--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Front Matter
Title Page and Credits
BLACK FOLK

Then and Now

AN ESSAY IN THE HISTORY AND

SOCIOLOGY OF THE NEGRO RACE

BY

W. E. BURGHARDT DU BOIS

PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY IN THE

ATLANTA UNIVERSITY

NEW YORK

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

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COPYRIGHT, 1939,

BY

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY, INC.

Published, June, 1939

Second printing, April, 1940

Third printing, May, 1944

Fourth printing, October, 1945

PRINTED IN THE

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

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THIS BOOK

IS DEDICATED TO

MY GRANDDAUGHTER

DU BOIS WILLIAMS

ON HER SIXTH BIRTHDAY IN THE

HOPE THAT HER BRIGHT EYES

MAY ONE DAY SEE SOME

OF THE THINGS

I DREAM

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Preface
THIS is not a work of exact scholarship; far too few studies in history and sociology are. But certainly those who write of human experience and social action today have a better ideal than yesterday for the careful establishing of fact and limitation of wish and conjecture. The kernel of this work is, I believe, a body of fairly well-ascertained truth; but there are also areas here of conjecture and even of guesswork which under other circumstances I should have hesitated to publish.

But we face a curious situation in the world attitude toward the Negro race today. On the one hand there is increasing curiosity as to the place of black men in future social development; in their relation to work, art and democracy; and judgment as to the future must depend upon the past. Yet this past lies shrouded not simply by widespread lack of knowledge but by a certain irritating silence. Few today are interested in Negro history because they feel the matter already settled: the Negro has no history.

This dictum seems neither reasonable nor probable. I remember my own rather sudden awakening from the paralysis of this judgment taught me in high school and in two of the world's great universities. Franz Boas came to Atlanta University where I was teaching history in 1906 and said to a graduating class: You need not be ashamed of your African past; and then he recounted the history of the black kingdoms south of the Sahara for a thousand years. I was too astonished to speak. All of this I had never heard and I came then and afterwards to realize how the silence and neglect of science can let truth utterly disappear or even be unconsciously distorted.

For instance, I am no Egyptologist. That goes without saying. And yet I have written something in this volume on the Negro in Egypt, because in recent years, despite the work of exploration and interpretation in Egypt and Ethiopia, almost nothing is said of the Negro race. Yet that race was always prominent in the Valley of

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the Nile. The fact, however, today has apparently no scientific interest. Or again, writers like Lugard and Reisner tell us that the Nigerians and Ethiopians were not "Negroes." The statement seems inexplicable, until we learn that in their view most of the black folk in Africa are not Negroes. The whole argument becomes merely a matter of words and definitions. Yet upon this easily misunderstood interpretation, millions of black and brown folk today, not to speak of most educated whites, have no conception of any role that black folk have played in history, or any hope in the past for present aspiration, or any apparent justification in demanding equal rights and opportunity for Negroes as average human beings.

Because of this situation I have for the last six years interested myself in trying to promote an Encyclopaedia of the Negro; an effort to ascertain and publish the verifiable history and social condition of the Negro race, according to the best scholarship of the world, regardless of race, nation or color. I believe the time over-ripe for such encyclopaedic treatment. The trustees of the Phelps-Stokes Fund and the many men, white and black, native and foreign, who are working with me in the project have not yet been able to secure the necessary funds for its collection and publication; but we are still not without hope.

Meantime it has seemed to me not out of place to do again, and I hope somewhat more thoroughly, the task which I attempted twentythree years ago in a little volume of the Home University Library, called The Negro. This book incorporates some of that former essay, but for the most part is an entirely new production and seeks to bring to notice the facts concerning the Negro, if not entirely according to the results of thorough scholarship, at least with scholarship as good as I am able to command with the time and money at my disposal.

The larger difficulties of this work are manifest: the breadth of the field which one mind can scarcely cover; the obstacles to securing data. Color was not important in the ancient world but it is of great economic and social significance today. Convincing proof of Negro blood in the Pharaohs was immaterial in 1900 B.C. and an almost revolutionary fact in 1900 A.D. Significant facts today are obscured by the personalities and prejudices of observers; the objects

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of industrial enterprise and colonial governments; the profit in caste; the assumed necessity of bolstering the amour-propre of Europe by excusing the slave trade and degrading the African.

I do not for a moment doubt that my Negro descent and narrow group culture have in many cases predisposed me to interpret my facts too favorably for my race; but there is little danger of long misleading here, for the champions of white folk are legion. The Negro has long been the clown of history; the football of anthropology; and the slave of industry. I am trying to show here why these attitudes can no longer be maintained. I realize that the truth of history lies not in the mouths of partisans but rather in the calm Science that sits between. Her cause I seek to serve, and wherever I fail, I am at least paying Truth the respect of earnest effort.

W. E. Burghardt Du Bois.

Atlanta University,

May, 1939.

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Contents
CHAPTER PAGE
1. NEGROES AND NEGROIDS 1
2. THE VALLEY OF THE NILE 15
3. THE NIGER AND THE DESERT 39
4. CONGO AND GUINEA 54
5. FROM THE GREAT LAKES TO THE CAPE 72
6. THE CULTURE OF AFRICA 92
7. THE TRADE IN MEN 126
8. WESTERN SLAVE MARTS 145
9. EMANCIPATION AND ENFRANCHISEMENT 177
10. THE BLACK UNITED STATES 196
11. BLACK EUROPE 219
12. THE LAND IN AFRICA 236
13. THE AFRICAN LABORER 256
14. THE POLITICAL CONTROL OF AFRICA 300
15. EDUCATION IN AFRICA 347
16. THE FUTURE OF WORLD DEMOCRACY 367
FURTHER READING 385
INDEX 393

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Black Folk: Then and Now
Chapter 1: Negroes and Negroids
IT is generally recognized today that no scientific definition of race is possible. Differences, and striking differences, there are between men and groups of men, but so far as these differences are physical and measurable they fade into each other so insensibly that we can only indicate the main divisions in broad outline. Of the psychological and mental differences which exist between individuals and groups, we have as yet only tentative measurements and limited studies; these are not sufficient to divide mankind into definite groups nor to indicate the connection between physical and mental traits. Especially is it difficult to say how far race is determined by a group of inherited characteristics and how far by environment and amalgamation.

Race would seem to be a dynamic and not a static conception, and the typical races are continually changing and developing, amalgamating and differentiating. In this 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 and no definite mental characteristics, but which nevertheless forms, as a mass, a series of social groups more or less distinct in history, appearance, and in cultural gift and accomplishment.

Skin color in the past has been the conventional criterion by which we divided the main masses of mankind. To this is usually added hair form, although the two criteria do not entirely correspond. If we add to these two criteria any third measurement we are more at sea: long-headed people may be found among white, black and brown; and broad-headed people are of all colors and sorts of hair. Facial

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measurements are not only difficult to standardize but even more difficult to co-ordinate with other human characteristics.

Moreover, many of these physical distinctions depend obviously on climate, diet and environment, and are of no intrinsic significance unless they indicate lines of evolution and deeper physical, mental and social differences. Whatever men may believe concerning this -- and there is a mass of passionate and dogmatic belief -- there is no clear scientific proof. The most we can say today is that there appear to be three types or stocks of man, judging mainly by color and hair: the Caucasian with light skin and straight or wavy hair; the Negroid with dark skin and more or less close-curled hair; and the Mongoloid with sallow or yellow skin and straight hair.

It is not possible absolutely to delimit these three stocks of men. They fade gradually into each other and of course we might so subdivide men as to make five or more main stocks. Assuming three main stocks, we have Africa as the main home of the Negroids, although they are also represented in southern Asia and the Melanesian Islands. They are characterized by dark skins and more or less closely curled hair. Many of them are broad-headed but perhaps most of them are long-headed. They vary in height from the tallest of men in certain parts of the Sudan to the shortest among the Pygmies. They show prognathism to an undetermined extent.

There has been a tendency to try to pick out among the different stocks some ideal which characterizes the stock in its purest form. Two methods are prevalent: one, to characterize as the "pure" representative of the stock, that which varies most widely from the other ideal stocks; that is, the pure Caucasic would be represented by blond and blue-eyed Scandinavians; the pure Mongoloids by yellow, slanteyed, straight-haired Chinese; and the pure Negro by those of darkest skin and crispest hair, together with certain extreme facial and cranial forms. There is no reason to believe that these extreme variations from the normal examples of the stocks of men represent anything racially pure or indeed anything more than local variation due primarily to climate, environment and social factors. Another method would seem much more rational and that is to regard the average representatives of the stocks as normal.

What relation is there between the black natives of Australia, India

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and the Melanesian Islands and those of Africa? We do not know. Perhaps there is no relation at all; simply the fact that they have been exposed to similar climatic and environmental influences. On the other hand, there may have been a continent like Lemuria between Africa and Australia from which the Negroids dispersed to both the continents and to Asia; or beginning in Asia black peoples may have wandered west; or beginning in Africa they may have migrated east. All this is pure guesswork.

A reasonable but of course unproven and perhaps unprovable thesis is that humankind in Africa started from the Great Lakes, developed down the Nile Valley and spread around the shores of the Mediterranean, forming thus the basis of both African and European peoples.

The Grimaldi Negroids, discovered in the Principality of Monaco on the French-Italian frontier in 1901, have been regarded as the earliest representatives of homo sapiens yet found in Europe. Creditable opinion is that they belong to a race of emigrants from Africa and that it was they who first established the great Aurignacian culture in Europe. It is possible to believe that the type which they represent may have been ancestral to the famous Cro-Magnon Race -- a race marked in many instances by definite Negroid characters and which dominated Europe during the later phase of the Aurignacian Age.

Perhaps, too, if we think of Africa as the center of all human development, another branch went into Asia, developing into the Mongoloid peoples and the Negroid peoples of southern Asia and Oceanica. The basic Indian culture, once attributed to conquering and invading "Aryans," is now considered by most students as the product of the dark substratum of the Indian stock.

