One of the great cities of the Sudan was Jenne. The chronicle says "that
its markets are held every day of the week and its populations are very
enormous. Its seven thousand villages are so near to one another that the
chief of Jenne has no need of messengers. If he wishes to send a note to
Lake Dibo, for instance, it is cried from the gate of the town and
repeated from village to village, by which means it reaches its
destination almost instantly."[23]
From the name of this city we get the modern name Guinea, which is used
to-day to designate the country contiguous to the great gulf of that
name--a territory often referred to in general as West Africa. Here,
reaching from the mouth of the Gambia to the mouth of the Niger, is a
coast of six hundred miles, where a marvelous drama of world history has
been enacted. The coast and its hinterland comprehends many well-known
names. First comes ancient Guinea, then, modern Sierra Leone and Liberia;
then follow the various "coasts" of ancient traffic--the grain, ivory,
gold, and slave coasts--with the adjoining territories of Ashanti,
Dahomey, Lagos, and Benin, and farther back such tribal and territorial
names as those of the Mandingoes, Yorubas, the Mossi, Nupe, Borgu, and
others.
Recent investigation makes it certain that an ancient civilization existed
on this coast which may have gone back as far as three thousand years
before Christ. Frobenius, perhaps fancifully, identified this African
coast with the Atlantis of the Greeks and as part of that great western
movement in human culture, "beyond the pillars of Hercules," which
thirteen centuries before Christ strove with Egypt and the East. It is, at
any rate, clear that ancient commerce reached down the west coast. The
Phoenicians, 600 B.C., and the Carthaginians, a century or more later,
record voyages, and these may have been attempted revivals of still more
ancient intercourse.
These coasts at some unknown prehistoric period were peopled from the
Niger plateau toward the north and west by the black West African type of
Negro, while along the west end of the desert these Negroes mingled with
the Berbers, forming various Negroid races.
Movement and migration is evident along this coast in ancient and modern
times. The Yoruba-Benin-Dahomey peoples were among the earliest arrivals,
with their remarkable art and industry, which places them in some lines of
technique abreast with the modern world. Behind them came the Mossi from
the north, and many other peoples in recent days have filtered through,
like the Limba and Temni of Sierra Leone and the Agni-Ashanti, who moved
from Borgu some two thousand years ago to the Gold and Ivory coasts.
We have already noted in the main the history of black men along the
wonderful Niger and seen how, pushing up from the Gulf of Guinea, a
powerful wedge of ancient culture held back Islam for a thousand years,
now victorious, now stubbornly disputing every inch of retreat. The center
of this culture lay probably, in oldest times, above the Bight of Benin,
along the Slave Coast, and reached east, west, and north. We trace it
to-day not only in the remarkable tradition of the natives, but in stone
monuments, architecture, industrial and social organization, and works of
art in bronze, glass, and terra cotta.
Benin art has been practiced without interruption for centuries, and Von
Luschan says that it is "of extraordinary significance that by the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a local and monumental art had been
learned in Benin which in many respects equaled European art and developed
a technique of the very highest accomplishment."[24]
Summing up Yoruban civilization, Frobenius concluded that "the technical
summit of that civilization was reached in the terra-cotta industry, and
that the most important achievements in art were not expressed in stone,
but in fine clay baked in the furnace; that hollow casting was thoroughly
known, too, and practiced by these people; that iron was mainly used for
decoration; that, whatever their purpose, they kept their glass beads in
stoneware urns within their own locality, and that they manufactured both
earthen and glass ware; that the art of weaving was highly developed among
them; that the stone monuments, it is true, show some dexterity in
handling and are so far instructive, but in other respects evidence a
cultural condition insufficiently matured to grasp the utility of stone
monumental material; and, above all, that the then great and significant
idea of the universe as imaged in the Templum was current in those
days."[25]
Effort has naturally been made to ascribe this civilization to white
people. First it was ascribed to Portuguese influence, but much of it is
evidently older than the Portuguese discovery. Egypt and India have been
evoked and Greece and Carthage. But all these explanations are
far-fetched. If ever a people exhibited unanswerable evidence of
indigenous civilization, it is the west-coast Africans. Undoubtedly they
adapted much that came to them, utilized new ideas, and grew from contact.
