AFRICAN NATIONS—DISTRIBUTION OF RACES—ARTS—MANNERS AND CHARACTER—SUPERSTITIONS—TREATMENT OF THE DEAD—REGARD FOR THE SPIRITS OF THE DEPARTED—WITCHCRAFT—ORDEAL—MILITARY FORCE—AMAZONS—CANNIBALISM.
Whence came the African races, and how did they get where they are? These are questions not easily answered, and are such as might have been put with the same hesitation, and in view of the same puzzling circumstances, three thousand years ago. On the monuments of Thebes, in Upper Egypt, of the times of Thothmes III., three varieties of the African form of man are distinctly portrayed. There is the ruling race of Egypt, red-skinned and massy-browed. There are captives not unlike them, but of a paler color, with their hair tinged blue; and there is the negro, bearing his tribute of skins, living animals, and ivory; with the white eyeball, reclining forehead, woolly hair, and other normal characteristics of his type.
Provided that these representations are correct, and that the colors have not changed, the Egyptian has been greatly modified as to his tint of skin; whether we consider them as represented by the Copts, or the Fellahs of that country at present, the former bearing clearer traces of the more ancient form. The population of Africa, as it is at present, seems to be chiefly derivable from the other two races. There are, however, circumstances difficult to reconcile, in the present state of our knowledge, with any hypothesis as to the dispersion of man.
Southern and equatorial Africa includes tribes speaking dialects of two widely-spread tongues. One of them, the Zingian, or the Zambezan, is properly distinguished by the excess to which it carries repetition of certain signs of thought, giving to inflections a character different from what they exhibit in any other language. This tongue, however, bears, in other respects, a strong relationship to the many, but, perhaps, not mutually dissimilar dialects, of northern Africa. It may be considered as the form of speech belonging to the true or most normally developed African race.
The other of these two tongues offers also circumstances of peculiar interest. We may consider it, first, as it is found in use by the Hottentot or Bushman race, of South Africa. It has even among them regular and well-constructed forms of inflection, and as distinguishing it from the negro dialects, it has the sexual form of gender, or that which arises from the poetical or personifying view of all objects—considering them as endowed with life, and dividing them into males and females. In this respect it is analogous to the Galla, the Abyssinian, and the Coptic. Nay, at this distant extremity of Africa, not only is the form of gender thus the same with that of the people who raised the wonderful monuments of Egypt, but that monumental tongue has its signs of gender, or the terminations indicating that relation, identical with those of the Hottentot race.
We have, therefore, the evidence of a race of men, striking through the other darker ones, on perhaps nearly a central line, from one end of the continent to the other. The poor despised Bushman, forming for himself, with sticks and grass, a lair among the low-spreading branches of a protea, or nestling at sunset in a shallow hole, amid the warm sand of the desert, with wife and little ones like a covey of birds, sheltered by some ragged sheepskins from the dew of the clear sky, has an ancestral and mental relationship to the builder of the pyramids and the colossal temples of Egypt, and to the artists who adorned them. He looks on nature with a like eye, and stereotypes in his language the same conclusions derived from it. He has in his words vivified external things, as they did, according to that form which, in our more logical tongues, we name poetical metaphor. The sun—“Soorees”—is to him a female, the productive mother of all organic life; and rivers, as Kuis-eep, Gar-eep, are endowed with masculine activity and strength.
To this scattered family of man, which ought properly to be called the Ethiopic race, as distinguished from the negro, may probably be ascribed the fierce invasions from the centre, eastward and westward, under the names of Galla Giagas, and other appellations, which occasionally convulsed both sides of Africa; and, perhaps, by intermixture of races, gave occasion to much of the diversity found among native tribes, in disposition, manners, and language. The localities occupied by it have become insulated through the intrusion of the negro. Its southern division, or the Hottentot tribes, were being pressed off into an angle, and apparently in the process of extinction or absorption by the Zambezan Kaffirs from the north and east, when Europeans met and rolled them away into a small corner of desert.
Egypt was evidently the artery through which population poured into the broad expanse of Africa. That the progenitors of the negro race first entered there, and that another race followed subsequently, is one mode of disposing of the question, which, however, only removes its difficulties a little farther back.