There is evidence of ancient Negro blood on the shores of the Mediterranean, along the Tigris-Euphrates and the Ganges. 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 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 hair, some tendency to a development of

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the maxillary parts of the face, and a dolichocephalic head. This type is not fixed nor definite. The color varies widely; it is never black, as some say, and it becomes often light brown or yellow. The hair varies from curly to a crisp mass, and the facial angle and cranial form show wide variation.

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 of 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 the Bushmen. The difference between the hair of the lighter and darker races is mainly one of degree, not of kind, and can easily be measured. The elliptical cross-section of the Negro's hair causes it to curl more or less tightly.

It is impossible in Africa as elsewhere to fix with any certainty the limits of racial variation due to heredity, to climate and to intermingling. In the past, when scientists assumed one distinct Negro type, every variation from that type was interpreted as meaning mixture of blood. Today 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 large 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.

Assuming prehistoric man, whether of African or Asiatic genesis, as having developed in historic times into three main stocks, we find all these stocks represented in Africa and for the most part inextricably intermingled. The intercourse of Africa with Arabia and other parts of Asia has been so close and long-continued that it is

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impossible today entirely to disentangle the blood relationships. Semites in early and later times 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. 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, have given rise to the term "Hamite," under cover of which millions of Negroids, some of them the blackest of men, have been characteristically transferred to the "white" race by some eager scientists. A "Hamite" is simply a mulatto of ancient Negro and Semitic blood.

Today we have Negroid populations in Africa which we may study under certain types. It would be impossible in limited space to name all of the at least five hundred main tribal units, which could be expanded almost indefinitely. Grouping of these tribes by physical, social or psychological measurement is impossible for lack of scientific data on any adequate or dependable scale. Cultural division is more important and possible.

One grouping follows Herskovits and is geographical and cultural: One, the Hottentot area in Southwest Africa. The Hottentots are perhaps the result of a mixture between the Bushmen and taller northern Negro tribes. There are comparatively few of them left; most of them have been absorbed into the Dutch and East Indian population. They are herdsmen originally clothed in skins and originally polygamous.

Two, the Bushmen in South Central Africa; here is a poor material culture with flowering of art and folklore, representing a very early stratum of African cultural life, with hunting as the chief occupation. The Bushman is short but not a Pygmy; his skin is yellow or yellowish-brown; his hair, sparse and closely curled; he is a hunter and lives in small bands of fifty to a hundred people; he is characterized by his rock paintings; he wears little clothing and is usually monogamous. There are also in Central Africa, the Pygmies, an interesting remains of a human group of which we know little. They are hunters and trappers and live in the thick forest. They perhaps represent the earliest African population and were known to the

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ancient world. They are reddish or brown in color with crisp hair.

Three, the East African cattle area, extending from the Nile Valley along the Great Lakes into South Africa; cattle occupy the most important place in the life of the people, but with this is an agricultural culture; the area of the tsetse fly breaks this culture in the center near the Great Lakes; ironworking and woodworking are pursued; the Bantu tongues are spoken in the south and the Nilotic tongues north of the lakes. A branch of this culture is found on the southwest coast.

Four, the Congo area, noted by the absence of cattle on account of the tsetse fly. It is predominantly agricultural; the secret society is important; political organization and markets occur, together with craft guilds. A branch of this Congo area can be found on the coast north of the Gulf of Guinea, in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Here is more complex political and social organization, distinctive art and larger domestic animals. These West African and Congo Negroes furnished the main mass of American Negroes.

Five, the East Horn includes such tribes as the Galla and Somali and modern Abyssinians. They are Negroids with more or less Semitic blood.

Six, the Eastern Sudan from Lake Chad to the Nile Valley and between the Sahara and the Congo. The people are mainly Negro nomads converted to Islam and organized about their live stock.

Seven, the Western Sudan, the battle ground of Mohammedanism and aboriginal religions. This is the area of great kingdoms and the flowering of political organization not unlike that of the Middle Ages in Europe. The economic life consists of herding, agriculture, manufacture and trade; the art is famous.

Eight, this section includes the desert with Mohammedan, Berber and Negroid nomads engaged in trade, camel and horse breeding.

Nine, Egypt with Arabian and some Negro blood and the Negroid Sudan.

Coming now to specific African tribes, we may attempt some general description of the various inhabitants of Africa, although the available knowledge for some regions is vague. A line drawn from the mouth of the Senegal River to Khartoum and through Abyssinia divides the Negroids of Africa into two closely related

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but fairly discernible parts; north of the line are peoples of mixed Negroid, Caucasic and Asiatic elements. In the extreme north Caucasians predominate among the Berbers, but fade decidedly into the Negroids after leaving the coast. Negroids are found east of Tripoli between the Sahara and the Mediterranean and evidently have lived there for a long time. Some of them resemble the ancient Egyptian stock: short, dark, long-headed people; and the same type can be found along the northern shores of the Mediterranean. The veiled Tuareg are of mixed blood but very largely Negroid. The Tibu merge into the Negroids of the central Sudan. The Fulani, spread over the western Sudan and Upper Senegal, are red-brown Negroids in part and in part Berber mulattoes. Their language is Negro.

Throughout Africa are many Arabs, but usually they are darkskinned, if not black and Negroid, with close-curled hair. The term is applied to any person professing Islam with little reference to his blood. The conquest of Egypt by the Arabs in the seventh century brought few actual Arabian invaders to the Nile Valley. On the other hand, the invasion of the eleventh century brought a considerable number to the Sudan. There are numbers of Arabian tribes now: those to the north and east have predominant Caucasic blood and those to the west and south predominant Negro blood. In modern Egypt there is considerable Negro as well as Arab blood.

South of the Senegal-Khartoum line, we find to the west, the Sudanic and Guinea Negroes whom we can divide today only by language. They are tall and black with close-curled hair, often with broad noses and sometimes with prognathism. They build gableroofed huts, use drums and the West African harp and are clothed in bark clothing and palm fiber. They organize secret societies and use masks, carve wood and make baskets. They are agriculturists but do not use cattle except north of the forest. They are especially the artists of Africa, working in ivory, wood and bronze. Their secret societies are primarily mutual benefit groups sometimes based on occupational guilds.

Among these people may be differentiated the Wolofs and the Serer between the Senegal and Gambia Rivers; then the Tukolors and the Mandingoes. The Wolofs are tall and black and divided

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into castes; the Mandingoes are tall and slender and lighter in color. All are agriculturists and many of them Mohammedans. The Songhai are tall, long-headed and brown. Perhaps there are two million of them today. The Mossi are widespread in West Africa and untouched by Mohammedanism. Their government is intricate and they are agriculturists.

In the central Sudan, east of the Niger, nearly all the tribes are Mohammedans and their political systems have been disintegrated by state building and conquest. They are the people of Kanem and of Bornu and the Bagirmi around Lake Chad. They are tall, broadnosed and long-headed black people.

Farther south and along the coast, are found the Kru, numbering about 40,000 and noted as seamen. On the Guinea coast are the Ashanti and allied peoples; the Ewe-speaking peoples and those of Dahomey, and especially the notable Yoruba. They have an advanced political organization and highly organized states such as Ashanti, Benin, Dahomey and Oyo. The Ashanti are of moderate stature and long-headed, numbering perhaps a quarter of a million people. Dahomey long had human sacrifice and a corps of women soldiers. They are tall and long-headed people, some of them the tallest in the world. Many are noted for their high social organization.

Across the Sudan from the Niger to the Nile stretch millions of black hillmen, some pagan and some Mohammedan, with a history of a succession of great states. The Hausa form a mixture of various tribes, united by language, and number more than five million. They are united in the Mohammedan emirates of Sokoto, Katsina, Kano, Zaria and others. They are farmers, traders and artisans and in the Middle Ages were divided into seven powerful states. They are tall, black and long-headed but usually not prognathic nor broad-nosed.

In this part of Africa are large numbers of pagan groups like the Nupe and the Jukur whose king is regarded as semi-divine. Farther to the east are the tall Nuba in the hills of southern Kordofan and the peoples of Darfur whose sultanate ended only with the World War. East of Kordofan are the Fung and other tribes, some of whom have mixtures of Asiatic blood.

In the Nile Valley are the Beja, the Nubians, the Galla, the Somali and the Abyssinians. The early Egyptians up the Nile Valley are

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probably represented today by the Beja. The shorter and more delicate pre-dynastic Egyptians were eventually mixed with stronger, taller and darker people from the upper Nile Valley and it was this sort of Egyptian that developed the highest civilization; from these, modern Egyptians have descended with dark color and a considerable proportion of broad noses and crisp hair.

Nubians are the descendants of those whom the Egyptians regarded as pure Negroes and whom they endeavored to keep above the first cataract. The Nubians are of medium height and longheaded. They have a long history going back two or three thousand years before Christ and closely intertwined with that of Egypt. Between the Sudan and Kenya are Eritrea, Abyssinia and Somaliland. The Negroids here have been mixed more or less with Semitic blood, especially toward the east and in Abyssinia, where Asiatic and Negroid languages are spoken. In Abyssinia the main mass are Semitic mulattoes; beside these are the black Jews known as Falashas; the Galla, tall brown people; the Somali, tall black people; and the Danakil, thin black curly-haired folk. All through this part of Africa are many small, unclassified tribes representing various kinds of artisans with some relationships to the Pygmies and Bushmen.

The peoples of East Africa and East Central Africa have often been given the name of Hamites. They represent the successive invasions from southern Arabia and the Horn of Africa spreading among various African peoples. Among them are the Masai and Nandi, the Suk and others. They are tall, slender and long-headed and brown or black in color. Many of them are nomadic herdsmen. Their cattle have exaggerated importance and are the center of their life and social organization. The medicine man plays a large part. There are also the Bari- and the Lotuko-speaking people, divided into totemic clans.

Between the Nile and the Congo are numbers of people often called Nilotic, like the Bongo, the Azande and the Mangbettu. The Azande are a confederation of tribes forming something like a nation. This confederation was pushing east and west at the time of the forming of the Belgian Congo. They are of varied physical characteristics and are organized in clans.

