The Negro by W.E.B. Du Bois

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The result was endless movement and migration both in ancient and modern
days, which makes the cultural history of the Great Lakes region very
difficult to understand. Three great elements are, however, clear: first,
the Egyptian element, by the northward migration of the Negro ancestors of
predynastic Egypt and the southern conquests and trade of dynastic Egypt;
second, the Semitic influence from Arabia and Persia; third, the Negro
influences from western and central Africa.

The migration of the Bantu is the first clearly defined movement of modern
times. As we have shown, they began to move southward at least a thousand
years before Christ, skirting the Congo forests and wandering along the
Great Lakes and down to the Zambesi. What did they find in this land?

We do not know certainly, but from what we do know we may reconstruct the
situation in this way: the primitive culture of the Hottentots of Punt had
been further developed by them and by other stronger Negro stocks until it
reached a highly developed culture. Widespread agriculture, and mining of
gold, silver, and precious stones started a trade that penetrated to Asia
and North Africa. This may have been the source of the gold of the Ophir.

The state that thus arose became in time strongly organized; it employed
slave labor in crushing the hard quartz, sinking pits, and carrying
underground galleries; it carried out a system of irrigation and built
stone buildings and fortifications. There exists to-day many remains of
these building operations in the Kalahari desert and in northern Rhodesia.
Five hundred groups, covering over an area of one hundred and fifty
thousand square miles, lie between the Limpopo and Zambesi rivers. Mining
operations have been carried on in these plains for generations, and one
estimate is that at least three hundred and seventy-five million dollars'
worth of gold had been extracted. Some have thought that the older
workings must date back to one or even three thousand years before the
Christian era.

"There are other mines," writes De Barros in the seventeenth century,[30]
"in a district called Toroa, which is otherwise known as the kingdom of
Butua, whose ruler is a prince, by name Burrow, a vassal of Benomotapa.
This land is near the other which we said consisted of extensive plains,
and those ruins are the oldest that are known in that region. They are all
in a plain, in the middle of which stands a square fortress, all of
dressed stones within and without, well wrought and of marvelous size,
without any lime showing the joinings, the walls of which are over
twenty-five hands thick, but the height is not so great compared to the
thickness. And above the gateway of that edifice is an inscription which
some Moorish [Arab] traders who were there could not read, nor say what
writing it was. All these structures the people of this country call
Symbaoe [Zymbabwe], which with them means a court, for every place where
Benomotapa stays is so called."

Later investigation has shown that these buildings were in many cases
carefully planned and built fortifications. At Niekerk, for instance, nine
or ten hills are fortified on concentric walls thirty to fifty feet in
number, with a place for the village at the top. The buildings are forts,
miniature citadels, and also workshops and cattle kraals. Iron implements
and handsome pottery were found here, and close to the Zambesi there are
extraordinary fortifications. Farther south at Inyanga there is less
strong defense, and at Umtali there are no fortifications, showing that
builders feared invasion from the north.

These people worked in gold, silver, tin, copper, and bronze and made
beautiful pottery. There is evidence of religious significance in the
buildings, and what is called the temple was the royal residence and
served as a sort of acropolis. The surrounding residences in the valley
were evidently occupied by wealthy traders and were not fortified. Here
the gold was received from surrounding districts and bartered with
traders.

As usual there have been repeated attempts to find an external and
especially an Asiatic origin for this culture. So far, however,
archeological research seems to confirm its African origin. The
implements, weapons, and art are characteristically African and there is
no evident connection with outside sources. How far back this civilization
dates it is difficult to say, a great deal depending upon the dating of
the iron age in South Africa. If it was the same as in the Mediterranean
regions, the earliest limit was 1000 B.C.; it might, however, have been
much earlier, especially if, as seems probable, the use of iron originated
in Africa. On the other hand the culmination of this culture has been
placed by some as late as the modern middle ages.

