CONCLUSIONS AND FORECASTS
The European partition of Africa—Only Liberia and Abyssinia remain
independent—Three classes into which Africa falls from
colonization standpoint—Healthy Africa—Yellow Africa—Black
Africa—Prognostications as to future race movements—Predominant
European races in the future—The eight great languages of New
Africa—Paganism will disappear—Muhammadan zeal will eventually
decay—The Negro may become identified in national interests with
his diverse European rulers, and not unite to form a universal
Negro nation with the cry of ‘Africa for the Africans,’ if he is
well treated—White nations may also arise in Africa—Yet future
of Africa remains very uncertain 442
APPENDIX I. Notable events and dates in the history of African
colonization 452
APPENDIX II. Bibliography 467
INDEX 472
LIST OF MAPS
1. Africa as known to the Ancients; showing
distribution of native races and lines of Bantu
invasion _To face_ p. 50
2. Muhammadan Africa _To face_ p. 74
3. Portuguese Africa _To face_ p.
114
4. French Africa _To face_ p.
238
5. British Africa _To face_ p.
388
6. German Africa _To face_ p.
422
7. Colonizable Africa _At end_
8. Political Africa, 1912 _At end_
_Note._ The spelling of African names adopted throughout this book is
the system sanctioned by the Royal Geographical Society, by which all
consonants are pronounced as in English and all vowels as in Italian. Ñ,
ñ represents the nasal sound of ‘ng’ in ‘ri_ng_i_ng_,’ ‘so_ng_,’ as
distinguished from the ‘ng’ in ‘a_ng_er.’ No consonants are doubled
unless pronounced twice in succession: thus ‘Massowah’ is properly
written Masawa. But where old established custom has sanctioned a
spelling diverging from these rules the official spelling of the name is
adopted. Thus: Moçambique instead of Msambiki; Quelimane instead of
Kelimān; Uganda as well as the more correct Buganda; Bonny instead of
Obani.
ERRATUM
p. 306, last line, _for_ Truster _read_ Truter, _and similarly in Index_
CHAPTER I
PREHISTORIC RACE MOVEMENTS IN AFRICA
THE theme of this book obviously deals rather with the invasion and
settlement of Africa by foreign nations than with the movements of
people indigenous in their present types to the African continent;
nevertheless, it may be well to preface this sketch of the history of
African colonization by a few remarks explaining the condition and
inhabitants of the continent—so far as we can deduce them from indirect
evidence—before it was subjected to invasion and conquest by races and
peoples from Europe and Asia.
In all probability man first entered Africa from the direction of Syria.
He penetrated into tropical Africa in the train of those large mammals
which still form the most striking feature in the African fauna; many of
which however were evolved not in tropical Africa but in southern Europe
or western Asia as well as in Egypt and Cis-Saharan Africa. These great
apes, elephants, giraffes, and antelopes sought a refuge in tropical
Africa not only from the cold of the glacial pleistocene, but from the
incessant attacks of carnivorous man. Later on, but still in most remote
times, there were (no doubt) migrations of European man from the
northern side of the Mediterranean. But it seems more likely that the
bulk of African humanity as represented by its modern types passed from
Syria and Persia into Arabia, and thence into north-eastern Africa.
Did the Neanderthal species of humanity—_Homo primigenius_, with his big
head, big brain, short neck, long trunk and arms, and shambling legs,
his ape-like jaws and possibly hairy body—ever populate any part of
Africa? So far, no trace of him in an unmixed form has been found beyond
the limits of Europe, either living or fossil. But no farther away from
Africa than Gibraltar there has been obtained from the layers of deposit
below the floor of a cave the famous neanderthaloid Gibraltar skull,
Which in cranial capacity is lower than any other type of _Homo
primigenius_ as yet discovered. Yet there is nothing of the negro about
this and other types of _Homo primigenius_. The nose was quite
differently formed and was very large and prominent. The great brow
ridges characteristic of _Homo primigenius_ and of his collateral
relation the modern Australoid are an un-negro-like feature, though
occasionally they appear sporadically in the negroes of Equatorial
Africa and even in the northern Bushmen. Some French anthropologists
have thought that North Africa was first colonized by the Neanderthal
species of man, and that this type has even left traces of its presence
there in tribes like the Mogods of north-west Tunisia and certain
peoples of the Atlas mountains.
The successor and supplanter of _Homo primigenius_ in western Europe was
a generalized type of _Homo sapiens_, represented by the Galley-Hill man
inhabiting south-east England, France, and central Europe some 150,000
years ago—to judge by the approximate age of the strata in which his
earliest remains have been discovered. This man of the Thames estuary
(Galley-Hill is in north Kent, near Dartford) resembled somewhat closely
in skull-form and skeleton the Tasmanian aborigines and like them
possessed considerable negroid affinities. There is some slight evidence
that the Galley-Hill type co-existed for ages with the more specialized
and divergent _Homo primigenius_ (perhaps mingling his blood and
producing hybrid types), but gradually supplanted this big-brained
though brutish being and spread over Africa and southern Asia,
penetrating finally to remote Tasmania, where his last direct
descendants were exterminated in the middle of the 19th century by the
British settlers in that genial island. Certain “Strandlooper” skulls of
unknown age found in southernmost Africa seem to suggest affinities with
the Tasmanian or Galley-Hill type who may have been the first real man
to colonize Africa.
The actual evolutionary area of the negro sub-species of _Homo sapiens_
is unknown to us at present. At one time it was thought likely to have
been India. There is a strong underlying negroid element in the mass of
the Indian population; and in the southernmost part of the great
peninsula there are forest tribes of dark skin and strikingly negro
physiognomy, with frizzled or woolly hair. There is a negroid element in
the gentle Burmese; and in the Andaman Islands—geologically little more
than a depressed peninsula of Further India—the dwarfish people are
absolute negroes of the Asiatic type. In the Malay Peninsula, here and
there in Sumatra, above all in the Philippine archipelago, there are
Negrito tribes or types akin to the Andaman islanders. In the more
eastern among the Malay islands—especially in Buru, Jilolo, and
Timor—the interior tribes are of obvious negro stock. Still more marked
is this in the case of New Guinea, and most of all in the Bismarck
archipelago and northern Solomon Islands. In these last the resemblance
of the natives to the average negro of Africa is most striking, although
the distance from Africa is something like 8000 miles. Negroid
affinities extend east of the Solomon archipelago to Fiji and Hawai, and
south to New Caledonia, Tasmania and even New Zealand. On the other
hand, Africa for many thousand years has been obviously the chief domain
of the negro. Did the negro subspecies originate in, say, North Africa,
and thence spread eastwards to Persia (southern Persia has vestiges of
an ancient negroid population—the Elamites of the Hebrew scriptures),
India, Further India, Malaysia, and Oceania? Or was Europe—southern
Europe—the region where the negro specialized from some basic type like
the Tasmanian Galley-Hill man? Or Arabia[1], Syria, or India? The
evidence as yet before us is too slight to justify any positive theory.
The probability is that some region of western Asia such as Syria was
the birth-place of the negro of a generalized type, who from this centre
migrated into northern Africa, southern Europe, and southern Asia. The
discoveries made by Dr Verneaux and others in southern and western
France and in Italy would seem to show that from 30,000 to 40,000 years
ago the population of these regions was of negroid aspect, and that they
were succeeded by the tall Cro-Magnon race of totally different type,
more recalling Caucasian man and the taller Mongoloids, such as the
Amerindian. A glance however at the populations of Italy, France, Spain,
Wales, and southern Ireland shows the observant anthropologist that both
in nigrescence and in facial features the ancient negroid strain has
never been completely eliminated in these lands.
There are certain anatomical differences between the existing negroes of
Asia and Oceania on the one hand and the negroes of modern Africa on the
other[2]. Whether the African negro was the first human colonizer of
Africa, or was preceded by more brutish or more generalized types, such
as the Galley-Hill man, is not yet known to us. But from the little we
possess in the way of fossil human remains and other evidence it seems
probable that every region of Africa, even Algeria and Egypt, once
possessed a negro population. In Mauretania (Morocco to Tripoli) these
ancient negroes were partly driven out by prehistoric Caucasian invaders
and partly absorbed by intermarriage, the mixture resulting in the
darkened complexions of so many of the North African peoples. In Egypt a
dwarfish type of negro seems to have inhabited the Nile delta some
10,000 years ago; and big black negroes formed the population of upper
Nubia and Dongola so late as about 4000 years ago.
Yet there are reasons for thinking that not all parts of Tropical Africa
were colonized by negroes, or rather by the typical big black negro,
until 2000 or 3000 years ago. Although the fringe of the Congo basin,
for example, has been inhabited for a very considerable period (as is
testified by the presence of stone implements somewhat deeply buried in
the soil), the central part of that area would seem to have been invaded
quite recently by man; while in South Africa beyond the Zambezi there
have been periods in which the only human type was the Bushman, rather
than the big black negro. The comparatively recent human colonization of
the forests of the southern Cameroons and the inner Congo basin may have
been due to the density of tree growth and the opposition of the
gorilla; and (in Congoland) to the swamps and the presence of large
shallow lakes now dried up into river-courses. Several French and German
pioneers have described to the writer of this book the way in which,
when attempting to explore the forests of South Cameroons, far back from
the coast, their caravans of negro porters were attacked by the
gorillas; and the utterly uninhabited character of considerable areas
along the Congo-Cameroons water-parting is said to be due to the terror
inspired in the native mind by these enormous, fierce, and resolute
creatures. The same fact may have hindered at one time the populating of
similar forest countries between the Mubangi and the main Congo. South
of the main Congo there are no gorillas; but a good deal of this central
Congo region has been under water until quite recent times, and even now
its inhabitants are often compelled to live in pile dwellings raised
above flood level.
The African negro is divisible into two main types, very distinct one
from the other, the Negro proper and the Bushman. The former is of
fairly tall stature (except in its few dwarf tribes), dark, almost black
of skin, and long-headed, has abundant head-hair and an inclination to
hairiness of face and body, is prognathous and large jawed, and has no
marked tendency to fleshiness of the buttocks. His sweat glands emit a
rank and most characteristic odour, absent—in this very marked form—from
either the Asiatic negro or the Bushman. The Bushman on the other hand
is yellow-skinned, short of stature (though of well-proportioned limbs),
has a round head rather than a long one, is not markedly prognathous (in
his southern types), has no hair on face or body—or at most a very
scanty beard in the old men—has the hair arranged in segregated tufts on
the head, and is especially distinguished by his marked steatopygy—the
growth of fat and muscle on the buttocks. This steatopygy is much more
marked in women than in men and is absent altogether in very young
children. Both sexes amongst the Bushmen have peculiarities in their
external genitalia absent from the true negro type[3].
The average and typical Bushman is, as I have said, orthognathous rather
than prognathous, and usually, like the negro, is noteworthy for the
bulging forehead and the absence of strongly marked brow ridges. Yet
there are types of Bush race still living, more especially in German
south-west Africa, in which there is either a strongly marked brow ridge
and much prognathism, or even a degree of prognathism more extreme and
ape-like than is to be seen anywhere else in the world, unless it be
here and there amongst the Congo pygmies. These exceptional Bushman
types (which resemble somewhat similar sporadic “simian” individuals
amongst the Berg-Damara negroes and the helot tribes along the northern
Limpopo) have sometimes been identified with a certain class of
“Strandlooper” skull found in caves on the South African coasts and
exhibiting a low cranial capacity and much prognathism. But, again,
among the Strandloopers[4] there were other types of great antiquity
which scarcely seem negro at all—they are of good cranial development
and recall the skulls of a generalized Caucasian in form—so that South
Africa may have been invaded by “white men,” somewhat akin to the modern
Hamite, many thousand years ago.
The modern Bushman is singled out from other African races by his
extraordinary gift for delineating and painting. He has painted or
engraved many pictures on the rocks in past times, illustrating thus his
customs, superstitions, battles, and above all the wild animals of which
he has long been an adroit and fearless hunter. No existing tribe of
true negro stock has possessed such a gift for drawing or such a desire
to display it. To find some parallel to the artistic work of the Bushmen
we must cross the Zambezi and travel northwards to the Sahara desert
between Lake Chad and the northernmost Niger on the one hand and the
coast regions of Algeria on the other. In all this vast region of desert
or stony plateau there are many engravings and pictures on the rocks;
but from such slight indications as we possess (some of them are so
ancient that they depict extinct beasts) we are inclined to attribute
them to a primitive white race, to some such people as covered the walls
of caverns in France and Spain with splendid pictures of bison, horses,
mammoths, reindeer, salmon, eels, lions, ibexes, and boars. So far no
examples of Bushman paintings have been discovered in the far west of
South Africa or to the north of the Zambezi. Yet there is some slight
traditional and historical evidence to show that Bushmen still lingered
in Nyasaland and in the interior of Moçambique down to a period of
perhaps three hundred years ago.
Another distinguishing mark of the Bushman type is its peculiar
language. This is almost unwritable, so much is it compounded of
inarticulate and beast-like sounds—clicks with the tongue, gasps, and
nasal grunts. There is very little discoverable syntax in Bushman
speech. Its peculiar phonology is shared to some extent by the
Hottentot; but, on the other hand, Hottentot has a well-marked syntax as
clearly defined as that of any European language, and discriminates
between the masculine, feminine and neuter genders. In short in its
construction and grammar it recalls very markedly the Hamitic language
family of north-east Africa; and there is—remarkable to relate—a
language, the Sandawi of German East Africa, south of the Victoria
Nyanza, which resembles Hottentot in possessing clicks and also in a few
of its word-roots, and in its syntax. This speech is used by a
semi-nomadic tribe of hunters, who, however, in physique seem to be
negroid with some tinge of Hamitic blood.
So far as the slight indications of their legendary history go, the
Hottentots of south-west Africa seem in their origin to have come from
the same direction—Unyamwezi—to have wandered with cattle and sheep
(both of a north-east African type) between Tanganyika and Nyasa, and
across the Congo water-parting into Upper Zambezia, whence they made
their way slowly, pushed on by other people, into eastern Damaraland.
Here they settled for a time, and then again moved on to the Atlantic
coast between Mossamedes and the Orange River. For hundreds or thousands
of years, no doubt, they warred and yet mingled with the Bushmen, until
at last they had acquired many of their physical characteristics and a
large element of their language. At the present day they exhibit all the
points of a cross between the true negro and the Bushman, with perhaps
some attenuated element of the Caucasian, more in their minds and
legends than in their bodies.
To return to the true negro. He again may be subdivided into three main
types, and a fourth compounded of a mixing of the three others. The
first three are (1) the Congo pygmy, (2) the Forest negro, and (3) the
Nilotic negro. The Congo pygmy is a dwarfed form of the most ancient
negro type, with some affinities to the Asiatic negro, distinguished by
a very flat, large nose, much prognathism, long upper lips, turned-in
toes, short legs, and a tendency to hairiness on the body. The Forest
negro is a slightly improved pygmy, of taller stature, with exaggerated
negro facial features, long arms, and legs that are disproportionately
short. The Nilotic negro, on the other hand, is remarkable for his long,
stilt-like legs, short arms, and a greater likeness to the Caucasian in
his facial lineaments. The Nilotic negro in his finest developments
(such as the Turkana of Lake Rudolf) is perhaps the tallest race in the
world. A mixture of all these types one with the other, and no doubt
with the vanished Bushmen of East and North Africa, has produced the
“average” negro which is the commonest type to be met with in West,
East, Central, and South Africa. The ordinary Kafir or Zulu, dressed
appropriately, or the average Swahili or Munyamwezi of East Africa, or
the Mubangi or Muluba of Congoland, would pass muster as a Mandingo, a
Mosi, an Ashanti or a Nupe negro in West Africa, or even as a Hausa or a
Senegalese.
From whatever direction the negro entered Africa—if he did not arise
there—he seems to have settled most thickly to the north of the Equator,
in that broad belt below the 15th degree of north latitude which
stretches across the continent from Senegal and Liberia to Abyssinia and
the Victoria Nyanza. In the great western prolongation of Africa, above
all, between Kordofan and Senegambia, especially in Nigeria, the negro
must have been established for many thousand years to permit of the
enormous variety and diversity of the languages therein spoken having
arisen. In some parts of West Africa, such as Liberia and French Guinea,
there are six or seven absolutely distinct language-families, some of
which are confined in their use to an area no larger than Rutland or
Bedfordshire.
