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

-- NA --

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

-- NA --

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

-- NA --

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

-- vii --

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

-- viii --
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

-- ix --
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.

-- NA --

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

-- 1 --

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

-- 2 --
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

-- 3 --
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

-- 4 --
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

-- [5] --

-- 6 --
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

-- 7 --
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

-- 8 --
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

-- 9 --
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

-- 10 --
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

-- 11 --
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

-- 12 --
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,

-- 13 --
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.

-- 14 --

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?

-- 15 --

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

-- 16 --
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

-- 17 --
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.

-- 18 --

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

-- [19] --

-- 20 --

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.

-- 21 --
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.

-- 22 --

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

-- 23 --
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

-- 24 --
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;

-- 25 --
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

-- 26 --
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

-- 27 --
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.

-- 28 --

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

-- 29 --
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.

-- 30 --

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

-- 31 --
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.

-- 32 --

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

-- 33 --
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

-- 34 --
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

-- 35 --
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

-- 36 --
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

-- 37 --
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

-- 38 --
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.

-- 39 --

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.

-- 40 --
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

-- 41 --
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.

-- 42 --

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] --

-- 44 --
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.

-- 45 --

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

-- 46 --
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,

-- 47 --
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

-- 48 --
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

-- 49 --
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

-- 50 --
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

-- 51 --
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

-- 52 --
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.

-- 53 --

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.

-- 54 --

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

-- 55 --
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 mingled with the Berbers, forming various Negroid types.

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

Down the west coast of Africa, south of the Senegal, came first the Wolofs and then the Serer, remarkable for their organization. Beyond that were similar groups and a flourishing agriculture. Further along between the Gambia River and French Guinea we come to a number of backward half savage tribes, who are the remains of populations overthrown and driven back by the Mandingo and Fulani. Sometimes they have taken refuge on islands and up the branches of rivers. From these, their more powerful neighbors drew thousands of slaves who crossed the Atlantic to the American colonies.

From French Guinea toward Liberia, the Mandingoes and allied tribes like the Susu pushed toward the sea. With them were the Vai, who invented a written language with an alphabet toward the end of the eighteenth century. In the hinterland behind Liberia and Sierra Leone there were a series of primitive people, sometimes cannibals, who cultivated the kola nut. Near them in the dense forests were

-- 56 --
other primitive people, who on the coast were known as the Kru men and who for five centuries have been sailors and workers on ships.

East of the Kru, from the Bambara River to the Volta, are a group of people with striking intellectual development, later debased by imported liquor. They include the Agni, the Abron, who have a well-organized state dating from the fifteenth century; and the Ashanti and Fanti. The Ashanti organized a well-constituted kingdom with its capital at Kumasi, which lasted from 1700 to 1895. Beyond the Volta River are peoples with intellectual and artistic gifts and excellent political organization. Among them are the Ewe, the Yoruba, and people of Benin, Dahomey and Nupe.

The kingdom of Yoruba can be traced back to the early eighteenth century when it invaded Dahomey twice but finally made peace in 1847, at which time the king of Dahomey undertook to pay annual tribute. The kings of Yoruba, Egba, Ketu and Jebu were closely allied, the title of the first being Alafin, and the king of the Egba being known as the Alake. About 1800 the Yoruba kingdom began to break up. The Fulani and others had entered the territory of the Hausa, and they, driven southward, pressed upon Yoruba.

The Yoruba, moving southward because of this and because of the rebellion of the Mohammedan party in their own territory, came to their present capital Oyo; and the Egbas, declaring independence, moved to their present capital Abeokuto. Ibadan in the old province of Egba declared its independence, and other secessions took place, making seven independent states; while the former Yoruba province was inhabited by Fulani and people of Bornu and Hausa.

Meantime Lagos and the coast had been colonized by Yoruba at the beginning of the eighteenth century and was noted as a slave market; and the captives in these wars were sent down there and sold to the slave traders.

West of Yoruba on the lower courses of the Niger is Benin, a state which in 1897 traced its twenty-three kings back a thousand years; some legends even named a line of sixty kings. It seems probable that Benin developed the imperial idea and once extended its rule into the Congo Valley.

Benin was one of the most carefully organized of the Negro states

-- 57 --
on the West Coast with a rare native culture. The Portuguese discovered the country about 1585 and traded with it in slaves and other produce. Lagos and other coast towns were first established by the Beni. It was a small country but its influence extended from Sierra Leone to the mouth of the Congo because of the widespread belief in the power of its Juju or chief spirit. The king was in the hands of the priesthood and the worship of the Juju demanded human sacrifice by crucifixion. Nevertheless the deaths were mercifully inflicted and the Beni had a high culture. They were noted for their work in brass and ivory. The British came in contact with Benin in 1553 and dealt in ivory, palm oil and other goods. The Dutch established factories near and engaged in the slave trade.

The slave trade long centered here and, after its abolition, explorers like Mungo Park and the Lander Brothers penetrated the interior. Between 1840 and 1860 European merchants of several nations were trading up these rivers and after the pause that followed the Indian mutiny and the Franco-Prussian War, British companies began to be formed.

The British attacked Lagos and after severe losses drove out one king and proclaimed another. Traders and missionaries flocked in. Finally in 1861 by force and bribes the king was induced to cede the territory to the protection of Great Britain. Benin still resisted.

Later and also to the west of Yoruba come two states showing a fiercer and ruder culture, Dahomey and Ashanti. Dahomey was probably founded before the sixteenth century and is mentioned by Leo Africanus. The kings at the capital, Abomey, were warriors and slave traders and celebrated for human sacrifice, but had an extraordinary well-organized state and were good farmers and artisans with high intellectual capacity.

The known history of Dahomey begins with the seventeenth century when the three sons of a Negro monarch established states of which one, Dahomey, in 1724-28, conquered the other two. King Gezo from 1818 to 1858 raised the power of Dahomey to the highest point and made a treaty with the French. There had been a widespread custom of human sacrifice based on filial piety and loyalty to the chief. These sacrifices Gezo greatly reduced. When England annexed Lagos in 1861, France began to intrigue for Dahomey and

-- 58 --
German agents also appeared. Finally in 1889 the French and the English agreed, and the French claimed Dahomey. There was severe fighting in which the Amazons took part. Peace was made in 1890, but war broke out again in 1892 when the mulatto General Dodds with French and Senegalese soldiers finally defeated the Dahomey troops and the king set fire to his capital. The country was divided and the royal family restored. Gradually the hinterland toward the north was added.

In the interior and to the north between these people and the bend of the Niger are a large number of tribes, primitive and chaotic in organization, sometimes included in the empire-building states and at other times repelling them by their wild independence. They are chiefly notable for their excellent farming. Further up on the Volta, near the beginning of the great forest, are little states founded by the Sunufo, noted for the iron industry, pottery, agriculture and the art of music.

The Akan people formed one tribe and lived originally further to the north toward the great bend of the Niger. The expanding imperialism there drove them south and divided them into various tribes. The first known king of Ashanti, a part of the Akans, reigned about 1600. He had been preceded by at least two kings. Gold was then unknown and iron was currency. Osai Tutu came to the throne in 1697 and founded Kumasi. The Ashanti were at war with the Denkara early in the eighteenth century and overcame them, thus coming in contact with the Dutch at Elmina on the coast. The next important king, Osai Kwesi, came to the throne in 1742 and kept up conquest and the putting down of revolts. Osai Tutu Kwamina was the first Ashanti king who came in contact with the English. By this time the Ashanti ruled over a vast extent of country with many tribes, calling for great activity in order to put down various rebellions.

The Portuguese arrived on the Guinea coast in the middle of the sixteenth century and were expelled by the Dutch in the seventeenth century. The Dutch quarreled with the English and eventually the English took possession of the coast and the slave trade. There ensued between 1803 and 1874 six Ashanti wars with the English. Ostensibly they were aimed at the customs of human sacrifice in

-- 59 --
Ashanti and to put down aggression upon the Fanti tribes who owed allegiance to Ashanti, but became allied with the English. In reality these wars all aimed at trade monopoly and economic empire for the English.

The records of the action of the English on the Gold Coast, "the earliest beginnings of which had their inception in the dark days of the slave trade, cannot but hold many things that modern Englishmen must recall with mingled shame and horror. The reader will find much to deplore in the public and private acts of many of the white men, who, in their time, made history on the Coast; and some deeds were done which must forever remain among the most bitter and humiliating memories of every Britisher who loves his country and is jealous of its fair fame." 20

When the first Ashanti war took place under King Osai Tutu Kwamina between 1803 and 1807 it began characteristically with the theft of gold and valuables from a grave -- a blasphemy of death and eternal life. The King of Ashanti demanded redress, but his messengers to the accused Fanti were killed. This led to a war between the Ashanti and the Fanti in which the English governor promised to defend some of the allies of the Fanti. The Ashanti advanced toward the sea and captured a fort belonging to the Dutch. The English governor tried to defend the allies of the Fanti and as a result his supporters were shut up in the fort and besieged by the Ashanti. Although the fort made a brilliant defense, 10,000 or more of the Fanti were killed. The governor sent for English ships to support him, but the officer in charge insisted on coming to terms with the Ashanti king. Eventually hostages from the Fanti allies were delivered to the Ashanti and a peace was planned, in which it was acknowledged that the coast and the territory of the Fanti belonged exclusively to the empire of the Ashanti, and that while the whites might have judicial authority in the forts, nevertheless the Ashanti were the rulers of the country.

This treaty was never actually signed, but the Ashanti withdrew, and the British trade on the Gold Coast was safe. The second Ashanti war was really a continuation of the first and lasted from 1808 to 1813. The Ashanti army had withdrawn after the proposed peace

-- 60 --
in 1807 because of the outbreak of smallpox and scarcity of supplies. Thereupon the Fanti began another rebellion, and peoples of the Gold Coast were warned by the English governor to take no part. Nevetheless they did, and attacked the Elminas who were allies of the Ashanti. The Ashanti king sent messengers declaring that he desired peace and trade, which were being interfered with by the Fanti. Nothing was done and the Ashanti after two weeks came to the support of the Elminas with a large army. Eventually they were victorious but lived up to their promise not to harm Europeans. Their allies, however, the Elminas, killed the Dutch governor, and the Fanti murdered the mulatto commandant of one of the forts and eventually killed an Englishman. As a result English ships destroyed the fort.

Certain of the tributaries of the Ashanti rebelled in 1811, and in 1814 the King of Ashanti determined to crush them. He especially demanded the surrender of three recalcitrant chiefs and came down to the coast to find them. The English governor sent to inquire the reason and promised that if he could find the rebels he would return them. The Ashanti, on the other hand, promised not to molest any of the people living under the protection of the forts. Eventually the chiefs were found and killed. In this way peace was restored between the Ashanti and the Fanti and great numbers of the Ashanti came down to Cape Coast and there was a brisk trade.

The English, thereupon, began to make efforts to extend their jurisdiction on the coast. On the conclusion of peace in 1816, the English felt that a regular treaty with the Ashanti ought to be made. They, therefore, sent an embassy to Kumasi under Bowdich. It was received in state with an assembling of 30,000 Ashanti soldiers and chiefs under gorgeous silk umbrellas. The description of the Ashanti court is worth quoting:

"The sun was reflected, with a glare scarcely more supportable than the heat, from the massy gold ornaments, which glistened in every direction. . . . The Caboceers, as did their superior captains and attendants, wore Ashantee cloths of extravagant price from the costly foreign silks which had been unravelled to weave them, . . . and massy gold necklaces intricately wrought. . . . Some wore necklaces reaching to the navel, entirely of aggry beads; a band of

-- 61 --
gold and beads encircled the knee, from which several strings of the same depended; small circles of gold like guineas, rings, and casts of animals, were strung round their ankles . . . and rude lumps of rock gold hung from their left wrists, which were so heavily laden as to be supported on the head of one of their handsomest boys. Gold and silver pipes and canes dazzled the eye in every direction. Wolves' and rams' heads as large as life, cast in gold, were suspended from their gold-handled swords, which were held around them in great numbers." 21

The king showed his readiness to come to understanding with the English, but the question of the payments for the occupation of forts came up. For more than a century the kings of Ashanti had received payment for Elmina Castle, and lately for the English and Dutch forts of Accra and the Danish fort. The king, however, showed that he had been cheated in these payments and most of the rentals had been retained by local chiefs. Bowdich, however, reassured the king, and the governor was communicated with and the payments were readjusted.

As a result a treaty was signed in 1817 in ten articles, promising peace between the British and Ashanti, security for the people of Cape Coast, and redress by the governor for any case of aggression on the part of the natives under British protection. A British officer was to reside at Kumasi as a means of communication with the governor. Trade was to be encouraged and the governor was to have the right to punish subjects of Ashanti for secondary offenses but not serious crimes. Two children of the king were to be sent to Cape Coast for education.

Here was a chance for peace and civilization on the Gold Coast through the alliance of one of the leading white civilized nations of Europe and a powerful black kingdom of Africa, independent and self-assertive, but eager to know the new white world. Inevitably war and blood sacrifice must have in the end succumbed to normal industry and philanthropic effort. The Ashanti king of the day was a man of unusual ability and high character, honorable and desiring peace. He never broke his word to the English. Claridge says:

"Osai Tutu Kwamina is, of all the Ashanti monarchs, the one on

-- 62 --
whom the Englishman should look with the most interest, for he was the first of the line who came into contact with Europeans, and by observing the attitude which he adopted towards them before the occurrence of those hostilities by which the relations of the two powers were subsequently embittered, we may learn what was the position that the Ashantis would have spontaneously adopted towards the white men." 22

The English did not understand Negro customs nor did their changing officials know or try to know what promises their government had made. As a result, the Fanti and other tribes, although the sworn vassals of the king of Ashanti, were struggling for freedom. They tried to gain their independence of Ashanti by putting themselves under the protection of the English, and thus led the English to interfere with the Ashanti power in ways which they had specifically promised not to use.

The fourth and fifth Ashanti wars were due entirely to such action on the part of the Fanti, and to the English breaking the treaty which they signed. The English went into the fourth war without right and without appreciating the power of Ashanti. The result was that at the battle of Insamankow, in 1824, the English Governor Mc-Carthy was killed and his army beaten, on the same day that the Ashanti king himself died a natural death at Kumasi. This defeat was partially retrieved by a later English success and the withdrawal of the Ashanti. It was a double disaster.

The English were now disposed to give up efforts on the Gold Coast. The war had cost a large sum; the slave trade had been forbidden, and while not stopped it was ceasing to be profitable to the English. The English merchants on the coast, however, saw further possibilities. They, therefore, got permission to carry on, and under a far-seeing governor, George Maclean, a new start was made, although trade had been nearly annihilated and the Ashanti were sullen. Nevertheless a peace was signed in 1831 and trade reopened. Two princes of the Ashanti royal family were sent to England to be educated. A serious attempt was made to introduce Christianity by sending missionaries in 1827, 1835, and 1843.

Maclean also tried to get at the root of the trouble by signing

-- 63 --
with the Fanti chiefs, who were at the bottom of so much of the trouble, the celebrated Bond of 1844. This bond acknowledged the power and jurisdiction exercised hitherto "for and on behalf of Her Majesty the Queen of Great Britain" and was signed by the chiefs and the governor. This bond really conferred no territorial rights but legalized and defined jurisdiction in criminal matters. The Fanti then took another interesting step. Their chiefs met and formed a legislative body which proposed a poll tax to be used for education and public improvements. It looked as though a new start for peace and advancement was being made on the Gold Coast through the chiefs who had been longest working in alliance with the English.

But two difficulties overthrew this: first, the English complicated the poll tax collection by establishing municipal corporations and local taxation; and, secondly, the Ashanti still considered that their jurisdiction over the Fanti had been interfered with. The Ashanti finally went to war again in 1860, capturing a number of Fanti prisoners, and the English gave up the attempt to punish them. The home agitation to withdraw from the Gold Coast was renewed.

In the meantime the Dutch and English had come to an understanding on the coast and had arranged an exchange of territory; but this meant that Elmina, which under the Dutch had always been the acknowledged property of the Ashanti, was now to be turned over to the English, and trouble between the Ashanti and Elminas broke out.

The Fanti as has been noted organized a confederation which if recognized by the English would have consolidated their power and made an organized center of defense against the power of Ashanti; but the English at that time in charge upon the coast were short-sighted and alarmed. The chiefs and educated Fanti natives had adopted a constitution to promote friendly intercourse between the kings and chiefs; to improve the country with roads and schools; and to have a representative assembly for preparing laws. The governor promptly arrested some of the leaders, although they were afterwards released by the home secretary of state. But the Confederation failed, leaving a great deal of bad feeling. All this irritated the Ashanti, and the war which had apparently stopped in 1863 broke out into new hostilities in 1873, when Elmina was occupied

-- 64 --
by the English. The Ashanti army began to march in 1873, and fought two hard battles which led to the retirement of the British. The British bombarded Elmina and brought in reinforcements.

This finally led the British to appoint Sir Garnet Wolseley to take charge. He came and demanded the withdrawal of the Ashanti. The Ashanti complained that their vassals refused to serve the king and ran away to the English, and that the Fanti plundered the agents of the Ashanti when they came down to the coast. "They fought with me six times and I drove them away and they escaped to be under you," said the king. Nevertheless the Ashanti retreated and Wolseley slowly followed; but he did not have European troops and the Fanti allies did not respond. Some indecisive battles took place and the Ashanti finally withdrew, but lost a large number of men and chiefs.

The English now determined to reduce Ashanti to complete submission. The whole European situation had changed: the Franco-Prussian war had been fought; Germany was a great power and England was consolidating her economic empire. Wolseley imported a well-equipped modern army from England and invaded Ashanti in 1873. In February he was at Kumasi and burned the town. The king of Ashanti renounced all his rights over subject tribes and over Elmina and promised heavy indemnities.

Between 1875 and 1880 the power of Ashanti partially revived but the English now were determined on domination. The Ashanti sent an embassy representing the king direct to England in 1894, but the colonial officials refused to receive it and recognized the head of the Ashanti state only as "King of Kumasi." Against him at last an expeditionary force was sent and he was surrounded in his capital.

"The scene was a most striking one. The heavy masses of foliage, that solid square of red coats and glistening bayonets, the artillery drawn up ready for any emergency, the black bodies of the Native levies, resting on their long guns in the background, while inside the square the Ashantis sat as if turned to stone, as Mother and Son, whose word was a matter of life and death, and whose slightest move constituted a command which all obeyed, were thus forced to humble themselves in sight of the assembled thousands." 23

-- 65 --

Not only was King Prempeh arrested and deported and the Ashanti humiliated, but the English governor even demanded the Golden Stool upon which kings of Ashanti always sat and which represented the "soul of the nation." To secure it they besieged Kumasi after a revolt in 1900, captured the city and overthrew the government; but the Golden Stool had disappeared. Years later when the King was brought back from exile the Golden Stool was found and surrendered.

In these states, and in later years, the whole character of West Coast culture had changed. In place of the Yoruban culture, with its city democracy, its elevated religious ideas, its finely organized industry, and its noble art, came cruder exhibitions of force and fetish in Ashanti and Dahomey. What was it that thus changed the character of the West Coast from developing culture to increased war and blood sacrifice, such as we read of later in these lands? There can be but one answer: the slave trade. Not simply the sale of men, but an organized effort to turn the attention and energies of men from nearly all other industries; to encourage war and all the cruelest passions of war; and to concentrate this traffic in precisely that part of Africa farthest from the ancient Mediterranean lines of contact.

We need not assume that the cultural change was sudden or absolute. Ancient Yoruba had the cruelty of a semi-civilized land, but it was neither aggressive nor tyrannical. Modern Benin and Dahomey showed traces of art, skill, and industry along with cruelty and insensibility to suffering. But it was the slave trade that turned the balance and set these lands backward. Dahomey was the last word in a series of human disasters in Africa which began with the defeat of the Askias at Tondibi.

From the middle of the fifteenth to the last half of the nineteenth centuries the American slave trade centered in Guinea and devastated the coast morally, socially, and physically. European rum and fire-arms were traded for human beings, and it was not until 1787 that any measures were taken to counteract this terrible scourge. In that year the idea arose of repatriating stolen Negroes on the coast and establishing civilized centers to supplant the slave trade. About four hundred Negroes from England were sent to Sierra Leone, to whom the promoters considerately added sixty white prostitutes as wives.

-- 66 --
The climate on the low coast, however, was so deadly that new recruits were soon needed.

An American Negro, Thomas Peters, who had served as sergeant under Sir Henry Clinton in the British army in America, went to England seeking an allotment of land for his fellows. The Sierra Leone Company welcomed him and offered free passage and land in Sierra Leone to the Negroes of Nova Scotia. As a result fifteen vessels sailed with eleven hundred and ninety Negroes in 1792. Arriving in Africa, they found the chief white man in control there so drunk that he soon died of delirium tremens. John Clarkson, the abolitionist, eventually assumed the lead, founded Freetown, and the colony began its checkered career. Later the colony was saved from insurrection by the exiled maroon Negroes from Jamaica. After 1833, when emancipation in English colonies began, severe measures against the slave trade were possible and the colony began to grow. Today its imports and exports amount to fifteen million dollars a year.

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

The last white governor of Liberia died in 1841 and was succeeded by the first colored governor, Joseph J. Roberts, a Virginian. The total population in 1843 was about twenty-eight hundred and with this as a beginning in 1847 Governor Roberts declared the independence of the state. The recognition of Liberian independence

-- 67 --
by all countries, except the United States, followed in 1849. The United States, not wishing to receive a Negro minister, did not recognize Liberia until the Civil War.

No sooner was the independence of Liberia announced than England and France began a long series of aggressions to limit her territory and sovereignty. A new conception of the role of Africa in European economy was emerging and an independent Negro republic did not fit into it. The English implied promise of independence for Sierra Leone was lost sight of, and the difficulties which Liberia has since encountered are not due to the American Negro immigrant and his ability, as much as to the fact that a free Negro state and European industrial imperialism clashed here in West Africa; and the little Negro state was almost overthrown. Only the intrusion of American capital after the World War saved Liberia from English, French, and German determination to dominate this rich remnant of the continent.

Considerable territory was lost by treaty, and in the effort to get capital in England to develop the rest, Liberia was saddled with a debt of four hundred thousand dollars, of which she received less than one hundred thousand dollars in actual cash. A second effort to redeem the first failure was equally unsuccessful, and international market control and monopoly freight rates brought the Liberians near despair. Finally, the Liberians turned to the United States for capital and protection. As a result the Liberian customs were put under international control and Charles Young, the ranking Negro officer in the United States army, with several colored assistants, was put in charge of the making of roads and drilling a constabulary to keep order in the interior, where "incidents" of tribal disorder, often deliberately incited, were continual excuses for foreign aggression. The debt was consolidated and control of customs was vested in a general receiver appointed by the United States.

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

We must think of the valley of the Congo, with its intricate interlacing

-- 68 --
of water route and jungle of forest, as a vast caldron shut away at first from the African world by known and unknown physical hindrances. It was first penetrated by the tiny red drawfs and afterward horde after horde of tall black men swirled into the valley like a maelstrom, moving usually from north to east and from south to west. The Congo Valley became, therefore, the center of the making of what we know today as the Bantu nations. They are not a unified people, but a congeries of tribes of considerable physical diversity, united by the compelling bond of language and other customs imposed on the conquered by invading conquerors.

The history of these invasions we must today largely imagine. Between two and three thousand years ago the wilder tribes of Negroes began to move out of the region south or southeast of Lake Chad. This was always a land of shadows and legends, where fearful cannibals dwelt and where no Egyptian, Ethiopian or Sudanese armies dared to go. It is possible, however, that pressure from civilization in the Nile Valley and rising culture around Lake Chad was at this time reinforced by expansion of the Yoruba-Benin culture on the West Coast. Perhaps, too, developing culture around the Great Lakes in the east beckoned, or the riotous fertility of the Congo valleys became known. At any rate the movement commenced, now by slow stages, now in wild forays.

There may have been a preliminary movement from east to west to the Gulf of Guinea. The main movement later, however, was eastward, skirting the Congo forests and passing down by the Victoria Nyanza and Lake Tanganyika. Here two paths beckoned: the lakes and the sea to the east, the Congo to the west. A great stream of men swept toward the ocean and, dividing, turned northward and fought its way down the Nile Valley and into the Abyssinian highlands; another branch turned south and approached the Zambesi, where we shall meet it again. Another horde of invaders turned west-ward and entered the valley of the Congo in three columns. The northern column moved along the Lualaba and Congo Rivers to the Cameroons; the second column became the industrial and state-building Luba and Lunda peoples in the southern Congo Valley and Angola; while the third column moved into Damaraland and mingled with Bushman and Hottentot.

-- 69 --

The kingdom of Loango lay between Cape Lopez and the mouth of the Congo River. East of Loango and northwest of the Congo was the kingdom of Ansika, whose inhabitants were the Bateke. The kingdom of Lunda extended into the valley of the Kasai and the Zambesi. This kingdom was the realm of Mwata-Yanvo. Between this kingdom and the Monomotapa on the middle Zambesi were the Barotse; and north of that, the Katanga. The Ba-Luba were found northwest of Lake Tanganyika and east of that lake was the realm of the Wanyamwezi. North of Lake Victoria was Uganda. Most of these kingdoms have been preserved even to our day.

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

Against these intruders there was but one defense, the State. State building was thus forced on the Congo Valley. How early it started we cannot say, but when the Portuguese arrived in the fifteenth century there had existed for centuries a large state among the Ba-Congo, with its capital at the city now known as San Salvador. This Kingdom of Congo dates back to the fourteenth century and extended over modern Angola as far east as the Kasai and Upper Zambesi Rivers.

The Negro Mfumu, or emperor, was eventually induced to accept Christianity. His sons and many young Negroes of high birth were taken to Portugal to be educated. There several were raised to the Catholic priesthood and one became bishop; others distinguished themselves at the universities. Thus suddenly there arose a Catholic kingdom south of the valley of the Congo, which lasted three centuries, but was partially overthrown by invading barbarians from the interior in the seventeenth century. A king of Congo still reigns as pensioner of Portugal, and on the coast today are the remains of the kingdom in the civilized blacks and mulattoes, who are intelligent traders and boat builders. 24

-- 70 --

The original Bushongo stock belongs to the Ba-Luba family, which extends from the Kasai River to Lake Nyasa and from the Sankuro River to Lake Bangweulu. A race of roving warriors or hunters came from the north and established a domination over the Ba-Luba. These Sudanese conquerors gave political security under which artistic gifts were encouraged and allowed to develop. One of their greatest kings, Shamba Bolongongo (about 1600), before his accession traveled for years in the west and visited among other places the kingdom of Congo where Ntotila, king of Congo, was reigning. The pomp and ceremonial of this country greatly impressed Shamba either because of this actual visit or from reports of embassies. Long before 1700 the greatest of Congo kingdoms was thus reflected in central Africa.

One of the remarkable characteristics of the Bushongo is the organization of its national council, which contains representatives of various arts and crafts. Trade representation is not usual among the Bantu. Torday thinks that this representation of trades and crafts comes from the Kingdom of Congo. There originally every clan had its special crafts, such as weavers, palm wine-makers, potters, smiths. In common they had only agriculture, the women's share; and hunting and fishing, the men's. Every chief of a clan who lived was not only the representative of a territorial division, but also voiced the wishes of some particular art or craft in the council of the king.

The Bushongo learned the use of the loom, as well as the arts of damask weaving, embroidery, and pile-cloth making from the Bapende. The use of the loom in Africa reached the coast after its use inland had become general. Velvets, brocades, satins, taffetas, and damasks were imported to Congo by those great traders, the Bateke.

"It seems to be fairly well established that peaceful penetration of Central Africa from the West Coast, particularly from the Kingdom of Congo, had begun quite early in the seventeenth century. As far as Bushongo is concerned, somewhere between 1600 and 1614, it must have fallen under the spell of Congo." 25

The Luba-Lunda people to the eastward had founded Katanga and other states, and in the sixteenth century the larger and more ambitious realm of the Mwata Yanvo. The last of the fourteen rulers of this line was feudal lord of about three hundred chiefs, who paid

-- 71 --
him tribute in ivory, skins, corn, cloth and salt. This included about one hundred thousand square miles and two million or more inhabitants. Eventually this state became torn by internal strife and revolt, especially by attacks from the south across the Congo-Zambesi divide. Farther north, among the Ba-Lolo and the Ba-Songo, the village policy persisted but the cannibals of the northeast pressed down on the more settled tribes. The result was a curious blending of war and industry, artistic tastes and savage customs.

The organized slave trade of the Arabs penetrated the Congo Valley in the sixteenth century and soon was aiding all the forces of unrest and turmoil. Industry was deranged and many tribes forced to take refuge in caves and other hiding places. Here, as on the West Coast, disintegration and retrogression followed, for as the American traffic lessened, the Arabian traffic increased.

In following the history of human development on the Guinea Coast and in the Congo Valley one cannot but feel, as elsewhere in Africa, that the outcome was not simply a matter of racial ability or natural human development; on the other hand, it is clear that the impact of a great movement which initiated the Industrial Revolution in Europe and started the hegemony of the white race over the world was accomplished at the expense of human culture in West Africa. Further, in the Congo Valley efforts at integration, civilization and state building crowded upon each other. There seemed no lack of human ability and ingenuity but there was rivalry and conquest and the intrusion of elements from other parts of Africa pouring in like waves, started by upheavals in the Sudan and on the West Coast. Finally there came to the Congo not simply a slave trade quite as destructive as the American traffic, but also the new economic imperialism of Africa built on American slavery and destined to build a new agricultural and industrial slavery in Africa.

-- 72 --

Chapter 5: From the Great Lakes to the Cape
THE earliest inhabitants of the land around the Great Lakes were apparently of the Bushman or Hottentot type of Negro. These were gradually pushed southward and westward by the intrusion of the Nilotic Negroes. The Nilotic Negroes early became great traders in ivory, gold, leopard skins, gums, beasts, birds, and slaves, and they opened up systematic trade between Egypt and the Great Lakes. From these and Sudanese tribes were gradually formed the Bantu.

The migration of the Bantu is the first clearly defined Negro mass movement of modern times. As we have shown, they began to move southward at least a thousand years before Christ, skirting the Congo forests and wandering along the Great Lakes and down to the Zambesi. Inland among the Bantu arose before the tenth century the line of rulers called the Monomotapa, among the Makalanga, Matabele and Mashona. Their state was very extensive. Map makers of the seventeenth century outlined it as stretching from the Zambesi to the Fish River. Its territory ran seven hundred and fifty miles inland along the south bank of the Zambesi and was approximately the size of Mexico. It was strongly organized, with feudatory allied states, and carried on an extensive commerce by means of the traders on the coast. The kings were converted to nominal Christianity by the Portuguese.

"Monomotapa," said Professor Frobenius, "was undoubtedly a very great kingdom, and from documents which are now in our possession it is apparent that its rulers wielded great power. . . . The Kings and Emperors of Monomotapa used to observe very curious customs. The King was very powerful, and conducted courts of justice

-- 73 --
and sacrifice in the spring and at harvest time. Every seventh year, however, he was killed by the people, and a new King was crowned. This is a very old custom, which was observed on the borders of the Indian Ocean. . . . The name itself means `Prince of the Mine,' for the area was a great mineral center, from which much gold and many rubies and diamonds were apparently extracted long before man had learned to use stones and metals."