What was it that overthrew this civilization? Undoubtedly the same sort of
raids of barbarous warriors that we have known in our day. For instance,
in 1570 there came upon the country of Mozambique, farther up the coast,
"such an inundation of pagans that they could not be numbered. They came
from that part of Monomotapa where is the great lake from which spring
these great rivers. They left no other signs of the towns they passed but
the heaps of ruins and the bones of inhabitants." So, too, it is told how
the Zimbas came, "a strange people never before seen there, who, leaving
their own country, traversed a great part of this Ethiopia like a scourge
of God, destroying every living thing they came across. They were twenty
thousand strong and marched without children or women," just as four
hundred years later the Zulu impi marched. Again in 1602 a horde of people
came from the interior called the Cabires, or cannibals. They entered the
kingdom of Monomotapa, and the reigning king, being weak, was in great
terror. Thus gradually the Monomotapa fell, and its power was scattered
until the Kaffir-Zulu raids of our day.[31]

The Arab writer, Macoudi, in the tenth century visited the East African
coast somewhere north of the equator. He found the Indian Sea at that time
frequented by Arab and Persian vessels, but there were no Asiatic
settlements on the African shore. The Bantu, or as he calls them, Zenji,
inhabited the country as far south as Sofala, where they bordered upon the
Bushmen. These Bantus were under a ruler with the dynastic title of
Waklimi. He was paramount over all the other tribes of the north and could
put three hundred thousand men in the field. They used oxen as beasts of
burden and the country produced gold in abundance, while panther skin was
largely used for clothing. Ivory was sold to Asia and the Bantu used iron
for personal adornment instead of gold or silver. They rode on their oxen,
which ran with great speed, and they ate millet and honey and the flesh of
animals.

Inland among the Bantu arose later the line of rulers called the
Monomotapa among the gifted Makalanga. Their state was very extensive,
ranging from the coast far into the interior and from Mozambique down to
the Limpopo. It was strongly organized, with feudatory allied states, and
carried on an extensive commerce by means of the traders on the coast. The
kings were converted to nominal Christianity by the Portuguese.

There are indications of trade between Nupe in West Africa and Sofala on
the east coast, and certainly trade between Asia and East Africa is
earlier than the beginning of the Christian era. The Asiatic traders
settled on the coast and by means of mulatto and Negro merchants brought
Central Africa into contact with Arabia, India, China, and Malaysia.

The coming of the Asiatics was in this wise: Zaide, great-grandson of Ali,
nephew and son-in-law of Mohammed, was banished from Arabia as a heretic.
He passed over to Africa and formed temporary settlements. His people
mingled with the blacks, and the resulting mulatto traders, known as the
Emoxaidi, seem to have wandered as far south as the equator. Soon other
Arabian families came over on account of oppression and founded the towns
of Magadosho and Brava, both not far north of the equator. The first town
became a place of importance and other settlements were made. The
Emoxaidi, whom the later immigrants regarded as heretics, were driven
inland and became the interpreting traders between the coast and the
Bantu. Some wanderers from Magadosho came into the Port of Sofala and
there learned that gold could be obtained. This led to a small Arab
settlement at that place.

Seventy years later, and about fifty years before the Norman conquest of
England, certain Persians settled at Kilwa in East Africa, led by Ali, who
had been despised in his land because he was the son of a black Abyssinian
slave mother. Kilwa, because of this, eventually became the most important
commercial station on the East African coast, and in this and all these
settlements a very large mulatto population grew up, so that very soon the
whole settlement was indistinguishable in color from the Bantu.

In 1330 Ibn Batuta visited Kilwa. He found an abundance of ivory and some
gold and heard that the inhabitants of Kilwa had gained victories over the
Zenji or Bantu. Kilwa had at that time three hundred mosques and was
"built of handsome houses of stone and lime, and very lofty, with their
windows like those of the Christians; in the same way it has streets, and
these houses have got terraces, and the wood-work is with the masonry,
with plenty of gardens, in which there are many fruit trees and much
water."[32] Kilwa after a time captured Sofala, seizing it from Magadosho.
Eventually Kilwa became mistress of the island of Zanzibar, of Mozambique,
and of much other territory. The forty-third ruler of Kilwa after Ali was
named Abraham, and he was ruling when the Portuguese arrived. The latter
reported that these people cultivated rice and cocoa, built ships, and had
considerable commerce with Asia. All the people, of whatever color, were
Mohammedans, and the richer were clothed in gorgeous robes of silk and
velvet. They traded with the inland Bantus and met numerous tribes,
receiving gold, ivory, millet, rice, cattle, poultry, and honey.

On the islands the Asiatics were independent, but on the main lands south
of Kilwa the sheiks ruled only their own people, under the overlordship of
the Bantus, to whom they were compelled to pay large tribute each year.