But their art and culture is Negro through and through.
Yoruba forms one of the three city groups of West Africa; another is
around Timbuktu, and a third in the Hausa states. The Timbuktu cities have
from five to fifteen hundred towns, while the Yoruba cities have one
hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants and more. The Hausa cities are many
of them important, but few are as large as the Yoruba cities and they lie
farther apart. AH three centers, however, are connected with the Niger,
and the group nearest the coast--that is, the Yoruba cities--has the
greatest numbers of towns, the most developed architectural styles, and
the oldest institutions.
The Yoruba cities are not only different from the Sudanese in population,
but in their social relations. The Sudanese cities were influenced from
the desert and the Mediterranean, and form nuclei of larger surrounding
monarchial states. The Yoruba cities, on the other hand, remained
comparatively autonomous organizations down to modern times, and their
relative importance changed from time to time without developing an
imperialistic idea or subordinating the group to one overpowering city.
This social and industrial state of the Yorubas formerly spread and
wielded great influence. We find Yoruba reaching out and subduing states
like Nupe toward the northward. But the industrial democracy and city
autonomy of Yoruba lent itself indifferently to conquest, and the state
fell eventually a victim to the fanatical Fula Mohammedans and was made a
part of the modern sultanate of Gando.
West of Yoruba on the lower courses of the Niger is Benin, an ancient
state which in 1897 traced its twenty-three kings back one thousand years;
some legends even named a line of sixty kings. It seems probable that
Benin developed the imperial idea and once extended its rule into the
Congo valley. Later and also to the west of the Yoruba come two states
showing a fiercer and ruder culture, Dahomey and Ashanti. The state of
Dahomey was founded by Tacondomi early in the seventeenth century, and
developed into a fierce and bloody tyranny with wholesale murder. The king
had a body of two thousand to five thousand Amazons renowned for their
bravery and armed with rifles. The kingdom was overthrown by the French in
1892-93. Under Sai Tutu, Ashanti arose to power in the seventeenth
century. A military aristocracy with cruel blood sacrifices was formed. By
1816 the king had at his disposal two hundred thousand soldiers. The
Ashanti power was crushed by the English in the war of 1873-74.
In these states and in later years in Benin the whole character of
west-coast culture seems to change. In place of the Yoruban culture, with
its city democracy, its elevated religious ideas, its finely organized
industry, and its noble art, came Ashanti and Dahomey. What was it that
changed the character of the west coast from this to the orgies of war and
blood sacrifice which we read of later in these lands?
There can be but one answer: the slave trade. Not simply the sale of men,
but an organized traffic of such proportions and widely organized
ramifications as to turn the attention and energies of men from nearly all
other industries, encourage war and all the cruelest passions of war, and
concentrate this traffic in precisely that part of Africa farthest from
the ancient Mediterranean lines of trade.
We need not assume that the cultural change was sudden or absolute.
