The Negro by W.E.B. Du Bois

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Dingan and these Boers were soon engaged in a death struggle in which the
Zulus were repulsed and Dingan replaced by Panda. Under this chief there
was something like repose for sixteen years, but in 1856 civil war broke
out between his sons, one of whom, Cetewayo, succeeded his father in 1882.
He fell into border disputes with the English, and the result was one of
the fiercest clashes of Europe and Africa in modern days. The Zulus fought
desperately, annihilating at one time a whole detachment and killing the
young prince Napoleon. But after all it was assagais against machine guns,
and the Zulus were finally defeated at Ulundi, July 4, 1879. Thereupon
Zululand was divided among thirteen semi-independent chiefs and became a
British protectorate.

[Illustration: Ancient Kingdom of Africa]

Since then the best lands have been gradually reoccupied by a large number
of tribes--Kaffirs from the south and Zulus from the north. The tribal
organization, without being actually broken up, has been deprived of its
dangerous features by appointing paid village headmen and transforming the
hereditary chief into a British government official. In Natal there are
about one hundred and seventy tribal chiefs, and nearly half of these have
been appointed by the governor.

Umsilikatsi, who had been driven into Matabililand by the terrible Chaka
in 1828 and defeated by the Dutch in 1837, had finally reestablished his
headquarters in Rhodesia in 1838. Here he introduced the Zulu military
system and terrorized the peaceful and industrious Bechuana populations.
Lobengula succeeded Umsilikatsi in 1870 and, realizing that his power was
waning, began to retreat northward toward the Zambesi. He was finally
defeated by the British and native forces in 1893 and the land was
incorporated into South Central Africa.

The result of all these movements was to break the inhabitants of
Bechuanaland into numerous fragments. There were small numbers of mulatto
Gricquas in the southwest and similar Bastaards in the northwest. The
Hottentots and Bushmen were dispersed into groups and seem doomed to
extinction, the last Hottentot chief being deposed in 1810 and replaced by
an English magistrate. Partially civilized Hottentots still live grouped
together in their kraals and are members of Christian churches. The
Bechuana hold their own in several centers; one is in Basutoland, west of
Natal, where a number of tribes were welded together under the far-sighted
Moshesh into a modern and fairly well civilized nation. In the north part
of Bechuanaland are the self-governing Bamangwato and the Batwana, the
former ruled by Khama, one of the canniest of modern rulers in Africa.

Meantime, in Portuguese territory south of the Zambesi, there arose Gaza,
a contemporary and rival of Chaka. His son, Manikus, was deputed by
Dingan, Chaka's successor, to drive out the Portuguese. This Manikus
failed to do, and to escape vengeance he migrated north of the Limpopo.
Here he established his military kraal in a district thirty-six hundred
and fifty feet above the sea and one hundred and twenty miles inland from
Sofala. From this place his soldiery nearly succeeded in driving the
Portuguese out of East Africa. He was succeeded by his son, Umzila, and
Umzila's brother, Guzana (better known as Gungunyana), who exercised for a
time joint authority. Gungunyana was finally overthrown in November, 1895,
captured, and removed to the Azores.

[Illustration: Races in Africa]

North of the Zambesi, in British territory, the chief role in recent times
has been played by the Bechuana, the first of the Bantu to return
northward after the South African migration. Livingstone found there the
Makolo, who with other tribes had moved northward on account of the
pressure of the Dutch and Zulus below, and by conquering various tribes
in the Zambesi region had established a strong power. This kingdom was
nearly overthrown by the rebellion of the Barotse, and in 1875 the Barotse
kingdom comprised a large territory. To-day their king, Lewanika, rules
directly and indirectly fifty thousand square miles, with a population
between one and two and a half million. They are under a protectorate of
the British.

In Southwest Africa, Hottentot mulattoes crossing from the Cape caused
widespread change. They were strong men and daring fighters and soon
became dominant in what is now German Southwest Africa, where they fought
fiercely with the Bantu Ova-Hereros. Armed with fire arms, these Namakwa
Hottentots threatened Portuguese West Africa, but Germany intervened,
ostensibly to protect missionaries. By spending millions of dollars and
thousands of soldiers Germany has nearly exterminated these brave men.

