine, goats, and cattle. On this
agricultural and cattle-raising economic foundation has arisen the
organized industry of the artisan, the trader, and the manufacturer.

While the Pygmies, still living in the age of wood, make no iron or stone
implements, they seem to know how to make bark cloth and fiber baskets and
simple outfits for hunting and fishing. Among the Bushmen the art of
making weapons and working in hides is quite common. The Hottentots are
further advanced in the industrial arts, being well versed in the
manufacture of clothing, weapons, and utensils. In the dressing of skins
and furs, as well as in the plaiting of cords and the weaving of mats, we
find evidences of their workmanship. In addition they are good workers in
iron and copper, using the sheepskin bellows for this purpose. The
Ashantis of the Gold Coast know how to make "cotton fabrics, turn and
glaze earthenware, forge iron, fabricate instruments and arms, embroider
rugs and carpets, and set gold and precious stones."[43] Among the people
of the banana zone we find rough basket work, coarse pottery, grass cloth,
and spoons made of wood and ivory. The people of the millet zone, because
of uncertain agricultural resources, quite generally turn to
manufacturing. Charcoal is prepared by the smiths, iron is smelted, and
numerous implements are manufactured. Among them we find axes, hatchets,
hoes, knives, nails, scythes, and other hardware. Cloaks, shoes, sandals,
shields, and water and oil vessels are made from leather which the natives
have dressed. Soap is manufactured in the Bautschi district, glass is
made, formed, and colored by the people of Nupeland, and in almost every
city cotton is spun and woven and dyed. Barth tells us that the weaving of
cotton was known in the Sudan as early as the eleventh century. There is
also extensive manufacture of wooden ware, tools, implements, and
utensils.

In describing particular tribes, Baker and Felkin tell of smiths of
wonderful adroitness, goatskins prepared better than a European tanner
could do, drinking cups and kegs of remarkable symmetry, and polished clay
floors. Schweinfurth says, "The arrow and the spear heads are of the
finest and most artistic work; their bristlelike barbs and points are
baffling when one knows how few tools these smiths have." Excellent wood
carving is found among the Bongo, Ovambo, and Makololo. Pottery and
basketry and careful hut building distinguish many tribes. Cameron (1877)
tells of villages so clean, with huts so artistic, that, save in book
knowledge, the people occupied no low plane of civilization. The Mangbettu
work both iron and copper. "The masterpieces of the Monbutto [Mangbettu]
smiths are the fine chains worn as ornaments, and which in perfection of
form and fineness compare well with our best steel chains." Shubotz in
1911 called the Mangbettu "a highly cultivated people" in architecture and
handicraft. Barth found copper exported from Central Africa in competition
with European copper at Kano.

Nor is the iron industry confined to the Sudan. About the Great Lakes and
other parts of Central Africa it is widely distributed. Thornton says,
"This iron industry proves that the East Africans stand by no means on so
low a plane of culture as many travelers would have us think. It is
unnecessary to be reminded what a people without instruction, and with the
rudest tools to do such skilled work, could do if furnished with steel
tools." Arrows made east of Lake Nyanza were found to be nearly as good as
the best Swedish iron in Birmingham. From Egypt to the Cape, Livingstone
assures us that the mortar and pestle, the long-handled axe, the goatskin
bellows, etc., have the same form, size, etc., pointing to a migration
southwestward. Holub (1879), on the Zambesi, found fine workers in iron
and bronze. The Bantu huts contain spoons, wooden dishes, milk pails,
calabashes, handmills, and axes.

Kaffirs and Zulus, in the extreme south, are good smiths, and the latter
melt copper and tin together and draw wire from it, according to Kranz
(1880). West of the Great Lakes, Stanley (1878) found wonderful examples
of smith work: figures worked out of brass and much work in copper.
Cameron (1878) saw vases made near Lake Tanganyika which reminded him of
the amphorae in the Villa of Diomedes, Pompeii. Horn (1882) praises tribes
here for iron and copper work. Livingstone (1871) passed thirty smelting
houses in one journey, and Cameron came across bellows with valves, and
tribes who used knives in eating. He found tribes which no Europeans had
ever visited, who made ingots of copper in the form of the St. Andrew's
cross, which circulated even to the coast. In the southern Congo basin
iron and copper are worked; also wood and ivory carving and pottery making
are pursued. In equatorial West Africa, Lenz and Du Chaillu (1861) found
iron workers with charcoal, and also carvers of bone and ivory. Near Cape
Lopez, Hübbe-Schleiden found tribes making ivory needles inlaid with
ebony, while the arms and dishes of the Osaka are found among many tribes
even as far as the Atlantic Ocean. Wilson (1856) found natives in West
Africa who could repair American watches.

Gold Coast Negroes make gold rings and chains, forming the metal into all
kinds of forms. Soyaux says, "The works in relief which natives of Lower
Guinea carve with their own knives out of ivory and hippopotamus teeth are
really entitled to be called works of art, and many wooden figures of
fetishes in the Ethnographical Museum of Berlin show some understanding of
the proportions of the human body." Great Bassam is called by Hecquard the
"Fatherland of Smiths." The Mandingo in the northwest are remarkable
workers in iron, silver, and gold, we are told by Mungo Park (1800), while
there is a mass of testimony as to the work in the north-west of Africa in
gold, tin, weaving, and dyeing. Caille found the Negroes in Bambana
manufacturing gunpowder (1824-28), and the Hausa make soap; so, too,
Negroes in Uganda and other parts have made guns after seeing European
models.

So marked has been the work of Negro artisans and traders in the
manufacture and exchange of iron implements that a growing number of
archeologists are disposed to-day to consider the Negro as the originator
of the art of smelting iron. Gabriel de Mortillet (1883) declared Negroes
the only iron users among primitive people. Some would, therefore, argue
that the Negro learned it from other folk, but Andree declares that the
Negro developed his own "Iron Kingdom." Schweinfurth, Von Luschan, Boaz,
and others incline to the belief that the Negroes invented the smelting of
iron and passed it on to the Egyptians and to modern Europe.

Boaz says, "It seems likely that at a time when the European was still
satisfied with rude stone tools, the African had invented or adopted the
art of smelting iron. Consider for a moment what this invention has meant
for the advance of the human race. As long as the hammer, knife, saw,
drill, the spade, and the hoe had to be chipped out of stone, or had to be
made of shell or hard wood, effective industrial work was not impossible,
but difficult. A great progress was made when copper found in large
nuggets was hammered out into tools and later on shaped by melting, and
when bronze was introduced; but the true advancement of industrial life
did not begin until the hard iron was discovered. It seems not unlikely
that the people who made the marvelous discovery of reducing iron ores by
smelting were the African Negroes. Neither ancient Europe, nor ancient
western Asia, nor ancient China knew the iron, and everything points to
its introduction from Africa. At the time of the great African discoveries
toward the end of the past century, the trade of the blacksmith was found
all over Africa, from north to south and from east to west. With his
simple bellows and a charcoal fire he reduced the ore that is found in
many parts of the continent and forged implements of great usefulness and
beauty."[44]

Torday has argued recently, "I feel convinced by certain arguments that
seem to prove to my satisfaction that we are indebted to the Negro for the
very keystone of our modern civilization and that we owe him the discovery
of iron. That iron could be discovered by accident in Africa seems beyond
doubt: if this is so in other parts of the world, I am not competent to
say. I will only remind you that Schweinfurth and Petherick record the
fact that in the northern part of East Africa smelting furnaces are worked
without artificial air current and, on the other hand, Stuhlmann and
Kollmann found near Victoria Nyanza that the natives simply mixed powdered
ore with charcoal and by introduction of air currents obtained the metal.
These simple processes make it simple that iron should have been
discovered in East or Central Africa. No bronze implements have ever been
found in black Africa; had the Africans received iron from the Egyptians,
bronze would have preceded this metal and all traces of it would not have
disappeared. Black Africa was for a long time an exporter of iron, and
even in the twelfth century exports to India and Java are recorded by
Idrisi.

"It is difficult to imagine that Egypt should have obtained it from
Europe where the oldest find (in Hallstadt) cannot be of an earlier period
than 800 B.C., or from Asia, where iron is not known before 1000 B.C., and
where, in the times of Ashur Nazir Pal, it was still used concurrently
with bronze, while iron beads have been only recently discovered by
Messrs. G.A. Wainwright and Bushe Fox in a predynastic grave, and where a
piece of this metal, possibly a tool, was found in the masonry of the
great pyramid."[45]

The Negro is a born trader. Lenz says, "our sharpest European merchants,
even Jews and Armenians, can learn much of the cunning and trade of the
Negroes." We know that the trade between Central Africa and Egypt was in
the hands of Negroes for thousands of years, and in early days the cities
of the Sudan and North Africa grew rich through Negro trade.

Leo Africanus, writing of Timbuktu in the sixteenth century, said, "It is
a wonder to see what plentie of Merchandize is daily brought hither and
how costly and sumptuous all things be.... Here are many shops of
artificers and merchants and especially of such as weave linnen and
cloth."

Long before cotton weaving was a British industry, West Africa and the
Sudan were supplying a large part of the world with cotton cloth. Even
to-day cities like Kuka on the west shore of Lake Chad and Sokota are
manufacturing centers where cotton is spun and woven, skins tanned,
implements and iron ornaments made.

"Travelers," says Bücher, "have often observed this tribal or local
development of industrial technique. 'The native villages,' relates a
Belgian observer of the Lower Congo, 'are often situated in groups. Their
activities are based upon reciprocality, and they are to a certain extent
the complements of one another. Each group has its more or less strongly
defined specialty. One carries on fishing; another produces palm wine; a
third devotes itself to trade and is broker for the others, supplying the
community with all products from outside; another has reserved to itself
work in iron and copper, making weapons for war and hunting, various
utensils, etc. None may, however, pass beyond the sphere of its own
specialty without exposing itself to the risk of being universally
proscribed.'"

From the Loango Coast, Bastian tells of a great number of centers for
special products of domestic industry. "Loango excels in mats and fishing
baskets, while the carving of elephants' tusks is specially followed in
Chilungo. The so-called Mafooka hats with raised patterns are drawn
chiefly from the bordering country of Kakongo and Mayyume. In Bakunya are
made potter's wares, which are in great demand; in Basanza, excellent
swords; in Basundi, especially beautiful ornamented copper rings; on the
Congo, clever wood and tablet carvings; in Loango, ornamented clothes and
intricately designed mats; in Mayumbe, clothing of finely woven mat-work;
in Kakongo, embroidered hats and also burnt clay pitchers; and among the
Bayakas and Mantetjes, stuffs of woven grass."[46]

A native Negro student tells of the development of trade among the
Ashanti. "It was a part of the state system of Ashanti to encourage trade.
The king once in every forty days, at the Adai custom, distributed among a
number of chiefs various sums of gold dust with a charge to turn the same
to good account. These chiefs then sent down to the coast caravans of
tradesmen, some of whom would be their slaves, sometimes some two or three
hundred strong, to barter ivory for European goods, or buy such goods with
gold dust, which the king obtained from the royal alluvial workings. Down
to 1873 a constant stream of Ashanti traders might be seen daily wending
their way to the merchants of the coast and back again, yielding more
certain wealth and prosperity to the merchants of the Gold Coast and Great
Britain than may be expected for some time yet to come from the mining
industry and railway development put together. The trade chiefs would, in
due time, render a faithful account to the king's stewards, being allowed
to retain a fair portion of the profit. In the king's household, too, he
would have special men who directly traded for him. Important chiefs
carried on the same system of trading with the coast as did the king. Thus
every member of the state, from the king downward, took an active interest
in the promotion of trade and in the keeping open of trade routes into the
interior."[47]

The trade thus encouraged and carried on in various parts of West Africa
reached wide areas. From the Fish River to Kuka, and from Lagos to
Zanzibar, the markets have become great centers of trade, the leading
implement to civilization. Permanent markets are found in places like
Ujiji and Nyangwe, where everything can be bought and sold from
earthenware to wives; from the one to three thousand traders flocked here.

"How like is the market traffic, with all its uproar and sound of human
voices, to one of our own markets! There is the same rivalry in praising
the goods, the violent, brisk movements, the expressive gesture, the
inquiring, searching glance, the changing looks of depreciation or
triumph, of apprehension, delight, approbation. So says Stanley. Trade
customs are not everywhere alike. If when negotiating with the Bangalas of
Angola you do not quickly give them what they want, they go away and do
not come back. Then perhaps they try to get possession of the coveted
object by means of theft. It is otherwise with the Songos and Kiokos, who
let you deal with them in the usual way. To buy even a small article you
must go to the market; people avoid trading anywhere else. If a man says
to another; 'Sell me this hen' or 'that fruit,' the answer as a rule will
be, 'Come to the market place.' The crowd gives confidence to individuals,
and the inviolability of the visitor to the market, and of the market
itself, looks like an idea of justice consecrated by long practice. Does
not this remind us of the old Germanic 'market place'?"[48]

Turning now to Negro family and social life we find, as among all
primitive peoples, polygamy and marriage by actual or simulated purchase.
Out of the family develops the typical African village organization, which
is thus described in Ashanti by a native Gold Coast writer: "The headman,
as his name implies, is the head of a village community, a ward in a
township, or of a family. His position is important, inasmuch as he has
directly to deal with the composite elements of the general bulk of the
people.

"It is the duty of the head of a family to bring up the members thereof in
the way they should go; and by 'family' you must understand the entire
lineal descendants of a materfamilias, if I may coin a convenient phrase.
It is expected of him by the state to bring up his charge in the knowledge
of matters political and traditional. It is his work to train up his wards
in the ways of loyalty and obedience to the powers that be. He is held
responsible for the freaks of recalcitrant members of his family, and he
is looked to to keep them within bounds and to insist upon conformity of
their party with the customs, laws, and traditional observances of the
community. In early times he could send off to exile by sale a troublesome
relative who would not observe the laws of the community.

"It is a difficult task that he is set to, but in this matter he has
all-powerful helpers in the female members of the family, who will be
either the aunts, or the sisters, or the cousins, or the nieces of the
headman; and as their interests are identical with his in every
particular, the good women spontaneously train up their children to
implicit obedience to the headman, whose rule in the family thus becomes a
simple and an easy matter. 'The hand that rocks the cradle rules the
world.' What a power for good in the native state system would the mothers
of the Gold Coast and Ashanti become by judicious training upon native
lines!

"The headman is par excellence the judge of his family or ward. Not only
is he called upon to settle domestic squabbles, but frequently he sits
judge over more serious matters arising between one member of the ward and
another; and where he is a man of ability and influence, men from other
wards bring him their disputes to settle. When he so settles disputes, he
is entitled to a hearing fee, which, however, is not so much as would be
payable in the regular court of the king or chief.

"The headman is naturally an important member of his company and often is
a captain thereof. When he combines the two offices of headman and
captain, he renders to the community a very important service. For in
times of war, where the members of the ward would not serve cordially
under a stranger, they would in all cases face any danger with their own
kinsman as their leader. The headman is always succeeded by his uterine
brother, cousin, or nephew--the line of succession, that is to say,
following the customary law."[49]

We may contrast this picture with the more warlike Bantus of Southeast
Africa. Each tribe lived by itself in a town with from five to fifteen
thousand inhabitants, surrounded by gardens of millet, beans, and
watermelon. Beyond these roamed their cattle, sheep, and goats. Their
religion was ancestor worship with sacrifice to spirits and the dead, and
some of the tribes made mummies of the corpses and clothed them for
burial. They wove cloth of cotton and bark, they carved wood and built
walls of unhewn stone. They had a standing military organization, and the
tribes had their various totems, so that they were known as the Men of
Iron, the Men of the Sun, the Men of the Serpents, Sons of the Corn
Cleaners, and the like. Their system of common law was well conceived and
there were organized tribunals of justice. In difficult cases precedents
were sought and learned antiquaries consulted. At the age of fifteen or
sixteen the boys were circumcised and formed into guilds. The land was
owned by the tribe and apportioned to the chief by each family, and the
main wealth of the tribe was in its cattle.

In general, among the African clans the idea of private property was but
imperfectly developed and never included land. The main mass of visible
wealth belonged to the family and clan rather than to the individual; only
in the matter of weapons and ornaments was exclusive private ownership
generally recognized.

The government, vested in fathers and chiefs, varied in different tribes
from absolute despotisms to limited monarchies, almost republican. Viewing
the Basuto National Assembly in South Africa, Lord Bryce recently wrote,
"The resemblance to the primary assemblies of the early peoples of Europe
is close enough to add another to the arguments which discredit the theory
that there is any such thing as an Aryan type of institutions."[50]

While women are sold into marriage throughout Africa, nevertheless their
status is far removed from slavery. In the first place the tracing of
relationships through the female line, which is all but universal in
Africa, gives the mother great influence. Parental affection is very
strong, and throughout Negro Africa the mother is the most influential
councilor, even in cases of tyrants like Chaka or Mutesa.

"No mother can love more tenderly or be more deeply beloved than the Negro
mother. Robin tells of a slave in Martinique who, with his savings, freed
his mother instead of himself. 'Everywhere in Africa,' writes Mungo Park,
'I have noticed that no greater affront can be offered a Negro than
insulting his mother. 'Strike me,' cried a Mandingo to his enemy, 'but
revile not my mother!' ... The Herero swears 'By my mother's tears!'.. The
Angola Negroes have a saying, 'As a mist lingers on the swamps, so lingers
the love of father and mother.'"[51]

Black queens have often ruled African tribes. Among the Ba-Lolo, we are
told, women take part in public assemblies where all-important questions
are discussed. The system of educating children among such tribes as the
Yoruba is worthy of emulation by many more civilized peoples.

Close knit with the family and social organization comes the religious
life of the Negro. The religion of Africa is the universal animism or
fetishism of primitive peoples, rising to polytheism and approaching
monotheism chiefly, but not wholly, as a result of Christian and Islamic
missions. Of fetishism there is much misapprehension. It is not mere
senseless degradation. It is a philosophy of life. Among primitive Negroes
there can be, as Miss Kingsley reminds us, no such divorce of religion
from practical life as is common in civilized lands. Religion is life, and
fetish an expression of the practical recognition of dominant forces in
which the Negro lives. To him all the world is spirit. Miss Kingsley says,
"If you want, for example, to understand the position of man in nature
according to fetish, there is, as far as I know, no clearer statement of
it made than is made by Goethe in his superb 'Prometheus.'"[52] Fetish is
a severely logical way of accounting for the world in terms of good and
malignant spirits.

"It is this power of being able logically to account for everything that
is, I believe, at the back of the tremendous permanency of fetish in
Africa, and the cause of many of the relapses into it by Africans
converted to other religions; it is also the explanation of the fact that
white men who live in the districts where death and danger are everyday
affairs, under a grim pall of boredom, are liable to believe in fetish,
though ashamed of so doing. For the African, whose mind has been soaked in
fetish during his early and most impressionable years, the voice of fetish
is almost irresistible when affliction comes to him."[53]

Ellis tells us of the spirit belief of the Ewe people, who believe that
men and all nature have the indwelling "Kra," which is immortal; that the
man himself after death may exist as a ghost, which is often conceived of
as departed from the "Kra," a shadowy continuing of the man. Bryce,
speaking of the Kaffirs of South Africa, says, "To the Kaffirs, as to the
most savage races, the world was full of spirits--spirits of the rivers,
the mountains, and the woods. Most important were the ghosts of the dead,
who had power to injure or help the living, and who were, therefore,
propitiated by offerings at stated periods, as well as on occasions when
their aid was especially desired. This kind of worship, the worship once
most generally diffused throughout the world, and which held its ground
among the Greeks and Italians in the most flourishing period of ancient
civilization, as it does in China and Japan to-day, was, and is, virtually
the religion of the Kaffirs."[54]

African religion does not, however, stop with fetish, but, as in the case
of other peoples, tends toward polytheism and monotheism. Among the
Yoruba, for instance, Frobenius shows that religion and city-state go hand
in hand.

"The first experienced glance will here detect the fact that this nation
originally possessed a clear and definite organization so duly ordered and
so logical that we but seldom meet with its like among all the peoples of
the earth. And the basic idea of every clan's progeniture is a powerful
God; the legitimate order in which the descendants of a particular clan
unite in marriage to found new families, the essential origin of every
new-born babe's descent in the founder of its race and its consideration
as a part of the God in Chief; the security with which the newly wedded
wife not only may, but should, minister to her own God in an unfamiliar
home."[55]

The Yoruba have a legend of a dying divinity. "This people ... give
evidence of a generalized system; a theocratic scheme, a well-conceived
perceptible organization, reared in rhythmically proportioned manner."

Miss Kingsley says, "The African has a great Over God."[56] Nassau, the
missionary, declares, "After more than forty years' residence among these
tribes, fluently using their language, conversant with their customs,
dwelling intimately in their huts, associating with them in the various
relations of teacher, pastor, friend, master, fellow-traveler, and guest,
and in my special office as missionary, searching after their religious
thought (and therefore being allowed a deeper entrance into the arcana of
their soul than would be accorded to a passing explorer), I am able
unhesitatingly to say that among all the multitude of degraded ones with
whom I have met, I have seen or heard of none whose religious thought was
only a superstition.

