The Negro by W.E.B. Du Bois

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14

"Travelers," says Buecher, "have often observed this tribal or local
development of industrial technique. 'The native villages,' relates a
Belgian observer of the Lower Congo, 'are often situated in groups. Their
activities are based upon reciprocality, and they are to a certain extent
the complements of one another. Each group has its more or less strongly
defined specialty. One carries on fishing; another produces palm wine; a
third devotes itself to trade and is broker for the others, supplying the
community with all products from outside; another has reserved to itself
work in iron and copper, making weapons for war and hunting, various
utensils, etc. None may, however, pass beyond the sphere of its own
specialty without exposing itself to the risk of being universally
proscribed.'"

From the Loango Coast, Bastian tells of a great number of centers for
special products of domestic industry. "Loango excels in mats and fishing
baskets, while the carving of elephants' tusks is specially followed in
Chilungo. The so-called Mafooka hats with raised patterns are drawn
chiefly from the bordering country of Kakongo and Mayyume. In Bakunya are
made potter's wares, which are in great demand; in Basanza, excellent
swords; in Basundi, especially beautiful ornamented copper rings; on the
Congo, clever wood and tablet carvings; in Loango, ornamented clothes and
intricately designed mats; in Mayumbe, clothing of finely woven mat-work;
in Kakongo, embroidered hats and also burnt clay pitchers; and among the
Bayakas and Mantetjes, stuffs of woven grass."[46]

A native Negro student tells of the development of trade among the
Ashanti. "It was a part of the state system of Ashanti to encourage trade.
The king once in every forty days, at the Adai custom, distributed among a
number of chiefs various sums of gold dust with a charge to turn the same
to good account. These chiefs then sent down to the coast caravans of
tradesmen, some of whom would be their slaves, sometimes some two or three
hundred strong, to barter ivory for European goods, or buy such goods with
gold dust, which the king obtained from the royal alluvial workings. Down
to 1873 a constant stream of Ashanti traders might be seen daily wending
their way to the merchants of the coast and back again, yielding more
certain wealth and prosperity to the merchants of the Gold Coast and Great
Britain than may be expected for some time yet to come from the mining
industry and railway development put together. The trade chiefs would, in
due time, render a faithful account to the king's stewards, being allowed
to retain a fair portion of the profit. In the king's household, too, he
would have special men who directly traded for him. Important chiefs
carried on the same system of trading with the coast as did the king. Thus
every member of the state, from the king downward, took an active interest
in the promotion of trade and in the keeping open of trade routes into the
interior."[47]

The trade thus encouraged and carried on in various parts of West Africa
reached wide areas. From the Fish River to Kuka, and from Lagos to
Zanzibar, the markets have become great centers of trade, the leading
implement to civilization. Permanent markets are found in places like
Ujiji and Nyangwe, where everything can be bought and sold from
earthenware to wives; from the one to three thousand traders flocked here.

"How like is the market traffic, with all its uproar and sound of human
voices, to one of our own markets! There is the same rivalry in praising
the goods, the violent, brisk movements, the expressive gesture, the
inquiring, searching glance, the changing looks of depreciation or
triumph, of apprehension, delight, approbation. So says Stanley. Trade
customs are not everywhere alike. If when negotiating with the Bangalas of
Angola you do not quickly give them what they want, they go away and do
not come back. Then perhaps they try to get possession of the coveted
object by means of theft. It is otherwise with the Songos and Kiokos, who
let you deal with them in the usual way. To buy even a small article you
must go to the market; people avoid trading anywhere else. If a man says
to another; 'Sell me this hen' or 'that fruit,' the answer as a rule will
be, 'Come to the market place.' The crowd gives confidence to individuals,
and the inviolability of the visitor to the market, and of the market
itself, looks like an idea of justice consecrated by long practice. Does
not this remind us of the old Germanic 'market place'?"[48]

Turning now to Negro family and social life we find, as among all
primitive peoples, polygamy and marriage by actual or simulated purchase.
Out of the family develops the typical African village organization, which
is thus described in Ashanti by a native Gold Coast writer: "The headman,
as his name implies, is the head of a village community, a ward in a
township, or of a family. His position is important, inasmuch as he has
directly to deal with the composite elements of the general bulk of the
people.

