Africa is at once the most romantic and the most tragic of continents. Its
very names reveal its mystery and wide-reaching influence. It is the
"Ethiopia" of the Greek, the "Kush" and "Punt" of the Egyptian, and the
Arabian "Land of the Blacks." To modern Europe it is the "Dark Continent"
and "Land of Contrasts"; in literature it is the seat of the Sphinx and
the lotus eaters, the home of the dwarfs, gnomes, and pixies, and the
refuge of the gods; in commerce it is the slave mart and the source of
ivory, ebony, rubber, gold, and diamonds. What other continent can rival
in interest this Ancient of Days?
There are those, nevertheless, who would write universal history and leave
out Africa. But how, asks Ratzel, can one leave out the land of Egypt and
Carthage? and Frobenius declares that in future Africa must more and more
be regarded as an integral part of the great movement of world history.
Yet it is true that the history of Africa is unusual, and its strangeness
is due in no small degree to the physical peculiarities of the continent.
With three times the area of Europe it has a coast line a fifth shorter.
Like Europe it is a peninsula of Asia, curving southwestward around the
Indian Sea. It has few gulfs, bays, capes, or islands. Even the rivers,
though large and long, are not means of communication with the outer
world, because from the central high plateau they plunge in rapids and
cataracts to the narrow coastlands and the sea.
The general physical contour of Africa has been likened to an inverted
plate with one or more rows of mountains at the edge and a low coastal
belt. In the south the central plateau is three thousand or more feet
above the sea, while in the north it is a little over one thousand feet.
Thus two main divisions of the continent are easily distinguished: the
broad northern rectangle, reaching down as far as the Gulf of Guinea and
Cape Guardafui, with seven million square miles; and the peninsula which
tapers toward the south, with five million square miles.
Four great rivers and many lesser streams water the continent. The
greatest is the Congo in the center, with its vast curving and endless
estuaries; then the Nile, draining the cluster of the Great Lakes and
flowing northward "like some grave, mighty thought, threading a dream";
the Niger in the northwest, watering the Sudan below the Sahara; and,
finally, the Zambesi, with its greater Niagara in the southeast. Even
these waters leave room for deserts both south and north, but the greater
ones are the three million square miles of sand wastes in the north.
More than any other land, Africa lies in the tropics, with a warm, dry
climate, save in the central Congo region, where rain at all seasons
brings tropical luxuriance. The flora is rich but not wide in variety,
including the gum acacia, ebony, several dye woods, the kola nut, and
probably tobacco and millet. To these many plants have been added in
historic times. The fauna is rich in mammals, and here, too, many from
other continents have been widely introduced and used.
Primarily Africa is the Land of the Blacks. The world has always been
familiar with black men, who represent one of the most ancient of human
stocks. Of the ancient world gathered about the Mediterranean, they formed
a part and were viewed with no surprise or dislike, because this world saw
them come and go and play their part with other men. Was Clitus the
brother-in-law of Alexander the Great less to be honored because he
happened to be black? Was Terence less famous? The medieval European
world, developing under the favorable physical conditions of the north
temperate zone, knew the black man chiefly as a legend or occasional
curiosity, but still as a fellow man--an Othello or a Prester John or an
Antar.
The modern world, in contrast, knows the Negro chiefly as a bond slave in
the West Indies and America. Add to this the fact that the darker races in
other parts of the world have, in the last four centuries, lagged behind
the flying and even feverish footsteps of Europe, and we face to-day a
widespread assumption throughout the dominant world that color is a mark
of inferiority.