"Standing in the village street, surrounded by a company whom their chief
has courteously summoned at my request, when I say to him, 'I have come to
speak to your people,' I do not need to begin by telling them that there
is a God. Looking on that motley assemblage of villagers,--the bold, gaunt
cannibal with his armament of gun, spear, and dagger; the artisan with
rude adze in hand, or hands soiled at the antique bellows of the village
smithy; women who have hasted from their kitchen fire with hands white
with the manioc dough or still grasping the partly scaled fish; and
children checked in their play with tiny bow and arrow or startled from
their dusty street pursuit of dog or goat,--I have yet to be asked, 'Who
is God?'"[57]

The basis of Egyptian religion was "of a purely Nigritian character,"[58]
and in its developed form Sudanese tribal gods were invoked and venerated
by the priests. In Upper Egypt, near the confines of Ethiopia, paintings
repeatedly represent black priests conferring on red Egyptian priests the
instruments and symbols of priesthood. In the Sudan to-day Frobenius
distinguishes four principal religions: first, earthly ancestor worship;
next, the social cosmogony of the Atlantic races; third, the religion of
the Bori, and fourth, Islam. The Bori religion spreads from Nubia as far
as the Hausa, and from Lake Chad in the Niger as far as the Yoruba. It is
the religion of possession and has been connected by some with Asiatic
influences.

From without have come two great religious influences, Islam and
Christianity. Islam came by conquest, trade, and proselytism. As a
conqueror it reached Egypt in the seventh century and had by the end of
the fourteenth century firm footing in the Egyptian Sudan. It overran the
central Sudan by the close of the seventeenth century, and at the
beginning of the nineteenth century had swept over Senegambia and the
whole valley of the Niger down to the Gulf of Guinea. On the east Islam
approached as a trader in the eighth century; it spread into Somaliland
and overran Nubia in the fourteenth century. To-day Islam dominates Africa
north of ten degrees north latitude and is strong between five and ten
degrees north latitude. In the east it reaches below the Victoria Nyanza.

Christianity early entered Africa; indeed, as Mommsen says, "It was
through Africa that Christianity became the religion of the world.
Tertullian and Cyprian were from Carthage, Arnobius from Sicca Veneria,
Lactantius, and probably in like manner Minucius Felix, in spite of their
Latin names, were natives of Africa, and not less so Augustine. In Africa
the Church found its most zealous confessors of the faith and its most
gifted defenders."[59]

The Africa referred to here, however, was not Negroland, but Africa above
the desert, where Negro blood was represented in the ancient Mediterranean
race and by intercourse across the desert. On the other hand Christianity
was early represented in the valley of the Nile under "the most holy pope
and patriarch of the great city of Alexandria and of all of the land of
Egypt, of Jerusalem, the holy city, of Nubia, Abyssinia, and Pentapolis,
and all the preaching of St. Mark." This patriarchate had a hundred
bishoprics in the fourth century and included thousands of black
Christians. Through it the Cross preceded the Crescent in some of the
remotest parts of black Africa.

All these beginnings were gradually overthrown by Islam except among the
Copts in Egypt, and in Abyssinia. The Portuguese in the sixteenth century
began to replant the Christian religion and for a while had great success,
both on the east and west coasts. Roman Catholic enterprise halted in the
eighteenth century and the Protestants began. To-day the west coast is
studded with English and German missions, South Africa is largely
Christian through French and English influence, and the region about the
Great Lakes is becoming christianized. The Roman Catholics have lately
increased their activities, and above all the Negroes of America have
entered with their own churches and with the curiously significant
"Ethiopian" movement.

Coming now to other spiritual aspects of African culture, we can speak at
present only in a fragmentary way. Roughly speaking, Africa can be divided
into two language zones: north of the fifth degree of north latitude is
the zone of diversity, with at least a hundred groups of widely divergent
languages; south of the line there is one minor language
(Bushman-Hottentot), spoken by less than fifty thousand people, and
elsewhere the predominant Bantu tongue with its various dialects, spoken
by at least fifty million. The Bantu tongue, which thus rules all Central,
West, and South Africa, is an agglutinative tongue which makes especial
use of prefixes. The hundreds of Negro tongues or dialects in the north
represent most probably the result of war and migration and the breaking
up of ancient centers of culture. In Abyssinia and the great horn of East
Africa the influence of Semitic tongues is noted. Despite much effort on
the part of students, it has been impossible to show any Asiatic origin
for the Egyptian language. As Sergi maintains, "everything favors an
African origin."[60] The most brilliant suggestion of modern days links
together the Egyptian of North Africa and the Hottentot and Bushmen
tongues of South Africa.

Language was reduced to writing among the Egyptians and Ethiopians and to
some extent elsewhere in Africa. Over 100 manuscripts of Ethiopian and
Ethiopic-Arabian literature are extant, including a version of the Bible
and historical chronicles. The Arabic was used as the written tongue of
the Sudan, and Negroland has given us in this tongue many chronicles and
other works of black authors. The greatest of these, the Epic of the Sudan
(Tarikh-es-Soudan), deserves to be placed among the classics of all
literature. In other parts of Africa there was no written language, but
there was, on the other hand, an unusual perfection of oral tradition
through bards, and extraordinary efficiency in telegraphy by drum and
horn.

The folklore and proverbs of the African tribes are exceedingly rich. Some
of these have been made familiar to English writers through the work of
"Uncle Remus." Others have been collected by Johnston, Ellis, and Theal.

A black bard of our own day has described the onslaught of the Matabili in
poetry of singular force and beauty:

  They saw the clouds ascend from the plains:
  It was the smoke of burning towns.
    The confusion of the whirlwind
Was in the heart of the great chief of the blue-colored cattle.
      The shout was raised,
        "They are friends!"
      But they shouted again,
        "They are foes!"
Till their near approach proclaimed them Matabili.
      The men seized their arms,
And rushed out as if to chase the antelope.
    The onset was as the voice of lightning,
And their javelins as the shaking of the forest in the autumn storm.[61]

There can be no doubt of the Negro's deep and delicate sense of beauty in
form, color, and sound. Soyaux says of African industry, "Whoever denies
to them independent invention and individual taste in their work either
shuts his eyes intentionally before perfectly evident facts, or lack of
knowledge renders him an incompetent judge."[62] M. Rutot had lately told
us how the Negro race brought art and sculpture to pre-historic Europe.
The bones of the European Negroids are almost without exception found in
company with drawings and sculpture in high and low relief; some of their
sculptures, like the Wellendorff "Venus," are unusually well finished for
primitive man. So, too, the painting and carving of the Bushmen and their
forerunners in South Africa has drawn the admiration of students. The
Negro has been prolific in the invention of musical instruments and has
given a new and original music to the western world.

Schweinfurth, who has preserved for us much of the industrial art of the
Negroes, speaks of their delight in the production of works of art for the
embellishment and convenience of life. Frobenius expressed his
astonishment at the originality of the African in the Yoruba temple which
he visited. "The lofty veranda was divided from the passageway by
fantastically carved and colored pillars. On the pillars were sculptured
knights, men climbing trees, women, gods, and mythical beings. The dark
chamber lying beyond showed a splendid red room with stone hatchets,
wooden figures, cowry beads, and jars. The whole picture, the columns
carved in colors in front of the colored altar, the old man sitting in the
circle of those who reverenced him, the open scaffolding of ninety
rafters, made a magnificent impression."[63]

The Germans have found, in Kamarun, towns built, castellated, and
fortified in a manner that reminds one of the prehistoric cities of Crete.
The buildings and fortifications of Zymbabwe have already been described
and something has been said of the art of Benin, with its brass and bronze
and ivory. All the work of Benin in bronze and brass was executed by
casting, and by methods so complicated that it would be no easy task for a
modern European craftsman to imitate them.

Perhaps no race has shown in its earlier development a more magnificent
art impulse than the Negro, and the student must not forget how far Negro
genius entered into the art in the valley of the Nile from Meroe and
Nepata down to the great temples of Egypt.

Frobenius has recently directed the world's attention to art in West
Africa. Quartz and granite he found treated with great dexterity. But more
magnificent than the stone monument is the proof that at some remote era
glass was made and molded in Yorubaland and that the people here were
brilliant in the production of terra-cotta images. The great mass of
potsherds, lumps of glass, heaps of slag, etc., "proves, at all events,
that the glass industry flourished in this locality in ages past. It is
plain that the glass beads found to have been so very common in Africa
were not only not imported, but were actually manufactured in great
quantities at home."

The terra-cotta pieces are "remains of another ancient and fine type of
art" and were "eloquent of a symmetry, a vitality, a delicacy of form, and
practically a reminiscence of the ancient Greeks." The antique bronze head
Frobenius describes as "a head of marvelous beauty, wonderfully cast," and
"almost equal in beauty and, at least, no less noble in form, and as
ancient as the terra-cotta heads."[64]

In a park of monuments Frobenius saw the celebrated forge and hammer: a
mighty mass of iron, like a falling drop in shape, and a block of quartz
fashioned like a drum. Frobenius thinks these were relics dating from past
ages of culture, when the manipulation of quartz and granite was
thoroughly understood and when iron manipulation gave evidence of a skill
not met with to-day.

Even when we contemplate such revolting survivals of savagery as
cannibalism we cannot jump too quickly at conclusions. Cannibalism is
spread over many parts of Negro Africa, yet the very tribes who practice
cannibalism show often other traits of industry and power. "These cannibal
Bassonga were, according to the types we met with, one of those rare
nations of the African interior which can be classed with the most
esthetic and skilled, most discreet and intelligent of all those generally
known to us as the so-called natural races. Before the Arabic and European
invasion they did not dwell in 'hamlets,' but in towns with twenty or
thirty thousand inhabitants, in towns whose highways were shaded by
avenues of splendid palms planted at regular intervals and laid out with
the symmetry of colonnades. Their pottery would be fertile in suggestion
to every art craftsman in Europe. Their weapons of iron were so perfectly
fashioned that no industrial art from abroad could improve upon their
workmanship. The iron blades were cunningly ornamented with damascened
copper, and the hilts artistically inlaid with the same metal. Moreover,
they were most industrious and capable husbandmen, whose careful tillage
of the suburbs made them able competitors of any gardener in Europe. Their
sexual and parental relations evidenced an amount of tact and delicacy of
feelings unsurpassed among ourselves, either in the simplicity of the
country or the refinements of the town. Originally their political and
municipal system was organized on the lines of a representative republic.
True, it is on record that these well-governed towns often waged an
internecine warfare; but in spite of this it had been their invariable
custom from time immemorial, even in times of strife, to keep the trade
routes open and to allow their own and foreign merchants to go their ways
unharmed. And the commerce of these nations ebbed and flowed along a road
of unknown age, running from Itimbiri to Batubenge, about six hundred
miles in length. This highway was destroyed by the 'missionaries of
civilization' from Arabia only toward the close of the eighteenth century.
But even in my own time there were still smiths who knew the names of
places along that wonderful trade route driven through the heart of the
'impenetrable forests of the Congo.' For every scrap of imported iron was
carried over it."[65]

In disposition the Negro is among the most lovable of men. Practically all
the great travelers who have spent any considerable time in Africa testify
to this and pay deep tribute to the kindness with which they were
received. One has but to remember the classic story of Mungo Park, the
strong expressions of Livingstone, the words of Stanley and hundreds of
others to realize this.

Ceremony and courtesy mark Negro life. Livingstone again and again reminds
us of "true African dignity." "When Ilifian men or women salute each
other, be it with a plain and easy curtsey (which is here the simplest
form adopted), or kneeling down, or throwing oneself upon the ground, or
kissing the dust with one's forehead, no matter which, there is yet a
deliberateness, a majesty, a dignity, a devoted earnestness in the manner
of its doing, which brings to light with every gesture, with every fold of
clothing, the deep significance and essential import of every single
action. Everyone may, without too greatly straining his attention, notice
the very striking precision and weight with which the upper and lower
native classes observe these niceties of intercourse."[66]

All this does not mean that the African Negro is not human with the
all-too-well-known foibles of humanity. Primitive life among them is,
after all, as bare and cruel as among primitive Germans or Chinese, but it
is not more so, and the more we study the Negro the more we realize that
we are dealing with a normal human stock which under reasonable conditions
has developed and will develop in the same lines as other men. Why is it,
then, that so much of misinformation and contempt is widespread concerning
Africa and its people, not simply among the unthinking mass, but among men
of education and knowledge?

One reason lies undoubtedly in the connotation of the term "Negro." In
North America a Negro may be seven-eights white, since the term refers to
any person of Negro descent. If we use the term in the same sense
concerning the inhabitants of the rest of world, we may say truthfully
that Negroes have been among the leaders of civilization in every age of
the world's history from ancient Babylon to modern America; that they have
contributed wonderful gifts in art, industry, political organization, and
religion, and that they are doing the same to-day in all parts of the
world.

In sharp contrast to this usage the term "Negro" in Africa has been more
and more restricted until some scientists, late in the last century,
declared that the great mass of the black and brown people of Africa were
not Negroes at all, and that the "real" Negro dwells in a small space
between the Niger and the Senegal. Ratzel says, "If we ask what justifies
so narrow a limitation, we find that the hideous Negro type, which the
fancy of observers once saw all over Africa, but which, as Livingstone
says, is really to be seen only as a sign in front of tobacco shops, has
on closer inspection evaporated from all parts of Africa, to settle no one
knows how in just this region. If we understand that an extreme case may
have been taken for the genuine and pure form, even so we do not
comprehend the ground of its geographical limitation and location; for
wherever dark, woolly-haired men dwell, this ugly type also crops up. We
are here in the presence of a refinement of science which to an
unprejudiced eye will hardly hold water."[67]

In this restricted sense the Negro has no history, culture, or ability,
for the simple fact that such human beings as have history and evidence
culture and ability are not Negroes! Between these two extreme
definitions, with unconscious adroitness, the most extraordinary and
contradictory conclusions have been reached.

Let it therefore be said, once for all, that racial inferiority is not the
cause of anti-Negro prejudice. Boaz, the anthropologist, says, "An
unbiased estimate of the anthropological evidence so far brought forward
does not permit us to countenance the belief in a racial inferiority which
would unfit an individual of the Negro race to take his part in modern
civilization. We do not know of any demand made on the human body or mind
in modern life that anatomical or ethnological evidence would prove to be
beyond the powers of the Negro."[68]

"We have every reason to suppose that all races are capable, under proper
guidance, of being fitted into the complex scheme of our modern
civilization, and the policy of artificially excluding them from its
benefits is as unjustifiable scientifically as it is ethically
abhorrent."[69] What is, then, this so-called "instinctive" modern
prejudice against black folk?

Lord Bryce says of the intermingling of blacks and whites in South
America, "The ease with which the Spaniards have intermingled by marriage
with the Indian tribes--and the Portuguese have done the like, not only
with the Indians, but with the more physically dissimilar Negroes--shows
that race repugnance is no such constant and permanent factor in human
affairs as members of the Teutonic peoples are apt to assume. Instead of
being, as we Teutons suppose, the rule in the matter, we are rather the
exception, for in the ancient world there seems to have been little race
repulsion."

In nearly every age and land men of Negro descent have distinguished
themselves. In literature there is Terence in Rome, Nosseyeb and Antar in
Arabia, Es-Sa'di in the Sudan, Pushkin in Russia, Dumas in France, Al
Kanemi in Spain, Heredia in the West Indies, and Dunbar in the United
States, not to mention the alleged Negro strain in Æsop and Robert
Browning. As rulers and warriors we remember such Negroes as Queen
Nefertari and Amenhotep III among many others in Egypt; Candace and
Ergamenes in Ethiopia; Mansa Musa, Sonni Ali, and Mohammed Askai in the
Sudan; Diaz in Brazil, Toussaint L'Ouverture in Hayti, Hannivalov in
Russia, Sakanouye Tamuramaro in Japan, the elder Dumas in France, Cazembe
and Chaka among the Bantu, and Menelik, of Abyssinia; the numberless black
leaders of India, and the mulatto strain of Alexander Hamilton. In music
and art we recall Bridgewater, the friend of Beethoven, and the
unexplained complexion of Beethoven's own father; Coleridge-Taylor in
England, Tanner in America, Gomez in Spain; Ira Aldridge, the actor, and
Johnson, Cook, and Burleigh, who are making the new American syncopated
music. In the Church we know that Negro blood coursed in the veins of many
of the Catholic African fathers, if not in certain of the popes; and there
were in modern days Benoit of Palermo, St. Benedict, Bishop Crowther, the
Mahdi who drove England from the Sudan, and Americans like Allen, Lot
Carey, and Alexander Crummell. In science, discovery, and invention the
Negroes claim Lislet Geoffroy of the French Academy, Latino and Amo, well
known in European university circles; and in America the explorers
Dorantes and Henson; Banneker, the almanac maker; Wood, the telephone
improver; McCoy, inventor of modern lubrication; Matseliger, who
revolutionized shoemaking. Here are names representing all degrees of
genius and talent from the mediocre to the highest, but they are strong
human testimony to the ability of this race.

We must, then, look for the origin of modern color prejudice not to
physical or cultural causes, but to historic facts. And we shall find the
answer in modern Negro slavery and the slave trade.

FOOTNOTES:

[35] "Some authors write that the Ethiopians paint the devil white, in
disdain of our complexions."--Ludolf: _History of Ethiopia_, p. 72.

[36] Ripley: _Races of Europe_, pp. 58, 62.

[37] Denniker: _Races of Men_, p. 63.

[38] G. Finot: _Race Prejudice_. F. Herz: _Moderne Rassentheorien_.

[39] Ratzel: quoted in Spiller: _Inter-Racial Problems_, p. 31.

[40] Spiller: _Inter-Racial Problems_, p. 35.

[41] Ratzel: _History of Mankind_, II, 380 ff.

[42] _Industrial Evolution_, p. 47.

[43] These and other references in this chapter are from Schneider:
Culturfähigkeit des Negers.

[44] Atlanta University Leaflet, No. 19.

[45] _Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute_, XLIII, 414, 415.
Cf. also _The Crisis_, Vol. IX, p. 234.

[46] Bücher: _Industrial Revolution_ (tr. by Wickett), pp. 57-58.

[47] Hayford: _Native Institutions_, pp. 95-96.

[48] Ratzel, II, 376.

[49] Hayford: _Native Institutions_, pp. 76 ff.

[50] _Impressions of South Africa_, 3d ed., p. 352.

[51] William Schneider.

[52] _West African Studies_, Chap. V.

[53] _Op. cit._

[54] _Impressions of South Africa._

[55] Frobenius: _Voice of Africa_, Vol. I.

[56] _West African Studies_, p. 107.

[57] Nassau: _Fetishism in West Africa_, p. 36.

[58] _Encyclopædia Britannica_, 9th ed., XX, 362.

[59] _The African Provinces_, II, 345.

[60] _Mediterranean Race_, p. 10.

[61] Stowe: _Native Races_, etc., pp. 553-554.

[62] Quoted in Schneider.

[63] Frobenius: _Voice of Africa_, Vol. I, Chap. XIV.

[64] Frobenius: _Voice of Africa_, Vol. I.

[65] Frobenius: _Voice of Africa_, I, 14-15.

[66] Frobenius: _Voice of Africa_, I, 272.

[67] Ratzel: _History of Mankind_, II, 313.

[68] Atlanta University Publications, No. 11.

[69] Robert Lowie in the _New Review_, Sept., 1914.



IX THE TRADE IN MEN


Color was never a badge of slavery in the ancient or medieval world, nor
has it been in the modern world outside of Christian states. Homer sings
of a black man, a "reverend herald"

    Of visage solemn, sad, but sable hue,
    Short, woolly curls, o'erfleeced his bending head,...
    Eurybiates, in whose large soul alone,
    Ulysses viewed an image of his own.

Greece and Rome had their chief supplies of slaves from Europe and Asia.
Egypt enslaved races of all colors, and if there were more blacks than
others among her slaves, there were also more blacks among her nobles and
Pharaohs, and both facts are explained by her racial origin and
geographical position. The fall of Rome led to a cessation of the slave
trade, but after a long interval came the white slave trade of the
Saracens and Moors, and finally the modern trade in Negroes.

Slavery as it exists universally among primitive people is a system
whereby captives in war are put to tasks about the homes and in the
fields, thus releasing the warriors for systematic fighting and the women
for leisure. Such slavery has been common among all peoples and was
wide-spread in Africa. The relative number of African slaves under these
conditions was small and the labor not hard; they were members of the
family and might and did often rise to high position in the tribe.

Remembering that in the fifteenth century there was no great disparity
between the civilization of Negroland and that of Europe, what made the
striking difference in subsequent development? European civilization, cut
off by physical barriers from further incursions of barbaric races,
settled more and more to systematic industry and to the domination of one
religion; African culture and industries were threatened by powerful
barbarians from the west and central regions of the continent and by the
Moors in the north, and Islam had only partially converted the leading
peoples.

When, therefore, a demand for workmen arose in America, European
exportation was limited by religious ties and economic stability. African
exportation was encouraged not simply by the Christian attitude toward
heathen, but also by the Moslem enmity toward the unconverted Negroes. Two
great modern religions, therefore, agreed at least in the policy of
enslaving heathen blacks, while the overthrow of black Askias by the Moors
at Tenkadibou brought that economic chaos among the advanced Negro peoples
and movement among the more barbarous tribes which proved of prime
advantage to the development of a systematic trade in men.