"It is the duty of the head of a family to bring up the members thereof in
the way they should go; and by 'family' you must understand the entire
lineal descendants of a materfamilias, if I may coin a convenient phrase.
It is expected of him by the state to bring up his charge in the knowledge
of matters political and traditional. It is his work to train up his wards
in the ways of loyalty and obedience to the powers that be. He is held
responsible for the freaks of recalcitrant members of his family, and he
is looked to to keep them within bounds and to insist upon conformity of
their party with the customs, laws, and traditional observances of the
community. In early times he could send off to exile by sale a troublesome
relative who would not observe the laws of the community.

"It is a difficult task that he is set to, but in this matter he has
all-powerful helpers in the female members of the family, who will be
either the aunts, or the sisters, or the cousins, or the nieces of the
headman; and as their interests are identical with his in every
particular, the good women spontaneously train up their children to
implicit obedience to the headman, whose rule in the family thus becomes a
simple and an easy matter. 'The hand that rocks the cradle rules the
world.' What a power for good in the native state system would the mothers
of the Gold Coast and Ashanti become by judicious training upon native
lines!

"The headman is par excellence the judge of his family or ward. Not only
is he called upon to settle domestic squabbles, but frequently he sits
judge over more serious matters arising between one member of the ward and
another; and where he is a man of ability and influence, men from other
wards bring him their disputes to settle. When he so settles disputes, he
is entitled to a hearing fee, which, however, is not so much as would be
payable in the regular court of the king or chief.

"The headman is naturally an important member of his company and often is
a captain thereof. When he combines the two offices of headman and
captain, he renders to the community a very important service. For in
times of war, where the members of the ward would not serve cordially
under a stranger, they would in all cases face any danger with their own
kinsman as their leader. The headman is always succeeded by his uterine
brother, cousin, or nephew--the line of succession, that is to say,
following the customary law."[49]

We may contrast this picture with the more warlike Bantus of Southeast
Africa. Each tribe lived by itself in a town with from five to fifteen
thousand inhabitants, surrounded by gardens of millet, beans, and
watermelon. Beyond these roamed their cattle, sheep, and goats. Their
religion was ancestor worship with sacrifice to spirits and the dead, and
some of the tribes made mummies of the corpses and clothed them for
burial. They wove cloth of cotton and bark, they carved wood and built
walls of unhewn stone. They had a standing military organization, and the
tribes had their various totems, so that they were known as the Men of
Iron, the Men of the Sun, the Men of the Serpents, Sons of the Corn
Cleaners, and the like. Their system of common law was well conceived and
there were organized tribunals of justice. In difficult cases precedents
were sought and learned antiquaries consulted. At the age of fifteen or
sixteen the boys were circumcised and formed into guilds. The land was
owned by the tribe and apportioned to the chief by each family, and the
main wealth of the tribe was in its cattle.

In general, among the African clans the idea of private property was but
imperfectly developed and never included land. The main mass of visible
wealth belonged to the family and clan rather than to the individual; only
in the matter of weapons and ornaments was exclusive private ownership
generally recognized.

The government, vested in fathers and chiefs, varied in different tribes
from absolute despotisms to limited monarchies, almost republican. Viewing
the Basuto National Assembly in South Africa, Lord Bryce recently wrote,
"The resemblance to the primary assemblies of the early peoples of Europe
is close enough to add another to the arguments which discredit the theory
that there is any such thing as an Aryan type of institutions."[50]

While women are sold into marriage throughout Africa, nevertheless their
status is far removed from slavery. In the first place the tracing of
relationships through the female line, which is all but universal in
Africa, gives the mother great influence. Parental affection is very
strong, and throughout Negro Africa the mother is the most influential
councilor, even in cases of tyrants like Chaka or Mutesa.

"No mother can love more tenderly or be more deeply beloved than the Negro
mother. Robin tells of a slave in Martinique who, with his savings, freed
his mother instead of himself. 'Everywhere in Africa,' writes Mungo Park,
'I have noticed that no greater affront can be offered a Negro than
insulting his mother. 'Strike me,' cried a Mandingo to his enemy, 'but
revile not my mother!' ... The Herero swears 'By my mother's tears!'.. The
Angola Negroes have a saying, 'As a mist lingers on the swamps, so lingers
the love of father and mother.'"[51]

Black queens have often ruled African tribes. Among the Ba-Lolo, we are
told, women take part in public assemblies where all-important questions
are discussed. The system of educating children among such tribes as the
Yoruba is worthy of emulation by many more civilized peoples.