On the other hand, over the great southern third of Africa, beyond the
Equator, there are at most only eleven distinct language-families (as
compared to the forty-two or forty-three farther north). Of these
eleven, one, the Bantu, predominates vastly over the others; which
others are the Bushman and Hottentot in the extreme south, three
unclassified Sudanese language-families in Northern Congoland, three
small patches of non-Bantu speech in Northern German East Africa, and in
the same region and in British East Africa the intrusive Nilotic and
Hamitic speech-groups.
At the present day nearly all Africa south of the Equator is the domain
of but one language-family, the Bantu. The other negro languages are
fast dying out. The Bantu conquest has all the appearance of having been
a recent event, not beginning perhaps more than 2500 years ago. The
Bantu language-family is distinguished by its use of distinctive
prefixes, to which correspond a concord of pronouns and adjectival
prefixes. Nouns are divided into a number of classes (say seventeen),
and each class is marked by a special prefix and concord. But the
classes do not correspond to the masculine and feminine of the
sex-denoting languages, or masculine, feminine, and neuter. No
discrimination in prefix or pronouns takes place to indicate sex; but
nouns are allotted arbitrarily to classes which in most cases have lost
any special meaning but originally undoubtedly corresponded with a
division of objects into natural categories, each distinguished by some
special feature. Thus there was the ‘living’ or ‘human’ class, the
‘tree’ class, the ‘long’ or ‘river’ class, the classes of diminutive
objects, of ‘gigantic,’ of collective like ‘water’ and ‘tribe,’ of
‘strong’ and ‘weak.’
This principle of numerous classes not based on sex distinctions, but
each class having its distinctive particle and concord, is by no means
confined to Bantu in Africa, but is shared by an important group of West
African languages in Senegambia and Sierra Leone (Timne, etc.), and by
Fula. Except that the Fula speech (with some allied groups between the
Niger bend, the northern Gold Coast and Dahomé) is governed by suffixes
instead of prefixes, it offers much resemblance in structure to the
Bantu. Other prefix-governed languages (but without a distinct concord)
have been found recently in Southern Kordofan. From some such direction
as this the Bantu language-family—which in vocabulary, though not in
syntax, bears signs of relationship with some of the Lower Niger
languages—must have taken its origin in a region between the basins of
the Nile, Congo, and Shari. It may have been called into existence in
the moulding of a number of negro tribes by some semi-Caucasian invader,
of which the Hima of the Victoria Nyanza basin, the Mañbettu and the
Nyamnyam of the Bahr-al-Ghazal and Wele-Mubangi are vestiges. After a
special development in the Mountain Nile basin, this language-type was
carried all over the southern projection of Africa by a series of
strenuous invasions proceeding west to the Cameroons, east to the shore
of the Indian Ocean, and south over the Great Lakes region, Zambezia,
and Congoland.
Fula[5], a form of speech of cognate origin, was the language of the
mysterious light-complexioned Fūl people who first came within the scope
of world-history when they rose into power as a conquering Muhammadan
nation of the Western Sudan (Senegambia and Upper Niger) in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Before that they had wandered more
or less as a cattle-keeping gypsy-like folk, scattered over Nigeria from
the basin of the Gambia and the Senegal to the confines of Bornu and the
Shari river; to the Benue, to Nupe, Borgu, and Dahomé. According to Arab
tradition they came into Senegambia originally from the Adrar country,
far south of Morocco. Some of their own traditions derive them from
Fezzan, south of Tripoli. Other slight indications lead us to suppose
that they formerly dwelt in Morocco and Algeria as—quite possibly—the
predecessors of the Libyans or Berbers, who will be dealt with
presently. The nearest affinities of the Fulde or Fula speech at the
present day are with the group of Mosi-Gurunsi negro tongues spoken at
the back of Ashanti and of Togoland. There are also faint resemblances
to Wolof, the language of the handsome black-skinned Jolofs of Senegal,
a mixed race with an ancient Caucasian strain in their blood. In any
case the pure Fula is a handsome hybrid type, obviously an early cross
(in North Africa most likely) between the invading Caucasian of Europe
and some ancient negro stock of North Africa. The purer types of Fula
have a skin no darker than the average Berber, the face-features of a
European, and hair that is in curly ringlets. Their gradual invasion of
the Western Sahara, Nigeria, and Senegambia—in the south they reached
down to the Lower Niger and Yoruba-land, to Baghirmi, and across the
Benue to within a few days’ journey of the Cameroons coast—may have been
caused by the peopling of North Africa some ten or more thousand years
ago by the Libyans or Berbers, a Caucasian people related in speech and
origin to the Gala and other Hamites of N.E. Africa, and to the ancient
Egyptians.
Four other negroid peoples require to be considered in their effect on
the colonization of Africa before we can deal with the more clearly
alien races. These are the Songhai of Central Nigeria, the Mandingo of
Western Nigeria, the Hausa, and the Tibus or Teda.
The Songhai (Sughai, Songhoi—the _gh_ is like the French _r_ _grasséyé_)
are something like the Wolofs in appearance, in that, though
black-skinned and woolly-haired, their features are often of Caucasian
cast, and their characteristics generally those of negroids rather than
negroes. Their language (the common speech of Timbuktu) is at present an
unsolved mystery, its affinities are unguessed at. The Songhai seem to
have dwelt first (where they still live under Tuareg influence) in the
Oasis of Agades, a country on the southern verge of the Sahara, due east
of the great Niger bend. Here they appear to have received immigrants
from Ptolemaic or Roman Egypt, who brought with them Egyptian domestic
animals and the Egyptian style of architecture. This last they applied
to building in mud instead of stone. But, although much modified since
by Berber or Arab (Saracenic) influence from the north, this massive
Egyptian style of mud-built walls, palaces, and mosques still prevails
throughout northern Nigeria from the Upper Niger to the vicinity of the
Shari River.
While the Songhai were extending their influence to the northern bend of
the Niger, the Mandingo peoples, from some unknown place of origin, were
fighting their way westwards along the Upper Niger towards Senegambia.
The Mandingos and the Songhai met somewhere about the junction of the
Niger and the Bani, near the celebrated Jenné, which became a great
Songhai city in the 8th century. The Mandingo negroids, who may have
been connected with the ancient N.W. African Kingdom of Ghana, early
attained wealth and power by opening up the salt and gold mines of the
arid country bordering on or within the Western Sahara. They possibly
carried on a trade thence with Romanized North Africa. Southwards they
got into touch with the gold-bearing country of Ashanti; and it was
perhaps through them that Roman and Byzantine beads first found their
way to Ashanti and the Gold Coast. Sometimes the Mandingo empire
prevailed over the Songhai; latterly the Songhai dominated the northern
Mandingos, until both were swamped by the Moorish invasion of the
sixteenth century. Both alike showed themselves very ready to receive
Arab traders and the Muhammadan religion.
The Hausa people are much more negro in their physical appearance than
the Mandingos or Songhai. But their language, on the other hand, is
imprinted with the white man’s influence. Not only is it sex-denoting,
but in pronouns and in the peculiarity of indicating the feminine gender
by the consonant _t_ it offers so many indications of ancient Hamitic
influence that we are entitled to assume that it arose through an early
invasion of Eastern Nigeria by people speaking a Hamitic language. If
there is any veracity in Hausa legends, these Hamitic civilisers of the
regions between the Niger and Lake Chad came from Egypt; apparently they
likewise penetrated as far south as Baghirmi on the Shari and westward
to the Logone, where they assisted to create the sex-denoting Musgu
tongue. At one time it was thought that the evident “Libyan” element in
Hausa came from the invasion of Central Nigeria by the Berbers or
Tuaregs[6]; but it now seems much more probable that it was a Hamitic
rather than a Berber influence, and more probably came from the regions
of Nubia and Dongola where at one time a Hamitic language was spoken.
The Hausa people were probably already in existence, and their
“compromise” trading language had already been formed before the Tuaregs
or desert Berbers of North Africa had found their way to the regions
east of the Niger.
Indeed this region south of the Tripolitaine, from Fezzan across the
Tibesti mountains and the eastern Sahara to Lake Chad, had become the
domain of another remarkable negroid race which has had much to do with
the opening up and the closing of negro Africa, the Tibu or Teda.
Physically they are an exact hybrid between Hamite and negro, and
resemble very much the more negro-like types of Somali; but their
language, which is cognate with the Kanuri of Bornu, a kingdom first
semi-civilized by the Tibu, offers no indications of affinity with other
African forms of speech; like Songhai it is (so far as our existing
knowledge goes) quite isolated. The Tibu had much to do with the
introduction of iron weapons and implements and iron-working into negro
Africa. They seem to have reproduced the boomerang or throwing-stick in
iron, and thus to have originated those wonderful throwing-knives which
attained their highest development in the north-central basin of the
Congo. A notable stream of Tibu culture (no doubt largely derived from
ancient Egypt) entered Congoland about 1500 to 2000 years ago, finding
its way up the Shari from Lake Chad, across the Mubangi and main Congo,
and so down into the Bushongo country of central Congoland. The old
Bushongo language (now extinct) was not a Bantu speech, but an
unclassified tongue with relationships to the forms of speech still
current on the Upper Shari.
Other civilizing negroid immigrants, Tibu or Hamite in origin, appear to
have drifted from the north-east into the Bahr-al-Ghazal region and
thence into N.E. Congoland, where by mixture with the negroes they
formed the remarkable Nyamnyam and Mañbettu peoples, or at any rate the
aristocracies of those tribes. Farther east still we have the remarkable
Hima aristocracies of cattle-keeping semi-nomads, very like the Fula in
appearance and customs, but always speaking pure Bantu languages. They
would seem to have been derived from an ancient Egyptian or Gala origin.
Putting together the slender evidence we have as to the prehistoric past
of Africa at a period of, let us say, 10,000 years ago—evidence
represented by stone implements, a few skulls of ancient date, rock
engravings in Mauretania, the earliest archaeological remains in Lower
Egypt—we may hazard the following conclusions. At that period the
coastal fringe of North Africa from Morocco to Egypt was inhabited by
Caucasian or semi-Caucasian races allied in the west, perhaps, to the
Fula type, and in the east (Cyrenaica and Egypt) to the Libyan or
Berber. There may even then have been the beginning of Semitic
settlements on the Isthmus of Suez and the Suez coast of the Red Sea.
These same Libyans or Hamites, at that period not strongly
differentiated from the Proto-Semites in race and language, and
emphatically “white men,” had probably also penetrated to the highlands
of Abyssinia, and by mixture with the precedent negroes and bushmen were
forming the modern Hamitic races. Some of these white men (besides the
more negroid Galas) had found their way down the more open, less
densely-forested east coast of Africa to Zambezia and South Africa[7].
But beyond this white fringe of Northern and North-eastern Africa, the
rest of the Dark continent was then the domain of the negro in his
Bushman and black-skinned types. The Sahara desert was not such a
rainless region then as now, but was more habitable and inhabited. On
the other hand, much of Central and some of Southern Africa was still
under water, covered with as yet undrained, unevaporated shallow lakes.
The vast forests of the centre and parts of the west may have been
uninhabited by man, afraid to encounter the chimpanzees and gorillas,
the leopards, pythons, and elephants which tenanted them. Then, 10,000
years ago, more or less, there came into the Nile valley from the
direction of Abyssinia the wonderful race of the Dynastic Egyptians[8],
whose original home seems to have been, first, South-West Arabia, and
next, the Danákil country, the coast-line of Abyssinia. The Dynastic
Egyptians were apparently a composite type, mainly of Hamitic stock,
impregnated with an ancient negroid strain and tinged to some extent
with Mongol blood from the early Mongolian invaders of Mesopotamia.
Their language remains an unsolved problem to this day. It offers
decided affinities with both Hamitic and Proto-Semitic, and yet contains
puzzling elements of its own which may be due both to negro and to
Mongolian influence. In the main it is an aberrant Hamitic tongue; but
with no very close resemblance to Gala or Somali, or to the Bisharin
dialects of Eastern Nubia. These (be it remarked) seem to have been
spoken for an enormously long period of time; and possibly the Bisharin
(Hamitic) natives of the Red Sea coast-lands—Rudyard Kipling’s
“Fuzzie-wuzzies”—were living where they now are when the dynastic
Egyptians poured as a Neolithic conquering host into the Nile valley in
Lower Nubia and made their way along the narrow ribbon of habitable
Egypt on either side of the Desert Nile.
The dynastic Egyptians found the Delta occupied by a Libyan people, akin
to the modern Berbers of North Africa. At that period the distinction
already existed between the Libyan or Berber and the Ethiopian or Gala
branches of the Hamitic family. Amongst these Berbers of the Nile Delta
were still lingering Bushman or negro serfs. The dynastic Egyptians
mingled much with these Libyans of North Egypt; indeed occasionally, in
the early days of organized Egypt, the Libyan race from the Western
Desert (which still lingers little altered in the Oasis of Siwah)
invaded Egypt and gave dynasties to that country. The dynastic Egyptians
ruled and populated the narrow valley of the Desert Nile as far south as
the first cataract, and also its broad delta to the shores of the
Mediterranean. South of the First Cataract there was a mixed population
of Egyptians, Hamites and negroes of the Nubian race. Above the Second
Cataract the country of the Nile valley was, whilst dynastic Egyptian
rule lasted, entirely negro in population. It was not invaded and
settled by Hamites of the Bisharin stock until about the period of
Ptolemaic rule.
The dynastic Egyptians governed a small portion only of the Red Sea
coast, between the Gulf of Suez and Ras Benās (Berenike). From ports at
Kosseir and Berenike they sent their fleets of galleys down the Red Sea
and out into the Gulf of Aden; and at a relatively late period of their
long (perhaps 6000 years) rule over Egypt, in about 1500 B.C., they
despatched the first of several expeditions to the Danákil coast and to
Somaliland, in search of incense trees. Whether Egyptian influence in
unrecorded voyages proceeded further down the east coast of Africa is
doubtful; at any rate it is not, so far, supported by any evidence. The
Egyptians seem to have been somewhat timid navigators. Their sea-going
galleys depended more on oarsmen than on lateen sails; and, although
they may have found it comparatively safe to coast along the Red Sea,
they would be perturbed by the much rougher, stormier waters of the Gulf
of Aden; while the Indian Ocean, with its strong monsoon winds and big
billows, would prove very unsafe for their unseaworthy ships. Their
civilizing, “Caucasianizing” influence over negro Africa was however
considerable, though probably not exercised with any effect until the
real Egyptian dynasties were passing away and the land of Egypt was
becoming a region doomed to be ruled by foreigners—Assyrians, Persians,
Greeks, Romans, Byzantines[9]. Egyptian trade, even as far back as 3000
or 4000 years before the Christian era, was penetrating through Nubia to
Kordofan and Darfur, Bornu, Tibesti, Agadés and the Niger; or down into
the Bahr-al-ghazal and the countries of the Mountain Nile where the
pygmies still dwelt. Hamitic peoples and Semitic colonists in Abyssinia
and Northern Galaland were in touch with the Egypt of the last dynasties
and the Egypt of the Ptolemies, and pushed a trade in Egyptian goods
inland as far as Mt Elgon and the shores of the Victoria Nyanza. Their
ancient, blue, Egyptian beads are dug up occasionally in the sub-soil of
Kavirondo. Egyptian or Gala adventurers appeared (outcasts, criminals,
or mutinous soldiers in origin, it may be) in the lands of savage
negroes about the sources of the Nile. They were looked upon as
demi-gods; and their descendants to this day (with a strikingly
Pharaonic physiognomy) are often called by a name which means “spirits,”
“white men,” or “gods.” They, or traders whom they attracted, brought
with them the domestic animals of Egypt and the cultivated plants,
besides a knowledge of metal working.
Is it generally realized that the whole of negro Africa, south of the
Northern Sahara, received its first and its principal domestic animals
and cultivated plants from Egypt, and Egypt only? The ox, long-horned
and straight-backed, or shorter-horned and humped, an Asiatic, and not a
European ordanese goat (not the long-eared, polled, fleecy Nubian goat
of after-development); one or more breeds of dog; the domesticated
Nubian ass; the domestic fowl—all came from Egypt. In vegetable
food-stuffs there were the jowari or sorghum grain (_Andropogon_), the
eleusine, the _Pennisetum_ millets, the taro “yam” (_Colocasia_ aroid),
various peas and beans, and gourds and pumpkins. From Egypt came ideas
as to boat-building which penetrated as far south and west as the
Victoria Nyanza, Lake Chad, and the Northern Niger; also methods of
hut-building and the ambitious mud-architecture of the Nigerian Sudan, a
hint or reflection of which penetrated even to the Niger delta, the
Northern Cameroons and Congo. Simple articles of furniture, such as
carved stools, head-rest pillows, musical instruments (lyres, drums,
harps, xylophones, zithers), games of the cat’s-cradle and backgammon
type, weapons (shields, improved bows, slings, lances and battle-axes),
found their way into the heart of negroland; though many of these
inventions got no farther south than Uganda and the central basin of the
Congo, or south of the northern Niger.