Vasco da Gama doubled the Cape of Good Hope in 1497 and went north on the
east coast as far as India. In the next ten years the Portuguese had
occupied more than six different points on that coast, including
Sofala.[33]

Thus civilization waxed and waned in East Africa among prehistoric
Negroes, Arab and Persian mulattoes on the coast, in the Zend or Zeng
empire of Bantu Negroes, and later in the Bantu rule of the Monomotapa.
And thus, too, among later throngs of the fiercer, warlike Bantu, the
ancient culture of the land largely died. Yet something survived, and in
the modern Bantu state, language, and industry can be found clear links
that establish the essential identity of the absorbed peoples with the
builders of Zymbabwe.

So far we have traced the history of the lands into which the southward
stream of invading Bantus turned, and have followed them to the Limpopo
River. We turn now to the lands north from Lake Nyassa.

The aboriginal Negroes sustained in prehistoric time invasions from the
northeast by Negroids of a type like the ancient Egyptians and like the
modern Gallas, Masai, and Somalis. To these migrations were added attacks
from the Nile Negroes to the north and the Bantu invaders from the south.
This has led to great differences among the groups of the population and
in their customs. Some are fierce mountaineers, occupying hilly plateaus
six thousand feet above the sea level; others, like the Wa Swahili, are
traders on the coast. There are the Masai, chocolate-colored and
frizzly-haired, organized for war and cattle lifting; and Negroids like
the Gallas, who, blending with the Bantus, have produced the race of
modern Uganda.

It was in this region that the kingdom of Kitwara was founded by the Galla
chief, Kintu. About the beginning of the nineteenth century the empire was
dismembered, the largest share falling to Uganda. The ensuing history of
Uganda is of great interest. When King Mutesa came to the throne in 1862,
he found Mohammedan influences in his land and was induced to admit
English Protestants and French Catholics. Uganda thereupon became an
extraordinary religious battlefield between these three beliefs. Mutesa's
successor, Mwanga, caused an English bishop to be killed in 1885,
believing (as has since proven quite true) that the religion he offered
would be used as a cloak for conquest. The final result was that, after
open war between the religions, Uganda was made an English protectorate in
1894.

The Negroes of Uganda are an intelligent people who had organized a
complex feudal state. At the head stood the king, and under him twelve
feudal lords. The present king, Daudi Chua, is the young grandson of
Mutesa and rules under the overlordship of England.

Many things show the connection between Egypt and this part of Africa. The
same glass beads are found in Uganda and Upper Egypt, and similar canoes
are built. Harps and other instruments bear great resemblance. Finally the
Bahima, as the Galla invaders are called, are startlingly Egyptian in
type; at the same time they are undoubtedly Negro in hair and color.
Perhaps we have here the best racial picture of what ancient Egyptian and
upper Nile regions were in predynastic times and later.

Thus in outline was seen the mission of The People--La Bantu as they
called themselves. They migrated, they settled, they tore down, and they
learned, and they in turn were often overthrown by succeeding tribes of
their own folk. They rule with their tongue and their power all Africa
south of the equator, save where the Europeans have entered. They have
never been conquered, although the gold and diamond traders have sought to
debauch them, and the ivory and rubber capitalists have cruelly wronged
their weaker groups. They are the Africans with whom the world of
to-morrow must reckon, just as the world of yesterday knew them to its
cost.

FOOTNOTES:

[30] Quoted in Bent: _Ruined Cities of Mashonaland_, pp. 203 ff.

[31] Cf. "Ethiopia Oriental," by J. Dos Santos, in Theal's _Records of
South Africa_, Vol. VII.

[32] Barbosa, quoted in Keane, II, 482.

[33] It was called Sofala, from an Arabic word, and may be associated with
the Ophir of Solomon. So, too, the river Sabi, a little off Sofala, may be
associated with the name of the Queen of Sheba, whose lineage was supposed
to be perpetuated in the powerful Monomotapa as well as the Abyssinians.

VII THE WAR OF RACES AT LAND'S END

Primitive man in Africa is found in the interior jungles and down at
Land's End in South Africa. The Pygmy people in the jungles represent
to-day a small survival from the past, but a survival of curious interest,
pushed aside by the torrent of conquest. Also pushed on by these waves of
Bantu conquest, moved the ancient Abatwa or Bushmen. They are small in
stature, yellow in color, with crisp-curled hair. The traditions of the
Bushmen say that they came southward from the regions of the Great Lakes,
and indeed the king and queen of Punt, as depicted by the Egyptians, were
Bushmen or Hottentots.