Close knit with the family and social organization comes the religious
life of the Negro. The religion of Africa is the universal animism or
fetishism of primitive peoples, rising to polytheism and approaching
monotheism chiefly, but not wholly, as a result of Christian and Islamic
missions. Of fetishism there is much misapprehension. It is not mere
senseless degradation. It is a philosophy of life. Among primitive Negroes
there can be, as Miss Kingsley reminds us, no such divorce of religion
from practical life as is common in civilized lands. Religion is life, and
fetish an expression of the practical recognition of dominant forces in
which the Negro lives. To him all the world is spirit. Miss Kingsley says,
"If you want, for example, to understand the position of man in nature
according to fetish, there is, as far as I know, no clearer statement of
it made than is made by Goethe in his superb 'Prometheus.'"[52] Fetish is
a severely logical way of accounting for the world in terms of good and
malignant spirits.

"It is this power of being able logically to account for everything that
is, I believe, at the back of the tremendous permanency of fetish in
Africa, and the cause of many of the relapses into it by Africans
converted to other religions; it is also the explanation of the fact that
white men who live in the districts where death and danger are everyday
affairs, under a grim pall of boredom, are liable to believe in fetish,
though ashamed of so doing. For the African, whose mind has been soaked in
fetish during his early and most impressionable years, the voice of fetish
is almost irresistible when affliction comes to him."[53]

Ellis tells us of the spirit belief of the Ewe people, who believe that
men and all nature have the indwelling "Kra," which is immortal; that the
man himself after death may exist as a ghost, which is often conceived of
as departed from the "Kra," a shadowy continuing of the man. Bryce,
speaking of the Kaffirs of South Africa, says, "To the Kaffirs, as to the
most savage races, the world was full of spirits--spirits of the rivers,
the mountains, and the woods. Most important were the ghosts of the dead,
who had power to injure or help the living, and who were, therefore,
propitiated by offerings at stated periods, as well as on occasions when
their aid was especially desired. This kind of worship, the worship once
most generally diffused throughout the world, and which held its ground
among the Greeks and Italians in the most flourishing period of ancient
civilization, as it does in China and Japan to-day, was, and is, virtually
the religion of the Kaffirs."[54]

African religion does not, however, stop with fetish, but, as in the case
of other peoples, tends toward polytheism and monotheism. Among the
Yoruba, for instance, Frobenius shows that religion and city-state go hand
in hand.

"The first experienced glance will here detect the fact that this nation
originally possessed a clear and definite organization so duly ordered and
so logical that we but seldom meet with its like among all the peoples of
the earth. And the basic idea of every clan's progeniture is a powerful
God; the legitimate order in which the descendants of a particular clan
unite in marriage to found new families, the essential origin of every
new-born babe's descent in the founder of its race and its consideration
as a part of the God in Chief; the security with which the newly wedded
wife not only may, but should, minister to her own God in an unfamiliar
home."[55]

The Yoruba have a legend of a dying divinity. "This people ... give
evidence of a generalized system; a theocratic scheme, a well-conceived
perceptible organization, reared in rhythmically proportioned manner."

Miss Kingsley says, "The African has a great Over God."[56] Nassau, the
missionary, declares, "After more than forty years' residence among these
tribes, fluently using their language, conversant with their customs,
dwelling intimately in their huts, associating with them in the various
relations of teacher, pastor, friend, master, fellow-traveler, and guest,
and in my special office as missionary, searching after their religious
thought (and therefore being allowed a deeper entrance into the arcana of
their soul than would be accorded to a passing explorer), I am able
unhesitatingly to say that among all the multitude of degraded ones with
whom I have met, I have seen or heard of none whose religious thought was
only a superstition.