The history of the social development here is not known certainly, but from what we do know we may reconstruct the situation in this way: the primitive culture of the Hottentots had been replaced by other stronger Negro stocks like the Makalanga until it reached a highly developed stage. Widespread agriculture and mining of gold, silver, and precious stones started a trade that penetrated to Asia and North Africa. This may have been the source of the gold of the Ophir. Doubtless Asiatic elements from Arabia or India penetrated the land and influenced and quickened the Negroes.

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

"There are other mines," writes De Barros 26 in the seventeenth century, "in a district called Toroa, which is otherwise known as the kingdom of Batua, whose ruler is a prince, by name Burrow, a vassal of Benomotapa. This land is near the other which we said consisted of extensive plains, and those ruins are the oldest that are known in that region. They are all in a plain, in the middle of which stands a square fortress, all of dressed stones within and without, well wrought and of marvelous size, without any lime showing the joinings, the

-- 74 --
walls of which are over twenty-five hands thick, but the height is not so great compared to the thickness. And above the gateway of that edifice is an inscription which some Moorish [Arab] traders who were there could not read, nor say what writing it was. All these structures the people of this country call Symbabwe [Zymbabwe], which with them means a court, for every place where Benomotapa stays is so called."

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

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

As usual there have been repeated attempts to find an external and especially an Asiatic origin for this culture. There is no proof of this. How far back this civilization dates it is difficult to say, a great deal depending upon the dating of the Iron Age in South Africa. If it was the same as in the Mediterranean regions, the earliest limit was 1000 B.C.; it might, however, have been earlier, especially if, as seems probable, the use of iron originated in Africa. On the other hand, the culmination of this culture has been placed by some as late as the late Middle Ages.

The balance of authority today leans toward the Bantu origin of these buildings and mines, although it is probable that trade and contact with Asia brought Mongoloid influences and perhaps an Asiatic migration.

-- 75 --

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

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

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

-- 76 --
brought Central Africa into contact with Arabia, India, China and Malaysia.

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

Seventy years later, and about fifty years before the Norman conquest of England, certain Persians settled at Kilwa in East Africa, led by Ali, who had been despised in his land because he was the son of a black Abyssinian slave mother. Kilwa, because of this, eventually became the most important commercial station on the East African coast, and in this and all these settlements a very large mulatto population grew up, so that very soon the whole settlement was indistinguishable in color from the Bantu. From 975 until its capture by the Portuguese in the fifteenth century, forty sovereigns ruled here.

A Semitic trading empire was thus built up by the fourteenth century, composed mainly of people of mixed Negro and Semitic blood. There was much fighting between Persians, Arabs and Kafir and Bantu. Trade went by sea to Asia and India, usually carried by mulattoes.

In 1330 Ibn Batuta visited Kilwa. He found an abundance of ivory and some gold and heard that the inhabitants of Kilwa had gained victories over the Zenji, or Bantu. Kilwa had at that time three hundred mosques and was "built of handsome houses of stone and lime, and very lofty with their windows like those of the Christians; in the same way it has streets, and these houses have terraces, and the wood

-- 77 --
worked in with the masonry, with plenty of gardens, in which there are many fruit trees and much water." 27

Kilwa after a time captured Sofala, seizing it from Magadosho. Eventually Kilwa became mistress of the island of Zanzibar, of Mozambique, and of much other territory. The forty-third ruler of Kilwa after Ali was named Abraham, and he was ruling when the Portuguese arrived. The latter reported that these people cultivated rice and cocoa, built ships, and had considerable commerce with Asia. All the people, of whatever color, were Mohammedans, and the richer were clothed in gorgeous robes of silk and velvet. They traded with the inland Bantus and met numerous tribes, receiving gold, ivory, millet, rice, cattle, poultry, and honey. On the islands, the Asiatics were independent, but on the mainland south of Kilwa the sheiks ruled only their own people, under the overlordship of the Bantus, to whom they were compelled to pay large tribute each year.

The sultans of Sofala and Zanzibar became in time independent of Kilwa. These sultans were not governors of states, but heads of Mohammedan colonies with natives living near. Their principal occupation came at last to be trade in slaves with Negro chiefs. They sent the slaves to the Persian Gulf or sold them to the Portuguese. All the Negro tribes scattered along the east coast were known as the Zendi, hence the name Zanzibar. Vasco da Gama doubled the Cape of Good Hope in 1497 and went north on the east coast as far as India. In the next ten years the Portuguese occupied the Coast and both here and on the West Coast widely intermarried with the natives.

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

So far we have traced the history of the lands into which the southward stream of invading Bantus turned, and have followed them

-- 78 --
to the Limpopo River. We turn now to the lands north from Lake Nyasa. The aboriginal Negroes sustained in prehistoric time, invasion from the northeast by Negroids of a type like the ancient Egyptians and like the modern Gallas, Masai, and Somalis. To these migrations were added attacks from the Nile Negroes to the north and the Bantu invaders from the south. This has led to great differences among the groups of the population and their customs. Some are fierce mountaineers, occupying hilly plateaus six thousand feet above the sea level; others, like the Wa-Swahili, are traders on the coast. There are the Masai, chocolate-colored and frizzly-haired, organized for war and cattle lifting; and Negroids like the Gallas, who, blending with the Bantus, have produced the race of modern Uganda.

It was in this region that the kingdom of Kitwara was founded by the Galla chief, Kintu. About the beginning of the nineteenth century the empire was dismembered, the largest share falling to Uganda. The ensuing history of Uganda is of great interest. When King Mutesa came to the throne in 1862, he found Mohammedan influences in his land and was induced to admit Protestants and Catholics. The Protestants, representing British imperialism, tried to convert the King, and the Catholics, representing French imperialism, tried to make him a Catholic. In the midst of this more Mohammedans appeared, seeking also to convert Mutesa. He refused all these faiths and died a rugged pagan.

He was succeeded by his son Mwanga, who distrusted the whites. He ordered the eastern frontier closed against Europeans and when the Protestant Bishop Hannington attempted to cross in 1885, he had him killed. The Protestants organized against Mwanga and he ordered both Protestants and Catholics away, and the Mohammedans became the power behind the throne. The Protestants withdrew from Buganda into Ankola and organized a united front of Christians against Mohammedans and Mwanga. They captured Mwanga's capital and divided it between Protestants and Catholics. The Mohammedans began to fight back and finally the Protestants appealed to the British East Africa Company. In 1889 the company dispatched a military mission to Uganda which was later joined by Lugard. Open civil war ensued between Catholics and Protestants.

"At the head of a considerable military force, Captain Lugard, of

-- 79 --
the Imperial British East Africa Company (Ibea), penetrated as far as Mengo, the residence of King Mwanga, and forced upon him a treaty of protectorate: then turning against the Catholics, he attacked them on some futile pretext, and drove them into a big island on Lake Victoria. There, around the king and the French missionaries, had gathered for refuge a considerable multitude of men, women, and children. Against this harmless and defenseless population Captain Lugard turned his guns and maxims. He exterminated a large number, and then, continuing his work of destruction, he gave full rein to his troops and adherents, who burnt all the villages and stations of the White Fathers, their churches and their crops." 28

The British Sudanese troops, who under Lugard had carried on the war, afterwards rebelled and had to be disbanded. The Imperial British East Africa Company administered its holdings in Uganda, Kenya and along the East African Coast until 1896, when it withdrew as a governing institution. In 1897 the king, Mwanga, returned from German East Africa with Mohammedan natives and drove out the British garrison from one of their forts. Mwanga was finally defeated in 1899, taken prisoner and deported. Uganda became a British protectorate in 1899.

German East Africa was annexed in 1889 and declared a protectorate. The Germans met revolt after revolt, especially among the southern tribes who resented the hut tax and forced labor. These revolts culminated in a national Maji-Maji in 1905, in which many whites were killed and 12,000 natives were massacred or died of famine.

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

-- 80 --

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

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

The Bushmen suffered most cruelly in the succeeding migrations and conquest of South Africa. They fought desperately in self-defense; they saw their women and children carried into bondage and they themselves hunted like wild beasts. Both savage and civilized men appropriated their land. Still they were brave people. "In this struggle for existence, their bitterest enemies, of whatever shade of color they might be, were forced to make an unqualified acknowledgement of the courage and daring they so invariably exhibited." 29

Here, to a remote corner of the world, where, as one of their number said, they had supposed that the only beings in the world were Bushmen and lions, came a series of invaders. It was the outer ripples of civilization starting far away, the indigenous and external civilizations of Africa beating with great impulse among the Ethiopians, the Egyptian mulattoes, the Sudanese Negroes and West Africans; and driving many tribes southward, the migrants absorbed the settlers of Zymbabwe and later were in turn pushed down upon the primitive

-- 81 --
Bushmen; possibly an earlier mingling of the Bushmen and the Nilotic Negroes gave rise to the Hottentots.

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

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

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

The Dutch were fighting Spain in the sixteenth century and began to trade with the East even before they were independent. The East India Company received a charter in 1602 and established themselves at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652. They found there, toward the west, Bushmen still hunters in the Stone Age; the Hottentots toward the east and Bantu toward the north; but with them they did not come in contact for some time. There was raiding and fighting between the Bushmen and Dutch and the Dutch and the Hottentots. In 1658 came the first of the Hottentot Wars, arising from runaway slaves and cattle raiding. Some West African slaves had been introduced. By 1664 there was much racial intermingling, with resulting mulatto children. Slavery was well established by 1770.

-- 82 --

The Bantu 30 gradually moved into South Africa by way of the Great Lakes. The Makalanga began to press upon the coastland behind Sofala as early as the ninth century and later established the empire of the Monomotapa, mingling possibly with earlier settlers. Late in the sixteenth the Abambo and the Amazimba rushed down upon the Monomotapa and poured into what is now Natal. They were followed by the Barotse and in the first half of the eighteenth century by the Bavenda and Bakwena, who conquered what is now the Transvaal and the Free State and as far south as the Caledon River. The Batlapin and the Barolong drove the Leghoia into the north-eastern Free State and before that the Leghoia had driven other tribes into the Kalihara Desert. Then about 1775 the Ovaherero and the Damaras came into southeast Africa. South of the empire of the Congo and along the ocean arose the state of Mataman, composed of the Herero, Damaras and the Hottentots.

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

The Bechuana, whom the Hottentots first met, were the most advanced of the Negro tribes of Central Africa. They had crossed the Zambesi in the fourteenth or fifteenth century; their government was a sort of feudal system with hereditary chiefs and vassals; they were careful agriculturists, laid out large towns with great regularity, and were the most skilled smiths. They used stone in building, carved on wood, and many of them, too, were keen traders. They seemed to echo the builders of Zymbabwe. These tribes, coming southward, occupied the east central part of South Africa, comprising modern

-- 83 --
Bechuanaland. Apparently they had started from the central lake country somewhere late in the fifteenth century, and by the middle of the eighteenth one of their great chiefs, Tao, met the on-coming Hottentots.

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

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

Thus in the latter part of the eighteenth century there were three main groups of Bantu in the hinterland of Cape Colony. To the north

-- 84 --
were the plateau tribes: Ovaherero and Damaras, blacker and smaller than the rest; and behind them the Ovambo, Batlapin mixed with Bakalahari and Balala and also with Hottentots and Bushmen; Bechuana and Bataung. To the northeast were the highlanders, Barotse, Bavenda and Bakwena, copper-colored to black, with crisp hair and beards, some with flat noses, others with aquiline noses. To the east were the coast tribes who came in contact with the Europeans at the Fish River. 31

The Abambo, and perhaps other tribes, came to be known after their chiefs, Ama-Xosa, Ama-Tembu, Ama-Pondo, Ama-Swazi, etc. They began to push down the coast toward the colony. They chased away the Bushmen and mixed with the Hottentots. The Xosa crossed the Kei River in 1702 and came in contact with the Dutch in cattle barter. About 1775 the Xosa crossed the Fish River. The Bantu were organized into tribes with paramount chiefs and much depended upon the chief and his counselors. There soon rose the inevitable conflict of ideas concerning the ownership of land; the Kafirs had no conception of individual landowning, but simply of crop raising; the Dutch wished individual holding of the land. The land became a problem of frontiers between white and black cattle farmers. A Bantu or "Kafir" war broke out on the eastern frontier in 1779, arising from charges of cattle stealing, shooting, etc. The colonists won in this first war and drove the Xosas back across the Fish River, seizing over 5,000 cattle.

Another Kafir war broke out in 1791, arising again over cattle; the Hottentots fought beside the whites. In 1795, at the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars, nine British warships with troops landed in South Africa and after some fighting took possession. By this time the Hottentots were regarded as free men. Their tribal system had been broken up and most of them had been deprived of their lands. Others together with half breeds were leaving the colony and settling in various localities to the north. The Koks were on the middle Orange Valley and the Namaquas moving south. Thus the Orange Valley swarmed with mulattoes, Hottentots, run-away slaves and white out-laws.

Northeast of them were the oncoming Bantu. There was continual

-- 85 --
bickering and rebellion among these various groups. In 1795 there were in the colony 16,000 Europeans, 17,000 slaves and an unknown number of Hottentots and Bushmen. The Dutch East Indian Company came to an end in 1798 and the Cape Colony was handed back to the new Batavian Republic in 1802 by the English, according to the Treaty of Amiens. The new governor pacified the Hottentots and made them allies against the Xosas.

In 1805 the British came again with sixty-one ships and seized the Cape. At that time there were twenty-five thousand Boers, twenty-five thousand pure and mixed Hottentots, and twenty-five thousand slaves. British settlers began to come. The Xosas were now across the Fish and claiming land. The English began to push them back and establish block houses.

Between 1811 and 1877 there were six Kafir-English wars. One of these in 1818 grew out of the ignorant interference of the English with the Kafir tribal system; then there came a terrible war between 1834 and 1835, followed by the annexation of all the country as far as the Kei River. Intra-tribal fighting began among the Xosa concerning the paramount chieftainship. The English began to offer land for new settlers and Parliament voted money. Some 5,000 British came between 1820 and 1821. From 1823 to 1837 Great Britain took more interest in the colony. The Reform Bill became the law in England in 1832 and slave emancipation was decreed in 1833 by Parliament. The Hottentots and colored persons had been given civil rights in 1828 and the freeing of the slaves was now imminent. Hottentots, Bushmen and other colored persons were given rights to own land in 1828. Rules for the care and education of slaves had been passed in 1823 and there was much negotiation from 1826 to 1834 as to methods of emancipation. Some of the Dutch farmers threatened rebellion. It was arranged that the ex-slaves were to be apprenticed to their former masters for four years after 1834 and compensation was paid, although it was less than had been expected.

Meantime between 1824 and 1834 trouble continued among the Bantu. Chaka had succeeded Dingiswayo. This great Zulu chieftain armed his unmarried warriors with great ox-hide shields and assagais, and arranged them in formation; discipline was stiffened and captains of the regiments chosen arbitrarily. McDonald says, "There has probably

-- 86 --
never been a more perfect system of discipline than that by which Chaka ruled his army and kingdom. At a review, an order might be given in the most unexpected manner, which meant death to hundreds. If the regiment hesitated or dared to remonstrate, so perfect was the discipline and so great the jealousy that another was ready to cut them down. A warrior returning unsuccessful in the main purpose of his expedition shared the same fate. Whoever displeased the king was immediately executed. The traditional courts practically ceased to exist so far as the will and the action of the tyrant was concerned."

With this army Chaka fell on tribe after tribe. He drove some tribes northward through the eastern coastland as far as Lake Nyasa and then rushed down through Natal. Umsilikazi, leader of one of Chaka's regiments, laid waste to the southwestern Transvaal. The Bechuanas fled to the Kalihara Desert, having already suffered under other tribes flying from Chaka. By the time the English came to Port Natal, Chaka was ruling over the whole southeastern seaboard, from the Limpopo River to Cape Colony, including the Orange and Transvaal States and the whole of Natal. Chaka was killed in 1828 and was eventually succeeded by his brother, Dingaan, who reigned twelve years.

The Portuguese in East Africa began to lose power in the eighteenth and the first quarter of the nineteenth century and were indulging in the slave trade with the English and American slavers. There were raids and counter raids with the Bantu between 1823 and 1834. The Xosa became restless because of the pressure of the Zulu and of the tribes that were pushing before them. The Tembus moved into Cape Colony and were driven back. There was trouble over cattle in 1834 and the Xosa warriors poured into the colony and ravaged the country for two weeks from Algoa Bay to Somerset East. War ensued, leaving 7,000 white farmers destitute; 455 farms were burnt and many people both white and Hottentots had been killed. Colonial losses were put at 300,000 pounds sterling.

There was a great deal of dissatisfaction and finally, in 1837, numbers of Boer farmers sold their farms and some 2,000 of them crossed the Orange River on the Great Trek. This was a quickening of a steady drift of Europeans and mulattoes beyond the frontiers which

-- 87 --
the colony had tried to proclaim. The Kafirs had stopped migration across the Fish River in 1779 but in 1832 new generations of Boers were demanding land. The Boers regarded the colony as too small and were seeking expansion. The Kafir war cut across the projected trek and when the fighting was finished, the first two organized parties of Boers crossed the Orange in 1835. Then came a severe drought and the Great Trek got into full movement in 1836. The trek was a demand for land and the control of labor.

Dingaan was alarmed at this invasion and killed the main Dutch leader, Retief, and his companions, including his Hottentot retainers, in February, 1838. He allowed the English missionaries to get away but attacked the Boer settlement; but was attacked in turn in December, 1838, and defeated. The river where 3,000 dead were left on the field has since been known as Blood River, and Dingaan's Day is the great Boer holiday. The Boers were now established in Natal and began to push northward into Zululand. They set the Zulus fighting against each other and this ended in the flight and death of Dingaan in 1840. On the border of the colony and between them and the new settlement were two native powers: the Griquas, mulattoes under the Koks, and the Basutos.

In 1846 the War of the Ax broke out on the eastern frontier between the English and the Kafirs, which lasted two or three months but cost a million pounds. In December, 1856, despairing of resistance to the whites, a black prophet arose among the Ama Xosa who advised the wholesale destruction of all Kafir property except weapons, in order that this faith might bring back their dead heroes. The result was that almost a third of the nation perished from hunger. In British Kaffraria alone the Bantu decreased from 105,000 to 37,000 souls.

A demand arose in 1856 for labor in Natal. The Bantu refused to leave their reserves in spite of the hut tax, and imported labor was demanded. England refused to send out convicts or destitute children and finally arrangements were made for East Indians, and at the same time the hut tax for natives was increased and forced labor on the roads required. By 1865, 6,500 Indians were at work in Natal.

There were continued hostilities between the Basutos and the Boers. The Basutos fought with the Zulus, but before Chaka died Moshesh founded the Basuto nation high up in his mountain fastness.

-- 88 --
He was hard beset by both Boers and English and by other Bantu at various times and his own warriors often made forays for cattle. Frequently he appealed to the English authorities at the Cape. Sometimes they aided him, sometimes they did not. At one time the Boers accused his people of stealing cattle, and the English demanded as penalty 10,000 head of cattle and 1,000 horses within three days. Moshesh surrendered only about one-third of this number, which was probably as much as he could do. The English troops started against him and were repulsed at Berea in 1852. The Basuto's chances for thoroughly thrashing the English were good, but at midnight, December 20, 1852, Moshesh wrote to the English governor, "As the object for which you have come is to have a compensation for the Boers, I beg that you will be satisfied with what you have taken. I entreat peace from you." The governor was wise. He marched back home and did not renew the attack. After the British withdrew, the Basutos defended themselves against the Boers, and in 1854 the Boer States and Basutoland were given up by the British.

However, the Indian Mutiny of 1857 began to influence Great Britain's colonial policy. The Boers declared war on the Basutos in 1858 and annexed much of their territory and live stock. In 1859 the British interfered and the boundaries of Basutoland were defined. British aggression led to the Gun War in 1880 and again the British withdrew. Again the Boers and the Basutos fought, but the British drove the Boers away and declared Basutoland a protectorate in 1884. Gold and diamonds began to be discovered in 1886. The famous diamond, the Star of Ethiopia, was found in Griqualand in 1869 and changed hands first for 11,000 pounds sterling and then for 25,000. The English arranged to have Griqualand declared part of Cape Colony.

Dingaan was succeeded by Panda. Under this chief there was something like repose for sixteen years, but in 1856 civil war broke out between his sons, one of whom, Cetewayo, succeeded his father in 1862. He fell into border disputes with the English, and the result was one of the fiercest clashes of Europe and Africa in modern days. The Zulus fought desperately, annihilating at one time a whole detachment and killing the young prince Napoleon. But after all, it was assagais against guns, and the Zulus were finally defeated at Ulundi,

-- 89 --
July 4, 1879. Thereupon Zululand was divided among thirteen semi-independent chiefs and became a British protectorate. Meantime in Portuguese territory south of the Zambesi there arose Gaza, a contemporary and rival of Chaka. His son, Manikus, was deputed by Dingaan, Chaka's successor, to drive out the Portuguese. This Manikus failed to do, and to escape vengeance he migrated north of the Limpopo. Here he established his military kraal in a district thirty-six hundred and fifty feet above the sea and one hundred and twenty miles inland from Sofala. From this place his soldiery nearly succeeded in driving the Portuguese out of East Africa.

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

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

The Boers helped by the Swazi were fighting Bantu tribes again in 1879, when the Ama-Xosa confederacy was finally broken up, and gradually these tribes passed from independence to vassalage to the

-- 90 --
British. Toward the north, Umsilikatsi, who had been driven into Matabeleland by the terrible Chaka in 1828 and defeated by the Dutch in 1837, had finally re-established his headquarters in Rhodesia in 1838. Here he introduced the Zulu military system and terrorized the peaceful and industrious Bechuana populations. Lobengula succeeded Umsilikatsi in 1870 and, realizing that his power was waning, began to retreat northward toward the Zambesi. Warren seized Bechuanaland in time for the Conference at Berlin. Boers and natives fighting together took up arms in 1880 and compelled the British to withdraw after the defeat at Majuba in 1881.

The independence of the Transvaal was guaranteed at the Pretoria Convention, but the British entered the Transvaal again in 1884 on account of gold. In 1889 a charter was issued to the British South Africa Company. The Boer War broke out in September, 1899. The natives gave the English their sympathy and co-operation during the war, but in 1906 there was a revolt against the poll tax on the part of the natives in Natal and a serious rebellion in Zululand under Dinizulu, son of Cetewayo.

In Southwest Africa, Hottentot mulattoes crossing from the Cape caused widespread change. They were strong men and daring fighters and soon became dominant in what is now German Southwest Africa, where they fought fiercely with the Bantu Ova-Hereros. Armed with firearms, these Namakwa Hottentots threatened Portuguese West Africa; but Germany intervened, ostensibly to protect missionaries. By spending millions of dollars Germany exterminated thousands of natives. Berlin made an annual grant of five million dollars to the colony of Southwest Africa and equipped it with railways, roads and arms. There were 12,000 white inhabitants and among them three thousand soldiers and police.

After the South African war Botha became Prime Minister of the Transvaal and, with Smuts, was prominent in the Convention of 1909 which formed the Union of South Africa. The native was practically unmentioned in the constitution of the new state. Imperial safeguards as to his treatment were not reaffirmed, his right to hold office was denied, and his disfranchisement in all provinces except the Cape was confirmed.

Botha became Prime Minister of the Union in 1910 and 1913. His

-- 91 --
first duty was to seek to unite the Dutch and English into one nation, and the next to attack the difficult native problem. However, the World War intervened and Botha found himself facing a rebellion among the Dutch, who favored the Germans. Some 12,000 rebels were in arms, when finally the revolt was quelled. The last leader to surrender was Martiz, who declared that he did not want South Africa ruled "by Englishmen, Niggers and Jews."

In 1915 a diversion was created by the conquest of German Southwest Africa, which was accomplished under Botha's leadership. Nevertheless in the fall, his majority in Parliament was seriously reduced and the Dutch threatened a further uprising. Botha died in 1919. His colleague Hertzog, who had been in Botha's first cabinet in 1910 but was left out of the cabinet in 1913, had formed the National Party. The National Party sent a delegation to the peace conference asking independence for South Africa. Smuts tried to incorporate Southern Rhodesia so as to increase his political power against Boer nationalism and labor demands, but the Rhodesians feared the trends in the Union: the possible influx of poor whites, and the drawing off of their native labor; in 1922, Southern Rhodesia refused to enter the union. Smuts was overthrown in the election of 1924, and Hertzog came to power.

Thus we have, between the years 1400 and 1900, successive waves when Bushmen, Hottentot, Bantu, Dutch and English appear in succession at Land's End. In the latter part of the eighteenth century we have the clash of the Hottentots and Bechuana, followed in the nineteenth century by the terrible wars of Chaka, the Kafirs, and Matabele. All of this history is complicated and obscured by lack of exact knowledge of tribal relations and movements. Finally, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, we see the gradual subjection of the Kafir-Zulus and the Bechuana under the English and the subjugation of the Dutch. Later the Dutch became the paramount element in the English colony and achieved political independence under the economic overlordship of English investors. The resulting racial and social problems in South Africa are of great intricacy. With significant symbolism, the ship of the Flying Dutchman still beats back and forth about the Cape on its endless quest.

-- 92 --

Chapter 6: The Culture of Africa
THE new anthropology is beginning to give us a rational and scientific picture of primitive man and so-called backward peoples, to replace the legends and assumptions of other days. If we could have a scientific study of mankind in Africa without economic axes to grind, without the necessity of proving race superiority, without religious conversion or compulsions of any kind or exaggerated consciousness of color; if we could have the known facts of history set down without bias and the unknown studied without propaganda, we might come to know much better not only Africa but Europe and America and human nature in general. No attempt has been made to summarize adequately the rich material concerning primitive Africa recently gathered. Its wide extent, intricacy of detail and inevitable gaps and contradictions call for time, thought and much further study. But the beginnings made are of great value.

It is, of course, easy to exaggerate the cultural gifts of any particular people; or, as is more common in the case of Africa, to underrate plain evidence and interpret all difference as inferiority. Even backwardness in a human group is a purely relative term with no absolute significance. The "backward" races of the Age of Pericles included most of the world's leading peoples today; and the cultural space between West Africa and England is nothing compared with that between the New Empire of Egypt and Rome. There is no scientific explanation of the rate and distribution of human progress. What the facts concerning the culture of Africa begin to tell us is simply that

-- 93 --
here we have a normal human stock whose development has been conditioned by certain physical and social factors.

The physical factors are of great importance: the comparative inaccessibility of the continent from without, contrasted with the ease of communication within, except the barriers of the deserts and the jungles. Three principal zones of habitation appear: first, the steppes and deserts around the Sahara in the north and the Kalahari Desert in the south; second, the grassy highlands bordering the Great Lakes and connecting these two regions; third, the forests and rivers of Central and West Africa. In the deserts are the nomads, and the Pygmies are in the forest fastnesses. Herdsmen and their cattle cover the steppes and highlands, save where the tsetse fly prevents. In the open forests and grassy highlands are the agriculturists.

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

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

Starting with agriculture, we learn that "among all the great groups of the `natural' races, the Negroes are the best and keenest tillers of the ground. A minority despise agriculture and breed cattle; many

-- 94 --
combine both occupations. Among the genuine tillers the whole life of the family is taken up in agriculture, and hence the months are by preference called after the operations which they demand. Constant clearing changes forests to fields, and the ground is manured with the ashes of the burnt thicket. In the middle of the field rise the light watch-towers, from which a watchman scares grain-eating birds and other thieves. An African cultivated landscape is incomplete without barns. The rapidity with which, when newly imported, the most varied forms of cultivation spread in Africa, says much for the attention which is devoted to this branch of economy. Industries, again, which may be called agricultural, like the preparation of meal from millet and other crops, also from cassava, the fabrication of fermented drinks from grain, or the manufacture of cotton, are widely known and sedulously fostered." 32

Bücher reminds us of the deep impression made upon travelers when they sight suddenly the well-attended fields of the natives on emerging from the primeval forests: "In the more thickly populated parts of Africa these fields often stretch for many a mile, and the assiduous care of the Negro women shines in all the brighter light when we consider the insecurity of life, the constant feuds and pillages, in which no one knows whether he will in the end be able to harvest what he has sown. Livingstone gives somewhere a graphic description of the devastations wrought by slave hunts; the people lying about slain, the dwellings demolished; in the fields, however, the grain was ripening and there was none to harvest it." 33

Sheep, goats, and chickens are domestic animals all over Africa, and Von Franzius considers Africa the home of the house cattle and the Negro as the original tamer. Northeastern Africa especially is noted for agriculture, cattle raising and fruit culture. In the eastern Sudan and among the great Bantu tribes, extending from the Sudan down toward the south, cattle are evidences of wealth; one tribe, for instance, having so many oxen that each village had ten or twelve thousand head. Lenz (1884), Bouet-Williamez (1848), Hecquard (1854), and Baker (1868) all bear witness to this, and Schweinfurth (1878) tells us of great cattle parks and of numerous agricultural and cattle-raising

-- 95 --
tribes. Von der Decken (1859-61) described the paradise of the dwellers about Kilimanjaro -- the bananas, fruit, beans and peas, cattle raising with stall feed, the fertilizing of the fields, and irrigation. The Negroid Gallas have seven or eight cattle to each inhabitant. Livingstone bears witness to the busy cattle raising of the Bantus and Kafirs. Hulub (1881) and Chapman (1868) tell of agriculture and fruit raising in South Africa. Shutt (1884) found the tribes in the southwestern basin of the Congo with sheep, swine, goats, and cattle. On this agricultural and cattle-raising economic foundation has arisen the organized industry of the artisan, the trader, and the manufacturer.

While the Pygmies, still living in the age of wood, make no iron or stone implements, they seem to know how to make bark cloth and fiber baskets and simple outfits for hunting and fishing. Among the Bushmen the art of making weapons and working in hides is quite common. The Hottentots are further advanced in the industrial arts, being well versed in the manufacture of clothing, weapons, and utensils. In the dressing of skins and furs, as well as in the plaiting of cords and the weaving of mats, we find evidences of their workmanship. In addition they are good workers in iron and copper, using the sheep-skin bellows for this purpose. The Ashantis of the Gold Coast know how to make "cotton fabrics, turn and glaze earthenware, forge iron, fabricate instruments and arms, embroider rugs and carpets, and set gold and precious stones." 34

Among the people of the banana zone we find rough basket work, coarse pottery, grass cloth, and spoons made of wood and ivory. The people of the millet zone, because of uncertain agricultural resources, quite generally turn to manufacturing. Charcoal is prepared by the smiths, iron is smelted, and numerous implements are manufactured. Among them we find axes, hatchets, hoes, knives, nails, scythes, and other hardware. Cloaks, shoes, sandals, shields, and water and oil vessels are made from leather which the natives have dressed. Soap is manufactured in the Bautschi district, glass is made, formed, and colored by the people of Nupeland, and in almost every city, cotton is spun and woven and dyed. Barth tells us that the weaving of cotton

-- 96 --
was known in the Sudan as early as the eleventh century. There was also extensive manufacture of wooden ware, tools, implements, and utensils.