The modern slave trade began with the Mohammedan conquests in Africa, when
heathen Negroes were seized to supply the harems, and as soldiers and
servants. They were bought from the masters and seized in war, until the
growing wealth and luxury of the conquerors demanded larger numbers. Then
Negroes from the Egyptian Sudan, Abyssinia, and Zanzibar began to pass
into Arabia, Persia, and India in increased numbers. As Negro kingdoms and
tribes rose to power they found the slave trade lucrative and natural,
since the raids in which slaves were captured were ordinary inter-tribal
wars. It was not until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the
demand for slaves in Christian lands made slaves the object, and not the
incident, of African wars.

In Mohammedan countries there were gleams of hope in slavery. In fiction
and in truth the black slave had a chance. Once converted to Islam, he
became a brother to the best, and the brotherhood of the faith was not the
sort of idle lie that Christian slave masters made it. In Arabia black
leaders arose like Antar; in India black slaves carved out principalities
where their descendants still rule.

Some Negro slaves were brought to Europe by the Spaniards in the
fourteenth century, and a small trade was continued by the Portuguese, who
conquered territory from the "tawny" Moors of North Africa in the early
fifteenth century. Later, after their severe repulse at Al-Kasr-Al-Kabu,
the Portuguese began to creep down the west coast in quest of trade. They
reached the River of Gold in 1441, and their story is that their leader
seized certain free Moors and the next year exchanged them for ten black
slaves, a target of hide, ostrich eggs, and some gold dust. The trade was
easily justified on the ground that the Moors were Mohammedans and refused
to be converted to Christianity, while heathen Negroes would be better
subjects for conversion and stronger laborers. In the next few years a
small number of Negroes continued to be imported into Spain and Portugal
as servants. We find, for instance, in 1474, that Negro slaves were common
in Seville. There is a letter from Ferdinand and Isabella in the year 1474
to a celebrated Negro, Juan de Valladolid, commonly called the "Negro
Count" (El Conde Negro), nominating him to the office of "mayoral of the
Negroes" in Seville. The slaves were apparently treated kindly, allowed to
keep their own dances and festivals, and to have their own chief, who
represented them in the courts, as against their own masters, and settled
their private quarrels.

Between 1455 and 1492 little mention is made of slaves in the trade with
Africa. Columbus is said to have suggested Negroes for America, but
Ferdinand and Isabella refused. Nevertheless, by 1501, we have the first
incidental mention of Negroes going to America in a declaration that Negro
slaves "born in the power of Christians were to be allowed to pass to the
Indies, and the officers of the royal revenue were to receive the money to
be paid for their permits."

About 1501 Ovando, Governor of Spanish America, was objecting to Negro
slaves and "solicited that no Negro slaves should be sent to Hispaniola,
for they fled amongst the Indians and taught them bad customs, and never
could be captured." Nevertheless a letter from the king to Ovando, dated
Segovia, the fifteenth of September, 1505, says, "I will send more Negro
slaves as you request; I think there may be a hundred. At each time a
trustworthy person will go with them who may have some share in the gold
they may collect and may promise them ease if they work well."[70] There
is a record of a hundred slaves being sent out this very year, and Diego
Columbus was notified of fifty to be sent from Seville for the mines in
1510.

After this time frequent notices show that Negroes were common in the new
world.[71] When Pizarro, for instance, had been slain in Peru, his body
was dragged to the cathedral by two Negroes. After the battle of Anaquito
the head of the viceroy was cut off by a Negro, and during the great
earthquake in Guatemala a most remarkable figure was a gigantic Negro seen
in various parts of the city. Nunez had thirty Negroes with him on the top
of the Sierras, and there was rumor of an aboriginal tribe of Negroes in
South America. One of the last acts of King Ferdinand was to urge that no
more Negroes be sent to the West Indies, but under Charles V, Bishop Las
Casas drew up a plan of assisted migration to America and asked in 1517
the right for immigrants to import twelve Negro slaves, in return for
which the Indians were to be freed.

Las Casas, writing in his old age, owns his error: "This advice that
license should be given to bring Negro slaves to these lands, the Clerigo
Casas first gave, not considering the injustice with which the Portuguese
take them and make them slaves; which advice, after he had apprehended the
nature of the thing, he would not have given for all he had in the world.
For he always held that they had been made slaves unjustly and
tyrannically; for the same reason holds good of them as of the
Indians[72]."

As soon as the plan was broached a Savoyard, Lorens de Gomenot, Governor
of Bresa, obtained a monopoly of this proposed trade and shrewdly sold it
to the Genoese for twenty-five thousand ducats. Other monopolies were
granted in 1523, 1527, and 1528[73]. Thus the American trade became
established and gradually grew, passing successively into the hands of the
Portuguese, the Dutch, the French, and the English.

At first the trade was of the same kind and volume as that already passing
northward over the desert routes. Soon, however, the American trade
developed. A strong, unchecked demand for brute labor in the West Indies
and on the continent of America grew until it culminated in the eighteenth
century, when Negro slaves were crossing the Atlantic at the rate of fifty
to one hundred thousand a year. This called for slave raiding on a scale
that drew upon every part of Africa--upon the west coast, the western and
Egyptian Sudan, the valley of the Congo, Abyssinia, the lake regions, the
east coast, and Madagascar. Not simply the degraded and weaker types of
Negroes were seized, but the strong Bantu, the Mandingo and Songhay, the
Nubian and Nile Negroes, the Fula, and even the Asiatic Malay, were
represented in the raids.

There was thus begun in modern days a new slavery and slave trade. It was
different from that of the past, because more and more it came in time to
be founded on racial caste, and this caste was made the foundation of a
new industrial system. For four hundred years, from 1450 to 1850, European
civilization carried on a systematic trade in human beings of such
tremendous proportions that the physical, economic, and moral effects are
still plainly to be remarked throughout the world. To this must be added
the large slave trade of Mussulman lands, which began with the seventh
century and raged almost unchecked until the end of the nineteenth
century.

These were not days of decadence, but a period that gave the world
Shakespeare, Martin Luther, and Raphael, Haroun-al-Raschid and Abraham
Lincoln. It was the day of the greatest expansion of two of the world's
most pretentious religions and of the beginnings of the modern
organization of industry. In the midst of this advance and uplift this
slave trade and slavery spread more human misery, inculcated more
disrespect for and neglect of humanity, a greater callousness to
suffering, and more petty, cruel, human hatred than can well be
calculated. We may excuse and palliate it, and write history so as to let
men forget it; it remains the most inexcusable and despicable blot on
modern human history.

The Portuguese built the first slave-trading fort at Elmina, on the Gold
Coast, in 1482, and extended their trade down the west coast and up the
east coast. Under them the abominable traffic grew larger and larger,
until it became far the most important in money value of all the commerce
of the Zambesi basin. There could be no extension of agriculture, no
mining, no progress of any kind where it was so extensively carried
on[74].

It was the Dutch, however, who launched the oversea slave trade as a
regular institution. They began their fight for freedom from Spain in
1579; in 1595, as a war measure against Spain, who at that time was
dominating Portugal, they made their first voyage to Guinea. By 1621 they
had captured Portugal's various slave forts on the west coast and they
proceeded to open sixteen forts along the coast of the Gulf of Guinea.
Ships sailed from Holland to Africa, got slaves in exchange for their
goods, carried the slaves to the West Indies or Brazil, and returned home
laden with sugar. In 1621 the private companies trading in the west were
all merged into the Dutch West India Company, which sent in four years
fifteen thousand four hundred and thirty Negroes to Brazil, carried on war
with Spain, supplied even the English plantations, and gradually became
the great slave carrier of the day.

The commercial supremacy of the Dutch early excited the envy and emulation
of the English. The Navigation Ordinance of 1651 was aimed at them, and
two wars were necessary to wrest the slave trade from them and place it in
the hands of the English. The final terms of peace, among other things,
surrendered New Netherlands to England and opened the way for England to
become henceforth the world's greatest slave trader.

The English trade began with Sir John Hawkins' voyages in 1562 and later,
in which "the Jesus, our chiefe shippe" played a leading part. Desultory
trade was kept up by the English until the middle of the seventeenth
century, when English chartered slave-trading companies began to appear.
In 1662 the "Royal Adventurers," including the king, the queen dowager,
and the Duke of York, invested in the trade, and finally the Royal African
Company, which became the world's chief slave trader, was formed in 1672
and carried on a growing trade for a quarter of a century. Jamaica had
finally been captured and held by Oliver Cromwell in 1655 and formed a
West Indian base for the trade in men.

The chief contract for trade in Negroes was the celebrated "Asiento" or
agreement of the King of Spain to the importation of slaves into Spanish
domains. The Pope's Bull or Demarkation, 1493, debarred Spain from African
possessions, and compelled her to contract with other nations for slaves.
This contract was in the hands of the Portuguese in 1600; in 1640 the
Dutch received it, and in 1701 the French. The War of the Spanish
Succession brought this monopoly to England.

This Asiento of 1713 was an agreement between England and Spain by which
the latter granted the former a monopoly of the Spanish colonial slave
trade for thirty years, and England engaged to supply the colonies within
that time with at least one hundred and forty-four thousand slaves at the
rate of forty-eight hundred per year. The English counted this prize as
the greatest result of the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), which ended the
mighty struggle against the power of Louis XIV. The English held the
monopoly until the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748), although they had to
go to war over it in 1739.

From this agreement the slave traders reaped a harvest. The trade centered
at Liverpool, and that city's commercial greatness was built largely on
this foundation. In 1709 it sent out one slaver of thirty tons' burden;
encouraged by Parliamentary subsidies which amounted to nearly half a
million dollars between 1729 and 1750, the trade amounted to fifty-three
ships in 1751; eighty-six in 1765, and at the beginning of the nineteenth
century one hundred and eighty-five, which carried forty-nine thousand two
hundred and thirteen slaves in one year.

The slave trade thus begun by the Portuguese, enlarged by the Dutch, and
carried to its culmination by the English centered on the west coast near
the seat of perhaps the oldest and most interesting culture of Africa. It
came at a critical time. The culture of Yoruba, Benin, Mossiland, and Nupe
had exhausted itself in a desperate attempt to stem the on-coming flood of
Mohammedan culture. It has succeeded in maintaining its small, loosely
federated city-states suited to trade, industry, and art. It had developed
strong resistance toward the Sudan state builders toward the north, as in
the case of the fighting Mossi; but behind this warlike resistance lay the
peaceful city life which gave industrial ideas to Byzantium and shared
something of Ethiopian and Mediterranean culture.

The first advent of the slave traders increased and encouraged native
industry, as is evidenced by the bronze work of Benin; but soon this was
pushed into the background, for it was not bronze metal but bronze flesh
that Europe wanted. A new tyranny, blood-thirsty, cruel, and built on war,
forced itself forward in the Niger delta. The powerful state of Dahomey
arose early in the eighteenth century and became a devastating tyranny,
reaching its highest power early in the nineteenth century. Ashanti, a
similar kingdom, began its conquests in 1719 and grew with the slave
trade. Thus state building in West Africa began to replace the city
economy, but it was a state built on war and on war supported and
encouraged largely for the sake of trade in human flesh. The native
industries were changed and disorganized. Family ties and government were
weakened. Far into the heart of Africa this devilish disintegration,
coupled with Christian rum and Mohammedan raiding, penetrated. The face of
Africa was turned south on these slave traders instead of northward toward
the Mediterranean, where for two thousand years and more Europe and Africa
had met in legitimate trade and mutual respect. The full significance of
the battle of Tenkadibou, which overthrew the Askias, was now clear.
Hereafter Africa for centuries was to appear before the world, not as the
land of gold and ivory, of Mansa Musa and Meroe, but as a bound and
captive slave, dumb and degraded.

The natural desire to avoid a painful subject has led historians to gloss
over the details of the slave trade and leave the impression that it was a
local west-coast phenomenon and confined to a few years. It was, on the
contrary, continent wide and centuries long and an economic, social, and
political catastrophe probably unparalleled in human history.

The exact proportions of the slave trade can be estimated only
approximately. From 1680 to 1688 we know that the English African Company
alone sent 249 ships to Africa, shipped there 60,783 Negro slaves, and
after losing 14,387 on the middle passage, delivered 46,396 in America.

It seems probable that 25,000 Negroes a year arrived in America between
1698 and 1707. After the Asiento of 1713 this number rose to 30,000
annually, and before the Revolutionary War it had reached at least 40,000
and perhaps 100,000 slaves a year.

The total number of slaves imported is not known. Dunbar estimates that
nearly 900,000 came to America in the sixteenth century, 2,750,000 in the
seventeenth, 7,000,000 in the eighteenth, and over 4,000,000 in the
nineteenth, perhaps 15,000,000 in all. Certainly it seems that at least
10,000,000 Negroes were expatriated. Probably every slave imported
represented on the average five corpses in Africa or on the high seas. The
American slave trade, therefore, meant the elimination of at least
60,000,000 Negroes from their fatherland. The Mohammedan slave trade meant
the expatriation or forcible migration in Africa of nearly as many more.
It would be conservative, then, to say that the slave trade cost Negro
Africa 100,000,000 souls. And yet people ask to-day the cause of the
stagnation of culture in that land since 1600!

Such a large number of slaves could be supplied only by organized slave
raiding in every corner of Africa. The African continent gradually became
revolutionized. Whole regions were depopulated, whole tribes disappeared;
villages were built in caves and on hills or in forest fastnesses; the
character of peoples like those of Benin developed their worst excesses of
cruelty instead of the already flourishing arts of peace. The dark,
irresistible grasp of fetish took firmer hold on men's minds.

Further advances toward civilization became impossible. Not only was there
the immense demand for slaves which had its outlet on the west coast, but
the slave caravans were streaming up through the desert to the
Mediterranean coast and down the valley of the Nile to the centers of
Mohammedanism. It was a rape of a continent to an extent never paralleled
in ancient or modern times.

In the American trade there was not only the horrors of the slave raid,
which lined the winding paths of the African jungles with bleached bones,
but there was also the horrors of what was called the "middle passage,"
that is, the voyage across the Atlantic. As Sir William Dolben said, "The
Negroes were chained to each other hand and foot, and stowed so close that
they were not allowed above a foot and a half for each in breadth. Thus
crammed together like herrings in a barrel, they contracted putrid and
fatal disorders; so that they who came to inspect them in a morning had
occasionally to pick dead slaves out of their rows, and to unchain their
carcases from the bodies of their wretched fellow-sufferers to whom they
had been fastened[75]."

It was estimated that out of every one hundred lot shipped from Africa
only about fifty lived to be effective laborers across the sea, and among
the whites more seamen died in that trade in one year than in the whole
remaining trade of England in two. The full realization of the horrors of
the slave trade was slow in reaching the ears and conscience of the modern
world, just as to-day the treatment of dark natives in European colonies
is brought to publicity with the greatest difficulty. The first move
against the slave trade in England came in Parliament in 1776, but it was
not until thirty-one years later, in 1807, that the trade was banned
through the arduous labors of Clarkson, Wilberforce, Sharpe, and others.

Denmark had already abolished the trade, and the United States attempted
to do so the following year. Portugal and Spain were induced to abolish
the trade between 1815 and 1830. Notwithstanding these laws, the
contraband trade went on until the beginning of the Civil War in America.
The reasons for this were the enormous profit of the trade and the
continued demand of the American slave barons, who had no sympathy with
the efforts to stop their source of cheap labor supply.

However, philanthropy was not working alone to overthrow Negro slavery and
the slave trade. It was seen, first in England and later in other
countries, that slavery as an industrial system could not be made to work
satisfactorily in modern times. Its cost was too great, and one of the
causes of this cost was the slave insurrections from the very beginning,
when the slaves rose on the plantation of Diego Columbus down to the Civil
War in America. Actual and potential slave insurrection in the West
Indies, in North and South America, kept the slave owners in apprehension
and turmoil, or called for a police system difficult to maintain. In North
America revolt finally took the form of organized running away to the
North, and this, with the growing scarcity of suitable land and the moral
revolt, led to the Civil War and the disappearance of the American slave
trade.

There was still, however, the Mohammedan slave trade to deal with, and
this has been the work of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In
the last quarter of the nineteenth century ten thousand slaves annually
were being distributed on the southern and eastern coast of the
Mediterranean and at the great slave market in Bornu.

On the east coast of Africa in 1862 nineteen thousand slaves were passed
into Zanzibar and thence into Arabia and Persia. As late as 1880, three
thousand annually were being thus transplanted, but now the trade is about
stopped. To-day the only centers of actual slave trading may be said to be
the cocoa plantations of the Portuguese Islands on the west coast of
Africa, and the Congo Free State.

Such is the story of the Rape of Ethiopia--a sordid, pitiful, cruel tale.
Raphael painted, Luther preached, Corneille wrote, and Milton sung; and
through it all, for four hundred years, the dark captives wound to the sea
amid the bleaching bones of the dead; for four hundred years the sharks
followed the scurrying ships; for four hundred years America was strewn
with the living and dying millions of a transplanted race; for four
hundred years Ethiopia stretched forth her hands unto God.

FOOTNOTES:

[70] Cf. Helps: _Spanish Conquest_, IV, 401.

[71] Helps, _op. cit._, I, 219-220.

[72] Helps, _op. cit._, II, 18-19.

[73] Helps, _op. cit._, III, 211-212.

[74] Theal: _History and Ethnography of South Africa before 1795_, I, 476.

[75] Ingram: _History of Slavery_, p. 152.



X THE WEST INDIES AND LATIN AMERICA


That was a wonderful century, the fifteenth, when men realized that beyond
the scowling waste of western waters were dreams come true. Curious and
yet crassly human it is that, with all this poetry and romance, arose at
once the filthiest institution of the modern world and the costliest. For
on Negro slavery in America was built, not simply the abortive cotton
kingdom, but the foundations of that modern imperialism which is based on
the despising of backward men.

According to some accounts Alonzo, "the Negro," piloted one of the ships
of Columbus, and certainly there was Negro blood among his sailors. As
early as 1528 there were nearly ten thousand Negroes in the new world. We
hear of them in all parts. In Honduras, for instance, a Negro is sent to
burn a native village; in 1555 the town council of Santiago de Chile voted
to allow an enfranchised Negro possession of land in the town, and
evidently treated him just as white applicants were treated. D'Allyon, who
explored the coast of Virginia in the first quarter of the sixteenth
century, used Negro slaves (who afterward revolted) to build his ships and
help in exploration; Balboa had with him thirty Negroes, who, in 1513,
helped to build the first ships on the Pacific coast; Cortez had three
hundred Negro porters in 1522.

Before 1530 there were enough Negroes in Mexico to lead to an
insurrection, where the Negroes fought desperately, but were overcome and
their ringleaders executed. Later the followers of another Negro
insurgent, Bayano, were captured and sent back to Spain. Negroes founded
the town of Santiago del Principe in 1570, and in 1540 a Negro slave of
Hernandez de Alarcon was the only one of the party to carry a message
across the country to the Zunis of New Mexico. A Negro, Stephen Dorantes,
discovered New Mexico. This Stephen or "Estevanico" was sent ahead by
certain Spanish friars to the "Seven Cities of Cibola." "As soon as
Stephen had left said friars, he determined to earn all the reputation and
honor for himself, and that the boldness and daring of having alone
discovered those villages of high stories so much spoken of throughout
that country should be attributed to him; and carrying along with him the
people who followed him, he endeavored to cross the wilderness which is
between Cibola and the country he had gone through, and he was so far
ahead of the friars that when they arrived at Chichilticalli, which is on
the edge of the wilderness, he was already at Cibola, which is eighty
leagues of wilderness beyond." But the Indians of the new and strange
country took alarm and concluded that Stephen "must be a spy or guide for
some nations who intended to come and conquer them, because it seemed to
them unreasonable for him to say that the people were white in the country
from which he came, being black himself and being sent by them."[76]

Slaves imported under the Asiento treaties went to all parts of the
Americas. Spanish America had by the close of the eighteenth century ten
thousand in Santo Domingo, eighty-four thousand in Cuba, fifty thousand in
Porto Rico, sixty thousand in Louisiana and Florida, and sixty thousand in
Central and South America.

The history of the Negro in Spanish America centered in Cuba, Venezuela,
and Central America. In the sixteenth century slaves began to arrive in
Cuba and Negroes joined many of the exploring expeditions from there to
various parts of America. The slave trade greatly increased in the latter
part of the eighteenth century, and after the revolution in Hayti large
numbers of French emigrants from that island settled in Cuba. This and
Spanish greed increased the harshness of slavery and eventually led to
revolt among the Negroes. In 1844 Governor O'Donnell began a cruel
persecution of the blacks on account of a plot discovered among them.
Finally in 1866 the Ten Years' War broke out in which Negro and white
rebels joined. They demanded the abolition of slavery and equal political
rights for natives and foreigners, whites and blacks. The war was cruel
and bloody but ended in 1878 with the abolition of slavery, while a
further uprising the following year secured civil rights for Negroes.
Spanish economic oppression continued, however, and the leading chiefs of
the Ten Years' War including such leaders as the mulatto, Antonio Maceo,
with large numbers of Negro soldiers, took the field again in 1895. The
result was the freeing of Cuba by the intervention of the United States.
Negro regiments from the United States played here a leading role. A
number of leaders in Cuba in political, industrial, and literary lines
have been men of Negro descent.