Thus we have between the years 1400 and 1900 a great period of migration
up to 1750, when Bushmen, Hottentot, Bantu, and Dutch appeared in
succession at Land's End. In the latter part of the eighteenth century we
have the clash of the Hottentots and Bechuana, followed in the nineteenth
century by the terrible wars of Chaka, the Kaffirs, and Matabili. Finally,
in the latter half of the nineteenth century, we see the gradual
subjection of the Kaffir-Zulus and the Bechuana under the English and the
final conquest of the Dutch. The resulting racial problem in South Africa
is one of great intricacy.

To the racial problem has been added the tremendous problem of modern
capital brought by the discovery of gold and diamond mines, so that the
future of the Negro race is peculiarly bound up in developments here at
Land's End, where the ship of the Flying Dutchman beats back and forth on
its endless quest.

FOOTNOTES:

[34] Stowe: Native Races of South Africa, pp. 215-216.

VIII AFRICAN CULTURE

We have followed the history of mankind in Africa down the valley of the
Nile, past Ethiopia to Egypt; we have seen kingdoms arise along the great
bend of the Niger and strive with the ancient culture at its mouth. We
have seen the remnants of mankind at Land's End, the ancient culture at
Punt and Zymbabwe, and followed the invading Bantu east, south, and west
to their greatest center in the vast jungle of the Congo valleys.

We must now gather these threads together and ask what manner of men these
were and how far and in what way they progressed on the road of human
culture.

That Negro peoples were the beginners of civilization along the Ganges,
the Euphrates, and the Nile seems proven. Early Babylon was founded by a
Negroid race. Hammurabi's code, the most ancient known, says "Anna and Bel
called me, Hammurabi the exalted prince, the worshiper of the gods; to
cause justice to prevail in the land, to destroy the wicked, to prevent
the strong from oppressing the weak, to go forth like the sun over the
black-head race, to enlighten the land, and to further the welfare of the
people." The Assyrians show a distinct Negroid strain and early Egypt was
predominantly Negro. These earliest of cultures were crude and primitive,
but they represented the highest attainment of mankind after tens of
thousands of years in unawakened savagery.

It has often been assumed that the Negro is physically inferior to other
races and markedly distinguishable from them; modern science gives no
authority for such an assumption. The supposed inferiority cannot rest on
color,[35] for that is "due to the combined influences of a great number
of factors of environment working through physiological processes," and
"however marked the contrasts may be, there is no corresponding difference
in anatomical structure discoverable."[36] So, too, difference in texture
of hair is a matter of degree, not kind, and is caused by heat, moisture,
exposure, and the like.

The bony skeleton presents no distinctly racial lines of variation.
Prognathism "presents too many individual varieties to be taken as a
distinctive character of race."[37] Difference in physical measurements
does not show the Negro to be a more primitive evolutionary form.
Comparative ethnology to-day affords "no support to the view which sees in
the so-called lower races of mankind a transition stage from beast to
man."[38]

Much has been made of the supposed smaller brain of the Negro race; but
this is as yet an unproved assumption, based on the uncritical measurement
of less than a thousand Negro brains as compared with eleven thousand or
more European brains. Even if future measurement prove the average Negro
brain lighter, the vast majority of Negro brain weights fall within the
same limits as the whites; and finally, "neither size nor weight of the
brain seems to be of importance" as an index of mental capacity. We may,
therefore, say with Ratzel, "There is only one species of man. The
variations are numerous, but do not go deep."[39]

To this we may add the word of the Secretary of the First Races Congress:
"We are, then, under the necessity of concluding that an impartial
investigator would be inclined to look upon the various important peoples
of the world as to all intents and purposes essentially equal in
intellect, enterprise, morality, and physique."[40]

If these conclusions are true, we should expect to see in Africa the
human drama play itself out much as in other lands, and such has actually
been the fact. At the same time we must expect peculiarities arising from
the physiography of the land--its climate, its rainfall, its deserts, and
the peculiar inaccessibility of the coast.

Three principal zones of habitation appear: first, the steppes and deserts
around the Sahara in the north and the Kalahari desert in the south;
secondly, the grassy highlands bordering the Great Lakes and connecting
these two regions; thirdly, the forests and rivers of Central and West
Africa. In the deserts are the nomads, and the Pygmies are in the forest
fastnesses. Herdsmen and their cattle cover the steppes and highlands,
save where the tsetse fly prevents. In the open forests and grassy
highlands are the agriculturists.