This supposition is unnecessary. Any number of human families living together, comprises varieties of constitution, affording a source from which, by the force of external circumstances, the extreme variations may be educed. If we examine critically the representations of the oldest inhabitants of Egypt, we shall see in the form of man which they exhibit, a combination of characteristics, or a provision for breaking into varieties corresponding to the conditions of external nature in the interior regions.
The dissatisfied, the turbulent, the defeated and the criminal would in these earliest times be thrown off from a settled community in Egypt, to penetrate into the southern and western regions. They would generally die there. Many ages of such attempts might pass before those individuals reached the marshes of the great central plateau, whose constitutions suited that position. Many of them, moreover, would die childless. Early death to the adult, and certain death to the immature, would sweep families off, as the streams bounding from southern Atlas intrude on the desert, and perish there. The many immigrants to whom all external things were adverse would be constantly weeded out; so it would be for generation after generation, until the few remained, whom heat, exposure, toil, marsh vapor, and fever left as an assorted and acclimated root of new nations.
Such seems to have been the process in Africa by which a declension of our nature took place from Egypt in two directions; one through the central plains down to the marshes of the Gaboon or the Congo river, where the aberrant peculiarities of the negro seem most developed; and the other along the mountains, by the Nile and the Zambeze, until the Ethiopian sank into the Hottentot.
The sea does not deal kindly with Africa, for it wastes or guards the shores with an almost unconquerable surf. Tides are small, and rivers not safely penetrable. The ocean offered to the negro nothing but a little food, procured with some trouble and much danger. Hence ocean commerce was unknown to them. Only in the smallest and most wretched canoes did they venture forth to catch a few fish. If strangers sought for regions of prosperity, riches, or powerful government, their views were directed to the interior. Benin, in 1484, confessed its subordination to a great internal sovereign, who only gave responses from behind a curtain, or permitted one of his feet to be visible to his dependents, as a mark of gracious favor. It was European commerce in gold and slaves, received for the coveted goods and arms they bought, which ultimately gave these monarchs an interest in the sea-shore.
Cruelty and oppression were everywhere, as they still are. It is not easy for us to conceive how a living man can be moulded to the unhesitating submission in which a negro subject lives, so that it should be to him a satisfaction to live and die, or suffer or rejoice, just as his sovereign wills. It can be accounted for only from the prevalence and the desolating fury of wars, which rendered perfect uniformity of will and movement indispensable for existence. It is not so easy to offer any probable reason for the eagerness to share in cruelty which glows in a negro’s bosom. Its appalling character consisted rather in the amount of bloodshed which gratified the negro, than in the studious prolongation of pain. He offers in this respect a contrast to the cold, demoniac vengeance of the North American Indian. Superstition probably excused or justified to him some of his worst practices. Human sacrifices have been common everywhere. There was no scruple at cruelty when it was convenient. The mouths of the victims were gagged by knives run through their cheeks; and captives among the southern tribes were beaten with clubs in order to prevent resistance, or “to take away their strength,” as the natives expressed it, that they might be more easily hurried to the “hill of death,” or authorized place of execution.
The negro arts are respectable, and would have been more so had not disturbance and waste come with the slave-trade. They weave coarse narrow cloths, and dye them. They work in wood and metals. The gold chains obtained at Wydah, of native manufacture, are well wrought. Nothing can be more correctly formed for its purpose than the small barbed lancet-looking point of a Bushman’s arrow. Those who shave their heads or beards have a neat, small razor, double-edged, or shaped like a shovel. Arts improve from the coast towards the northeast.
Their normal form of a house is round, with a conical roof. The pastoral people of the south have it of a beehive form, covered with mats; the material is rods and flags. If the whole negro nations, however, were swept away, there would not remain a monument on the face of their continent to tell that such a race of men had occupied it.