Ancient Yoruba had the cruelty of a semi-civilized land, but it was not
dominant or tyrannical. Modern Benin and Dahomey showed traces of skill,
culture, and industry along with inexplicable cruelty and
bloodthirstiness. But it was the slave trade that turned the balance and
set these lands backward. Dahomey was the last word in a series of human
disasters which began with the defeat of the Askias at Tenkadibou.[26]
From the middle of the fifteenth to the last half of the nineteenth
centuries the American slave trade centered in Guinea and devastated the
coast morally, socially, and physically. European rum and fire arms were
traded for human beings, and it was not until 1787 that any measures were
taken to counteract this terrible scourge. In that year the idea arose of
repatriating stolen Negroes on that coast and establishing civilized
centers to supplant the slave trade. About four hundred Negroes from
England were sent to Sierra Leone, to whom the promoters considerately
added sixty white prostitutes as wives. The climate on the low coast,
however, was so deadly that new recruits were soon needed. An American
Negro, Thomas Peters, who had served as sergeant under Sir Henry Clinton
in the British army in America, went to England seeking an allotment of
land for his fellows. The Sierra Leone Company welcomed him and offered
free passage and land in Sierra Leone to the Negroes of Nova Scotia. As a
result fifteen vessels sailed with eleven hundred and ninety Negroes in
1792. Arriving in Africa, they found the chief white man in control there
so drunk that he soon died of delirium tremens. John Clarkson, however,
brother of Thomas Clarkson, the abolitionist, eventually took the lead,
founded Freetown, and the colony began its checkered career. In 1896 the
colony was saved from insurrection by the exiled Maroon Negroes from
Jamaica. After 1833, when emancipation in English colonies took place,
severer measures against the slave trade was possible and the colony began
to grow. To-day its imports and exports amount to fifteen million dollars
a year.
Liberia was a similar American experiment. In 1816 American
philanthropists decided that slavery was bound to die out, but that the
problem lay in getting rid of the freed Negroes, of which there were then
two hundred thousand in the United States. Accordingly the American
Colonization Society was proposed this year and founded January 1, 1817,
with Bushrod Washington as President. It was first thought to encourage
migration to Sierra Leone, and eighty-eight Negroes were sent, but they
were not welcomed. As a result territory was bought in the present
confines of Liberia, December 15, 1821, and colonists began to arrive. A
little later an African depot for recaptured slaves taken in the
contraband slave trade, provided for in the Act of 1819, was established
and an agent was sent to Africa to form a settlement. Gradually this
settlement was merged with the settlement of the Colonization Society, and
from this union Liberia was finally evolved.
The last white governor of Liberia died in 1841 and was succeeded by the
first colored governor, Joseph J. Roberts, a Virginian. The total
population in 1843 was about twenty-seven hundred and ninety, and with
this as a beginning in 1847 Governor Roberts declared the independence of
the state. The recognition of Liberian independence by all countries
except the United States followed in 1849. The United States, not wishing
to receive a Negro minister, did not recognize Liberia until 1862.
No sooner was the independence of Liberia announced than England and
France began a long series of aggressions to limit her territory and
sovereignty. Considerable territory was lost by treaty, and in the effort
to get capital to develop the rest, Liberia was saddled with a debt of
four hundred thousand dollars, of which she received less than one hundred
thousand dollars in actual cash. Finally the Liberians turned to the
United States for capital and protection. As a result the Liberian customs
have been put under international control and Major Charles Young, the
ranking Negro officer in the United States army, with several colored
assistants, has been put in charge of the making of roads and drilling a
constabulary to keep order in the interior.
To-day Liberia has an area of forty thousand square miles, about three
hundred and fifty miles of coast line, and an estimated total population
of two million of which fifty thousand are civilized. The revenue amounted
in 1913 to $531,500. The imports in 1912 were $1,667,857 and the exports
$1,199,152. The latter consisted chiefly of rubber, palm oil and kernels,
coffee, piassava fiber, ivory, ginger, camwood, and arnotto.
Perhaps Liberia's greatest citizen was the late Edward Wilmot Blyden, who
migrated in early life from the Danish West Indies and became a prophet of
the renaissance of the Negro race.
Turning now from Guinea we pass down the west coast. In 1482 Diego Cam of
Portugal, sailing this coast, set a stone at the mouth of a great river
which he called "The Mighty," but which eventually came to be known by the
name of the powerful Negro kingdom through which it flowed--the Congo.
We must think of the valley of the Congo with its intricate interlacing of
water routes and jungle of forests as a vast caldron shut away at first
from the African world by known and unknown physical hindrances. Then it
was penetrated by the tiny red dwarfs and afterward horde after horde of
tall black men swirled into the valley like a maelstrom, moving usually
from north to east and from south to west.