Among the forest farmers the village is the center of life, while in the
open steppes political life tends to spread into larger political units.
Political integration is, however, hindered by an ease of internal
communication almost as great as the difficulty of reaching outer worlds
beyond the continent. The narrow Nile valley alone presented physical
barriers formidable enough to keep back the invading barbarians of the
south, and even then with difficulty. Elsewhere communication was all too
easy. For a while the Congo forests fended away the restless, but this
only temporarily.

On the whole Africa from the Sahara to the Cape offered no great physical
barrier to the invader, and we continually have whirlwinds of invading
hosts rushing now southward, now northward, from the interior to the coast
and from the coast inland, and hurling their force against states,
kingdoms, and cities. Some resisted for generations, some for centuries,
some but a few years. It is, then, this sudden change and the fear of it
that marks African culture, particularly in its political aspects, and
which makes it so difficult to trace this changing past. Nevertheless
beneath all change rests the strong substructure of custom, religion,
industry, and art well worth the attention of students.

Starting with agriculture, we learn that "among all the great groups of
the 'natural' races, the Negroes are the best and keenest tillers of the
ground. A minority despise agriculture and breed cattle; many combine both
occupations. Among the genuine tillers the whole life of the family is
taken up in agriculture, and hence the months are by preference called
after the operations which they demand. Constant clearings change forests
to fields, and the ground is manured with the ashes of the burnt thicket.
In the middle of the fields rise the light watch-towers, from which a
watchman scares grain-eating birds and other thieves. An African
cultivated landscape is incomplete without barns. The rapidity with which,
when newly imported, the most various forms of cultivation spread in
Africa says much for the attention which is devoted to this branch of
economy. Industries, again, which may be called agricultural, like the
preparation of meal from millet and other crops, also from cassava, the
fabrication of fermented drinks from grain, or the manufacture of cotton,
are widely known and sedulously fostered."[41]

Buecher reminds us of the deep impression made upon travelers when they
sight suddenly the well-attended fields of the natives on emerging from
the primeval forests. "In the more thickly populated parts of Africa these
fields often stretch for many a mile, and the assiduous care of the Negro
women shines in all the brighter light when we consider the insecurity of
life, the constant feuds and pillages, in which no one knows whether he
will in the end be able to harvest what he has sown. Livingstone gives
somewhere a graphic description of the devastations wrought by slave
hunts; the people were lying about slain, the dwellings were demolished;
in the fields, however, the grain was ripening and there was none to
harvest it."[42]

Sheep, goat, and chickens are domestic animals all over Africa, and Von
Franzius considers Africa the home of the house cattle and the Negro as
the original tamer. Northeastern Africa especially is noted for
agriculture, cattle raising, and fruit culture. In the eastern Sudan, and
among the great Bantu tribes extending from the Sudan down toward the
south, cattle are evidences of wealth; one tribe, for instance, having so
many oxen that each village had ten or twelve thousand head. Lenz (1884),
Bouet-Williaumez (1848), Hecquard (1854), Bosman (1805), and Baker (1868)
all bear witness to this, and Schweinfurth (1878) tells us of great cattle
parks with two to three thousand head and of numerous agricultural and
cattle-raising tribes. Von der Decken (1859-61) described the paradise of
the dwellers about Kilimanjaro--the bananas, fruit, beans and peas, cattle
raising with stall feed, the fertilizing of the fields, and irrigation.
The Negroid Gallas have seven or eight cattle to each inhabitant.
Livingstone bears witness to the busy cattle raising of the Bantus and
Kaffirs. Hulub (1881) and Chapman (1868) tell of agriculture and fruit
raising in South Africa. Shutt (1884) found the tribes in the southwestern
basin of the Congo with sheep, swine, goats, and cattle. On this
agricultural and cattle-raising economic foundation has arisen the
organized industry of the artisan, the trader, and the manufacturer.