The so-called Nilotic peoples extend from some two hundred

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miles south of Khartoum to Lake Kiogo in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Among them are the Shilluk, the Dinka and the Nuer. They are all tall, black, long-headed people. Cannibalism and human sacrifice are unknown and they are herdsmen and hunters with varied social organization. The Shilluk are united into a strong nation with a king and have a long cultural history.

The Bantu are a mingled mass of tribes in central and southern Africa, united by the type of language which they speak. They probably originated near the Great Lakes. East and south there is some infiltration of Asiatic blood. They may be divided into southern, western and eastern Bantu. The southern Bantu are south of the Zambesi River, covering Southern Rhodesia, the southern half of Portuguese East Africa, the Union of South Africa, Southwest Africa and Bechuanaland. The eastern Bantu stretch through Kenya, Tanganyika, Northern Rhodesia, Nyasaland and Portuguese East Africa north of the Zambesi. The western Bantu stretch from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic and up to French West Africa.

The southern Bantu form the largest group, divided into numbers of tribes. It includes the Shona people toward the north and toward the east the Zulu-Xosa which include the Xosa, the Tembu, the Pondo, etc., the Matabele and others. In the center are the Bechuana, the Bamangwato and the Basuto. Toward the west are the Herero-Ovambo. They are tall graceful people with Negro hair and dark chocolate tinge.

The Basutos consist of various tribes welded together by Moshesh into a nation. The Zulus consist of a hundred small separate tribes united by Chaka at the end of the eighteenth century. The history of Southeast Africa is one of wars, separations, migrations, etc., out of which various tribes emerged. The tribes vary in size from a few hundred to a couple of thousand and in some cases larger. The Bakwena number 11,000; the Bamangwato 60,000; the Ovambo 65,000; the Swazi 110,000 and the Basuto nearly a half million. They live in small households which unite into villages of some five to fifty households. The southern Bantus are patrilineal; the western largely matrilineal. They keep cattle and raise crops. Ancestor worship is strong.

The western Bantu include French Equatorial Africa and the Congo

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Free State together with Portuguese East Africa north of Zambesi. This is the tropical rain forest of Africa and has had many highly organized kingdoms like the Kingdom of the Kongo, Balunda and later the Bushongo Empire. There are some one hundred and fifty tribes in this territory. Among these are the Barotse, the Luba-Wenda tribes, the Basongo; the Bakongo and Bushongo groups who are noted for their wood carving; the Bateke; and farther north the Pangwe or Fang. The eastern Bantu include the peoples of Uganda who formed at one time the Kitwara empire. The Baganda have a semifuedal organization. They form a part of Uganda, where there is evidence of invading warriors among agricultural people. The Baganda are tall stout men dark in color with Negroid hair. Other lake tribes include the Wanyamwezi.

The eastern Bantu fall into two main parts: the Akamba and Kikuyu toward the north and numbers of tribes with totemic clans and age groups. The Kikuyu have large plantations, cattle and goats. In the east, among the eastern Bantu, the Swahili are important because their language has become the chief medium of communication over all East Africa. It is a Bantu language with Arabic and Portuguese words. The tribe itself is mixed with many elements.

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. 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.

If the history of Africa is unusual, 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,

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because from the central high plateau they plunge in rapids and cataracts to the narrow coastlands and the sea.

Two physical facts 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 and eyes 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, although the Congo forest was a partial barrier.

With this peculiarly uninviting coast line and the difficulties of 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 micro-organisms which cause deadly, disfiguring, or debilitating diseases, or themselves create the morbid condition of the persecuted human being, beast, bird, reptile, frog, or fish." 1 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.

Four great rivers and many lesser streams water the continent. The greatest is the Congo in the center, with its vast curving and endless branches; 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.

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It may well be that Africa rather than Asia was the birthplace of the human family and ancient Negro blood the basis of the blood of all men. Negro races were among the first who made and used tools, developed systematic religion, pursued art, domesticated animals and smelted metal, especially iron. The subsequent development of the Negro race was affected by physical changes in Africa: the Sahara and Lybian deserts, once fertile plains, were desiccated, forcing Negroes to migrate. Many of the peoples and much of the culture of ancient Egypt originated in Equatorial Africa. In the mythology of ancient Greece many Negroes play parts -- Memnon, Eurybates, Cephus, Cassiopeia and Andromeda. During the Middle Ages in the western Sudan, Negro kingdoms and empires were organized with as high culture as many of the contemporary states in Europe. The increasing desiccation of north and south Africa, the introduction of Christianity and Mohammedanism and the establishment of the Arab and European slave trade overthrew these Negro states and largely ruined their culture.

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?

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Chapter 2: The Valley of the Nile
THE Nile Valley has been called "one continuous cemetery of buried civilizations." From prehistoric time, it has been regarded as the home of Black Folk, and its southern portions, above the First Cataract, were known to the Greeks and Romans as Ethiopia, the "Land of Burnt Faces." The term occurs in the writings of Homer, dating about the 9th century B.C., and some think it had currency before that. Black people were present in the Aegaean world in the Pre-Homeric period. The early Greeks of Homeric and pre-Homeric times included in the term "Ethiopia" lands and peoples in both Africa and Asia.

In the very dawn of Greek literature we hear in the Iliad (i. 423-5) how Zeus and other gods went each year to feast for twelve days among "the blameless Ethiopians," while the Odyssey (i. 22-6) represents Poseidon as doing the same upon his own account. Here, too, among "the Ocean streams" the cranes made their winter home, carrying "death and destruction" to the Pygmies. Black Memnon, King of Ethiopia, was one of Homer's heroes. Homer sings of a black man, a "reverend herald":

Of visage solemn, sad, but sable hue,
Short, woolly curls, o'erfleeced his bending head, . . .
Eurybates, in whose large soul alone,
Ulysses viewed an image of his own. 2

Homer, Herodotus, Strabo, Diodorus, Pliny and others frequently mentioned Ethiopia. Homer speaks of eastern and western Ethiopia. Herodotus places Ethiopia southwest of Egypt as the last inhabited

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land in that direction. There is gold there, elephants, ebony and the men are tall, handsome and long-lived.

The term "Ethiopia" was employed mainly by Greeks and Romans; the Egyptians, the Ethiopians, Assyrians and Hebrews had other names for Ethiopia. The Ethiopians designated the country or a large part of it as "Ques" or "Kesh," which the Egyptians translated into "Kush." Parts of Ethiopia near Egypt were called "Land of the Kupar" or "Korti." Below that came various districts: Mam, Mash, Napata, etc. Further south were Yesbe, Meroe, and Thabre. The Egyptians called part of Ethiopia nearest them "the Land of Nehesi"; that is, the land of the blacks. Beyond that was Khent, the borderland; and Ta Sti, "the Land of the Bow." During the Middle and New Kingdoms, the Egyptians called Ethiopia "Kash" or "Kush." In the farthest confines of Kush lay Punt, the cradle of their race.

There has been much dispute as to the location of Punt. Many think it was on the shores of the Red Sea or even in Arabia or perhaps in Somaliland; but the sort of goods which Egypt brought from Punt, gold and tropical products, point rather to the region of the Great Lakes. Semitic writers called the country by the name which its own people gave to it, Cashi, and Kush. It will be noted that nearly all these writers merged Kush and Egypt as forming essentially one people.

After the fifth and fourth centuries before Christ, the term Ethiopia was used by the Greeks usually to designate only regions situated in Africa. These regions corresponded roughly to the territory which we now know as the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. The Arabic name Sudan or Bilad-es-Sudan was applied to the country of the blacks stretching from the Nile west to the Atlantic. The part around Dongola eventually received the name of Nubia, meaning land of gold, and it is known by that name today.

"The Ethiopians conceived 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 supposed themselves also to be the inventors of worship, of festivals, of solemn assemblies, of sacrifices, and every religious practice." Pliny says that Ethiopia was

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a vigorous and powerful country at the time of the Trojan War when Memnon was its king. Strabo, Diodorus and Pliny conceived Ethiopia as the kingdoms of Meroe and Napata.

Our knowledge of the history of Ethiopia comes from Ethiopian documents and from Egyptian, Assyrian and Hebrew sources. The Egyptian records of Ethiopian history are preserved on their monuments and in manuscripts. The Ethiopian records are preserved mainly on sandstone steles, and inscriptions on monuments. All those which have been recovered date from the eighth century B.C. to the fourth century A.D. There are many Greek and Roman accounts, including Homer, ninth century B.C.; Hesiod, eighth century B.C.; Herodotus, fifth century B.C.; Diodorus Siculus, first century B.C.; Strabo, first century B.C.; Pliny, first century A.D.; Ptolemy, second century A.D. and Dion Cassius, second century A.D. There are a number of other references by literary writers, more or less authentic, as for instance, Callisthenes and Josephus. Fragments of still other writers, writing in the classical age, are often referred to. It is interesting to remember that most of the accounts of these authors refer to the ancient Ethiopians in exalted terms, and consider them as the oldest, the wisest and most just of men.

The racial identity of the Ethiopians has often been disputed. There is no question but that they were dark brown or black people. If, however, scientists go beyond that and, like Reisner, apparently confine the designation "Negro" to black people with close-curled hair, flat noses, thick lips and prognathism, many of the Ethiopians were not Negroes; although there is distinct evidence of the wide prevalence of precisely this type of Negro among the blacks of Ethiopia; but according to such definition, most black people of Africa and the world are not Negroes and never were, leaving the number of "pure" Negroes too small to form a race. 3

Lepsius declared the Ethiopians were of the same stock as the modern Nubians or, as he concluded later, the Beja. Sayce and Reisner admit that there was Negro blood in Ethiopia but declare that the ruling classes were "Lybians." Randall-MacIver declares that the Ethiopians were Negroes and that the century 741 to 663 B.C. was the heyday of the Negro.