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

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

In the Congo Valley the invaders settled in villages, absorbed such indigenous inhabitants as they found or drove them deeper into the forest; and immediately began to develop industry and political organization.

-- 97 --
They became skilled agriculturists, raising in some localities a profusion of cereals, fruit, and vegetables such as manioc, maize, yams, sweet potatoes, ground nuts, sorghum, gourds, beans, peas, bananas, and plantains. Everywhere they showed skill in mining and the welding of iron, copper, and other metals. They made weapons, wire and ingots, cloth, and pottery. A widespread system of trade arose. Some tribes extracted rubber from the talamba root; others had remarkable breeds of fowl and cattle, and still others divided their people by crafts into farmers, smiths, boatbuilders, warriors, cabinet-makers and armorers. Women here and there took part in public assemblies and were rulers in some cases. Large towns were built, some of which required hours to traverse from end to end. Many tribes developed intelligence of a high order. Wissmann called the Ba-Luba, "a nation of thinkers." Bateman found them "thoroughly and unimpeachably honest, brave to foolhardiness, and faithful to each other and to their superiors." 35

Kafirs and Zulus, in the extreme south, are good smiths, and the latter melt copper and tin together and draw wire from it, according to Kranz (1880). West of the Great Lakes, Stanley (1871) found wonderful examples of smith work: figures worked out of brass and much work in copper. Cameron (1878) saw vases made near Lake Tanganyika which reminded him of the amphorae in the villa of Diomedes, Pompeii. Horn (1882) praises tribes here for iron and copper work. Livingstone (1871) passed thirty smelting houses in one journey, and Cameron came across bellows with valves, and tribes who used knives in eating. He found tribes which no Europeans had ever visited, who made ingots of copper in the form of the St. Andrew's cross, which circulated even to the coast.

In the southern Congo basin, iron and copper are worked; also wood and ivory carving and pottery making are pursued. In equatorial West Africa, Lenz and Du Chaillu (1861) found ironworkers with charcoal, and also carvers of bone and ivory. Near Cape Lopez, Hübbe-Schleiden found tribes making ivory needles inlaid with ebony. Wilson (1856) found natives in West Africa who could repair American watches.

Gold Coast Negroes make gold rings and chains, forming the metal

-- 98 --
into all kinds of forms. Soyaux says, "The works in relief which natives of Lower Guinea carve with their own knives out of ivory and hippopotamus teeth, are really entitled to be called works of art; and many wooden figures of fetishes in the Ethnographical Museum of Berlin show some understanding of the proportions of the human body." Great Bassam is called by Hecquard the "Fatherland of Smiths." The Mandingo in the northwest are remarkable workers in iron, silver, and gold, we are told by Mungo Park (1800); while there is a mass of testimony as to the work in the northwest of Africa in gold, tin, weaving, and dyeing. Caille found the Negroes in Bambana manufacturing gunpowder (1824-28), and the Hausa make soap; so, too, Negroes in Uganda and other parts made guns after seeing European models.

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

"The native arts and crafts of Benin, in comparison with those of the Yoruba towns, are still in a highly flourishing condition; the wood-carvers in particular were fully occupied. Again and again I came across altars for ancestor worship, images, carved doors, etc., which have been made during the last few score years. They show a wealth of pagan artistic skill of high order which is most impressive, especially in contrast with the stagnation at such places as Ibadan and Ife; and is even more astonishing, as Benin was overwhelmed by a catastrophe from which one might have expected that it would never recover. A British punitive expedition conquered the city and dethroned the king in 1897 and an extensive fire burnt down the whole place. At this time most of the Benin bronze work came to Europe; of the older products only a few were left in their original home. Consequently., the art of new Benin has been built up again on a tabula rasa. But the work of these forty years is plentiful enough. One has the impression that Benin is determined to make good the colossal damage that was done to it." 36

-- 99 --

"The ars artium, however, of Negro Africa is the use of iron. The question of the origin of the art of iron-smelting is now being treated in detail by ethnologists, and, while general agreement has not been reached, the mass of evidence so far disclosed has convinced eminent men of science like Boas and Von Luschan that the smelting of iron was first discovered by the African Negroes, from whom, by way of Egypt and Asia Minor, this art made its way into Europe and the rest of the Old World." 37

Gabriel de Mortillet (1883) declared Negroes the only iron users among primitive people. Some would, therefore, argue that the Negro learned it from other folk, but Andrée declares that the Negro developed his own "Iron Kingdom."

Boas says, "It seems likely that at a time when the European was still satisfied with rude stone tools, the African had invented or adopted the art of smelting iron. Consider for a moment what this invention has meant for the advance of the human race. As long as the hammer, knife, saw, drill, the spade, and the hoe had to be chipped out of stone, or had to be made of shell or hard wood, effective industrial work was not impossible, but difficult. A great progress was made when copper found in large nuggets was hammered out into tools and later on shaped by melting; and when bronze was introduced; but the true advancement of industrial life did not begin until the hard iron was discovered. It seems not unlikely that the people who made the marvelous discovery of reducing iron ores by smelting were the African Negroes. Neither ancient Europe, nor ancient western Asia, nor ancient China knew iron, and everything points to its introduction from Africa. At the time of the great African discoveries toward the end of the past century, the trade of the blacksmiths was found all over Africa, from north to south and from east to west. With his simple bellows and a charcoal fire he reduced the ore that is found in many parts of the continent and forged implements of great usefulness and beauty." 38

Torday has argued, "I feel convinced by certain arguments that seem to prove to my satisfaction that we are indebted to the Negro for the very keystone of our modern civilization and that we owe

-- 100 --
him the discovery of iron. That iron could be discovered by accident in Africa seems beyond doubt: if this is so in other parts of the world, I am not competent to say. I will only remind you that Schweinfurth and Petherick record the fact that in the northern part of East Africa smelting furnaces are worked without artificial air current and, on the other hand, Stuhlmann and Kollmann found near Victoria Nyanza that the natives simply mixed powdered ore with charcoal and by introduction of air currents obtained the metal. These simple processes make it clear that iron could have been discovered in East or Central Africa. No bronze implements have ever been found in black Africa; had the Africans received iron from the Egyptians, bronze would have preceded this metal and all traces of it would not have disappeared. Black Africa was for a long time an exporter of iron, and even in the twelfth century exports to India and Java are recorded by Idrisi." 39

Much of the industry, arts and skills thus described by travelers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have changed and disappeared today: agriculture has retrograded among many tribes; cattle raising has led to erosion and lean and ill-fed herds; the work of native artisans has been replaced by cheap European manufactures in iron, earthenware and fiber. Sometimes new skills and methods borrowed from the white invaders or imitated have come in to replace the old, sometimes there has been nothing but retrogression; and, on the other hand, in many cases there is entire adaptation of European arts and methods, or of such portions of them as natives are permitted to learn.

The Negro is a born trader. Lenz says, "Our sharpest European merchants, even Jews and Armenians, can learn much of the cunning and trade of the Negroes." We know that the trade between Central Africa and Egypt was in the hands of Negroes for thousands of years, and in the early days the cities of the Sudan and North Africa grew rich through Negro trade. Leo Africanus, writing of Timbuktu in the sixteenth century, said, "It is a wonder to see what plentie of Merchandize is daily brought hither and how costly and

-- 101 --
sumptuous all things be. . . . Here are many shops of artificers and merchants and especially of such as weave linnen and cloth."

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

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

From the Loango coast, Bastian tells of a great number of centers for special products of domestic industry. "Loango excels in mats and fishing baskets, while the carving of elephants' tusks is specially followed in Chilungo. The so-called Mafooka hats with raised patterns are drawn chiefly from the bordering country of Kakongo and Mayyume. In Bakunya are made potter's wares, which are in great demand; in Basanza, excellent swords; in Basundi, especially beautiful ornamented copper rings; on the Congo, clever wood and tablet carvings; in Loango, ornamented clothes and intricately designed mats; in Mayumbe, clothing of finely woven matwork; in Kakongo, embroidered hats and also burnt clay pitchers; and among the Bayakas and Mantetjes, stuffs of woven grass." 40

A native Negro student tells of the development of trade among the Ashanti. "It was a part of the state system of Ashanti to encourage trade. The king once in every forty days, at the Adai custom, distributed among a number of chiefs various sums of gold dust with a charge to turn the same to good account. These chiefs then sent

-- 102 --
down to the coast caravans of tradesmen, some of whom would be their slaves, sometimes some two or three hundred strong, to barter ivory for European goods, or buy such goods with gold dust, which the king obtained from the royal alluvial workings. Down to 1873, a constant stream of Ashanti traders might be seen daily wending their way to the merchants of the coast and back again, yielding more certain wealth and prosperity to the merchants of the Gold Coast and Great Britain than may be expected for some time yet to come from the mining industry and railway development put together. The trade chiefs would, in due time, render a faithful account to the king's stewards, being allowed to retain a fair portion of the profit. In the king's household, too, he would have special men who directly traded for him. Important chiefs carried on the same system of trading with the coast as did the king. Thus every member of the state, from the king downward, took an active interest in the promotion of trade and in the keeping open of trade routes into the interior." 41

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

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

-- 103 --
`Come to the market place.' The crowd gives confidence to individuals and the inviolability of the visitor to the market, and of the market itself, looks like an idea of justice consecrated by long practice. Does not this remind us of the old Germanic `market place'?" 42

Of the social organization of Negroes, we are just beginning to have scientific study, and no adequate summary of the studies already made and making is available; but some observations of travelers and observers may be quoted for what they are worth. Beginning with the Negro family and social life, we find, as among all primitive peoples, polygamy and marriage by actual or simulated purchase. Out of the family develops the typical African village organization, which is thus described in Ashanti by a native Gold Coast writer: "The headman, as his name implies, is the head of a village community, a ward in a township, or of a family. His position is important inasmuch as he has directly to deal with the composite elements of the general bulk of the people.

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

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

-- 104 --
would the mothers of the Gold Coast and Ashanti become by judicious training upon native lines.

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

"The headman is naturally an important member of his company and often is a captain thereof. When he combines the two offices of headman and captain, he renders to the community a very important service. For in times of war, where the members of the ward would not serve cordially under a stranger, they would in all cases face any danger with their own kinsman as their leader. The headman is always succeeded by his uterine brother, cousin, or nephew -- the line of succession, that is to say, following the customary law." 43

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

In general, among the African clans, the idea of private property

-- 105 --
was but imperfectly developed and never included land. The main mass of visible wealth belonged to the family and clan rather than to the individual; only in the matter of weapons and ornaments was exclusive private ownership generally recognized.

The government, vested in fathers and chiefs, varied in different tribes from absolute despotism to limited monarchies, almost republican. Viewing the Basuto National Assembly or Pitso in South Africa, Lord Bryce wrote, "The resemblance to the primary assemblies of the early peoples of Europe is close enough to add another to the arguments which discredit the theory that there is any such thing as an Aryan type of institution." 44

Of the larger political developments of the Negro, much has already been said on the history of Ethiopia, the Sudanese kingdoms and the central and southern African tribes. A word may be added on the development of cities. Yoruba forms one of the three city groups of West Africa; another is around Timbuktu, and a third in the Hausa states. The Sudanese cities have from five to fifteen hundred towns, while the Yoruba cities have one hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants and more. The Hausa cities are many of them important, but few are as large as the Yoruba cities and they lie farther apart. All three centers, however, are connected with the Niger, and the group nearest the coast -- that is, the Yoruba cities -- has the greatest number of towns, the most developed architectural styles, and the oldest institutions.

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

While women are sold into marriage throughout Africa, nevertheless their status is far removed from slavery. In the first place, the tracing of relationships through the female line, which is all but universal in Africa, gives the mother great influence. Parental affection

-- 106 --
is very strong, and throughout Negro Africa the mother is the most influential councilor, even in cases of tyrants like Chaka or Mutesa.

"No mother can love more tenderly or be more deeply beloved than the Negro mother. `Everywhere in Africa,' writes Mungo Park, `I have noticed that no greater affront can be offered a Negro than insulting his mother.' `Strike me,' cried a Mandingo to his enemy, `but revile not my mother.' The Herero swears `By my mother's tears.' The Angola Negroes have a saying, `As a mist lingers on the swamps, so lingers the love of father and mother.'" 45

Black queens have often ruled African tribes. Among the Ba-Lolo, we were told, women take part in public assemblies where all-important questions are discussed.

Close knit with the family and social organization comes the religious life of the Negro. The religion of Africa is the universal animism or fetishism of primitive peoples, rising to polytheism and approaching monotheism chiefly, but not wholly, as a result of Christian and Islamic missions. Of fetishism there is much misapprehension. It is not mere senseless degradation. It is a philosophy of life. Among primitive Negroes there can be, as Miss Kingsley reminds us, no such divorce of religion from practical life as is common in civilized lands. Religion is life, and fetish an expression of the practical recognition of the dominant natural forces which surround the Negro. To him all the world is spirit. Miss Kingsley says, "If you want, for example, to understand the position of man in nature according to fetish, there is, as far as I know, no clearer statement of it made than is made by Goethe in his superb `Prometheus.' 46 Fetish is a severely logical way of accounting for the world in terms of good and malignant spirits.

"It is this power of being able logically to account for everything that is, I believe, at the back of the tremendous permanency of fetish in Africa, and the cause of many of the relapses into it by Africans converted to other religions; it is also the explanation of the fact that white men who live in the districts where death and danger are everyday affairs, under a grim pall of boredom, are liable to believe in fetish, though ashamed of so doing. For the African, whose mind

-- 107 --
has been soaked in fetish during his early and most impressionable years, the voice of fetish is almost irresistible when affliction comes to him." 47

Ellis tells us of the Ewe people, who believe that men and all nature have the indwelling "Kra," which is immortal; that the man himself after death may exist as a ghost, which is often conceived of as departed from the "Kra," a shadowy continuing of the man. Bryce, speaking of the Kafirs of South Africa, says, "To the Kafirs, as to the most savage races, the world was full of spirits -- spirits of the rivers, the mountains, and the woods. Most important were the ghosts of the dead, who had power to injure or help the living, and who were, therefore, propitiated by offerings at stated periods, as well as on occasions when their aid was especially desired. This kind of worship, the worship once most generally diffused throughout the world, and which held its ground among the Greeks and Italians in the most flourishing period of ancient civilization, as it does in China and Japan today, was, and is, virtually the religion of the Kafirs." 48

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

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

In the religious mythology of black West Africa, Shango, the

-- 108 --
Yoruba God of Thunder, is another legend of a dying divinity. He was the mightiest man born of the All-Mother in Ife and soars above the legend of Thor and Jahveh. "He is the Hurler of thunderbolts, the Lord of the Storm, the God who burns down compounds and cities, the Render of trees and the Slayer of men; cruel and savage, yet splendid and beneficent in his unbridled action. For the floods which he pours from the lowering welkin give life to the soil that is parched and gladden the fields with fertility. And, therefore, mankind fear him, yet love him."

The basis of Egyptian religion was "of a purely Nigritian character," 49 and, in its developed form, Sudanese tribal gods were invoked and venerated by the priest. In Upper Egypt, near the confines of Ethiopia, paintings repeatedly represent black priests conferring on red Egyptian priests the instruments and symbols of priesthood. In the Sudan today, Frobenius distinguishes four principal religions: first, earthly ancestor worship; next, the social cosmogony of the Atlantic races; third, the religion of the Bori, and fourth, Islam. The Bori religion spreads from Nubia as far as the Hausa, and from Lake Chad in the Niger as far as the Yoruba. It is the religion of possession and has been connected by some with Asiatic influences.

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

Christianity early entered Africa; indeed, as Mommsen says, "It was through Africa that Christianity became the religion of the world. Tertullian and Cyprian were from Carthage, Arnobius from Sicca Veneria; Lactantius, and probably in like manner, Minucius

-- 109 --
Felix, in spite of their Latin names, were natives of Africa, and not less so Augustine. In Africa the Church found its most zealous confessors of the faith and its most gifted defenders." 50

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

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

On the other hand and in connection with religious customs, there can be no question as to the outcropping of cruelty and oppression in Africa. Slavery was widespread in Africa and domestic slavery still persists to some extent. Whether or not slavery was more common in Africa than elsewhere cannot be stated dogmatically and may be doubted; but it certainly was common and widespread. The slave trade which supplied domestic slaves was an outcome of intertribal wars, until a foreign demand arose which raised an unusual economic problem and led to stupendous results which we shall treat in another chapter.

-- 110 --

Out of fetish and witchcraft, out of pestilence, conquest and political change grew, especially in the jungle and the fever coast of West Africa, many terrible customs: human sacrifice, in some cases and times on a large scale; witch-hunting, cannibalism and cruel punishments. Compared with European and Asiatic civilization these occurrences are not altogether unusual. "It has been estimated that in England between 1170 and 1783 at least 50,000 persons suffered death at Tyburn alone. English criminals during that time were branded, hanged, drawn and quartered and burned alive." Nevertheless the persistence of these customs in some parts of Africa and especially often among otherwise gifted and progressive folk, argues for some special reasons.

The widespread system of human sacrifice on the West Coast of Africa was an arresting and sinister phenomenon. It was not, however, deliberate cruelty, but part of an age-old belief in the spirit world and the eternity of royal power. It provided the king after death not only with wives but servants in the spirit world, and renewed these servants from time to time. With this also went appeasement of evil spirits and punishment of crime.

There is no doubt that this custom waxed and waned with various influences. The foreign slave trade increased ruthless cruelty and provided victims, while on the other hand strong kings like Gezo of Dahomey limited the custom, if they could not wholly do away with it. Had Ashanti been allowed to consolidate the power of the state, and the slave trade had not interfered with the normal economy, there is no reason to doubt that the artistic sense and industrial technique of the West Coast would gradually have abated these customs. Instead of this, there came the Europeans with distaste for many Negro customs and horror at blood sacrifice, but nevertheless with no purely philanthropic motives; as former Governor Hugh Clifford says:

"There can be no reasonable doubt that, if the British had not interfered, the Ashantis would have extended their empire over all the nations of the Gold Coast; but our disapproval of their invasions were due, in the beginning, not so much to any feeling of pity for their victims, as to resentment at the disturbance to trade which they occasioned. Thus the role of protector of the defenseless was more

-- 111 --
or less inexorably thrust upon us in the interests of our own commerce." 51 It may be that the difficult fight which man in certain areas of Africa has had for physical survival against disease, the fear of wild beast and wilder men, the gloom of the jungle, made human sacrifice and cannibalism a more lasting phenomenon than in cases of most other peoples.

There is general agreement as to the main groups of African languages. They are Bushmen, Bantu, Sudanic and Semitic, and what is probably a combination of the last two, and usually called Hamitic. There is as yet no certainty as to the unity of Sudanic languages and the relation between the Sudanic and the Bantu tongues, nor are we sure just what is meant by the Hamitic languages. We recognize today, in world speech, three kinds of languages: the isolating languages such as the Chinese, where most words are mono-syllables and meaning is conveyed in part by intonation; next the agglutinating languages where formative elements are attached to the roots of words as separable parts; and finally inflectional languages where the formative elements are added to the roots and cannot be separated.

Covering the southern half of Africa are about one hundred and eighty-two Bantu languages in a closely united family. They are agglutinating, and the dominating factor in their structure is inflection by prefixes, the genitive following the governing nouns and the verb with many derivative forms. The Bantu is divided into eleven groups, which include Swahili, Zulu, Herero and Congo. Their "intricacy combined with regularity of structure is found in very few languages." They have sometimes been called Italian in their clarity, and exhibit "a beauty and harmony of euphonic sound hardly to be equaled."

There are about two hundred and sixty-four Sudanic languages, used in a stretch across the continent from the Atlantic to Abyssinia. They are not as unified as the Bantu tongues, as a result of past movements and shiftings of population. Some tongues have perished and others grown up. These languages have, however, certain common likenesses. They are isolating tongues and depend on intonation, have monosyllabic stems, and no grammatic sex distinctions. The genitive

-- 112 --
precedes the thing possessed and the verbal stem is not changed in conjugation. The Sudanic languages are divided into eastern, central and western groups. In the eastern group the largest divisions are the Shilluk, Dinka and Nuer; the central group comprises the Nile-Congo languages, the Ubangi, the Shari and the Niger Cameroons; the western Sudanic group includes various languages of the coast of the Gulf of Guinea like the Ewe, Yoruba, Nube and others, and also the west Atlantic languages, the Mandingo and others.

The inflectional Semitic languages are Arabic, spoken in North Africa and the eastern Sudan, and some of the languages of Abyssinia. There are perhaps in all ten Semitic dialects. There are forty-two languages in Africa which would seem to lie between the Semitic and the other African languages. They include probably ancient Egyptian and today languages spoken by the Galla, the Nandi, the Suk, etc., and also the Berber dialects and perhaps the Hausa. They are called "Hamitic" languages. The Hottentor language of South Africa resembles the Hamitic family. The Bushmen tribes speak languages which can be divided into three groups: southern, central and northern. They are remarkable for the so-called "clicks." No Pygmy language seems to be known.

In general the Negro languages of Africa have a common linguistic sub-stratum in etymology and in many formative elements. Of the languages of Africa, many are spoken over a small area by a few people. Twelve are spoken by a million or more people. "Many Bantu languages and dialects, especially those of the Zulu-Xosa groups, have a quality of music which makes them a delight to listen to, as they roll forth with their trochaic lilt on the smooth, round baritone of the male voices. Nor is the music confined to language. The Bantu obviously share with the Negroes a very marked general musical flair." Other languages like the Swahili may be placed among the more important languages of the world. "Hausa, Ibo, Yoruba, Mossi-Dagomba, Mandingo, Lulua are spoken by millions of people. There are many other purely tribal languages, such as Zulu, Xosa, Suto, Ganda, Nyamwezi, Ruanda, Luo, Zande, Banda, Efik, the Akan stock, Ewe, Mende, each comprising hundreds of thousands of speakers and some of them with a definite expansive tendency. There

-- 113 --
is no inherent reason why such languages should not evolve a literature." 52

Language was reduced to writing among the Egyptians and Ethiopians and to some extent elsewhere in Africa. Over one hundred manuscripts of Ethiopian and Ethiopic-Arabian literature are extant, including a version of the Bible and historical chronicles. The Arabic was used as the written tongue of the Sudan, and Negroland has given us in this tongue many chronicles and other works of black authors. 53 The greatest of these is the Epic of the Sudan (Tarik-es-Soudan). Another is the Tarikh-al-Fettach. In other parts of Africa there were no written languages, but there was, on the other hand, an unusual perfection of oral tradition through bards, and extraordinary efficiency in telegraphy by drum and horn.

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

African art has doubtless received many stimuli from abroad. It has felt the influence of the Arabian, Indian and Persian; a streak of culture has probably come from the South Seas as well as from Europe and the Near East. Nevertheless, African art is as original as any art, and is in the main indigenous, authentic and beautiful. There can be no doubt of the Negro's deep and delicate sense of beauty in form, color, and sound. Soyaux says of African industry, "Whoever denies to them independent invention and individual taste in their work, either shuts his eyes intentionally before perfectly evident facts, or lack of knowledge renders him an incompetent judge." 54 M. Rutot has lately told us how the Negro race brought art and sculpture to prehistoric Europe. The bones of the European Negroids are almost without exception found in company with drawings and sculpture in high and low relief; some of their sculptures, like the Wellendorff "Venus," are unusually well finished for primitive man. So, too, the painting and carving of the Bushmen and their forerunners in South Africa have drawn the admiration of students.

-- 114 --

Schweinfurth, who has preserved for us much of the industrial art of the Negro, speaks of their delight in the production of works of art for the embellishment and convenience of life. Frobenius expressed his astonishment at the originality of the African in the Yoruba temple which he visited. The lofty veranda was divided from the passageway by fantastically carved and colored pillars. On the pillars were sculptured knights, men climbing trees, women, gods, and mythical beings. The dark chamber lying beyond showed a splendid red room with stone hatchets, wooden figures, cowry beads, and jars. The whole picture, the columns carved in colors in front of the colored altar, the old man sitting in the circle of those who reverenced him, the open scaffolding of ninety rafters, made a magnificent impression. 55

To sum up Yoruban civilization, it has been said that "the technical summit of that civilization was reached in the terra-cotta industry, and that the most important achievements in art were not expressed in stone, but in fine clay baked in the furnace; that hollow casting was thoroughly known, too, and practiced by these people; that iron was mainly used for decoration; that, whatever their purpose, they kept their glass beads in stoneware urns within their own locality, and that they manufactured both earthen and glass ware; that the art of weaving was highly developed among them; that the stone monuments, it is true, show some dexterity in handling and are so far instructive, but in other respects evidence a cultural condition insufficiently matured to grasp the utility of stone monumental material; and, above all, that the then great and significant idea of the universe as imaged in the temple was current in those days." 56

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

-- 115 --

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

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

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

"Today the art of Negro Africa has its place of respect among the esthetic traditions of the world. . . . For us its psychological content must always remain in greater part obscure. But, because its qualities have a basic plastic integrity and because we have learned to look at Negro art from this viewpoint, it has finally come within the scope of our enjoyment, even as the art expressions of such other alien cultures as the Mayan, the Chaldaean, and the Chinese." 57

"It is the vitality of the forms of Negro art that should speak to us, the simplification without impoverishment, the unerring emphasis on the essential, the consistent, three-dimensional organization of structural planes in architectonic sequences, the uncompromising truth to material with a seemingly intuitive adaptation of it, and the tension achieved between the idea or emotion expressed through representation and the abstract principles of sculpture. The art of Negro

-- 116 --
Africa is a sculptor's art. As a sculptural tradition in the last century it has had no rival." 58

"The general distinction between native African and European music is this: that European music (since about A.D. 1600) is built on harmony; all other music on pure melody. In fact it is non-European music which has made us remember what pure melody really is." 59

"In African music, three features stand out and have been stressed by all those who have heard Negroes sing: antiphony (the alternate singing of solo and chorus), part-singing, and highly developed rhythm." 60

"The African Negroes are uncommonly gifted for music -- probably, on an average, more so, than the white race. This is clear not only from the high development of African music, especially as regards polyphony and rhythm, but a very curious fact, unparalleled, perhaps, in history, makes it even more evident; namely, the fact that Negro slaves in America and their descendants, abandoning their original musical style, have adapted themselves to that of their white masters and produced a new kind of folk-music in that style. Presumably no other people would have accomplished this." 61

In the life of primitive man, and especially among African Negroes, music and dance have a greater significance than with whites. They do not come under the general headings of Art or Games and serve neither as pastimes nor recreations.

"A short analysis of an African dance will show that its structure is quite different from modern European dancing. Thus when the dance is only a small one, and much more so when several hundreds of persons are taking part in it, it requires a stereotyped form, a prescribed mode of performance, concerted activities, recognized leadership and elaborate organization and regulation." 62

The Negro has been prolific in the invention of musical instruments and has given a new and original music to the western world, not only in the spirituals, but in the "blues" and "rag-time" which

-- 117 --
have launched modern dance music. These are the only kinds of music brought forth in America by immigrants.

Even when we contemplate such revolting survivals of savagery as cannibalism, we cannot jump too quickly at conclusions. Cannibalism is spread over many parts of Negro Africa, yet the very tribes who practice cannibalism show often other traits of industry and power. "These cannibal Bassonga were, according to the types we met with, one of those rare nations of the African interior which can be classed with the most esthetic and skilled, most discreet and intelligent of all those generally known to us as the so-called natural races. Before the Arabic and European invasion they did not dwell in `hamlets,' but in towns with twenty or thirty thousand inhabitants, in towns whose highways were shaded by avenues of splendid palms planted at regular intervals and laid out with the symmetry of colonnades. Their pottery would be fertile in suggestion to every art craftsman in Europe. Their weapons of iron were so perfectly fashioned that no industrial art from abroad could improve upon their workmanship. The iron blades were cunningly ornamented with damascened copper, and the hilts artistically inlaid with the same metal. Moreover, they were most industrious and capable husbandmen, whose careful tillage of the suburbs made them able competitors of any gardener in Europe.

"Their sexual and parental relations evidenced an amount of tact and delicacy of feelings unsurpassed among ourselves, either in the simplicity of the country or the refinements of the town. Originally their political and municipal system was organized on the lines of a representative republic. True, it is on record that these well-governed towns often waged an internecine warfare; but in spite of this it had been their invariable custom from time immemorial, even in times of strife, to keep the trade routes open and to allow their own and foreign merchants to go their ways unharmed. And the commerce of these nations ebbed and flowed along a road of unknown age, running from Itimbiri to Batubenge, about six hundred miles in length. This highway was destroyed by the `missionaries of civilization' from Arabia, only toward the close of the eighteenth century. But even in my own time there were still smiths who knew the names of places along that wonderful trade route driven through the heart of the

-- 118 --
`impenetrable forests of the Congo.' For every scrap of imported iron was carried over it." 63

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

Ceremony and courtesy mark Negro life. Livingstone again and again reminds us of "true African dignity." "When Ilifian men or women salute each other, be it with a plain and easy curtsey (which is here the simplest form adopted), or kneeling down, or throwing oneself upon the ground, or kissing the dust with one's forehead, no matter which, there is yet a deliberateness, a majesty, a dignity, a devoted earnestness in the manner of its doing, which brings to light with every gesture, with every fold of clothing, the deep significance and essential import of every single action. Everyone may, without too greatly straining his attention, notice the very striking precision and weight with which the upper and lower native classes observe these niceties of intercourse." 64

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

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

-- 119 --

Undoubtedly color prejudice in the modern world is the child of the American slave trade and the Cotton Kingdom. Before American slavery became the foundation of a new and world-wide economic development, the trend of human thought was toward recognizing the essential equality of all men, despite obvious differences. Beginning, however, with the second quarter of the nineteenth century and with the recognition of the value of black slave labor, came a determined, even though partially unconscious, effort to prove scientifically the essential inferiority of Africans.

There had been attempts to reduce racial differences to scientific measurement in the eighteenth century. It was at first anthropological and emphasized differences in physical development; and then it leaped to conclusions concerning mental and social achievement. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the new theory of evolution led to studies in comparative anatomy, brain capacity and brain weights; and finally in the twentieth century came the psychological intelligence tests. Today little scientific weight is given to the older anthropological and anatomical studies as determining racial differences or racial superiority, but effort has been centered upon attempts to measure intelligence.

Most of the efforts to measure differences in human intelligence between black and white have been carried out in the United States, which is in some respects unfortunate, because of the natural bias of most of the investigators, due to the history of the Negro problem. Psychological studies and measurements in Africa where the bulk of the Negro race lives have hardly begun. A review of intelligence tests in the United States shows that, first, in most of these investigations the fundamental conditions of measurement and experimentation have not been observed; and, secondly, the tests used have been standardized upon whites in the northern part of the United States while most of the Negroes measured have been from the South where Negro slavery disappeared only two generations ago. The sampling has been faulty either because the groups have been too small or unlike in social status, school training and cultural background.

A questionnaire sent out in 1929-30 and answered by over one hundred and fifty leading psychologists, educationists, sociologists

-- 120 --
and anthropologists in the United States, who had been in the closest contact with the field of measuring racial differences for twenty years or more, showed that over three-fourths of them believed that a fair interpretation of the intelligence tests hitherto made was either inconclusive as to the inherent mental ability of the Negro or showed him to be equal to the whites. 65

Moreover, the fundamental and logical difficulty with all racial comparison is that there is no way of determining just what a race is; how far the characteristics of a given group are inherited; how far they are due to social and physical environment and what biological mixtures have taken place.