Two other elements in the pre-historic colonization of Africa require
mention at this stage—the Semitic and the Malay. “Semitic” and “Hamitic”
are useful terms which apply exactly to two distinct types of
sex-denoting languages; languages which conceivably had a common origin
very far back in time—12,000 years ago or more?—somewhere in southwest
Asia, perhaps not far from Caucasia or Armenia. But in a looser sense we
apply Semitic and Hamitic to physical types, and speak of a Semitic
profile and the dark Hamitic complexion and curly hair. “Hamite”—or,
more correctly, Kushite—applies without much inconsistency to the
physical type which speaks the Eastern Hamitic languages[10]—yellow or
brown in skin colour, with the handsome features and straight, thin
noses of the better-looking Caucasian, and bushy, black hair which
betrays the ancient negro intermixture by its curliness. The Kushites
are in fact descended from Libyans (Berbers) who have mingled in
North-East Africa with negro races. The whiter Libyans passed on
westwards to colonize the southern and north-western shores of the
Mediterranean, while the Hamites populated Middle and Eastern Egypt,
Abyssinia, and Galaland; from which direction their nomad wanderers as
hunters and herdsmen permeated all Eastern Africa in ancient times. The
Hamitic languages are akin to the Libyan, though the two groups are
widely separated in affinities of vocabulary, and must have diverged
from a common origin in North-Western Arabia ten or more thousand years
ago.
It is far less easy in the case of the Semites to define a physical type
associated with the speaking of Semitic languages; as difficult, indeed,
as to postulate the corporeal form of the men who originated the Aryan
tongues. The Aramaic type so familiar to us in the typical Jew is akin
to the old Assyrian; and the Assyrian was probably a compound of
Armenian and Mediterranean man mixed with the old negroid peoples of
Southern Persia. The Arabs of Arabia are in the north very “Nordic” in
appearance, and evidently exhibit the results of ancient invasions of
Syria by peoples akin to the Teutonic or blond Aryan type; others again
show the hooked “Semitic” nose of the Armenian or the long nasal organ
of the average Persian; while in the natives of Southern Arabia there is
a Hamitic, Gala-like strain, besides the general underlying stratum of
that hypothetical small-bodied, big-nosed white Neolithic race which is
associated with stone-worship and megalithic stone-building, and is
perhaps the basis of the Mediterranean type of man. Curiously enough,
there is not any evidence as yet of an ancient _negro_ peopling of
Arabia, such as exists in regard to Algeria and Egypt, and Southern
(Elamite) Persia.
These varying and composite races speaking Semitic tongues appear to
have travelled south and west from Syria and Arabia on the heels of both
Libyans (Amorites) and Hamites, and even to have settled on the Red Sea
coast of Egypt at a very early period before the dynastic Egyptians had
conquered the Nile valley. Much later they invaded Lower Egypt in force
as the Haqshu (Hikushahu) or Shepherd kings—if these are rightfully
identified as speaking a Semitic tongue. Still later they began to cross
the Red Sea farther south and colonized Abyssinia and even Somaliland.
In these regions (Abyssinia and Harrar) their Semitic tongues remain to
this day. Perhaps as early as 1000 years before the time of Christ (at a
guess) their ships, more seaworthy than those of the Egyptians, found
their way from the ports of the Sabaean, Minaean and Himyarite kingdoms
to India, to the Zanzibar coast of Africa, and to the north end of
Madagascar and the Comoro Islands. Later, in all probability, than the
first Minaean ventures along the East African coast was a more authentic
voyage of the Phoenicians, which will be mentioned in the next chapter.
Attention should be given at this stage in our survey of the ancient
colonization of Africa to the unsolved mystery of the Rhodesian
ruins—the stone-built forts, the aqueducts, round towers, stone-embanked
hill-terraces, stone-lined pits, rock-mines, and buildings which suggest
the name of “temple.” These ruins (in and under which have been found
beautiful gold ornaments, ingot-moulds, strange, sculptured birds—eagles
or vultures—at the ends of long soap-stone monoliths, and stone
_phalli_) dot the surface of Southern Rhodesia somewhat thickly. They
seem to radiate, as it were, from the head streams of the Sabi River, in
fact from where the most wonderful of all these ruins, Great Zimbabwe,
is situated. The northernmost of the clusters of ruins of stone
buildings is to the north of Mt Hampden and the modern town of
Salisbury; but none of these strange remains of an unexplained
civilization are found anywhere near the Zambezi. It would seem that the
unknown people to whom the really antique and skilfully built among
these towers, temples, and labyrinthine fortifications (and not their
more modern, negro-made clumsy imitations) are to be ascribed, entered
south-east Africa at or near the old Arab port of Sofala and made their
way up the Sabi river. The ruins are all situated on lofty tablelands or
mountain ridges, in healthy, cool country. Their existence was noted by
Arab writers so early as the 10th century A.C.; and they were described
as old and partly in decay when first seen by the Portuguese in the 16th
century. The name “Zimbaoe,”—like the modern Zimbabwe—applied to them in
Portuguese writings is simply a local Bantu plural word meaning
“stones”; but these Zimba or Zimbabwe came to be specially associated
with the remarkable negro kingdom or empire of Monomotapa[11] which
existed in this part of south-east Africa from the time the Islamite
Arabs settled anew at Sofala in the 10th century A.C. down to the early
19th century, when it was apparently finally extinguished by the
invading Zulus from the south. From this region may have come the
conquering hordes of the “Ba-zimba” who are thought to have crossed over
into west Madagascar, and who passed ravaging and slaying up the east
coast of Africa—very much after the style of the later Angoni-Zulu
raids—in the late 16th century, temporarily effacing the Portuguese hold
over Mombasa.
The Rhodesian stone buildings are obviously associated with gold-mining;
but they must have been centres of somewhat elaborate agriculture, and
of a phallic worship (the _phallus_ being, together with the associated
cylinder or _lingam_, a sacred symbol of a religious belief which
prevailed once in Egypt, India, and ancient Arabia and Syria). Phallic
worship, for example, was carried by the Phoenicians to southern
Tunis—no doubt to Carthage and elsewhere; but its symbols happen to have
survived in actual use in southern Tunis to the present day. The masonry
of the Zimbabwe type of building (the real old kind, not the modern
negro imitation) displays remarkable skill in the shaping and placing of
stones in courses, all much of the same size. The masonry is without
mortar, but the stones fit fairly closely in their horizontal,
accurately-laid courses; and in the round buildings the symmetry is
remarkable.
What race raised such monuments and was gifted with so much civilization
at a period which is certainly antecedent (in the really ancient types
of building) to the 10th century A.C.? Was it the Arabs from southern
Arabia, who were settled on the East African coast before the Christian
era? This seems probable. The Zimbabwe ruins yield no ornament, no
detail whatever of the Saracenic style, and (so far) no inscription of
any kind in any language. There is nothing whatever about them to
suggest their having been built by Islamic Arabs; everything to the
contrary, as certainly these Arabs would not have carved either birds or
phalli. There are suggestions here and there of Indian influence. The
buildings of the true Zimbabwe style are certainly pre-Islamic or have
been associated with a people which ignored Islam. They resemble most
nearly the works of the Phoenicians and the southern Arabians, from any
date between 1000 B.C. and the early part of the Christian era. The
round conical towers are like those of Sardinia and Ireland and other
ancient haunts of the enterprising Phoenicians. Yet there is nowhere any
inscription in the Phoenician, Hebrew, Sabaean or Kufic or other ancient
eastern alphabets, though according to Portuguese traditions
inscriptions in unknown characters did exist at Zimbabwe; and no skull
has so far been dug up from beneath the ruins or in close association
with them or the ancient gold-workings which is not of the ordinary
Bantu negro type. No ancient coin has been found; all the pottery,
porcelain, and glass fragments indicate comparatively modern oriental
ware which might have been introduced at any date between the 15th and
the 17th centuries. Yet most of these last discoveries, though made at a
considerable depth below the surface under the oldest ruins, come from
places where they might have been buried in recent times, and do not
really militate against the theory that the finest masonry work of
Zimbabwe and kindred establishments dates from a period of 2000 years
ago or earlier.
No one who really knows the negro of Africa, south of the Sahara desert,
can easily believe that the hundreds of stone-built towns, villages and
forts of ancient appearance in southern Rhodesia were built, unaided and
uninspired, by a pure negro race, or doubt even that these works (I am
referring to those of perfect construction) were the outcome of some
foreign invasion of south-east Africa at a period of unfixed history
prior to the 7th century of the Christian era. We know of no negro,
scarcely any negroid, race of Africa which, left to itself and of its
own inspiration, has taken to building in stone. The great metal-working
tribes of the Congo basin which developed a really remarkable native
art—the Bushongo, for example, a race more negroid than
negro—nevertheless ignored stone as a building material or an object of
worship. Between southern Congoland or Nyasaland on the north and
Mashonaland on the south nothing has ever been discovered hitherto which
indicates the existence in former times of a stone-building race of
negroes or negroids, or of the path followed through the, until
recently, barbarous regions of Zambezia and Moçambique by the possible
ancestors of the people who built the Zimbabwe and similar monuments.
The resemblance between the round towers of Rhodesia and the primitive,
conical, round minarets of the old mosques at Lamu, Malindi, Mombasa,
and other places on the East African coast (dominated by Arabs for at
least 2000 years) is very striking. Both may date from the pre-Islamic
period. There are other analogies between the Rhodesian ruins and the
ancient buildings of pre-Islamic Arabia which suggest, as the most
probable explanation of this mystery in African colonization, that the
ancient gold-miners, _phallus-_ and sun-worshippers, irrigators,
terrace-cultivators of Matebele- and Mashonaland, were likewise Arabs
from some part of western or southern Arabia who penetrated inland from
Sofala attracted by the signs of gold. After a century or so of
profitable gold-mining in a land which had only then a spare Bushman
population, the Bantu hordes from the north descended on these Semitic
colonies and eventually exterminated or drove away the Arabs, taking
their place clumsily as gold-miners and builders. Although the Arabs
never regained their position in the interior, they continued or resumed
their occupancy of the south-east African coast-line down to the arrival
of the Portuguese. Probably also the Tsetse fly, by its interference
with the means of transport, was another deterrent factor in the history
of this colonization which failed to spread. It is possible,
nevertheless, that Madagascar and Bantu East Africa owe to these
hypothetical, unnamed, prehistoric Arab colonizers not only the
introduction (indirectly from India) of the edible banana or plantain,
which afterwards spread right across the continent, but also the
long-horned, straight-backed Egyptian ox, and the domestic fowl; hemp
perhaps likewise, a “smoking mixture” which preceded tobacco by many
centuries.
One of the greatest mysteries in the prehistoric past of Man is the
Malayan colonization of the large island of Madagascar. Madagascar lies
off the east coast of Africa at a minimum distance of 300 miles. Between
the north-west corner of the island and the East African mainland lies
the archipelago of the Comoro islands, which assist to some extent to
bridge the interval. So far as our researches go, there is no evidence
in Madagascar of ancient human inhabitants. The island was probably
uninhabited by man until the arrival of the Malagasy from Sumatra or
Java, though, more or less simultaneously, negroes from eastern Africa
were arriving on the west coast of Madagascar, either in their own
canoes, or more probably in the sailing vessels of the Arabs who were
trading up and down the east coast of Africa from perhaps as early as
1000 B.C. But the unsolved problem is, How did the Malagasy tribes reach
this island at different periods between an approximate 500 B.C. and 500
A.C.? Their language affinities[12] show that they must have come from
Sumatra or Java. Physically the Malagasy of pure race—like the Hova
tribes—unmixed (as so many of them are along the eastern side of the
central plateau) with negro, Indian, or Arab blood, resemble pretty
closely the Malay types of Sumatra and Java. We can understand the Malay
and Indonesian conquest of Oceania. In the relatively calm,
island-studded Pacific Ocean it is not an impossible task for men to
sail on from island to island in large canoes with outriggers and decks,
and with masts and sails, and thus to reach in their migrations to
within 2000 or 3000 miles of North or South America, and 5000 or 6000
miles from their starting-point. But it is a different matter to cross
in a direct line the whole breadth of the Indian Ocean from Java or
Sumatra to Madagascar, with no convenient islands to halt at by the way.
It is true that there is the little Chagos group, leading to the
Mascarene archipelago of Mauritius, Réunion and Rodriguez; but on no one
of these islands has there been found any trace of the former presence
of human inhabitants before the arrival of the Portuguese, Dutch, and
French. It seems more probable therefore that the excursions and
adventures of the Sumatran and Javan Malays (inspired to some extent as
they may have been by the mysterious Indonesians coming from Indo-China,
who settled at some unknown date in Sumatra and the more eastern islands
of the Malay archipelago, and were the progenitors of the Polynesians)
first took a western direction in crossing the Bay of Bengal to Ceylon
and southern India; thence passing on to the Maldiv archipelago, and so
to the Seychelles and farther to the Almirante Islands and the north end
of Madagascar. But there is very little evidence of a positive nature to
support this theory, except it be the slightly “Malay” look about the
people of the Maldiv group and the scanty remains of ancient human
settlement which are undoubtedly to be found in the larger Seychelles
Islands; though these had long been uninhabited when rediscovered by the
Portuguese and French. It seems, however, almost impossible, that
repeated colonizations of Madagascar should have taken place by direct
voyages from Sumatra or Java (at a period from 2500 to 1500 years ago)
by adventurous Malays starting forth in outrigger canoes for an ocean
journey of about 4000 miles. How did they know Madagascar awaited them
on the other side of that tremendous interval? It is much more likely
that they passed on by degrees from point to point in their western
migrations; first to Ceylon, then to the Maldiv Islands (this name, like
some other place and tribal names in South India, suggests affinity with
“Malay,” “Malagasy”), and so on to the Seychelles, Almirante, Aldabra
and the Comoros. But, if so adventurous, why did not these Malagasy
Malays also colonize the east coast of Africa? If they ever did so,
there remains not the slightest trace of their presence in either the
physique or the languages of the present inhabitants. There are, it is
true, outrigger canoes in use at Zanzibar which may derive from some
occupation of that island by Malagasies on their way to Madagascar; but
Zanzibar, though only twenty miles from the mainland, is very distinct
from East Africa. Its original inhabitants, when it was first examined
by Europeans, belonged to only three types—negroes, Arabs, and Indians.
There is evidence, however, of a scattered and varied character, that
intercourse for trading purposes between China, India and Persia on the
one hand, and South Arabia and Zanzibar on the other is as old as the
beginning of the Christian era. Himyaritic-Arab intercourse with the
Malagasy of north Madagascar must be at least as old as that; to judge
by a variety of indications, it is certainly pre-Islamic.
The west coast of Madagascar may have been already peopled by negroes
from East Africa who had crossed over by the route of the Comoro
archipelago[13]. But, if so, these last must have been assisted or
compelled to make the attempt by some superior seafaring race coming
from the north, Arab or Phoenician, because there is no evidence that
the East African negroes have ever been great navigators or have
possessed in earlier times any means of embarkation better than dug-out
canoes propelled by paddles; and it is difficult to believe that in such
unstable vessels they could cross a broad strait of rough sea between
East Africa and the Comoro Islands. It is easier to suppose that the
large negro element of Bantu origin which exists in north-west
Madagascar was brought there within the last 2000 years by Arab ships,
before and after the days of Islam. The negro colonization of this large
island could not have been helped by the persistence of some
land-bridge, some Comoro isthmus which has since broken down; for along
such an isthmus would have come many African beasts, birds, and snakes,
which are totally absent from Madagascar[14]. With only a narrow strait
to cross, negroes or Bushmen might have passed over to Madagascar in
canoes or on rafts. The Comoro Islands, when first discovered by
Europeans, were (as now) inhabited by Arabs and a race of Bantu negroes,
speaking dialects related to the Swahili of Zanzibar. But these may have
been brought there centuries before by the Arab ships. It is probable
that there was no Malagasy settlement of the Comoro archipelago until
the 19th century.