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All this seems much like fruitless quibbling and comes from the fact that there is no agreement among anthropologists as to what a race is and particularly who are Negroes; and finally as to just what could possibly be expected in human culture of the Negro race. As Montesquieu once wrote ironically of the arguments of the eighteenth century, "It is almost unthinkable that God, who is goodness itself, could have determined to place a soul, much less a good soul, in a body so black and repulsive as that of the Negro."

Written Ethiopian records go back many centuries. They are in the form of inscriptions carved on stone walls, or on slabs of stone, and a few records have been found written in ink or painted on plaster. Ethiopians had no limestone, marble or alabaster, such as were common in Egypt, and were forced to use soft sandstone or sedimentary rock. Their inscriptions, therefore, have not been as well preserved.

They fall into three general groups: those using the Egyptian hieroglyphs; those using the Meroitic hieroglyphs, and those using the Meroitic script. The Egyptian hierology dates from the eighth and seventh centuries before Christ, when the political and cultural relations between Ethiopia and Egypt were strong. By the fifth century B.C. the language had become distinct, and an Ethiopian hieroglyphic was used with distinctive innovations. Finally, came the script which had an alphabet of twenty-three characters, and which is not yet altogether translatable. It is possible that the script was invented before the hieroglyphics. Diodorus says that whereas in Egypt the priests alone knew the hieroglyphic writing, in Ethiopia all writers used it.

"The oldest and most important source of Ethiopian history is the Stele of Piankhy, erected at Gebel Barkal about 720 B.C. Its wealth of historical detail, its picturesqueness and fervor of language, and above all the incidental manner in which it reveals the ability, character, and magnanimity of a great personality, have led scholars to place this celebrated inscription among the most valuable of primary historical documents that have come down to the present from the ancient world." 4

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The territory formerly occupied by Ethiopia has today, in the northern part, a rainless desert; in the central part, a steppe country, fading off toward the south into a savannah country. In the southern part it is a region of rain and forests. In Ethiopia is situated the greater part of one of the large river systems of the world, the Nile and its tributaries. In the east are two smaller river systems, both of which are drying up. In the west, are three dead rivers which once flowed into the Nile, but are now nearly dry. There are numbers of other indications of ancient rivers. There are no lakes in the territory but traces of ancient lakes now represented by salt beds and small oases.

Today, Ethiopia is divided into the following districts:

1. Nubia

2. The Eastern Desert

3. The Western Desert

4. The Island of Meroe

5. Abyssinia

Nubia roughly includes the Nile Valley from the First Cataract down to the junction of the Atbara and the Blue Nile. From Alexandria to the First Cataract and from the First Cataract to the junction of the rivers, is each a section of about five hundred miles. Throughout Nubia, the Nile River does not overflow, even in flood. Here and there it fertilizes a narrow stretch on the banks, but that is exceptional. For the most part the desert comes down to the banks. Thus, the Nile Valley in Nubia today has very limited economic value, and its inhabitants are scarce and poor. On the other hand, in ancient times, this region was occupied by a large prosperous population, with many towns and cities. There is no doubt that once the Nile at its flood rose at least twenty feet higher than today and irrigated an extensive area. There were well-wooded regions where now the Valley is practically without forests.

At the junction of the Atbara and the Blue Nile begins "the Island of Meroe." It is almost completely surrounded by the waters of the Nile and its branches, which reach up into the mountains of Abyssinia to Lake Tsana. This island resembles Ireland in shape and size.

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The northern part today is a desert; south of this there is tall grass with bushes and trees, which shrivel during the dry season. At the southern end is a zone fairly well watered with much fertile soil.

Here again there is much evidence that in ancient times the island was much more fertile and densely populated. It formed the heart of the Ethiopian empire. Here was the capital city, Meroe, the largest, most powerful, and probably the second oldest Ethiopian city. Meroe is mentioned by Herodotus and tradition today says that the people in ancient times "were powerful and wise, and of great wealth, but God grew angry with them and stopped the rain."

The Eastern Desert extends from the southern boundaries of Egypt to the northern boundary of Abyssinia, and from the Nile to the Red Sea. It is a hilly plateau, mostly desert, but with some arable tracts. In this Eastern Desert dwell the Beja tribes who may represent descendants of those who in ancient times populated Ethiopia and Egypt. They are black and brown with curly or frizzly hair, and present many of the same types as American Negroes do today.

The Western Desert includes the whole western side of the Nile Valley until it merges with the Sahara. On the north, it begins with the Mediterranean Sea, and sweeps down 1,500 miles to Equatorial Africa. It is one of the most desolate parts of the earth, without animal or vegetable life. "For miles and miles there is but a vast ocean with flat sand without feature or hill, mound, rock or stone."

In the far southern section, the sand gives way to stony ground, and there are ranges, which support a small nomad population. Again much of this desert was probably well-watered in ancient times, but today for a stretch of 1,800 miles the Nile receives no western tributary, although in earlier times it received several rivers. Ruins of ancient settlements and petrified trees dot the banks of these dry streams.

Research in the Nile Valley and study of the records establish the fact that ancient Ethiopia in what is now the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan was the seat of one of the oldest and greatest of the world's civilizations. The golden age of this culture dates from the middle of the eighth century before Christ to the middle of the fourth century after Christ. But its beginnings go back to the dawn of history, four or five thousand years before Christ, and in a way Ethiopian history parallels that of ancient Egypt.

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A reasonable interpretation of historical evidence would show that the history of the Nile Valley was something as follows: Negro tribes migrated down the Nile, slowly penetrating what is now modern Egypt. They there gradually came in contact and mingled with whites from the north and Semites from the east. Stimulated to an unusual degree by this contact of the three primitive stocks of mankind, the resulting culture of Egypt was gradually developed.

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 seem to have 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 Semitic blood from the east, now by Caucasic types from the north and west.

Herodotus, who knew and saw Egyptians four hundred and fifty years before Christ, in an incontrovertible passage alludes to the Egyptians as "black and curly-haired" 5 -- a peculiarly significant statement from one used to the brunette Mediterranean type; nor was this a mere slip of the pen, for again, in his second book (Chapters 55-57), he tells of the legend of the two black doves, who flew from Egypt and became soothsayers at Dodona. He explains that the women were called doves because they were foreigners, and their words sounded like the noise of birds; and then he says: "Lastly, by calling the dove black, the Dodonaeans indicated the woman was an Egyptian." Further, he says, "There can be no doubt that the Colchians are an Egyptian race. Before I heard any mention of the fact from others, I had remarked it myself. My own conjectures were founded first, on the fact that they are black-skinned and have woolly hair, which certainly amounts to but little, since several other nations are so too; but further and more especially, on the circumstance that the Colchians, the Egyptians, and the Ethiopians, are the only nations who have practised circumcision from the earliest times." 6 Aeschylus, mentioning

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a boat seen from the shore, declares that its crew are Egyptians, because of their black complexions.

Diodorus says that the Ethiopians declared that the Egyptians were settlers from Ethiopia. "That Egypt itself is a land built up by the slime and mud which the Nile brought down from Ethiopia. Most of the Egyptian laws and customs are of Ethiopian origin."

The Egyptians themselves, in later days, affirmed that they and their civilization came from the south and from the 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." 7 Modern archaeological and anthropological research lends some confirmation to the tradition that the original homeland of many of the people of Egypt and of their culture was Equatorial Africa. Many evidences of Negro descent are revealed by the bones and statues of Egypt's ancient dead.

"The more we learn of Nubia and the Sudan," writes Dr. D. Randall-MacIver, "the more evident does it appear that what was most characteristic in the predynastic culture of Egypt is due to intercourse with the interior of Africa and the immediate influence of that permanent Negro element which has been present in the population of Southern Egypt from remotest times to our own day."

Sir Flinders Petrie, in the same vein, writes that it is remarkable how renewed vitality came to Egypt from the south. The First Dynasty appears to have moved up from Punt. The Third Dynasty which led to the Fourth shows a strongly Ethiopian face in Sa Nekht; the Twelfth Dynasty we can trace to a Galla origin; the Eighteenth Dynasty was an Ethiopian race paled by marrying a Libyan princess; the Twenty-fifth Dynasty was from distant Meroe.

Volney in the eighteenth century expressed the belief that the ancient Egyptians were Negroes, or at any rate, strongly Negroid. Recently, Ripley, in his Races of Europe, agrees with this fact. Dr. Randall-MacIver, and Dr. Arthur Thompson, after an extensive survey of skeletons of ancient Egypt, said that of the Egyptians studied from the early predynastic to the Fifth Dynasty, twenty-four per cent of the males and nineteen per cent of the females must be classified as Negro. In every character they conform to the Negro type. From the

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Sixth to the Eighteenth Dynasty, twenty per cent of the males and fifteen per cent of the females were Negroes. There were in all these cases a number of intermediate types with Negroid traits, but the Negro features were not sufficiently distinct to class these skeletons with Negroes.

Others have shown Negro individuals with woolly or frizzly hair, thick noses, and thick lips, portrayed in the predynastic period of Egypt. Griffith says that more than one Nubian can be traced as holding a high position in Egypt during the Fourth and Fifth Dynasties. The famous Stele of Yna shows that in the Sixth Dynasty, Asiatics in Palestine were annihilated by an army of many tens of thousands made up of soldiers recruited from among various groups of Negroes. In the fourth, third, second and first millenniums before Christ, there were repeated migrations and invasions of African peoples into Northern Ethiopia and Egypt.

Among the Pharaohs of the earlier dynasties whose statues or recovered bones show them to have been deeply tinged with Negro blood are King Den of the First Dynasty, King Khasekhemui of the Third Dynasty, and King SaNekht of the Third Dynasty. Sir Harry Johnston writes: "The Dynastic Egyptians were not far distant in physical type from the Galla of today, but they had perhaps some element of the proto-Semite; and their language, which is still rather a puzzle to classifiers, though mainly Kushite in its features, exhibited early in its history the influence of Semitic speech, and no doubt absorbed into itself elements of the Libyan sister, which it perhaps found already extending to the valley of the Nile. The Dynastic Egyptians evidently concentrated themselves in the narrow strip of fertility along the banks of the Nile, not colonizing very markedly the Red Sea coast-lands. By about 8,000 years ago they had become the conquerors and rulers of Lower and Upper Egypt. The inhabitants of Egypt were thenceforth a people in which Hamitic (Libyan-Kushite), Semitic, Nilotic and even Sudanese-Negro elements were fused."