"We find, according to Dixon and others, that due to wholesale amalgamation in extremely early times, there are no longer any primary races; for these, if there were such, have been and are now in a state of flux. According to Hooton, the most common of the human races are of the secondary sort and primary races are decidedly rare. Finally, if fertility of inter-breeding is to be considered a criterion, all `breeds of man must be assigned to one group.' In fact one anthropologist, Haddon, regards racial types as an artificial concept." 66

The mulatto hypothesis which assumes that the intermingling of white and black blood produces an offspring of intermediate intelligence has not been sustained. As Herskovits has shown, the result of such unions depends entirely upon the individuals mated and not upon the "race."

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

The average social scientist today is born with so firm and unconscious a belief in the inferiority of darker races that unbiased investigation

-- 121 --
is difficult. Take for instance the study of recruits in the American army during the World War. A larger proportion of Negroes in the South were found fit for service in the army than of whites; and at the same time they were found of inferior mental ability. But the first conclusion was certainly influenced by a desire to send Negroes to the front and a reluctance of white men to go; while the second conclusion was influenced by the desire to keep Negroes from being selected as officers or even put into the fighting ranks but rather relegated as largely as possible to the regiments of stevedores.

The measurements for the most part were done by or under the direction of American army officers whose anti-Negro attitude is well known. The conclusions from these measurements were foregone, and despite the fact that the "Negroes" measured included mulattoes of all degrees, the results were attributed to the "Negro" race. While it was found that Negroes in northern units were inferior in mental ability to whites, it was also found that northern Negroes were in many cases superior to southern whites. Nevertheless, this was not allowed to alter the general conclusion.

The question of individual accomplishment and genius as exhibited by the Negro race is not easy to judge. Not only is our general estimate of what great men have done colored largely by selected facts and unconscious propaganda, but in the case of foreigners and members of alien races their work is quite apt to be forgotten or distorted. Especially in the case of the Negro the fact is that his color is easily forgotten after the deed, and last and always, what is a "Negro"? It is impossible, therefore, to answer the question as to how far genius or unusual ability has appeared in the Negro race, until we are able to determine scientifically just what a "Negro" is, and to prove historically in what degree particular examples of genius belonged to this race.

What we can say, however, today is this: there is no color line in genius; exceptional ability has occurred repeatedly among the darkest of mankind; and we are justified in asserting that if the world of men be divided into three great types by measurable physical and cultural differences, the darkest section has repeatedly given birth to exceptional men in art, religion and government. This we

-- 122 --
can assert, despite the fact that with the modern emphasis put upon the accomplishment of white folk, much that black folk have done has been forgotten or ignored.

If we speak first of black men in whom there is no clear evidence of Caucasic or Mongoloid blood, we have not only the more or less legendary black men of the ancient world like Memnon, Clitus and Eurybates; and writers like Lokman and Aesop himself; but also the fact that the Buddha throughout India, China and Japan is represented often as black with closely curled hair and a large number of his proselyting disciples are shown as black. In Japanese history there is the black Sakanouye Tamuramaro, who subdued the Ainus.

Passing by for the moment the Negroids of Egypt, we cannot forget the unquestioned black folk of distinction: Nefertari, "the most venerated figure in Egyptian history," Queen Mut-em-ua, and the Pharaoh, Ra-Nehesi, with many other blacks in high station.

In ancient Ethiopia there are the black kings of Ethiopia like Taharka, the queens called Candace, and that succession of powerful Negroes who led the world in the seventh and sixth centuries before Christ.

In Arabian and Mohammedan history there are Bilal, the friend of Mohammed; writers like Nosseyeb, the black poet in the Court of Haroun al Raschid; and Al Kenemi at the Court of Almansur in Spain and Ahmed Baba, Sudanese savant. As rulers and warriors, we may remember black rulers of the Sudan like the great Mohammed Askia; Bafur, viceroy of Egypt in the tenth century; Abu'l Hasan Ali, the Black Sultan of Morocco; Mohammed Ahmad, the Madhi; and the black rajahs of India.

In modern days we have Toussaint L'Ouverture and Christophe in Haiti, Chaka and Moshesh in South Africa; Tutu Kwamina and Blyden in West Africa; Tippoo Tip in the Congo; Calemba, one of the kings of the Ba-Luba, "a really princely prince," who, Batemar says, would "amongst any people be a remarkable and indeed in many respects a magnificent man." 67 In Europe we may note Latino, and Amo who taught in the University of Wittenberg; and Hannibal, once commander-in-chief of the Russian army under the Empress Elizabeth.

-- 123 --

In the church we have black saints like Saint Benedict, Blessed Martin of Porres and Benoit of Palermo in the Catholic Church, not to mention reputed black popes and church fathers; Bishop Crowther in the English Church and Alexander Crummell in America.

In Mexico there was Dorantes, the discoverer of the southwestern United States. In the United States Phyllis Wheatley, the poet; Paul Cuffe, Robert Brown Elliot, the politician; Paul Lawrence Dunbar, the poet; Roland Hayes and Paul Robeson.

The list of distinguished black folk with more or less admixture of other types would include in the ancient world great pharaohs like Amen-hotep I and Amen-hotep III, the builder of Luxor; Tahutmes III and many others; and all the mulatto rulers of Ethiopia like Pianky, conqueror and redeemer of Egypt, and Shabaka. The kings and emperors of Abyssinia would come in this list, including Theodore, Menelik II and Haile Selassie; the founders of the Songhay, especially Es-Sadi. There are Tarik ben Zaid, who captured Gibraltar, Almansur the conqueror of North Africa and southern Europe, Yusuf I, the Almoravide, and the rulers of Morocco like Mulai Ismail. Most such mulattoes in ancient and medieval times escaped notice because their color and racial descent was not thought of sufficient importance to emphasize.

Since the African slave trade, while many West Indians and Americans of Negro descent are not so recorded, many others are. There are Dario and Placido, West Indian poets; Bridgewater, the friend of Beethoven; Chevalier Sainte-Georges, knighted by Louis XVI; Gomez, the Spanish painter, and Lislet Geoffroy, a corresponding member of the French Academy; Coleridge-Taylor in England. We have Petion in Haiti; Pushkin, the father of Russian literature; Alexander Dumas, the father of romance; Maceo, the martyr to Cuban independence; several presidents of Brazil, like Pecanha, and Patrocinio, the emancipator; McCoy and Matseliger, distinguished American inventors. In America too we have had Benjamin Banneker, Frederick Douglass; Henry O. Tanner, the painter, and Ira Aldridge, the actor, both of whom had an European reputation; Rillieux, inventor of the sugar vacuum pan; and the Lamberts, Burleigh,

-- 124 --
Rosamond Johnson and Dett, musicians; Booker T. Washington, who was known the world over.

In some cases cited here there has been dispute as to whether the person was really a "Negro" or was really great. Impartial judgment, based on such facts and testimony as are available, seems, however, to confirm the partial catalog given above. Much that is known and proven about persons of this sort has been curiously slurred over and forgotten in modern days. We know, for instance, the Arabian Nights, but almost nothing of the Romance of Antar, a cycle of poems published in Cairo in thirty-two volumes and first introduced to European readers in 1802. The romance is a companion piece to the Arabian Nights and a standard work of Arabia, and is founded on the career of the mulatto son of Sheik Shedad and a black woman. One of Antar's poems was hung in the temple at Mecca among the greatest poems written, that all pilgrims might know and do obeisance to them. Many white men of the highest distinction in Europe and America had Negro blood, but to this day prejudice is too bitter even to mention the fact, while documentary proof is usually impossible. But this was not always so.

Black faces are repeatedly represented in medieval art; among the three kings at the birth of Christ; by the black Virgin Mary and by travelers' stories; by the multitude of brown and black saints pictured in cathedrals like Chartres; especially is Shakespeare's Othello a peculiar case in point. Coleridge says that Shakespeare could not have been so utterly ignorant as to make a barbarian Negro plead royal birth; and Brandes regards it quite unreasonable to suppose that Shakespeare thought of Othello as a Negro. But Alice Werner, the great English student of Africa, says: "There are sufficient indications in the play that Shakespeare had the Negro and not the Arab type in mind; the "thick lips," and the repeated reference to blackness, which cannot be understood of anything but the real African tint. Still more conclusive is Shakespeare's conception of Othello's character: `There is a great-hearted simplicity, a boundless capacity for affection and reverence, in the African character, of which Coleridge would not seem to have had the faintest suspicion.'" Miss Werner reminds us that, "in 1486, the King of Benin sent an Embassy to the King of Portugal, requesting the latter to send Christian

-- 125 --
priests to instruct his people. The Kings of Congo were potentates recognized and treated with by Portugal in Shakespeare's day." "Certainly, Othello on the stage should be black, or rather -- for absolutely black people are in a minority, even in Africa -- some shade of dark brown, like Khama, or Dinuzulu, or Lewanika, or Daudi Chwa of Uganda."

Europe during the Middle Ages had some knowledge of the Sudan and Africa. Melle and Songhay appear on medieval maps. In literature we have many allusions: the mulatto king, Feirifis, was one of Wolfram von Eschenbach's heroes; Prester John furnished endless lore; all show more or less legendary knowledge of what African civilization was at that time doing. A stream of travelers, like Leo Africanus, Ibn Batuta, Idrisi and others, brought continuous reports at least to Mediterranean lands.

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

A word should be added on the scientific study of culture in Africa. Recent trends of investigation have emphasized the study of primitive culture and have led to a wide realization of the essential likenesses in the development of early human culture and emphasis on the fact that difference, in time or method, is no proof of race inferiority or cultural limitations. On the other hand there has been little effort on the part of sociology to follow the lead of anthropology and study Negro groups past and present which have emerged from primitive conditions and achieved a more or less civilized status. The development then of the Negro in the Nile Valley and the Sudan, in West and South Africa is left in strange silence or still surrendered to the unproven assumptions of nineteenth century philosophical history. Administration, on the other hand, assuming that science thus proves Africa has been and is now simply primitive, proceeds to rule on this assumption, to ignore fact and present progress and to pour its contempt on educated and presumptuous "niggers" aping white folk. The call here to scientific sociology and history is loud and imperative.

-- 126 --

Chapter 7: The Trade in Men
THE new thing in the Renaissance was not simply freedom of spirit and body, but a new freedom to destroy freedom; freedom for eager merchants to exploit labor; freedom for white men to make black slaves. The ancient world knew slaves and knew them well; but they were slaves who worked in private and personal service, or in public service like the building of pyramids and making of roads. When such slaves made goods, the goods made them free because men knew the worker and the value of his work and treated him accordingly. But when, in the later fifteenth century, there came slaves, and mainly black slaves, they performed an indirect service. That service became for the most part not personal but labor which made crops, and crops which sold widely in unknown places and in the end promised vaster personal services than previous laborers could directly give.

This then was not mere labor but capitalized labor; labor transmitted to goods and back to services; and the slaves were not laborers of the older sort but a kind of capital goods; and capital, whether in labor or in goods, in men or in crops, was impersonal, inhuman, and a dumb means to mighty ends.

Immediately black slaves became not men but things; and were valued as things are valued, by the demand and supply of their labor force as represented by their bodies. They belonged, it happened, to a race apart, unknown, unfamiliar, because the available supply of people of that race was for the moment cheaper; because religious feuds and political conquest in Africa rendered masses of men homeless and defenseless, while state-building in feudal Europe conserved and protected the peasants. Hence arose a doctrine of race based

-- 127 --
really on economic gain but frantically rationalized in every possible direction. The ancient world knew no races; only families, clans, nations; and degrees and contrasts of culture. The medieval world evolved an ideal of personal worth and freedom for wide groups of men and a dawning belief in humanity as such. Suddenly comes America; the sale of men as goods in Africa; the crops these goodsmen grew; the revolution in industry and commerce; in manufacture and transport; in trade and transformation of goods for magnificent service and power. "The Commercial Revolution of the sixteenth century through the opening of new trade routes to India and America, the development of world markets, and the increased output of silver from the German, Austrian and Mexican mines, made possible the productive use of capital which had heretofore been employed chiefly in military operations, and which resulted in its rapid increase. Great companies flourished and a new class of wealthy merchants arose to vie in luxury not only with the great landed proprietors but even with princes and kings. Many parallels are to be found between this and the Industrial Revolution three centuries later." 68

It was not a mere case of parallelism but of cause and effect: the African slave trade of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries gave birth to the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth. The cry for the freedom of man's spirit became a shriek for freedom in trade and profit. The rise and expansion of the liberal spirit were arrested and diverted by the theory of race, so that black men became black devils or imbeciles to be consumed like cotton and sugar and tobacco, so as to make whiter and nobler men happier.

There are two reasons why the history of Africa is peculiar. Color of skin is not one that was regarded as important before the eighteenth century. "I am black but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem," cries the old Hebrew love song. Cultural backwardness was no reason -- Africa, as compared with Europe, Asia, and America, was not backward before the seventeenth century. It was different, because its problems were different. At times Africa was in advance of the world. But climate: hot sun and flooding rains made Africa a land of desert, jungle, and disease, where culture could indeed start even earlier than in ice-bound Europe, but when, unaided by recent

-- 128 --
discoveries of science, its survival and advance was a hard fight. And finally, and above all, beginning with the fifteenth century and culminating in the eighteenth and nineteenth, mankind in Africa became goods -- became merchandise, became even real estate. Men were bought and sold for private profit and on that profit Europe, by the use of every device of modern science and technique, began to dominate the world.

How did Africans become goods? Why did they submit? Why did the white world fight and scheme and steal to own them? Negroes were physically no weaker than others, if as weak; they were no more submissive. Slavery as an institution is as old as humanity; but never before the Renaissance was the wealth and well-being of so many powerful and intelligent men made squarely dependent not on labor itself but on the buying of labor power. And never before nor since have so many million workers been so helpless before the mass might and concentrated power of greed, helped on by that Industrial Revolution which black slavery began in the sixteenth century and helped to culmination in the nineteenth.

A new and masterful control of the forces of nature evoked a Frankenstein, which Christianity could not guide. But the Renaissance also gave birth to an idea of individual freedom in Europe and emphasized the Christian ideal of the worth of the common man. The new industry, therefore, which was as eager to buy and sell white labor as black, was canalized off toward the slavery of blacks, because the beginnings of the democratic ideal acted so as to protect the white workers. To dam this philanthropy and keep it from flooding into black slavery, the theory of the innate and eternal inferiority of black folk was invented and diffused. It was not until the nineteenth century that the floods of human sympathy began to burst through this artificial protection of slavery and in the abolition movement start to free the black worker.

Fortunately, as Gobineau rationalized this subjection of men, Marx saw the virus of labor exploitation, of labor regarded and treated as goods, poisoning Europe. He saw the social revolution; revolution in ideas which traffic in labor force for power and personal enjoyment, brought; and he saw this becoming the object of that very industrial

-- 129 --
revolution to which black slavery gave birth. Freedom then became freedom to enslave all working classes and soon the emancipation of the new wage slaves, arising out of the hell of the Industrial Revolution, was hindered by chattel slavery and then men began dimly to see slavery as it really was.

Then chattel slavery of black folk fell, but immediately and in its very falling it was rebuilt on African soil, in the image and pattern of European wage slavery of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which at the time was yielding before a new labor movement. The abolitionists, however, did not realize where the real difference between white and black workers had entered. Initially the goods which the white workers made had made them free; because they began to get their share; but the goods which black slaves made did not make them free. It long kept them slaves with a minimum share, because these workers were isolated in far and wild America. The eaters and wearers and smokers of their crops, even the owners of their crops and bodies, did not see them working or know their misery or realize the injustice of their economic situation. They were workers isolated from the consumer and consumers bargained only with those who owned the fruit of their stolen toil, often fine, honest, educated men.

Those then who in the dying nineteenth century and dawning twentieth saw the gleam of the new freedom were too busy to realize how land monopoly and wage slavery and forced labor in present Africa were threatening Europe of the twentieth century, re-establishing the worst aspects of the factory system and dehumanizing capital in the world, at the time when the system was diligently attacked in culture lands. They did not see that here was the cause of that new blossoming of world wars which instead of being wars of personal enmity, of dynastic ambition, or of national defense, became wars for income and income on so vast a scale that its realization meant the enslavement of the majority of men. They therefore did not finish the task, and today in the twentieth century, as the white worker struggles toward a democratization of industry, there is the same damming and curtailment of human sympathy to keep the movement from touching workers of the darker races. On their exploitation

-- 130 --
is being built a new fascist capitalism. Hence the significance of that slave trade which we now study.

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

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

Remembering that in the fifteenth century there was no great disparity between the civilization of Negroland and that of Europe, what made the striking difference in subsequent development? European civilization, cut off by physical barriers from further incursions of barbaric races, settled more and more to systematic industry and to the domination of one religion; African culture and industry were not only threatened by powerful African barbarians from the west and central regions of the continent, but also by invading Arabs with a new religion precipitating from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries a devastating duel of cultures and faiths.

When, therefore, a demand for workmen arose in America, European exportation was limited by unity of religious ties and economic stability. African exportation was encouraged not simply by the Christian attitude toward heathen, but also by the Moslem enmity toward the unconverted. Two great modern religions, therefore, agreed at least in the policy of enslaving heathen blacks; while the conquest of Egypt, the overthrow of the black Askias by the Moors at Tondibi, brought economic chaos among the advanced Negro

-- 131 --
peoples. Finally the duel between Islam and Fetish left West Africa naked to the slave-trader.

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

There was, however, between the Mohammedan and American slave trade one fundamental difference which has not heretofore been stressed. The demand for slaves in Mohammedan countries was to a large extent a luxury demand. Black slaves were imported as soldiers and servants or as porters of gold and ivory rather than industrial workers. The demand, therefore, was limited by the wealth of a leisure class or the ambitions of conquest and not by the prospect of gain on the part of a commercial class. Even where the idle rich did not support slavery in Africa, other conditions favored its continuance, as Cooley points out, when he speaks of the desert as a cause of the African slave trade.

"It is impossible to deny the advancement of civilization in that zone of the African continent which has formed the field of our inquiry. Yet barbarism is there supported by natural circumstances with which it is vain to think of coping. It may be doubted whether, if mankind had inhabited the earth only in populous and adjoining communities, slavery would have ever existed. The Desert, if it be not absolutely the root of the evil, has, at least, been from the earliest times the great nursery of slave hunters. The demoralization of the towns on the southern borders of the desert has been pointed out, and if the vast extent be considered of the region in which man has no riches but slaves, no enjoyment but slaves, no article of trade but slaves, and where the hearts of wandering thousands are closed against pity by the galling misery of life, it will be difficult to resist the conviction

-- 132 --
that the solid buttress on which slavery rests in Africa, is -- The Desert." 69

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

Some Negro slaves were brought to Europe by the Spaniards in the fourteenth century, and a small trade was continued by the Portuguese, who conquered territory from the "tawny" Moors of North Africa in the early fifteenth century. Later, after their severe repulse at Al Kasr Al Kebir, the Portuguese swept farther down the West Coast in quest of trade with Negroland, a new route to India and the realm of Prester John. As early as 1441, they reached the River of Gold, and their story is that their leader seized certain free Moors and the next year exchanged them for ten black slaves, a target of hide, ostrich eggs, and some gold dust. The trade was easily justified on the ground that the Moors were Mohammedans and refused to be converted to Christianity, while heathen Negroes would be better subjects for conversion and stronger laborers.

In the next few years a small number of Negroes continued to be imported into Spain and Portugal as servants. We find, for instance, in 1474, that Negro slaves were common in Seville. There is a letter from Ferdinand and Isabella in the year 1474 to a celebrated Negro, Juan de Valladolid, commonly called the "Negro Count" (El Conde Negro), nominating him to the office of "mayoral of the Negroes" in Seville. The slaves were apparently treated kindly, allowed to keep their own dances and festivals, and to have their own chief, who represented them in the courts, as against their own masters, and settled their private quarrels.

In Portugal, "the decline of the population, in general, and the labor supply, in particular, was especially felt in the southern provinces, which were largely stripped of population. This resulted in the establishment there of a new industrial system. The rural lands were converted into extensive estates held by absentee landlords, and

-- 133 --
worked by large armies of black bondmen recently brought from Africa. Soon the population of Algarve was almost completely Negro; and by the middle of the sixteenth century, blacks outnumbered whites in Lisbon itself. As intermarriage between the two races went on from the beginning, within a few generations Ethiopian blood was generally diffused throughout the nation, but it was notably pronounced in the south and among the lower classes." 70

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

About 1501 Ovando, Governor of Spanish America, was objecting to Negro slaves and "solicited that no Negro slaves should be sent to Hispaniola, for they fled amongst the Indians and taught them bad customs, and never could be captured." Nevertheless a letter from the king to Ovando, dated Segovia, in September, 1505, says, "I will send more Negro slaves as you request; I think there may be a hundred. At each time a trustworthy person will go with them who may have some share in the gold they may collect and may promise them ease if they work well." 71 There is a record of a hundred slaves being sent out this very year, and Diego Columbus was notified of fifty to be sent from Seville for the mines in 1510.

After this time frequent notices show that Negroes were common in the New World. 72 When Pizarro, for instance, had been slain in Peru, his body was dragged to the cathedral by two Negroes. After the battle of Anaquito, the head of the viceroy was cut off by a Negro; and during the great earthquake in Guatemala a most remarkable figure was a gigantic Negro seen in various parts of the city. Núñez had thirty Negroes with him on the top of the Sierras, and there was rumor of an aboriginal tribe of Negroes in South America. One of the last acts of King Ferdinand was to urge that no more

-- 134 --
Negroes be sent to the West Indies, but, under Charles V, Bishop Las Casas drew up a plan of assisted migration to America and asked in 1517 the right for immigrants to import twelve Negro slaves each, in return for which the Indians were to be freed.

Las Casas, writing in his old age, owns his error: "This advice that license should be given to bring Negro slaves to these lands, the Clerigo Casas first gave, not considering the injustice with which the Portuguese take them and make them slaves; which advice, after he had apprehended the nature of the thing, he would not have given for all he had in the world. For he always held that they had been made slaves unjustly and tyrannically; for the same reason holds good of them as of the Indians." 73

As soon as the plan was broached, a Savoyard, Lorens de Gomenot, Governor of Bresa, obtained a monopoly of this proposed trade and shrewdly sold it to the Genoese for twenty-five thousand ducats. Other monopolies were granted in 1523, 1527, and 1528. 74 Thus the American trade became established and gradually grew, passing successively into the hands of the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French, and the English.

At first the slave trade was of the same kind and volume as that already passing northward over the desert routes. Soon, however, the American trade developed. A strong, unchecked demand for brute labor in the West Indies and on the continent of America grew, until it culminated in the eighteenth century, when Negro slaves were crossing the Atlantic at the rate of fifty to one hundred thousand a year. This called for slave raiding on a scale that drew slaves from most parts of Africa, although centering on the West Coast, from the Senegal to St. Paul de Loanda. The Mohammedan trade continued along the East Coast and the Nile Valley.

Carleton Beals says: "This vast labor army, conscripted for developing the Americas, represented a force of many millions of man power. It was taken from all parts of Africa; from Angola and from the deep Congo, from Bonny River and the central Niger and Hausaland, from Lagos, Dahomey, Old Calabar; from Madagascar and Ethiopia and Gabun. The Portuguese, Spanish, Flemish, Dutch, English,

-- 135 --
French recruiting agents with their platoons of soldiers reached far above Stanley Pool to the Mozambique, clear south of Kunene River. Portuguese Guinea and the Gold Coast poured forth their contingents. Not only the Yoruba, Egba, Jebu, Sokoto, the Mandingo, but the Hottentots and Bushmen gave up forced levies.

"Mohammedan Negro settlements are found in Brazil, the Guianas and elsewhere. Some of them still speak and use Arabic."

Herskovits believes: "From contemporary documentary evidence that the region from which the slaves brought to the New World were derived, has limits that are less vast than stereotyped belief would have them. . . . That some, perhaps in the aggregate, even impressive numbers of slaves, came from the deep interior, or from East or South Africa, does not make less valid the historical evidence that by far the major portion of the slaves brought to the New World came from a region that comprises only a fraction of the vast bulk of the African continent." 75

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

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

-- 136 --
to let men forget it; it remains a most inexcusable and despicable blot on modern history.

The Portuguese built the first slave-trading fort at Elmina, on the Gold Coast, in 1482, and extended their trade down the West Coast and up the East Coast. Under them the abominable traffic grew larger and larger, until it became far the most important in money value of all the commerce of the Zambesi basin. There could be no extension of agriculture, no mining, no progress of any kind where it was so extensively carried on. 76

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

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

The English trade began with Sir John Hawkins' voyages in 1562 and later, in which "the Jesus, our chiefe shippe," played a leading part. Desultory trade was kept up by the English until the middle of the seventeenth century, when English chartered slave-trading companies began to appear. In 1662 the "Royal Adventurers," including the king, the queen dowager, and the Duke of York, invested in the

-- 137 --
trade, and finally the Royal African Company, which became the world's chief slave trader, was formed in 1672 and carried on a growing trade for a quarter of a century. Jamaica had finally been captured and held by Oliver Cromwell in 1655 and formed the West Indian base for the trade in men.

The chief contract for trade in Negroes was the celebrated "Asiento" or agreement of the King of Spain to the importation of slaves into Spanish domains. The Pope's Bull of Demarcation, 1493, debarred Spain from African possessions, and compelled her to contract with other nations for slaves. This contract was in the hands of the Portuguese in 1600; in 1640 the Dutch received it, and in 1701, the French. The War of the Spanish Succession was motivated not so much by royal rivalries as to bring this slave trade monopoly to England.

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

It has been shown by a recent study made at Howard University that the development of England as a great capitalist power was based directly and mainly upon the slave trade. 77 English industry and commerce underwent a vast expansion in the early seventeenth century, based on the shipment of English goods to Africa, of African slaves to the West Indies, and of West Indian products back to England. About 1700 Bristol became an important center of the slave trade, followed by London and Liverpool. Liverpool soon overtook both Bristol and London. In 1709 it sent out one slaver of thirty tons burden; encouraged by Parliamentary subsidies which amounted to nearly a half million dollars between 1729 and 1750, the trade increased

-- 138 --
to fifty-three ships in 1751; eighty-six in 1765, and at the beginning of the nineteenth century, one hundred and eighty-five, which carried forty-nine thousand two hundred and thirteen slaves in one year. In 1764 a quarter of the shipping of Liverpool was in the African trade and Liverpool merchants conducted one half of England's trade with Africa. The value of all English goods sent to Africa was 464,000 pounds sterling of which three-fourths was of English manufactures.

This growth of Liverpool indicated the evolution of the capitalist economy in England. Liverpool did not grow because it was near the Lancaster manufacturing district, but, on the contrary, Lancaster manufacturers grew because they were near the Liverpool slave trade and largely invested in it. Thus Liverpool made Manchester.

Karl Marx emphasized the importance of slavery as the foundation of the capitalist order. He said, "Slavery is an economic category just as any other. Direct slavery is the pivot of bourgeois industry, just as are machinery and credit, etc. Without slavery there is no cotton; without cotton, there is no modern industry. It is slavery that has given value to universal commerce, and it is world trade which is the condition of large scale industry. Thus, slavery is an economic category of the first importance." 78

The tremendous economic stake of Great Britain in the African and West Indian trade is shown by these figures, after Bryan Edwards: from 1701 to 1787 British ships took to Africa goods to the value of twenty-three million pounds sterling. Of these, fourteen million pounds sterling were of British manufacture. Slaves, gold and other products were purchased with these goods. The slaves were transported to the West Indies. From the West Indies in the century from 1698 to 1798 Great Britain imported goods to the value of over two hundred million pounds.

The basis of the English trade, on which capitalism was erected, was Negro labor. This labor was cheap and was treated as capital goods and not as human beings. The purchase of slaves furnished a large market for British manufacture, especially textiles. African gold became the medium of exchange which rising capitalism and the profits of African trade demanded. The large fortunes which were

-- 139 --
turned to industrial investment, and especially to the African trade, stimulated industries like ship building, which helped make England mistress of the seas. The West Indies too as a seat of slavery furnished an outlet for British manufacture and a source of raw materials. From this again large fortunes arose which were transferred to the mother country and invested.

All this spelled revolution: world-wide revolution starting in Europe; sinister and fatal revolution in West Africa. The city-state represented by Yoruban civilization had fought with the empire builders of the Sudan and retreated toward the Gulf of Guinea. Here they came in contact with the new western slave trade. It stimulated trade and industry; but the trade was not only in gold and oil and ivory, it was in men; and those nations that could furnish slaves were encouraged and prospered. The ruder culture of Ashanti and Dahomey outstripped Yoruba. Benin was changed. Blood lust was encouraged and the human culture which the slave trade helped build up for Europe, tore down and debauched West Africa.

The culture of Yoruba, Benin, Mossiland and Nupe had exhausted itself in a desperate attempt to stem the on-coming flood of Sudanese expansion. It had succeeded in maintaining its small, loosely federated city-states suited to trade, industry, and art. It had developed strong resistance toward the Sudan state builders toward the north, as in the case of the fighting Mossi; but behind this warlike resistance lay the peaceful city life which gave industrial ideas to Byzantium and shared something of Ethiopian and Mediterranean culture.

The first advent of the slave traders increased and encouraged native industry, as is evidenced by the bronze work of Benin; but soon this was pushed into the background, for it was not bronze metal but bronze flesh that Europe wanted. A new state-building tyranny, ingenious, well organized but cruel, and built on war, forced itself forward in the Niger Delta. The powerful state of Dahomey arose early in the eighteenth century. Ashanti, a similar kingdom, began its conquests in 1719 and grew with the slave trade because the profits of the trade and the insatiable demands of the Europeans disrupted and changed the older native economy.

Thus state building in West Africa began to replace the city economy; but it was a state built on war and on war supported and encouraged

-- 140 --
largely for the sake of trade in human flesh. The native industries were changed and disorganized. Family ties and government were weakened. Far into the heart of Africa this devilish disintegration, coupled with Christian rum and Mohammedan raiding, penetrated.

Few detailed studies have been made of the Mohammedan slave trade. Slave raiding was known in the Nile Valley from the time of the Egyptians and with the advent of Islam it continued, but it was incidental to conquest and proselytism. Later, however, it began to be commercialized; it was systematically organized with raiders, factories, markets, and contractors. By the nineteenth century African slaves were regularly supplied to Egypt, Turkey, Arabia, and Persia; and also to Morocco there came from the Western Sudan and Timbuktu about four thousand annually.

Egyptians in the nineteenth century tried to stop this slave trade, but they encountered vested interests making large profits. The trade continued to exist as late as 1890. The English charge that under the Madhi in the Egyptian Sudan, slavery and slave raiding were wide-spread; but this was the result of the very misrule and chaos which caused the Madhist movement and for which it was not responsible. Doubtless many of the Madhist followers were enslaved and robbed under cover of religious frenzy; but the Madhi could not in the midst of war curb an evil which forced recognition even from Chinese Gordon. From the East African coast and especially the lake districts a stream of slaves went to the coast cities, whence they were sent to Madagascar, Arabia and Persia. In 1862, nineteen thousand slaves a year were passing from the regions about Lake Nyasa to Zanzibar. Minor trade in slaves took place in and about Abyssinia and Somaliland. Turkey began to check the slave traffic between 1860 and 1890. In Morocco it continued longer.