The Congo valley became, therefore, the center of the making of what we
know to-day as the Bantu nations. They are not a unified people, but a
congeries of tribes of considerable physical diversity, united by the
compelling bond of language and other customs imposed on the conquered by
invading conquerors.
The history or these invasions we must to-day largely imagine. Between two
and three thousand years ago the wilder tribes of Negroes began to move
out of the region south or southeast of Lake Chad. This was always a land
of shadows and legends, where fearful cannibals dwelt and where no
Egyptian or Ethiopian or Sudanese armies dared to go. It is possible,
however, that pressure from civilization in the Nile valley and rising
culture around Lake Chad was at this time reënforced by expansion of the
Yoruba-Benin culture on the west coast. Perhaps, too, developing culture
around the Great Lakes in the east beckoned or the riotous fertility of
the Congo valleys became known. At any rate the movement commenced, now by
slow stages, now in wild forays. There may have been a preliminary
movement from east to west to the Gulf of Guinea. The main movement,
however, was eastward, skirting the Congo forests and passing down by the
Victoria Nyanza and Lake Tanganyika. Here two paths beckoned: the lakes
and the sea to the east, the Congo to the west. A great stream of men
swept toward the ocean and, dividing, turned northward and fought its way
down the Nile valley and into the Abyssinian highlands; another branch
turned south and approached the Zambesi, where we shall meet it again.
Another horde of invaders turned westward and entered the valley of the
Congo in three columns. The northern column moved along the Lualaba and
Congo rivers to the Cameroons; the second column became the industrial and
state-building Luba and Lunda peoples in the southern Congo valley and
Angola; while the third column moved into Damaraland and mingled with
Bushman and Hottentot.
In the Congo valley the invaders settled in village and plain, absorbed
such indigenous inhabitants as they found or drove them deeper into the
forest, and immediately began to develop industry and political
organization. They became skilled agriculturists, raising in some
localities a profusion of cereals, fruit, and vegetables such as manioc,
maize, yams, sweet potatoes, ground nuts, sorghum, gourds, beans, peas,
bananas, and plantains. Everywhere they showed skill in mining and the
welding of iron, copper, and other metals. They made weapons, wire and
ingots, cloth, and pottery, and a widespread system of trade arose. Some
tribes extracted rubber from the talamba root; others had remarkable
breeds of fowl and cattle, and still others divided their people by crafts
into farmers, smiths, boat builders, warriors, cabinet makers, armorers,
and speakers. Women here and there took part in public assemblies and were
rulers in some cases. Large towns were built, some of which required hours
to traverse from end to end.
Many tribes developed intelligence of a high order. Wissmann called the Ba
Luba "a nation of thinkers." Bateman found them "thoroughly and
unimpeachably honest, brave to foolhardiness, and faithful to each other
and to their superiors." One of their kings, Calemba, "a really princely
prince," Bateman says would "amongst any people be a remarkable and indeed
in many respects a magnificent man."[27]
These beginnings of human culture were, however, peculiarly vulnerable to
invading hosts of later comers. There were no natural protecting barriers
like the narrow Nile valley or the Kong mountains or the forests below
Lake Chad. Once the pathways to the valley were open and for hundreds of
years the newcomers kept arriving, especially from the welter of tribes
south of the Sudan and west of the Nile, which rising culture beyond kept
in unrest and turmoil.
Against these intruders there was but one defense, the State. State
building was thus forced on the Congo valley. How early it started we
cannot say, but when the Portuguese arrived in the fifteenth century,
there had existed for centuries a large state among the Ba-Congo, with its
capital at the city now known as San Salvador.
The Negro Mfumu, or emperor, was eventually induced to accept
Christianity. His sons and many young Negroes of high birth were taken to
Portugal to be educated. There several were raised to the Catholic
priesthood and one became bishop; others distinguished themselves at the
universities. Thus suddenly there arose a Catholic kingdom south of the
valley of the Congo, which lasted three centuries, but was partially
overthrown by invading barbarians from the interior in the seventeenth
century. A king of Congo still reigns as pensioner of Portugal, and on the
coast to-day are the remains of the kingdom in the civilized blacks and
mulattoes, who are intelligent traders and boat builders.