Slavery was abolished by Guatemala in 1824 and by Mexico in 1829.
Argentine, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Paraguay ceased to recognize it about
1825. Between 1840 and 1845 it came to an end in Colombia, Venezuela, and
Ecquador. Bolivar, Paez, Sucre, and other South American leaders used
Negro soldiers in fighting for freedom (1814-16), and Hayti twice at
critical times rendered assistance and received Bolivar twice as a
refugee.

Brazil was the center of Portuguese slavery, but slaves were not
introduced in large numbers until about 1720, when diamonds were
discovered in the territory above Rio Janeiro. Gradually the seaboard from
Pernambuco to Rio Janeiro and beyond became filled with Negroes, and
although the slave trade north of the equator was theoretically abolished
by Portugal in 1815 and south of the equator in 1830, and by Brazil in
these regions in 1826 and 1830, nevertheless between 1825 and 1850 over a
million and a quarter of Negroes were introduced. Not until Brazil
abolished slavery in 1888 did the importation wholly cease. Brazilian
slavery allowed the slave to purchase his freedom, and the color line was
not strict. Even in the eighteenth century there were black clergy and
bishops; indeed the Negro clergy seem to have been on a higher moral level
than the whites.

Insurrection was often attempted, especially among the Mohammedan Negroes
around Bahia. In 1695 a tribe of revolted slaves held out for a long time.
In 1719 a widespread conspiracy failed, but many of the leaders fled to
the forest. In 1828 a thousand rose in revolt at Bahia, and again in 1830.
From 1831 to 1837 revolt was in the air, and in 1835 came the great revolt
of the Mohammedans, who attempted to enthrone a queen. The Negroes fought
with furious bravery, but were finally defeated.

By 1872 the number of free Negroes had very greatly increased, so that
emancipation did not come as a shock. While Mohammedan Negroes still gave
trouble and were in some cases sent back to Africa, yet on the whole
emancipation was peaceful, and whites, Negroes, and Indians are to-day
amalgamating into a new race. "At the present moment there is scarcely a
lowly or a highly placed federal or provincial official at the head of or
within any of the great departments of state that has not more or less
Negro or Amer-Indian blood in his veins."[77]

Lord Bryce says, "It is hardly too much to say that along the coast from
Rio to Bahia and Pernambuco, as well as in parts of the interior behind
these two cities, the black population predominates.... The Brazilian
lower class intermarries freely with the black people; the Brazilian
middle class intermarries with mulattoes and Quadroons. Brazil is the one
country in the world, besides the Portuguese colonies on the east and west
coasts of Africa, in which a fusion of the European and African races is
proceeding unchecked by law or custom. The doctrines of human equality and
human solidarity have here their perfect work. The result is so far
satisfactory that there is little or no class friction. The white man does
not lynch or maltreat the Negro; indeed I have never heard of a lynching
anywhere in South America except occasionally as part of a political
convulsion. The Negro is not accused of insolence and does not seem to
develop any more criminality than naturally belongs to any ignorant
population with loose notions of morality and property.

"What ultimate effect the intermixture of blood will have on the European
element in Brazil I will not venture to predict. If one may judge from a
few remarkable cases, it will not necessarily reduce the intellectual
standard. One of the ablest and most refined Brazilians I have known had
some color; and other such cases have been mentioned to me. Assumptions
and preconceptions must be eschewed, however plausible they may
seem."[78]

A Brazilian writer said at the First Races Congress: "The coöperation of
the _metis_[79] in the advance of Brazil is notorious and far from
inconsiderable. They played the chief part during many years in Brazil in
the campaign for the abolition of slavery. I could quote celebrated names
of more than one of these _metis_ who put themselves at the head of the
literary movement. They fought with firmness and intrepidity in the press
and on the platform. They faced with courage the gravest perils to which
they were exposed in their struggle against the powerful slave owners, who
had the protection of a conservative government. They gave evidence of
sentiments of patriotism, self-denial, and appreciation during the long
campaign in Paraguay, fighting heroically at the boarding of the ships in
the naval battle of Riachuelo and in the attacks on the Brazilian army, on
numerous occasions in the course of this long South American war. It was
owing to their support that the republic was erected on the ruins of the
empire."[80]

The Dutch brought the first slaves to the North American continent. John
Rolfe relates that the last of August, 1619, there came to Virginia "a
Dutch man of warre that sold us twenty Negars."[81] This was probably one
of the ships of the numerous private Dutch trading companies which early
entered into the developed and the lucrative African slave trade. Although
the Dutch thus commenced the continental slave trade they did not actually
furnish a very large number of slaves to the English colonies outside the
West Indies. A small trade had by 1698 brought a few thousand to New York
and still fewer to New Jersey.

The Dutch found better scope for slaves in Guiana, which they settled in
1616. Sugar cane became the staple crop, but the Negroes early began to
revolt and the Dutch brought in East Indian coolies. The slaves were badly
treated and the runaways joined the revolted Bush Negroes in the interior.
From 1715 to 1775 there was continuous fighting with the Bush Negroes or
insurrections, until at last in 1749 a formal treaty between sixteen
hundred Negroes and the Dutch was made. Immediately a new group revolted
under a Mohammedan, Arabi, and they obtained land and liberty. In 1763 the
coast Negroes revolted. They were checked, but made terms and settled in
the interior. The Bush Negroes fought against both French and English to
save Guiana to the Dutch, but Guiana was eventually divided between the
three. The Bush Negroes still maintain their independence and vigor.

The French encouraged settlements in the West Indies in the seventeenth
century, but at last, finding that French immigrants would not come, they
began about 1642 to import Negroes. Owing to wars with England, slaves
were supplied by the Dutch and Portuguese, although the Royal Senegal
Company held the coveted Asiento from 1701 to 1713.

It was in the island of Hayti, however, that French slavery centered.
Pirates from many nations, but chiefly French, began to frequent the
island, and in 1663 the French annexed the eastern part, thus dividing the
island between France and Spain. By 1680 there were so many slaves and
mulattoes that Louis XIV issued his celebrated Code Noir, which was
notable in compelling bachelor masters, fathers of slave children, to
marry their concubines. Children followed the condition of the mother as
to slavery or freedom; they could have no property; harsh punishments were
provided for, but families could not be separated by sale except in the
case of grown children; emancipation with full civil rights was made
possible for any slave twenty years of age or more. When Louisiana was
settled and the Alabama coast, slaves were introduced there. Louisiana was
transferred to Spain in 1762, against the resistance of both settlers and
slaves, but Spain took possession in 1769 and introduced more Negroes.

Later, in Hayti, a more liberal policy encouraged trade; war was over and
capital and slaves poured in. Sugar, coffee, chocolate, indigo, dyes, and
spices were raised. There were large numbers of mulattoes, many of whom
were educated in France, and many masters married Negro women who had
inherited large properties, just as in the United States to-day white men
are marrying eagerly the landed Indian women in the West. When white
immigration increased in 1749, however, prejudice arose against these
mulattoes and severe laws were passed depriving them of civil rights,
entrance into the professions, and the right to hold office; severe edicts
were enforced as to clothing, names, and social intercourse. Finally,
after 1777, mulattoes were forbidden to come to France.

When the French Revolution broke out, the Haytians managed to send two
delegates to Paris. Nevertheless the planters maintained the upper hand,
and one of the colored delegates, Oge, on returning, started a small
rebellion. He and his companions were killed with great brutality. This
led the French government to grant full civil rights to free Negroes,
Immediately planters and free Negroes flew to arms against each other and
then, suddenly, August 22, 1791, the black slaves, of whom there were four
hundred and fifty-two thousand, arose in revolt to help the free Negroes.

For many years runaway slaves had hidden in the mountains under their own
chiefs. One of the earliest of these chiefs was Polydor, in 1724, who was
succeeded by Macandal. The great chief of these runaways or "Maroons" at
the time of the slave revolt was Jean François, who was soon succeeded by
Biassou.

Pierre Dominic Toussaint, known as Toussaint L'Ouverture, joined these
Maroon bands, where he was called "the doctor of the armies of the king,"
and soon became chief aid to Jean François and Biassou. Upon their deaths
Toussaint rose to the chief command. He acquired complete control over the
blacks, not only in military matters, but in politics and social
organization; "the soldiers regarded him as a superior being, and the
farmers prostrated themselves before him. All his generals trembled before
him (Dessalines did not dare to look in his face), and all the world
trembled before his generals."[82]

The revolt once started, blacks and mulattoes murdered whites without
mercy and the whites retaliated. Commissioners were sent from France, who
asked simply civil rights for freedmen, and not emancipation. Indeed that
was all that Toussaint himself had as yet demanded. The planters intrigued
with the British and this, together with the beheading of the king (an
impious act in the eyes of Negroes), induced Toussaint to join the
Spaniards. In 1793 British troops were landed and the French commissioners
in desperation declared the slaves emancipated. This at once won back
Toussaint from the Spaniards. He became supreme in the north, while
Rigaud, leader of the mulattoes, held the south and the west. By 1798 the
British, having lost most of their forces by yellow fever, surrendered
Mole St. Nicholas to Toussaint and departed. Rigaud finally left for
France, and Toussaint in 1800 was master of Hayti. He promulgated a
constitution under which Hayti was to be a self-governing colony; all men
were equal before the law, and trade was practically free. Toussaint was
to be president for life, with the power to name his successor.

Napoleon Bonaparte, master of France, had at this time dreams of a great
American empire, and replied to Toussaint's new government by sending
twenty-five thousand men under his brother-in-law to subdue the
presumptuous Negroes, as a preliminary step to his occupation and
development of the Mississippi valley. Fierce fighting and yellow fever
decimated the French, but matters went hard with the Negroes too, and
Toussaint finally offered to yield. He was courteously received with
military honors and then, as soon as possible, treacherously seized,
bound, and sent to France. He was imprisoned at Fort Joux and died,
perhaps of poison, after studied humiliations, April 7, 1803.

Thus perished the greatest of American Negroes and one of the great men of
all time, at the age of fifty-six. A French planter said, "God in his
terrestrial globe did not commune with a purer spirit."[83] Wendell
Phillips said, "Some doubt the courage of the Negro. Go to Hayti and stand
on those fifty thousand graves of the best soldiers France ever had and
ask them what they think of the Negro's sword. I would call him Napoleon,
but Napoleon made his way to empire over broken oaths and through a sea of
blood. This man never broke his word. I would call him Cromwell, but
Cromwell was only a soldier, and the state he founded went down with him
into his grave. I would call him Washington, but the great Virginian held
slaves. This man risked his empire rather than permit the slave trade in
the humblest village of his dominions. You think me a fanatic, for you
read history, not with your eyes, but with your prejudices. But fifty
years hence, when Truth gets a hearing, the Muse of history will put
Phocion for the Greek, Brutus for the Roman, Hampden for the English, La
Fayette for France, choose Washington as the bright, consummate flower of
our earlier civilization, then, dipping her pen in the sunlight, will
write in the clear blue, above them all, the name of the soldier, the
statesman, the martyr, Toussaint L'Ouverture."

The treacherous killing of Toussaint did not conquer Hayti. In 1802 and
1803 some forty thousand French soldiers died of war and fever. A new
colored leader, Dessalines, arose and all the eight thousand remaining
French surrendered to the blockading British fleet.

The effect of all this was far-reaching. Napoleon gave up his dream of
American empire and sold Louisiana for a song. "Thus, all of Indian
Territory, all of Kansas and Nebraska and Iowa and Wyoming and Montana and
the Dakotas, and most of Colorado and Minnesota, and all of Washington and
Oregon states, came to us as the indirect work of a despised Negro.
Praise, if you will, the work of a Robert Livingstone or a Jefferson, but
to-day let us not forget our debt to Toussaint L'Ouverture, who was
indirectly the means of America's expansion by the Louisiana Purchase of
1803."[84]

With the freedom of Hayti in 1801 came a century of struggle to fit the
people for the freedom they had won. They were yet slaves, crushed by a
cruel servitude, without education or religious instruction. The Haytian
leaders united upon Dessalines to maintain the independence of the
republic. Dessalines, like Toussaint and his lieutenant Christophe, was
noted in slavery days for his severity toward his fellows and the
discipline which he insisted on. He had other characteristics of African
chieftains. "There were seasons when he broke through his natural
sullenness and showed himself open, affable, and even generous. His vanity
was excessive and manifested itself in singular perversities."[85] He was
a man of great personal bravery and succeeded in maintaining the
independence of Hayti, which had already cost the Frenchmen fifty thousand
lives.

On January 1, 1804, at the place whence Toussaint had been treacherously
seized and sent to France, the independence of Hayti was declared by the
military leaders. Dessalines was made governor-general for life and
afterward proclaimed himself emperor. This was not an act of
grandiloquence and mimicry. "It is truer to say that in it both Dessalines
and later Christophe were actuated by a clear insight into the social
history and peculiarities of their people. There was nothing in the
constitution which did not have its companion in Africa, where the
organization of society was despotic, with elective hereditary chiefs,
royal families, polygamic marriages, councils, and regencies."[86]

The population was divided into soldiers and laborers. The territory was
parceled out to chiefs, and the laborers were bound to the soil and worked
under rigorous inspection; part of the products were reserved for their
support, and the rest went to the chiefs, the king, the general
government, and the army. The army was under stern discipline and
military service was compulsory. Women did much of the agricultural labor.
Under Toussaint the administration of this system was committed to
Dessalines, who carried it out with rigor; it was afterward followed by
Christophe. The latter even imported four thousand Negroes from Africa,
from whom he formed a national guard for patrolling the land. These
regulations brought back for a time a large part of the former prosperity
of the island.

The severity with which Dessalines enforced the laws soon began to turn
many against him. The educated mulattoes especially objected to submission
to the savage African _mores_. Dessalines started to suppress their
revolt, but was killed in ambush in October, 1806.

Great Britain now began to intrigue for a protectorate over the island and
the Spanish end of the island threatened attack. These difficulties were
overcome, but at a cost of great internal strain. After the death of
Dessalines it seemed that Hayti was about to dissolve into a number of
petty subdivisions. At one time Christophe was ruling as king in the
north, Petion as president at Port au Prince, Rigaud in the south, and a
semi-brigand, Goman, in the extreme southwest. Very soon, however, the
rivalry narrowed down to Petion and Christophe. Petion was a man of
considerable ability and did much, not simply for Hayti, but for South
America. Already as early as 1779, before the revolution in Hayti, the
Haytian Negroes had helped the United States. The British had captured
Savannah in 1778. The French fleet appeared on the coast of Georgia late
that year and was ordered to recruit men in Hayti. Eight hundred young
freedmen, blacks and mulattoes, offered to take part in the expedition,
and they fought valiantly in the siege and covered themselves with glory.
It was this legion that made the charge on the British and saved the
retreating American army. Among the men who fought there was Christophe.

When Simon Bolivar, Commodore Aury, and many Venezuelan families were
driven from their country in 1815, they and their ships took temporary
refuge in Hayti. Notwithstanding the embarrassed condition of the
republic, Petion received them and gave them four thousand rifles with
ammunition, provisions, and last and best a printing press. He also
settled some international quarrels among members of the groups, and
Bolivar expressed himself afterward as being "overwhelmed with magnanimous
favors."[87]

Petion died in 1818 and was succeeded by his friend Boyer. Christophe
committed suicide the following year and Boyer became not simply ruler of
western Hayti, but also, by arrangement with the eastern end of the
island, gained the mastery there, where they were afraid of Spanish
aggression. Thus from 1822 to 1843 Boyer, a man of much ability, ruled the
whole of the island and gained the recognition of Haytian independence
from France and other nations.

France, under Charles X, demanded an indemnity of thirty million dollars
to reimburse the planters for confiscated lands and property. This Hayti
tried to pay, but the annual installment was a tremendous burden to the
impoverished country. Further negotiations were entered into. Finally in
1838 France recognized the independence of the republic and the indemnity
was reduced to twelve million dollars. Even this was a large burden for
Hayti, and the payment of it for years crippled the island.

The United States and Great Britain in 1825-26 recognized the independence
of Hayti. A concordat was arranged with the Pope for governing the church
in Hayti, and finally in 1860 the church placed under the French
hierarchy. Thus Boyer did unusually well; but his necessary concessions to
France weakened his influence at home, and finally an earthquake, which
destroyed several towns in 1842, raised the superstitious of the populace
against him. He resigned in 1843, leaving the treasury well filled; but
with his withdrawal the Spanish portion of the island was lost to Hayti.

The subsequent history of Hayti since 1843 has been the struggle of a
small divided country to maintain political independence. The rich
resources of the country called for foreign capital, but outside capital
meant political influence from abroad, which the little nation rightly
feared. Within, the old antagonism between the freedman and the slave
settled into a color line between the mulatto and the black, which for a
time meant the difference between educated liberalism and reactionary
ignorance. This difference has largely disappeared, but some vestiges of
the color line remain. The result has been reaction and savagery under
Soulouque, Dominique, and Nord Alexis, and decided advance under
presidents like Nissage-Saget, Solomon, Legitime, and Hyppolite.

In political life Hayti is still in the sixteenth century; but in
economic life she has succeeded in placing on their own little farms the
happiest and most contented peasantry in the world, after raising them
from a veritable hell of slavery. If modern capitalistic greed can be
restrained from interference until the best elements of Hayti secure
permanent political leadership the triumph of the revolution will be
complete.

In other parts of the French-American dominion the slaves achieved freedom
also by insurrection. In Guadeloupe they helped the French drive out the
British, and thus gained emancipation. In Martinique it took three revolts
and a civil war to bring freedom.

The English slave empire in America centered in the Bermudas, Barbadoes,
Jamaica and the lesser islands, and in the United States. Barbadoes
developed a savage slave code, and the result was attempted slave
insurrections in 1674, 1692, and 1702. These were not successful, but a
rising in 1816 destroyed much property under the leadership of a mulatto,
Washington Franklin, and the repeal of bad laws and eventual
enfranchisement of the colored people followed. One Barbadian mulatto, Sir
Conrad Reeves, has held the position of chief justice in the island and
was knighted. A Negro insurrection in Dominica under Farcel greatly
exercised England in 1791 and 1794 and delayed slave trade abolition; in
1844 and 1847 further uprisings took place, and these continued from 1853
to 1893.

The chief island domain of English slavery was Jamaica. It was Oliver
Cromwell who, in his zeal for God and the slave trade, sent an expedition
to seize Hayti. His fleet, driven off there, took Jamaica in 1655. The
English found the mountains already infested with runaway slaves known as
"Maroons," and more Negroes joined them when the English arrived. In 1663
the freedom of the Maroons was acknowledged, land was given them, and
their leader, Juan de Bolas, was made a colonel in the militia. He was
killed, however, in the following year, and from 1664 to 1738 the three
thousand or more black Maroons fought the British Empire in guerrilla
warfare. Soldiers, Indians, and dogs were sent against them, and finally
in 1738 Captain Cudjo and other chiefs made a formal treaty of peace with
Governor Trelawney. They were granted twenty-five hundred acres and their
freedom was recognized.

The peace lasted until 1795, when they rebelled again and gave the
British a severe drubbing, besides murdering planters. Bloodhounds again
were imported. The Maroons offered to surrender on the express condition
that none of their number should be deported from the island, as the
legislature wished. General Walpole hesitated, but could get peace on no
other terms and gave his word. The Maroons surrendered their arms, and
immediately the whites seized six hundred of the ringleaders and
transported them to the snows of Nova Scotia! The legislature then voted a
sword worth twenty-five hundred dollars to General Walpole, which he
indignantly refused to accept. Eventually these exiled Maroons found their
way to Sierra Leone, West Africa, in time to save that colony to the
British crown.[88]

The pressing desire for peace with the Maroons on the part of the white
planters arose from the new sugar culture introduced in 1673. A greatly
increased demand for slaves followed, and between 1700 and 1786 six
hundred and ten thousand slaves were imported; nevertheless, so severely
were they driven, that there were only three hundred thousand Negroes in
Jamaica in the latter year.

Despite the Moravian missions and other efforts late in the eighteenth
century, unrest among the Jamaica slaves and freedmen grew and was
increased by the anti-slavery agitation in England and the revolt in
Hayti. There was an insurrection in 1796; and in 1831 again the Negroes of
northwest Jamaica, impatient because of the slow progress of the
emancipation, arose in revolt and destroyed nearly three and a half
million dollars' worth of property, well-nigh ruining the planters there.
The next year two hundred and fifty-five thousand slaves were set free,
for which the planters were paid nearly thirty million dollars. There
ensued a discouraging condition of industry. The white officials sent out
in these days were arbitrary and corrupt. Little was done for the mass of
the people and there was outrageous over-taxation. Nevertheless the
backwardness of the colony was attributed to the Negro. Governor Eyre
complained in 1865 that the young and strong were good for nothing and
were filling the jails; but a simultaneous report by a missionary told the
truth concerning the officials. This aroused the colored people, and a
mulatto, George William Gordon, called a meeting. Other meetings were
afterward held, and finally the Negro peasantry began a riot in 1861, in
which eighteen people were killed, only a few of whom were white.

The result was that Governor Eyre tried and executed by court-martial 354
persons, and in addition to this killed without trial 85, a total of 439.
One thousand Negro homes were burned to the ground and thousands of
Negroes flogged or mutilated. Children had their brains dashed out,
pregnant women were murdered, and Gordon was tried by court-martial and
hanged. In fact the punishment was, as the royal commissioners said,
"reckless and positively barbarous."[89]

This high-handed act aroused England. Eyre was not punished, but the
island was made a crown colony in 1866, and given representation in the
legislature in 1886.