Another curious feature in this Malay colonization of Madagascar is
that, once having reached this great island, the Malagasy immigrants
appear to have completely renounced their seafaring life, to have
maintained no sea-going vessels of any size (though they had and have
still neatly made outrigger boats), and never to have voyaged anywhere
from the coasts of their new home. Otherwise they could not have failed
to discover and colonize Mauritius or Réunion. In many of its aspects
the colonization of Madagascar in prehistoric times by a race coming
obviously from Sumatra or Java and allied in physical type and language
less to the Malays than to the Malayo-Polynesians and even to the darker
Melanesians is perhaps the most puzzling of the unsolved enigmas to be
found in the study of the peopling of Africa by foreign immigrants.
Judging from local traditions, from time to time fleets of canoes
containing Malays were blown right across the Indian Ocean to the east
coast of Madagascar. Such was—it is said—the history of the Imérina or
Hova tribes who originated mainly from the last accidental Malay
colonization of Madagascar. These Hovas found the coast belt so
unhealthy that they made their way inland to the high plateaus of
Imérina. Here, after long isolation, they acquired strength from their
invigorating climate and, obtaining arms from the Europeans in the 17th
and 18th centuries, spread over Madagascar as conquerors and brought
nearly the whole island under their rule. Yet the Sakalavas, the
dark-skinned remnant of a far earlier Malaysian invasion, spoke a
dialect nearer to the actual Malay than that of the Hova. It remains to
be said that the strong negroid element of Madagascar is attributed by
some authorities to Melanesian colonists from Malaysia of a relatively
ancient date and not to negroes from Africa. There are numerous
Melanesian words in the Malagasy language.
-----
Footnote 1:
A hundred thousand years ago the Red Sea may have been a long,
isolated lake filling up a great Rift Valley, and the south-western
extremity of Arabia have been joined across the narrow straits of
Bab-al-Mandib to Somaliland. There is an Arab tradition that in the
remote past these straits were formed by a series of earthquakes and
land-slides. But if this were the case why is not the west of Arabia,
in fertile, well-watered regions, more “African” in its mammalian,
bird, and insect fauna? Arabia is a great enigma still in these
questions of geographical distribution. It would be convenient to
regard it as the evolutionary area of the negro, if, for example,
there were any evidence of a positive character—as there is in
southern Persia—to show that it was ever the home of a negro race in
ancient times. But there is no such evidence, and its present negro or
negroid population only dates from the trade in negro slaves which
began about the commencement of the Christian era, and flourished
exceedingly after the eruption of Islam.
“Lemuria”—the hypothetical isthmus which once united Madagascar and
East Africa with India and Ceylon—could not have been the negro’s
birth-place, as some have suggested, inasmuch as it ceased to exist in
the early Tertiaries, long before Man had been evolved.
Footnote 2:
They can be gleaned—most of them—from the recent writings of Dr Arthur
Keith, and Mr W. L. H. Duckworth, and are to some extent summarized in
the preliminary chapter of the present writer’s book on _The Negro in
the New World_.
Footnote 3:
These will be found described in Mr W. L. H. Duckworth’s _Morphology
and Anatomy_, and also in studies of the Bushmen and Hottentots
recently published by Dr Péringuey of the State Library and Museum,
Capetown. It is true that the researches of German and Italian
anthropologists have shown that the hypertrophy of the external
genitalia characteristic of the Bushwoman, together with steatopygy,
not only occur amongst the East African negroes, but even in
Somaliland, Abyssinia and Egypt; but this is only an additional piece
of evidence showing the previous existence of the Bushman in these
regions, perhaps also in Southern Europe.
Footnote 4:
The name is Dutch and means “shore-runners,” there being a legend
amongst the Boers derived from the Hottentots that the present race of
Bushmen was preceded by a vanished type of humanity which derived its
living from the shellfish on the sea-shore.
Footnote 5:
It is more convenient to refer to this speech family and racial type
as “Fula,” but the actual name applied by the “Ful-be” people to their
language is “Fulful-de.”
Footnote 6:
It is more correct to spell this tribal name _Tawareq_, the plural of
Tarqi, “a raider.” But the modern pronunciation of this Arab term (it
is unknown to the Berbers themselves) is “Tuareg.” Wherever in this
book _q_ is used in transliterating African words it stands for the
faucal “k” of the Arabs and other Semites, a guttural which is more
commonly pronounced as a _g_ in North Africa.
Footnote 7:
In which region they may have been preceded by Bushmen, and by a more
generalized, Tasmanian-like type of man, similar to the Galley-Hill
man who inhabited Kent and Central Europe approximately 100,000 years
ago.
Footnote 8:
So called by Professor W. F. Petrie and others because the type is
illustrated in the many portraits of the Pharaohs of Egyptian
dynasties.
Footnote 9:
To be followed, with no return to sovereigns of real Egyptian race, by
Arabs, Turks, Circassians, Albanians, Macedonians, Armenians, French,
and British.
Footnote 10:
Some writers reserve “Hamite” and “Hamitic” for the general name of
the language family which includes the Libyan and the eastern Hamitic
tongues, and employ Kushite as a special designation for the great
eastern branch of Hamitic speech-forms which extends its range through
North-east Africa from Egypt to the Equator. The main groups of these
eastern Hamitic or Kushite languages are the _Beja_ or _Bisharin_ of
the Red Sea north-west coast and the country between the Nile and
Suakin; the _Saho_ of the Abyssinian coast-lands; the
_Afar-Danakil-Somali_ group; the _Agau-Bilin_ of the Abyssinian
highlands; the _Gala_, stretching from central Abyssinia to the Juba
and Tana rivers; and the _Kafa_ of south-west Galaland, reaching
southward to near Lake Rudolf. In the south-west of the Ethiopian
Empire there are many unclassified Hamitic dialects (as there are in
northern German East Africa) which are much mixed with negro
word-roots and syntax. These almost merge into the Masai and Nilotic.
Footnote 11:
This word is evidently derived from the Zambezi Bantu words
_Mwene-mutapa_ = Lord of the Mine. Another form “Bena mutapa” for the
people might be translated “Brothers of the mine”—Bena (Baina) in Old
Bantu = brothers, or “clan.”
Footnote 12:
Although the people of west and south Madagascar are very negroid in
appearance and those of the north are evidently mixed with Arab and
Indian blood, the Malay-like Malagasy language is the one universal
speech throughout the whole island. It contains, however, loan words
from Himyaritic Arabic and from East African Bantu.
Footnote 13:
Some evidence, chiefly traditional, is adduced to show that Madagascar
was once inhabited by a yellow-skinned dwarfish race of Bushman stock
known as the “Kimo.” But it is still more difficult to imagine a
Bushman race possessing canoes sufficiently large and seaworthy for
the crossing of the Moçambique channel; or to ascribe to the
prehistoric Arabs, who may have traded with south-east Africa, the
motiveless transportation of Bushmen to south-west Madagascar. The
supposed negro aborigines, apart from the dwarfish Kimo, are known
traditionally by the Malagasy as “Ba-zimba” or “Va-zimba,” and their
burial places are pointed out. The Ba-zimba may have been the
mysterious race which built Zimbabwe.
Footnote 14:
Yet from two to ten thousand years ago, the Comoro island chain was
probably larger and approached much nearer to the mainland, thus
permitting Madagascar to be reached (by swimming) by two or three
species of hippopotamus (now extinct) and by the bush-pig which still
exists there. It is very improbable that either of these mammals could
have swum the distance of 200 miles which now separates East Africa
from the nearest Comoro Island.
CHAPTER II
THE MEDITERRANEAN COLONIZATION OF AFRICA
The historical colonization of Africa by alien peoples (if we regard the
dynastic Egyptians as autochthonous) commences with the exploits of the
Phoenicians in Mauretania. This remarkable Semitic people, no doubt akin
to the ancestors of the Jews in race and language, is believed to have
originated on the S.W. shores of the Persian Gulf, and at a period of
some remoteness—perhaps four thousand years ago—to have made its way up
the Euphrates and across the Syrian Desert to the coast of the
Mediterranean, where eventually the great trading cities of Tyre (Tsur
or Ṣor), Akko, Saida or Sidon, Sarepta, Arvad or Ruad, Biruta or Biruna
(Beirūt), etc., were established mostly on islets off the Syrian coast
which eventually grew into peninsulas. From these strongholds their
galleys ranged the Mediterranean and reached the North African coast,
the Straits of Gibraltar, and the open Atlantic Ocean. By about the
twelfth century before Christ the Phoenicians from Sidon had established
trading stations at Utica (Atiqa) at the mouth of the Majerda River in
North-East Tunisia, and at Lixus on the coast of Morocco (perhaps mouth
of River Draa, opposite to the Canary Islands). At the same
period—perhaps earliest of all—Gades (Cadiz) was founded as a Sidonian
colony at the mouth of the Guadalquivir in Southern Spain. Carthage
(Kart-hadshat or Kart-hadasht = the New City), afterwards the Phoenician
metropolis in North Africa, did not come into existence till about 822
B.C. It was a settlement of the Tyrians on the west side of the Gulf of
Tunis not far from Utica on the Majerda River, and was called the New
City in contrast to Utica the “Ancient” (Atiqa). The Tyrians and perhaps
the Phoenicians from other sea-cities also created trading depôts on the
Cyrenaic and Tripolitan coast, thus coming into contact with the
Egyptians. But from the seventeenth to the twelfth century before Christ
the Phoenicians had been under the overlordship of Egypt; and it was
only when the Egyptian power began to weaken that the great ships built
at Sidon and at Tyre from the timber of Cyprus and the Lebanon dared to
found African colonies immediately to the westward of Egypt.
Long afterwards, in the days when the strength of the Phoenicians was
itself to decline in the grip of the Assyrian kings, these bold
navigators hired themselves and their ships to the rulers of Egypt for
naval transport and geographical discovery. In about 600 B.C., according
to the story of Herodotos, the last but three of the native Egyptian
Pharaohs, Niku (Necho) II, summoned a captain of the Phoenicians whose
ships were stationed in the Gulf of Suez (perhaps conveyed thither from
the Mediterranean through some canal between the Nile and the Bitter
Lakes), and despatched him in command of an expedition of two or three
vessels, with the order to attempt to sail round the peninsular
continent of Africa and through the Straits of Gibraltar back to the
Nile Delta. Very likely the ship-masters from South Arabia had already
spread the news that the east coast of Africa trended steadily westwards
beyond the equator, and had guessed that Africa was circumnavigable from
the land of the negroes on the east back to that land of black men on
the west of which the Carthaginians were beginning to spread some dim
foreknowledge from their journeys southward along the Morocco and Sahara
coasts.
This Phoenician expedition accordingly set out, and in about three
years’ time had circumnavigated Africa and re-entered the Mediterranean
through the strait which separates Morocco from Spain. Somewhere off the
southern coast of Africa they had landed, sown grain and waited in the
southern summer (our winter) till it matured and ripened. Then they
reaped their harvest and continued the voyage, not willingly losing
sight of the coast, no doubt, yet landing as seldom as possible (we may
imagine) in their justifiable terror of savage tribes and fierce wild
beasts. The account given in Herodotos is very bare. Only one experience
of these Phoenician pioneers is given, other than the corn-growing; they
are said during the (northern) summer season to have had the sun on
their right hand—that is to say, in the north of the sky at mid-day.
This observation shows at any rate that these Phoenicians had sailed far
enough south to have reached the south temperate zone wherein the sun
would always be in the northern sky at mid-day; while the ship’s general
east-to-west course round the southern extremity of Africa would place
the sun on the right hand of a spectator facing the west.
All the minor geographical discoveries of this expedition have been lost
to us, if any were recorded. No mention is made of the gold of
south-east Africa, of any Arab settlements along the east coast, of the
negro inhabitants of these wild regions, or the means by which the
Phoenician mariners supplied themselves with food to supplement the corn
which they grew and reaped. It would not have been difficult for them,
coming from the east, to reach the southern extremity of Africa, and
still less difficult if there really were Arab stations at which they
could recruit in the vicinity of Sofala and Inyambane. The story, by no
means an incredible one, rests almost entirely on a statement of
Herodotos, but was thought to have received fresh support from records
of the events of the reign of Niku II which were said to have been
discovered in the collection of a French Egyptologist. These inscribed
scarabs are however now believed to be clear forgeries[15]. There is
nothing improbable about this legend of the Phoenician east-to-west
circumnavigation of Africa. The winds and currents, be it observed,
would make it much easier for sailing ships to circumnavigate Africa
from the east coast round to the west coast, and then north, than in the
reverse direction; and it is curious to note, among other shreds of
historical record, that a Persian nobleman of Egypt in the sixth century
B.C. and the Carthaginians of the same period both tried to sail round
Africa from Morocco past the West coast, and gave up the enterprise as
too difficult and tedious.
There has been transmitted to us through the diligence of ancient Greek
geographers the Greek version of what is supposed to be the original
description in Punic of the voyage of Hanno the Carthaginian. This Punic
explorer started from Carthage some time in the sixth century before
Christ (perhaps about 520 B.C.) with a fleet of 60 ships, and a
multitude of men and women (said to have been 30,000 in number), on a
voyage of discovery mainly, but also for the purpose of replenishing
with settlers the Carthaginian stations along the coast of Morocco. In
the account given of the journey it is stated that, after passing the
Straits of Hercules and stopping at the site of the modern Sebu, they
rounded Cape Cantin and came to a marsh in which a large number of
elephants were disporting themselves[16]. They then continued their
journey along the coast till they came to the river Lixus, which has
been identified with the river Draa. From here they coasted the desert
till they reached what we now call the Rio de Oro, and on an islet at
the head of this inlet they founded the commercial station of Kerne.
From Kerne they made an expedition as far south as a river which has
been identified as the river Senegal, having first visited the Lagoon of
Teniahir. Once more setting out from Kerne, they passed Cape Verde, the
river Gambia, and the Sierra Leone coast as far as the Sherboro inlet,
which was the limit of their voyage of discovery. Here they encountered
“wild men and women covered with hair”—probably the chimpanzees, which
are found there to this day, and not the gorilla, which is an ape,
restricted in its westward range to the Cameroons. As Hanno’s
interpreter called these creatures “gorilla,” that name was fancifully
given in the nineteenth century to the huge anthropoid ape discovered by
American missionaries in the Gaboon. When Hanno’s expedition visited the
neighbourhood of the Senegal river they were attacked by the natives,
who were described as “wild men wearing the skins of beasts and
defending themselves with stones.” So far as we know, this was the first
sight that civilized man had of his wild Palaeolithic brother since the
two had parted company in Neolithic times, except for glimpses of the
Troglodytes, whom the Carthaginians appear to have met with in the
valley of the river Draa[17].
At Kerne and other trading stations on the coast to the south of
Morocco, the Carthaginians did no doubt a little trade with the Berber
natives in the produce of the Sudan, south of the Sahara, but after a
time the weakening of the power of Carthage and the attacks of the
natives must have destroyed most of these West African settlements; for
the Romans in replacing the Carthaginians do not seem to have gone
further south than the river Draa.
During the eighth century before the Christian era the Tyrian and
Sidonian colonies in North Africa and Spain began to detach themselves
from any political submission to the Phoenician State in Syria, a
kingdom then much harassed by the Assyrians and henceforth doomed to
lose its independence under the alternate sway of Egypt, Assyria,
Chaldaea, Persia, and Macedonia. Carthage became the metropolis of
Western Phoenicia, of the Canaanite[18] settlements in Berberland and
Iberia. The North African coast was dotted at frequent intervals, from
Leptis (Lebda) in Tripoli to the mouth of the Draa on the Atlantic coast
of Morocco, with Canaanite trading or governing cities. More especially
was the Tunisian or African[19] coast under their domination, from the
Island of Meninx-Jerba (the land of date-palms and Lotos-eaters) to what
is now called Bona in Algeria; this last being one of the several towns
anciently named Ubbo or Hippo. One such was the modern Benzert
(Bizerta), the Hippo-Diarrhytos of the Greeks and the Hippon-Zaryt of
late Roman and Byzantine times.
From Carthage, the metropolis, there ran a causeway, of which traces
still remain, up the valley of the Majerda river (the Bagradas of old
times) to the date-palm country, the fruitful land of the shallow
salt-lakes and the hot springs—a region which is some day going to be of
the greatest importance in North Africa for its medicinal waters, its
never-failing springs of sweet water, its fertile soil and genial
climate. The Carthaginians also held from time to time desert cities of
commanding position in what is termed the Matmata country, between the
land of the “Shatts” or lakes and the Tripolitan frontier. But it is
doubtful even here if Carthaginian rule extended as much as 100 miles
inland; and elsewhere in North Africa, away from Tunisia, the
Carthaginians only held what they occupied. At the least weakening of
their power the Berber tribes were ready to revolt and take part with
their enemies. The Carthaginian troops were mainly recruited in Barbary,
and were mercenaries. They frequently mutinied and turned against their
Syrian employers. Yet occasionally Carthage produced a man like Hannibal
who could win the confidence of these Berber soldiers and lead them to
fight the battles of Carthage in Spain, Sicily, and Italy. But in the
outlying districts of North Africa, especially in Morocco, tradition
states that the Berbers occasionally rose as a nation and destroyed the
Carthaginian settlements.