"Standing in the village street, surrounded by a company whom their chief
has courteously summoned at my request, when I say to him, 'I have come to
speak to your people,' I do not need to begin by telling them that there
is a God. Looking on that motley assemblage of villagers,--the bold, gaunt
cannibal with his armament of gun, spear, and dagger; the artisan with
rude adze in hand, or hands soiled at the antique bellows of the village
smithy; women who have hasted from their kitchen fire with hands white
with the manioc dough or still grasping the partly scaled fish; and
children checked in their play with tiny bow and arrow or startled from
their dusty street pursuit of dog or goat,--I have yet to be asked, 'Who
is God?'"[57]

The basis of Egyptian religion was "of a purely Nigritian character,"[58]
and in its developed form Sudanese tribal gods were invoked and venerated
by the priests. In Upper Egypt, near the confines of Ethiopia, paintings
repeatedly represent black priests conferring on red Egyptian priests the
instruments and symbols of priesthood. In the Sudan to-day Frobenius
distinguishes four principal religions: first, earthly ancestor worship;
next, the social cosmogony of the Atlantic races; third, the religion of
the Bori, and fourth, Islam. The Bori religion spreads from Nubia as far
as the Hausa, and from Lake Chad in the Niger as far as the Yoruba. It is
the religion of possession and has been connected by some with Asiatic
influences.

From without have come two great religious influences, Islam and
Christianity. Islam came by conquest, trade, and proselytism. As a
conqueror it reached Egypt in the seventh century and had by the end of
the fourteenth century firm footing in the Egyptian Sudan. It overran the
central Sudan by the close of the seventeenth century, and at the
beginning of the nineteenth century had swept over Senegambia and the
whole valley of the Niger down to the Gulf of Guinea. On the east Islam
approached as a trader in the eighth century; it spread into Somaliland
and overran Nubia in the fourteenth century. To-day Islam dominates Africa
north of ten degrees north latitude and is strong between five and ten
degrees north latitude. In the east it reaches below the Victoria Nyanza.

Christianity early entered Africa; indeed, as Mommsen says, "It was
through Africa that Christianity became the religion of the world.
Tertullian and Cyprian were from Carthage, Arnobius from Sicca Veneria,
Lactantius, and probably in like manner Minucius Felix, in spite of their
Latin names, were natives of Africa, and not less so Augustine. In Africa
the Church found its most zealous confessors of the faith and its most
gifted defenders."[59]

The Africa referred to here, however, was not Negroland, but Africa above
the desert, where Negro blood was represented in the ancient Mediterranean
race and by intercourse across the desert. On the other hand Christianity
was early represented in the valley of the Nile under "the most holy pope
and patriarch of the great city of Alexandria and of all of the land of
Egypt, of Jerusalem, the holy city, of Nubia, Abyssinia, and Pentapolis,
and all the preaching of St. Mark." This patriarchate had a hundred
bishoprics in the fourth century and included thousands of black
Christians. Through it the Cross preceded the Crescent in some of the
remotest parts of black Africa.

All these beginnings were gradually overthrown by Islam except among the
Copts in Egypt, and in Abyssinia. The Portuguese in the sixteenth century
began to replant the Christian religion and for a while had great success,
both on the east and west coasts. Roman Catholic enterprise halted in the
eighteenth century and the Protestants began. To-day the west coast is
studded with English and German missions, South Africa is largely
Christian through French and English influence, and the region about the
Great Lakes is becoming christianized. The Roman Catholics have lately
increased their activities, and above all the Negroes of America have
entered with their own churches and with the curiously significant
"Ethiopian" movement.

Coming now to other spiritual aspects of African culture, we can speak at
present only in a fragmentary way. Roughly speaking, Africa can be divided
into two language zones: north of the fifth degree of north latitude is
the zone of diversity, with at least a hundred groups of widely divergent
languages; south of the line there is one minor language
(Bushman-Hottentot), spoken by less than fifty thousand people, and
elsewhere the predominant Bantu tongue with its various dialects, spoken
by at least fifty million. The Bantu tongue, which thus rules all Central,
West, and South Africa, is an agglutinative tongue which makes especial
use of prefixes. The hundreds of Negro tongues or dialects in the north
represent most probably the result of war and migration and the breaking
up of ancient centers of culture. In Abyssinia and the great horn of East
Africa the influence of Semitic tongues is noted. Despite much effort on
the part of students, it has been impossible to show any Asiatic origin
for the Egyptian language. As Sergi maintains, "everything favors an
African origin."[60] The most brilliant suggestion of modern days links
together the Egyptian of North Africa and the Hottentot and Bushmen
tongues of South Africa.