The result is that in writing of this, one of the most ancient,
persistent, and widespread stocks of mankind, one faces astounding
prejudice. That which may be assumed as true of white men must be proven
beyond peradventure if it relates to Negroes. One who writes of the
development of the Negro race must continually insist that he is writing
of a normal human stock, and that whatever it is fair to predicate of the
mass of human beings may be predicated of the Negro. It is the silent
refusal to do this which has led to so much false writing on Africa and
of its inhabitants. Take, for instance, the answer to the apparently
simple question "What is a Negro?" We find the most extraordinary
confusion of thought and difference of opinion. There is a certain type in
the minds of most people which, as David Livingstone said, can be found
only in caricature and not in real life. When scientists have tried to
find an extreme type of black, ugly, and woolly-haired Negro, they have
been compelled more and more to limit his home even in Africa. At least
nine-tenths of the African people do not at all conform to this type, and
the typical Negro, after being denied a dwelling place in the Sudan, along
the Nile, in East Central Africa, and in South Africa, was finally given a
very small country between the Senegal and the Niger, and even there was
found to give trace of many stocks. As Winwood Reade says, "The typical
Negro is a rare variety even among Negroes."
As a matter of fact we cannot take such extreme and largely fanciful stock
as typifying that which we may fairly call the Negro race. In the case of
no other race is so narrow a definition attempted. A "white" man may be of
any color, size, or facial conformation and have endless variety of
cranial measurement and physical characteristics. A "yellow" man is
perhaps an even vaguer conception.
In fact it is generally recognized to-day that no scientific definition of
race is possible. Differences, and striking differences, there are between
men and groups of men, but they fade into each other so insensibly that we
can only indicate the main divisions of men in broad outlines. As Von
Luschan says, "The question of the number of human races has quite lost
its _raison d'être_ and has become a subject rather of philosophic
speculation than of scientific research. It is of no more importance now
to know how many human races there are than to know how many angels can
dance on the point of a needle. Our aim now is to find out how ancient and
primitive races developed from others and how races changed or evolved
through migration and inter-breeding."[1]
The mulatto (using the term loosely to indicate either an intermediate
type between white and black or a mingling of the two) is as typically
African as the black man and cannot logically be included in the "white"
race, especially when American usage includes the mulatto in the Negro
race.
It is reasonable, according to fact and historic usage, to include under
the word "Negro" the darker peoples of Africa characterized by a brown
skin, curled or "frizzled" hair, full and sometimes everted lips, a
tendency to a development of the maxillary parts of the face, and a
dolichocephalic head. This type is not fixed or definite. The color varies
widely; it is never black or bluish, as some say, and it becomes often
light brown or yellow. The hair varies from curly to a wool-like mass, and
the facial angle and cranial form show wide variation.
It is as impossible in Africa as elsewhere to fix with any certainty the
limits of racial variation due to climate and the variation due to
intermingling. In the past, when scientists assumed one unvarying Negro
type, every variation from that type was interpreted as meaning mixture of
blood. To-day we recognize a broader normal African type which, as
Palgrave says, may best be studied "among the statues of the Egyptian
rooms of the British Museum; the larger gentle eye, the full but not
over-protruding lips, the rounded contour, and the good-natured, easy,
sensuous expression. This is the genuine African model." To this race
Africa in the main and parts of Asia have belonged since prehistoric
times.
The color of this variety of man, as the color of other varieties, is due
to climate. Conditions of heat, cold, and moisture, working for thousands
of years through the skin and other organs, have given men their
differences of color. This color pigment is a protection against sunlight
and consequently varies with the intensity of the sunlight. Thus in Africa
we find the blackest men in the fierce sunlight of the desert, red pygmies
in the forest, and yellow Bushmen on the cooler southern plateau.
Next to the color, the hair is the most distinguishing characteristic of
the Negro, but the two characteristics do not vary with each other. Some
of the blackest of the Negroes have curly rather than woolly hair, while
the crispest, most closely curled hair is found among the yellow
Hottentots and Bushmen. The difference between the hair of the lighter and
darker races is a difference of degree, not of kind, and can be easily
measured. If the hair follicles of a China-man, a European, and a Negro
are cut across transversely, it will be found that the diameter of the
first is 100 by 77 to 85, the second 100 by 62 to 72, while that of the
Negro is 100 by 40 to 60. This elliptical form of the Negro's hair causes
it to curl more or less tightly.