The Phoenicians introduced Syrian ideas of religion into North Africa,
more especially the worship of Baal-hammana (the Lord Ammon) or Milk
(Moloch, the “King”), to whom human sacrifices were offered; Tanit, the
“Face of Baal,” the virgin goddess of the moon, a variant of the Syrian
Astarte; Ashmun, the God of Healing (Æsculapius); Rashūf, the Flame,
Fire, or Lightning God (= Apollo); Baal Milkkart, the “King of the City”
identified with Hercules; Tammuz or Adonis (a beautiful young man);
Pateχ, a hideous dwarf god; Rabbat Amma, the “Lady Mother,” a goddess
like the Greek Cybele. These religious ideas became associated in
southern Tunis and Tripoli with the worship of the _phallus_ as a symbol
of life-giving, creative power, and so powerfully tinged the mentality
of the indigenes of this region that down to the present day there are
schismatics in Islam (especially in the Island of Jerba) that erect
small phallic temples and shrines, or crown with a phallic symbol every
minaret. It is here, as well as in the fifth- and sixth-century
buildings of south-eastern Syria, dating from the early days of
Byzantine architecture, that one may trace the evolution of the _mahrab_
(mihrab) or holy shrine of the Muhammadan mosque from the hollow
phallus, into which the country people of Jerba enter to say their
prayers. This cult once existed in western Arabia, and it is remarkable
to find such distinct traces of it in the ruins of Zimbabwe in
south-east Africa.
The Phoenicians being used to the tamed “Indian” elephant in Syria—a
region in which there were wild Indian elephants down to about the time
of the Phoenician settlement of the Syrian coast—brought about the
taming of the smaller African elephant in North Africa. Probably they
also introduced Syrian breeds of horses, cattle, and pigs, though the
sheep and goats of Mauretania seem rather to have been derived from
Spain. They brought thither the Syrian greyhound and perhaps some other
breeds of dogs; but not the white, wolfish dog of the Berber nomads,
which came from Europe. To these beauty-loving Tyrian mariner-merchants
is due the early introduction of the peacock into North Africa. It is
still a common domestic bird in Tunisia, and figures on old inscribed
stones, even far away in the desert, which date, seemingly, back to
Carthaginian times. The Phoenicians probably brought with them, likewise
from Syria, the cultivated vine, olive, fig, and pomegranate.
Compared with the Romans, the Carthaginians did little to open up the
interior of North Africa, except in what is now called Tunisia. Trade
with the outer world was restricted by jealous monopolies; but the
Phoenician language was nevertheless much impressed on North Africa, and
became the accepted means of intercommunication among the more civilized
tribes between Tripoli and Western Morocco. Indeed the Phoenician
tongue, closely akin to Hebrew and not very far removed from Arabic, is
believed to have lingered all through the subsequent Roman occupation of
Africa and only to have disappeared completely under the invasion of
Arabic, the immediate consequence of the Arab conquest in the seventh
century of our era. Even then it is considered that some Phoenician
words remain incorporated in the Arabic dialects of Tripoli and Tunis
and especially in Maltese; Malta having also been occupied by the
Carthaginians. The Jews, who settled so abundantly in North Africa both
before and after the fall of Jerusalem, brought thither the influence of
Hebrew and of Aramaic, and contributed to Semiticise North Africa in
language and religion. So that Carthaginian rule paved the way for the
Judaizing of certain tribes, before and after the Roman empire ousted
Syria for a time as a colonizing agency; and the use of the Phoenician
tongue down to the seventh century A.C. in the villages and smaller
towns of the Tunisian coast-belt undoubtedly prepared the way for the
rapid and wide-spread acceptance of Arabic a hundred years later. Amid
all their wrangles, throughout all the recorded history of North Africa,
Berber and Semite seem unconsciously to have recognized that by descent
and language they had more kinship with each other than with the Aryan
peoples.
The Jews, after the first century of the Christian era, settled
numerously in North Africa from Cyrenaica to Western Morocco. They are
believed to have preceded the Berbers in settling the oasis of Twat in
mid-Sahara, and other oases of the desert also; though they probably
found these habitable regions still retaining a negroid population.
The earliest _historical_ connection between Aryan Europe and Africa was
brought about by the Greeks, commencing some 600 years B.C.[20], who
settled in the country of Kurene (Cyrene), the modern province of Barka.
After the repulse of the Persians there was a great expansion of Greece.
Prior to the historical establishment of settlements in the Ionian
Islands, in Sicily, at Marseilles and on the east coast of Spain, Greek
seamen had no doubt ranged the coasts of the Mediterranean; and from
their adventures were evolved the fascinating stories of the Argonauts
and Ulysses. Prehistoric settlements of Greeks on the coast of Tunis are
believed by modern French ethnologists to have taken place, on the
strength of the well-marked Greek type to be found amongst the present
population, for instance, in the Cape Bon peninsula; but these Greek
types may also be descended from the Byzantine occupation of the country
in the Christian era. The Island of Lotos-Eaters, of Greek mythology,
would seem with likelihood to take its origin in the island of Jerba,
where the date palm is indigenous[21]. But about 631 B.C. an expedition
of Dorians from the island of Thera[22] founded the colony of Kurene on
the north coast of Africa, where that continent approaches closest to
the Greek Archipelago. The settlement of Kurene was situated about ten
miles from the sea at an altitude of nearly 1800 ft. on the forest-clad
Aχdar mountains. Around Kurene (a name corrupted to Grenna by the Arabs)
were grouped four other cities—Barke, Teuχeira, Euesperides, and
Apollonia. This Greek colony continued to exist with varying
fortunes—threatened at times with dissolution through the civil wars of
the colonists and the intermittent attacks of the Berbers—till it came
under the control of Rome 100 years before Christ. It was occasionally
dominated by the Greek dynasty of the Ptolemies in Egypt. Though the
civilization of the Cyrenaica was finally extinguished by the disastrous
Arab invasion in the seventh century of the Christian era, it had
nevertheless received a death-blow in 117 A.C. by an uprising of the
Jewish settlers, who attacked the Graeco-Roman colonists with the help
of the native Libyans and slew more than 200,000 of the descendants of
the Greek and Italian invaders. The Jews in their turn were massacred,
and after that most of the Cyrenaic cities fell into decay.
In the adjoining country of Egypt the Greeks began to appear as
merchants and travellers in the seventh century B.C. A Pharaoh,
Psammetik I, the father of the Niku who sent Phoenician ships to
circumnavigate Africa, had employed Greek mercenaries to assist him in
establishing his claims to the throne of Egypt. He rewarded their
services by allowing their countrymen to trade with the ports of the
Nile delta. The city of Naukratis was founded not far from the modern
Rosetta, and became almost a Greek colony. Nearly 200 years later
Herodotos, a native of Halikarnassos (a Greek settlement in Asia Minor),
visited Egypt and Kurene. It is probable that he ascended the Nile as
far as the First Cataract. He found his fellow-countrymen settled as
merchants and mechanics and also as soldiers in the delta of the Nile,
and he records that the whole coast of Cyrenaica between Dernah, near
the borders of Egypt, and Benghazi (Euesperides) was wholly occupied by
Greek settlements.
Through Herodotos and even earlier Greek writers, like Hekataios (who
derived his information from the Phoenicians), vague rumours reached the
Greek world of the Niger River, of ostriches[23], the dwarf races of
Central Africa (then perhaps lingering about the Bahr-al-Ghazal and
Nigeria), and baboons, described as “men with dogs’ heads[24].”
The great development of the Persian Empire under Cyrus brought that
power into eventual conflict with Egypt; and under Kambujiya (Cambyses)
the Persians conquered Egypt (in 525 B.C.), besides then and
subsequently dominating the western and southern parts of Arabia, from
which they occasionally meddled with Ethiopia. The Persians were
followed more than two hundred years later by their great conqueror,
Alexander of Macedonia, who added Egypt to his empire in 332 B.C., and
founded in that year in the westernmost reach of the Nile delta the
great city which bears his name, and which has been at times the capital
of Egypt. Alexander’s conquest was succeeded in 323 by the rule of his
general, Ptolemaios Soter, who founded in 308 the famous Greek monarchy
of the Ptolemies over Egypt, which lasted till near the commencement of
the Christian era, when it was replaced by the domination of Rome.
Subsequently the sceptre passed from Rome to Byzantium, and Egypt again
became subject to Greek influence. During the Ptolemies’ rule Abyssinia
was Egyptianized, and much Greek influence penetrated that country of
Hamites ruled by Semites, resulting in the foundation of the
semi-civilized kingdom of Axum in north-eastern Abyssinia with a port
(Adulis) on Annesley Bay. This Hellenized and, later on, Christian State
flourished for about six centuries from the commencement of the
Christian era, and conquered in the 6th century the opposite Arab
country of Yaman. Under the Roman and Byzantine Empire the Red Sea, the
coast of Somaliland, and Equatorial East Africa were much more carefully
explored and even charted; and it is said that the Greeks settled on the
island of Sokotra. The extent of knowledge which the Roman world
possessed at the beginning of the Christian era is displayed by the
celebrated Periplus of the Red Sea, written by a Greek merchant of
Alexandria about 80 A.C. This work shows that Greek commerce extended to
Zanzibar and Dar-es-Salaam; for by Rhapta is obviously indicated a port
on the east coast of Africa which can only be Dar-es-Salaam, the modern
capital of German East Africa. Opposite to this was the Island of
Menouthias, intended (as described in the Periplus) for Zanzibar, and
mentioned even then as being a region under the suzerainty of the Kings
of Yaman, and much resorted to by Arab merchants from the port of Muza,
no doubt the abandoned harbour of Uda, some distance north of Mokha.
Beyond this the knowledge of the Greek writer of the Periplus did not
extend; but further allusions to Menouthias or other islands near the
east coast of Africa, to be found in later Greek and Latin writers on
geography, seem to apply much more to Madagascar than to Zanzibar.
Among the Greek merchants of the first century trading with India was a
certain Diogenes, who may have supplied the unknown Alexandrian author
of the Periplus with some of his information. Diogenes, returning from a
voyage to India in about 50 A.C., landed at Rhapta or Rhaptum. From some
such point—Rhaptum in this instance may be distinct from Rhapta and
equivalent to Pangani, a trading-post at the mouth of the Rufu River,
opposite Pemba Island—Diogenes travelled inland for twenty-five days—so,
at least, he stated—and arrived in the vicinity of two great lakes and a
snowy range of mountains whence the Nile drew its twin sources.
Twenty-five days’ journey might have brought a Greek traveller easily
within sight of Kilimanjaro, but certainly not of the Victoria Nyanza.
It is more likely that Diogenes saw Kilimanjaro and added to his
impressions, of that mighty dome of snow and ice the statements of the
Arab traders who may at that period have penetrated inland as far as the
Victoria Nyanza and even ascertained the existence of Ruwenzori and the
Albert Nyanza. If pre-historic Arab trade permeated these countries at
that time, it was no doubt afterwards driven back to the coast by the
tumultuous movements of the Bantu and Nilotic negroes.
Though the information of Diogenes may have reached the author of the
Periplus, it was, so far as the semi-legendary history goes, told to a
Syrian geographer, Marinus of Tyre, who published it at Alexandria about
the same time that the Periplus was being written. The writings of
Marinus disappeared with the dispersal of the Alexandrian Library. But
that portion dealing with the sources of the Nile was quoted almost word
for word by a later writer, Claudius Ptolemaeus, a latinized
Egyptian-Greek who resided in Alexandria. Ptolemy (as he is commonly
called in English) wrote his works about the year 150 A.C.; and to him
is commonly attributed the first clearly expressed theory as to the main
origin of the White Nile. He believed that this mysterious river found
its ultimate source in two great lakes, the waters of which were derived
from a great snowy range called the Mountains of the Moon. It is,
however, clear from the writings of Eratosthenes (an African Greek who
published his geographical works about 200 B.C.) and Pliny the Elder
(Caius Plinius Secundus, whose principal book was published in 77 A.C.)
that before the Christian era a glimmering of the geography of the Upper
Nile basin had already reached Greek Egypt. Perhaps earlier still it had
come to the knowledge of the Persian rulers of Egypt, and may have been
brought to them by Ethiopian slave and ivory traders, akin to the modern
Abyssinians and Galas, who at that period seem to have freely penetrated
through the lands of the negro savages.
Not long after the Romans had annexed Egypt to their Empire, they had
begun to push their control of the Nile beyond the First to the Second
Cataract. Ahead of them went Greek explorers, mainly from Kurene or Asia
Minor, who traced the Nile upstream about as far as Khartum, perhaps
even beyond. All this region beyond the Second Cataract was known either
as the Nubian Kingdom of Napata (which was then peopled by Ethiopians
speaking Hamitic languages) or as Meroe (Merawi). The term Meroe applied
not only to a city but also to the supposed island, a considerable tract
of land nearly enclosed by the courses and tributaries of the Blue Nile,
White Nile, and Atbara, a region formerly of great fertility which
played a considerable part in the civilizing of Inner Africa, especially
westwards towards Lake Chad. The Emperor Nero was temporarily interested
in the mystery of the Nile sources and despatched an expedition under
two centurions about the year 66 A.C., to discover the origin of the
White Nile. This Roman expedition was organized in the principality of
Meroe and furnished with boats and men by the Nubian or the Ethiopian
chiefs. These boats were subsequently exchanged higher up the Nile for
dug-out canoes; and in these the two centurions apparently travelled as
far south as the confluence of the Bahr-el-Ghazal and the Kir or White
Nile. Their further explorations seem to have been stopped by the
accumulation of water vegetation called the sudd. Discouraged by the
natural obstacles to their penetration of this desolate region, by the
hostility of the naked Nile negroes, and no doubt also by the
unendurable attacks of the mosquitoes, the two centurions returned to
Egypt; and their discouraging reports apparently put an end to further
Roman enterprise in this direction.
The wars with Carthage in the second century before the Christian era
drew the Romans into the occupation of Tunisia. They were enabled
finally to conquer and destroy Carthage by allying themselves with the
Numidian and Mauretanian kings, who, in their desire to establish
complete home rule in North Africa, were anxious to destroy the
Carthaginian power. But after the destruction of Carthage in 146 B.C.
Rome picked quarrels, first with the Kings of Numidia, and next with
those farther west in what are now called Algeria and Morocco, with the
result that between 104 and 50 B.C. the region equivalent to Tunisia and
western Tripoli became the Roman province of Africa; while all the coast
region of Algeria and Morocco was annexed to the Roman Empire in 46 B.C.
and 42 A.C. respectively. Some time previous to this, in 96 B.C., the
Romans had annexed the old Greek colonies in Cyrenaica, to which—as a
Roman province—was added Egypt in 30 B.C.; while Roman armies
established Roman influence in Fezzan by 19 B.C. Consequently, by the
middle of the first century of the Christian era, the Roman power was
predominant over the whole coast-belt of North Africa. Roman explorers
even penetrated far into Morocco, examined the High Atlas range, and
crossed it into the Sahara Desert near Figuig; in fact, a Roman general,
Suetonius Paulinus, afterwards a conqueror of Britain, penetrated in 50
A.C. to the palm-fringed river valleys south of the Atlas range, which
would seem to have been in Pliocene times the head-waters of streams
flowing far south into the Niger basin. One such stream was called by
Roman geographers the Ger, and is still known as Gir by the Berbers.
Even before the Christian era began—if we may place any reliance on the
stories collected by Marinus Tyrius and cited in the works of Ptolemy
the Alexandrian—the Romans had despatched in 19 B.C. an expedition from
Fezzan (then a semi-civilized kingdom of the Tibus or Garamantes, far to
the south of Tripoli) to reach the country of the Blacks, reports of
which, together with some of its products, had come under Roman notice
even before the conquest of Carthage. Setting out from Garama (Jerma, in
Fezzan) and escorted by Tibu chieftains and their men, a Roman general
named Septimus Flaccus is said to have reached the black man’s country
across the Desert in three months’ marching. It is possible that camels
were already employed on this expedition, but horses would also have
been available; and even oxen seem to have been used as late as this
period by the desert peoples to draw carts. It is very probable that
1800 years ago this portion of the Sahara was much less arid, and that
there were more numerous wells and sources of water supply and a greater
amount of forage. What happened to Septimus Flaccus, and whether he
really reached the land of the negroes, afterwards to be known by an
Arab name, Sudan, we are not told; but about the beginning of the
Christian era another Roman explorer, Julius Maternus, also started from
Garama and reached a land which he named Agisymba, after a march of four
months. This was possibly Kanem, or even Bornu near Lake Chad, and is
described as a country swarming with rhinoceroses—beasts still to be
found there, though in much reduced numbers.