Language was reduced to writing among the Egyptians and Ethiopians and to
some extent elsewhere in Africa. Over 100 manuscripts of Ethiopian and
Ethiopic-Arabian literature are extant, including a version of the Bible
and historical chronicles. The Arabic was used as the written tongue of
the Sudan, and Negroland has given us in this tongue many chronicles and
other works of black authors. The greatest of these, the Epic of the Sudan
(Tarikh-es-Soudan), deserves to be placed among the classics of all
literature. In other parts of Africa there was no written language, but
there was, on the other hand, an unusual perfection of oral tradition
through bards, and extraordinary efficiency in telegraphy by drum and
horn.

The folklore and proverbs of the African tribes are exceedingly rich. Some
of these have been made familiar to English writers through the work of
"Uncle Remus." Others have been collected by Johnston, Ellis, and Theal.

A black bard of our own day has described the onslaught of the Matabili in
poetry of singular force and beauty:

They saw the clouds ascend from the plains:
It was the smoke of burning towns.
The confusion of the whirlwind
Was in the heart of the great chief of the blue-colored cattle.
The shout was raised,
"They are friends!"
But they shouted again,
"They are foes!"
Till their near approach proclaimed them Matabili.
The men seized their arms,
And rushed out as if to chase the antelope.
The onset was as the voice of lightning,
And their javelins as the shaking of the forest in the autumn storm.[61]

There can be no doubt of the Negro's deep and delicate sense of beauty in
form, color, and sound. Soyaux says of African industry, "Whoever denies
to them independent invention and individual taste in their work either
shuts his eyes intentionally before perfectly evident facts, or lack of
knowledge renders him an incompetent judge."[62] M. Rutot had lately told
us how the Negro race brought art and sculpture to pre-historic Europe.
The bones of the European Negroids are almost without exception found in
company with drawings and sculpture in high and low relief; some of their
sculptures, like the Wellendorff "Venus," are unusually well finished for
primitive man. So, too, the painting and carving of the Bushmen and their
forerunners in South Africa has drawn the admiration of students. The
Negro has been prolific in the invention of musical instruments and has
given a new and original music to the western world.

Schweinfurth, who has preserved for us much of the industrial art of the
Negroes, speaks of their delight in the production of works of art for the
embellishment and convenience of life. Frobenius expressed his
astonishment at the originality of the African in the Yoruba temple which
he visited. "The lofty veranda was divided from the passageway by
fantastically carved and colored pillars. On the pillars were sculptured
knights, men climbing trees, women, gods, and mythical beings. The dark
chamber lying beyond showed a splendid red room with stone hatchets,
wooden figures, cowry beads, and jars. The whole picture, the columns
carved in colors in front of the colored altar, the old man sitting in the
circle of those who reverenced him, the open scaffolding of ninety
rafters, made a magnificent impression."[63]

The Germans have found, in Kamarun, towns built, castellated, and
fortified in a manner that reminds one of the prehistoric cities of Crete.
The buildings and fortifications of Zymbabwe have already been described
and something has been said of the art of Benin, with its brass and bronze
and ivory. All the work of Benin in bronze and brass was executed by
casting, and by methods so complicated that it would be no easy task for a
modern European craftsman to imitate them.

Perhaps no race has shown in its earlier development a more magnificent
art impulse than the Negro, and the student must not forget how far Negro
genius entered into the art in the valley of the Nile from Meroe and
Nepata down to the great temples of Egypt.

Frobenius has recently directed the world's attention to art in West
Africa. Quartz and granite he found treated with great dexterity. But more
magnificent than the stone monument is the proof that at some remote era
glass was made and molded in Yorubaland and that the people here were
brilliant in the production of terra-cotta images. The great mass of
potsherds, lumps of glass, heaps of slag, etc., "proves, at all events,
that the glass industry flourished in this locality in ages past. It is
plain that the glass beads found to have been so very common in Africa
were not only not imported, but were actually manufactured in great
quantities at home."

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14