The face of Africa was turned south and west toward these slave traders instead of northward toward the Mediterranean, where for two thousand years and more Europe and Africa had met in legitimate trade and mutual respect. The full significance of the battle at Tondibi, which overthrew the Askias, was now clear. Hereafter Africa for centuries was to appear before the world, not as the land

-- 141 --
of gold and ivory, of Gongo Mussa and Meroe, but as a bound and captive slave, dumb and degraded.

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

Usually the slave trade has been thought of from its sentimental and moral point of view; but it is its economic significance that is of greatest moment. Whenever the human element in industry is degraded, society must suffer accordingly. In the case of the African slave trade the human element reached its nadir of degradation. Great and significant as was the contribution of black labor to the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, its compensation approached zero, falling distinctly and designedly below the cost of human reproduction; and yet on this system was built the wealth and power of modern civilization. One can conceive no more dangerous foundation; because even when the worst aspects were changed and the slave trade limited and the slave given certain legal rights of freedom, nevertheless the possibilities of low wages for the sake of high profits remained an ideal in industry, which made the African slave trade the father of industrial imperialism, and of the persistence of poverty in the richest lands.

As Marx declared: "Under the influence of the colonial system, commerce and navigation ripened like hot-house fruit. Chartered companies were powerful instruments in promoting the concentration of capital. The colonies provided a market for the rising manufactures, and the monopoly of this market intensified accumulation. The treasures obtained outside Europe by direct looting, enslavement, and murder, flowed to the motherland in streams, and were there turned into capital."

The exact proportions of the slave trade can be estimated only approximately. From 1680 to 1688 we know that the English African Company alone sent two hundred forty-nine ships to Africa, shipped there sixty thousand, seven hundred eighty-three Negro slaves, and

-- 142 --
after losing fourteen thousand, three hundred eighty-seven on the middle passage, delivered forty-six thousand, three hundred ninety-six in America.

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

The total number of slaves imported is not known. Dunbar estimates that nearly 900,000 came to America in the sixteenth century, 2,75,000 in the seventeenth, 7,000,000 in the eighteenth, and over 4,000,000 in the nineteenth, perhaps 15,000,000 in all. Certainly it seems that at least 10,000,000 Negroes were expatriated. The Mohammedan slave trade meant the expatriation or forcible migration in Africa of millions more. (Many other millions were left dead in the wake of the raiders.) It would be conservative, then, to say that the slave trade cost Negro Africa from a fourth to a third of its population. And yet people ask today the cause of the stagnation of culture in that land since 1600!

Such a large number of slaves could be supplied only by organized slave raiding. The African continent gradually became revolutionized. Whole regions were depopulated, whole tribes disappeared; the character of people developed excesses of cruelty instead of the flourishing arts of peace. The dark, irresistible grasp of fetish took firmer bold on men's minds. Advances toward higher civilization became more difficult. It was a rape of a continent to an extent seldom if ever paralleled in ancient or modern times.

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

-- 143 --
bodies of their wretched fellow-sufferers to whom they had been fastened." 79

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

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

However, philanthropy was not working alone to overthrow Negro slavery and the slave trade. It was seen, first in England and later in other countries, that slavery as an industrial system could not be made to work satisfactorily in modern times. Its cost tended to become too great, as the sources of supply of slaves dried up; on the other hand, the slave insurrections from the very beginning threatened the system, as modern labor strikes have threatened capitalism, from the time when the slaves rose on the plantation of Diego Columbus down to the Civil War in America. Actual and potential slave insurrections in the West Indies, in North and South America, kept the slave owners in apprehension and turmoil, or called for a police system difficult to maintain.

The red revolt of Haiti struck the knell of the slave trade. In North America revolt finally took the form of organized running away to the North. All this with the growing scarcity of suitable land

-- 144 --
led to the abolition of the slave trade, the American Civil War and the disappearance of the American slave system. Further effort stopped the Mohammedan slave raider, but slowly because its philanthropic objects were clouded and hindered by the new Colonial Imperialism of Christian lands, which sought not wholly to abolish slavery but rather to re-establish it under new names, with a restricted slave trade.

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

-- 145 --

Chapter 8: Western Slave Marts
THE West Indies, or Antilles, consist of 90,000 square miles of land, among the most beautiful spots in the world, strewn through endless areas of tropical waters and inhabited today by ten million persons mostly of Negro descent.

Late in the fifteenth century these islands were discovered; beautiful, fertile but sparsely inhabited. In the sixteenth century the treasure hunt started. Columbus, Balboa, Cortez, and Pizarro searched and killed for gold and found it; but the real wealth of the Indies was not discovered until the seventeenth century, when sugar planting began in 1650, followed by cotton, coffee and other crops. All that was needed was labor and for that the Indians were enslaved and nearly exterminated. Then Negroes from Africa began to arrive. The main African labor supply came in the eighteenth century. England had kept Spain from falling into the lap of either Austria or Louis XIV by the war of Spanish Succession and extracted as her pay not only Gibraltar but the right to the Spanish slave trade, the Asiento. She poured slaves into the New World and thus began her mastery of the seas, her manufactures and her trades. By the middle of the eighteenth century new finance capital based on African and American gold, new wealth based on West Indian crops, established the capitalistic system in Europe. The buying of labor and selling of goods, thus encouraged throughout Europe, brought prosperity and self-assurance to capitalists and employers.

France built in Haiti the richest colony in the world and thus encouraged her merchants, trade and manufacturers to throw off the yoke of a lazy, elegant and wastrel nobility. The revolution beginning in a cry for commercial freedom, rose rapidly to a demand for

-- 146 --
a political dictatorship of the proletariat. Before this was curbed, its fire caught the tinder in the West Indies -- a contingency wholly undreamed of -- and under Toussaint the Savior, actually in the end abolished Negro slavery, posing a new problem for nineteenth century democracy.

We can only sketch the history of the Negro in the West Indies, here and there, for lack of complete and accessible data. But even fugitive facts are illuminating. According to some accounts Alonzo, "The Negro," piloted one of the ships of Columbus, 80 and it has been claimed that Negroes reached America from Africa in prehistoric times. Some Negroid and Australoid skulls have been found, and Leo Wiener traces direct cultural connection between Africa and America in art, food, language and religion.

Continually Negroes appear with the explorers. Nuflo de Olana, a Negro, was with Balboa when he discovered the Pacific Ocean, 81 and afterward thirty Negroes helped Balboa direct the work of over five hundred Indians in transporting the material for his ships across the mountains to the South Sea. 82

Cortez carried Negroes and Indians with him from Cuba to Mexico and one of these Negroes was the first to sow and reap grain there. There were two Negroes with Velas in 1520, and two hundred black slaves with Alvarado on his desperate expedition to Quito. Almagro and Valdivia in 1525 were saved from death by Negroes. 83

As early as 1528 there were about 10,000 Negroes in the New World. We hear of one sent as an agent of the Spanish to burn a native village in Honduras. In 1539 they accompanied De Soto and one of them stayed among the Indians in Alabama and became the first settler from the Old World. In 1555 in Santiago de Chile a free Negro owned land in the town. Menendez had a company of trained Negro artisans and agriculturists when he founded St. Augustine in 1565. 84

In the seventeenth century began systematic transportation of black labor from Africa to the developed slave markets of the West Indies and America. Slaves imported under the Asiento treaties

-- 147 --
reached all parts of the Americas. Spanish America had, by the close of the eighteenth century, ten thousand Negroes in San Domingo, eighty-four thousand in Cuba, fifty thousand in Puerto Rico, sixty thousand in Louisiana and Florida, and sixty thousand in Central and South America.

The history of Negroes in the West Indies and South America falls naturally into two parts: that before and that after the emancipation of the slaves; and the history of slavery may best be considered according to the exploiting nations. Spanish American history is centered in Cuba, San Domingo, Puerto Rico, Central and South America, as well as in Jamaica and other islands which early were lost to Spain. It was the role of the Spaniards to explore and to make some beginnings of the plantation system with slave labor.

English and French pirates came to Cuba in the sixteenth century. The Indians were exterminated or mingled their blood with an increasing number of Negro slaves, and illicit trade in contravention to Spanish law was the early basis of Cuba's wealth. Havana was captured by the British in the eighteenth century but exchanged for Florida. The Spanish part of San Domingo was ceded to France and afterwards became independent. Cuba was practically independent during the latter part of the eighteenth and the first part of the nineteenth century, because of the wars in Europe and the freedom of trade.

Intensive exploitation of the Spanish slaves did not begin until the second quarter of the nineteenth century. A desire to be revenged on England and encouragement of shipping and industry under Charles III led to efforts to develop Cuba. Slaves were rushed in between 1753 and 1790; the Cuban sugar crop multiplied tenfold. After the French Revolution Cuba replaced San Domingo as a producer of sugar. This development led to increased exploitation of the slaves until after the San Domingan revolt. Then the Cuban slaves under José Aponte also attempted an uprising. Estates were burned and owners killed but the leader was finally captured and hanged. In 1774 Cuba had a population of 160,000 which increased rapidly to over a half million in 1817. As early as the sixteenth century Negroes formed over half the population.

In the nineteenth century the island was threatened with annexation

-- 148 --
by both European and American countries. It was ruled at the time by irresponsible captains-general and the increased exploitation led to a bloody persecution of Negroes in 1844 because of a slave plot. Toward 1850 the pro-slavery interests in the United States schemed to annex Cuba. The Ostend Manifesto proclaimed this and Presidents Pierce and Buchanan encouraged it. There were three filibustering expeditions.

Corrupt administration, heavy taxes and harsh driving of labor led finally to the Cuban Ten Years war in 1866, in which Negroes and white rebels joined. They demanded the abolition of slavery and equal political rights for natives and foreigners, whites and blacks. The war was cruel and bloody, but ended in 1878 with the legal abolition of slavery, while a further uprising the following year demanded civil rights for Negroes. The majority of Cuban Negroes, however, were not really freed until the eighties.

In Puerto Rico, Spanish exploitation early exterminated the Indians. They were followed by hordes of Negro slaves, and by invasion of Indians from other islands. Hurricanes, pirates and the attacks of Europeans made the island unhappy for years. Both the English and Dutch attempted its capture, but it remained in the hands of the Spanish until 1898. East of Puerto Rico are a hundred little islands long known as the Virgin Islands. They were the favorite resort of buccaneers in the seventeenth century and were subject to English and Danish rule in the early nineteenth century.

The Spaniards settled the lowlands of Central America, and Venezuela, Ecuador, Colombia and Peru in South America. They introduced there considerable numbers of slaves and encountered repeated slave insurrections. On the coast of Mexico there were in the second half of the sixteenth century nearly twenty thousand Negroes. They took part in various expeditions and before 1530 led a desperate insurrection.

It was from Mexico that the expedition started out to discover the land which is now New Mexico. It was led by Steven Dorantes or Estevanico, an intelligent black man who came to America with the Narvaez expedition in 1527. He and three Spaniards survived a succession of disasters and reached Mexico from Florida by the overland route. Because of his knowledge of Indian tongues, Estevanico

-- [149] --

-- 150 --
guided the expedition to the "Seven Cities of Cibola," as the land of the Zuñis was supposed to be. He reached the pueblos but was killed by the Indians and the expedition following him turned back. The legend of his visit is still current among the Zuñi Indians. It was forty years before further attempts were made to penetrate New Mexico.

In Cuba and Central America bands of fugitive slaves who took refuge in the mountains were known as "maroons." They were a continual cause of trouble in Jamaica and San Domingo, and fought fiercely with the Spanish in Mexico. In the middle of the sixteenth century they were attacking the treasure trains crossing the isthmus, and under a black leader, Bayano, organized a regular government. The colony started a campaign against them in 1560 and eventually captured Bayano and sent him to Spain. His followers founded the city of San Diego de Principe.

The maroons spread, organized new revolts, and intermarried with the Indians, and finally formed the race known as the Mosquitoes. By the seventeenth century they mustered forty thousand soldiers and later, in alliance with the Indians, swept the Spaniards from the coast.

The Isthmus of Panama has seen strange vicissitudes. An order of black monks was inaugurated by the Catholic Church in Spanish America early in the sixteenth century and by the middle of the seventeenth a Negro freedman and charcoal burner saw his son, Francisco Xavier de Luna Victoria, become Bishop of Panama, the first native Catholic bishop in America.

A Negro landed with the first Spaniards in Peru and Negroes were among those who later welcomed Drake and offered him aid. They repeatedly led rebellions and furnished one saint for the Catholic Church, Brother Martin de Porres. This black priest was a Franciscan monk and suffered much racial discrimination. He gave his life to helping the poor. In the Argentine, the Indian slaves, killed off by severe labor, were replaced by Negroes, many of whom later became household servants and formed a considerable part of the population of Buenos Aires and Cordoba.

The Portuguese followed the Spaniards in America. Their empire, because of the Bull of Demarcation, centered in Brazil, which juts far enough to the eastward to fall within the western limits set by the

-- 151 --
pope. Slaves were not introduced in considerable number until the middle of the eighteenth century, after the discovery of gold and diamonds. Gradually the seaboard from Pernambuco to Rio de Janeiro and north was filled with Negroes. The slave trade was abolished by Portugal north of the equator in 1815 and south of the equator in 1830, but the illicit trade persisted long after this. Between 1800 and 1850 probably two million Negroes were poured into Brazil.

By the aid of Negroes, the Portuguese penetrated the valley of the Amazon from the Parana to Guiana. Negroes helped them conquer the land, fighting against the French in Rio de Janeiro in 1711. Nash writes in the Conquest of Brazil, "When gold came to dominate the economic life of Brazil, the Negro assumed the entire load. Every panful of earth from which the gold was washed, every clod of cascalho from which diamonds were gleaned, and all the millions of tons that yielded nothing at all, were moved by Negroes carrying upon their stalwart heads the loads their masters were too stupid to move on wheelbarrows. Negroes carried upon their well-muscled backs the full weight of that Portuguese Empire in the eighteenth century, as they alone carried the weight of the Brazilian Empire for the first half of the new nineteenth century."

There were repeated insurrections among the Brazilian Negroes. The Palmares in 1695, a tribe of slaves, held back an army of seven thousand and their leaders committed suicide when finally defeated. In 1719 there was a widespread slave conspiracy and between 1828 and 1837 Mohammedan Negroes revolted repeatedly.

The Dutch supplanted the Portuguese as slave traders on the African coast and brought the first slaves to the North American continent. In South America they settled Guiana in 1616 and began the cultivation of sugar cane. Later, to curb the revolting Negroes, they brought in East Indian coolies. The so-called Bush Negroes in the interior of Guiana were descendants of runaway slaves, and early established villages and an organized government. By the end of the seventeenth century they had large settlements on the Suriname River and before the middle of the eighteenth century they were making repeated raids on the plantations. From 1715 to 1763 fighting continued until at last formal treaties between the Dutch and Negroes were

-- 152 --
made. Today the Bush Negroes retain their independence and when they drink with the white man their toast is "free." 85

Eventually the English forced the Dutch out of the slave trade and became the great slave traders of the world. Their empire in America centered in the Barbados, Jamaica and other West India islands and in the American colonies on the mainland. Large numbers of Negroes were imported, reaching a total of over 50,000 annually late in the eighteenth century. Between 1680 and 1786 it is estimated that over two million slaves were imported into the British West Indies. Even young Irish peasants were "hunted down as men hunt down game, and were forcibly put on board ship, and sold to the planters in Barbados." 86

Barbados, seized in 1625, developed a savage slave code, and the result was slave insurrections in 1674, 1692, and 1702. These were not successful, but a rising in 1816 under the leadership of a mulatto, Washington Franklin, destroyed much property. A Negro insurrection in Dominica under Farcel greatly exercised England in 1791 and 1794 and delayed slave trade abolition; from 1844 to 1893 further uprisings took place.

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

The peace lasted until 1795, when, inspired by Haiti, they rebelled

-- 153 --
again, killed planters, and tried to incite a general slave insurrection. They gave the British a severe drubbing. Bloodhounds again were imported. The maroons offered to surrender on the express condition that none of their number should be deported from the island, as the legislature wished. General Walpole hesitated, but could get peace on no other terms and so gave his word. The maroons surrendered their arms, and immediately the whites seized six hundred of the ring-leaders and transported them to the snows of Nova Scotia! The legislature then voted a sword worth twenty-five hundred dollars to General Walpole, which he indignantly refused to accept. Eventually many of these exiled maroons found their way to Sierra Leone, West Africa.

The pressing desire for peace with the maroons on the part of the white planters arose from the new sugar culture introduced in 1673. A greatly increased demand for slaves followed, and between 1700 and 1786 six hundred ten thousand slaves were imported. In 1768 there were exported from Jamaica 56,000 hogsheads of sugar; 15,500 puns of rum; 2,500 bags of cotton; 4,000 bags of coffee and, in addition to this, pimento, ginger, log-wood, mahogany, molasses, and hides. In 1774 these exports had increased and in 1787, they were worth two million pounds sterling. At the close of 1791 Jamaica had seven hundred sixty-seven sugar plantations with 140,000 Negroes; six hundred seven coffee plantations with 21,000 Negroes; 1,047 grazing and breeding farms with 31,000 Negroes; and a number of small settlements for cotton, ginger, pimento, etc., employing 58,000 Negroes.

The revolution in San Domingo cut off the French colonies from Europe. The price of sugar in London rose from thirty-two shillings a cwt. in 1793 to fifty-eight shillings, and then advanced until the end of 1798 when it touched eighty-seven shillings. Jamaica made every effort to increase its output with additional slave labor and the introduction of a different species of cane. Several sugar islands were captured and the British slave trade rose from twenty-five thousand to fifty-seven thousand a year.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the value of Jamaica "as British property" was estimated at twelve and a half million

-- 154 --
pounds sterling in 250,000 slaves and twenty-six and a half million in land and other property; or thirty-nine million pounds in all. 87

But already change was in the air. The American Revolution stopped the English continental slave trade and brought rivalry in the shipping trade. The French Revolution threatened all property and the Haitian revolt cut security of investment from beneath the feet of slavery. Sugar, then the chief slave crop, reeled drunkenly from twenty-two dollars a hundredweight after Toussaint had burned Haitian plantations, to a low of seven dollars, when not only Jamaica but Cuba began to pour increasing amounts on the glutted market.

In Hamburg, where British ships sold their sugar, there were eighty-three bankruptcies in four months, in 1800-01, and Parliament had to loan the West Indian merchants of Liverpool two and a half million dollars. The profit in American slavery and the slave trade was beginning to disappear. English capital turned to Africa and Asia.

When now the deadening manacles of profit, chaining English commerce to the slave trade and slavery, began to loosen, there was a chance for humanity and philanthropy to express itself in England; and this chance was broadened by the French Revolution and the Haitian Revolt. A splendid and unselfish crusade for human freedom arose, led by Sharpe, Wilberforce and Buxton and by philanthropists throughout the world. The first fruit was the suppression of the African slave trade, which was begun in 1807 but not finished until after the American Civil War. There followed the abolition of slavery, beginning in 1833 and ending legally in 1838 in the British islands, but continuing actually in some other West India islands down to 1870. It was accompanied by wide unrest, as, for instance, the insurrection in northwest Jamaica in 1831, when Negroes destroyed nearly three and a half million dollars' worth of property and brought wide ruin on the planters.

In many of the minor islands under English control curious bits of slave history may be unearthed. In the island of St. Vincent, Indians sought to enslave fugitive Negroes, but the Negroes drove the Indian men away and took the Carib women. The black Caribs fought with the English and others for three-quarters of a century when finally

-- 155 --
the British took possession in 1763. Eventually the black Caribs received a third of the island as their property. Then they helped the French against the British and were deported to the island of Ruatan off Honduras.

The tiny island of St. Lucia is one of the most charming spots in the tropics. It was long held by the French who fortified it and held it with two thousand Negro soldiers. In 1796 England tried to seize it and stop the spread of French revolutionary ideas of equality. It took eleven thousand English soldiers a month to secure the fortifications and then the Negroes took to the woods. Abercrombie and Sir John Moore nearly lost their lives fighting against these guerillas. They finally were induced to lay down their arms on condition that they remain free. Later they were formed into an English regiment and sent to fight on the coast of Africa.

Owing to wars with England, the French never became great slave traders and their West Indian possessions were supplied mainly by the Dutch and Portuguese in the earlier days, although the French Royal Senegal Company held the coveted Asiento from 1701 to 1713. On the other hand, the French developed on the island of San Domingo a system of slavery which had great influence upon the Negro race and the economic history of the world.

French slavery centered in San Domingo, Guadeloupe, Martinique, some other small islands and French Guiana. Later the French introduced slaves into Louisiana and on the Alabama coast. Martinique and Guadeloupe were seized in 1639 and Guiana in 1674. There was much trouble with the Indians and with the British, but eventually these colonies remained French. In Martinique, the Indians were exterminated and sugar planting began there in 1650. Within a century there were sixty thousand slaves in the island and it took three revolts and a civil war to make them free.

It was in the island of San Domingo, however, that French slavery centered. Ovando arrived there in 1502. He imported 40,000 Indians from the Bahamas to replace the local Indians who were rapidly disappearing. Sugar cane was planted in 1506 and immediately became an important product. Diego, son of Columbus, was the next governor, but in six years the Indian population of 60,000 had decreased

-- 156 --
to 14,000. Africans began to be imported as early as 1510, and by 1522 the new blacks had already staged a rebellion.

Trade was carefully guarded as a Spanish monopoly, but the English and French broke into it by force. The Spaniards did not proceed with the cultivation and organization of the sugar traffic and as the buccaneers gradually invaded the island, cultivation dwindled. In 1586, Drake attacked San Domingo City and secured a ransom of thirty thousand dollars; by the beginning of the seventeenth century the commerce between San Domingo and Spain had been practically destroyed.

The French West India Company gradually began to occupy the island and their right to the western part was recognized in the Treaty of Ryswick. By 1685 there were so many slaves and mulattoes that Louis XIV issued his celebrated Code Noir, which was notable in compelling bachelor masters, fathers of mulatto children, to marry their concubines. Children followed the condition of the mother as to slavery or freedom; slaves could have no property; harsh punishments were provided for, but families could not be separated by sale, except in the case of grown children; emancipation with full civil rights was made possible for any slave twenty years of age or more. Indigo, cocoa and sugar cane were planted and by 1728 there were 50,000 Negroes, who increased to 172,000 in a quarter of a century.

From the middle of the eighteenth century to the French Revolution, French San Domingo was counted as being the richest colonial possession in the world. Intense and complete organization of the plantations became general. There were windmills, coffee plantations, sugar factories, acres of vanilla bushes, wide fields of cotton and sugar cane. Thousands of black slaves were at work and slept in huts at the edge of the cultivated land. Many of the owners lived in luxury almost barbaric, with palaces, gilded coaches, scores of horses, well-trained servants and unbounded power. Probably nowhere else in America was existence more delightful for the white man than in San Domingo in the eighteenth century. Ten thousand square miles produced more sugar, coffee, chocolate, indigo, timber, dye-woods and spices than all the rest of the West Indies put together.

The French bourgeoisie, even shackled as they were by the privileges and pretensions of the nobility, developed fast in the eighteenth

-- 157 --
century. Between 1714 and 1789 French commerce quadrupled. At the outbreak of the French Revolution there were three thousand indigo plantations and an equal number of coffee plantations in San Domingo. Eight hundred great estates produced sugar and as many others produced cotton. Cocoa was a great crop and there were distilleries, lime kilns, brick yards and potteries. In 1788 there were imported from France into the French part of San Domingo, goods to the value of $21,000,000, including flour, wine, clothing and manufactures. These importations were carried in five hundred eighty vessels, and ninety-eight other French ships plied from the coast of Africa. In 1788 there were brought to San Domingo twenty-nine thousand five hundred slaves in ninety-eight vessels, including fifteen thousand men, seven thousand women and seven thousand children. In ten years, 1782 to 1792, the number of slaves employed on its plantations probably doubled.

French San Domingo in 1791 exported one hundred seventy-seven million pounds of sugar, seventy-four million pounds of coffee, seven million pounds of cotton and nearly seven million pounds of dye-woods. The value of the exports was about fifty million dollars and the total value of the plantation and slaves was over one hundred-ninety million dollars. The taxes laid on San Domingo were a considerable source of French revenue and its commerce employed most of the French shipping.

There was great increase in the white emigration from France to San Domingo in the middle of the eighteenth century. This included a class of poor whites (petits blancs), persons with little capital, but eager to get rich, and jealous and bitter against the mulattoes and free Negroes, who were their economic rivals. There also came numbers of marriageable young French women without dowry. These, however, found themselves in little demand, the Frenchmen preferring to marry rich mulatto girls. Jealousy and envy thus arose between the petits blancs, the white women and the colored folk. After the Peace of 1763, a number of young mulattoes educated in the new philosophy of France returned to San Domingo and wanted to take part in public affairs.

Color prejudice grew in intensity and gradually mulattoes were deprived of civil and political rights and restricted in their occupations.

-- 158 --
Edicts regulated their clothing, names and social intercourse. All this was patently illegal since article fifty-nine of the Code Noir declared that freed slaves enjoyed the rights and privileges of citizens.

In 1771 the Minister of Colonies declared against granting mulattoes certificates of citizenship and said that Louis XV was determined to maintain the principle that colored people and their posterity could never be permitted the same advantages as whites. After 1777 mulattoes were refused the right to come to France.

The outbreak of revolution in France in 1787 had extraordinary repercussions in San Domingo. Here the planters (grands blancs), the poor whites (petits blancs) and the mulattoes were all aroused. The planters demanded sole recognition as citizens, excluding both the petits blancs and the mulattoes. The mulattoes were excluded because of their race and the petits blancs because they did not own at least twenty-five slaves. The grands blancs wanted membership in both the French Constituent Assembly and in the provincial assembly limited to grands blancs. They also supported the monarchy against the general trend of the revolution.

The petits blancs wanted membership in both assemblies and they supported the revolution against the king. Both groups opposed the demands of the mulattoes, while the mulattoes sought alliance with either or both groups of whites in order to achieve their rights.

As soon as the States-General was summoned, the planters of Haiti secretly elected delegates to represent the island in the Constituent Assembly. Six of these finally were admitted. But the mulattoes were also alert. Numbers of them were resident in Paris. They and others in the West Indies had been inspired by current radical thought and by the American Declaration of Independence.

Indeed in 1779, when the French undertook to help American independence, Comte d'Estaing was able to raise eight hundred volunteers among Haitian blacks and mulattoes, including Rigaud and the great Christophe, who at the siege of Savannah saved the American army from annihilation by the British. It was here that Pulaski and Sergeant Jasper were killed, and among the British leaders was Maitland, who later tried to seize San Domingo.

Colored people suffered civil and political disabilities in San Domingo, but on the other hand they held a considerable amount of land

-- 159 --
and wealth. In France they had a number of distinguished and influential friends. In the fall of 1789 they sent a delegation to Paris, including Julien Raymond and Vincent Ogé. They also sent six million francs in gold and a promise to contribute this and one-fifth of the property which the mulattoes owned in San Domingo to the public debt. These delegates were received by the National Assembly October 22, 1789, and they presented a petition asking citizenship rights in San Domingo for free Negroes. The presiding officer replied politely if vaguely that "not a single part of the nation shall ask in vain for its rights from the assembly of the representatives of the French people."

However, the Club Massiac, the Paris rendezvous of the San Domingan planters, moved swiftly and their advice was backed by petitions from the manufacturers and merchants of the great French cities. Consequently March 8, 1790, the Constituent Assembly voted by a large majority not to interfere with the interior government of the colonies, or subject them to laws "incompatible with their local establishments"; and also buttressed the slave trade by declaring that the National Assembly would not cause any innovation to be made, directly or indirectly, "in any system of commerce in which the colonies were already concerned." 88

This was the beginning of a series of extraordinary and contradictory pronouncements on the part of the government of France. The Amis des Noirs bestirred themselves and on March 18 secured supplementary instructions to the vote of March 8, declaring that free Negroes were citizens and could vote in parish elections.

On May 15, 1791, came a strong and definite pronouncement giving the privilege of French citizenship to free Negroes in the colony and the right to vote and sit in colonial assemblies. Notwithstanding this, on September 24 the same year, just before it went out of existence, the Constituent Assembly virtually repealed this decree, leaving the fate of the free Negroes and the mulattoes in the hands of the Colonial Assembly.

This was the last effort of the bourgeoisie in the Constituent Assembly, before the meeting of the more radical Legislative Assembly. In the Legislative Assembly in April, 1892, the right of free Negroes

-- 160 --
to vote was affirmed and this decree was signed by the king. As the government got more radical under the Committee of Safety in 1793, July 22, the emancipation of slaves was announced and confirmed February 4, 1794. Notwithstanding this, in 1801 Napoleon, by decree, re-established slavery.

These contradictory decrees registered the gradual advance of French public opinion to the point of admitting the manhood rights of Negroes; and at the same time showed the contradictory and restraining effect of colonial planter opinion and economic power in France.

Let us follow this history more in detail both in France and San Domingo. The Negroes from San Domingo and other colored folk in Paris after their demands upon the Constituent Assembly, were set upon, assaulted and in some cases murdered. Others escaped to San Domingo. As we have said the Amis des Noirs succeeded in getting the decree of March 8, 1790, supplemented March 28 by "instructions recognizing the right to vote in parishes of all free persons twenty-five years of age." The authorities of Martinique, Guadeloupe and San Domingo all decreed that this applied only to white persons.

Meantime, the white planters became divided into bitter factions. The great landholders and large investors regarded the revolution as a movement to turn over the conduct of the colony into their hands; while the petits blancs proposed taking it from the hands of the great landholders and proprietors into their own; some of the officials, hoping for a restoration of royal power, were waiting to sail in with that tide. None of these factions envisaged any real division of power with the mulattoes, and against this attitude the mulattoes began to plot and even to fight.

Bitterly disappointed with the decision of the French assembly in 1790, Ogé returned to America. He went by way of the United States in order to collect arms and escape observation. Landing secretly in the north of San Domingo, he collected a force of three hundred men. They were immediately attacked by a much larger force from Cap François and compelled to take refuge in the Spanish part of the island. The governor surrendered them, and Ogé and Chavannes, the two leaders, March 12, 1791, were sentenced "whilst

-- 161 --
alive to have their arms, legs, thighs and spines broken; and afterward to be placed on a wheel, their faces toward Heaven, and there to stay as long as it would please God to preserve their lives; and when dead, their heads were to be cut off and exposed on poles." 89 This sentence was executed in the presence of the members of the Northern Provincial Assembly gathered in state.

When the news of this barbaric treatment reached France, there was a storm of indignation. A pantomime on the story of Ogé was given in the theaters and planters were afraid to appear in the streets of Paris. They and their friends threatened that if anything was done against slavery, the colonies would be destroyed. "Perish the colonies," said Robespierre, "rather than sacrifice one iota of our principles." The majority reiterated the sentiment, and the famous decree of the 15th of May, 1791, was pronounced "amidst the acclamation and applause of the multitude." 90

The decree of May 15, 1791, gave the privilege of French citizenship to free Negroes in the colonies and the right to vote and sit in the parochial and colonial assemblies. When the news of this decree reached San Domingo, the white people went quite crazy; a caste war was predicted and the whites swore they would never yield. There was talk of secession, of confiscating French goods; and the national cockade was thrown into the gutter to be trampled upon. The representatives of the planters withdrew from the Constituent Assembly. On the eighth of June, 1791, Abbé Gregoire, protagonist of the blacks, wrote his famous letter to the citizens of color in the French West Indies: "You were men, you are now citizens."