In the island of St. Vincent, Indians first sought to enslave the fugitive
Negroes wrecked there, but the Negroes took the Carib women and then drove
the Indian men away. These "black Caribs" fought with Indians, English,
and others for three quarters of a century, until the Indians were
exterminated. The British took possession in 1763. The black Caribs
resisted, and after hard fighting signed a treaty in 1773, receiving
one-third of the island as their property. They afterward helped the
French against the British, and were finally deported to the island of
Ruatan, off Honduras. In Trinidad and British Guiana there have been
mutinies and rioting of slaves and a curious mingling of races.

Other parts of South America must be dismissed briefly, because of
insufficient data. Colombia and Venezuela, with perhaps eight million
people, have at least one-third of their population of Negro and Indian
descent. Here Simon Bolivar with his Negro, mulatto, and Indian forces
began the war that liberated South America. Central America has a smaller
proportion of Negroids, perhaps one hundred thousand in all. Bolivia and
Peru have small amounts of Negro blood, while Argentine and Uruguay have
very little. The Negro population in these lands is everywhere in process
of rapid amalgamation with whites and Indians.

FOOTNOTES:

[76] H.O. Flipper's translation of Castaneda de Nafera's narrative.

[77] Johnston: _Negro in the New World_, p. 109.

[78] Bryce: _South America_, pp. 479-480.

[79] I.e., mulattoes.

[80] _Inter-Racial Problems_, p. 381.

[81] Smith: _General History of Virginia_.

[82] La Croix: _Mémoires sur la Révolution_, I, 253, 408.

[83] Marquis d'Hermonas. Cf. Johnston: _Negro in the New World_, p. 158.

[84] DeWitt Talmage, in Christian Herald, November 28, 1906.

[85] Aimes: _African Institutions in America_ (reprinted from _Journal of
American Folk Lore_), p. 25.

[86] Brown: _History of San Domingo_, II, 158-159.

[87] See Leger: _Hayti_, Chap. XI.

[88] Cf. Chapter V, p. 69.

[89] Johnston: _Negro in the New World_.



XI THE NEGRO IN THE UNITED STATES


There were half a million slaves in the confines of the United States when
the Declaration of Independence declared "that all men are created equal;
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights;
that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." The
land that thus magniloquently heralded its advent into the family of
nations had supported the institution of human slavery for one hundred and
fifty-seven years and was destined to cling to it eighty-seven years
longer.

The greatest experiment in Negro slavery as a modern industrial system was
made on the mainland of North America and in the confines of the present
United States. And this experiment was on such a scale and so
long-continued that it is profitable for study and reflection. There were
in the United States in its dependencies, in 1910, 9,828,294 persons of
acknowledged Negro descent, not including the considerable infiltration of
Negro blood which is not acknowledged and often not known. To-day the
number of persons called Negroes is probably about ten and a quarter
million. These persons are almost entirely descendants of African slaves,
brought to America in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and
nineteenth centuries.

The importation of Negroes to the mainland of North America was small
until the British got the coveted privilege of the Asiento in 1713. Before
that Northern States like New York had received some slaves from the
Dutch, and New England had early developed a trade by which she imported a
number of house servants. Ships went out to the African coast with rum,
sold the rum, and brought the slaves to the West Indies; there they
exchanged the slaves for sugar and molasses and brought the molasses back
to New England, to be made into rum for further exploits. After the
Asiento treaty the Negro population increased in the eighteenth century
from about 50,000 in 1710 to 220,000 in 1750 and to 462,000 in 1770. When
the colonies became independent, the foreign slave trade was soon made
illegal; but illicit trade, annexation of territory and natural increase
enlarged the Negro population from a little over a million at the
beginning of the nineteenth century to four and a half millions at the
outbreak of the Civil War and to about ten and a quarter millions in 1914.

The present so-called Negro population of the United States is:

1. A mixture of the various African populations, Bantu, Sudanese,
west-coast Negroes, some dwarfs, and some traces of Arab, Berber, and
Semitic blood.

2. A mixture of these strains with the blood of white Americans through a
system of concubinage of colored women in slavery days, together with some
legal intermarriage.

The figures as to mulattoes[90] have been from time to time officially
acknowledged to be understatements. Probably one-third of the Negroes of
the United States have distinct traces of white blood. This blending of
the races has led to interesting human types, but racial prejudice has
hitherto prevented any scientific study of the matter. In general the
Negro population in the United States is brown in color, darkening to
almost black and shading off in the other direction to yellow and white,
and is indistinguishable in some cases from the white population.

Much has been written of the black man in America, but most of this has
been from the point of view of the whites, so that we know of the effect
of Negro slavery on the whites, the strife among the whites for and
against abolition, and the consequent problem of the Negro so far as the
white population is concerned.

This chapter, however, is dealing with the matter more from the point of
view of the Negro group itself, and seeking to show what slavery meant to
them, how they reacted against it, what they did to secure their freedom,
and what they are doing with their partial freedom to-day.

The slaves landing from 1619 onward were received by the colonies at first
as laborers, on the same plane as other laborers. For a long time there
was in law no distinction between the indented white servant from England
and the black servant from Africa, except in the term of their service.
Even here the distinction was not always observed, some of the whites
being kept beyond term of their service and Negroes now and then securing
their freedom. Gradually the planters realized the advantage of laborers
held for life, but they were met by certain moral difficulties. The
opposition to slavery had from the first been largely stilled when it was
stated that this was a method of converting the heathen to Christianity.
The corollary was that when a slave was converted he became free. Up to
1660 or thereabouts it seemed accepted in most colonies and in the English
West Indies that baptism into a Christian church would free a Negro slave.
Masters therefore, were reluctant in the seventeenth century to have their
slaves receive Christian instruction. Massachusetts first apparently
legislated on this matter by enacting in 1641 that slavery should be
confined to captives in just wars "and such strangers as willingly sell
themselves or are sold to us,"[91] meaning by "strangers" apparently
heathen, but saying nothing as to the effect of conversion. Connecticut
adopted similar legislation in 1650, and Virginia declared in 1661 that
Negroes "are incapable of making satisfaction" for time lost in running
away by lengthening their time of services, thus implying that they were
slaves for life. Maryland declared in 1663 that Negro slaves should serve
_durante vita_, but it was not until 1667 that Virginia finally plucked up
courage to attack the issue squarely and declared by law: "Baptism doth
not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or freedom, in
order that diverse masters freed from this doubt may more carefully
endeavor the propagation of Christianity."[92]

The transplanting of the Negro from his African clan life to the West
Indian plantation was a social revolution. Marriage became geographical
and transient, while women and girls were without protection.

The private home as a self-protective, independent unit did not exist.
That powerful institution, the polygamous African home, was almost
completely destroyed, and in its place in America arose sexual
promiscuity, a weak community life, with common dwelling, meals, and child
nurseries. The internal slave trade tended further to weaken natural ties.
A small number of favored house servants and artisans were raised above
this--had their private homes, came in contact with the culture of the
master class, and assimilated much of American civilization. This was,
however, exceptional; broadly speaking, the greatest social effect of
American slavery was to substitute for the polygamous Negro home a new
polygamy less guarded, less effective, and less civilized.

At first sight it would seem that slavery completely destroyed every
vestige of spontaneous movement among the Negroes. This is not strictly
true. The vast power of the priest in the African state is well known; his
realm alone--the province of religion and medicine--remained largely
unaffected by the plantation system. The Negro priest, therefore, early
became an important figure on the plantation and found his function as the
interpreter of the supernatural, the comforter of the sorrowing, and as
the one who expressed, rudely but picturesquely, the longing and
disappointment and resentment of a stolen people. From such beginnings
arose and spread with marvelous rapidity the Negro church, the first
distinctively Negro American social institution. It was not at first by
any means a Christian church, but a mere adaptation of those rites of
fetish which in America is termed obe worship, or "voodooism."[93]
Association and missionary effort soon gave these rites a veneer of
Christianity and gradually, after two centuries, the church became
Christian, with a simple Calvinistic creed, but with many of the old
customs still clinging to the services. It is this historic fact, that the
Negro church of to-day bases itself upon the sole surviving social
institution of the African fatherland, that accounts for its extraordinary
growth and vitality.

The slave codes at first were really labor codes based on an attempt to
reestablish in America the waning feudalism of Europe. The laborers were
mainly black and were held for life. Above them came the artisans, free
whites with a few blacks, and above them the master class. The feudalism
called for the plantation system, and the plantation system as developed
in America, and particularly in Virginia, was at first a feudal domain. On
these plantations the master was practically supreme. The slave codes in
early days were but moderately harsh, allowing punishment by the master,
but restraining him in extreme cases and providing for care of the slaves
and of the aged. With the power, however, solely in the hands of the
master class, and with the master supreme on his own plantation, his power
over the slave was practically what he wished it to be. In some cases the
cruelty was as great as on the worst West Indian plantations. In other
cases the rule was mild and paternal.

Up through this American feudalism the Negro began to rise. He learned in
the eighteenth century the English language, he began to be identified
with the Christian church, he mingled his blood to a considerable extent
with the master class. The house servants particularly were favored, in
some cases receiving education, and the number of free Negroes gradually
increased.

Present-day students are often puzzled at the apparent contradictions of
Southern slavery. One hears, on the one hand, of the staid and gentle
patriarchy, the wide and sleepy plantations with lord and retainers, ease
and happiness; on the other hand one hears of barbarous cruelty and
unbridled power and wide oppression of men. Which is the true picture? The
answer is simple: both are true. They are not opposite sides of the same
shield; they are different shields. They are pictures, on the one hand, of
house service in the great country seats and in the towns, and on the
other hand of the field laborers who raised the great tobacco, rice, and
cotton crops. We have thus not only carelessly mixed pictures of what were
really different kinds of slavery, but of that which represented different
degrees in the development of the economic system. House service was the
older feudal idea of personal retainership, developed in Virginia and
Carolina in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It had all the
advantages and disadvantages of such a system; the advantage of the strong
personal tie and disadvantage of unyielding caste distinctions, with the
resultant immoralities. At its worst, however, it was a matter primarily
of human relationships.

Out of this older type of slavery in the northern South there developed,
during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in the southern South the
type of slavery which corresponds to the modern factory system in its
worst conceivable form. It represented production of a staple product on a
large scale; between the owner and laborer were interposed the overseer
and the drivers. The slaves were whipped and driven to a mechanical task
system. Wide territory was needed, so that at last absentee landlordship
was common. It was this latter type of slavery that marked the cotton
kingdom, and the extension of the area of this system southward and
westward marked the aggressive world-conquering visions of the slave
barons. On the other hand it was the milder and far different Virginia
house service and the personal retainership of town life in which most
white children grew up; it was this that impressed their imaginations and
which they have so vividly portrayed. The Negroes, however, knew the other
side, for it was under the harsher, heartless driving of the fields that
fully nine-tenths of them lived.

There early began to be some internal development and growth of
self-consciousness among the Negroes: for instance, in New England towns
Negro "governors" were elected. This was partly an African custom
transplanted and partly an endeavor to put the regulation of the slaves
into their own hands. Negroes voted in those days: for instance, in North
Carolina until 1835 the Constitution extended the franchise to every
freeman, and when Negroes were disfranchised in 1835, several hundred
colored men were deprived of the vote. In fact, as Albert Bushnell Hart
says, "In the colonies freed Negroes, like freed indentured white
servants, acquired property, founded families, and came into the political
community if they had the energy, thrift, and fortune to get the necessary
property."[94]

The humanitarian movement of the eighteenth century was active toward
Negroes, because of the part which they played in the Revolutionary War.
Negro regiments and companies were raised in Connecticut and Rhode Island,
and a large number of Negroes were members of the continental armies
elsewhere. Individual Negroes distinguished themselves. It is estimated
that five thousand Negroes fought in the American armies.

The mass of the Americans considered at the time of the adoption of the
Constitution that Negro slavery was doomed. There soon came a series of
laws emancipating slaves in the North: Vermont began in 1779, followed by
judicial decision in Massachusetts in 1780 and gradual emancipation in
Pennsylvania beginning the same year; emancipation was accomplished in New
Hampshire in 1783, and in Connecticut and Rhode Island in 1784. The
momentous exclusion of slavery in the Northwest Territory took place in
1787, and gradual emancipation began in New York and New Jersey in 1799
and 1804.

Beneficial and insurance societies began to appear among colored people.
Nearly every town of any size in Virginia in the early eighteenth century
had Negro organizations for caring for the sick and burying the dead. As
the number of free Negroes increased, particularly in the North, these
financial societies began to be openly formed. One of the earliest was the
Free African Society of Philadelphia. This eventually became the present
African Methodist Church, which has to-day half a million members and over
eleven million dollars' worth of property.

Negroes began to be received into the white church bodies in separate
congregations, and before 1807 there is the record of the formation of
eight such Negro churches. This brought forth leaders who were usually
preachers in these churches. Richard Allen, the founder of the African
Methodist Church, was one; Lot Carey, one of the founders of Liberia, was
another. In the South there was John Chavis, who passed through a regular
course of studies at what is now Washington and Lee University. He started
a school for young white men in North Carolina and had among his pupils a
United States senator, sons of a chief justice of North Carolina, a
governor of the state, and many others. He was a full-blooded Negro, but a
Southern writer says that "all accounts agree that John Chavis was a
gentleman. He was received socially among the best whites and asked to
table."[95]

In the war of 1812 thirty-three hundred Negroes helped Jackson win the
battle of New Orleans, and numbers fought in New York State and in the
navy under Perry, Channing, and others. Phyllis Wheatley, a Negro girl,
wrote poetry, and the mulatto, Benjamin Banneker, published one of the
first American series of almanacs.

In fine, it seemed in the early years of the nineteenth century that
slavery in the United States would gradually disappear and that the Negro
would have, in time, a man's chance. A change came, however, between 1820
and 1830, and it is directly traceable to the industrial revolution of the
nineteenth century.

Between 1738 and 1830 there had come a remarkable series of inventions
which revolutionized the methods of making cloth. This series included the
invention of the fly shuttle, the carding machine, the steam engine, and
the power loom. The world began to look about for a cheaper and larger
supply of fiber for weaving. It was found in the cotton plant, and the
southern United States was especially adapted to its culture. The
invention of the cotton gin removed the last difficulties. The South now
had a crop which could be attended to by unskilled labor and for which
there was practically unlimited demand. There was land, and rich land, in
plenty. The result was that the cotton crop in the United States increased
from 8,000 bales in 1790 to 650,000 bales in 1820, to 2,500,000 bales in
1850, and to 4,000,000 bales in 1860.

In this growth one sees the economic foundation of the new slavery in the
United States, which rose in the second decade of the nineteenth century.
Manifestly the fatal procrastination in dealing with slavery in the
eighteenth century received in the nineteenth century its terrible reward.
The change in the attitude toward slavery was manifest in various ways.
The South no longer excused slavery, but began to defend it as an economic
system. The enforcement of the slave trade laws became notoriously lax
and there was a tendency to make slave codes harsher.

This led to retaliation on the part of the Negroes. There had not been in
the United States before this many attempts at insurrection. The slaves
were distributed over a wide territory, and before they became intelligent
enough to cooperate the chance of emancipation was held before them.
Several small insurrections are alluded to in South Carolina early in the
eighteenth century, and one by Cato at Stono in 1740 caused widespread
alarm. The Negro plot in New York in 1712 put the city into hysterics.
There was no further plotting on any scale until the Haytian revolt, when
Gabriel in Virginia made an abortive attempt. In 1822 a free Negro,
Denmark Vesey, in South Carolina, failed in a well-laid plot, and ten
years after that, in 1831, Nat Turner led his insurrection in Virginia and
killed fifty-one persons. The result of this insurrection was to
crystallize tendencies toward harshness which the economic revolution was
making advisable.

A wave of legislation passed over the South, prohibiting the slaves from
learning to read and write, forbidding Negroes to preach, and interfering
with Negro religious meetings. Virginia declared in 1831 that neither
slaves nor free Negroes might preach, nor could they attend religious
service at night without permission. In North Carolina slaves and free
Negroes were forbidden to preach, exhort, or teach "in any prayer meeting
or other association for worship where slaves of different families are
collected together" on penalty of not more than thirty-nine lashes.
Maryland and Georgia and other states had similar laws.

The real effective revolt of the Negro against slavery was not, however,
by fighting, but by running away, usually to the North, which had been
recently freed from slavery. From the beginning of the nineteenth century
slaves began to escape in considerable numbers. Four geographical paths
were chiefly followed: one, leading southward, was the line of swamps
along the coast from Norfolk, Virginia, to the northern border of Florida.
This gave rise to the Negro element among the Indians in Florida and led
to the two Seminole wars of 1817 and 1835. These wars were really slave
raids to make the Indians give up the Negro and half-breed slaves
domiciled among them. The wars cost the United States ten million dollars
and two thousand lives.

The great Appalachian range, with its abutting mountains, was the safest
path northward. Through Tennessee and Kentucky and the heart of the
Cumberland Mountains, using the limestone caverns, was the third route,
and the valley of the Mississippi was the western tunnel.

These runaways and the freedmen of the North soon began to form a group of
people who sought to consider the problem of slavery and the destiny of
the Negro in America. They passed through many psychological changes of
attitude in the years from 1700 to 1850. At first, in the early part of
the eighteenth century, there was but one thought: revolt and revenge. The
development of the latter half of the century brought an attitude of hope
and adjustment and emphasized the differences between the slave and the
free Negro. The first part of the nineteenth century brought two
movements: among the free Negroes an effort at self-development and
protection through organization; among slaves and recent fugitives a
distinct reversion to the older idea of revolt.

As the new industrial slavery, following the rise of the cotton kingdom,
began to press harder, a period of storm and stress ensued in the black
world, and in 1829 came the first full-voiced, almost hysterical protest
of a Negro against slavery and the color line in David Walker's Appeal,
which aroused Southern legislatures to action.

The decade 1830-40 was a severe period of trial. Not only were the chains
of slavery tighter in the South, but in the North the free Negro was
beginning to feel the ostracism and competition of white workingmen,
native and foreign. In Philadelphia, between 1829 and 1849, six mobs of
hoodlums and foreigners murdered and maltreated Negroes. In the Middle
West harsh black laws which had been enacted in earlier days were hauled
from their hiding places and put into effect. No Negro was allowed to
settle in Ohio unless he gave bond within twenty days to the amount of
five thousand dollars to guarantee his good behavior and support.
Harboring or concealing fugitives was heavily fined, and no Negro could
give evidence in any case where a white man was party. These laws began to
be enforced in 1829 and for three days riots went on in Cincinnati and
Negroes were shot and killed. Aroused, the Negroes sent a deputation to
Canada where they were offered asylum. Fully two thousand migrated from
Ohio. Later large numbers from other parts of the United States joined
them.

In 1830-31 the first Negro conventions were called in Philadelphia to
consider the desperate condition of the Negro population, and in 1833 the
convention met again and local societies were formed. The first Negro
paper was issued in New York in 1827, while later emancipation in the
British West Indies brought some cheer in the darkness.

A system of separate Negro schools was established and the little band of
abolitionists led by Garrison and others appeared. In spite of all the
untoward circumstances, therefore, the internal development of the free
Negro in the North went on. The Negro population increased twenty-three
per cent between 1830 and 1840; Philadelphia had, in 1838, one hundred
small beneficial societies, while Ohio Negroes had ten thousand acres of
land. The slave mutiny on the Creole, the establishment of the Negro Odd
Fellows, and the growth of the Negro churches all indicated advancement.

Between 1830 and 1850 the concerted coöperation to assist fugitives came
to be known as the Underground Railroad. It was an organization not simply
of white philanthropists, but the coöperation of Negroes in the most
difficult part of the work made it possible. Hundreds of Negroes visited
the slave states to entice the slaves away, and the list of Underground
Railroad operators given by Siebert contains one hundred and twenty-eight
names of Negroes. In Canada and in the northern United States there was a
secret society, known as the League of Freedom, which especially worked to
help slaves run away. Harriet Tubman was one of the most energetic of
these slave conductors and brought away several thousand slaves. William
Lambert, a colored man, was reputed between 1829 and 1862 to have aided in
the escape of thirty thousand.

The decade 1840-50 was a period of hope and uplift for the Negro group,
with clear evidences of distinct self-assertion and advance. A few
well-trained lawyers and physicians appeared, and colored men took their
place among the abolition orators. The catering business in Philadelphia
and other cities fell largely into their hands, and some small merchants
arose here and there. Above all, Frederick Douglass made his first speech
in 1841 and thereafter became one of the most prominent figures in the
abolition crusade. A new series of national conventions began to assemble
late in the forties, and the delegates were drawn from the artisans and
higher servants, showing a great increase of efficiency in the rank and
file of the free Negroes.

By 1850 the Negroes had increased to three and a half million. Those in
Canada were being organized in settlements and were accumulating property.
The escape of fugitive slaves was systematized and some of the most
representative conventions met. One particularly, in 1854, grappled
frankly with the problem of emigration. It looked as though it was going
to be impossible for Negroes to remain in the United States and be free.
As early as 1788 a Negro union of Newport, Rhode Island, had proposed a
general exodus to Africa. John and Paul Cuffe, after petitioning for the
right to vote in 1780, started in 1815 for Africa, organizing an
expedition at their own expense which cost four thousand dollars. Lot
Carey organized the African Mission Society in 1813, and the first Negro
college graduate went to Liberia in 1829 and became superintendent of
public schools. The Colonization Society encouraged this migration, and
the Negroes themselves had organized the Canadian exodus.