One curious relation to external nature seems to have prevailed throughout all Africa, consisting in a special reverence, among different tribes, for certain selected objects. From one of these objects the tribe frequently derives its national appellation: if it is a living thing, they avoid killing it or using it as food. Serpents, particularly the gigantic pythons or boas, are everywhere reverenced. Some traces of adoration offered to the sun have been met with on the west coast; but, generally speaking, the superstitions of Africa are far less intellectual. These and many of their other practices have a common characteristic in the disappearance of all trace of their origin among the tribes observing them. To all inquiries they have the answer ready, that their fathers did so. There is in this, however, no great assurance of real antiquity, for tradition extends but a short way back.
A reliance on grisgris, or amulets, worn about the person, belongs to Africa, perhaps from very ancient ages. Egypt was probably its source: a kind of literary character has been given to it by the Mohammedans. Throughout inland central Africa, sentences written on scraps of paper or parchment have a marketable value. An impostor or devotee may gain authority and profit in this way. As we pass southward we find this superstition sinking lower and lower in debasement: men there really cover or load themselves with all kinds of trumpery, and have a real and hearty confidence in bones, buttons, scraps, or almost any conceivable thing, as a security against any conceivable evil. The Kroomen, even, with their purser’s names, of Jack Crowbar, Head Man, and Flying-Jib, Bottle of Beer, Pea Soup, Poor Fellow, Prince Will, and others, taken on board the “Perry,” in Monrovia, were found now and then with their sharks’, tigers’ and panthers’ teeth, and small shells, on their ankles and wrists; although most of these people, from contact with the Liberians, have seen the folly of this practice, and dispensed with their charms.
The Africans also have stationary fetishes, consisting in sacred places and sacred things. They have practices to inspire terror, or gain reverence in respect to which it is somewhat difficult to decide whether the actors in them are impostors or sincere. Idols in the forms of men, rude and frightful enough, are among these fetishes, but it cannot be said that idolatry of this kind prevails extensively in the country.
In two respects they look towards the invisible: they dread a superhuman power, and they fear and worship it as being a measureless source of evil. It is scarcely correct to call this Devil-worship, for this is a title of contrast, presuming that there has been a choice of the evil in preference to the good. The fact in their case seems to be, that good in will, or good in action, are ideas foreign to their minds. Selfishness cannot be more intense, nor more exclusive of all kindness and generosity or charitable affection, than it is generally found among these barbarians. The inconceivableness of such motives to action has often been found a strong obstacle to the influence of the Christian missionary. They can worship nothing good, because they have no expectation of good from any thing powerful. They have mysterious words or mutterings, equivalent to what we term incantations, which is the meaning of the Portuguese word from which originated the term fetish.
The other reference of their intellect to invisible things consists in acknowledging the continued existence of the dead, and paying reverence to the spirits of their forefathers. This leads to great cruelty. Men of rank at their death are presumed to require attendance, and be gratified with companionship. This event, therefore, produces the murder of wives and slaves, to afford them suitable escort and service in the other world. From the strange mixture of the material and spiritual common to men in that barbarian condition, the bodies or the blood of the slain appear to be the essentials of these requirements. Thus, also, the utmost horror is felt at decapitation, or at the severing of limbs from the body after death. It is revenge, as much as desire to perpetuate the remembrance of victory, which makes them eager for the skulls and jaw-bones of their enemies, so that in a royal metropolis, walls, and floors, and thrones, and walking-sticks, are everywhere lowering with the hollow eyes of the dead. These sad, bare and whitened emblems of mortality and revenge present a curious and startling spectacle, cresting and festooning the red clay walls of Kumassi, the Ashantee capital.
Such belief leads to strange vagaries in practice. They sympathize with the departed, as subject still to common wants and ruled by common affections. A negro man of Tahou would show his regard for the desires of the dead by sitting patiently to hold a spread umbrella over the head of a corpse. The dead man’s mouth, too, was stuffed with rice and fowl, and in cold weather a fire was kept burning in the hut for the benefit of their deceased friend. They consulted his love of ornament, also, for the top of his head and his brow were stained red, his nose and cheeks yellow, and the lower jaw white; and fantastic figures of different colors were daubed over his black body.