In Egyptian sculpture and painting, the Negro type appears as a slave and captive, as a tribute-bearer and also as ruler and official. The great Sphinx at Gizeh, so familiar to all the world; the Sphinxes of Tanis, the statue from Fayum; the statue of the Esquiline at Rome;

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and the Colossi of Bubastis, all represent Negroid types. They 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." 8

Blyden, the 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 of race to which that king belonged?" 9

Chamberlain says of the Negro in Egypt: "Ancient Egypt knew him, both bond and free, and his blood flowed in the veins of not a few of the mighty Pharaohs." Besides these marked individual instances, "there is the fact that the Egyptian race itself in general had a considerable element of Negro blood, and 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 Negroland was drafted off into the service of Mediterranean and Asiatic culture." 10

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 Egyptian treatment and arrangement of the hair and beard indicate strongly their Negroid affinity and similar coiffures suitable to crisp hair can be seen in modern Africa.

Of course, the number of those who deny the presence of Negro blood to any great extent in Egypt is large. One must remember that Egyptology, starting in 1821, grew up during the African slave trade, the Sugar Empire and the Cotton Kingdom. Few scientists during

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that period dared to associate the Negro race with humanity, much less with civilization. A curious incident of the World War throws interesting light on Egyptian blood today: When the "Anzacs" from New Zealand and Australia came to be quartered in Egypt, they stared at the fellahin and cried: "My god! We didn't know Egyptians was niggers!"

The history of Egypt is a science in itself and must not detain us. 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 people with certainly some Negroid characteristics. At the end of the period the empire fell apart into Egyptian and Ethiopian halves, and a silence of three centuries ensued.

The middle empire arose 3064 B.C. and lasted nearly twenty-four centuries. The ancient glories of Egypt were restored and surpassed. At the same time there is strong continuous pressure from 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 (circa 2660-2622 B.C.), 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 Napata.

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, whose domination lasted for five hundred years.

The redemption of Egypt from these barbarians came from Upper Egypt, led by 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," 11 was a woman of royal Ethiopian lineage and Negroid characteristics. She was represented on the Egyptian

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monument with "a complexion of ebony-blackness," and as Chamberlain says was "a Negress of great beauty, strong personality, and remarkable administrative ability." She was for years associated in the government with her son, Amenhotep I, who succeeded his father. Queen Nefertari was highly venerated and many monuments were erected in her honor; she was venerated as "ancestress and founder of the Eighteenth Dynasty" and styled "the wife of the god Ammon." In addition to being the wife of Aahmes, the founder of the Eighteenth Dynasty, she was also the mother of Amenhotep I, and according to some authorities, the grandmother of Thothmes I, and the great-grandmother of Hathshepsut and Thothmes III -- two of the greatest sovereigns that ever sat on an Egyptian throne. 12

Another strain of Negro blood came into the line of the Pharaohs with Mut-em-ua, wife of Thothmes IV, whose son, Amenhotep III, had a Negroid physiognomy. Amenhotep III was famous as a builder and his reign (circa 1400 B.C.) is distinguished by a marked improvement in Egyptian art and architecture. He it was who built the great temple of Ammon at Luxor and the colossi of 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 to Thebes, while the Assyrians under Nimrod overran lower Egypt. The center of interest is now transferred to Ethiopia. From records and reports of expeditions, the history of Ethiopia can be reconstructed as follows:

1. A pre-historic period, extending down to 3500 B.C.

2. A proto-historic period, from 3500 B.C. to 723 B.C. This includes two periods corresponding with the Old and Middle Kingdoms of Egypt, and a third period corresponding with the New Egyptian empire.

3. An historic period, from 1723 B.C. to 355 A.D. This includes:

A. The Napatan Period -- 1723 to 308 B.C.

B. The Middle-Meroitic Period -- 308 B.C. to 10 A.D.

C. The Late Meroitic Period, 10 A.D. to 355 A.D.

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In prehistoric times, Ethiopians traded gold, ivory and skins with the Egyptians for food. Caravans from Ethiopia and even from places south visited Egypt. Egyptians and Ethiopians were friendly during the First and Second Dynasties but, at the beginning of the Fourth Dynasty, an Egyptian Pharaoh raided Ethiopia and returned with black prisoners and live stock. He probably went south as far as the Fourth Cataract or even to Khartoum. During the Fifth Dynasty, when the Egyptians made war on the people in the eastern desert, the Egyptian soldiers were joined by Ethiopian soldiers, including blacks from five provinces. This led to a conference between the Pharaoh and the chiefs of the blacks and some Egyptian control over Ethiopia.

As social order was overthrown after the Sixth Dynasty, Egyptian control over Ethiopia ceased and tribute was no longer paid. In the Ninth and Tenth Dynasties there were punitive expeditions against Ethiopia and also widespread trade. Blacks came north into Egypt both as free settlers and as slaves. The Pharaohs of the Eleventh Dynasty extended their influence south beyond Thebes and Ethiopians had probably moved north and invaded Egyptian territory as far as Thebes. Kings of the Twelfth Dynasty made raids into Nubia and pushed the borders of Egypt to the Third Cataract. They opened gold mines and Ethiopian forced labor resulted. The Pharaoh Usertesen I conquered a number of tribes and districts and extended the power of Egypt; but it was Usertesen III who took Egyptian power to the Second Cataract and built two forts. He used Ethiopian soldiers with Egyptian officers.

Thus we see that 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 rise during the middle empire of Egypt and centered at Napata and Meroe. Widespread trade in gold, ivory, precious stones, skins, wood and works of handicraft arose. The Negro began to be the great trader of Egypt. This new wealth of Ethiopia excited the cupidity of

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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.

During the Hyksos invasion, i.e., in the Fourteenth, Fifteenth, Sixteenth and Seventeenth Dynasties, many noble Egyptian families migrated to Ethiopia and intermarried with the ruling houses of Ethiopia. Later one of these Egypto-Ethiopian families, ruling under the Hyksos at Thebes, revolted, and through the aid of Ethiopian soldiers, expelled the invaders and established the great Eighteenth Dynasty.

The ensuing New Empire witnessed the gradual incorporation of Ethiopia into Egypt, although the darker kingdom continued to resist. Both 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 B.C.

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, Sheshang I, the Libyan, usurped the throne of the Pharaohs in the tenth century B.C., the Egyptian legitimate dynasty went to Napata 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.

At present, we have the names of forty-nine kings and queens of Ethiopia, from 750 B.C. to 355 A.D., and records of twenty-seven others, whose names are not known, making seventy-six rulers in all. During the early Napata period, extending from 750 to 308 B.C., there were twenty-six kings, of whom the most noted were Piankhy, 744-710; Shabaka, 710-700; Taharka, 688-663; and Nastasen, 328-308 B.C. The first king, Piankhy, was Egyptian bred and a mulatto type; but his successors showed more and more evidence of Negro blood -- Kashta the Kushite, Shabaka, Taharka, and Tanutamen.

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Piankhy ascended the throne of Ethiopia about 744 B.C., and ruled thirty-four years. He inherited from his father, Kashta, dominion over Egypt as far northward as Thebes, and perhaps for 200 or 300 miles farther, and he served as governor or viceroy over Egypt under the Ethiopian crown before the conquest. Piankhy was religious and peaceful, but he was also a practical statesman, with a river navy and trained soldiers.

In 732 B.C. Piankhy was informed by courier that a Libyan prince from the Delta was marching south. Piankhy waited for the Libyan to get as far as possible from his base. When he reached Hermophlis, 400 miles south of the Mediterranean, Piankhy started the attack, assembling an army at Napata, and ordering them to march northward to Thebes. Finally, he himself joined his armies, swept through Egypt, and received the submission of sixteen princes. The Libyan leader himself wrote: "So now, through fear of thee, I have fled to the uttermost swamps, down by the great green sea."

Egypt thus became a tribute-paying dependency upon Ethiopia, with rulers whose titles were confirmed by the Kings of Ethiopia. Eventually, in 710 B.C., when Piankhy died, the Ethiopian council at Napata chose Shabaka as king of the two lands. He kept peace and was a good administrator. The influence of Egypt was restored and he tried to stem the power of Assyria by negotiation. Diodorus says that Shabaka "went beyond all his predecessors in his worship of the Gods and his kindness to his subjects." Herodotus says that he abolished capital punishment in Egypt.

During Ethiopian rule, a royal son was appointed to rule Egypt, just as formerly a royal Egyptian had ruled Kush. This Ethiopian kingdom showed its Negro peculiarities: first, in its worship of Sudanese gods; secondly, in the custom of female succession to the throne; and thirdly, by the election of the kings from among the 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."

Shabaka attempted to restore Egyptian art. He began works at Karnak, and preserved historical documents. Finally, however, the Assyrians defeated the forces of Egypt and Ethiopia at the battle of

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Eltekeh in Assyria. Shabaka abdicated, and Shabataka succeeded him. At last, 688 to 663 B.C., came the greatest of the Ethiopian kings, Taharka. His reign, with all its wars, was an era of prosperity and cultural advancement. Weigall calls his reign: "That astonishing epoch of nigger domination"; and Randall-MacIver says: "It seems amazing that an African Negro should have been able with any sort of justification to style himself Emperor of the World." Taharka ascended the throne 688 B.C. at the age of about forty-two. For fifteen years Taharka fostered the economic, cultural, and religious life of Ethiopia and Egypt. The trade of the country increased and there was money to repair the ancient temples and build new ones. Taharka established friendly alliances with western Asia and with Assyria, and the Assyrian expedition against Egypt and Ethiopia was stopped. The Hebrew Bible chronicles this as the downfall of Sennacherib, and notes Ethiopia's trade. 13

Taharka's building at Karnak, although never finished, was planned as one of the most striking in the ancient world. The temple built at Thebes has a relief representing the four courts of the four quarters of the Nilotic world: Dedun the great God of Ethiopia, represents the South; Sopd, the Eastern Desert; Sedek, the West Desert; while Horus represents the North. Petrie says: "This shows how Southern was the center of thought, when the whole of Egypt was recorded as the North." Some writers say that Taharka traveled beyond his domains, and Strabo even declares that, with four other kings, Taharka led expeditions as far as the Straits of Gibraltar.