The Rochester Negro convention in 1853 pronounced against migration, but
nevertheless emissaries were sent in various directions to see what
inducements could be offered. One went to the Niger valley, one to Central
America, and one to Hayti. The Haytian trip was successful and about two
thousand black emigrants eventually settled in Hayti.

Delaney, who went to Africa, concluded a treaty with eight kings offering
inducements to Negroes, but nothing came of it. In 1853 Negroes like
Purvis and Barbadoes helped in the formation of the American Anti-slavery
society, and for a while colored men coöperated with John Brown and
probably would have given him considerable help if they had thoroughly
known his plans. As it was, six or seven of his twenty-two followers were
Negroes.

Meantime the slave power was impelled by the high price of slaves and the
exhaustion of cotton land to make increased demands. Slavery was forced
north of Mason and Dixon's line in 1820; a new slave empire with thousands
of slaves was annexed in 1850, and a fugitive slave law was passed which
endangered the liberty of every free Negro; finally a determined attempt
was made to force slavery into the Northwest in competition with free
white labor, and less effective but powerful movements arose to annex more
slave territory to the south and to reopen the African slave trade.

It looked like a triumphal march for the slave barons, but each step cost
more than the last. Missouri gave rise to the early abolitionist movement.
Mexico and the fugitive slave law aroused deep opposition in the North,
and Kansas developed an attack upon the free labor system, not simply of
the North, but of the civilized world. The result was war; but the war was
not against slavery. It was fought to protect free white laborers against
the competition of slaves, and it was thought possible to do this by
segregating slavery.

The first thing that vexed the Northern armies on Southern soil during the
war was the question of the disposition of the fugitive slaves, who
immediately began to arrive in increasing numbers. Butler confiscated
them, Fremont freed them, and Halleck caught and returned them; but their
numbers swelled to such large proportions that the mere economic problem
of their presence overshadowed everything else, especially after the
Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln was glad to have them come after once
he realized their strength to the Confederacy.

The Emancipation Proclamation was forced, not simply by the necessity of
paralyzing industry in the South, but also by the necessity of employing
Negro soldiers. During the first two years of the war no one wanted Negro
soldiers. It was declared to be a "white man's war." General Hunter tried
to raise a regiment in South Carolina, but the War Department disavowed
the act. In Louisiana the Negroes were anxious to enlist, but were held
off. In the meantime the war did not go as well as the North had hoped,
and on the twenty-sixth of January, 1863, the Secretary of War authorized
the Governor of Massachusetts to raise two regiments of Negro troops.
Frederick Douglass and others began the work with enthusiasm, and in the
end one hundred and eighty-seven thousand Negroes enlisted in the Northern
armies, of whom seventy thousand were killed and wounded. The conduct of
these troops was exemplary. They were indispensable in camp duties and
brave on the field, where they fought in two hundred and thirteen battles.
General Banks wrote, "Their conduct was heroic. No troops could be more
determined or more daring."[96]

The assault on Fort Wagner, led by a thousand black soldiers under the
white Colonel Shaw, is one of the greatest deeds of desperate bravery on
record. On the other hand the treatment of Negro soldiers when captured by
the Confederates was barbarous. At Fort Pillow, after the surrender of the
federal troops, the colored regiment was indiscriminately butchered and
some of them were buried alive.

Abraham Lincoln said, "The slightest knowledge of arithmetic will prove to
any man that the rebel armies cannot be destroyed with Democratic
strategy. It would sacrifice all the white men of the North to do it.
There are now in the service of the United States near two hundred
thousand able-bodied colored men, most of them under arms, defending and
acquiring Union territory.... Abandon all the posts now garrisoned by
black men; take two hundred thousand men from our side and put them in the
battlefield or cornfield against us, and we would be compelled to abandon
the war in three weeks."[97] Emancipation thus came as a war measure to
break the power of the Confederacy, preserve the Union, and gain the
sympathy of the civilized world.

However, two hundred and forty-four years of slavery could not be stopped
by edict. There were legal difficulties, the whole slow problem of
economic readjustment, and the subtle and far-reaching questions of future
race relations.

The peculiar circumstances of emancipation forced the legal and political
difficulties to the front, and these were so striking that they have since
obscured the others in the eyes of students. Quite unexpectedly and
without forethought the nation had emancipated four million slaves. Once
the deed was done, the majority of the nation was glad and recognized that
this was, after all, the only result of a fearful four years' war which in
any degree justified it. But how was the result to be secured for all
time? There were three possibilities: (1) to declare the slave free and
leave him at the mercy of his former masters; (2) to establish a careful
government guardianship designed to guide the slave from legal to real
economic freedom; (3) to give the Negro the political power to guard
himself as well as he could during this development. It is very easy to
forget that the United States government tried each one of these in
succession and was literally forced to adopt the third, because the first
had utterly failed and the second was thought too "paternal" and
especially too costly. To leave the Negroes helpless after a paper edict
of emancipation was manifestly impossible. It would have meant that the
war had been fought in vain.

Carl Schurz, who traversed the South just after the war, said, "A
veritable reign of terror prevailed in many parts of the South. The Negro
found scant justice in the local courts against the white man. He could
look for protection only to the military forces of the United States still
garrisoning the states lately in rebellion and to the Freedmen's
Bureau."[98] This Freedmen's Bureau was proposed by Charles Sumner. If it
had been presented to-day instead of fifty years ago, it would have been
regarded as a proposal far less revolutionary than the state insurance of
England and Germany. A half century ago, however, and in a country which
gave the _laisser faire_ economics their extremest trial, the Freedmen's
Bureau struck the whole nation as unthinkable, save as a very temporary
expedient and to relieve the more pointed forms of distress following war.
Yet the proposals of the Bureau were both simple and sensible:

1. To oversee the making and enforcement of wage contracts for freedmen.

2. To appear in the courts as the freedmen's best friend.

3. To furnish the freedmen with a minimum of land and of capital.

4. To establish schools.

5. To furnish such institutions of relief as hospitals, outdoor relief
stations, etc.

How a sensible people could expect really to conduct a slave into freedom
with less than this it is hard to see. Even with such tutelage extending
over a period of two or three decades, the ultimate end had to be
enfranchisement and political and social freedom for those freedmen who
attained a certain set standard. Otherwise the whole training had neither
object nor guarantee. Precisely on this account the former masters opposed
the Freedmen's Bureau with all their influence. They did not want the
Negro trained or really freed, and they criticized mercilessly the many
mistakes of the new Bureau.

The North at first thought to pay for the main cost of the Freedmen's
Bureau by confiscating the property of former slave owners; but finding
this not in accordance with law, they realized that they were embarking on
an enterprise which bade fair to add many millions to the already
staggering cost of the war. When, therefore, they saw that the abolition
of slavery could not be left to the white South and could not be done by
the North without time and money, they determined to put the
responsibility on the Negro himself. This was without a doubt a tremendous
experiment, but with all its manifest mistakes it succeeded to an
astonishing degree. It made the immediate reëstablishment of the old
slavery impossible, and it was probably the only quick method of doing
this. It gave the freedmen's sons a chance to begin their education. It
diverted the energy of the white South slavery to the recovery of
political power, and in this interval, small as it was, the Negro took his
first steps toward economic freedom.

The difficulties that stared reconstruction politicians in the face were
these: (1) They must act quickly. (2) Emancipation had increased the
political power of the South by one-sixth. Could this increased political
power be put in the hands of those who, in defense of slavery, had
disrupted the Union? (3) How was the abolition of slavery to be made
effective? (4) What was to be the political position of the freedmen?

The Freedmen's Bureau in its short life accomplished a great task. Carl
Schurz, in 1865, felt warranted in saying that "not half of the labor that
has been done in the South this year, or will be done there next year,
would have been or would be done but for the exertions of the Freedmen's
Bureau.... No other agency except one placed there by the national
government could have wielded that moral power whose interposition was so
necessary to prevent Southern society from falling at once into the chaos
of a general collision between its different elements."[99]
Notwithstanding this the Bureau was temporary, was regarded as a
makeshift, and soon abandoned.

Meantime partial Negro suffrage seemed not only just, but almost
inevitable. Lincoln, in 1864, "cautiously" suggested to Louisiana's
private consideration "whether some of the colored people may not be let
in as, for instance, the very intelligent, and especially those who fought
gallantly in our ranks. They would probably help in some trying time to
come, to keep the jewel of liberty in the family of freedom." Indeed, the
"family of freedom" in Louisiana being somewhat small just then, who else
was to be intrusted with the "jewel"? Later and for different reasons
Johnson, in 1865, wrote to Mississippi, "If you could extend the elective
franchise to all persons of color who can read the Constitution of the
United States in English and write their name, and to all persons of color
who own real estate valued at not less than two hundred and fifty dollars,
and pay taxes thereon, you would completely disarm the adversary and set
an example the other states will follow. This you can do with perfect
safety, and you thus place the Southern States, in reference to free
persons of color, upon the same basis with the free states. I hope and
trust your convention will do this."

The Negroes themselves began to ask for the suffrage. The Georgia
convention in Augusta (1866) advocated "a proposition to give those who
could write and read well and possessed a certain property qualification
the right of suffrage." The reply of the South to these suggestions was
decisive. In Tennessee alone was any action attempted that even suggested
possible Negro suffrage in the future, and that failed. In all other
states the "Black Codes" adopted were certainly not reassuring to the
friends of freedom. To be sure, it was not a time to look for calm, cool,
thoughtful action on the part of the white South. Their economic condition
was pitiable, their fear of Negro freedom genuine. Yet it was reasonable
to expect from them something less than repression and utter reaction
toward slavery. To some extent this expectation was fulfilled. The
abolition of slavery was recognized on the statute book, and the civil
rights of owning property and appearing as a witness in cases in which he
was a party were generally granted the Negro; yet with these in many cases
went harsh and unbearable regulations which largely neutralized the
concessions and certainly gave ground for an assumption that, once free,
the South would virtually reenslave the Negro. The colored people
themselves naturally feared this, protesting, as in Mississippi, "against
the reactionary policy prevailing and expressing the fear that the
legislature will pass such prescriptive laws as will drive the freedmen
from the state, or practically reënslave them."

The codes spoke for themselves. As Burgess says, "Almost every act, word,
or gesture of the Negro, not consonant with good taste and good manners as
well as good morals, was made a crime or misdemeanor for which he could
first be fined by the magistrates and then be consigned to a condition of
almost slavery for an indefinite time, if he could not pay the bill."[100]

All things considered, it seems probable that, if the South had been
permitted to have its way in 1865, the harshness of Negro slavery would
have been mitigated so as to make slave trading difficult, and so as to
make it possible for a Negro to hold property and appear in some cases in
court; but that in most other respects the blacks would have remained in
slavery.

What could prevent this? A Freedmen's Bureau established for ten, twenty,
or forty years, with a careful distribution of land and capital and a
system of education for the children, might have prevented such an
extension of slavery. But the country would not listen to such a
comprehensive plan. A restricted grant of the suffrage voluntarily made by
the states would have been a reassuring proof of a desire to treat the
freedmen fairly and would have balanced in part, at least, the increased
political power of the South. There was no such disposition evident.

In Louisiana, for instance, under the proposed reconstruction "not one
Negro was allowed to vote, though at that very time the wealthy
intelligent free colored people of the state paid taxes on property
assessed at fifteen million dollars and many of them were well known for
their patriotic zeal and love for the Union."[101]

Thus the arguments for universal Negro suffrage from the start were strong
and are still strong, and no one would question their strength were it not
for the assumption that the experiment failed. Frederick Douglass said to
President Johnson, "Your noble and humane predecessor placed in our hands
the sword to assist in saving the nation, and we do hope that you, his
able successor, will favorably regard the placing in our hands the ballot
with which to save ourselves."[102]

Carl Schurz wrote, "It is idle to say that it will be time to speak of
Negro suffrage when the whole colored race will be educated, for the
ballot may be necessary to him to secure his education."[103]

The granting of full Negro suffrage meant one of two alternatives to the
South: (1) The uplift of the Negro for sheer self-preservation. This is
what Schurz and the saner North expected. As one Southern school
superintendent said, "The elevation of this class is a matter of prime
importance, since a ballot in the hands of a black citizen is quite as
potent as in the hands of a white one." Or (2) Negro suffrage meant a
determined concentration of Southern effort by actual force to deprive the
Negro of the ballot or nullify its use. This last is what really happened.
But even in this case, so much energy was taken in keeping the Negro from
voting that the plan for keeping him in virtual slavery and denying him
education partially failed. It took ten years to nullify Negro suffrage in
part and twenty years to escape the fear of federal intervention. In these
twenty years a vast number of Negroes had arisen so far as to escape
slavery forever. Debt peonage could be fastened on part of the rural South
and was; but even here the new Negro landholder appeared. Thus despite
everything the Fifteenth Amendment, and that alone, struck the death knell
of slavery.

The steps toward the Fifteenth Amendment were taken slowly. First Negroes
were allowed to take part in reconstructing the state governments. This
was inevitable if loyal governments were to be obtained. Next the restored
state governments were directed to enfranchise all citizens, black or
white, or have their representation in Congress cut down proportionately.
Finally the United States said the last word of simple justice: the states
may regulate the suffrage, but no state may deprive a person of the right
to vote simply because he is a Negro or has been a slave.

For such reasons the Negro was enfranchised. What was the result? No
language has been spared to describe these results as the worst
imaginable. This is not true. There were bad results, and bad results
arising from Negro suffrage; but those results were not so bad as usually
painted, nor was Negro suffrage the prime cause of many of them. Let us
not forget that the white South believed it to be of vital interest to its
welfare that the experiment of Negro suffrage should fail ignominiously
and that almost to a man the whites were willing to insure this failure
either by active force or passive acquiescence; that besides this there
were, as might be expected, men, black and white, Northern and Southern,
only too eager to take advantage of such a situation for feathering their
own nests. Much evil must result in such case; but to charge the evil to
Negro suffrage is unfair. It may be charged to anger, poverty, venality,
and ignorance, but the anger and poverty were the almost inevitable
aftermath of war; the venality was much greater among whites than Negroes
both North and South, and while ignorance was the curse of Negroes, the
fault was not theirs and they took the initiative to correct it.

The chief charges against the Negro governments are extravagance, theft,
and incompetency of officials. There is no serious charge that these
governments threatened civilization or the foundations of social order.
The charge is that they threatened property and that they were
inefficient. These charges are in part undoubtedly true, but they are
often exaggerated. The South had been terribly impoverished and saddled
with new social burdens. In other words, states with smaller resources
were asked not only to do a work of restoration, but a larger social
work. The property holders were aghast. They not only demurred, but,
predicting ruin and revolution, they appealed to secret societies, to
intimidation, force, and murder. They refused to believe that these
novices in government and their friends were aught but scamps and fools.
Under the circumstances occurring directly after the war, the wisest
statesman would have been compelled to resort to increased taxation and
would have, in turn, been execrated as extravagant, dishonest, and
incompetent. It is easy, therefore, to see what flaming and incredible
stories of Reconstruction governments could gain wide currency and belief.
In fact the extravagance, although great, was not universal, and much of
it was due to the extravagant spirit pervading the whole country in a day
of inflated currency and speculation.

That the Negroes led by the astute thieves, became at first tools and
received some small share of the spoils is true. But two considerations
must be added: much of the legislation which resulted in fraud was
represented to the Negroes as good legislation, and thus their votes were
secured by deliberate misrepresentation. Take, for instance, the land
frauds of South Carolina. A wise Negro leader of that state, advocating
the state purchase of farm lands, said, "One of the greatest of slavery
bulwarks was the infernal plantation system, one man owning his thousand,
another his twenty, another fifty thousand acres of land. This is the only
way by which we will break up that system, and I maintain that our freedom
will be of no effect if we allow it to continue. What is the main cause of
the prosperity of the North? It is because every man has his own farm and
is free and independent. Let the lands of the South be similarly
divided."[104]

From such arguments the Negroes were induced to aid a scheme to buy land
and distribute it. Yet a large part of eight hundred thousand dollars
appropriated was wasted and went to the white landholders' pockets.

The most inexcusable cheating of the Negroes took place through the
Freedmen's Bank. This bank was incorporated by Congress in 1865 and had in
its list of incorporators some of the greatest names in America including
Peter Cooper, William Cullen Bryan and John Jay. Yet the bank was allowed
to fail in 1874 owing the freedmen their first savings of over three
millions of dollars. They have never been reimbursed.

Many Negroes were undoubtedly venal, but more were ignorant and deceived.
The question is: Did they show any signs of a disposition to learn to
better things? The theory of democratic government is not that the will of
the people is always right, but rather that normal human beings of average
intelligence will, if given a chance, learn the right and best course by
bitter experience. This is precisely what the Negro voters showed
indubitable signs of doing. First they strove for schools to abolish
ignorance, and second, a large and growing number of them revolted against
the extravagance and stealing that marred the beginning of Reconstruction,
and joined with the best elements to institute reform. The greatest stigma
on the white South is not that it opposed Negro suffrage and resented
theft and incompetence, but that, when it saw the reform movements growing
and even in some cases triumphing, and a larger and larger number of black
voters learning to vote for honesty and ability, it still preferred a
Reign of Terror to a campaign of education and disfranchised Negroes
instead of punishing rascals.

No one has expressed this more convincingly than a Negro who was himself a
member of the Reconstruction legislature of South Carolina, and who spoke
at the convention which disfranchised him against one of the onslaughts of
Tillman. "We were eight years in power. We had built school houses,
established charitable institutions, built and maintained the penitentiary
system, provided for the education of the deaf and dumb, rebuilt the jails
and court houses, rebuilt the bridges, and reestablished the ferries. In
short, we had reconstructed the state and placed it upon the road to
prosperity, and at the same time, by our acts of financial reform,
transmitted to the Hampton government an indebtedness not greater by more
than two and a half million dollars than was the bonded debt of the state
in 1868, before the Republican Negroes and their white allies came into
power."[105]

So, too, in Louisiana in 1872, and in Mississippi later, the better
element of the Republicans triumphed at the polls and, joining with the
Democrats, instituted reforms, repudiated the worst extravagance, and
started toward better things. Unfortunately there was one thing that the
white South feared more than Negro dishonesty, ignorance, and
incompetency, and that was Negro honesty, knowledge, and efficiency.

In the midst of all these difficulties the Negro governments in the South
accomplished much of positive good. We may recognize three things which
Negro rule gave to the South: (1) democratic government, (2) free public
schools, (3) new social legislation.

In general, the words of Judge Albion W. Tourgee, a white "carpet bagger,"
are true when he says of the Negro governments, "They obeyed the
Constitution of the United States and annulled the bonds of states,
counties, and cities which had been issued to carry on the War of
Rebellion and maintain armies in the field against the Union. They
instituted a public school system in a realm where public schools had been
unknown. They opened the ballot box and the jury box to thousands of white
men who had been debarred from them by a lack of earthly possessions. They
introduced home rule into the South. They abolished the whipping post, the
branding iron, the stocks, and other barbarous forms of punishment which
had up to that time prevailed. They reduced capital felonies from about
twenty to two or three. In an age of extravagance they were extravagant in
the sums appropriated for public works. In all of that time no man's
rights of persons were invaded under the forms of law. Every Democrat's
life, home, fireside, and business were safe. No man obstructed any white
man's way to the ballot box, interfered with his freedom of speech, or
boycotted him on account of his political faith."[106]

A thorough study of the legislation accompanying these constitutions and
its changes since shows the comparatively small amount of change in law
and government which the overthrow of Negro rule brought about. There were
sharp and often hurtful economies introduced, marking the return of
property to power; there was a sweeping change of officials, but the main
body of Reconstruction legislation stood. The Reconstruction democracy
brought forth new leaders and definitely overthrew the old Southern
aristocracy. Among these new men were Negroes of worth and ability. John
R. Lynch, when Speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives, was
given a public testimonial by Republicans and Democrats, and the leading
white paper said, "His bearing in office had been so proper, and his
rulings in such marked contrasts to the partisan conduct of the ignoble
whites of his party who have aspired to be leaders of the blacks, that the
conservatives cheerfully joined in the testimonial."[107]

Of the colored treasurer of South Carolina the white Governor Chamberlain
said, "I have never heard one word or seen one act of Mr. Cardoza's which
did not confirm my confidence in his personal integrity and his political
honor and zeal for the honest administration of the state government. On
every occasion, and under all circumstances, he has been against fraud and
robbery and in favor of good measures and good men."[108]

Jonathan C. Gibbs, a colored man and the first state superintendent of
instruction in Florida, was a graduate of Dartmouth. He established the
system and brought it to success, dying in harness in 1874. Such men--and
there were others--ought not to be forgotten or confounded with other
types of colored and white Reconstruction leaders.

There is no doubt that the thirst of the black man for knowledge, a thirst
which has been too persistent and durable to be mere curiosity or whim,
gave birth to the public school system of the South. It was the question
upon which black voters and legislators insisted more than anything else,
and while it is possible to find some vestiges of free schools in some of
the Southern States before the war, yet a universal, well-established
system dates from the day that the black man got political power.