Their tribes may be divided, in accordance with their noticeable artistic
talents, into the painters and the sculptors. The sculptors entered South
Africa by moving southward through the more central portions of the
country, crossing the Zambesi, and coming down to the Cape. The painters,
on the other hand, came through Damaraland on the west coast; when they
came to the great mountain regions, they turned eastward and can be traced
as far as the mountains opposite Delagoa Bay. The mass of them settled
down in the lower part of the Cape and in the Kalahari desert. The
painters were true cave dwellers, but the sculptors lived in large
communities on the stony hills, which they marked with their carvings.

These Bushmen believed in an ancient race of people who preceded them in
South Africa. They attributed magic power to these unknown folk, and said
that some of them had been translated as stars to the sky. Before their
groups were dispersed the Bushmen had regular government. Tribes with
their chiefs occupied well-defined tracts of country and were subdivided
into branch tribes under subsidiary chiefs. The great cave represented the
dignity and glory of the entire tribe.

The Bushmen suffered most cruelly in the succeeding migrations and
conquests of South Africa. They fought desperately in self-defense; they
saw their women and children carried into bondage and they themselves
hunted like wild beasts. Both savage and civilized men appropriated their
land. Still they were brave people. "In this struggle for existence their
bitterest enemies, of whatever shade of color they might be, were forced
to make an unqualified acknowledgement of the courage and daring they so
invariably exhibited."[34]

Here, to a remote corner of the world, where, as one of their number said,
they had supposed that the only beings in the world were Bushmen and
lions, came a series of invaders. It was the outer ripples of civilization
starting far away, the indigenous and external civilizations of Africa
beating with great impulse among the Ethiopians and the Egyptian mulattoes
and Sudanese Negroes and Yorubans, and driving the Bantu race southward.
The Bantus crowded more and more upon the primitive Bushmen, and probably
a mingling of the Bushmen and the Bantus gave rise to the Hottentots.

The Hottentots, or as they called themselves, Khoi Khoin (Men of Men),
were physically a stronger race than the Abatwa and gave many evidences of
degeneration from a high culture, especially in the "phenomenal
perfection" of a language which "is so highly developed, both in its rich
phonetic system, as represented by a very delicately graduated series of
vowels and diphthongs, and in its varied grammatical structure, that
Lepsius sought for its affinities in the Egyptian at the other end of the
continent."

When South Africa was first discovered there were two distinct types of
Hottentot. The more savage Hottentots were simply large, strong Bushmen,
using weapons superior to the Bushmen, without domestic cattle or sheep.
Other tribes nearer the center of South Africa were handsomer in
appearance and raised an Egyptian breed of cattle which they rode.

In general the Hottentots were yellow, with close-curled hair, high cheek
bones, and somewhat oblique eyes. Their migration commenced about the end
of the fourteenth century and was, as is usual in such cases, a scattered,
straggling movement. The traditions of the Hottentots point to the lake
country of Central Africa as their place of origin, whence they were
driven by the Bechuana tribes of the Bantu. They fled westward to the
ocean and then turned south and came upon the Bushmen, whom they had only
partially subdued when the Dutch arrived as settlers in 1652.

The Dutch "Boers" began by purchasing land from the Hottentots and then,
as they grew more powerful, they dispossessed the dark men and tried to
enslave them. There grew up a large Dutch-Hottentot class. Indeed the
filtration of Negro blood noticeable in modern Boers accounts for much
curious history. Soon after the advent of the Dutch some of the
Hottentots, of whom there were not more than thirty or forty thousand, led
by the Korana clans, began slowly to retreat northward, followed by the
invading Dutch and fighting the Dutch, each other, and the wretched
Bushmen. In the latter part of the eighteenth century the Hottentots had
reached the great interior plain and met the on-coming outposts of the
Bantu nations.

The Bechuana, whom the Hottentots first met, were the most advanced of the
Negro tribes of Central Africa. They had crossed the Zambesi in the
fourteenth or fifteenth century; their government was a sort of feudal
system with hereditary chiefs and vassals; they were careful
agriculturists, laid out large towns with great regularity, and were the
most skilled of smiths. They used stone in building, carved on wood, and
many of them, too, were keen traders. These tribes, coming southward,
occupied the east-central part of South Africa comprising modern
Bechuanaland. Apparently they had started from the central lake country
somewhere late in the fifteenth century, and by the middle of the
eighteenth century one of their great chiefs, Tao, met the on-coming
Hottentots.