While the Pygmies, still living in the age of wood, make no iron or stone
implements, they seem to know how to make bark cloth and fiber baskets and
simple outfits for hunting and fishing. Among the Bushmen the art of
making weapons and working in hides is quite common. The Hottentots are
further advanced in the industrial arts, being well versed in the
manufacture of clothing, weapons, and utensils. In the dressing of skins
and furs, as well as in the plaiting of cords and the weaving of mats, we
find evidences of their workmanship. In addition they are good workers in
iron and copper, using the sheepskin bellows for this purpose. The
Ashantis of the Gold Coast know how to make "cotton fabrics, turn and
glaze earthenware, forge iron, fabricate instruments and arms, embroider
rugs and carpets, and set gold and precious stones."[43] Among the people
of the banana zone we find rough basket work, coarse pottery, grass cloth,
and spoons made of wood and ivory. The people of the millet zone, because
of uncertain agricultural resources, quite generally turn to
manufacturing. Charcoal is prepared by the smiths, iron is smelted, and
numerous implements are manufactured. Among them we find axes, hatchets,
hoes, knives, nails, scythes, and other hardware. Cloaks, shoes, sandals,
shields, and water and oil vessels are made from leather which the natives
have dressed. Soap is manufactured in the Bautschi district, glass is
made, formed, and colored by the people of Nupeland, and in almost every
city cotton is spun and woven and dyed. Barth tells us that the weaving of
cotton was known in the Sudan as early as the eleventh century. There is
also extensive manufacture of wooden ware, tools, implements, and
utensils.

In describing particular tribes, Baker and Felkin tell of smiths of
wonderful adroitness, goatskins prepared better than a European tanner
could do, drinking cups and kegs of remarkable symmetry, and polished clay
floors. Schweinfurth says, "The arrow and the spear heads are of the
finest and most artistic work; their bristlelike barbs and points are
baffling when one knows how few tools these smiths have." Excellent wood
carving is found among the Bongo, Ovambo, and Makololo. Pottery and
basketry and careful hut building distinguish many tribes. Cameron (1877)
tells of villages so clean, with huts so artistic, that, save in book
knowledge, the people occupied no low plane of civilization. The Mangbettu
work both iron and copper. "The masterpieces of the Monbutto [Mangbettu]
smiths are the fine chains worn as ornaments, and which in perfection of
form and fineness compare well with our best steel chains." Shubotz in
1911 called the Mangbettu "a highly cultivated people" in architecture and
handicraft. Barth found copper exported from Central Africa in competition
with European copper at Kano.

Nor is the iron industry confined to the Sudan. About the Great Lakes and
other parts of Central Africa it is widely distributed. Thornton says,
"This iron industry proves that the East Africans stand by no means on so
low a plane of culture as many travelers would have us think. It is
unnecessary to be reminded what a people without instruction, and with the
rudest tools to do such skilled work, could do if furnished with steel
tools." Arrows made east of Lake Nyanza were found to be nearly as good as
the best Swedish iron in Birmingham. From Egypt to the Cape, Livingstone
assures us that the mortar and pestle, the long-handled axe, the goatskin
bellows, etc., have the same form, size, etc., pointing to a migration
southwestward. Holub (1879), on the Zambesi, found fine workers in iron
and bronze. The Bantu huts contain spoons, wooden dishes, milk pails,
calabashes, handmills, and axes.

Kaffirs and Zulus, in the extreme south, are good smiths, and the latter
melt copper and tin together and draw wire from it, according to Kranz
(1880). West of the Great Lakes, Stanley (1878) found wonderful examples
of smith work: figures worked out of brass and much work in copper.
Cameron (1878) saw vases made near Lake Tanganyika which reminded him of
the amphorae in the Villa of Diomedes, Pompeii. Horn (1882) praises tribes
here for iron and copper work. Livingstone (1871) passed thirty smelting
houses in one journey, and Cameron came across bellows with valves, and
tribes who used knives in eating. He found tribes which no Europeans had
ever visited, who made ingots of copper in the form of the St. Andrew's
cross, which circulated even to the coast. In the southern Congo basin
iron and copper are worked; also wood and ivory carving and pottery making
are pursued. In equatorial West Africa, Lenz and Du Chaillu (1861) found
iron workers with charcoal, and also carvers of bone and ivory. Near Cape
Lopez, Huebbe-Schleiden found tribes making ivory needles inlaid with
ebony, while the arms and dishes of the Osaka are found among many tribes
even as far as the Atlantic Ocean. Wilson (1856) found natives in West
Africa who could repair American watches.