Finally, in legislation covering property, the wider functions of the
state, the punishment of crime and the like, it is sufficient to say that
the laws on these points established by Reconstruction legislatures were
not only different from and even revolutionary to the laws in the older
South, but they were so wise and so well suited to the needs of the new
South that, in spite of a retrogressive movement following the overthrow
of the Negro governments, the mass of this legislation, with elaborations
and development, still stands on the statute books of the South.[109]

The triumph of reaction in the South inaugurated a new era in which we may
distinguish three phases: the renewed attempt to reduce the Negroes to
serfdom, the rise of the Negro metayer, and the economic disfranchisement
of the Southern working class.

The attempt to replace individual slavery had been frustrated by the
Freedmen's Bureau and the Fifteenth Amendment. The disfranchisement of
1876 was followed by the widespread rise of "crime" peonage. Stringent
laws on vagrancy, guardianship, and labor contracts were enacted and large
discretion given judge and jury in cases of petty crime. As a result
Negroes were systematically arrested on the slightest pretext and the
labor of convicts leased to private parties. This "convict lease system"
was almost universal in the South until about 1890, when its outrageous
abuses and cruelties aroused the whole country. It still survives over
wide areas, and is not only responsible for the impression that the Negro
is a natural criminal, but also for the inability of the Southern courts
to perform their normal functions after so long a prostitution to ends far
removed from justice.

In more normal economic lines the employers began with the labor contract
system. Before the war they owned labor, land, and subsistence. After the
war they still held the land and subsistence. The laborer was hired and
the subsistence "advanced" to him while the crop was growing. The fall of
the Freedmen's Bureau hindered the transmutation of this system into a
modern wage system, and allowed the laborers to be cheated by high
interest charges on the subsistence advanced and actual cheating often in
book accounts.

The black laborers became deeply dissatisfied under this system and began
to migrate from the country to the cities, where there was an increasing
demand for labor. The employing farmers complained bitterly of the
scarcity of labor and of Negro "laziness," and secured the enactment of
harsher vagrancy and labor contract laws, and statutes against the
"enticement" of laborers. So severe were these laws that it was often
impossible for a laborer to stop work without committing a felony.
Nevertheless competition compelled the landholders to offer more
inducements to the farm hand. The result was the rise of the black share
tenant: the laborer securing better wages saved a little capital and began
to hire land in parcels of forty to eighty acres, furnishing his own tools
and seed and practically raising his own subsistence. In this way the
whole face of the labor contract in the South was, in the decade 1880-90,
in process of change from a nominal wage contract to a system of tenantry.
The great plantations were apparently broken up into forty and eighty acre
farms with black farmers. To many it seemed that emancipation was
accomplished, and the black folk were especially filled with joy and hope.

It soon was evident, however, that the change was only partial. The
landlord still held the land in large parcels. He rented this in small
farms to tenants, but retained direct control. In theory the laborer was
furnishing capital, but in the majority of cases he was borrowing at
least a part of this capital from some merchant.

The retail merchant in this way entered on the scene as middle man between
landlord and laborer. He guaranteed the landowner his rent and relieved
him of details by taking over the furnishing of supplies to the laborer.
He tempted the laborer by a larger stock of more attractive goods, made a
direct contract with him, and took a mortgage on the growing crop. Thus he
soon became the middle man to whom the profit of the transaction largely
flowed, and he began to get rich.

If the new system benefited the merchant and the landlord, it also brought
some benefits to the black laborers. Numbers of these were still held in
peonage, and the mass were laborers working for scant board and clothes;
but above these began to rise a large number of independent tenants and
farm owners.

In 1890, therefore, the South was faced by this question: Are we willing
to allow the Negro to advance as a free worker, peasant farmer, metayer,
and small capitalist, with only such handicaps as naturally impede the
poor and ignorant, or is it necessary to erect further artificial barriers
to restrain the advance of the Negroes? The answer was clear and
unmistakable. The advance of the freedmen had been too rapid and the South
feared it; every effort must be made to "keep the Negro in his place" as a
servile caste.

To this end the South strove to make the disfranchisement of the Negroes
effective and final. Up to this time disfranchisement was illegal and
based on intimidation. The new laws passed between 1890 and 1910 sought on
their face to base the right to vote on property and education in such a
way as to exclude poor and illiterate Negroes and admit all whites. In
fact they could be administered so as to exclude nearly all Negroes. To
this was added a series of laws designed publicly to humiliate and
stigmatize Negro blood: as, for example, separate railway cars; separate
seats in street cars, and the like; these things were added to the
separation in schools and churches, and the denial of redress to seduced
colored women, which had long been the custom in the South. All these new
enactments meant not simply separation, but subordination, caste,
humiliation, and flagrant injustice.

To all this was added a series of labor laws making the exploitation of
Negro labor more secure. All this legislation had to be accomplished in
the face of the labor movement throughout the world, and particularly in
the South, where it was beginning to enter among the white workers. This
was accomplished easily, however, by an appeal to race prejudice. No
method of inflaming the darkest passions of men was unused. The lynching
mob was given its glut of blood and egged on by purposely exaggerated and
often wholly invented tales of crime on the part of perhaps the most
peaceful and sweet-tempered race the world has ever known. Under the flame
of this outward noise went the more subtle and dangerous work. The
election laws passed in the states where three-fourths of the Negroes
live, were so ingeniously framed that a black university graduate could be
prevented from voting and the most ignorant white hoodlum could be
admitted to the polls. Labor laws were so arranged that imprisonment for
debt was possible and leaving an employer could be made a penitentiary
offense. Negro schools were cut off with small appropriations or wholly
neglected, and a determined effort was made with wide success to see that
no Negro had any voice either in the making or the administration of
local, state, or national law.

The acquiescence of the white labor vote of the South was further insured
by throwing white and black laborers, so far as possible, into rival
competing groups and making each feel that the one was the cause of the
other's troubles. The neutrality of the white people of the North was
secured through their fear for the safety of large investments in the
South, and through the fatalistic attitude common both in America and
Europe toward the possibility of real advance on the part of the darker
nations.

The reaction of the Negro Americans upon this wholesale and open attempt
to reduce them to serfdom has been interesting. Naturally they began to
organize and protest and in some cases to appeal to the courts. Then, to
their astonishment, there arose a colored leader, Mr. Booker T.
Washington, who advised them to yield to disfranchisement and caste and
wait for greater economic strength and general efficiency before demanding
full rights as American citizens. The white South naturally agreed with
Mr. Washington, and the white North thought they saw here a chance for
peace in the racial conflict and safety for their Southern investments.

For a time the colored people hesitated. They respected Mr. Washington for
shrewdness and recognized the wisdom of his homely insistence on thrift
and hard work; but gradually they came to see more and more clearly that,
stripped of political power and emasculated by caste, they could never
gain sufficient economic strength to take their place as modern men. They
also realized that any lull in their protests would be taken advantage of
by Negro haters to push their caste program. They began, therefore, with
renewed persistence to fight for their fundamental rights as American
citizens. The struggle tended at first to bitter personal dissension
within the group. But wiser counsels and the advice of white friends
eventually prevailed and raised it to the broad level of a fight for the
fundamental principles of democracy. The launching of the "Niagara
Movement" by twenty-nine daring colored men in 1905, followed by the
formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People in 1910, marked an epoch in the advance of the Negro. This latter
organization, with its monthly organ, _The Crisis_, is now waging a
nation-wide fight for justice to Negroes. Other organizations, and a
number of strong Negro weekly papers are aiding in this fight. What has
been the net result of this struggle of half a century?

In 1863 there were about five million persons of Negro descent in the
United States. Of these, four million and more were just being released
from slavery. These slaves could be bought and sold, could move from place
to place only with permission, were forbidden to learn to read or write,
and legally could never hold property or marry. Ninety per cent were
totally illiterate, and only one adult in six was a nominal Christian.

Fifty years later, in 1913, there were in the United States ten and a
quarter million persons of Negro descent, an increase of one hundred and
five per cent. Legal slavery has been abolished leaving, however, vestiges
in debt slavery, peonage, and the convict lease system. The mass of the
freedmen and their sons have

1. Earned a living as free and partially free laborers.

2. Shared the responsibilities of government.

3. Developed the internal organization of their race.

4. Aspired to spiritual self-expression.

The Negro was freed as a penniless, landless, naked, ignorant laborer.
There were a few free Negroes who owned property in the South, and a
larger number who owned property in the North; but ninety-nine per cent of
the race in the South were penniless field hands and servants.

To-day there are two and a half million laborers, the majority of whom are
efficient wage earners. Above these are more than a million servants and
tenant farmers; skilled and semi-skilled workers make another million and
at the top of the economic column are 600,000 owners and managers of farms
and businesses, cash tenants, officials, and professional men. This makes
a total of 5,192,535 colored breadwinners in 1910.

More specifically these breadwinners include 218,972 farm owners and
319,346 cash farm tenants and managers. There were in all 62,755 miners,
288,141 in the building and hand trades; 28,515 workers in clay, glass,
and stone; 41,739 iron and steel workers; 134,102 employees on railways;
62,822 draymen, cab drivers, and liverymen; 133,245 in wholesale and
retail trade; 32,170 in the public service; and 69,471 in professional
service, including 29,750 teachers, 17,495 clergymen, and 4,546
physicians, dentists, trained nurses, etc. Finally, we must not forget
2,175,000 Negro homes, with their housewives, and 1,620,000 children in
school.

Fifty years ago the overwhelming mass of these people were not only
penniless, but were themselves assessed as real estate. By 1875 the
Negroes probably had gotten hold of something between 2,000,000 and
4,000,000 acres of land through their bounties as soldiers and the low
price of land after the war. By 1880 this was increased to about 6,000,000
acres; in 1890 to about 8,000,000 acres; in 1900 to over 12,000,000 acres.
In 1910 this land had increased to nearly 20,000,000 acres, a realm as
large as Ireland.

The 120,738 farms owned by Negroes in 1890 increased to 218,972 in 1910,
or eighty-one per cent. The value of these farms increased from
$179,796,639 in 1900 to $440,992,439 in 1910; Negroes owned in 1910 about
500,000 homes out of a total of 2,175,000. Their total property in 1900
was estimated at $300,000,000 by the American Economic Association. On the
same basis of calculation it would be worth to-day not less than
$800,000,000.

Despite the disfranchisement of three-fourths of his voting population,
the Negro to-day is a recognized part of the American government. He holds
7,500 offices in the executive service of the nation, besides furnishing
four regiments in the army and a large number of sailors. In the state and
municipal service he holds nearly 20,000 other offices, and he furnishes
500,000 of the votes which rule the Union.

In these same years the Negro has relearned the lost art of organization.
Slavery was the almost absolute denial of initiative and responsibility.
To-day Negroes have nearly 40,000 churches, with edifices worth at least
$75,000,000 and controlling nearly 4,000,000 members. They raise
themselves $7,500,000 a year for these churches.

There are 200 private schools and colleges managed and almost entirely
supported by Negroes, and these and other public and private Negro schools
have received in 40 years $45,000,000 of Negro money in taxes and
donations. Five millions a year are raised by Negro secret and beneficial
societies which hold at least $6,000,000 in real estate. Negroes support
wholly or in part over 100 old folks' homes and orphanages, 30 hospitals,
and 500 cemeteries. Their organized commercial life is extending rapidly
and includes over 22,000 small retail businesses and 40 banks.

Above and beyond this material growth has gone the spiritual uplift of a
great human race. From contempt and amusement they have passed to the
pity, perplexity, and fear on the part of their neighbors, while within
their own souls they have arisen from apathy and timid complaint to open
protest and more and more manly self-assertion. Where nine-tenths of them
could not read or write in 1860, to-day over two-thirds can; they have 300
papers and periodicals, and their voice and expression are compelling
attention. Already in poetry, literature, music, and painting the work of
Americans of Negro descent has gained notable recognition. Instead of
being led and defended by others, as in the past, American Negroes are
gaining their own leaders, their own voices, their own ideals.
Self-realization is thus coming slowly but surely to another of the
world's great races, and they are to-day girding themselves to fight in
the van of progress, not simply for their own rights as men, but for the
ideals of the greater world in which they live: the emancipation of women,
universal peace, democratic government, the socialization of wealth, and
human brotherhood.

FOOTNOTES:

[90]

The figures given by the census are as follows:
1850, mulattoes formed 11.2 per cent of the total Negro population.
1860, mulattoes formed 13.2 per cent of the total Negro population.
1870, mulattoes formed 12 per cent of the total Negro population.
1890, mulattoes formed 15.2 per cent of the total Negro population.
1910, mulattoes formed 20.9 per cent of the total Negro population.

Or in actual numbers:
1850, 405,751 mulattoes.
1860, 588,352 mulattoes.
1870, 585,601 mulattoes.
1890, 1,132,060 mulattoes.
1910, 2,050,686 mulattoes.

[91] Cf. "The Spanish Jurist Solorzaris," quoted in Helps: _Spanish
Conquest_, IV, 381.

[92] Hurd: _Law of Freedom and Bondage_.

[93] "Obi (Obeah, Obiah, or Obia) is the adjective; Obe or Obi, the noun.
It is of African origin, probably connected with Egyptian Ob, Aub, or
Obron, meaning 'serpent.' Moses forbids Israelites ever to consult the
demon Ob, i.e., 'Charmer, Wizard.' The Witch of Endor is called Oub or Ob.
Oubaois is the name of the Baselisk or Royal Serpent, emblem of the Sun,
and, according to Horus Appollo, 'the Ancient Deity of Africa.'"--Edwards:
_West Indies_, ed. 1819, II. 106-119. Cf. Johnston: _Negro in the New
World_, pp. 65-66; _also Atlanta University Publications_, No. 8, pp. 5-6.

[94] _Boston Transcript_, March 24, 1906.

[95] Bassett: _North Carolina_, pp. 73-76.

[96] Cf. Wilson: _The Black Phalanx_.

[97] Wilson: _The Black Phalanx_, p. 108.

[98] _American Historical Review_, Vol. XV.

[99] Report to President Johnson.

[100] _Reconstruction and the Constitution._

[101] Brewster: _Sketches_, etc.

[102] McPherson: _Reconstruction_, p. 52.

[103] Report to the President, 1865.

[104] _American Historical Review_, Vol. XV, No. 4.

[105] _Occasional Papers_, American Negro Academy, No. 6.

[106] _Occasional Papers_, American Negro Academy, No. 6.

[107] _Jackson (Miss.) Clarion_, April 24, 1873.

[108] Allen: _Governor Chamberlain's Administration_, p. 82.

[109] Reconstruction Constitutions, practically unaltered, were kept in
Florida, 1868-85, seventeen years; Virginia, 1870-1902, thirty-two years;
South Carolina, 1868-95, twenty-seven years; Mississippi, 1868-90,
twenty-two years.



XII THE NEGRO PROBLEMS


It is impossible to separate the population of the world accurately by
race, since that is no scientific criterion by which to divide races. If
we divide the world, however, roughly into African Negroes and Negroids,
European whites, and Asiatic and American brown and yellow peoples, we
have approximately 150,000,000 Negroes, 500,000,000 whites, and
900,000,000 yellow and brown peoples. Of the 150,000,000 Negroes,
121,000,000 live in Africa, 27,000,000[110] in the new world, and
2,000,000 in Asia.

What is to be the future relation of the Negro race to the rest of the
world? The visitor from Altruria might see here no peculiar problem. He
would expect the Negro race to develop along the lines of other human
races. In Africa his economic and political development would restore and
eventually outrun the ancient glories of Egypt, Ethiopia, and Yoruba;
overseas the West Indies would become a new and nobler Africa, built in
the very pathway of the new highway of commerce between East and West--the
real sea route to India; while in the United States a large part of its
citizenship (showing for perhaps centuries their dark descent, but
nevertheless equal sharers of and contributors to the civilization of the
West) would be the descendants of the wretched victims of the seventeenth,
eighteenth, and nineteenth century slave trade.

This natural assumption of a stranger finds, however, lodging in the minds
of few present-day thinkers. On the contrary, such an outcome is usually
dismissed summarily. Most persons have accepted that tacit but clear
modern philosophy which assigns to the white race alone the hegemony of
the world and assumes that other races, and particularly the Negro race,
will either be content to serve the interests of the whites or die out
before their all-conquering march. This philosophy is the child of the
African slave trade and of the expansion of Europe during the nineteenth
century.

The Negro slave trade was the first step in modern world commerce,
followed by the modern theory of colonial expansion. Slaves as an article
of commerce were shipped as long as the traffic paid. When the Americas
had enough black laborers for their immediate demand, the moral action of
the eighteenth century had a chance to make its faint voice heard.

The moral repugnance was powerfully reënforced by the revolt of the slaves
in the West Indies and South America, and by the fact that North America
early began to regard itself as the seat of advanced ideas in politics,
religion, and humanity.

Finally European capital began to find better investments than slave
shipping and flew to them. These better investments were the fruit of the
new industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, with its factory
system; they were also in part the result of the cheapened price of gold
and silver, brought about by slavery and the slave trade to the new world.
Commodities other than gold, and commodities capable of manufacture and
exploitation in Europe out of materials furnishable by America, became
enhanced in value; the bottom fell out of the commercial slave trade and
its suppression became possible.

The middle of the nineteenth century saw the beginning of the rise of the
modern working class. By means of political power the laborers slowly but
surely began to demand a larger share in the profiting industry. In the
United States their demand bade fair to be halted by the competition of
slave labor. The labor vote, therefore, first confined slavery to limits
in which it could not live, and when the slave power sought to exceed
these territorial limits, it was suddenly and unintentionally abolished.

As the emancipation of millions of dark workers took place in the West
Indies, North and South America, and parts of Africa at this time, it was
natural to assume that the uplift of this working class lay along the same
paths with that of European and American whites. This was the _first_
suggested solution of the Negro problem. Consequently these Negroes
received partial enfranchisement, the beginnings of education, and some of
the elementary rights of wage earners and property holders, while the
independence of Liberia and Hayti was recognized. However, long before
they were strong enough to assert the rights thus granted or to gather
intelligence enough for proper group leadership, the new colonialism of
the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries began to dawn. The new
colonial theory transferred the reign of commercial privilege and
extraordinary profit from the exploitation of the European working class
to the exploitation of backward races under the political domination of
Europe. For the purpose of carrying out this idea the European and white
American working class was practically invited to share in this new
exploitation, and particularly were flattered by popular appeals to their
inherent superiority to "Dagoes," "Chinks," "Japs," and "Niggers."

This tendency was strengthened by the fact that the new colonial expansion
centered in Africa. Thus in 1875 something less than one-tenth of Africa
was under nominal European control, but the Franco-Prussian War and the
exploration of the Congo led to new and fateful things. Germany desired
economic expansion and, being shut out from America by the Monroe
Doctrine, turned to Africa. France, humiliated in war, dreamed of an
African empire from the Atlantic to the Red Sea. Italy became ambitious
for Tripoli and Abyssinia. Great Britain began to take new interest in her
African realm, but found herself largely checkmated by the jealousy of all
Europe. Portugal sought to make good her ancient claim to the larger part
of the whole southern peninsula. It was Leopold of Belgium who started to
make the exploration and civilization of Africa an international movement.
This project failed, and the Congo Free State became in time simply a
Belgian colony. While the project was under discussion, the international
scramble for Africa began. As a result the Berlin Conference and
subsequent wars and treaties gave Great Britain control of 2,101,411
square miles of African territory, in addition to Egypt and the Egyptian
Sudan with 1,600,000 square miles. This includes South Africa,
Bechuanaland and Rhodesia, East Africa, Uganda and Zanzibar, Nigeria, and
British West Africa. The French hold 4,106,950 square miles, including
nearly all North Africa (except Tripoli) west of the Niger valley and
Libyan Desert, and touching the Atlantic at four points. To this is added
the Island of Madagascar. The Germans have 910,150 square miles,
principally in Southeast and South-west Africa and the Kamerun. The
Portuguese retain 787,500 square miles in Southeast and Southwest Africa.
The Belgians have 900,000 square miles, while Liberia (43,000 square
miles) and Abyssinia (350,000 square miles) are independent. The Italians
have about 600,000 square miles and the Spanish less than 100,000 square
miles.

This partition of Africa brought revision of the ideas of Negro uplift.
Why was it necessary, the European investors argued, to push a continent
of black workers along the paths of social uplift by education,
trades-unionism, property holding, and the electoral franchise when the
workers desired no change, and the rate of European profit would suffer?

There quickly arose then the _second_ suggestion for settling the Negro
problem. It called for the virtual enslavement of natives in certain
industries, as rubber and ivory collecting in the Belgian Congo, cocoa
raising in Portuguese Angola, and diamond mining in South Africa. This new
slavery or "forced" labor was stoutly defended as a necessary foundation
for implanting modern industry in a barbarous land; but its likeness to
slavery was too clear and it has been modified, but not wholly abolished.

The _third_ attempted solution of the Negro sought the result of the
_second_ by less direct methods. Negroes in Africa, the West Indies, and
America were to be forced to work by land monopoly, taxation, and little
or no education. In this way a docile industrial class working for low
wages, and not intelligent enough to unite in labor unions, was to be
developed. The peonage systems in parts of the United States and the labor
systems of many of the African colonies of Great Britain and Germany
illustrate this phase of solution.[111] It is also illustrated in many of
the West Indian islands where we have a predominant Negro population, and
this population freed from slavery and partially enfranchised. Land and
capital, however, have for the most part been so managed and monopolized
that the black peasantry have been reduced to straits to earn a living in
one of the richest parts of the world. The problem is now going to be
intensified when the world's commerce begins to sweep through the Panama
Canal.