Eventually the Assyrians were too strong for Taharka and he had to give up Egypt and retire into Ethiopia and the "night of death." Tanutamen, his successor, held back the Assyrian storm for a while (Nahum, iii, 1-19), but Ethiopian and Egyptian strength were eventually dashed to pieces. Egyptian temples were wrecked, and the conqueror, Ashurbanipal, declared: "I captured Thebes like a flood."

The Assyrians conquered Northern Egypt, but the dynasty was continued in Southern Egypt by Ethiopian kings. Egyptian rule was revived briefly in Northern Egypt but this was followed by two invasions from Persia, 525-415 B.C. and 342-332 B.C., and finally by the domination of Egypt by Greece after 332 B.C.

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Aspeluta, whose mother and sister are represented as full-blooded Negroes, ruled probably from 593-567 B.C. Horsiatef (c. 372-61 B.C.) made nine expeditions against the war-like tribes south of Meroe, and his successor was Nastasen (c. 328-308 B.C.) who removed the capital from Napata to Meroe, although Napata continued to be the religious capital and the Ethiopian kings were still crowned on its golden throne. In 525 or 524 B.C. Cambyses, the Persian, tried to invade Nubia, but was either defeated or his army died from starvation.

During the middle period, 308-225 B.C., there were ten rulers, five reigning at Napata and five at Meroe. Then the kingdoms became united again under Ergamenes, 225-200 B.C., and six kings reigned over the whole of Ethiopia; then came nine kings, of whom four reigned at Meroe, and five at Napata. These were succeeded by three kings ruling over Ethiopia until 15 A.D. From that time to 355 A.D. there ruled twenty-two kings over a united Ethiopia. The Ptolemies did not invade Nubia but tried to obtain trade by peaceful inroads. Ergamenes was brought up at the court of Ptolemy II and the "nine nations" of Ethiopia were brought under complete control of Egypt without war.

Meroe, between the Atabara and the Blue Nile, was founded later than Napata, and probably not earlier than the eighth century B.C. Kings reigned at Meroe in all for about six hundred years. It stands on the banks of the Nile, midway between the Fifth and Sixth Cataracts, and is accessible to caravans coming across the Atabara from the Red Sea. It was, therefore, the natural outlet to the Nile of the desert route from the east. It was said to have had a standing army of two hundred thousand and four thousand artisans. The people adopted the Egyptian hieroglyphic system of writing which they modified somewhat. Excavations so far have not discovered anything in Meroe older than the first century. It may not have been a flourishing city in early times, but was probably always an important trading center. It developed greatly after the downfall of Napata. It was the center of a network of roads leading in all directions. It had palaces and baths, temples and pyramids, and was widely famous.

It was here that the Candaces reigned as queens -- the designation being a title rather than a given name. Pliny tells us that one Candace

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of the time of Nero had had forty-four predecessors on the throne. The prestige of Ethiopia at this time was considerable throughout the world. Pseudo-Callisthenes tells of a visit of Alexander the Great to Candace, Queen of Meroe, fabulous perhaps but showing 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.

On the death of Cleopatra, Egypt became a province of the Roman Empire and Augustus sent a prefect there. The power of Ethiopia declined before black invaders from the west. The Prefect Gallus summoned these chiefs and granted them their independence under the power of Rome in 29 A.D. After his death, the blacks revolted and advanced northward into the Thebaid. The Romans sent a great army of 10,000 infantry and 800 cavalry to suppress 30,000 rebels. The Romans were victorious and advanced on the Ethiopians at Napata, where a Candace, a masculine woman with one eye, was reigning. She is probably the "Candace" mentioned in Acts viii, 27. Petronius captured Napata, and 1,000 prisoners were sent to Caesar as slaves and many sold at auction. Nevertheless as soon as Petronius left Candace attacked the Roman garrison at Premis where the Pharaohs had formerly had a fort. The Ethiopians demanded the right to lay their case before Caesar, which was granted, and Caesar remitted the tribute.

The Roman Emperor Nero, A.D. 64-68, planned to invade Ethiopia and sent some scouts to report. They penetrated as far as the region of the Sadd. For the next 200 years the Nubians and other desert tribes did as they pleased, while the power of Ethiopia continued to decline. From the beginning of the third century, tribes from the eastern desert called the Blemmyes, probably the modern Beja, invaded Egypt and plundered; becoming masters of Southern Egypt during the reign of Aurelian. The Romans continued to have so much trouble with their Ethiopian frontier that finally, when the Abyssinian Semitic mulattoes appeared in the east, the Emperor Diocletian invited the Nubians (Nobadae) from the west to repel them. These Nubians eventually embraced Christianity, and Northern Ethiopia

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came to be known in time as Nubia. The Roman garrisons were withdrawn and the Romans depended upon the Nubians from the western desert, Darfur and Kordofan, to protect their interests. Diocletian gave these Nubians land and a yearly subsidy and also subsidized the Beja. In this way, playing off tribe against tribe, he secured peace. Nevertheless during the reigns of Theodosius and Justinian the tribes broke into revolt again and again.

The Negro and Negroid populations of eastern Africa received, from time to time, Semitic immigration from the east and an Abyssinian empire was built up. These Semitic mulattoes lived on 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 declared that a queen, Maqueda, or Nikaula of Sheba, a state of central Abyssinia, visited the Jewish 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, Axum, 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 its King Kaleb to protect the Christians in southwestern Arabia. Kaleb conquered Yemen in 525 and held it fifty years, and sent 40,000 men against Mecca.

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 (i.e., the Abyssinians) slept for nearly a thousand

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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.

About 450 A.D. the Nubians under Silco, king of the Beja, had embraced Christianity and made Old Dongola their capital. The new capital replaced Napata 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 who held it back for two centuries. Omar, second of the Mohammedan Caliphs, invaded Egypt in 641. He sent twenty thousand men into Nubia but the Nubians in turn invaded Upper Egypt.

The Arabs attacked Dongola but finally the matter was arranged by the Nubians paying tribute, which they did for six hundred years. This history of revolt and defeat was kept up until 1225, when Saladin crushed the Nubians and the Arabs annexed Nubia in 1275. Between 1311 and 1412 fighting went on between Arabians and Nubians and finally the Christian kingdom of the Nubians fell in the sixteenth century.

Farther south other wild tribes pushed out of the Sudan. Chief among these were the Fung, who fixed their capital at Senaar, at the junction of the White and Blue Nile. The first king of the Fung was Amar Dunkas, who began to reign in 1515. When Selim conquered and invaded Egypt in 1617, the Fung embraced Islam and arranged to divide Ethiopia between themselves and the Arabs, so that the Fung ruled from the Third Cataract to Senaar from 1515 to 1789. Islam then swept on south in a great circle, skirted the Great Lakes, and then curled back to Somaliland, completely isolating Abyssinia. In the latter part of the seventeenth century a king of the Fung conquered the Shilluks. He was a patron of learning and built a mosque at Senaar. Another in the eighteenth century defeated the Abyssinians who had invaded Ethiopia. East of Wadai and nearer the Nile

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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 it 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 the new and increasing slave trade.

From 1789 to 1821 there were a number of kings but a general state of anarchy. During this time the Fung tried to annex northern Ethiopia but were driven back with slaughter. In 1820, Mohammed Ali sent his son with Turks and Arabs to conquer Nubia. He defeated the Mameluke Beys at Dongola and then marched through Ethiopia, but was killed in 1822 just after he had founded Khartoum. Mohammed Ali avenged this terribly and eventually in 1839 determined to exploit the Sudan for gold and slaves. He stirred up strife among the chiefs and took their land and destroyed their people. About 1840, Mohammed Ali's Sudan included all the territory formerly belonging to Napata and Meroe and from then until 1880 Ethiopia was reduced to a state of ruin and misery by the Arab masters of the Egyptians.

The entrance of England into Egypt, after the building of the Suez Canal, eventually stirred up revolt in the Sudan by loosing the hold of the Arab taskmasters on the natives. 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 and Egyptian oppression. The Sudan was soon aflame, and the able mulatto general, Osman Digna, aided by revolt among the

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heathen Dinka, drove both Egypt and England out of the Sudan for sixteen years.

The Mahdi was a black Kushite born in the Dongola Province, the son of a boat builder. The Mohammedans expected the Saviour to appear in 1882. Mohammed Ahmad announced publicly that he was the Mahdi in 1881. The authorities tried to capture him, but he escaped, defeating the governor of Fashoda in the mountains of southern Kordofan and then seized Kordofan in 1883. He massacred the army of the Englishman Hicks Pasha, 10,000 strong, at Chekan in November, 1883. The Egyptian governor of Darfur and the Bahrel-Ghazal surrendered in 1884. Only Emin Pasha in Equatoria and the governor of Dongola held out. In 1885 the Mahdi seized Omdurman, a suburb of Khartoum, and later entered Khartoum over the mud of the dammed river and killed Chinese Gordon. He was now master of four-fifths of the Egyptian Sudan, but died of typhoid fever the same year. His successor, the Khalifa Abdullah, belonged to the Baggara tribe of Arabian Negroes. He displaced the Nubian relatives of the Mahdi with Darfur people, attacked Abyssinia and killed the Negus John. Emin Pasha abandoned Equatoria in 1889 and the Khalifa Abdullah established himself there in 1892.

Meantime this Mahdist revolt had delayed England's designs on Abyssinia, and the Italians, encourged by England, 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, 14 led some of the charges. By this battle Abyssinia became independent until 1936.