These are the only recorded attempts of the Romans to reach the Sudan
across the Sahara Desert; but that intercourse had been going on for
hundreds, if not thousands, of years between the Libyans and Hamites of
Northern and North-Eastern Africa on the one hand, and the negroids and
negroes of the Lake Chad and Benue regions and of the whole Niger basin
on the other, there can be little doubt, from a variety of evidence[25].
Roman beads are dug up in Hausaland and are obtained even from the
graves of Ashanti chiefs; and some of these differ but little from Roman
beads found in the mud of the Thames or amidst the ashes of Pompeii.
Even ideas of Roman and Greek Christianity filtered through the Libyan
and Sahara Deserts and reached countries beyond the Niger.
The Niger River had been vaguely known to classical geographers for two
or three centuries before and two centuries after the commencement of
the Christian era. These writers, as far back as the time of Herodotos,
recorded legends of Libyan adventurers from southern Tunisia who
penetrated through the Sahara Desert to lands of running rivers, open
waters, and tropical vegetation. The Senegal River, under the name of
Bambotus, is described by Polybius (about 140 B.C.) as a great stream
far beyond the Sahara Desert which contained crocodiles and hippopotami.
To such a river, or even, it may be, to this dimly realized Niger, was
applied a Berber name for a stream, Gir, or Ni-gir. I have already
mentioned the Gir River which rises to the south of the Great Atlas
range in Morocco, and which was discovered by the Roman general
Suetonius Paulinus about the year 50 A.C. This was confused with the
real Nigir or Niger, of which it may have been a million years ago one
of the ultimate tributaries. Lamps of Roman design in metal penetrated
as far into the interior of Africa as the Northern Cameroons, as did
also imitations in clay architecture of Greek or Roman fortresses. But
the remarkable clay architecture now associated with the Fulas and which
is ascribed in its origins to the Songhai of Agades, would seem rather
to have come from Egypt than across the Sahara Desert from Roman Africa.
Actual posts erected and even garrisoned by Roman soldiers may have
extended as far south as Ghadames (Cydames) or Murzuk (Phazania). Direct
Roman rule, however, was chiefly notable in what is now the Regency of
Tunis and in Egypt. Tunisia and western Tripoli almost surpass Italy in
the number and magnificence of their Roman remains. All along the actual
coast of Algeria and Northern Morocco existing ruins testify to the
great number of Roman cities which once flourished there. Eastern
Algeria shared with Western Tunisia a most notable degree of Roman
civilization. The present writer has been much impressed with the fact
that from Gafsa in the south of Tunis to Tebessa in Algeria the
traveller can ride along about a hundred miles of ancient Roman road
scarcely ever out of sight of the ruins of former cities, some of which
must have been of great magnificence, though their culmination of
splendour was not attained until the rule of Byzantium had replaced that
of Rome.
----------------------------------------------------------------
AFRICA AS KNOWN TO THE ANCIENTS
BEFORE THE MUHAMMADAN INVASION OF THE SEVENTH CENTURY, B. C.
Plate I.
[Illustration]
Sir H.H. Johnston del^t W. & A.K. Johnston Limited Edinburgh & London
Explanatory Note
[blue] _Probable site of Bantu mother country_
[brown] ” _area of distribution of Black Negroes 2000 years
ago_
[tan] ” ” ” _Pygmies, Bushmen, and
Hottentots_
[yellow] ” ” ” _Hamites and Semites_
[pink] ” ” ” _Malay races_
_This map shows also the probable distribution of races about the
commencement of the Christian Era and the lines of Bantu invasion_
_The Blue lines give the directions of the principal Bantu invasions_
_The mingling of race tints indicates mixture of races_
_A Red line indicates the limits of more or less certainly known
country; a red dotted line gives the limits of vaguely known
regions. Red shading indicates the approximate area of country well
known to Europe or civilised Asia_
----------------------------------------------------------------
Nevertheless, all through the period between 146 B.C. and 415 A.C.,
when the Vandals invaded Roman Africa[26], the Romans were
constantly warring with the Berbers, who no doubt to a great extent
were pushed out of Tunisia by colonists more or less of Italian
origin. The most prosperous and brilliant period of Roman rule was
between 50 A.C. and 297 A.C. In 297 A.C. began the establishment of
definite Christianity. Between about 50 and 530 A.C., Latin replaced
Punic as the tongue most commonly spoken in the Roman province of
Africa and even in the coast-lands of Algeria and Morocco. Still the
Berbers were there all the time. Only a few became Christianized,
the bulk of the indigenous tribes showing disgust at the way in
which the different Christian sects attacked and slew each other.
The Jews, having settled numerously in North Africa, won over a
number of Berber chieftains to the Jewish religion. Hatred of Roman
rule and of Roman Christianity impelled the Berbers of Morocco and
Algeria to make common cause with the invading Vandals, and led to
the rapid overthrow of Roman rule and Roman civilization. But in 531
A.C. Byzantine generals from Constantinople conquered the Vandals
and established the rule of the Eastern Empire over Roman North
Africa from Tangier (Tingis) to Egypt. There was once again a
revival of Mediterranean civilization throughout all this region,
though the Berber tribes still remained recalcitrant.
Abyssinia between 350 and 500 A.C. accepted Christianity from the
teaching of Egyptian Greek missionaries, and developed a
considerable degree of strength from the civilization which followed
in the track of the Christian faith. Not only did Abyssinian kings
rule over the opposite parts of Western Arabia, but their armies and
slave raids penetrated far south from Galaland towards Equatorial
Africa. A debased edition of the Christian faith was carried almost
to the shores of Lake Rudolf; while the kingdom of Merawi, before
the Arab invasions of this stronghold of the Ethiopian negroids,
became a Christian state, which retained its Christianity well into
the 12th century of our era. Through the Abyssinian traders,
Graeco-Roman commerce began again to get indirectly into touch with
the Upper Nile and East Africa. But the Christian-Abyssinian
conquest of South-west Arabia seems to have arrested for a time the
Arab trade with Madagascar and the East African coast, and may have
contributed to the overthrow (by the invading hordes of Bantu
negroes) of the Zimbabwe civilization of South-east Africa. It was
however just as Graeco Roman rule in northern Africa was coming to
an end that its effects on Negro Africa became apparent. The great
racial movements in the northern Sudan, which led to the creation of
the Mandingo, Songhai, and Bornu kingdoms of the 8th century, were
undoubtedly due to impulses coming across the desert from Greek or
Roman Egypt, Tripoli, or Tunis. Christianized Berbers from North
Africa even carried Jewish and Christian ideas of religion as far
into the Dark Continent as Borgu, to the west of the Lower Niger.
-----
Footnote 15:
The alleged records on stone scarabs are discussed by Prof. Flinders
Petrie in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, Nov. 1908.
Footnote 16:
This is an interesting observation. Not only does the statement
repeatedly occur in the writings of ancient Greek and Roman
geographers that the African elephant was found wild in Mauretania in
these times, but this animal is pictured in the remarkable rock
engravings in the Sus country in the extreme south of Morocco and in
the central and south-eastern part of Algeria, besides being
represented in the Roman mosaics of Tunisia, now exhibited at the
Bardo Museum near Tunis. (See for this the travels of the Moroccan
Jewish Rabbi, Mordokhai, the various works recently published by Mons.
Gautier of the University of Algiers, and the researches of Professor
A. Pomel.) The Phoenicians tamed the African elephant, found wild in
the forests of Western Tunisia, which was a somewhat smaller breed
than the Indian elephant or the elephant of tropical Africa, yet a
typical African elephant in its large ears. It was more often figured
on Roman medals and in Roman sculpture than the Indian type.
Footnote 17:
It does not follow, however, that these Troglodytes were dwarfs or
negroes, or palæolithic in culture, or greatly different in race from
the Berbers. They may have been akin to the Troglodytes still to be
seen in the Tunisian Sahara, a Berber people living in caves, which
are either natural hollows in the limestone rock or have been
artificially excavated. Other allusions and incidents connected with
the story of Hanno and an analysis of that story are fully discussed
in the first volume of the present writer’s book on Liberia, published
in 1906. It is remarkable to note that the little islet at the head of
the Rio de Oro Gulf is still called “Herne” by the Moors.
Footnote 18:
The national name for the Phoenicians was _χnā_ (_Khna_, _Kinah_,
_Kinahni_, ‘Canaan’). The Greeks invented for them the name
_Phoinike_, _Phoinikes_, which the Latins adopted as _Punica_, _Poeni_
or _Puni_, from _Phoinix_ = red; the Phoenicians appearing to the
fair-skinned Greeks as “red” men. Very often they went by the name of
Sidonoi (Sidonians), from the name of their oldest city Sidunnu
(Sidon, Saida).
Footnote 19:
The Phoenicians may have first brought into vogue the word “Africa.”
This would seem to have been derived (see note on p. 10 of Victor
Piquet’s _Les Civilisations de l’Afrique du Nord_: Paris, 1909) from a
Berber tribe named Afarik, Awarigha—or latterly, Awuraghen—which
occupied the north-east coast of Tunisia in pre-Roman times, but which
with other Berber peoples retreated by degrees into the interior till
at length it became a Tuareg or desert people. Under the name of
Awuraghen, dwelling in Asjer, west of Ghat, this tribe, which has
given its name to the whole continent, still exists.
Footnote 20:
The computation given by Eusebius would, according to the late Sir E.
H. Bunbury, date the founding of the colony at 631 B.C. In laying
stress on the word _historical_ I wish to impress on the reader that
European immigration into Africa from Sicily and Spain stretches far
back beyond the records of written history to ages quite remote in the
existence of man.
Footnote 21:
The fruit of the date-palm was almost certainly the lotos of the
ancients. It is much more likely to have made a profound impression on
them by its honey-sweet pulp than the insipid berries of the Zizyphus.
Footnote 22:
The modern Santorin or Thira, the most southern of the Cyclades.
Footnote 23:
The ‘cranes’ with whom the pygmies fought.
Footnote 24:
Other evidence goes to show that baboons were found wild in the
southern parts of Mauretania in ancient days.
Footnote 25:
This evidence has been fully discussed by the present writer in other
works, such as, for example, _The Nile Quest_, London, 1904, _The
Opening-up of Africa_, 1911, _Liberia_, 1906, _George Grenfell and the
Congo_, 1908, and _Pioneers in West Africa_, 1911, in which works
references to the opinions and researches of other writers are also
given.
Footnote 26:
The Vandals were a Gothic people supposed to be not far from the
Angles and Saxons in origin. After sweeping down on France and
Italy and settling in Baetica or southern Spain—a region to which
they are supposed to have given their name, Vandalusia, corrupted
by the Arabs into Andalusia—they built ships, on the Spanish
coast, crossed over with a host of Spanish camp followers into
Morocco, and with the aid of the Berbers swept the Roman power
before them till they conquered the whole country to the frontiers
of Tripoli. They also acquired Sardinia. By degrees they
concentrated their settlement on northern Tunisia, and here,
mingling with the Roman colonists and the Berber indigenes, they
gradually lost all their fighting spirit. But probably they added
a not unimportant element of European (Aryan) blood to the mixed
populations of North Africa, a region more or less ruled by their
Teutonic kings for 116 years.
CHAPTER III
THE ARAB CONQUEST OF AFRICA
At the beginning of the 7th century of our era the condition of
affairs in North Africa stood thus. In Egypt, which continued to be
governed from Greek Alexandria, the semblance of Roman rule was
wielded, in things temporal as well as spiritual, by the Greek
Orthodox Patriarch, who was usually appointed by the Emperor at
Byzantium to be Prefect as well. He occupied himself chiefly in
persecuting non-orthodox Christian churches, such as the Monophysite
or Jacobite Church, which, arising first in Syria, had become the
national church of the Egyptians or Copts, as contrasted with the
people of Greek race. The outposts of Upper Egypt were abandoned or
left but feebly garrisoned; the Hamitic Blemmyes or Bisharin, the
“Fuzzie-wuzzies” of the Red Sea coast-lands, and the negroid Nubians
overwhelmed the Nabatæan kingdom of Ethiopia and burst into Upper
Egypt, and, although they were once or twice severely chastised,
remained, and barbarized a land which at the beginning of the Roman
empire over Egypt had attained a high degree of culture.
In 616 A.C. the Persian armies once more entered Egypt, assisted in
their easy conquest by the disaffection of the Copts; at the same
period they drove the Abyssinians out of western Arabia and even
followed them up into eastern Abyssinia. Then the Persian power
became paralysed in its turn. In 626 Heraclius sent an army into
Egypt which drove out the Persians; and for a few years Egypt was
fairly well governed by a Greek governor sent from Byzantium. Then
once more the rule passed into ecclesiastical hands; and Kuros, the
last Greek patriarch, ruled Egypt from 630 till the invasion of the
Arabs, excepting for one short period of exile due to his fierce
persecution of the Jacobite Copts. Cyrenaica had been practically
abandoned to the Libyans after the terrible Jewish uprising and the
massacre of Greek colonists in 117 A.C. Along the rest of the
littoral of North Africa there were still flourishing Roman colonies
and cities under Byzantine rulers or Berber chiefs, from Leptis
Magna and Tripolis (Oea) on the east to Tangis (Tangier) on the
west; while other Roman or Byzantine towns still persisted far
inland in Tunisia and Algeria, notably Gafsa, Thala, Tebessa, and
Timgad. Elsewhere, beyond the walls of the Roman cities, the Berber
tribes had regained their independence and ruled over Romans and
Berbers alike.
At this period the great Libyan or Berber race of North Africa,
which inhabited the whole region between the western frontiers of
Egypt (Siwa) on the east and the Atlantic coast of Morocco on the
west (practically but one language, the Libyan, being spoken
throughout this vast breadth of Africa) were divided into three main
branches: (1) the Berbers of the East or Libyans proper (Luata,
Huara, Aurigha, Nefusa) occupying the Cyrenaica, Tripolitaine,
Tunisia and a portion of eastern Algeria; (2) the Berbers of the
West, or Sanhaga (Sanhaja), who peopled the Algerian coast-lands and
western Algeria and all Morocco as far down as the limits of the
Sahara; and (3) the Zeneta, a darker race, the descendants of the
Getulians, perhaps in origin akin to the Fula, who in the 7th
century A.C. peopled the more or less desert regions at the back of
eastern Algeria, southern Tunis and Tripoli. From these Zeneta are
descended the modern Mzab Berbers, the Wargli people, and the
Beni-Merīn who founded one of the ruling dynasties of mediaeval
Barbary. Several of these Zeneta dark-skinned Berber peoples pushed
down to the Mediterranean coast in later times. On the other hand,
many of the Eastern Berbers or Libyans were thrust back into the
desert by the Arab invaders; and some of them have become the semi
nomad “Tuareg” (Tawareq)[27] of to-day. Sections of the Western
Berbers of the Sanhaga group also passed down into the Sahara from
the 7th century onwards (though no doubt Berber invasions of Negro
Africa had occurred in previous times), and settled on or near the
northern Niger and the northern Senegal coast. In fact from Sanhaga
comes no doubt the Berber tribal name of “Zenaga” which the
Portuguese corrupted into “Senegal.”
In the 7th century, also, the negroid Garamantes, who shared
Phazania with the incoming Berbers and were no doubt identical with
the modern Tibu or Teda (whose language is utterly unlike Libyan,
and belongs to an unclassified negro speech-group), carried on a
good deal of trading intercourse south and eastward across the
Libyan Desert with Kanem and Lake Chad, Darfur and Kordofan, and no
doubt in this way facilitated the subsequent Arab penetration of the
Sudan and the Tripolitaine. The domesticated camel had been
introduced into North Africa before this period, and greatly
facilitated these race movements across the Desert.