Dingaan, the Zulu chief, was exceedingly fond of ornament. He used to boast that the Zulus were the only people who understood dress. Sometimes he came forward painted with all kinds of stripes and crosses, in a very bizarre style. The people took all this gravely, saying that “he was king and could do what he pleased,” and they were content with his taste. It is this unreflecting character which astounds us in savages. They never made it a question whether the garniture of the king or of the corpse had any thing unsuitable.
All along the coasts, from the equator to the north of the Gulf of Guinea, they did not eat without throwing a portion on the ground for those who had died. Sometimes they dug a small hole for these purposes, or they had one in the hut, and into it they poured what they thought would be acceptable. They conceived that they had sensible evidence of the inclinations of the dead. In lifting up or carrying a corpse on their shoulders, men may not attend to the exact direction of their own muscular movements or those of their associates. There are necessarily shocks, jolts and struggles, from the movements of their associates. People will, in some cases, pull different ways when hustled together. All these unconscious movements, not unlike the “table turnings” of the present era, were taken as expressive of the will of the dead man, as to how and whither he was to be carried.
Their belief, as we have seen, influenced their life: it was earnest and heartfelt. When the king of Wydah, in 1694, heard that Smith, the chief of the English factory, was dangerously ill with fever, he sent his fetishman to aid in the recovery. The priest went to the sick man, and solemnly announced that he came to save him. He then marched to the white man’s burial-ground with a provision of brandy, oil, and rice, and made a loud oration to those that slept there. “O you dead white people, you wish to have Smith among you; but our king likes him, and it is not his will to let him go to be among you.” Passing on to the grave of Wyburn, the founder of the factory, he addressed him, “You, captain of all the whites who are here! Smith’s sickness is a piece of your work. You want his company, for he is a good man; but our king does not want to lose him, and you can’t have him yet.” Then digging a hole over the grave, he poured into it the articles which he had brought, and told him that if he needed these things, he gave them with good-will, but he must not expect to get Smith. The factor died, notwithstanding. The ideas here are not very dissimilar to those of the old Greeks.
It is remarkable, however, that in tracing this negro race along the continent towards the south, we find these notions and practices to fade away, and at last disappear. Southeast of the desert, along the Orange River, there is scarcely a trace of them.
The dread of witchcraft prevails universally. In general, the occurrence of disease is ascribed to this source. In the north they fear a supernatural influence; in the south this is traced to no superhuman origin, but is conceived to be a power which any one may possess and exercise. Among these tribes, the man presumed to be guilty of this crime is a public enemy (as were the witches occasionally found among our own venerated pious, and public-spirited puritan forefathers—a blemish in their character due to the general ignorance of the age), to be removed if possible, as a lion, tiger, or pestilence would be annihilated. Even the force of civilized law, when introduced among them, has not saved a man under this stigma from being secretly murdered by the terrified people. It has yielded only to the enlightening influence of Christian missionaries.
These delusions are often rendered the support of tyranny by the chiefs, for the property of the accused is confiscated. Scenes sad and horrible are exhibited as the consequence of a chief’s illness. In order to force a discovery of the means employed, and to get the witchcraft counteracted, some native, who is generally rich enough to be worth plundering, is seized and tortured, until, as an old author expresses it, “he dies, or the chief recovers.” They extend the horror of the infliction, by calling in the aid of vermin life, destined in nature to devour corruption, by scattering handfuls of ants over the scorched skin and quivering flesh of their victim.
Generally among the Guinea negroes, the ordeal employed to detect this crime, is to compel the accused to drink a decoction of sassy-wood. This may be rendered harmless or destructive, according to the object of the fetishman. It is oftener his purpose to destroy than to save, and great cruelty has in almost all cases been found to accompany the trial.
Plunder is the reward of the soldier. In the central regions this was increased by the sale of captives. Captives of both sexes were the chief’s property. Thus the warriors looked to the acquisition of wives from the chief, as the recompense of successful wars. They announced this as their aim in their preparatory songs. The chief was, therefore, to them the source of every thing. Their whole thought responded to his movements, and sympathized with his greatness and success.