All these solutions and methods, however, run directly counter to modern
philanthropy, and have to be carried on with a certain concealment and
half-hypocrisy which is not only distasteful in itself, but always liable
to be discovered and exposed by some liberal or religious movement of the
masses of men and suddenly overthrown. These solutions are, therefore,
gradually merging into a _fourth_ solution, which is to-day very popular.
This solution says: Negroes differ from whites in their inherent genius
and stage of development. Their development must not, therefore, be sought
along European lines, but along their own native lines. Consequently the
effort is made to-day in British Nigeria, in the French Congo and Sudan,
in Uganda and Rhodesia to leave so far as possible the outward structure
of native life intact; the king or chief reigns, the popular assemblies
meet and act, the native courts adjudicate, and native social and family
life and religion prevail. All this, however, is subject to the veto and
command of a European magistracy supported by a native army with European
officers. The advantage of this method is that on its face it carries no
clue to its real working. Indeed it can always point to certain undoubted
advantages: the abolition of the slave trade, the suppression of war and
feud, the encouragement of peaceful industry. On the other hand, back of
practically all these experiments stands the economic motive--the
determination to use the organization, the land, and the people, not for
their own benefit, but for the benefit of white Europe. For this reason
education is seldom encouraged, modern religious ideas are carefully
limited, sound political development is sternly frowned upon, and industry
is degraded and changed to the demands of European markets. The most
ruthless class of white mercantile exploiters is allowed large liberty, if
not a free hand, and protected by a concerted attempt to deify white men
as such in the eyes of the native and in their own imagination.[112]

White missionary societies are spending perhaps as much as five million
dollars a year in Africa and accomplishing much good, but at the same time
white merchants are sending at least twenty million dollars' worth of
European liquor into Africa each year, and the debauchery of the almost
unrestricted rum traffic goes far to neutralize missionary effort.

[Illustration: Distribution of Negro Blood, Ancient and Modern]

Under this last mentioned solution of the Negro problems we may put the
attempts at the segregation of Negroes and mulattoes in the United States
and to some extent in the West Indies. Ostensibly this is "separation" of
the races in society, civil rights, etc. In practice it is the
subordination of colored people of all grades under white tutelage, and
their separation as far as possible from contact with civilization in
dwelling place, in education, and in public life.

On the other hand the economic significance of the Negro to-day is
tremendous. Black Africa to-day exports annually nearly two hundred
million dollars' worth of goods, and its economic development has scarcely
begun. The black West Indies export nearly one hundred million dollars'
worth of goods; to this must be added the labor value of Negroes in South
Africa, Egypt, the West Indies, North, Central, and South America, where
the result is blended in the common output of many races. The economic
foundation of the Negro problem can easily be seen to be a matter of many
hundreds of millions to-day, and ready to rise to the billions tomorrow.

Such figures and facts give some slight idea of the economic meaning of
the Negro to-day as a worker and industrial factor. "Tropical Africa and
its peoples are being brought more irrevocably every year into the vortex
of the economic influences that sway the western world."[113]

What do Negroes themselves think of these their problems and the attitude
of the world toward them? First and most significant, they are thinking.
There is as yet no great single centralizing of thought or unification of
opinion, but there are centers which are growing larger and larger and
touching edges. The most significant centers of this new thinking are,
perhaps naturally, outside Africa and in America: in the United States and
in the West Indies; this is followed by South Africa and West Africa and
then, more vaguely, by South America, with faint beginnings in East
Central Africa, Nigeria, and the Sudan.

The Pan-African movement when it comes will not, however, be merely a
narrow racial propaganda. Already the more far-seeing Negroes sense the
coming unities: a unity of the working classes everywhere, a unity of the
colored races, a new unity of men. The proposed economic solution of the
Negro problem in Africa and America has turned the thoughts of Negroes
toward a realization of the fact that the modern white laborer of Europe
and America has the key to the serfdom of black folk, in his support of
militarism and colonial expansion. He is beginning to say to these
workingmen that, so long as black laborers are slaves, white laborers
cannot be free. Already there are signs in South Africa and the United
States of the beginning of understanding between the two classes.

In a conscious sense of unity among colored races there is to-day only a
growing interest. There is slowly arising not only a curiously strong
brotherhood of Negro blood throughout the world, but the common cause of
the darker races against the intolerable assumptions and insults of
Europeans has already found expression. Most men in this world are
colored. A belief in humanity means a belief in colored men. The future
world will, in all reasonable probability, be what colored men make it. In
order for this colored world to come into its heritage, must the earth
again be drenched in the blood of fighting, snarling human beasts, or will
Reason and Good Will prevail? That such may be true, the character of the
Negro race is the best and greatest hope; for in its normal condition it
is at once the strongest and gentlest of the races of men: "Semper novi
quid ex Africa!"

FOOTNOTES:

[110] Sir Harry Johnston estimates 135,000,000 Negroes, of whom 24,591,000
live in America. See _Inter-Racial Problems_, p. 335.

[111] The South African natives, in an appeal to the English Parliament,
show in an astonishing way the confiscation of their land by the English.
They say that in the Union of South Africa 1,250,000 whites own
264,000,000 acres of land, while the 4,500,000 natives have only
21,000,000 acres. On top of this the Union Parliament has passed a law
making even the future purchase of land by Negroes illegal save in
restricted areas!

[112] The traveler Glave writes in the _Century Magazine_ (LIII, 913):
"Formerly [in the Congo Free State] an ordinary white man was merely
called 'bwana' or 'Mzunga'; now the merest insect of a pale face earns the
title of 'bwana Mkubwa' [big master]."

[113] E.D. Morel, in the _Nineteenth Century_.



SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING


There is no general history of the Negro race. Perhaps Sir Harry H.
Johnston, in his various works on Africa, has come as near covering the
subject as any one writer, but his valuable books have puzzling
inconsistencies and inaccuracies. Keane's _Africa_ is a helpful
compendium, despite the fact that whenever Keane discovers intelligence in
an African he immediately discovers that its possessor is no "Negro." The
articles in the latest edition of the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ are of
some value, except the ridiculous article on the "Negro" by T.A. Joyce.
Frobenius' newly published _Voice of Africa_ is broad-minded and
informing, and Brown's _Story of Africa and its Explorers_ brings together
much material in readable form. The compendiums by Keltie and White, and
Johnston's _Opening up of Africa_ are the best among the shorter
treatises.

None of these authors write from the point of view of the Negro as a man,
or with anything but incidental acknowledgment of the existence or value
of his history. We may, however, set down certain books under the various
subjects which the chapters have treated. These books will consist of (1)
standard works for wider reading and (2) special works on which the author
has relied for his statements or which amplify his point of view. _The
latter are starred_.


THE PHYSIOGRAPHY OF AFRICA

A.S. White: _The Development of Africa_, 2d ed., 1892.

Stanford's Compendium of Geography: _Africa_, by A.H. Keane, 2d ed.,
1904-7.

E. Reclus: _Universal Geography_, Vols. X-XIII.


RACIAL DIFFERENCES AND THE ORIGIN AND CHARACTERISTICS OF NEGROES

J. Deniker: _The Races of Man_, etc., New York, 1904.

*J. Finot: _Race Prejudice_ (tr. by Wade-Evans), New York, 1907.

*W.Z. Ripley: _The Races of Europe_, etc., New York, 1899.

*Jacques Loeb: in _The Crisis_, Vol. VIII, p. 84, Vol. IX, p. 92.

*_Papers on Inter-Racial Problems Communicated to the First Universal
Races Congress_, etc. (ed. by G. Spiller), 1911.

*G. Sergi: _The Mediterranean Race_, etc., London, 1901.

*Franz Boas: _The Mind of Primitive Man_, New York, 1911.

C.B. Davenport: _Heredity of Skin Color in Negro-White Crosses_, 1913.


EARLY MOVEMENTS OF THE NEGRO RACE

*Sir Harry H. Johnston: _The Opening up of Africa_ (Home University
Library).

---- _A History of the Colonization of Africa by Alien Races_, Cambridge,
1905.

*G.W. Stowe: _The Native Races of South Africa_ (ed. by G.M. Theal),
London, 1910.

(Consult also Johnston's other works on Africa, and his article in Vol.
XLIII of the _Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great
Britain and Ireland_; also _Inter-Racial Problems, and_ Deniker, noted
above.)


NEGRO IN ETHIOPIA AND EGYPT

(The works of Breasted and Petrie, Maspero, Budge and Newberry and
Garstang are the standard books on Egypt. They mention the Negro, but
incidentally and often slightingly.)

*A.F. Chamberlain: "The Contribution of the Negro to Human Civilization"
(_Journal of Race Development_, Vol. I, April, 1911).

T.E.S. Scholes: _Glimpses of the Ages_, etc., London, 1905.

W.H. Ferris: _The African Abroad_, etc., 2 vols., New Haven, 1913.

E.A.W. Budge: _The Egyptian Sudan_, 2 vols., 1907.

*_Archeological Survey of Nubia_.

*A. Thompson and D. Randal McIver: _The Ancient Races of the Thebaid_,
1905.


ABYSSINIA

Job Ludolphus: _A New History of Ethiopia_ (tr. by Gent), London, 1682.

W.S. Harris: _Highlands of Æthiopia_, 3 vols., London, 1844.

R.S. Whiteway: _The Portuguese Expedition to Abyssinia_ ... as narrated by
Castanhosa, etc., 1902.


THE NIGER RIVER AND ISLAM *F.L. Shaw (Lady Lugard): _A Tropical
Dependency_, etc., London, 1906.

(The reader may dismiss as worthless Lady Lugard's definition of "Negro."
Otherwise her book is excellent.)

*Es-Sa'di, Abderrahman Ben Abdallah, etc., translated into French by O.
Houdas, Paris, 1900.

*F. DuBois: _Timbuktu the Mysterious_ (tr. by White), 1896.

*W.D. Cooley: _The Negroland of the Arabs_, etc., 1841.

*H. Barth: _Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa_, etc., 5
vols., 1857-58.

*Ibn Batuta: _Travels_, etc. (tr. by Lee), 1829.

*Leo Africanus: _The History and Description of Africa_, etc. (tr. by
Pory, ed. by R. Brown), 3 vols., 1896.

*E.W. Blyden: _Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race_.

*Leo Frobenius: _The Voice of Africa_ (tr. by Blind), 2 vols., 1913.

Mungo Park: _Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa_, 1799.


THE NEGRO ON THE GUINEA COAST

*Leo Frobenius (as above).

Sir Harry H. Johnston: _Liberia_, 2 vols., New York, 1906.

H.H. Foote: _Africa and the American Flag_, New York, 1859.

T.H.T. McPherson: _A History of Liberia_, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins
Studies.

T.J. Alldridge: _A Transformed Colony_ (Sierra Leone), London, 1910.

E.D. Morel: _Affairs of West Africa_, 1902.

H.L. Roth: _Great Benin and Its Customs_, 1903.

*F. Starr: _Liberia_, 1913.

W. Jay: _An Inquiry_, etc., 1835.

*A.B. Ellis: _The Tshi-speaking Peoples of the Gold Coast_, 1887.

---- _The Ewe-speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast_, 1890.

---- _The Yoruba-speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast_, 1894.

C.H. Read and O.M. Dalton: _Antiquities from the City of Benin_, etc.,
1899.

*M.H. Kingsley: _West African Studies_, 2d. ed., 1904.

*G.W. Ellis: _Negro Culture in West Africa_ (Vai-speaking peoples), 1914.



THE CONGO VALLEY

*G. Schweinfurth: _The Heart of Africa_, Vol. II, 1873.

*H.M. Stanley: _Through the Dark Continent_, 2 vols., 1878.

---- _In Darkest Africa_, 2 vols., 1890.

---- _The Congo_, etc., 2 vols., London, 1885.

H. von Wissman: _My Second Journey through Equatorial Africa_, 1891.

*H.R. Fox-Bourne: _Civilization in Congoland_, 1903.

Sir Harry H. Johnston: _George Grenfell and the Congo_, 2 vols., London,
1908.

*E.D. Morel: _Red Rubber_, London, 1906.


THE NEGRO IN THE REGION OF THE GREAT LAKES

*Sir Harry H. Johnston: _The Uganda Protectorate_, 2d ed., 2 vols., 1904.

---- _British Central Africa_, 1897.

---- _The Nile Quest_, 1903.

*D. Randal McIver: _Mediæval Rhodesia_, 1906.

*_The Last Journals of David Livingstone in Central Africa_ (ed. by H.
Waller), 1874.

J. Dos Santos: _Ethiopia Oriental_ (Theal's _Records of South Africa_,
Vol. VII).

C. Peters: "Ophir and Punt in South Africa" (_African Society Journal_,
Vol. I).

De Barros: _De Asia_.

R. Burton: _Lake Regions of Central Africa_, 1860.

R.P. Ashe: _Chronicles of Uganda_, 1894.

(See also Stanley's works, as above.)


THE NEGRO IN SOUTH AFRICA

*G.M. Theal: _History and Ethnography of South Africa of the Zambesi to
1795_, 3 vols., 1907-10.

---- _History of South Africa since September, 1795_, 5 vols., 1908.

---- _Records of South Eastern Africa_, 9 vols., 1898-1903.

*J. Bryce: _Impressions of South Africa_, 1897.

D. Livingstone: _Missionary Travels in South Africa_, 1857.

*South African Native Affairs Commission, 1903-5, _Reports_, etc., 5
vols., Cape Town, 1904-5.

G. Lagden: _The Basutos_, London, 1909.

J. Stewart: _Lovedale_, 1884.

(See also Stowe, as above.)


ON NEGRO CIVILIZATION

J. Dowd: _The Negro Races_, 1907, 1914.

*H. Gregoire: _An Inquiry concerning the Intellectual and Moral Faculties
and Literature of Negroes_, etc. (tr. by Warden), Brooklyn, 1810.

C. Bücher: _Industrial Evolution_ (tr. by Wickett), New York, 1904.

*Franz Boas: "The Real Race Problem" (_The Crisis_, December, 1910).

---- _Commencement Address_ (Atlanta University Leaflet, No. 19).

*F. Ratzel: _The History of Mankind_ (tr. by Butler), 3 vols., 1904.

C. Hayford: _Gold Coast Institutions_, 1903.

A.B. Camphor: _Missionary Sketches and Folk Lore from Africa_, 1909.

R.H. Nassau: _Fetishism in West Africa_, 1907.

*William Schneider: _Die Culturfähigkeit des Negers_, Frankfort, 1885.

*G. Schweinfurth: _Artes Africanae_, etc., 1875.

Duke of Mecklenburg: _From the Congo to the Niger and the Nile_ (English
tr.), Philadelphia, 1914.

D. Crawford: _Thinking Black_.

R.N. Cust: _Sketch of Modern Language of Africa_, 2 vols., 1883.

H. Chatelain: _The Folk Lore of Angola_.

D. Kidd: _The Essential Kaffir_, 1904.

---- _Savage Childhood_, 1906.

---- _Kaffir Socialism and the Dawn of Individualism_, 1908.

M.H. Tongue: _Bushman Paintings_, Oxford, 1909.

(See also the works of A.B. Ellis, Miss Kingsley, Sir Harry H. Johnston,
Frobenius, Stowe, Theal, and Ibn Batuta; and particularly Chamberlain's
article in the _Journal of Race Development_.)


THE SLAVE TRADE

T.K. Ingram: _History of Slavery and Serfdom_, London, 1895. (Same article
revised in Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edition.)

John R. Spears: The American Slave Trade, 1900.

*T.F. Buxton: _The African Slave Trade and Its Remedy_, etc., 1896.

T. Clarkson: _History ... of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade_,
etc., 2 vols., 1808.

R. Drake: _Revelations of a Slave Smuggler_, New York, 1860.

*_Report of the Lords of the Committee of Council_, etc., London, 1789.

*B. Mayer: _Captain Canot or Twenty Years of an African Slaver_, etc.,
1854.

W.E.B. DuBois: _The suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the U.S.A._,
1896.

(See also Bryan Edwards' _West Indies_.)


THE WEST INDIES AND SOUTH AMERICA

Fletcher and Kidder: _Brazil and the Brazilians_, 1879.

*Bryan Edwards: _History ... of the British West Indies_, 5 editions,
Vols. II-V, 1793-1819.

*Sir Harry H. Johnston: _The Negro in the New World_, 1910.

T.G. Steward: _The Haitian Revolution_, 1791-1804, 1914.

J.N. Leger: _Haiti_, etc., 1907.

J. Bryce: _South America_, etc., 1912.

*J.B. de Lacerda: "The Metis or Half-Breeds of Brazil" (_Inter-Racial
Problems_, etc.)

A.K. Fiske: _History of the West Indies_, 1899.


THE NEGRO IN THE UNITED STATES

*_Walker's Appeal_, 1829.

*G.W. Williams: _History of the Negro Race in America_, 1619-1880, 1882.

B.G. Brawley: _A Short History of the American Negro_, 1913.

B.T. Washington: _Up from Slavery_, 1901.

---- _The Story of the Negro_, 2 vols., 1909.

*_The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man_, 1912.

*G.E. Stroud: _Sketch of the Laws relating to Slavery_, etc., 1827.

_The Human Way_: Addresses on Race Problems at the Southern Sociological
Congress, Atlanta, 1913 (ed. by J.E. McCulloch).

W.J. Simmons: _Men of Mark_, 1887.

*J.R. Giddings: _The Exiles of Florida_, 1858.

W.E. Nell: _The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution_, etc., 1855.

C.W. Chesnutt: _The Marrow of Tradition_, 1901.

P.L. Dunbar: _Lyrics of Lowly Life_, 1896.

*_Life and Times of Frederick Douglass_, revised edition, 1892.

*H.E. Kreihbel: _Afro-American Folk Songs_, etc., 1914.

T.P. Fenner and others: _Cabin and Plantation Songs_, 3d ed., 1901.

W.F. Allen and others: _Slave Songs of the United States_, 1867.

W.E.B. DuBois: "The Negro Race in the United States of America"
(_Inter-Racial Problems_, etc.).

---- "The Economics of Negro Emancipation" (_Sociological Review_,
October, 1911).

---- _John Brown_.

---- _The Philadelphia Negro_, 1899.

W.E.B. DuBois: "Reconstruction and its Benefits" (_American Historical
Review_, Vol. XV, No. 4).

---- _editor_, The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races, monthly, 1910.

---- _editor_, The Atlanta University Studies:
  No. 1. _Mortality Among Negroes in Cities_, 1896.
  No. 2. _Social and Physical Conditions of Negroes in Cities_, 1897.
  No. 3. _Some Efforts of Negroes for Social Betterment_, 1898.
  No. 4. _The Negro in Business_, 1899.
  No. 5. _The College Bred Negro_, 1900.
  No. 6. _The Negro Common School_, 1901.
  No. 7. _The Negro Artisan_, 1902.
  No. 8. _The Negro Church_, 1903.
  No. 9. _Notes on Negro Crime_, 1904.
  No. 10. _A Select Bibliography of the Negro American_, 1905.
  No. 11. _Health and Physique of the Negro American_, 1906.
  No. 12. _Economic Co-operation among Negro Americans_, 1907.
  No. 13. _The Negro American Family_, 1908.
  No. 14. _Efforts for Social Betterment among Negro Americans_, 1909.
  No. 15. _The College Bred Negro American_, 1910.
  No. 16. _The Common School and the Negro American_, 1911.
  No. 17. _The Negro American Artisan_, 1912.
  No. 18. _Morals and Manners among Negro Americans_, 1913.

*G.W. Cable: _The Silent South_, etc., 1885.

*J.R. Lynch: _The Facts of Reconstruction_, 1913.

*J.T. Wilson: _The Black Phalanx_, 1897.

William Goodell: _Slavery and Anti-Slavery_, 1852.

G.S. Merriam: _The Negro and the Nation_, 1906.

A.B. Hart: _The Southern South_, 1910.

*G. Livermore: _An Historical Research respecting the Opinions of the
Founders of the Republic on Negroes_, etc., 1862.

Hartshorn and Penniman: _An Era of Progress and Promise_, 1910 (profusely
illustrated).

*James Brewster: _Sketches of Southern Mystery, Treason, and Murder_.

Willcox and DuBois: _Negroes in the United States_ (United States Census
of 1900, Bulletin No. 8).


THE FUTURE OF THE NEGRO RACE

*J.S. Keltie: _The Partition of Africa_, 2d ed., 1895.

B.T. Washington: _The Future of the Negro_.

W.E.B. DuBois: "The Future of the Negro Race in America" (_East and West_,
Vol. II, No. 5).

---- _Souls of Black Folk_, 1913.

---- _Quest of the Silver Fleece_.

Alexander Crummell: _The Future of Africa_, 2d ed., 1862.

*Casely Hayford: _Ethiopia Unbound_, 1911.

Kelly Miller: _Out of the House of Bondage_, 1914.

---- _Race Adjustment_, 1908.

*J. Royce: _Race Questions_, etc., 1908.

*R.S. Baker: _Following the Color Line_, 1908.

N.S. Shaler: _The Neighbor_.

E.D. Morel: "Free Labor in Tropical Africa" (_Nineteenth Century and
After_, 1914).

(See also Finot, Boas, _Inter-Racial Problems_, and White's _Development
of Africa_.)





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