A newly elected colonial assembly met in San Domingo August 9 and then adjourned to await three commissioners which France was sending to pacify the colony. Up to this point practically the whole public controversy had turned, first, upon the future repositories of power in the colonies, whether it was to be the former great proprietors or whether the poorer whites would share; these together formed forty thousand of the inhabitants. This controversy had resulted in the beginning of civil war between the whites and into this situation was precipitated the question of the future status of the

-- 162 --
twenty-eight thousand free Negroes and mulattoes, which threatened to add a race war.

Up to this point practically nothing definite had been said about four hundred and fifty-two thousand black slaves. Although Lameth, in his great speech before the Constituent Assembly, had mentioned the possible liberation of the blacks, this was regarded only as a vague and indefinite matter of the future.

Then suddenly at midnight, August twenty-second, the representatives of the half million black slaves of Haiti rose in a bloody revolt that shook the modern world. "In an instant twelve hundred coffee and two-hundred sugar plantations were in flames; the buildings, the machinery, the farmhouses, were reduced to ashes; and the unfortunate proprietors were hunted down, murdered, or thrown into the flames, by the infuriated Negroes. The horrors of a servile war universally appeared. The unchained African signalized his ingenuity by the discovery of new methods and unheard of modes of torture." 91

The revolt was all the more startling because while it had been in the fears and imagination of the colonists for two hundred years, it was always undreamed of as an actual occurrence. There had been numberless revolts, which had spread terror to whites all over the West Indies, Central America and the mainland of the United States; but once they were quickly suppressed, their details and facts were minimized, the records destroyed and the memory forgotten.

In San Domingo itself the dangers of slave revolts were not unknown. For years runaway slaves had hidden in the mountains, especially in the northeastern part of the island. There were serious slave revolts in 1679, 1691 and 1718, and in the middle of the eighteenth century a Negro, Macandel, carried out systematic poisoning which created a panic.

After eight years of open warfare with the French and Spanish, these maroons had completed a treaty of peace with the French in 1780. The maroons were organized under chiefs, among whom were Père Jean in 1679; Michel in 1713; Colas in 1720; Polydor, 1730; Macandel, 1758; Canga, 1777; and Santiague, 1782. The great chief at the time of the slave revolt was Jean François, who was soon succeeded by Biassou and after Biassou came Toussaint L'Ouverture.

-- 163 --

Pierre Dominic Toussaint, known as Toussaint L'Ouverture, joined these maroon bands, where he was called "the doctor of the armies of the king," and soon became leading aid to Jean François and Biassou. Upon their deaths Toussaint rose to the chief command. He acquired complete control over the blacks, not only in military matters, but in politics and social organization.

Toussaint was one of the great men of the world. He made an extraordinary impression upon those who knew him personally or studied his life, whether they were friends or enemies. August Comte included him with Washington, Plato, Buddha and Charlemagne as worthy to replace all the calendar saints. Morvins, biographer of Napoleon, calls him "a man of genius." Beauchamp refers to him as "one of the most extraordinary men of a period when so many extraordinary men appeared on the scene." Lamartine wrote a drama with Toussaint as his hero. Harriet Martineau wrote a novel on his life. Whittier and Wordsworth published poems about him. Sir Spenser St. John, consular agent in Haiti, called him "the one grand figure of a cruel war." Rainsford, a British officer, refers to him as "that truly great man." Chateaubriand charges that Bonaparte not only murdered, but imitated him.

There seems to be little doubt that Toussaint planned and led the revolt of 1791. He was at that time about forty-eight years of age, a small, rather ugly black man, without a drop of white blood. His plans and those of the maroons generally were hidden behind the veil of heathen rites. Much has been written about West Indian voodoo. Its ceremonies and sacrifices were matters of curiosity and ridicule among planters and travelers. They represented, at first, a survival of primitive African animism. Later, equipped with a priesthood, weird African ceremonies and the signaling of drums and tomtoms, they called slaves to worship in the dark mountains of central San Domingo; but they also concealed and protected the plotting of their leaders and directors.

Here it was that, at the time of the revolution, Toussaint laid his plans. He watched the developments in France carefully. There is even a story that he was in France with Ogé, but this is doubtful. While a man with no formal education, he read and thought, and had not only a singular and impressive dignity of bearing, but a character

-- 164 --
which for combined persistence, absolute unselfishness and deep wisdom, has seldom been duplicated. He knew that the new colonial assembly, elected in defiance of French law, since free Negro voters were excluded, was to meet in August. On August fourteenth, in a raging thunder storm, Toussaint and his black leaders made final plans. Their object was to let loose a terror which would make the world pause and give attention to the demands, not only of free Negroes, but of the slaves. Toussaint was convinced that the partial and temporizing attempts of the mulattoes to gain their rights would never be effective. He was determined to strike a tremendous and unheard-of blow.

For four days, the revolt increased. For three weeks the flames spread. Carteau, a planter, who saw it, said: "Picture to yourself, the whole horizon a wall of fire, from which continually rose thick vortices of smoke, whose huge black volumes could be likened only to those frightful storm-clouds which roll onward charged with thunder and lightnings. The rifts in these clouds disclosed flames as great in volume, which rose darting and flashing to the very sky. Such was their voracity that for nearly three weeks we could barely distinguish between day and night, for so long as the rebels found anything to feed the flames, they never ceased to burn." 92

The governor of the colony helplessly called on the revolting Negroes to surrender. In answer Toussaint wrote: "Sir, -- We have never thought of failing in the duty and respect which we owe to the representative of the person of the King, nor even to any of his servants whatever; we have proofs of the fact in our hands; but do you, who are a just man as well as a general, pay us a visit; behold this land which we have watered with our sweat or rather, with our blood, -- those edifices which we have raised, and that in the hope of a just reward! Have we obtained it? The King -- the whole world -- has bewailed our lot, and broken our chains; while, on our part, we, humble victims, were ready for anything, not wishing to abandon our masters. What do we say? We are mistaken; those, who next to God, should have proved our fathers, have been tyrants, monsters unworthy of the fruits of our labours: and do you, brave general, desire that as sheep we should throw ourselves into the jaws of the wolf?

-- 165 --
No! it is too late. God, who fights for the innocent, is our guide; he will never abandon us. Accordingly, this is our motto -- Death or Victory!" 93

Thus while the slaves arranged themselves with the king as symbolic head of the state, the new colonial assembly August 24, 1791, instead of appealing to France, begged protection, especially for their property, from England: "Fire lays waste our possessions, the hands of our Negroes in arms are already dyed with the blood of our brethren. Very prompt assistance is necessary to save the wreck of our fortunes -- already half-destroyed; and confined within the towns, we look for your aid." 94

The governor of Jamaica was wily. He sent five hundred muskets but no other active aid. Meantime the commissioners authorized to pacify the colony arrived in December. They were surprised and shocked at conditions, since no word of the slave revolt had reached Paris before they sailed. Immediately Toussaint showed the statesmanship which was always his strongest card. He sent a white prisoner with a flag of truce and offered to submit. He did not ask complete and immediate abolition of slavery but what was the beginning of it. He demanded general pardon for himself and followers; for a certain comparatively small number of the revolted slaves, comprising probably his most trusted confederates, he asked complete emancipation. For the great body of slaves he demanded that hereafter they work three days a week for their owners and that the other three days they should have the right to work for themselves, presumably on land furnished them by the owners or by the state. There was a current report that France had proposed this step toward emancipation.

It was of course a revolutionary demand, but under the circumstances it should have been treated with consideration. It was not. The commissioners handed the matter over to the Colonial Assembly. The Colonial Assembly at first did not deign to answer. Patiently Toussaint sent a second message by two free Negroes. The bearers were received with contempt and told to return for a reply within ten days. This reply to "revolted slaves" simply asserted that the

-- 166 --
assembly "cannot hold communication with people armed against the law, against all laws" and then ordered the messengers pre-emptorily "to withdraw!" The French commissioners, however, at this breakdown of preliminary negotiations, tried to propose a general amnesty; but this suited no one and two of the commissioners returned to France in the spring of 1792.

Nevertheless this terrible uprising had already brought results. The rebellion had spread to the southwest and was joined by the mulatoes. Two thousand of them rose in one parish and began murder and destruction. They approached Port au Prince, but at that point the mulatto leaders refused further to co-operate with the blacks and told the white colonists that they had been fighting not for the slaves, but to support the decree of May fifteenth which gave mulattoes the right to vote. Immediately the Colonial Assembly, in order to get the support of the mulattoes and separate them from the slaves, proposed to recognize free people of color as citizens, including even those born of slaves, which the decree did not require. It looked as though the mulattoes had won their fight.

Meantime, however, the National Assembly in France on the point of dissolution passed a decree, September twenty-fourth, putting the whole question of the status of slaves and free Negroes in the power of the Colonial Assembly. Early in November news of the new decree arrived in Haiti. The whites, again sure of French support, immediately repudiated their agreement with the free Negroes, arrested colored people and burned several alive. The free Negroes reorganized their forces and renewed their fight.

In France the revolution was developing. The Constituent Assembly had not established democracy but had placed the state in the control of property holders. It now gave way in October, 1791, to the Legislative Assembly where the power of the workers and their radical leaders was definitely increased. This was shown by the decree of April 4, 1792, which said that "The persons of color, multatoes and Negroes, free, shall be admitted, as the white colonists, to vote in all the electoral assemblies, and shall be eligible to all positions when they have also the requisite qualifications." 95

This decree led in San Domingo to a joining of forces between

-- 167 --
the governor and the mulattoes and the capturing of Port au Prince from the white colonists. The enfranchisement of the free Negroes and the mulattoes in the south was celebrated July fourteenth, but the whites took no part; and in the north the blacks still fought on.

A new commission headed by the Jacobin, Santhonax, arrived in the island and was immediately interrogated by the Colonial Assembly as to their policies. The Assembly declared that the Constituent Assembly of France had agreed with them that there could be no agriculture in San Domingo without slavery; and certainly five hundred thousand savage slaves could not become French citizens. Santhonax replied, "We declare that never was it the intention of the National Assembly to abolish slavery"; Polverel added that if France should interfere with slavery he would give up his commission and return home.

On the other hand, the commission insisted on recognizing the citizenship of the free Negroes, and they proceeded to show this by dissolving the Colonial Assembly and appointing an Intermediary Committee of six whites and six mulattoes. This brought the commission into sharp antagonism with the white colonists and with the new French governor, which opposition finally flared into a civil war and reduced Cap François to ashes. The commission had to abandon the town and found themselves face to face with the black revolt in the north.

These slaves realized the change in their position. They were fighting not only the white planters but the mulatto planters also; and in addition to that, they were now fighting the power of the French government which was evidently recognizing slavery. Great Britain and Spain were now at war with France, and Spain approached Toussaint with an offer of freedom to the slaves; while Great Britain, again appealed to by the planters, planned to help them. In the midst of this France killed her king.

Immediately Toussaint took service under Charles IV of Spain, and joined his forces to the Spanish part of San Domingo. He was amazed and repelled by regicide. He had believed in the King's justice. He and his colleagues were made Spanish generals. He immediately issued a manifesto to all Negroes and mulattoes. "I am Toussaint L'Ouverture; my name is perhaps known to you. I have undertaken to avenge

-- 168 --
your wrongs. It is my desire that liberty and equality shall reign in San Domingo. I am striving to this end. Come and unite with us, brothers, and fight with us for the same cause." 96

Through the prowess of Toussaint, the Spanish pushed the French farther and farther back and in a short time secured possession of nearly the whole north of the island and part of the south. The French commission found themselves in a tight place and tried to extricate themselves in June, 1793, by offering to free all slaves who would enroll in their army. In August they went even further and proclaimed universal emancipation in San Domingo, and this action was confirmed by the French National Convention, February 4, 1794.

The first proclamation had no influence upon Toussaint. As a Spanish general, he refused to recognize the authority of the French. But when the English invaded San Domingo, the aspect of things changed. They landed in September and soon had captured the whole western coast except Port au Prince. Finally they captured that city with its heavy artillery and two million dollars' worth of shipping in its harbor. Toussaint knew the British as slave traders, and he now suspected that Spain wanted vengeance on France rather than freedom for the slaves. When, therefore, the French government affirmed universal emancipation early in 1794, he returned to French allegiance to the open delight of the commission. They said, "Remember that distinctions of color are no more!"

The blacks under Toussaint now proceeded to restore San Domingo to France. The mere magic of his name did much without fighting. In April Toussaint left the Spanish army; in May the French flag was flying at Gonaives. From now on Toussaint was known as L'Ouverture, the Savior. Gradually the whole northern part of the island was in his possession. As Santhonax wrote in his diary, "These Negroes perform miracles of bravery." 97

In France, the desperate position of the republic in July, 1793, had been changed under the National Convention. The mountain radicals gained the upper hand; the commune ruled Paris and Robespierre ruled France. Horrible as was this Reign of Terror, it was by

-- 169 --
this means that the traitors within were driven out and France galvanized into self-defense. By the treaty of Basel in 1795, Spain surrendered her portion of San Domingo to France.

Meantime Rigaud and the mulattoes had been making desperate resistance against the British, and the French commission had recognized them by bestowing high office upon colored men. By the end of 1793 they were exercising wide political power. When, however, after the return of Toussaint to allegiance, both he and Rigaud were made brigadier-generals, the old jealousy and mistrust arose between the blacks and mulattoes. It was emphasized by the continuing success of Toussaint and the stalemate between the mulattoes and the British.

Despite Rigaud, the English had captured Port au Prince, but Toussaint attacked them from the east and even after reinforcements brought them under General Howe, he totally defeated them and was made commander-in-chief of the army of San Domingo in May, 1797. Just as Toussaint was getting ready to besiege Port au Prince, the British agreed on a truce giving up the city and retiring to Jeremie. Toussaint's entrance into Port au Prince was an ovation. Flags were flying, flowers were heaped on him and many distinctions and honors proffered.

The British after five years were sick of their attempt to conquer Haiti. By September 30, 1796, out of the whole number of white troops, British and foreign, who had landed in Haiti since 1795, at least 15,000 men, only 3,000 were left alive. April 22, 1798, the British Commander Maitland evacuated all towns in Haiti except Mole St. Nicholas. He had only about a thousand troops alive. 98

The brilliant success of Toussaint not only aroused the envy of the mulattoes, but the suspicion of France. The commission of Santhonax, who had returned, reported to the new government of the Directory in France, the facts concerning Toussaint, and they thought it best to send a governor who would curb his power. Hédouville, the new governor, arrived April 20, 1798, and proposed to take charge of the negotiations with the English; but Maitland, the English commander, was only too glad to affront France by dealing

-- 170 --
directly and exclusively with Toussaint and to attempt to gain for England by flattery and bribery what he could not take by force. After five years of fighting, the loss of thirty thousand men and the expenditure of one hundred million dollars, he offered to surrender.

On October 1, 1798, Toussaint entered Mole St. Nicholas as conqueror. The white troops saluted him. He was dined in the public square, on a silver service which was afterwards presented him in the name of the King of England. A treaty was signed by which the English gave up the island, recognized Haiti as independent, and entered into a commercial agreement. They then tried secretly to induce Toussaint to declare himself king, but he refused.

Hédouville, insulted, returned to Europe, taking with him a band of eighteen hundred equally disgruntled whites, mulattoes and blacks. As a final thrust he encouraged open strife between Toussaint and Rigaud by recognizing Rigaud as independent ruler in the south. Despite every effort on the part of Toussaint, the breach between his followers and the mulattoes flamed into open hostilities; but by the summer of 1800 Rigaud had been induced voluntarily to leave Haiti for France, where he got his revenge by later joining Le Clerc's expedition.

Toussaint next took possession of the Spanish part of the island and thus became master of the whole island. His next step was a critical one. Haiti was conquered but it had to be organized and governed, and no one was so capable of establishing this government as Toussaint. He, therefore, proceeded to draw up and promulgate a constitution of seventy-seven articles. It abolished slavery forever, and declared all men born there free citizens of the French Republic; and everyone of whatever color eligible for all kinds of employment. Agriculture was especially encouraged; and for the first time in the history of the world, a state constitution provided for free trade.

Beyond these political provisions, he turned attention toward the economic; the island was divided into districts with inspectors who were to see that the freed men returned to their work. A fifth part of the produce of each estate was to go to the workers. Commercial arrangements were made with the United States and England.

This constitution he sent to France for approval, a year after the Eighteenth Brumaire, when the bourgeoisie returned to power with

-- 171 --
Napoleon as First Consul. The course of the French Revolution had again changed. The dictatorship of the workers with its welter of blood, gave the owners of capital a chance and excuse to seize the reins of government, hiding behind the patriotism which the attack of all Europe on France had evoked.

To Napoleon, the planter interests appealed. They wrote to Josephine, soon to be Napoleon's wife, that "a black ape, a certain Toussaint," has made himself ruler of the island with the connivance of Santhonax. "Take your kerchief, as you have always done in difficult situations, put it to your weeping eyes, and entreat Barras and the Egyptian hero who has just returned to Paris, General Bonaparte, the victor of Lodi, Arcole, Milan, and Marengo; entreat them by all the saints still surviving in France to put colonial affairs in order at the earliest possible moment, before they become unmanageable. A slave cannot be free, according to the counsel of the gospel." 99

Napoleon, when he received the constitution from Toussaint, was thirty-two years of age, and in the full tide of his extraordinary career. He could not tolerate colored or black men. He had relieved General Dumas, son of a French Marquis, from his command for no reason but color. Dumas was the father of the author of The Three Musketeers, and grandfather of the author of Camille.

Napoleon would have ordered an army to San Domingo as soon as he seized power in France, but the English blockade hindered him, and affairs in Egypt were going badly. As soon as the peace of Amiens was signed with the English, Napoleon felt free to handle Toussaint and the blacks. He intimated that Toussaint was usurping French power and not recognizing the paramount authority of the mother country. "A constitution of a Haitian Republic, with a black consul at its head, would be a violation of France's sovereignty, just as the liberty of the Blackamoors is an insult to Europe."

Napoleon gradually elaborated his own plans for the restoration of French colonial power in America. He wanted to know to what extent the French bankers "will assist the republic which is striving to gain a strategic vantage ground on the American continent." Islands were not enough. He wanted foothold in North America.

-- 172 --

He admitted that Toussaint, by bringing together the blacks and mulattoes, had prepared San Domingo for France. "We should be making a mistake, if France did not turn to account the prosperity which this black general has brought to our richest island. How can this be done? The Negroes must be reduced to submission. We have grounds for dissatisfaction. Toussaint has submitted to me for confirmation a Negro constitution for the Republic of Haiti. This is an insult to France, and we will make war on Haiti. We will put an announcement in the papers that there is no slavery in our colonies. I, as First Consul, will write a flattering reply to Toussaint L'Ouverture. But what we must achieve is: first, the complete restoration of the former status of the Negroes; secondly, the cautious removal, after careful preparation, of all Negro leaders." 100

Napoleon's plans were backed not only by the large number of disaffected colonials and exiled planters living in Paris, by speculators and merchants who wanted again to handle the labor and crops of the West Indies, but also the mulatto colony in Paris let their hatred of Toussaint blind them to the real aims of Napoleon and were eager to co-operate with him.

Napoleon figured that by reconquering the queen of the Antilles he would not only keep his large and expensive army active but acquire new prestige. Also he would find a berth for his obscure brother-in-law, Charles Victor Emmanuel Le Clerc. Napoleon's preparations to conquer San Domingo were on a tremendous scale and no expense was spared. Bodies of troops were collected in France, Holland and Spain. Every dockyard was busy. Napoleon gave more personal attention to organizing this expedition than he had to his Egyptian campaign. The army included veterans who had distinguished themselves in all the Napoleonic campaigns. He summoned the young sons of Toussaint, flattered them and sent them as hostages along with the fleet. He promised a bishopric to any of Toussaint's confessors who would induce him to surrender.

Le Clerc sailed with a fleet of five squadrons, leaving Europe on December 14, 1801. He had twenty-one thousand troops on more than eighty vessels; thirteen major generals and twenty-seven brigadier-generals accompanied him and all of the expelled leaders of the

-- 173 --
mulattoes: Rigaud, Petion, Birot. The orders given to this fleet were a combination of threats, promises and dastardly lying which seem today almost incomprehensible for the head of a great state. "No mistaken notions of soldierly honor," Napoleon admonished Le Clerc. "Remember that Negroes are not human beings."

He sent an open letter to Toussaint, thanking him for restoring San Domingo to France and commending certain things in his constitution, but declaring that much of it conflicted with the dignity and supreme authority of the French nation. At the same time secret instructions were given Le Clerc. The campaign was to be divided into three periods: the first period, from fifteen to twenty days, was to be given up to occupying the forts, quieting the people and getting acquainted with the topography, and taking possession of the plains. The second period, the rebels were to be pursued to death and the confidence of their leaders gained. In the third period, the leaders to be sent to France as prisoners and their remaining followers pursued into the hills to be finished off at leisure.

Late in January, Le Clerc assembled his fleet at the eastern tip of the island. One glance at it convinced Toussaint that the object was conquest and slavery. He had about nineteen thousand men under Christophe, Dessalines and his brother, Paul L'Ouverture. When Le Clerc approached Cap François, Christophe refused to let him enter. After a parley, a battle began which lasted all day and sank one of the chief vessels. Christophe then burned the town, beginning with his own palatial headquarters and destroying more than twenty million dollars' worth of property. He then took to the hills with his troops, leaving only the ashes for Le Clerc to occupy.

This exploit was characteristic of the extraordinary campaign between Le Clerc and Toussaint. With his trained soldiers and his supplies, Le Clerc easily and quickly captured the whole San Domingan coast. The blacks fighting retreated to the hills. Le Clerc closed in upon them. They eluded him, burst through his lines, fell upon him with fierce onslaught and disappeared into thin air. With desperate valor, his veterans captured the central almost inaccessible fortress, Crête à Pierrot. But that exploit alone cost the French twenty-seven hundred men, and they had to adopt various expedients to conceal their losses. Le Clerc called for reinforcements from France. He

-- 174 --
sought to restore to the planters their former power over their slaves, and at the same time declared that slavery was not to be restored. But San Domingo remained unconquered. His lines of communication and commissary department broke down.

Then Le Clerc tried duplicity: he had already sent Toussaint's own sons to plead with him, but Toussaint merely told them that they could stay with him or go back to the French; and added, "I must warn you that to remain with me means to remain with your race and with its cause, to remain in the Land of Mountains, and to regard the Land of Mountains as the Mother of the Earth. We must remold human relations here -- we must alter human society here -- and from here, liberty will go out to the whole world." 101

Now Le Clerc made subtler approach. He promised San Domingans, "before the face of the Supreme Being," to respect their liberty. He argued that he simply represented the authority of France which the leaders willingly acknowledged. Why could there not be peace? He seduced Christophe, Dessalines and other leaders until Toussaint found himself stripped of co-operation. He did not believe Le Clerc, but there was nothing for him to do but submit.

His progress to the Cap to make a treaty of peace was like a triumphant procession. He signed the treaty and sat silently at a great banquet in his honor. He said, "I accept everything which is for the advance of the people and the army. As for myself, I wish to retire."

For a month he was allowed to live in peace, and then responding courteously to an invitation to consult with General Brunet, he was seized, imprisoned and sent to France. Le Clerc wrote to Napoleon, "Toussaint must not be left at liberty. Shut him up somewhere in the republic so that he never again sees San Domingo." Napoleon sent him to Fort Joux in the cold and snow of the Jura Alps.

Meantime and in less than two weeks after the peace treaty, yellow fever struck the French army; within three weeks, three thousand French soldiers were dead, and many more thousands were being nursed by the blacks. Le Clerc fairly shrieked his complaints to the strangely silent Napoleon. Already in May, 1802, Le Clerc was wailing that "sickness is destroying the army under my command. Not another second is to be lost. Send reinforcements immediately." Then

-- 175 --
came the arrest of Toussaint. "I implore you earnestly," he wrote, "to send reinforcements. I am without supplies. I am not master in the colony. Send me money. The army is in desperate straits. Do something for us."

Not only did the scourge of fever increase but signs of distrust and rebellion multiplied among the blacks. The news of restored slavery in Martinique and Guadeloupe leaked out. "No general of an army has ever been in such an unfavorable situation. The troops which arrived last month have ceased to exist. The rebels are attacking the valley every day; they open fire, which can be heard in Le Cap. It is impossible for me to defend myself; my regiments have been crushed, and I have no means for carrying on the defence or for utilizing the advantages which they offer me." 102

The tom-toms rolled darkly in the hills. By September the revolt was in full sway. Even the mulattoes deserted the French. Earlier in the spring of the same year Toussaint died or was murdered at Fort Joux. He had not been allowed the services of a physician because as his jailor explained, "The health of Negroes is in no way similar to the health of Europeans." After studied humiliations and deprivations he was found dead April seventh.

Thus perished the greatest of American Negroes and one of the great men of all time, at the age of fifty-six. A French planter said, "God in his terrestrial globe did not commune with a purer spirit." 103 Wendell Phillips said, "You think me a fanatic, for you read history, not with your eyes, but with your prejudices. But fifty years hence, when Truth gets a hearing, the Muse of history will put Phocion for the Greek, Brutus for the Roman, Hampden for the English, La Fayette for France; choose Washington as the bright, consummate flower of our earliest civilization; and then, dipping her pen in the sunlight, will write in the clear blue, above them all, the name of the soldier, the statesman, the martyr, Toussaint L'Ouverture."

Santhonax, a wily Jacobin, who knew him, said, "Toussaint is the real leader of the Negroes, and the white inhabitants, who have been conciliated, regard him as a friend. Sometimes I feel that this fanatic

-- 176 --
man is inflamed with an unquenchable fire of love for humanity." 104

Wordsworth wrote:

There's not a breathing of the common wind
That will forget thee: thou hast great allies;
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And love, and Man's unconquerable mind.

In 1802 and 1803 nearly forty thousand French soldiers died of war and fever. Le Clerc himself died in November, 1803. Rochambeau succeeded to his command and was promised soldiers by Napoleon; but already in May, 1803, Great Britain started new war with France and communication between France and San Domingo was impossible. The black insurgents held the land; the British held the sea. In November, 1803, Rochambeau surrendered and white authority died in San Domingo forever.

The effect of all this was far-reaching. Napoleon gave up his dream of American empire and sold Louisiana for a song. "Thus, all of Indian Territory, all of Kansas and Nebraska, Iowa and Wyoming, Montana and the Dakotas, and most of Colorado and Minnesota, and all of Washington and Oregon states, came to us as the indirect work of a despised Negro. Praise, if you will, the work of a Robert Livingstone or a Jefferson, but today let us not forget our debt to Toussaint L'Ouverture, who was indirectly the means of America's expansion by the Louisiana Purchase of 1803." 105

-- 177 --

ONE has but to notice significant dates in the emancipation of Negro slaves and the enfranchisement of white workers to become aware of the close connection between the two series of events. Especially since the French Revolution, the white workers of Europe were striving to better their condition through the achievement of political power. There was in the minds of their leaders no question but that with the right to vote all things economic were possible. Slowly through the reform bills and subsequent legislation in England, through the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 in France, and by analogous steps in many other countries, including the revolution in the United States under Andrew Jackson, the great mass of white workers were enfranchised. At the same time in the West Indies and South America the working class was being made legally free and in some cases also achieved the right to vote. In the rest of the world and among the darker peoples, the workers remained for the most part in semi-serfdom.

Meantime the power of capitalism expanded enormously. Capital actually gained that freedom of action and irresponsibility of power which had been dreamed into reality in the eighteenth century as an attribute of the free individual citizen. The power of capital in the state increased much faster than the participation of workers in the direction of the state. Moreover, the power of capital rested upon legal property and property was the thing that was most tenaciously withheld from the democratic power of the new workers.

England stopped the slave trade in order to defeat Napoleon. She was enabled to do this because a moral revolt was sweeping England against the methods of the slave trade; and this revolt was allowed

-- 178 --
scope because continual slave uprisings and new conditions in Africa were reducing the profits of slavery. Moreover, a new era of capitalism was approaching. It was gradually becoming possible to transfer capital to places where labor was available instead of, as formerly, being compelled to transfer labor to available land and capital.

This increased ease in the transfer of capital came through the establishment of stock exchanges. In 1773 the "Stock Exchange Coffee House" was established in London and business grew so fast that in 1801 the members raised capital and provided a building and opened it in 1802. Thus while particular recipients of profits might be ruined, and were ruined, in the stopping of the slave trade and the abolition of slavery, nevertheless the general flow of profits to the masters of capital could be and was enormously increased at the beginning of the nineteenth century by possibilities of investment in Europe, Asia, and Africa.

On the other hand, recalcitrant groups of laborers who revolted against capitalists' methods, like those in the West Indies Islands, could now be starved into submission. Instead of transporting labor from Africa to the rich lands of America, it was possible to transfer capital to the labor of Africa and Asia and thus control increasing amounts of necessary raw materials. With this new capitalistic era went new methods of controlling democracy through wealth, through investment in colonial labor. The wealth and power of capitalist classes in democratic lands became so large that directly and indirectly they controlled votes and public opinion. The forms of democracy remained but the substance began steadily to decay as colonial imperialism increased.

The main problem of the West Indies is not political, but economic, and the problem of race is only important as it affects economic status. The labor of the islands, ignorant and degraded and exploited for centuries, was freed only in the sense that the importations of Africans ceased. There was some division of lands varying in different islands from the complete peasant proprietorship of Haiti to complete land monopoly under landlords in many other islands.

The taxes direct and indirect on the poor are high; the officials, especially in the British Islands, receive large salaries and perquisites. For instance, in West Indian, Central and South American British

-- 179 --
colonies, nine governors receive as salaries and allowances $175,000 a year, not to speak of other governmental expenses. Yet the work of these nine men could easily be concentrated into the hands of two or three executives. Such federation, however, would mean increasing power and democratic control among black people, attack on investment returns, with all of the slow and painful training of those folk into self-government. This task Great Britain is not disposed to undertake. The markets in which the island produce can be sold are monopolized and directed by white capital in European centers, and the carrying trade is entirely in their hands. Capital for local enterprise can only be obtained from them and the local labor employed is paid at the lowest competitive price.

Revolt has been controlled by the rise of a small local bourgeoisie composed of whites and reinforced gradually by mulattoes and a few blacks, who are recognized as part of the dominant white community and associate and often intermarry with them. All signs of revolt and leadership are thus persistently taken away from the Negro masses and honors, appointments and recognition by the mother country are so arranged as to keep the status quo.