Women in Africa are everywhere slaves, or the slaves of slaves. The burdens of agricultural labor fall on them. When a chief is announced as having hundreds or thousands of wives, it signifies really that he has so many female slaves. There does not appear to be any tribe in Africa, in which it is not the rule of society, that a man may have as many such wives as he can procure. The number is of course, except in the case of the supreme chief, but few. The female retinue of a sovereign partakes everywhere of the reverence due to its head. The chief and his household are a kind of divinity to the people. His name is the seal of their oath. The possibility of his dying must never be expressed, nor the name of death uttered in his presence. Names of things appearing to interfere with the sacredness of his, must be changed. His women must not be met or looked at.
In war, as long as success depends alone on individual prowess, the strong and athletic only can be successful soldiers. Where the weapons, rather than the person are the source of power, docility and endurance are qualities more valuable than strength. In these the weaker sex, in savage life, surpasses the other; hence women have appeared in the world as soldiers. It was probably the introduction of the arrow, killing at a distance, as superior in effect and safety to the rude clubs and spears of earlier conflict, which originated the Amazons of old history. The same fact is resulting in Africa from the introduction of the musket. Females thus armed were found, commonly as royal guards, in the beginning of the last century. The practice still continues in the central regions.
In Dahomey a considerable proportion of the national troops consists of armed and disciplined females. They are known as being royal women, strictly and watchfully kept from any communication with men, and seem to have been trained, through discipline and the force of co-operation, to the accomplishment of enterprises, from which the tumultuous warriors of a native army would shrink. A late English author (Duncan) says, “I have seen them, all well armed, and generally fine, strong, healthy women, and doubtless capable of enduring great fatigue. They seem to use the long Danish musket with as much ease as one of our grenadiers does his firelock, but not of course with the same quickness, as they are not trained to any particular exercise; but on receiving the word, make an attack like a pack of hounds, with great swiftness. Of course they would be useless against disciplined troops, if at all approaching to the same numbers. Still their appearance is more martial than the generality of the men, and if undertaking a campaign, I should prefer the female to the male soldiers of this country.”
The same author thus describes a field review of these Amazons, which he witnessed: “I was conducted to a large space of broken ground, where fourteen days had been occupied in erecting three immense prickly piles of green bush. These three clumps or piles, of a sort of strong brier or thorn, armed with the most dangerous prickles, were placed in line, occupying about four hundred yards, leaving only a narrow passage between them, sufficient merely to distinguish each clump appointed to each regiment. These piles were about seventy feet wide and eight feet high. Upon examining them, I could not persuade myself that any human being without boots or shoes would, under any circumstances, attempt to pass over so dangerous a collection of the most efficiently armed plants I had ever seen.”
The Amazons wear a blue striped cotton surtout, manufactured by the natives, and a pair of trowsers falling just below the knee. The cartridge-box is girded around the loins.
The drums and trumpets soon announced the approach of three or four thousand Amazons. “The Apadomey soldiers (female) made their appearance at about two hundred yards from, or in front of, the first pile, where they halted with shouldered arms. In a few seconds the word for attack was given, and a rush was made towards the pile with a speed beyond conception, and in less than one minute the whole body had passed over this immense pile, and had taken the supposed town. Each of the other piles was passed with the same rapidity, at intervals of twenty minutes.” “When a person is killed in battle, the skin is taken from the head, and kept as a trophy of valor. I counted seven hundred scalps pass in this manner. The captains of each corps (female), in passing, again presented themselves before his majesty, and received the king’s approval of their conduct.” These heroines, however, say that they are no longer women, but men.
The people of Ashantee and Dahomey are considerably in advance of those on the coast. They cultivate the soil extensively, manufacture cotton cloth, and build comparatively good houses. They have musical instruments, which, if rude, are loud enough. Their drums and horns add to the stateliness of their ceremonies. Of such exhibitions they are very fond, and consider it a national honor if they can render them impressive to strangers. The Dahomeans are about one hundred miles in the interior, west of the Niger.
Necessity has occasionally driven some of the southern tribes to adopt the practice of cannibalism. There it has ever excited horror and disgust. Those who have practised it are distinguished by an appellation setting them apart from other men. Among some of the central tribes it has prevailed rather, however, in all appearance, from superstitious motives, or as an exhibition of triumphant revenge, than in the revolting form which it assumes among some of the Polynesian islanders.