Meantime the Luba-Lunda people to the eastward founded Kantanga and other
states, and in the sixteenth century the larger and more ambitious realm
of the Mwata Yamvo. The last of the fourteen rulers of this line was
feudal lord of about three hundred chiefs, who paid him tribute in ivory,
skins, corn, cloth, and salt. His territory included about one hundred
thousand square miles and two million or more inhabitants. Eventually this
state became torn by internal strife and revolt, especially by attacks
from the south across the Congo-Zambesi divide.
Farther north, among the Ba-Lolo and the Ba-Songo, the village policy
persisted and the cannibals of the northeast pressed down on the more
settled tribes. The result was a curious blending of war and industry,
artistic tastes and savage customs.
The organized slave trade of the Arabs penetrated the Congo valley in the
sixteenth century and soon was aiding all the forces of unrest and
turmoil. Industry was deranged and many tribes forced to take refuge in
caves and other hiding places.
Here, as on the west coast, disintegration and retrogression followed, for
as the American traffic lessened, the Arabian traffic increased. When,
therefore, Stanley opened the Congo valley to modern knowledge, Leopold II
of Belgium conceived the idea of founding here a free international state
which was to bring civilization to the heart of Africa. Consequently there
was formed in 1878 an international committee to study the region. Stanley
was finally commissioned to inquire as to the best way of introducing
European trade and culture. "I am charged," he said, "to open and keep
open, if possible, all such districts and countries as I may explore, for
the benefit of the commercial world. The mission is supported by a
philanthropic society, which numbers nobleminded men of several nations.
It is not a religious society, but my instructions are entirely of that
spirit. No violence must be used, and wherever rejected, the mission must
withdraw to seek another field."[28]
The Bula Matadi or Stone Breaker, as the natives called Stanley, threw
himself energetically into the work and had by 1881 built a road past the
falls to the plateau, where thousands of miles of river navigation were
thus opened. Stations were established, and by 1884 Stanley returned armed
with four hundred and fifty "treaties" with the native chiefs, and the new
"State" appealed to the world for recognition.
The United States first recognized the "Congo Free State," which was at
last made a sovereign power under international guarantees by the Congress
of Berlin in the year 1885, and Leopold II was chosen its king. The state
had an area of about nine hundred thousand square miles, with a population
of about thirty million.
One of the first tasks before the new state was to check the Arab slave
traders. The Arabs had hitherto acted as traders and middlemen along the
upper Congo, and when the English and Congo state overthrew Mzidi, the
reigning king in the Kantanga country, a general revolt of the Arabs and
mulattoes took place. For a time, 1892-93, the whites were driven out, but
in a year or two the Arabs and their allies were subdued.
Humanity and commerce, however, did not replace the Arab slave traders.
Rather European greed and serfdom were substituted. The land was
confiscated by the state and farmed out to private Belgian corporations.
The wilder cannibal tribes were formed into a militia to prey on the
industrious, who were taxed with specific amounts of ivory and rubber, and
scourged and mutilated if they failed to pay. Harris declares that King
Leopold's regime meant the death of twelve million natives.
"Europe was staggered at the Leopoldian atrocities, and they were terrible
indeed; but what we, who were behind the scenes, felt most keenly was the
fact that the real catastrophe in the Congo was the desolation and murder
in the larger sense. The invasion of family life, the ruthless destruction
of every social barrier, the shattering of every tribal law, the
introduction of criminal practices which struck the chiefs of the people
dumb with horror--in a word, a veritable avalanche of filth and immorality
overwhelmed the Congo tribes."[29]
So notorious did the exploitation and misrule become that Leopold was
forced to take measures toward reform, and finally in 1909 the Free State
became a Belgian colony. Some reforms have been inaugurated and others may
follow, but the valley of the Congo will long stand as a monument of shame
to Christianity and European civilization.