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 rediscoveredrediscovered 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.