Here and there despite this, revolts arise. One of the most spectacular was the case of Marcus Garvey. He was a leader of the Jamaica peasants and, migrating to the United States, tried from that base to emancipate the Negroes of the world by commercial enterprise. It was of course a dream far beyond his power or ability, but it aroused the Negro world and led to precautionary measures both in the West Indies and in Africa. Recently widespread labor troubles have broken out both in the French and the British West Indies. The only systematic attempt to meet the grievances of this peasantry has been taken in the producers' and consumers' co-operative movement, which the English government has subsidized, chiefly to offset the monopoly of the American owned United Fruit Company.

The West Indies still remain remote exploited provinces, cut off from union with the world labor movement or with their racial groups, and distracted by petty internal jealousies and provincialisms. It is the tragedy and paradox of a land where life might be easy, healthy and happy, with a minimum of toil for simple needs, or even luxury with adequate technique, that the investing races of the world

-- 180 --
have for centuries lived on the toil of this proletariat, raping its land and labor; impoverishing it with taxes and interest; monopolizing its sugar, coffee and fruit; depressing the prices of its products in the world market and saddling it with eternal debt. Today the white world visits the land either to play or to rule; to reap large profit and to throw pennies and guffaws at little, lithe, black, begging swimmers.

The racial problem in these areas is biological, but even more cultural. The people are European in speech and outlook, but largely African in their unconscious memories and survivals; and still so filled with a naive joy and exhilaration from an awful experience in slave trade and slavery that there survives art and laughter and joy of living, sprung today from emancipation, and not embittered as yet by memory of a fall from decent standards of living or lost dreams of wealth.

Human beings are apt to be naive in their plans of righting social wrongs, particularly if it seems possible to execute these plans without loss of income to themselves or others. If the stealing of men instituted slavery, their emancipation meant freedom and happiness. It was a commonplace among abolitionists to prove beyond peradventure that a free laborer could do more work and better work than a slave and create more wealth. It was not, on the other hand, at all clear that while the profit which the slave made went almost exclusively to his master save for the pittance which kept him alive, on the other hand, the profit of the free laborer was divided: an increased proportion went to the laborer himself in the form of wages or of leisure; and he might easily have no direct interest in making the total profit large.

Of course those who had invested in the West Indies knew that under slavery or freedom, under political control or independence, they owned the land, they would handle the crops, they would pay the labor. Unless then the land was confiscated or the crops seriously decreased in amount, or the labor inefficient or intractable, they might still make profit. It happened after West Indian emancipation, that only in one country was the land definitely and entirely taken from the former proprietors.

Sugar, coffee, cocoa, tobacco and rum, and later oil and tropical

-- 181 --
fruits were the raw materials eventually turned out by the West Indies in increasing amounts. Their value was enhanced at first by the Napoleonic wars and later by the prosperity and increased demand of the industrial development of the nineteenth century.

Labor varied in efficiency and docility. The first impulse of the freed slave was to rest, to realize his freedom in leisure and absence of driven toil. If he had his own land as in Haiti, he worked only irregularly and when his wants compelled him. On the other hand, in Cuba he remained a slave long after legal emancipation, being driven to work by land monopoly and the low wages paid. In Jamaica there was at first widespread ruin among the planters. They were already in debt to English financiers and the demand of the free laborers in wage and leisure was more than they could pay and keep solvent.

On the other hand, the owner and exploiter was not without weapons against the laborer: he could refuse to furnish capital except this was accompanied by at least some political control. Foreign capital could be attracted to these regions of emancipation only by the payment of large interest and the promise of excessive profit. Even when emancipated labor began to get political power and to vote, nevertheless this power could be controlled by limiting its scope to the selection of powerless officials and carefully keeping control of property and industry out of the hands of the voters.

Unfortunately, all the interesting details of this economic development in the West Indies have not been seriously studied by sociologists and economists. Usually the explanation of everything that has taken place there is purely racial: Negroes are lazy and inefficient and consequently poor and turbulent; with a different kind of labor the West Indies would flourish, but their racial fate is upon them.

Despite this oft-repeated belief, it is quite clear that if the West Indian laborers were paid decent wages and given a modern education; if they could control capital and income through a free vote; there might arise there a center of world industry; and more than that, a center of thought and art. But so long as the labor is isolated on these islands, given but limited education, paid a starvation wage, kept largely from the use of the land, and taxed on consumption, some art may emerge and some individuals of note, but on the whole

-- 182 --
the islands and the adjacent mainland will remain a sort of world slum, illustrating and making clear the exploitation which planted it in the past and prolongs it today.

The future development of this interesting and fundamentally important part of the world may come through the economic emancipation of its preponderantly dark peasantry and the raising of them to higher standards of living. On the other hand it may come by the persistent effort which one sees today to subject them to a bourgeoisie partly risen from their own masses and partly foreign, which will build a prosperity of wealth on the continued subjection of the masses of labor. It is for the promise of this latter purpose, that these groups are held today apart, not only by general economic exploitation but by studiously encouraging provincialism in small and separate islands and groups, with every difficulty of intercourse and contact and in the face of the general neglect of the world.

To illustrate the development of the West Indies, since the emancipation of the slaves, we may take certain typical examples: the drama of the West Indies typified itself in the story of San Domingo. Here was the nadir of labor, a great amorphous mass of black commodity flesh dumped into a little island of heavenly beauty and exploited with every ecstasy of cruelty and blood, from the mass murder of Indians in the fifteenth century to the sugar-cane exploitation of the eighteenth. And then suddenly, in a night, there came the revolution. It came as Marx would have had it, not so much from the educated and rich mulattoes, as from the great black mass of slaves, led by an incredible man; those slaves drove out the imperial Spaniards and the commercial English and ruined Napoleon Bonaparte's dream of empire in the Valley of the Mississippi; they set up a free and independent state.

The result of the Haitian revolution was not so much the independence of a small island with its half million or more inhabitants, but rather the ideas which it spread among many million black laborers in America, and their exploiters; and even beyond that, the challenge to democracy which it eventually instituted.

The world alternately grew red with laughter and white with fear as this little independent state, born of slavery and revolution, started its tempestuous career. Its real problem was not political, although it

-- 183 --
had to struggle for political independence against France and the United States. The essential struggle was for economic survival; for feeding and sheltering these slaves and enabling them to barter with the world for a share in world goods. Commercial isolation was not permitted. They must trade and on such terms as white folk willed. They established under the great Christophe, whose monument is still the most marvelous building in America, a replica of the African tribal government with emperor, chieftains, clans and family life, and raised Haiti from the inertia of reaction to organized and fairly efficient beginnings of economic life.

Above all, this regime accomplished the most astonishing thing in the modern world: it divided the land among the peasantry in fee simple, sharply in contrast with the land monopoly of Europe, the current land theft of Africa, the other West Indies and America. Land-holding by foreigners was forbidden and large holdings by natives were neither politically wise nor profitable. The plantation system disappeared.

This was the result not so much of edict as of custom. Toussaint, Christophe and Petion all were compelled to drive the black laborers back to their land; but they gave them holidays to work for themselves and they gave them customary rights of tenure. Gradually it came to be Haitian law that peasants could not be evicted and this law stood until the Americans did what they could to overturn it during their occupation. But, after all, this island of communal effort and peasant proprietorship was in the midst of a sea of private profit organized during the Industrial Revolution and coming, in the early nineteenth century, to its perfect flower.

The kidnaping and death of Toussaint opened the eyes of his followers; Dessalines and Christophe and mulattoes like Petion, who had joined the French, soon saw their mistake. The result was that Rochambeau was literally driven into the sea and had to surrender to the English. After the loss of sixty thousand Frenchmen, Haiti became independent and in 1804 Dessalines tore out the white stripe from the French tricolor and threw it on the ground and put the red and the blue together as the standard of a new state, which he called Haiti, "Land of Mountains."

He and his successor, Christophe, were curious combinations of

-- 184 --
primitive African chieftains and shrewd modern men, uneducated and violent but determined and shrewd. Through the Napoleonic wars they maintained the political independence. Political subjugation could not be forced on Haiti, but economic subjugation was almost inevitable. Crops decreased; Haitians were not raising sugar for the world but food for themselves; they were not toiling for the ease of white folk, but for their own enjoyment. The Sugar Empire passed to the slaves of Cuba. The French later insisted on enormous tribute, which Boyer reduced in actual figures, but which still remained more than this poor community could pay and live.

The pressure of American investment began, culminating in demands for strategic coaling stations and finally in attempted subjugation. The result in Haiti was that the people limped forward, wavering between the attempted leadership of presidents analogous to African chieftains, and presidents who represented the French élite of capital.

The élite could establish no exploitation in modern form because they could furnish neither land nor cheap labor to investors, nor did the island have technical skill for industry. The agriculture of Haiti was at the mercy of colonial imperialism throughout the world, with a low value set on raw materials, by those world centers where profit was made and expected, not from the raising of crops, but from their transformation into manufactured goods. Such foreign capital as was offered Haiti was offered only on the severest terms with a demand for more or less political control in the background and with the additional demand, peculiar to colored countries, that white representatives be the local repositories of all expenditure and control.

During these years the fight in Haiti was between an incipient bourgeoisie with a fine tradition of French culture but small wealth, and a black peasantry fanatic in its insistence upon land ownership and freedom from compulsory labor. Civil disturbances, rapid succession of officials and social unrest in Haiti can practically all be explained in these terms.

Finally the United States conceived of Haiti as a way station to the Panama Canal, and President Wilson, at the behest of American investors and commercial freebooters, seized the country. The resistance was not mainly, and could not be, physical. The new engines

-- 185 --
of war were too terrible; but Haiti put in action a "sit-down" strike, a silent refusal to co-operate; it made use of all of the difficulties of a language which the Americans did not know, and of a law code with which they were not familiar; the inability of the conquerors legally to monopolize land; and above all a determined propaganda among the Negroes of the United States which threatened their allegiance to the Republican party, the party of finance capital, in many critical centers.

There were only two ways out: murder and subjugation, which the Republican party with its Negro supporters did not dare inaugurate; or compromise. That compromise consisted of compelling Haiti to accept a debt which was nothing less than highway robbery, and included every alleged "contract" that it could, under the most disadvantageous terms. Haiti again became "free," but her existence depended upon a dictatorship which must, on the one hand, keep the peace; and, on the other hand, pay enormous and continuous tribute to the banks of New York. An American fiscal officer sits in Port au Prince with his hands on the treasury, seeing that the profit of foreign investors, made permanent by the debt agreement, is paid before anything can be done for Haitian labor in wage, education, health or social advance.

Under such circumstances no new orientation of object could easily take place. The new voices of industrial democracy were sternly repressed and perhaps had to be if the threat of American subjugation was not to return. Nevertheless, the voices were there and the effort. The voices declared that the true ideal of Haiti is to raise its land-holding peasantry to economic independence and intelligence; and perhaps the most significant prophecy of this thought was when Bellegarde, delegate of Haiti, alone raised his voice against the South African murder of the Bondelschwartz, voicing the complaint of a whole world of exploited black folk in the League of Nations.

The Spanish end of the island of San Domingo is known today as the Dominican Republic. It remained separate from Haiti until Toussaint and his revolting slaves united the island. When Haiti was established as an independent republic, the Spanish part of the island reverted to Spain, but became independent in 1821. The Haitians

-- 186 --
under President Boyer dominated the whole island from 1822 to 1844. Since then the Dominican Republic has been independent, except for the intervention of American business, 1916 to 1924. The greatest leader of the country was the mulatto, Ulisse Heureaux.

Much Negro and less Spanish blood make up the people of the republic, but the Dominicans are anxious to be regarded as white because they want to be treated like white people and preserve the social and cultural bonds which they still have with Spanish-speaking countries. They, therefore, discriminate against Negroes in their immigration laws. On the other hand, their workers form a part of the low paid exploited labor of the West Indies, working under the control of foreign capital.

Turning now to Jamaica, we find a development different in many ways. Two hundred fifty-five thousand slaves were set free in 1838 for which the planters were paid nearly thirty million dollars. There ensued a discouraging condition of industry. This was partly due to unwilling and lazy Negro labor, trained by slavery to despise common work; but it was also in part due to English commercial adjustments. The capital invested in the West Indies by Englishmen was more and more concentrated in the carrying trade and that trade even after emancipation remained large and lucrative. The Jamaica crops of sugar and coffee markedly decreased at the time of emancipation, but crops from other islands and new crops more than made up the difference.

The losses fell principally on the plantation owners who had borrowed from the financiers and already paid them handsome profit. Tariff protection on Jamaican sugar in the English market was withdrawn after emancipation and the price of sugar which had been about ten dollars a hundredweight fell to six dollars. The overvalued estates were burdened with mortgages and debts owed largely to English consignees, who had formerly bought the sugar crop. There was a severe financial and banking crisis in England. Ninetenths of the Jamaican land and estates in Jamaica were owned by absentee landlords and administered by agents. They proceeded to cut the wages of labor from fifty cents to twenty-five cents a day and finally even to sixteen cents a day. And often at that they had no money to pay the wages due.

-- 187 --

Thomas Carlyle came forward as the extreme protagonist of the planters with his Discourse on Niggers in 1849: "You are not slaves now; nor do I wish, if it can be avoided, to see you slaves again; but decidedly you have to be servants to those that are born wiser than you; . . . servants to the whites, if they are (as what mortal man can doubt they are?) born wiser than you! That, you may depend upon, my obscure black friends! Is and was always the Law of the world for you and all men." 106

The white officials sent out in these days were arbitrary and corrupt. Little was done for the mass of people and there was outrageous over-taxation. Nevertheless the backwardness of the colony was attributed solely to the Negro. Governor Eyre complained in 1865 that the young and strong were good for nothing and were filling the jails.

The colored people were aroused and a mulatto, George William Gordon, began agitation for reform. Gordon was the son of a white planter by a Negro slave woman, who taught himself to read and write and eventually bought his own and his mother's freedom. He became a prosperous storekeeper, and when his white father became insolvent redeemed the home and maintained his father and the white family in it, although they refused to recognize him or let him enter the house. The minister of the Scotch church in Kingston characterized him as "a man of princely generosity and unbounded benevolence." He married a white woman and by allying himself as a planter with the whites, as so many of the mulattoes did, he might have escaped the difficulties of black folk. But he espoused the cause of the blacks and as a parish official tried to help them in many ways.

Meetings were held, and finally the Negro peasantry began a riot in 1861, in which twenty-two people were killed, only three of whom were white. Thirty-four persons were wounded. The result was that Governor Eyre tried and executed by court-martial three hundred and fifty-four persons, and also killed without trial eighty-five, a total of four hundred and thirty-nine. In addition to this, one hundred and forty-seven were killed after martial law ceased. One thousand Negro homes were burned to the ground and thousands of Negroes flogged or mutilated. Children had their brains dashed out,

-- 188 --
pregnant women were murdered, and Gordon himself, whose direct connection with the riot was never proved, was tried by courtmartial and hanged. In fact the punishment was, as the royal commissioners admitted, "reckless and positively barbarous." Eyre was never punished, but the island was made a crown colony in 1866 and twenty years later the voters were given the right to elect a majority of the legislature.

Nevertheless this right to vote was seriously curtailed. It could not touch the returns on old investments made by the English dating back to slavery days. It had but limited control over the land, and its right of taxation was strictly curtailed by the governor and colonial office and could not impede the freedom of capital. The peasantry remains with elementary education, little land, low wages and uncertain employment.

Above the mass has arisen a considerable class of educated, well-to-do Negroes and mulattoes, who achieve on the whole political and social equality with the whites. Good education is available for them and commercial and political preferment. But their ranks could be multiplied tenfold and their horizon infinitely widened in industry, literature and art, if the barriers of slavery did not hold the great flood of ability and genius imprisoned in the black peasantry.

Emancipation wrought no sudden miracle in Cuba. Economic oppression continued after emancipation. The mass of the Negroes were still beasts of burden on the sugar and tobacco plantations and manumission gave them no settled economic status. They were continually uprooted by war, disorganized, politically unstable, and even when enfranchised the victims of demagogues and fuel for further revolution.

It was the Negroes and mulattoes who made Cuba politically independent of Spain and started her on her torturous climb to economic justice. The Ten Years War brought legal emancipation, but when oppression and injustice followed, Antonio Maceo, a handsome mulatto, took the field with numbers of Negro soldiers in 1895. The wealthy Spanish and creole capitalists denounced this war as a race struggle of Negroes against whites. From the beginning it was bitter. For fourteen days Maceo and his companions were hunted over hills and valleys and through forests. Some of his companions were killed,

-- 189 --
others captured, and he himself was wounded twenty-five times. Finally in December, 1896, he was killed "too soon to witness the final triumph of his cause," but he lived long enough "to stamp him the greatest military leader in Cuba's history." His bronze monument today dominates Havana.

Through the intervention of the United States, Cuba secured her freedom. American Negro regiments played a leading role, among other things rescuing Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders from threatened annihilation. But the American intervention had its price. It was motivated by no desire to see Negroes free and politically independent in Cuba, but rather with the distinct design of dominating the Cuban sugar fields and concentrating in that island the sugar culture which formerly had centered in Haiti and Jamaica. With the rule of American capital and under such officials as Wood, Brookes and Lagoon, labor exploitation was accomplished and helped by racial discrimination which was now emphasized in Cuba to an extent never known before.

Notwithstanding this, the political leaders, whether they were puppets of the Americans or local demagogues, had to be careful of their Negro political support. Estrada Palma, who was the first independent Cuban official and a direct representative of American finance, depended upon Martin Delgado, the black leader, for political backing. He managed, however, in deference to American prejudice, to refuse recognition to Delgado's wife at social functions.

Palma subjected the government to foreign capital, closed the doors to native development and favored foreign banking. The sugar lands were increasingly monopolized. Whole towns on the sugar estates were subject to American law, with private company railways and private ports. A wave of purely racial resentment swept over Cuba for the first time. Under the leadership of Estenoz, born in the black capital, Santiago de Cuba, a new Independent Colored Party was formed and incorporated in 1907. Within a year it had a membership of over sixty thousand Negro voters. The result was race riots and clashes, in one of which at Oriente, three thousand Negroes were killed.

President Gomez depended again upon Delgado and by his aid an electoral law was introduced forbidding the formation of any

-- 190 --
political party along racial lines. But the lesson had been learned. Negro officials began to be appointed. They have occupied cabinet and other high positions. Under President Grau, the Havana chief of police was a capable mulatto. A black judge was appointed and the number of Negro Army officers increased. Indeed the present military dictator of Cuba, Fulgencio Batista, who came to power in 1933, is a mulatto with white, Negro and Indian blood.

The present Negro population of Cuba probably runs to about seventy per cent despite official statistics. The Negroes form naturally the bulk of the poor, ignorant and untrained. The American economic penetration has monopolized the resources of the island and made the Negro's opportunity worse. There are now Negro and white jobs and open discrimination in pay. As Beals says, if present tendencies persist, "Cuba will be converted into a vast sugar plantation with a population of West Indian Negroes, a cowardly native bureaucracy; a government receiving orders from Wall Street, and a flag -- symbol of its independence." 107

Puerto Rico was annexed to the United States after the Spanish American war and in 1917 the inhabitants became American citizens. Education has been provided widely but the poverty and low social status of the people as a result of long history of exploitation and misrule are notable and have led to clashes with the officials, labor controversy and other sorts of unrest.

Turning now to South America, we may center our attention upon Brazil because this country represents a rather different attempt to solve the problem, not only of the worker but of the workers of different races. The submerged peoples here were the Indians and the Negroes. The Indians were only partially enslaved and lived apart in the swamps and forests. Their exploitation as porters and laborers did not reach the concentration of effort characterized by the importation of Negro slaves. It is probable today that white folk form only one-third of the population of Brazil, the other two-thirds being Indians, Negroes, and mixtures of these races and the whites.

Emancipation of Negroes did not come in Brazil until 1872, but before that gradually large numbers had been freed; and also before and after emancipation, Negroes, whites and Indians were amalgamating

-- 191 --
into a new race. Some of the most intelligent Brazilians have possessed Negro blood. Indians and Negroes made up the lowest class in Brazil, and the white element the highest; but nevertheless race and color have played only a secondary part in social life. Discriminatory laws existed in the past, until the close of the colonial era, those having Negro blood being legally disqualified from becoming priests or holding civil office; yet individuals evidently Negro secured such positions. Even in the eighteenth century there were black clergy and bishops; indeed the Negro clergy seem to have been on a higher moral level than the whites. Negroes rose to high posts even in colonial times. A recognition of the equality of the two darker races with the white one was shown when four persons were decorated and ennobled for services in driving out the Dutch; one was an Indian chief and another a Negro captain of a black regiment. Later patents of nobility were repeatedly conferred upon persons known to have Negro blood. 108

A Brazilian writer said at the First Races Congress: "The co-operation of the metis in the advance of Brazil is notorious and far from inconsiderable. 109 They played the chief part during many years in Brazil in the campaign for the abolition of slavery. I could quote celebrated names of more than one of these metis who put themselves at the head of the literary movement. They fought with firmness and intrepidity in the press and on the platform. They faced with courage the gravest perils to which they were exposed in their struggle against the powerful slave-owners, who had the protection of a conservative government. It was owing to their support that the republic was erected on the ruins of the empire."

At other parts of South America we can but glance. Colombia, Venezuela, Peru and Ecuador, and some parts of Mexico have considerable amounts of Negro blood. Slavery was abolished by Guatemala in 1824 and by Mexico in 1829. Argentina, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Paraguay ceased to recognize it about 1825. Between 1840 and 1845 it came to an end in Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador.

When Bolivar announced his war in Colombia and Venezuela,

-- 192 --
many Negroes flocked to the standard, and, after his first failure, it was President Petion of Haiti who twice provided him with filibuster forces of black troops to start the war anew, with the proviso that Bolivar would at once free the slaves. Paez, Sucre, and other South American leaders used Negro soldiers in their fight for freedom. In general, in South America, Negroes found the army a short cut to social improvement and were especially used as soldiers in many civil wars and rebellions.

In Colombia, Venezuela, Peru and Ecuador there are today whole towns predominantly or entirely Negro. All along the coast of Colombia, Guatemala and Honduras there are numbers of Negroes and mixed people of Negro, Spanish, and Indian blood. The Negroes of Nicaragua are mostly on the Pacific side and form a notably handsome group of people; but throughout this country the economic disintegration and social squalor are tremendous. These lands are largely without guiding ideals or encouragement and receive little help from the civilized world, which in turn has not yet reduced them to profitable wage slavery.

Negroes have always exercised an important political role in Venezuela, where most of the leaders of revolts have had Negro and Indian blood. There are perhaps thirty thousand Negroes in Ecuador, where they have led many of the recent revolts. They are interbred widely with Spaniards and Indians, "and today give a distinct flavor to the whole coast culture, ever so separatist, so resentful and mistrustful of highland Quito rule." 110

When the French Panama Canal Company began to dig, they brought large numbers of black laborers from the British and French West Indies and Haiti, and began a trade in transferring labor from island to island and to the coast, which is still carried on by none too honest contractors. It has not very greatly improved the lot of the laborers, but it has begun to get them acquainted with each other and conscious of their common wrongs. When the United States took up the work of digging the Panama Canal they used thousands of these laborers and dumped the surplus across the borders into the new republic of Panama. Thus Panama became a distributing center for labor all along the Central American and South American coast.

-- 193 --

In the Canal Zone the United States drew the color line strictly by law and custom, discriminating in wages and particularly in housing. The housing of black laborers in Panama and Colon has been described as horrible. "No more tragic contrast is presented between these people, dumped originally on Panama by the Zone authorities, and the great civilized symbol represented by the remarkable operation of the canal itself." 111

In general, throughout South America, the situation differs from that in the West Indies. First of all, here the migration of Europeans has been large enough to establish a group of local capitalists in most of the countries, who proceeded to exploit the mass of Indian and Negro labor. They were encouraged to borrow large amounts of capital from Europe and the United States and for a time fell into continuous revolutionary squabbles over the division of the profits.

Gradually, however, their ranks were penetrated with Indian and Negro blood, and a new patriotism arose which looks upon these countries as places of development for the mass of their people. Endeavors to break down land monopoly in countries like Mexico and to reorganize the state on less oligarchic lines, as in Brazil, went on and still, with halting and retrogression, are proceeding. On the other hand, in Brazil, the Argentine and elsewhere European capital is playing a menacing role and increasing in power.

The ignorance and inexperience of the masses here are partly compensated for in a certain carefree life in the forest and on the plains, for a people who have developed a love of mere existence even on a low plane. There is a good chance, therefore, that in South America, despite the power of European capital, a democracy in industry and agriculture will eventually arise and that people of mixed Indian, Spanish, Portuguese and Negro blood will form a new amalgam with increasing economic equality and a rich cultural life.

The widespread mixture of races in the West Indies and South America: Indian, Spanish, Dutch, English, and Negro, has given rise to exceptional men and women. Yet systematically their relation to any of these races except the Negro is stressed; and if any West Indian insists that he or his ancestors were not of Negro descent, it is a matter of courtesy to agree with him; and of course documentary

-- 194 --
proof is nearly always impossible. On the other hand, there were few white women in the West Indies, especially in earlier days, and those few were protected by wealth, law and custom. An illegitimate child, therefore, in the West Indies in the earlier days was almost proof positive of Negro descent. Thus Alexander Hamilton, the great American statesman, and the forebears of Robert Browning were probably of Negro descent; but the facts can naturally never be proven.

Today only one country in the West Indies openly acknowledges and even boasts of its Negro blood, and that is Haiti, although as a matter of fact there are more Negroes in Cuba than in Haiti. Haiti has often been tempted to stress her mulatto element and forget her black peasantry, but the temptation to this lies primarily in the insult and discrimination which she had suffered, even at the hands of the Pan-American Union.

Beyond the physical results of this mixture, come certain cultural developments. In Brazil "at the present moment there is scarcely a lowly or a highly placed federal or provincial official at the head of or within any of the great departments of state that has not more or less Negro or American-Indian blood in his veins." 112

Lord Bryce says, "It is hardly too much to say that along the coast from Rio to Bahia and Pernambuco, as well as in parts of the interior behind these two cities, the black population predominates. . . . The Brazilian middle class intermarries with mulattoes and quadroons. Brazil is the one country in the world, besides the Portuguese colonies on the east and west coasts of Africa, in which a fusion of the European and African races is proceeding unchecked by law or custom. The doctrines of human equality and human solidarity have here their perfect work. The result is so far satisfactory that there is little or no class friction."

Waldo Frank writes: "The dark folk alone that dwell in Brazil can create an authentic Brazilian culture. This dark folk does not make republics and has not learned yet sufficiently how to direct one. It has not studied the intricacies of international commerce. Its potency is a deeper level. It is already forming the vision, the art, the

-- 195 --
play of its world. It is the living plasm of Brazil, whence must rise its spirit."

From the French West Indies many people of mixed blood have arisen to distinction both there and in France. Olivier fought as an officer in the German wars. Chevalier de St. Georges was knighted by Louis XVI. The Dumas family furnished a general under Napoleon and two of the leading literary men of France; and finally Josephine Tascher de la Pagerie, granddaughter of a Negro, became first the mistress of a member of the Directory and later wife of Napoleon and first empress of France.

The art influence of the Negro in the West Indies and Latin America has been deep. He is responsible for much of its spiritual heritage. Ruben Dario, a Nicaraguan mulatto, is perhaps the greatest poet of Latin America. In Cuba there was the poet Placido and today there is Guillan. In Peru there are two mulatto poets, Abujar and Yerovi. José de Patrocinio was of Negro descent and not only one of Brazil's greatest writers but a leading abolitionist. Negro language customs and folklore have been preserved in Guiana, in Cuba, in Jamaica and Haiti. There are few dances in America that have not been influenced by the Negro.

The future of Latin America is with no single race but with a new amalgam which is already setting its pattern. Often the fear is expressed that parts of Central America and the West Indies will grow black and that drink, disease and sexual immorality will degrade the people. But the danger does not lie here. It lies rather in the determination to pauperize any people with black blood and thus deliver it into the arms of disease and crime. For hundreds of years the development of ability among West Indians and the opening of doors, particularly, of economic opportunity, were confined to white people or to those light mulattoes who by courtesy passed as white. The great mass of laborers became a proletariat reduced in the days of the slave trade to the very lowest labor status. There is no sufficient reason to doubt that economic opportunity and social justice will raise, out of this part of the world, people not only capable of supporting present human civilization but of creating new centers for a greater and finer culture.

-- 196 --

Chapter 10: The Black United States
THERE were half a million slaves in the confines of the United States when the Declaration of Independence declared "that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." The land that thus magniloquently heralded its advent into the family of nations had supported the institution of human slavery for one hundred and fifty-seven years and was destined to cling to it desperately eighty-seven years longer. The greatest experiment in Negro slavery as the base of a modern industrial system was made on the mainland of North America and in the confines of the present United States.

There were in the United States and its dependencies, in 1930, 11,891,143 persons of acknowledged Negro descent, not including the considerable infiltration of Negro blood which is not acknowledged and often not known. Today the number of persons called Negroes is probably about thirteen millions. These persons are almost entirely descendants of African slaves, brought to America from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

The importation of Negroes to the mainland of North America was small until the British obtained the coveted privilege of the Asiento in 1713. After the Asiento treaty the Negro population in the confines of the United States increased in the eighteenth century from about 50,000 in 1710 to 220,000 in 1750 and 462,000 in 1770. When the colonies became independent, the foreign slave trade was soon made illegal; but illicit trade, annexation of territory and natural increase enlarged the Negro population from a little over a million at the beginning of the nineteenth century to four and a half millions

-- 197 --
at the outbreak of the Civil War and to about ten and a quarter millions in 1914.

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

1. A mixture of the various African populations: Bantu, Sudanese, Nilotic and West Coast Negroes; some dwarfs, and some traces of Semitic blood.

2. A mixture of Negro and American Indian blood.

3. A mixture of Negro with the blood of white Americans through a system of concubinage of colored women in slavery days, together with some legal intermarriage then and later.

The census figures as to mulattoes 113 have been from time to time officially acknowledged to be understatements. This blending of the races has led to interesting human types, but there has been little scientific study of the matter. In general the Negro population in the United States is brown in color, darkening to almost black and shading off in the other direction to yellow and white, and in some cases indistinguishable from the white population.

It has been estimated on admittedly partial data that less than twenty-five per cent of American Negroes are of unmixed African descent, the balance having in varying degrees Indian and white blood. 114

The slaves, landing from 1619 onward, were usually transported from the West Indian marts, after acclimatization and training in systematic plantation work. They were received by the colonies at first as laborers, on the same plane as other laborers. For a long time there was in law no distinction between the indented white servant from England and the black servant from Africa, except in the term of their service. Even here the distinction was not always observed, some of the whites being kept beyond term of their service and Negroes now and then securing their freedom.

The opposition to slavery had from the first been largely stilled when it was stated that this was a method of converting the heathen to Christianity. The corollary was that when a slave was converted he became free. Up to 1660 or thereabouts it seemed accepted in most colonies and in the English West Indies, that baptism into a Christian

-- 198 --
Church would legally free a Negro slave. Masters, therefore, were reluctant in the seventeenth century to have their slaves receive Christian instruction. Maryland declared in 1663 that Negro slaves should serve durante vita, but it was not until 1667 that Virginia finally plucked up courage to attack the issue squarely and declared by law: "Baptism doth not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or freedom, in order that diverse masters freed from this doubt may more carefully endeavor the propagation of Christianity."