In the year 623 A.C. an Arab of the Quraish Tribe of Western Arabia,
probably born in Mecca (anciently known as Bakka and really called
Makka at the present day), and named Muhammad or the Praiser,
attracted attention by establishing himself at the Palm Oasis of
Yathrib or Medina, not only as a bandit who led masterless men to
the attack of trading caravans, but also as a mystic who was
conceiving and promulgating a new form of religion, one which was
largely based on Jewish teaching and the Jewish Scriptures and yet
incorporated a few ideas from Christianity and perhaps even from the
Zoroastrian faiths of Persia. Muhammad opposed the degraded beliefs
in a variety of gods and goddesses which still lingered in Western
Arabia and, above all, at Mecca itself, where a wonderful fetish
stone—the remains of an immense meteorite—was exhibited for
reverence, and where, together with the rude representations of old
Semitic gods and a goddess named Allat[28], existed—as in
Coelo-Syria and Ancient Phoenicia—the idea of the Mahrab or Sacred
Shrine. This last was a sexual symbol and a relic of the
nature-worship of Phoenicia. It has also been the parent of the
horseshoe arch. The Sacred Shrine is an essential feature in all
Muhammadan mosques, though its original purport has long since been
forgotten.
Muhammad prevailed partly by his successes in warfare and the rich
booty they brought to his Arab adherents, partly by his sweetness of
disposition, the magnetism of his appearance and manner, and his
gift for pouring out conceptions of God and religion and garbled
versions of the Jewish Scriptures and Christian beliefs in rhyming
couplets easily committed to memory. He united gradually under his
sceptre, as a religious teacher and legist, all the clans of
fighting men in Western Arabia; and, in search of greater spoil than
the poverty-stricken peninsula of that day could afford, he marched
northwards to convert the Roman world and the great kingdom of
Persia to his new faith. Almost like another Moses, he died on the
threshold of the promised land; for within a few years of his death
(632 A.C.) the Arab armies had not only smashed the Byzantine rule
over Syria but were pouring into Byzantine Egypt and were rapidly
conquering for the Muhammadan faith the states of South-west, South
and East Arabia, and the whole kingdom of Persia, to the very heart
of Asia.
In 640-2 Amr-bin-al-As (an early opponent and a later convert of
Muhammad) invaded Egypt from Arabia; and he or his lieutenants
pushed thence into Tripoli, and even into Fezzan. A little later
(647-8), under Abdallah-bin-Abu-Sarh and Abdallah-bin-Zubeir, the
Arabs invaded Tripoli, and fought with a Byzantine governor known as
Gregory the Patrician, who had just before rebelled from Byzantium,
and proclaimed himself Emperor of Africa, with his seat of
government in central Tunisia. The battle lasted for days, but
Gregory was overmastered by a ruse and killed. The Arabs pursued his
defeated army into the heart of Tunisia, and even into Algeria. For
a payment of 300 quintals of gold they agreed to evacuate Tunisia,
but they left behind an agent or representative at Suffetula (the
modern Sbeitla), which had been Gregory’s capital.
In 661 the first dissenting sect of Islam arose, the Khariji. These
schismatics preached the equality of all good Muslims—a kind of
communism—the need for a Puritan life and the cessation of the
hereditary Khalifat (Caliphate) with the death of Ali. As they were
much persecuted, some of the Khariji fled at this period to the
coast of Tunis, and in the island of Jerba their descendants remain
to this day; while their doctrines were adopted by the bulk of the
Berber population of that island[29], and spread thence right across
inner North Africa to the Atlantic coast of Morocco, becoming after
720 almost a national religion of the Berbers as contrasted with the
orthodox Sunni Muhammadanism of the Arab governors or the Omaiyad
dynasties of Spain, or the Shia faith of the Fatimites of Tunis and
Egypt. The industrious Mzab Berbers of south central Algeria and the
Nefusa tribes of western Tripoli are also Khariji still at the
present day.
In 669 the Arab invasions of North Africa were resumed.
Oqba-bin-Nafa overran Fezzan, and was appointed by the Omaiyad
Khalif governor of “Ifriqiah” (modern Tunis). The Byzantines were
defeated in several battles, and Kairwan[30] was founded as a
Muhammadan capital about 673. Oqba was replaced for a time by Dinar
Bu’l-Muhajr, who pushed his conquests as far west as Tlemsan, on the
borders of modern Morocco. Oqba resumed command in 681, and advanced
with his victorious army to the Sūs country and shore of the
Atlantic Ocean, afterwards receiving a somewhat friendly reception
from Count Julian at Ceuta[31] (Septa).
But now the Berbers began to turn against the Arab invaders, finding
them worse for rapacity than Roman or Greek. A quondam ally, the
Berber prince Kuseila, united his forces with the Greek and Roman
settlers, and inflicted such a severe defeat on Oqba near Biskra
that he was enabled afterwards to rule in peace as king over
Mauretania for five years, being accepted as ruler by the European
settlers. Kuseila, however, was defeated and killed by other Arab
invaders in 688, though the victors subsequently retired and
suffered a defeat at the hands of the Byzantines in Barka. Queen
Dahia-al-Kahina[32] succeeded her relative Kuseila. The Arab
general, Hassan-bin-Numan, was successful in taking Carthage (698),
but afterwards was defeated and driven out of Tunisia by Queen
Kahina. Unfortunately this brave woman ordered a terrible
devastation of the fertile district or sub-province of Byzacene, so
that the want of food supply might deter the Arabs from returning;
and this action on her part was the beginning of the marked
deterioration of this magnificent country, the southern half of
Tunisia. Kahina was finally defeated and slain by the Arabs under
Hassan-bin-Numan in 705. Arab conquests then once more surged ahead
under Musa-bin-Nusseir. The whole of Morocco was conquered except
Ceuta, where the Arabs were repelled by Count Julian. To some extent
also Morocco was Muhammadanized; and no doubt through all these
invasions the Arabs experienced little difficulty in converting the
Berbers to Islam, even though they might subsequently enrage them by
their depredations. Before the arrival of the Arabs the Berbers in
many districts had strong leanings towards Judaism[33]. Amongst the
Berber chiefs converted to Muhammadanism by the invasion of Morocco
was a man of great gallantry known as Tarik, who became a general in
the Arab army. Tarik was left in charge of Tangiers by Musa, and
entered into friendly relations with Count Julian at Ceuta. Count
Julian, having quarrelled with the last Gothic king of Spain, urged
Tarik to invade that country. After a reconnaissance near the modern
Tarifa, Tarik invaded Spain at or near Gibraltar[34] with 13,000
Berbers officered by 300 Arabs, and was shortly afterwards followed
by Musa with reinforcements; and Spain was thus conquered.
For a few years longer all North Africa remained loosely connected
with the Khalifs (Caliphs) of Baghdad; then Idris, a descendant of
Ali, and consequently of Muhammad, established himself in Morocco as
an independent sultan, afterwards asserting his claim to be Khalif
and Imam, though he and his successors were of the Sunni, not the
Shia faith. At his death he was succeeded by his son Idris II; and
his blood is supposed to have filtered down through many generations
and devious ways to the present ruling family in Morocco. Until
about 800 A.C. Eastern Barbary, at any rate, was ruled by an Arab
governor from Baghdad; but soon after that date Harun-al-Rashid
appointed a brave Berber-Arab soldier, Ibrahim-bin-Aghlab, to be his
viceroy in Ifriqiah (as the Arabs called “Africa,” i.e. Tunisia).
Ibrahim-bin-Aghlab founded a dynasty which ruled over Tunis and
Tripoli for a hundred and ten years. Concurrently with the Aghlabite
viceroys or sultans in Roman “Africa,” there was the independent
Moorish kingdom of the Idrisites with its capital at Fez (near the
Roman Volubilis); a Berber principality of the Beni-Midrar at
Sigilmessa in Tafilalt (S.E. Morocco); and another of the Beni
Rustam at Tiaret (Western Algeria). These two last were Khariji or
heretic states.
Spain had remained from 715 till about 760 an appanage of the
Abbaside Khalif of Baghdad. But in 758 there arrived in southern
Spain a refugee prince of the rival house of Omar, Abd-ar-rahman bin
Mūawiya, who after thirty years of almost incessant warfare wrested
all Spain from the Baghdad Caliphate and founded the most splendid
of the Arab dynasties in Spain, that of the Omaiyads, which lasted
till about 1020. The Omaiyad Amirs or Khalifs frequently invaded
Morocco and derived thence numbers of negro slaves, who, together
with Slav prisoners bought in Germany through the Jews, made up
their powerful mercenary armies. As Mamluks or slave-soldiers, quite
a number of Slavs from Germany and Austria—made prisoners and sold
to the Moslems of Spain by Charlemagne and his successors—settled in
North Africa from the 8th to the 10th century.
In the ninth century numerous Shia Arabs, who were advocates of the
caliphate of the descendants of Ali and Fatima (Muhammad’s
daughter), had converted to the Shia faith the powerful Berber tribe
of the Ketama (of the Sanhaga group dwelling in Eastern Algeria);
and an emissary of the “hidden” Khalif of the Alide
family—Obeid-Allah—arrived in North Africa about 890 and preached
the Shia faith and the coming of a Madhi or Divine messenger. Having
by the aid of the Berbers overthrown the Aghlabite dynasty of
Kairwan, this emissary, who was named Abu-AbdAllah, sent for the
Mahdi, Obeid-Allah, the descendant of Ali and Fatima. Obeid-Allah
came and founded the great Fatimite dynasty which played such a part
in Tunisia, Sicily and Egypt; but ungratefully enough he caused
Abu-AbdAllah to be slain and the Ketama tribe to be massacred. He
then moved his capital from Kairwan to Mahdia, or Mehdia, on the
coast of Tunisia, a city which he founded on the ruins of a Roman
town. His son and successor, who nicknamed himself “The sustainer of
God’s orders” (Al-Kaïm bi Amr Allah), instituted the practice of
never appearing in the open in public without a sunshade being held
over his head—the Royal Umbrella which still figures in Moroccan
court ceremonial. Under the third sovereign, Al Mu’izz, the dynasty
of Fatimite Caliphs reigned over all North Africa, from Morocco to
Egypt, and thence to Damascus. The Fatimite general commanding the
army in Egypt, Jauhar-al-Kaid, founded the citadel and town of Cairo
(Al Kahirah) in 969-71[35], more or less on the sites of the
previous Arab capitals of Al-Masr, Al-’Askar, and Al-Katai; and here
the Fatimite Caliph transferred his capital and his presence from
Kairwan, giving up the rule over Tripoli, Tunis, Algeria and Morocco
to Berber viceroys.
From the 7th to the middle of the 11th century, the Arab element in
North Africa was small and represented chiefly by a few thousand
warriors, statesmen and religious teachers, who had in a marvellous
manner, difficult to explain, forced their religion, and to some
extent their language and rule, on several millions of Berbers, on
some 300,000 Christians of Roman, Greek and Gothic origin, and
100,000 Jews. But in the 11th century took place those Arab
invasions of North Africa which have been the main source of the
Arab element in the northern part of the continent, and without
which Muhammadanism might in time have faded away; and a series of
independent Berber states have been formed once more under Christian
rule.
About 1045 two Arab tribes, the Beni-Hilal and the Beni-Soleim
(originally from Central Arabia, and deported thence to Upper
Egypt), left the right bank of the Nile to invade Barbary. They had
made themselves troublesome in Upper Egypt; and the weakened rulers
of that country, to get rid of them, had urged them to invade
north-western Africa. About two or three hundred thousand crossed
the desert and reached the frontiers of Tunis and Tripoli. They
defeated the Berbers at the battle of Haiderān, and then settled in
southern Tunis and western Tripoli. During their raids they
destroyed the city of Kairwan, which never regained its former
importance. Eventually some portion of them was unseated by the
Berbers and driven westward into Morocco. They were succeeded by
fresh drafts from Egypt and Arabia, but many of these later invaders
settled in Barka and eastern Tripoli[36]. Later on other Arab tribes
left the west coast of Arabia, and settled on the central Nile,
avoiding the Abyssinian highlands, where they were kept at bay by
their Christianized relatives of far earlier immigrations; and on
the Blue Nile (Sennār), where they founded the powerful Funj empire
which lasted from the 14th to the early 19th century. From the upper
Nile they directed many and repeated invasions of Central and
Western Africa. To this day tribes of more or less pure Arab descent
are found in the districts round Lake Chad, in Darfur, Wadai, and in
the western Sahara north of the Senegal and Niger rivers.
In the 11th century began the real revival of the Roman Empire from
the onslaught of Arabia and the prior Teutonic invasions. The
Normans recovered Sicily and Malta from the Berbers; earlier still,
the Pisans drove the Berbers out of Sardinia and crushed them in
Majorca. The cities of Italy, forming themselves into republics,
were tempted by their extending commerce to interfere with North
Africa. The Venetians, in spite of the hare-brained crusades and the
damage that they did by reviving Muhammadan fanaticism, began to
open up those commercial relations with Egypt, which for four and a
half centuries gave them the monopoly of the Levant and Indian
trade. The Normans, after founding the kingdom of Naples and Sicily,
commenced a series of bold attacks on the coasts of Algeria, Tunis
and Tripoli, which did not however lead to an occupation of more
than forty years (about 1123 to 1163). The Pisan and Genoese natives
in the 11th and 12th centuries carried out a series of such sharp
reprisals against the Moorish pirates, that they inspired some
respect for Italy in the minds of Tunisians and Algerians.
Afterwards they were enabled to open up commercial relations,
especially with the north coast of Tunis; and these, to the
advantage of both Italy and Barbary, continued, with fitful
interruptions, until the 16th century.
In the 11th century another great Berber movement took place—the
rise of the “Almoravides.” The name of this sect of Muhammadan
reformers is a Spanish corruption of _Al-Murabitin_, which is the
plural of _Marabut_; and _Marabut_ is derived from the place-name
_Ribat_ (a monastery or school), meaning “the people living at the
Ribat,” though the word has since come to mean in North Africa and
elsewhere a Muhammadan saint. The Almoravides owed their origin to
one of the early African Mahdis or Messiahs, of whom the tale has
subsequently been repeated and repeated with such servile imitation
of detail that one can only imagine the mass of African Muhammadans
to have been without any philosophical reflections on history or any
sense of humour; since Mahdi after Mahdi arises as an ascetic saint,
and dies a licentious monarch, whose power passes into the hands of
a lieutenant, who is the first in the line of a slowly crumbling
dynasty. Far away across the Sahara Desert, and near the Upper
Niger, was a tribe of Tawareq Berbers known as the Lamta or Lemtuna,
who had been in the 10th century converted to Muhammadanism. The
chief of this tribe, returning from a pilgrimage to Mecca, met a
Berber of South Morocco known as Ibn Yaṣin, who on his Meccan
pilgrimage had acquired a great reputation for austere holiness. The
chief of the Lemtuna invited Ibn Yaṣin to his court; and the latter,
after arriving in the Niger countries, established himself on an
island named Ribat, on the upper Niger, where he collected adherents
round him and promulgated his puritanical reforms. Gradually Ibn
Yaṣin’s influence extended over the whole Lamta or Lemtuna tribe,
and he urged these Berbers towards the conversion of Senegambia. It
was mainly through his influence that the Berbers were carried by
their conquests into Senegambia and Nigeria. Then he led them (about
1050) north-west across the Sahara Desert; and they conquered
Morocco, and from thence invaded Muhammadan Spain. By this time Ibn
Yaṣin, the teacher, was dead, but the warrior chief of the Lamta
tribe—Yussuf-bin-Tashfin—had become sovereign of Morocco and Spain,
and had assumed the title of Amir-al-Mumenin[37].
A hundred years later another Berber Mahdi arose in the person of
Ibn Tumert, who was “run” by Abd-al-Mumin of Tlemsan (West Algeria),
and whose fighting force was the great Berber tribe of the Masmuda
from the High Atlas Mountains. The programme was the same—to start
with puritanical reform, afterwards degenerating rapidly into mere
lust of conquest. This small sect known by us as the “Almohades”
(from Al-Muāḥadim or Muaḥidūn, meaning “(Disciples of) the Unity of
God[38]”) attacked the decaying power of the Almoravides. Ibn
Tumert—an exact parallel of all the Mahdis—died early in the
struggle, but was succeeded as “Khalifa” by his warlike lieutenant,
Abd-al-Mumin, who pursued his conquests until he had brought under
his power all North Africa and Muhammadan Spain, and had founded the
greatest Berber empire that ever existed. Concurrently, however,
with the sway of his overlordship, the Ziri and Hamadi dynasties of
Berber sultans continued to exist at Tunis and in eastern Algeria.