The Hottentots compelled Tao to retreat, but the mulatto Gricquas arrived
from the south, and, allying themselves with the Bechuana, stopped the
rout. The Gricquas sprang from and took their name from an old Hottentot
tribe. They were led by Kok and Barends, and by adding other elements they
became, partly through their own efforts and partly through the efforts of
the missionaries, a community of fairly well civilized people. In
Gricqualand West the mulatto Gricquas, under their chiefs Kok and
Waterboer, lived until the discovery of diamonds.

The Griquas and Bechuana tribes were thus gradually checking the
Hottentots when, in the nineteenth century, there came two new
developments: first, the English took possession of Cape Colony, and the
Dutch began to move in larger numbers toward the interior; secondly, a
newer and fiercer element of the Bantu tribes, the Zulu-Kaffirs, appeared.
The Kaffirs, or as they called themselves, the Amazosas, claimed descent
from Zuide, a great chief of the fifteenth century in the lake country.
They are among the tallest people in the world, averaging five feet ten
inches, and are slim, well-proportioned, and muscular. The more warlike
tribes were usually clothed in leopard or ox skins. Cattle formed their
chief wealth, stock breeding and hunting and fighting their main pursuits.
Mentally they were men of tact and intelligence, with a national religion
based upon ancestor worship, while their government was a patriarchal
monarchy limited by an aristocracy and almost feudal in character. The
common law which had grown up from the decisions of the chiefs made the
head of the family responsible for the conduct of its branches, a village
for all its residents, and the clan for all its villages. Finally there
was a paramount chief, who was the civil and military father of his
people. These people laid waste to the coast regions and in 1779 came in
contact with the Dutch. A series of Dutch-Kaffir wars ensued between 1779
and 1795 in which the Dutch were hard pressed.

In 1806 the English took final possession of Cape Colony. At that time
there were twenty-five thousand Boers, twenty-five thousand pure and mixed
Hottentots, and twenty-five thousand slaves secured from the east coast.
Between 1811 and 1877 there were six Kaffir-English wars. One of these in
1818 grew out of the ignorant interference of the English with the Kaffir
tribal system; then there came a terrible war between 1834 and 1835,
followed by the annexation of all the country as far as the Kei River. The
war of the Axe (1846-48) led to further annexation by the British.

Hostilities broke out again in 1856 and 1863. In the former year,
despairing of resistance to invading England, a prophet arose who advised
the wholesale destruction of all Kaffir property except weapons, in order
that this faith might bring back their dead heroes. The result was that
almost a third of the nation perished from hunger. Fresh troubles occurred
in 1877, when the Ama-Xosa confederacy was finally broken up, and to-day
gradually these tribes are passing from independence to a state of mild
vassalage to the British.

Meantime the more formidable part of the Zulu-Kaffirs had been united
under the terrible Chief Chaka. He had organized a military system, not a
new one by any means, but one of which we hear rumors back in the lake
regions in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. McDonald says, "There
has probably never been a more perfect system of discipline than that by
which Chaka ruled his army and kingdom. At a review an order might be
given in the most unexpected manner, which meant death to hundreds. If the
regiment hesitated or dared to remonstrate, so perfect was the discipline
and so great the jealousy that another was ready to cut them down. A
warrior returning from battle without his arms was put to death without
trial. A general returning unsuccessful in the main purpose of his
expedition shared the same fate. Whoever displeased the king was
immediately executed. The traditional courts practically ceased to exist
so far as the will and action of the tyrant was concerned." With this army
Chaka fell on tribe after tribe. The Bechuana fled before him and some
tribes of them were entirely destroyed. The Hottentots suffered severely
and one of his rival Zulu tribes under Umsilikatsi fled into Matabililand,
pushing back the Bechuana. By the time the English came to Port Natal,
Chaka was ruling over the whole southeastern seaboard, from the Limpopo
River to Cape Colony, including the Orange and Transvaal states and the
whole of Natal. Chaka was killed in 1828 and was eventually succeeded by
his brother Dingan, who reigned twelve years. It was during Dingan's reign
that England tried to abolish slavery in Cape Colony, but did not pay
promptly for the slaves, as she had promised; the result was the so-called
"Great Trek," about 1834, when thousands of Boers went into the interior
across the Orange and Vaal rivers.

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