Gold Coast Negroes make gold rings and chains, forming the metal into all
kinds of forms. Soyaux says, "The works in relief which natives of Lower
Guinea carve with their own knives out of ivory and hippopotamus teeth are
really entitled to be called works of art, and many wooden figures of
fetishes in the Ethnographical Museum of Berlin show some understanding of
the proportions of the human body." Great Bassam is called by Hecquard the
"Fatherland of Smiths." The Mandingo in the northwest are remarkable
workers in iron, silver, and gold, we are told by Mungo Park (1800), while
there is a mass of testimony as to the work in the north-west of Africa in
gold, tin, weaving, and dyeing. Caille found the Negroes in Bambana
manufacturing gunpowder (1824-28), and the Hausa make soap; so, too,
Negroes in Uganda and other parts have made guns after seeing European
models.

So marked has been the work of Negro artisans and traders in the
manufacture and exchange of iron implements that a growing number of
archeologists are disposed to-day to consider the Negro as the originator
of the art of smelting iron. Gabriel de Mortillet (1883) declared Negroes
the only iron users among primitive people. Some would, therefore, argue
that the Negro learned it from other folk, but Andree declares that the
Negro developed his own "Iron Kingdom." Schweinfurth, Von Luschan, Boaz,
and others incline to the belief that the Negroes invented the smelting of
iron and passed it on to the Egyptians and to modern Europe.

Boaz says, "It seems likely that at a time when the European was still
satisfied with rude stone tools, the African had invented or adopted the
art of smelting iron. Consider for a moment what this invention has meant
for the advance of the human race. As long as the hammer, knife, saw,
drill, the spade, and the hoe had to be chipped out of stone, or had to be
made of shell or hard wood, effective industrial work was not impossible,
but difficult. A great progress was made when copper found in large
nuggets was hammered out into tools and later on shaped by melting, and
when bronze was introduced; but the true advancement of industrial life
did not begin until the hard iron was discovered. It seems not unlikely
that the people who made the marvelous discovery of reducing iron ores by
smelting were the African Negroes. Neither ancient Europe, nor ancient
western Asia, nor ancient China knew the iron, and everything points to
its introduction from Africa. At the time of the great African discoveries
toward the end of the past century, the trade of the blacksmith was found
all over Africa, from north to south and from east to west. With his
simple bellows and a charcoal fire he reduced the ore that is found in
many parts of the continent and forged implements of great usefulness and
beauty."[44]

Torday has argued recently, "I feel convinced by certain arguments that
seem to prove to my satisfaction that we are indebted to the Negro for the
very keystone of our modern civilization and that we owe him the discovery
of iron. That iron could be discovered by accident in Africa seems beyond
doubt: if this is so in other parts of the world, I am not competent to
say. I will only remind you that Schweinfurth and Petherick record the
fact that in the northern part of East Africa smelting furnaces are worked
without artificial air current and, on the other hand, Stuhlmann and
Kollmann found near Victoria Nyanza that the natives simply mixed powdered
ore with charcoal and by introduction of air currents obtained the metal.
These simple processes make it simple that iron should have been
discovered in East or Central Africa. No bronze implements have ever been
found in black Africa; had the Africans received iron from the Egyptians,
bronze would have preceded this metal and all traces of it would not have
disappeared. Black Africa was for a long time an exporter of iron, and
even in the twelfth century exports to India and Java are recorded by
Idrisi.

"It is difficult to imagine that Egypt should have obtained it from
Europe where the oldest find (in Hallstadt) cannot be of an earlier period
than 800 B.C., or from Asia, where iron is not known before 1000 B.C., and
where, in the times of Ashur Nazir Pal, it was still used concurrently
with bronze, while iron beads have been only recently discovered by
Messrs. G.A. Wainwright and Bushe Fox in a predynastic grave, and where a
piece of this metal, possibly a tool, was found in the masonry of the
great pyramid."[45]

The Negro is a born trader. Lenz says, "our sharpest European merchants,
even Jews and Armenians, can learn much of the cunning and trade of the
Negroes." We know that the trade between Central Africa and Egypt was in
the hands of Negroes for thousands of years, and in early days the cities
of the Sudan and North Africa grew rich through Negro trade.

Leo Africanus, writing of Timbuktu in the sixteenth century, said, "It is
a wonder to see what plentie of Merchandize is daily brought hither and
how costly and sumptuous all things be.... Here are many shops of
artificers and merchants and especially of such as weave linnen and
cloth."

Long before cotton weaving was a British industry, West Africa and the
Sudan were supplying a large part of the world with cotton cloth. Even
to-day cities like Kuka on the west shore of Lake Chad and Sokota are
manufacturing centers where cotton is spun and woven, skins tanned,
implements and iron ornaments made.

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