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there was a considerable forced slave trade of whites from Europe under the guise of indentured servants. It met, however, not only the monopoly of feudal labor, but the new demand for labor purchase in the expanding industries of Europe. And, on the other hand, these very industries were encouraged and enlarged by the raw material raised in America by slave labor. The profits of the slave trade and of the plantations, together with the ease of obtaining black slaves through the systematic organization of the trade, increased the importation of black slave labor, while white free labor gradually replaced indentured workers.

The African family and clan life were disrupted in this transplantation; the communal life and free use of land were impossible; the power of the chief was transferred to the master, bereft of the usual blood ties and ancient reverence. The African language survived only in occasional words and phrases. African religion, both fetish and Islam, was transformed. Fetish survived in certain rites and even here and there in blood sacrifice, carried out secretly and at night; but more often in open celebration which gradually became transmuted into Catholic and Protestant Christian rites. The slave preacher replaced to some extent the African medicine man and gradually, after a century or more, the Negro Church arose as the center and almost the only social expression of Negro life in America. Nevertheless, there can still be traced not only in words and phrases but in customs, literature and art, and especially in music and dance, something of the African heritage of the black folk in America. Further study will undoubtedly make this survival and connection clearer.

The war of the American colonies against England in 1776 was an effort to escape the colonial status, in which the profits of agriculture

-- [199] --

-- 200 --
and industry went to the mother country. In this struggle for industrial freedom and independence of England, the Negroes took part in considerable numbers, while others helped the Tories, tempted by offers of freedom. It was natural that at the conclusion of the war and at a time when the profits of the slave system were low, the small number of slaves in the northern colonies should be emancipated, partly in gratitude for their help during the war, and partly because the extinction of slavery in the new nation seemed inevitable.

The series of laws emancipating slaves in the North began in Vermont in 1779, followed by judicial decision in Massachusetts in 1780, and gradual emancipation in Pennsylvania beginning the same year; emancipation was accomplished in New Hampshire in 1783, and in Connecticut and Rhode Island in 1784. The momentous exclusion of slavery in the Northwest Territory took place in 1787, and, helped by Haiti, gradual emancipation began in New York and New Jersey in 1799 and 1804.

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

In order to forward this movement, the Constitution permitted and subsequent legislation spurred by the Haitian revolt confirmed the abolition of the foreign slave trade. This meant not simply putting a stop to the further importation of slaves but also, and closely bound up with this, the firm conviction of all Americans that without an active slave trade the slave system would disappear. The Act of 1808, therefore, was conceived as a first and decisive step toward the overthrow of the old slave system and represented a triumph of abolitionism

-- 201 --
both North and South. Even then, however, there was some opposition to this legislation and open violation of it for many years because of the loss of slaves during the war and the consequent curtailment of the labor force on Southern plantations.

Two things ensued: Slavery changed in the United States from a slave-consuming to a slave-conserving system, and the Negroes, being more carefully treated, increased rapidly in number from a million to a million and three-quarters between 1800 and 1820. It was evident that the American Negro unassisted by the slave trade would not die out, and for that reason there arose the movement begun by the American Colonization Society in 1816 which resulted in the establishment of Liberia.

The forces back of colonization were fatally divided. Some wished to repatriate American Negroes in Africa and others wished to get rid of free Negroes so as to buttress the slave system. Simultaneously with this, came an increase of the cotton crop from 8,000 bales in 1790 to 650,000 bales in 1820. This phenomenal increase of a comparatively new crop was accompanied by the westward movement of the slave-cultivated area and by the birth of the Cotton Kingdom in the vivid minds of men, and the death of the colonization idea.

A new slavery began to appear, whose aim was production rather than consumption as represented by house service. It led to slave conspiracy and revolt dangerous in portent if not in actual fact. Several small insurrections are alluded to in South Carolina early in the eighteenth century, and one by Cato at Stono in 1740 caused widespread alarm. The Negro plot in New York in 1712 put the city into hysterics. There was no further plotting on any scale until the Haitian revolt, which shook the whole slave edifice to its foundation and terrified the New World. There were laws and migrations and a new series of plots. Gabriel in Virginia, in 1800, made an abortive attempt. In 1822 a free Negro, Denmark Vesey, in South Carolina, failed in a well-laid plot, and ten years after that, in 1831, Nat Turner led his insurrection in Virginia and killed fifty-one persons. The result of this insurrection was to crystallize tendencies toward harshness, which the economic revolution was making advisable.

A wave of legislation passed over the South, strengthening and enforcing the laws prohibiting the slaves from learning to read and

-- 202 --
write, forbidding Negroes to preach, and interfering with their religious meetings. Thus between 1830 and 1850 the philosophy of the South changed: it strongly repressed the slaves by a more careful patrol system; and it began to rationalize slavery with theories of race inferiority. In reaction from this there came the "Underground Railway" which systematized the regular and increasing running away of slaves toward the North, thus adding fuel and giving practical examples to the rising abolition movement.

The most effective revolt of the Negro against slavery was not fighting, but running away, usually to the North, which had been recently freed of slavery. From the beginning of the nineteenth century slaves began to escape in considerable numbers. Four geographical paths were chiefly followed: one, leading southward, was the line of swamps along the coast from Norfolk, Virginia, to the northern borders of Florida. This gave rise to the Negro element among the Indians in Florida and led to the two Seminole wars of 1817 and 1835. These wars were really slave raids to make the Indians give up the Negro and half-breed slaves domiciled among them. The wars cost the United States ten million dollars and two thousand lives. The great Appalachian range, with its abutting mountains, was the safest path northward, and this John Brown plotted to develop. Through Tennessee and Kentucky and the heart of the Cumberland Mountains, using the limestone caverns, was the third route, and the valley of the Mississippi was the western tunnel.

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

-- 203 --
and recent fugitives, a distinct reversion to the older idea of revolt and migration.

On the other hand, the cotton crop leaped from 650,000 bales in 1820 to 2,500,000 bales in 1850 and was destined to reach the phenomenal height of four million bales in 1860. This new and tremendous economic foundation for a new Negro slavery increased the economic rivalry between the cotton-raising South and the increasingly industrialized North.

There seemed to the South two ways of escape from the domination which northern industry exercised over them by its larger capital, close organization and concentrated aims: one was to encourage industry in the South. Already there was a considerable number of slave artisans and some faint beginnings of a factory system. But if this was to be increased, slaves must be trained and educated or white artisans imported. Either alternative was dangerous for the slave system. The South feared free Negroes, and free Negroes were showing increasing group consciousness. They began to develop writers who expressed their reaction against slavery. They organized beneficial and insurance societies. They set up independent churches and fought in the War of 1812. In cities like Cincinnati and Philadelphia they came into sharp physical conflict with the white workers and as a result began to consider the possibilities of emigration from the United States. After a series of conventions, large numbers went to Canada where they were offered asylum, and later agents were sent to Central America, Haiti and Africa. Leaders arose like Frederick Douglass, who made his first speech in 1841, and a number of educated Negroes and others of ability went to Liberia and West Africa.

The second path which the white South considered for the development of an economy based on slavery was to build up an agricultural monopoly in the South and in slave territory which might eventually be annexed, and then make terms with industry both in the northern United States and in the world. This latter plan, however, called for accumulating capital in a spending and luxury-loving group, and for discipline and practical self-control to which the South had never been used. Nevertheless, the increasing cotton crop, and an almost unlimited world demand for it, seemed to insure the prosperity of the South, unless the slave system was interfered with;

-- 204 --
and the interference which the South would not and, in defense of its system, could not brook, was limitation of its political power by which it had hitherto maintained ascendancy in the nation. This political power was increased by counting three-fifths of the slave population. Slavery was forced north of Mason and Dixon's line in 1820; a new slave empire with thousands of slaves was annexed in 1850, and a fugitive slave law was passed which decreased fugitives even if it endangered the liberty of every free Negro and nullified the Common Law; finally determined attempts were made to force slavery into the Northwest in competition with free white labor, and less concerted but powerful movements arose to annex Cuba and other slave territory to the south and to reopen the African slave trade.

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

At this critical point the South proposed to establish a separate and independent state where the slave system would be absolutely protected politically and from which economically fortified retreat it could make terms with the industrial world. The North, on the other hand, was determined not to surrender a part of its territory which was not only a market for its manufactures and agricultural products but the source of raw materials -- tobacco, sugar, and cotton.

In the revolution which ensued, the possible reaction of the slaves was ignored by all except the small party of abolitionists, with its contingent of free Negroes. In the end, however, this great mass of four million slaves settled the physical conflict, even though the mass of them remained on the plantations. They were from the first a source of great anxiety, and a considerable percentage of them at every opportunity ran away to the area occupied by Northern armies and became servants and laborers; eventually, to the number of 200,000, they became actual soldiers bearing arms.

-- 205 --

The first thing that vexed the Northern armies on Southern soil during the war was the question of the disposition of these fugitive slaves, who began to arrive in increasing numbers. Butler confiscated them, Frémont freed them, and Halleck caught and returned them; but their numbers swelled to such large proportions that the mere economic problem of their presence overshadowed everything else, especially after the Emancipation Proclamation. Their flight from the plantation was not merely bewildered swarming; it was the growth of an increasingly purposeful general strike against slavery, after the well-known pattern of the Underground Railway. Lincoln welcomed and encouraged it, once he realized that even the idle presence of the Negroes was so much strength withdrawn from the Confederacy.

It gradually became clear to the North that here they had tapped a positive source of strength to their cause, which would balance the indisposition of large numbers of white Northerners, especially laborers and foreign immigrants, to enter the army; and also the South saw just as quickly that here was a point of fatal weakness which they had unconsciously feared. The moment that any considerable number, not to mention the majority, of their four million slaves stopped work, much less took up arms, the cause of the South was lost.

The Emancipation Proclamation was forced not simply by the necessity of paralyzing agriculture in the South, but also by the necessity of employing Negro soldiers. During the first two years of the war no one wanted Negro soldiers. It was declared to be a "white man's war." General Hunter tried to raise a regiment in South Carolina, but the War Department disavowed the act. In Louisiana the Negroes were anxious to enlist, but were held off. But the war did not go as swiftly as the North had hoped, and on the twenty-sixth of January, 1863, the Secretary of War authorized the Governor of Massachusetts to raise two regiments of Negro troops. Frederick Douglass and others began the work of enlistment with enthusiasm, and in the end one hundred and eighty-seven thousand Negroes enlisted in the Northern armies, of whom seventy thousand were killed and wounded.

The conduct of these troops was exemplary. They were indispensable in camp duties and brave on the field, where they fought in two hundred and thirteen engagements. General Banks wrote, "Their

-- 206 --
conduct was heroic. No troops could be more determined or more daring." Abraham Lincoln said, "The slightest knowledge of arithmetic will prove to any man that the rebel armies cannot be destroyed with Democratic strategy. It would sacrifice all the white men of the North to do it. There are now in the service of the United States near two hundred thousand able-bodied colored men, most of them under arms, defending and acquiring Union territory. . . . Abandon all the posts now garrisoned by black men; take two hundred thousand men from our side and put them in the battlefield or cornfield against us, and we would be compelled to abandon the war in three weeks."

Emancipation thus came as a war measure to break the power of the Confederacy, preserve the Union, and gain the sympathy of the civilized world. It was this fact even more than the exhaustion of Southern resources and the success of Northern armies, which induced the South to surrender long before they had reached the theoretical limits of their resources. The emancipation of the slaves, promised during the war both as a moral sop to abolition sentiment and a needed addition to Northern resources, became a fact after Lee's surrender. And then for the first time the nation had to sit down and consider a situation which it had never before envisaged realistically.

The initial settlement of the problem, proposed by the South, and at first not strongly opposed in the North, was to substitute serfdom for slavery; and a series of Negro codes to this end were passed by the Southern states. These were so unnecessarily drastic that they increased the sympathy with Negroes in the North, already well-disposed because of the military service of black soldiers.

To protect Negroes therefore, a Freedmen's Bureau was proposed

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

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

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

4. To establish schools.

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

Such an institution was bitterly opposed in the South as interfering with labor control, and given but half-hearted support in the North

-- 207 --
because it was too costly and a bad precedent in labor relations. The temporary makeshift which was actually enacted had neither time, sufficient funds nor proper organization for wide success.

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

Philanthropy poured out of the North to help the freedmen and establish schools; but the mass of Northerners were chiefly interested in the restoration of production and commerce and willing to leave the Negro to the control of the South, if this could be accomplished peacefully and profitably. The South was not satisfied with this and demanded increased political power, larger in proportion to its population than it had had before secession. This arose from the fact that each American Negro now counted for representation in Congress as one citizen instead of as three-fifths of a person, in accordance with the celebrated three-fifths compromise of the Constitution. Even with their normal political power, the returning South was a threat to Northern bond-holders, to the new national bank system, to the high tariff of manufacturers and to various other privileges and concessions which Northern industry had reaped during the war.

Northern industry gradually gained the support of an increasing feeling among the former abolitionists and ordinary American citizens, that the nation was rather shamelessly deserting its Negro allies; but the South, led blindly and stubbornly by Andrew Johnson, repudiated the Fourteenth Amendment and the establishment of a real Freedmen's Bureau. As a result the North placed its reliance upon what was at once a settled American political doctrine and a new political expedient: the political doctrine of democratic control exercised by newly emancipated black slaves, which was in reality now a

-- 208 --
political expedient, by which the South with this threat of black labor dictatorship over it, would consent to the industrial policies which the dominant North wanted.

An experiment in democracy followed which instead of being a complete failure as most Americans no doubt thought it would be, was so successful that a new revolutionary bargain was needed to overthrow it. In 1867, a Dictatorship of the Proletariat was established in a large part of the South, with black and white workers in the majority. It was not a dictatorship conscious of any plan for continuing labor control of government. On the contrary, it was vitiated by the old American doctrine which assumed that any thrifty worker could become a capitalist. And yet this temporary dictatorship envisaged a chance for the poor freedman and the poor white to control enough wealth and capital to overturn the power of the former planters and slave barons. As steps toward this, they introduced democratic control in states where it had not been the rule; they began a new social legislation which gave government aid to the poor; they essayed protection from crime and furnished state capital to enterprises like railways. And above all, led especially by the blacks, they established a public elementary school system.

The chief charges against these labor and Negro governments are extravagance, theft, and incompetency of officials. There is no serious charge that these governments threatened civilization or the foundations of social order. The charge is that they threatened property and that they were inefficient. These charges are undoubtedly in part true; but they are often exaggerated. The South had been impoverished and saddled with new social burdens. In other words, states with smaller economic resources were asked not only to do a work of restoration, but a larger permanent social work. The property-holders were aghast. They not only demurred, but, predicting ruin and revolution, they appealed to "race" pride, secret societies, intimidation, force and murder. They refused to believe that these novices in government and their friends were aught but scamps and fools. Under the resulting circumstances directly after the war, the wisest statesman would have been compelled to resort to increased taxation and would have, in turn, been execrated by property-holders as extravagant, dishonest, and incompetent.

-- 209 --

Much of the legislation which resulted in fraud was basically sound. Take, for instance, the land frauds of South Carolina. The Federal Government refused to furnish land. A wise Negro leader said, "One of the greatest slavery bulwarks was the infernal plantation system, one man owning his thousand, another his twenty, another fifty thousand acres of land. This is the only way by which we will break up that system, and I maintain that our freedom will be of no effect if we allow it to continue. What is the main cause of the prosperity of the North? It is because every man has his own farm and is free and independent. Let the lands of the South be similarly divided." From such arguments the Negroes were induced to aid a scheme to buy land and distribute it. Yet a large part of eight hundred thousand dollars appropriated found its way to the white landholders' pockets through artificially inflated prices.

The most inexcusable cheating of the Negroes took place through the failure of the Freedmen's Bank. This bank was incorporated by Congress in 1865 and had in its list of incorporators some of the greatest names in America, including Peter Cooper, William Cullen Bryant, and John Jay. The bank did excellent work in thrift and saving for a decade and then through neglect and dishonesty was allowed to fail in 1874, owing the freedmen their first savings of over three millions of dollars. They have never been reimbursed.

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

-- 210 --
of education, and disfranchised men for being black and not for being dishonest.

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

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

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

In the process of accomplishing this revolutionary change in Southern economy there was waste and theft due in part to ignorance and in part to the deliberate connivance of the best elements in the community, who were determined that Negro suffrage and labor control should cease. The old planter class was decimated by the war and hard experiences after the war, and their place taken by new capitalists, some trained after the Northern industrial pattern and all eager to follow it. This new leadership of the South was eager to strike a bargain with the industrial North and they did so in 1876.

The bargain consisted in allowing the Southern whites to disfranchise the Negroes by any means which they wished to employ, including force and fraud, but which somehow was to be reduced to semblance of legality in time. And then that the South hereafter would stand with the North in its main industrial policies and all the

-- 211 --
more certainly so, because Northern capital would develop an industrial oligarchy in the old South.

Forcible overthrow of democratic government in the South followed from 1872 to 1876. Negroes were kept from voting by force and intimidation, while whites were induced to vote as employers wished by emphasized race hate and fear. The disfranchisement of 1876 and later was followed by the widespread rise of "crime" peonage. Stringent laws on vagrancy, guardianship, and labor contracts were enacted and large discretion given judge and jury in cases of petty crime. As a result Negroes were systematically arrested on the slightest pretext and the labor of convicts leased to private parties.

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

The black laborers became deeply dissatisfied under this system and began to migrate from the country to the cities, where there was a competitive demand for labor and money wages. The employing farmers complained bitterly of the scarcity of labor and of Negro "laziness," and secured the enactment of harsher vagrancy and labor contract laws, and statutes against the "enticement" of laborers. So severe were these laws that it was often impossible for a laborer to stop work without committing a felony.

Nevertheless competition compelled the landholders to offer more inducements to the farm hand. The result was the rise of the black share tenant; the laborer, securing better wages, saved a little capital and began to hire land in parcels of forty to eighty acres, furnishing his own tools and seed and practically raising his own subsistence. In this way the whole face of the labor contract in the South was, in the decade 1880-90, in process of change from a nominal wage contract to a system of tenantry. The great plantations were apparently broken up into forty and eighty acre farms with black farmers. To

-- 212 --
many it seemed that emancipation was accomplished, and the black folk were especially filled with joy and hope.

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

Nevertheless, Negroes had begun the accumulation of land and property and had eagerly accepted the democratic ideals of popular suffrage and the eventual accomplishment of social and economic salvation by means of the vote. In the two decades from 1880 to 1900 they tried desperately to put this program into accomplishment by efforts to regain their lost political power; but these were the years of tremendous expansion of industry and wealth in the United States and the world over; government was dominated by business and the possibility of any real political influence on the part of a poor and socially excluded minority was extremely small.

The illegal disfranchisement of the Negro, against which he was protesting in season and out, now began to be buttressed by law. In 1890 Mississippi disfranchised Negroes by a literacy test, securing the acquiescence of the ignorant whites by requiring on the part of the prospective voter either the ability to read or "understand" a part of the Constitution read to him by sympathetic officials. South Carolina followed in 1895 by an illiteracy or property test and the Mississippi "understanding" clauses. In 1898 Louisiana enacted an illiteracy and property test and added to that the celebrated "Grandfather Clause" which allowed persons to vote whose father or grandfather had had the right to vote before Negroes were enfranchised. Variations and elaborations of this kind of disfranchisement followed in Alabama in 1901, Virginia in 1902, in Georgia in 1909. Not only were these laws clearly unfair if not unconstitutional, but their administration was openly and designedly discriminatory. Yet in the cases rushed before the courts, they were invariably upheld; indeed it was not until 1915 that even the "Grandfather Clause" was declared unconstitutional.

To all this was added a series of labor laws making the exploitation of Negro labor more secure. All this legislation had to be accomplished

-- 213 --
in the face of the labor movement throughout the world, and particularly in the South, where it was beginning to enter among the white workers. This was accomplished easily, however, by an appeal to race prejudice. No method of inflaming the darkest passions of men was unused. Racial sex jealousy was especially emphasized. The lynching mob was given its glut of blood and egged on by purposely exaggerated and often wholly invented tales of crime on the part of perhaps the most peaceful and sweet-tempered people the world has known. Labor laws were so arranged that imprisonment for debt was possible and leaving an employer could be made a penitentiary offense. Negro schools were cut off with small appropriations or wholly neglected, and a determined effort was made with wide success to see that no Negro had any voice either in the making or the administration of local, state, or national law.

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

It was natural that a leader should arise at this time who should point out the necessity of economic adjustment before political defense was possible. Booker T. Washington in his celebrated speech in Atlanta in 1896 enunciated this principle and united under his leadership Southern whites who wanted nothing so much as an end to political pretentions on the part of Negroes; Northern whites who wanted to encourage the development of a dependable labor force in the South not dominated by the labor class consciousness of the North; and by Negroes who were willing to give up their right to vote and hold office if they but had a chance to earn a living.

What Mr. Washington did not see or understand was the connection of his movement with the labor movement of the world. His idea was to develop skilled labor under the benevolent leadership of white capital; and out of wages to save capital so as to develop a Negro bourgeoisie who would hire black labor and co-operate with white

-- 214 --
capital. He did not know the difficulty, indeed the practical impossibility, of this program, when capital was willing to exploit race prejudice and the rivalry of race groups in industry, and at a time when the possibility of accumulating capital on the part of laborers and in competition with the great monopolies of capital in the industrial world was rapidly coming to an end. Even more than that, he did not foresee, perhaps could not have foreseen, the disappearance of special technical skills before mass production and the impossibility of establishing a permanent system of education based on the handing on of skills which might easily become obsolete in a generation or even in a day.

The political revolt of white labor against prevalent conditions began about 1880 and American farmers joined the movement by 1890. Populism arose both in the West and in the South, but Negroes paid little attention to it. They were bound up in the Washington idea that their salvation lay in close alliance with capital. The result was that there was some alliance between black and white labor in the South, as for instance when Negro Republicans and white Populists elected a congressman in North Carolina in 1896; in Georgia on the contrary, Tom Watson, exasperated because the Populists did not get a larger Negro following, tried the experiment of joining the forces for Negro disfranchisement and anti-Semitism, and thus cut the labor foundation from under his own feet.

This failure on the one hand of Negroes to make common cause with white labor and the failure of white labor on the other hand to invite or desire their co-operation, together with the bitter agitation for disfranchisement, increased mob violence and lynching. The lynchings in one year, 1892, numbered two hundred thirty-five. In the period between 1882 and 1927 nearly five thousand persons were lynched in the United States, and three thousand five hundred of these were Negroes. Race hatred reached an apogee, and with it came the series of laws in the South and some Northern states which established persons of Negro descent as a caste with curtailed civil rights in matters of marriage, travel, residence, and social intercourse.

The twentieth century saw a determined effort on the part of Negroes to stem this tide. They had made efforts at general organization within racial lines since the first convention in 1830; and just before and during the Civil War they had held a number of very effective

-- 215 --
general congresses. In the nineties they started the Afro-American Council as a national organization, which held annual meetings and served to consolidate public opinion. But the real effective effort came in 1905 with the Niagara Movement which clarified and laid down a new clear bill of rights. In 1910 the leaders of the Niagara Movement were joined by a large number of white liberals and the resulting organization was the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The Association proved, between 1910 and the World War, one of the most effective organizations of the liberal spirit and the fight for social progress which the Negro race in America has known. It won case after case before the Supreme Court, establishing the validity of the Fifteenth Amendment, the unconstitutionality of the "Grandfather Clause" and the illegality of residential segregation. Above all, it began a determined nation-wide and interracial fight against lynching which eventually reduced this relic of barbarism from two hundred thirty-five victims a year to eighteen.

The World War radically altered this whole situation. First of all came the economic results. Immigration since the Civil War had poured into the North such a mass of laborers that industry had a reservoir of labor at low prices which they could discharge and rehire at will. This abundance of labor had kept the Negro largely out of industry in the North, because of exacerbated race prejudice and fear of wage under-bidding, which on the other hand largely repelled foreign immigration to the South; and in the whole land excluded Negroes, by competition and lack of opportunity, from learning skilled operations.

The War stopped this flow of immigrants as early as 1914 and with equal suddenness the Negro began to pour into the North, until by 1920 black workers and their families to a total of two million had left the South. This caused difficulties of competition for jobs with whites, which resulted in riots in East St. Louis, Chicago, Pennsylvania, Washington and elsewhere. Despite this the Negro found work and the best paid work that he had been able to do since emancipation.

The result was a great increase in his economic power, and also his political influence as a voter, especially in Northern cities and as part of a new labor movement with which he began to make tentative alliance. When the United States was drawn into the war, his power

-- 216 --
was revealed. The government had to pay him special attention. German propaganda was feared. A conference of Negro editors was held in Washington; a Negro was made adviser to the Secretary of War; and when the War Department determined not to appoint Negro officers, a nation-wide Negro agitation compelled the opening of a special camp for their training. Eventually seven hundred Negro officers were commissioned. Of all the white nations that took part in the World War, the United States was the only nation that recognized its colored constituents to any such extent. England did not have a single officer of acknowledged Negro blood; France had many, but no such number as America.

After the war and with the depression, the Negro's position again became critical. Mass production gave him entrance into industry formerly largely monopolized by skilled white workers, but the general depression threw the Negro first into the ranks of the unemployed. He was saved from something like economic annihilation by his increased political power, based on the black population in cities like New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Pittsburgh and Chicago. After a lapse of thirty years, one Negro congressman appeared in Washington and Negroes became members of state legislatures in a dozen different states and were represented on city councils. While they lost a good many of the more spectacular political jobs that were formerly set aside for them, they gained representation for merit and training in a number of less conspicuous but important positions under the New Deal.

But above all they had to examine again the balance of importance between political and economic power. It was pointed out that the casting of a ballot must not be simply for the election of officials or to settle at infrequent times, broad contrasting matters of policy; but rather that real democracy can be attained only when the laborer can express his wishes in industry; when he has a voice in the production and distribution of wealth. And while the broad accomplishment of this great advance in human progress is not in the hands of the Negro voter today, he has the opportunity of starting toward it through the organization of his power as a consumer and by utilization of the cultural bands of his racial grouping to secure industrial emancipation.

-- 217 --

Meantime the American Negro forms an important group. It has a population larger than Sweden, Norway and Denmark together and owned, before the depression, land equal to half the area of Ireland. He forms nine and seven-tenths per cent of the population of the land, with nine and one-third million of its population living in the South and two and one-half million in the North. Fifty-six per cent live in towns and cities of two thousand five hundred or more. The crude death rate in the registration area is 18.7 per 1,000 of population, but most Negroes live outside this area. The illiteracy of this population ten years of age and over is reported as 16.3 per cent, although probably in reality it is considerably larger than this. Two and one-half million Negro children are in school.

The Negroes are occupied as farmers, laborers and servants; 36 per cent being engaged in agriculture; 19 per cent in manufacture and mechanical industries, chiefly as laborers and porters; and 28 per cent in domestic and personal service. In addition to these there are 25,000 clergymen, 56,000 teachers, 4,000 physicians, 2,000 dentists, 1,200 lawyers, 6,000 trained nurses and 11,000 musicians. Beside these there are 34,000 barbers and hairdressers, 108,000 chauffeurs and truck drivers, 28,000 retail dealers, 6,000 mail-carriers, 11,000 masons, 21,000 mechanics, 15,000 painters.

At the Census of 1930, the number of Negro farm operators was 882,850, with 37,597,132 acres; the value of the land and buildings, $1,402,945,799. Their ownership was 20.5 per cent; the number of farms owned, 181,016, and the value of their owned land and buildings $334,451,396. Negro representation is weakest in the higher ranks of skilled labor, business and commerce. Nevertheless, Negroes are so integrated in American industry that they are for the present at least indispensable.

There are 42,500 Negro churches with five million members and property worth $200,000,000. In American poetry, prose literature, music and art, the Negro has gained notable recognition. In sports and physical prowess, representatives of this race have continually come to the fore.

It is astonishing how the African has integrated himself into American civilization. The first national holiday, the fifth of March, commemorated the death of Crispus Attucks. In the War of 1812, the

-- 218 --
Civil War, the Spanish War and the World War, Negro soldiers were prominent.

Paul Cuffee began agitation and a movement to Africa, and David Walker's Appeal anticipated the abolition movement. That movement received indispensable aid from Douglass, Remond and Sojourner Truth. After the Civil War, Lynch of Mississippi, Cardozo and Eliott of South Carolina, and Dunn and Dubuclet of Louisiana were recognized as able political leaders.

In science, Banneker issued early American almanacs and assisted in surveying the city of Washington. Later Just made a record in biology; Turner in entomology and Fuller in psychiatry; Hinton is today a leading American authority on syphilis.

In religion, Richard Allen was a national leader; Payne and Turner prominent and forceful; and Pennington received his doctor of divinity from Heidelberg in 1843. Chavis and Booker Washington were leading educators; George Leile and Lott Carey led in American foreign missionary effort. As inventors Matseliger founded our pre-eminence in shoe manufacture, Rillieux in sugar and McCoy began the lubrication of running machinery.

But it is in art that the Negro stands pre-eminent: his folk song began its wide influence with the Fisk Jubilee Singers; and was followed by the compositions of the Lamberts, Rosamond Johnson, Dett, Burleigh and Handy. There are the great voices of the "Black Patti," Roland Hayes and Marian Anderson. For years, before his recent death, Henry O. Tanner was the dean of the American painters. The stage has had no comedian to surpass Bert Williams and every year brings a new dramatic figure like Gilpin and Richard Harrison.

The Negro's work in literature was begun by Phyllis Wheatley. She was not a great writer, but she led American literature in her day. In Louisiana in 1843-45, Negroes published an anthology of their poetry which represents a higher literary standard than anything contemporary in the United States. In the early twentieth century came Chestnutt and Dunbar, Braithwaite who revived appreciation for poetry in America; James Weldon Johnson and Benjamin Brawley. The record, by no means complete, is an astonishing proof of the capacity of the Negro race.

-- 219 --

Chapter 11: Black Europe
SO what is Africa? Guernier repeats in 1933 the ancient lie of 1833: "Seule de tous les continents, l'Afrique n'a pas d'histoire." This preludes modestly his thesis that Africa is the future field of exploitation and expansion for Europe; that Europe is being hemmed in and forced out of the teeming and revivified East; that Europe can hope for no further foothold in the American West; but that the black South can be regarded as open, virgin, empty soil.

The drama which has played itself out in Africa has been as human and dramatic and intensely interesting as that of any other continent. That it did not finally integrate into one great and unified culture, like that of Europe or of China, was the clear and logical result of its physical characteristics and of the slave trade. The human spirit that expanded in Africa was the same humanity that all the world knows. It shows itself in family and clan, in town and city, in individual genius, and above all in art, an art that connoisseurs today recognize among the great aesthetic traditions of the world. But all this was surrounded and conditioned by a plateau that warded off easy egress to the sea; by a desert that limited contact with other worlds, and by a climate the most difficult in some respects which human life ever faced.

On this continent came early, if not the earliest, writhing of humanity in its urge toward food and shelter, protection and adventure. Starting in the Great Lakes, it swept up the Valley of the Nile and probably into the Valley of the Tigris-Euphrates. Traces of it can be found along the shores of the Mediterranean and in Crete. Limited by the jealous desert, it sailed westward down the Niger and wound around the central jungle with the Congo.

--