There have been repeated efforts to discover, by measurements of various
kinds, further and more decisive differences which would serve as really
scientific determinants of race. Gradually these efforts have been given
up. To-day we realize that there are no hard and fast racial types among
men. Race is a dynamic and not a static conception, and the typical races
are continually changing and developing, amalgamating and differentiating.
In this little book, then, we are studying the history of the darker part
of the human family, which is separated from the rest of mankind by no
absolute physical line, but which nevertheless forms, as a mass, a social
group distinct in history, appearance, and to some extent in spiritual
gift.
We cannot study Africa without, however, noting some of the other races
concerned in its history, particularly the Asiatic Semites. The
intercourse of Africa with Arabia and other parts of Asia has been so
close and long-continued that it is impossible to-day to disentangle the
blood relationships. Negro blood certainly appears in strong strain among
the Semites, and the obvious mulatto groups in Africa, arising from
ancient and modern mingling of Semite and Negro, has given rise to the
term "Hamite," under cover of which millions of Negroids have been
characteristically transferred to the "white" race by some eager
scientists.
The earliest Semites came to Africa across the Red Sea. The Phoenicians
came along the northern coasts a thousand years before Christ and began
settlements which culminated in Carthage and extended down the Atlantic
shores of North Africa nearly to the Gulf of Guinea.
From the earliest times the Greeks have been in contact with Africa as
visitors, traders, and colonists, and the Persian influence came with
Cambyses and others. Roman Africa was bounded by the desert, but at times
came into contact with the blacks across the Sahara and in the valley of
the Nile. After the breaking up of the Roman Empire the Greek and Latin
Christians filtered through Africa, followed finally by a Germanic
invasion in 429 A.D.
In the seventh century the All-Mother, Asia, claimed Africa again for her
own and blew a cloud of Semitic Mohammedanism all across North Africa,
veiling the dark continent from Europe for a thousand years and converting
vast masses of the blacks to Islam. The Portuguese began to raise the veil
in the fifteenth century, sailing down the Atlantic coast and initiating
the modern slave trade. The Spanish, French, Dutch, and English followed
them, but as traders in men rather than explorers.
The Portuguese explored the coasts of the Gulf of Guinea, visiting the
interior kingdoms, and then passing by the mouth of the Congo proceeded
southward. Eventually they rounded the Cape of Good Hope and pursued their
explorations as far as the mountains of Abyssinia. This began the modern
exploration of Africa, which is a curious fairy tale, and recalls to us
the great names of Livingstone, Burton, Speke, Stanley, Barth,
Schweinfurth, and many others. In this way Africa has been made known to
the modern world.
The difficulty of this modern lifting of the veil of centuries emphasizes
two physical facts that underlie all African history: the peculiar
inaccessibility of the continent to peoples from without, which made it so
easily possible for the great human drama played here to hide itself from
the ears of other worlds; and, on the other hand, the absence of interior
barriers--the great stretch of that central plateau which placed
practically every budding center of culture at the mercy of barbarism,
sweeping a thousand miles, with no Alps or Himalayas or Appalachians to
hinder.
With this peculiarly uninviting coast line and the difficulties in
interior segregation must be considered the climate of Africa. While there
is much diversity and many salubrious tracts along with vast barren
wastes, yet, as Sir Harry Johnston well remarks, "Africa is the chief
stronghold of the real Devil--the reactionary forces of Nature hostile to
the uprise of Humanity. Here Beelzebub, King of the Flies, marshals his
vermiform and arthropod hosts--insects, ticks, and nematode worms--which
more than in other continents (excepting Negroid Asia) convey to the skin,
veins, intestines, and spinal marrow of men and other vertebrates the
microorganisms which cause deadly, disfiguring, or debilitating diseases,
or themselves create the morbid condition of the persecuted human being,
beasts, bird, reptile, frog, or fish."[2] The inhabitants of this land
have had a sheer fight for physical survival comparable with that in no
other great continent, and this must not be forgotten when we consider
their history.