The Negro Part 7

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

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

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

Turning now to Negro family and social life we find, as among all primitive peoples, polygamy and marriage by actual or simulated purchase.

Out of the family develops the typical African village organization, which is thus described in Ashanti by a native Gold Coast writer: "The headman, as his name implies, is the head of a village community, a ward in a towns.h.i.+p, or of a family. His position is important, inasmuch as he has directly to deal with the composite elements of the general bulk of the people.

"It is the duty of the head of a family to bring up the members thereof in the way they should go; and by 'family' you must understand the entire lineal descendants of a materfamilias, if I may coin a convenient phrase.

It is expected of him by the state to bring up his charge in the knowledge of matters political and traditional. It is his work to train up his wards in the ways of loyalty and obedience to the powers that be. He is held responsible for the freaks of recalcitrant members of his family, and he is looked to to keep them within bounds and to insist upon conformity of their party with the customs, laws, and traditional observances of the community. In early times he could send off to exile by sale a troublesome relative who would not observe the laws of the community.

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

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

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

We may contrast this picture with the more warlike Bantus of Southeast Africa. Each tribe lived by itself in a town with from five to fifteen thousand inhabitants, surrounded by gardens of millet, beans, and watermelon. Beyond these roamed their cattle, sheep, and goats. Their religion was ancestor wors.h.i.+p 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 circ.u.mcised and formed into guilds. The land was owned by the tribe and apportioned to the chief by each family, and the main wealth of the tribe was in its cattle.

In general, among the African clans the idea of private property was but imperfectly developed and never included land. The main ma.s.s 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 owners.h.i.+p generally recognized.

The government, vested in fathers and chiefs, varied in different tribes from absolute despotisms to limited monarchies, almost republican. Viewing the Basuto National a.s.sembly in South Africa, Lord Bryce recently wrote, "The resemblance to the primary a.s.semblies 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 inst.i.tutions."[50]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The first experienced glance will here detect the fact that this nation originally possessed a clear and definite organization so duly ordered and so logical that we but seldom meet with its like among all the peoples of the earth. And the basic idea of every clan's progeniture is a powerful G.o.d; 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 G.o.d in Chief; the security with which the newly wedded wife not only may, but should, minister to her own G.o.d in an unfamiliar home."[55]

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

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

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

The basis of Egyptian religion was "of a purely Nigritian character,"[58]

and in its developed form Sudanese tribal G.o.ds were invoked and venerated by the priests. In Upper Egypt, near the confines of Ethiopia, paintings repeatedly represent black priests conferring on red Egyptian priests the instruments and symbols of priesthood. In the Sudan to-day Frobenius distinguishes four princ.i.p.al religions: first, earthly ancestor wors.h.i.+p; next, the social cosmogony of the Atlantic races; third, the religion of the Bori, and fourth, Islam. The Bori religion spreads from Nubia as far as the Hausa, and from Lake Chad in the Niger as far as the Yoruba. It is the religion of possession and has been connected by some with Asiatic influences.

From without have come two great religious influences, Islam and Christianity. Islam came by conquest, trade, and proselytism. As a conqueror it reached Egypt in the seventh century and had by the end of the fourteenth century firm footing in the Egyptian Sudan. It overran the central Sudan by the close of the seventeenth century, and at the beginning of the nineteenth century had swept over Senegambia and the whole valley of the Niger down to the Gulf of Guinea. On the east Islam approached as a trader in the eighth century; it spread into Somaliland and overran Nubia in the fourteenth century. To-day Islam dominates Africa north of ten degrees north lat.i.tude and is strong between five and ten degrees north lat.i.tude. 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, Arn.o.bius from Sicca Veneria, Lactantius, and probably in like manner Minucius Felix, in spite of their Latin names, were natives of Africa, and not less so Augustine. In Africa the Church found its most zealous confessors of the faith and its most gifted defenders."[59]

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

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

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

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

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

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

They saw the clouds ascend from the plains: It was the smoke of burning towns.

The confusion of the whirlwind Was in the heart of the great chief of the blue-colored cattle.

The shout was raised, "They are friends!"

But they shouted again, "They are foes!"

Till their near approach proclaimed them Matabili.

The men seized their arms, And rushed out as if to chase the antelope.

The onset was as the voice of lightning, And their javelins as the shaking of the forest in the autumn storm.[61]

There can be no doubt of the Negro's deep and delicate sense of beauty in form, color, and sound. Soyaux says of African industry, "Whoever denies to them independent invention and individual taste in their work either shuts his eyes intentionally before perfectly evident facts, or lack of knowledge renders him an incompetent judge."[62] M. Rutot had lately told us how the Negro race brought art and sculpture to pre-historic Europe.

The bones of the European Negroids are almost without exception found in company with drawings and sculpture in high and low relief; some of their sculptures, like the Wellendorff "Venus," are unusually well finished for primitive man. So, too, the painting and carving of the Bushmen and their forerunners in South Africa has drawn the admiration of students. The Negro has been prolific in the invention of musical instruments and has given a new and original music to the western world.

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

The Germans have found, in Kamarun, towns built, castellated, and fortified in a manner that reminds one of the prehistoric cities of Crete.

The buildings and fortifications of Zymbabwe have already been described and something has been said of the art of Benin, with its bra.s.s and bronze and ivory. All the work of Benin in bronze and bra.s.s was executed by casting, and by methods so complicated that it would be no easy task for a modern European craftsman to imitate them.

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

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

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

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

Even when we contemplate such revolting survivals of savagery as cannibalism we cannot jump too quickly at conclusions. Cannibalism is spread over many parts of Negro Africa, yet the very tribes who practice cannibalism show often other traits of industry and power. "These cannibal Ba.s.songa were, according to the types we met with, one of those rare nations of the African interior which can be cla.s.sed 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 fas.h.i.+oned that no industrial art from abroad could improve upon their workmans.h.i.+p. 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 compet.i.tors of any gardener in Europe. Their s.e.xual and parental relations evidenced an amount of tact and delicacy of feelings unsurpa.s.sed among ourselves, either in the simplicity of the country or the refinements of the town. Originally their political and munic.i.p.al system was organized on the lines of a representative republic.

True, it is on record that these well-governed towns often waged an internecine warfare; but in spite of this it had been their invariable custom from time immemorial, even in times of strife, to keep the trade routes open and to allow their own and foreign merchants to go their ways unharmed. And the commerce of these nations ebbed and flowed along a road of unknown age, running from Itimbiri to Batubenge, about six hundred miles in length. This highway was destroyed by the 'missionaries of civilization' from Arabia only toward the close of the eighteenth century.

But even in my own time there were still smiths who knew the names of places along that wonderful trade route driven through the heart of the 'impenetrable forests of the Congo.' For every sc.r.a.p of imported iron was carried over it."[65]

In disposition the Negro is among the most lovable of men. Practically all the great travelers who have spent any considerable time in Africa testify to this and pay deep tribute to the kindness with which they were received. One has but to remember the cla.s.sic 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 cla.s.ses observe these niceties of intercourse."[66]

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