England was startled and her colonial policy was stampeded into a new and vaster policy of economic imperialism. Her dream of Cape to Cairo was threatened by two black men: one in Abyssinia and one

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in the Sudan; and by the French in alliance with Abyssinia. No sooner did England hear of the battle of Adua, than Kitchener started to Egypt with machine guns and modern military equipment. He recaptured Khartoum in 1898, killing and wounding 27,000 natives at a cost of less than 500 casualties among his troops; the Khalifa was defeated and killed, Osman Digna captured and the tomb of the Mahdi desecrated. The road to the gold and diamonds of Cape Town lay open.

Such in general outline is the strange story of the Valley of the Nile. Strange, not so much because of the facts, but because of the extraordinary interpretation put upon them. By general consent modern historians have cut the history of the Nile Valley entirely away from the history of Africa and most of them deny any connection between the two. This is directly against the known evidence. Egypt was by blood and by cultural development a part of the history of Africa and Negro Africa must be explained certainly in part by the history and development of Egypt. Further than that, in Ethiopia and in what is known as the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, we have pre-eminently a land of the black race from prehistoric times; and yet today by a narrow and indefensible definition the connection even of Ethiopia with Negro history is denied; while the Sudan is left as a sort of historical no man's land, and is regarded now as Arabian, now as Egyptian, now as "Hamitic," and always as not worth careful investigation and study. Its events have been misinterpreted and its heroes, like the Mahdi, maligned and written down as the cause of that very misery and turmoil against which they rebelled and fought. Such at the hands of modern science has been the fate of

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

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Chapter 3: The Niger and the Desert
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 today a population of perhaps eighty million. It is thus two-thirds the size of the United States and about 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 from 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 pushed the dwarfs gradually into the inhospitable forests and occupied the Sudan, pushing on to the Atlantic. Here the newcomers, curling northward, came in contact with Europeans or Berbers, or actually crossed into Europe; 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 contacts of these with the Berbers in the desert, and Semites from Arabia and from the east gave rise to centers of Negro culture in the Sudan, at Ghana and Melle and in Songhay; in Nupe, the Hausa states, and Bornu.

We know that Egyptian Pharaohs in several cases ventured into the western Sudan and Egyptian influences are distinctly traceable. Greek and Byzantine culture and Phoenician and Carthaginian trade also penetrated, while Islam had wide influence. Behind all these influences, however, stood from the first an indigenous Negro culture.

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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 invasion.

To this ancient culture, modified somewhat by Byzantine and Christian influences, came Islam and the Arabs. They swept in as a conquering army in the seventh century but were comparatively few in actual numbers until the eleventh century, when there was a large Arab immigration. In the seventh century the Arabs conquered North Africa from the Red Sea to the Atlantic. The Berber Mohammedans, led by the Arabs, entered Spain in the eighth century and overthrew the Visigoths. In 718 A.D. they crossed the Pyrenees and met Charles Martel at Poitiers. The invaders, repulsed, turned back and settled in Spain, occupying it without much attempt to proselyte. But in time the conflict for the control of the Mohammedan world left Spain in anarchy.

In 758 there arrived in Spain a Prince of Omayyads, Abdurrahman, who after thirty years of fighting founded an independent government which in the tenth century became the Caliphate of Kordova. The power was based on his army of Negro and Slavonian Christian slaves. Abdurrahman III, 912-961, established a magnificent court and restored order. His son gave protection to writers and thinkers. His power passed into the hands of a mulatto known as Almansur, who kept order with his army of Berbers and Negroes, making fifty invasions into Christian territory. He died in 1002 and in a few years through the revolt of the army the Caliphate declined and the Christians began to reconquer the country. The Mohammedans began to look to Africa for rescue.

"When the conquest of the West [by the Arabs] was completed, and merchants began to penetrate into the interior, they saw no nation

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of the Blacks so mighty as Ghanah, the dominions of which extended westward as far as the ocean." In the eleventh century there was a large Arab immigration. The Berbers by that time had adopted the Arab tongue and the Mohammedan religion, and Mohammedanism had spread slowly southward across the Sahara; while in east Africa, Arabs, Persians and Indians had planted commercial colonies on the coast.

About 1000-1200 A.D. the situation was this: Ghana was on the edge of the desert in the north; Mandingoland was between the Niger and the Senegal in the south and the western Sahara, the Wolofs were 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 effective in fact only 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." 15 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.

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 Audoghast 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.

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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. The history of Ghana goes back at least to the fourth century. It was probably founded by Berbers but eventually passed into the control of the black Sarakolle peoples. In the ninth and tenth centuries it was flourishing but fell before the proselyting Almoravides and eventually passed under the control of Melle. Its chief city was Kumbi-Kumbi, the ruins of which have been identified. It had prosperous agriculture and its later decline was due in part to the encroachment of the desert. The surrounding country was inhabited by the Bafur Negroes, who formed the Songhay toward the east, and Serers and the Wangara in the center. To the Wangara belong the Mandingoes who founded Melle. West of Ghana a mixture of Serers and Berbers formed the mulatto Fulani peoples. The black kings of Ghana eventually extended their rule over the Berber city of Audhoghast and the veiled tribes of the desert.

At Ghana we are told that there were forty-four white rulers, half coming before the Hegira and half after it. Then the power passed to black Sarakolles who were Negroes with some Semitic blood. 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 with the Sudan.

Meantime, led by Yassine, three Berber tribes, inflamed with religious zeal, began to spread, starting from the lower Senegal and converting the black natives over a considerable territory. Audhoghast was recaptured from Ghana in the eleventh century, and reinforced by black converts, the movement spread until eventually it went into Morocco and then into Spain. Composed now of Berbers and Negroes, these fanatics shaped their course northward, and, united under the name of Al Morabitun, or Champions of the Faith, they

-- [43] --

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subjugated the fertile countries on both sides of the southern Atlas, and founded, in 1073, the empire and city of Morocco.

The Al Morabitun, or Morabites, subsequently extended their plan into Spain, in the history of which country they figure under the name of Almoravides. "But long before they carried their arms into Europe, they corresponded intimately with the polished courts of Mohammedan Spain; and while they had not yet quite relinquished the desert, nor forgotten their acquaintance with the frontiers of Negro-land, they communicated their information to the inquisitive, and, for that age, well-instructed Spanish Arabs." 16 This movement invaded Spain and inflicted a decisive defeat on Alphonso VI and Zilaca in 1086 under the leadership of Yusuf. The Almoravides held the conquest until 1120 when they suffered defeat at Kutanda at the hands of the Almohades, a more bigoted religious sect, who were victorious in 1195 and held Mohammedan Spain until 1212. By 1238, however, Mohammedan Spain was reduced to the ports between Granada and Cadiz.

The spread of Islam in Africa was slow. Timbuktu founded, in the eleventh century, did not become Mohammedan until 1591. The Congo forest kept back the Arabs from expanding westward from the east coast, just as the Sahara kept them from expanding southward in North Africa. At the end of the eleventh century the Almoravides carried their proselyting down toward the Gulf of Guinea, attracted by the abundance of kola nuts, and founded a city on the Volta River. This city, Bego, became an important metropolis and center of commerce and propaganda. Later its inhabitants spread along the Ivory Coast, enriching themselves with commerce and intellectual development, which has continued up to the present.

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 compact mass of that older heathen culture, pushing itself upward from the Guinea coast, stood firmly against Islam down to the nineteenth century.

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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 Soso in 1203. 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.

Melle began on the left bank of the Upper Niger, under Negro kings who reigned without interruption, save for fifteen years, from 600 to the present, and are probably the oldest reigning dynasty in the world. The Mansa, or kings of Melle, were obscure rulers until about 1050, when they were converted to Mohammedanism.

"As to the people of Mali [Melle], they surpassed the other Blacks in these countries in wealth and numbers. They extended their dominions, and conquered the Susu, as well as the kingdom of Ghanah in the vicinity of the Ocean towards the west. The Mohammedans say that the first King of Mali was Baramindanah. He performed the pilgrimage to Mekkah, and enjoined his successors to do the same." 17

Melle secured control of the trade in gold dust which Ghana had formerly monopolized. It was annexed by the Soso in 1224, but Sundiata Keita made the country independent and allied himself with neighboring Mandingo chiefs. He took Ghana and destroyed it in 1240 and developed agriculture, also the raising and wearing of cotton. Under his successor, various southern territories, including the valley of the Gambia River, were added to Melle; and from 1307 to 1332, Gongo-Mussa brought the kingdom of Melle to its highest prosperity. He made a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324 which aroused great interest, and brought back with him an Arab who began a new style of architecture in the black Sudan.

"The number of people employed to carry his baggage and provisions amounted to 12,000, all dressed in tunics of figured cotton, or the silk called El-Yemeni. The Haji Tunis, interpreter of this nation in Kahirah [Cairo], said that Mansa [Gongo] Mussa brought

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with him to Egypt no less than 80 loads of Tibar [gold dust], each weighing 300 pounds." 18

On his return from Mecca, Gongo-Mussa 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. Gongo-Mussa 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."

"Ibn Said, a writer of the thirteenth century, has enumerated thirteen nations of Blacks, extending across Africa, from Ghanah in the west, to the Boja [Beja] on the shores of the Red Sea in the east."

The Mandingan empire at this time occupied nearly the whole of what is now French West Africa, including part of British West Africa. The rulers had close relations with the rulers of Morocco and interchanged visits. Ibn Batuta visited Melle in 1352 and testified to the excellent administration of the city, and its courtesy, prosperity and discipline. Its finances were in good condition and there was luxury and ceremony. In fine the culture of Melle at this time compared favorably with the culture of Europe. The Mellestine preserved its pre-eminence until the beginning of the fifteenth century, when the rod of Sudanese empire passed to Songhay, the largest and most famous of the black empires.

This Negro kingdom centered at Gao, where a dynasty called the Dia, or Za, remained in power on the western Niger from 690 to 1335. 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. 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 Songhay king was converted to Mohammedanism in 1009, and after that all the Songhay princes were Mohammedans.

Gongo-Mussa, on his capture of Timbuktu, had taken 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,

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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, and 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 number 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."