After ruling for a century the Almohade empire broke up, and was
succeeded by independent Berber rulers in Tunis and Tripoli (the
Hafsides), in Algeria (the Abd-al-Wadite or Zeyanite kings of
Tlemsan), and in Morocco (the Marinide or Beni-Marin). Remarkable
among these was the Hafs dynasty, which governed Tunis and part of
Tripoli for 300 years, and proved the most beneficent of all
Muhammadan rulers in North Africa. Abu Muhammad Hafsi was a Berber
governor of Tunis under one of the last of the Almohade emperors,
and eventually became the independent sovereign of Tunisia. The
Almohade rulers, towards the end of the 12th century, had
transported most of the turbulent Arabs of southern and central
Tunisia to Morocco, where for the first time the Arabs began to form
an appreciable element in the population. About this time Kurdish
and Turkish mercenaries began to find employment in Tunisia and in
Tripoli under chiefs who rebelled against the Almohade empire.
During the period between 1250 and 1500 the Moorish civilization,
art, architecture, letters, and industries reached their highest
development: especially at Kairwan, Tlemsan, and Fas (Fez).
In 1270 that truly good but erratic monarch, St Louis of France,
deflected a crusade intended for the Levant to Tunis as being a
Muhammadan country much nearer at hand and more accessible. Moreover
his brother, Charles of Anjou, claimed the sovereignty of Sicily and
Naples, and thought the possession of Tunis would better establish
his precarious kingdom. Louis IX landed at Carthage, but owing to
failing health his imposing invasion was followed by military
inaction. He died at Carthage, and a capitulation subsequently took
place by which the Crusaders retired from Tunisia. After their
departure the Muhammadans entirely destroyed all that remained of
Roman Carthage, as the buildings had afforded to the invaders the
protection of fortresses. Up till that time a good deal of Roman
civilization had lingered in Tunisia, but now the country became
more and more Arabized. Christian bishops probably ceased to exist
in the 13th century, but Christians were not persecuted for another
two or three hundred years, until the attacks of the Spaniards and
the intervention of the Turks roused Muhammadan fanaticism to a high
degree which is only beginning to abate with the opening of the 20th
century and the spread of education.
In the 13th century the Spanish and Portuguese kings reduced the
area of Muhammadan rule in the Iberian Peninsula to the kingdom of
Granada in S.E. Spain; and early in the 15th century the kingdom of
Portugal felt itself sufficiently strong to carry the war into the
enemy’s country. In 1415 the Portuguese army, to which was attached
Prince Henry, afterwards known as the Navigator, captured the
Moorish citadel of Ceuta on the Moroccan coast; and from this
episode started the magnificent Portuguese discoveries initiated by
Prince Henry which will be described in the next chapter. The
Portuguese subsequently acquired Tangier, Tetwan, and most of the
ports along the Atlantic coast of Morocco. Castile-Aragon, bursting
out a little later, when her monarchs had conquered the last Moorish
kingdom on Spanish soil (Granada), seized Melilla in 1490, and, on
one pretext or another, port after port along the coasts of Algeria
and Tunis, until by 1540 the Spanish empire had established
garrisons at Oran, Bugia, Bona, Hunein, and Goletta[39]. They also
instigated the Knights of Malta—an outcome of the crusades—to hold
for a time the town of Tripoli in Barbary, and the Tunisian island
of Jerba. The Portuguese kings by the middle of the 16th century
were practically suzerains of Morocco. The penultimate ruler of the
brilliant House of Avis—young Dom Sebastião—determined in 1578, soon
after his accession to the throne of Portugal at the age of 23,
thoroughly to conquer Morocco. He landed with 100,000 men at
Acila[40], then marched inland and took up a position behind the
Wad-al-Makhazen on the fatal field of Kasr-al-Kabir. But he was
utterly defeated by the Moors under Mulai Abd-al-Malek (who died
during the battle) and Abu’l Abbas Ahmad-al-Mansur. The latter
became Sultan of all Morocco after the defeat and death of the
unfortunate Dom Sebastião. Al-Mansur belonged to a family of Sa’adi
Sharifs[41] (noblemen—descended from Fatima and Ali and therefore
from Muhammad) from the upper valley of the river Draa in South
Morocco. His ancestor, Muhammad-al-Mahdi, had overturned the
Marinide Sultan and founded the second Sharifian (Arab) or Saadian
dynasty. Nevertheless, the Portuguese retained most of their
fortified ports on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, and also Ceuta.
During the 60 years of the abeyance of the Portuguese monarchy
(1580-1640) these places became nominally Spanish, but returned to
Portugal with the restoration of the House of Bragança, though Ceuta
and Melilla were subsequently ceded to Spain, and Tangier to
England. Thus ended what might very well have been, but for the
battle of Kasr-al-Kabīr, the Portuguese Empire of Morocco.
At the end of the 12th century, other Sharifs of Yanbu, the coast
port of the holy city of Medina in Arabia, following returning
Moorish pilgrims, established themselves at Sijilmassa in Tafilalt,
or Filal, a country of Southern Morocco. One of them,
Hassan-bin-Kassim, increasing greatly in power, became in the 15th
century the founder of the present Sharifian dynasty of Morocco;
though some centuries elapsed before these Filali chiefs succeeded
in becoming supreme rulers over both Fez and Marrakesh. The Filali
Sultans did not displace the Saadian Sharifs till 1658.
But during the reign of the sixth Saadian monarch—Al-Mansur, also
surnamed “the Golden”—Morocco reached the acme of her power and
acquired a vast Nigerian dominion. At the close of the 15th century
a Muhammadan negro dynasty had arisen on the upper Niger, and in the
western Sudan. One of these negro kings, who made a pilgrimage to
Mecca, obtained from the descendant of the Abbaside khalifs residing
at Cairo the title of “Lieutenant of the Prince of Believers in the
Sudan.” He made Timbuktu[42] his capital, and it became a place of
great learning and flourishing commerce. His grandson,
Ishak-bin-Sokya[43], became rich and powerful, and attracted the
rapacity of the Saadian Sharifian Khalif of Morocco (Abu’l Abbas
al-Mansur, who had distinguished himself by wiping out the
Portuguese under Dom Sebastião at the battle of Kasr-al-Kabīr), and
had recently extended his rule across the Sahara to the oasis of
Twat[44]. The Moorish emperor attempted to pick a quarrel by
disputing this negro king’s right to the title of Lieutenant of the
Khalifs in the Sudan, demanded his vassalage, and a tax on the
Sahara salt mines along the route to Timbuktu. Ishak-bin-Sokya
refused, whereupon a Moorish army under Juder Basha was despatched
by Abu’l Abbas-al-Mansur in 1590 to conquer the Sudan. This army
crossed the Sahara, defeated Ishak-bin-Sokya, and captured Timbuktu,
but raised the siege of Gaghu or Gao, lower down the Niger, whither
Ishak had fled. A more vigorous commander, Mahmud Basha, completed
the Moorish conquest of the Sudan, a conquest which extended in its
effects to Bornu on the one hand and to Senegambia on the other, and
only faded away in the 18th century, mainly owing to the uprise of
the Fula and the attacks of the Tawareq. Gradually all Morocco was
brought under Sharifian rule; all European hold over the country was
eradicated; and the reign of culminating glory was that of the
Filali emperor Mulai Ismail, the “Bloodthirsty,” who ruled for 57
years, and is said to have left living children to the number of 548
boys and 340 girls. Mulai Ismail died in 1727. He had attained to
and maintained himself in supreme power by the introduction of
regiments of well-drilled Sudan Negroes; but the “nigrification” of
Morocco—the importation on a large scale of negro slaves and
soldiers—had begun much earlier in the conquest of North Africa by
the Lamtuna Berbers from the northern Niger, the “Almoravides.” But
the civilization and the conquering power of Morocco were largely
due to the “Ruma” or “Rumi” element, the Spanish Moors emigrating
from Spain and bringing into North-West Africa a powerful “White
Man” element—for they were often the descendants of the
Roman-Iberian people of Gothic Spain. They were remarkable for their
knowledge of firearms and their skill as artisans; and their
descendants are everywhere the “aristocracy” of Muhammadan North
Africa.
Morocco might have conquered and ruled all North Africa in the 16th
century but for the arrival of the Turks. The Turks, who had
replaced the Arabs of Mesopotamia, Syria, and Asia Minor as
Muhammadan rulers, had captured Constantinople in 1453, had seized
Egypt in 1517, and were becoming the backbone of the Muhammadan
power. When the Algerians and Tunisians appealed to Turkish pirates
for help against the attacks of the Christian Spaniards in the 16th
century, the Sultan of Constantinople took advantage of their
intervention to establish, through the Turkish Corsairs, Turkish
regencies in Algeria (1519), Tunis (1573), and Tripoli (1551)[45].
Morocco, however, always remained independent; and indeed, after the
extinction of the line of Abbasid Baghdad Khalifs at Cairo in 1538,
the great Sharifian sovereign, Al-Mansur, after his victory over the
Portuguese, declared himself Khalif over the Muhammadan world in
right of his descent from Fatima and Ali, and refused to recognize
the claim of the Ottoman Emperor of Constantinople to have acquired
the transfer of the Caliphate from Motawakkiq the last of the
Abbasids in 1517. Nevertheless, though Morocco remained a great
independent Muhammadan power, her princes borrowed many customs from
Turkey, such as the Turkish style of clothing, the Turkish method of
arranging troops in battle, and the title of Pasha (Basha).
Except in Morocco, Turkish control replaced Arab influence in
northern Africa, and extended by degrees far into the old Garamantan
kingdom of Fezzan, and across the Libyan Desert to the Red Sea. But
no matter whether Turk, Circassian, Greek, Albanian, Slav, or
Arabized Negro ruled in Berber North Africa, Muhammadan influence
and Arab culture continued to spread over all the northern half of
Africa. Somaliland, Sennār, Nubia, Kordofan, Darfur, Wadai, Bornu,
Hausa-land and the Sahara, much of Senegambia, and most of the
country within the bend of the Niger and along the banks of the
upper Volta were converted to Muhammadanism, and became familiar
with the Arab tongue as the religious language, and with some degree
of Arab civilization.
Egypt after the Arab invasion of 640-2 was governed from the Delta
of the Nile to the First Cataract by Arab governors deputed by the
Khalif of Baghdad. The Christian Copts and Greeks were not
materially interfered with, provided they paid their taxes
regularly. In 706 Arabic finally displaced Greek as the official
language of the country, and never subsequently lost its hold over
Egypt. Coptic (the degenerate form of Ancient Egyptian) gradually
sank into the position of a ritual language only connected with
religious exercises and literature; and Arabic since the 8th century
has been the universal speech of all Egypt, except in the Oasis of
Siwa, where a Berber dialect is still spoken, and among the tribes
inhabiting the lands between the Cataract Nile and the Red Sea, who
preserve their Hamitic (Gala-like) languages. A good deal of Arab
colonization of Upper and Lower Egypt, and of Nubia and Dongola,
took place between the 8th and the 12th centuries. In 828-32 a
serious rebellion of Copts and of malcontent Arabs was only
suppressed by the Baghdad Khalif introducing an army of 2000 Turks;
and from this time onwards the Turks had much to do with Egypt, as
they had with Syria and Mesopotamia, because the Arabs were losing
their energy and fighting capacity. After 856 most of the
functionaries in Egypt were Turks; and in 875 a Turkish governor,
Ahmad bin Tulūn, turned his governorship into a hereditary
sovereignty. The Tulunid dynasty of sultans governed Egypt till 905,
when the direct rule of the Baghdad Khalifs was resumed. Then, once
more, a Turkish governor was appointed to rule Egypt for the Khalif,
in 935, to whom was granted the kingly title of Ikshid. The Ikshids
governed until 969, when they were supplanted by the establishment
of the Fatimite Khalif Mu’izz-li-din-Allah already referred to, who
left Tunisia in 973 to take up his residence first in Alexandria and
then in newly-founded Cairo.
This revolution was really effected by a Jewish official, Yakub bin
Killis, and a Slav or Greek general, Jauhar, both of them converts
to Islam. The Fatimite Khalifs of Egypt rose for a short time to be
the greatest power in Islam, their empire extending from Tangier to
Aleppo, and nearly always including Syria. But the Khalifs soon
became puppet sovereigns, the rule being carried on in their name by
Jewish, Syrian, Negro, Turkish, or Kurd ministers. Between 1163 and
1170 the French and German crusaders invaded Egypt and for a short
time garrisoned Cairo. They were driven out by a Kurdish prefect of
Alexandria, Salah-ad-din Yusaf bin Ayub (“Joseph the son of Job”—the
famous “Saladin”), who at last swept away the fiction of these Shia
Khalifs, restored the Sunni form of Muhammadanism and proclaimed the
Abbasid Khalifs of Baghdad as spiritual leaders. Egypt has remained
Sunni ever since. Saladin however made himself “Malik” or King of
Egypt and Syria. His descendants ruled Egypt, Western Arabia and
such parts of Palestine as were not occupied by the Crusaders until
1260, when this Ayubite dynasty was replaced by that of the Turkish
slave, Bibars. The Ayubite kings of Egypt purchased large numbers of
boy slaves (_Mamluk_) and trained them as soldiers. They were
European Slavs, Greeks and Italians, Asiatic Turks, Circassians,
Kurds and Mongols. These dynasties of slave sultans recognized and
kept in their midst a puppet Abbasid Khalif, who after the capture
of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1260 resided in Cairo. The Mamluk Kings
governed Egypt until 1517, when this land was conquered by the
Ottoman Turks and the last of the Abbasid Khalifs was compelled to
confer the Muhammadan Caliphate (most illegally) on the Ottoman
Emperor of Rūm (Rome, i.e. Constantinople). But the Mamluk or slave
soldiers, derived from the races above mentioned, continued to exist
and to some extent to administer Egypt even under Turkish governors
till the invasion of the French in 1798; they revived again after
the French quitted Egypt (1801), till the last of them were
massacred by a Turkish (Macedonian-Albanian) major of artillery,
Muhammad Ali, who became the almost independent Pasha of Egypt and
founded the present dynasty of the Khedives.
During all this period of twelve hundred and twenty years (between,
let us say, 690 and 1910) while Northern Africa lay under Islamic
control, enormous numbers of Asiatics and Europeans colonized Egypt
and Mauretania—Arabs, Jews, Syrians; Turks, Kurds and some Persians;
Greeks, Slavs (sold by the conquering Germans to Jewish dealers who
resold these Poles, Chekhs, Wends, Croats and Serbs to the Spanish
Arabs, the Berbers, Egyptians and Turks); Italians, Spaniards,
Germans; French; and even English and Irish. One is also struck with
the power wielded over the Muhammadan world of North Africa by the
Jew, which was not displaced till the modern Christian European
conquest of North Africa.
Arabs completely displaced the Hamitic tribes on the Desert Nile in
Nubia, Dongola and Sennār after the 11th and 12th centuries, and in
the last-named country, Sennār, founded the Funj dynasty of kings
which powerfully affected North-East Africa from the 13th to the
18th centuries. In the 12th century, Somaliland was converted to
Islam and from that period onwards permeated by Arabs. From the
middle of the 8th century, the pre-Islamic settlements of southern
Arabs along the East coast of Africa were revived by fresh bands of
militant traders and missionaries of Islam. Arabs established
themselves once more at Sofala, at Sena and Quelimane on the lower
Zambezi, at Moçambique, Kilwa, Zanzibar, Mombasa, and various ports
on the Somali coast. A colony of Muhammadanized Persians joined them
in the 10th century at Lamu; and Persian as well as Muhammadan
Indian influence began to be very apparent in architecture on the
East coast of Africa. The powerful Sultanate of Kilwa was founded in
the 10th century, and exercised for some time a dominating influence
over all the other Arab settlements on the East coast of Africa.
Arabs, as already related, had discovered the island of Madagascar,
which they first made clearly known to history. In Islamic times
they again settled as traders on its north and north-west coasts,
while the adjoining Comoro Islands or Islands of the “Full Moon”
(Komr) became little Arab sultanates practically in the hands of
Arabized Negroes. Until the coming of the Portuguese in the 16th
century these Arab East African states were sparsely colonized by
Himyaritic or South Arabian Arabs from the Hadhramaut, Yaman, and
Aden. But a development of power and enterprise amongst the Arabs of
Maskat, which led to their driving away the Portuguese from the
Persian Gulf and subsequently attacking them on the East coast of
Africa, caused the Maskat[46] Arab to become the dominant type. The
Maskat Arabs founded the modern Zanzibar sultanate, which quite late
in the 19th century was separated by the intervention of the British
Government from the parent state of ’Oman.