After the death of Sonni Ali, the dynasty of the Askias ruled in Songhay from 1493 to 1591. The first one, Askia Mohammed, ruled from 1493 to 1529. Sonni Ali was a Songhay, whose mother was black and whose father, 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 1497 there was nothing of the barbaric splendor of Gongo-Mussa, but a brilliant group of scholars and officials 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. Eventually he was made by the authorities of Mecca, Caliph of the Sudan. He returned to the Sudan in 1497.

He had a genius for selecting collaborators, and instead of forcing the peasants into the army, he recruited a professional army and encouraged farmers, artisans and merchants. He 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

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and consolidated an empire two thousand miles long by one thousand wide at its greatest extent -- 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 tenth 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." Leo Africanus described his state about 1507. He made intellectual centers at cities like Gao, Timbuktu and Jenne, where there were writers and where students from North Africa came to study. A literature developed in Timbuktu in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 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 invasion of 1591.

Before continuing the history of the Songhay, we may note some smaller, contemporary states. There were the Bambara south of Timbuktu, who flourished from 1660 to 1862; there were the various Fulani kingdoms from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, and the Tukolor conquest of 1776. West of Ghana, the long dwelling of Berbers with the black Serers formed eventually the Fulani people who sent forth groups to the southwest, east and southeast. In the early sixteenth century the Fulani attacked Songhay but were repulsed and took refuge northwest of the Futa-Jalon. Eventually they founded a kingdom under the so-called Deninake who maintained power from 1559 to 1776. In the Futa-Jalon, inland from French Guinea, the Soso and Fulani, together with other Negro tribes, formed a nation called the Fula, speaking the Fulani language and for the most part Mohammedans, who built up a theocratic state.

Many smaller states were involved in this history; there was the kingdom of Diara southwest of Ghana, which lasted from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century with more or less independence, and

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was finally incorporated into the Songhay empire. The kingdom of the Soso southwest of Timbuktu was at first dependent upon Ghana. Then Sumangura in 1203 overwhelmed Ghana and held it for a few years, but the Soso were finally overcome by Sundiata of Melle and the state annexed. Far to the west came a revolt of Tukolor Negroes late in the eighteenth century. They triumphed over the Fulani, and under Omar extended their conquest considerably. Omar made a pilgrimage to Mecca. He was finally put to flight by the French in 1859 with the help of the mulatto French commander Paul Holle. His entire territory was annexed by the French in 1890.

The Mossi had two kingdoms founded in the eleventh and twelfth centuries among the Negroes inland from the Gulf of Guinea. They are of interest because of the type of state which they invented, and which was widely copied over Negro Africa and still persists. The main Mossi empire had four vassal kingdoms besides the kingdom of the ruler. In the ruler's kingdom there were five provinces whose governors made up the imperial council and were the chief officers of state. Associated with the council were eleven ministers ruling the army, religion, musicians and collecting taxes. The Mossi empires were peculiar in having little or no Berber or white influence. They did not make extensive conquests, but at one time attacked Timbuktu and later resisted Sonni Ali.

Askia Mohammed of the Songhay was succeeded by descendants who nearly ruined his great country by civil wars, massacres and unfortunate military expeditions. One successor, Daoud, who reigned from 1549 to 1583, renewed agriculture and science and was closely associated with the Sultan of Morocco, but already the empire was on the decline.

Meantime great things were happening in the world beyond the desert, the ocean, and the Nile; Arabian Mohammedanism 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 Asia. Religious zeal, fear of conquest, and commercial greed inflamed Europe against the Mohammedans and led to the discovery of a new

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world, the riches of which poured first on Spain and then on England.

Oppression of the Berbers and Moors in Spain 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 them and the Christians, captured the Mediterranean ports and cut the Moors off permanently from Europe.

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 Almansur came to the throne of Morocco, he increased the efficiency of his army by supplying it with firearms and cannon. Almansur determined to attack the Sudan. A company of 3,000 Spanish renegades with muskets, led by Judar, finally attacked the Songhay in 1590. They overthrew the Askias at the battle of Tondibi in 1591 and thereafter ruled at Timbuktu.

Askia Ishak, the king, offered terms, and Judar 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 at Timbuktu and one who maintained himself in the Hausa states to the east, which the invaders could not subdue. Anarchy reigned in Songhay. The soldiers tried to put down disorder with a high hand, drove out and murdered 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 Morocco and 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 west; but the face of the finest Negro civilization the modern world had produced, was veiled from Europe and given to the defilement of a wild horde, which Delafosse calls the "Scum of Europe." In 1623 it is written "excesses of every kind are now committed

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unchecked by the soldiery," and "the country is profoundly convulsed and oppressed."

The Tuaregs marched down from the desert and deprived the invaders 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 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." They lived a nomadic life, plundering the Negroes. To such depths did the mighty songhay fall.

After 1660 these Pashas, now of mixed Spanish and Negro blood, ruled at Timbuktu for 120 years. They preserved a pretense of authority by paying tribute to the black Bambara kings of Segu and also by bribing the Tuaregs. After 1780 the title of Pasha disappeared and "mayors" of Timbuktu were chosen sometimes by the Bambara, sometimes by the Tuareg, and sometimes by the Fulani. In 1894 the city was taken by Joffre, later Marshal of France.

Meanwhile, to the eastward, two powerful states had 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 Katsina the most famous. Gober was celebrated after the sixteenth century for its cotton and leather manufacture. Kano was populous in the sixteenth century. Katsina was the center of agriculture and had military power, and Zaria was a center of commerce. In the fifteenth century these states were united under the kings of Kebbi. In 1513 the Hausa states made alliance with Askia Mohammed of Songhay, but afterward regained their independence.

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. Katsina 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 states, and for the different trades and industries, as saddlers, shoemakers, dyers, etc.

The Hausa were converted to Mohammedanism about the beginning

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of the nineteenth century. This was accomplished by the Sheik Ousman, who extended his rule over the Hausa kingdom and Kebbi, and even invaded Bornu early in the nineteenth century. He was succeeded by Mohammed Bello, who reigned from 1815 to 1837. Mohammed Bello was a noted man of letters who composed poems and prose works in Arabic. He was succeeded by his brother and then by his son, who were harassed by continual revolts. Finally the pieces of the empire fell apart in 1904, and the capital Sokoto was occupied by the British under Lugard.

To the east of the Hausa, on both sides of Lake Chad, is a domain called Bornu in the west and Kanem in the east. The population is dispersed across immense territories and divided into a great number of tribes, some frankly Negroes and others more or less mixed with white blood. The first ruler of Bornu-Kanem was Saefe and was certainly Negro, although we do not know exactly when he lived. Toward the eleventh century under one of his successors, Mohammedanism made its first appearance. The dynasty of Saefe was overthrown by Mohammedans, whose kings took the title of Mai. The first king, ruling from 1220 to 1259, had to contend with continual revolts from the subdued peoples, so that two centuries passed in anarchy. Mai Idris I, 1352 to 1376, came to the throne when the Arab traveler, Ibn Batuta, was visiting near. At that time copper mines were in full operation and many Negro customs were evident, like the concealment of the king behind a curtain, and the use of drums with different rhythms to send messages. Under Idris III, 1573 to 1603, the empire of Bornu was at its height. It ruled over Kano and the Air, over Kanem and land south of Lake Chad. The Tunjur Negroes were in the ascendancy. Rabah attacked and conquered the country in 1893, but after his death the English made Bornu a British protectorate.

Southwest of Lake Chad, arose in 1520 a sultanate of Bagirmi, which reached its highest power in the seventeenth century. This dynasty was overthrown by the Negroid Mabas, who established Wadai to the eastward about 1640. After struggling with Bornu it was attacked by Rabah in 1893 and annexed by the French in 1896. Wadai and a number of other tribes with Arabian and Negro blood ruled in the eastern Sudan in the seventeenth century.

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Darfur and Kordofan in the eastern Sudan arose to power in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A ruler of Kordofan was in touch with Napoleon in his Egyptian campaign late in the eighteenth century. Kordofan was occupied by the Egyptians in the nineteenth century and extended to the Nile. The southern or mountainous part of Kordofan was called Nubia, although that name is also used for the region about Dongola. The central figure of the eastern Sudan in the nineteenth century is Rabah. Rabah was the son of a Negro woman and the principal lieutenant in the army of Zobir Pasha, who was governor of the Bahr-el-Ghazal in 1875. When Zobir's son was overthrown, Rabah took the army and began conquest northwest of the Bahr-el-Ghazal in 1878. He brought a considerable part of north central Africa under control, overthrowing the Bagirmi, Bornu, Gober and many other states around Lake Chad. In 1900 he was conquered and killed by the French after an adventure of twenty-two years.

These complicated and not yet thoroughly known phases of history have almost been forgotten in modern times. Many long regarded it as Arabian and Mohammedan history because Arabic was the lingua franca of most of these peoples. Lately, however, a clearer knowledge of the meaning and development in this part of Africa has been attained. These peoples were not Arabs. They were Negroes with some infiltration of Arabian blood. They were not all Mohammedans, but their history is that of a more or less fierce clash of Moslem religion and ancient African beliefs.

The chief difficulty here was the impossibility of self-defense on the part of various centers of culture and rising nations, and the overwhelming force that entered from time to time both from Europe and Asia. The proximity of these rising and falling empires and centers of culture to the cheap labor of the south led increasingly to the slave trade, which became a cause of demoralization and weakness, especially when encouraged and carried on by alien merchants. On the other hand the pressure of Sudanese kingdoms upon the ancient peoples of the West Coast not only weakened this indigenous African culture, cut it off from Europe, but left it a prey to the Christian slave trade. Thus the black civilization of the Sudan in a sense fell before the onslaught of two of the world's great religions.

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Chapter 4: Congo and Guinea
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 wished 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." 19

From the name of this city we get the modern name Guinea, which is used today 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 comprehend many well-known names. First comes ancient Guinea, then modern Sierra Leone and Liberia; then follow the various "coasts" of former 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.

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 are Negro. 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

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the Greeks and as a 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 m