The Negro by W.E.B. Du Bois

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The terra-cotta pieces are "remains of another ancient and fine type of
art" and were "eloquent of a symmetry, a vitality, a delicacy of form, and
practically a reminiscence of the ancient Greeks." The antique bronze head
Frobenius describes as "a head of marvelous beauty, wonderfully cast," and
"almost equal in beauty and, at least, no less noble in form, and as
ancient as the terra-cotta heads."[64]

In a park of monuments Frobenius saw the celebrated forge and hammer: a
mighty mass of iron, like a falling drop in shape, and a block of quartz
fashioned like a drum. Frobenius thinks these were relics dating from past
ages of culture, when the manipulation of quartz and granite was
thoroughly understood and when iron manipulation gave evidence of a skill
not met with to-day.

Even when we contemplate such revolting survivals of savagery as
cannibalism we cannot jump too quickly at conclusions. Cannibalism is
spread over many parts of Negro Africa, yet the very tribes who practice
cannibalism show often other traits of industry and power. "These cannibal
Bassonga were, according to the types we met with, one of those rare
nations of the African interior which can be classed with the most
esthetic and skilled, most discreet and intelligent of all those generally
known to us as the so-called natural races. Before the Arabic and European
invasion they did not dwell in 'hamlets,' but in towns with twenty or
thirty thousand inhabitants, in towns whose highways were shaded by
avenues of splendid palms planted at regular intervals and laid out with
the symmetry of colonnades. Their pottery would be fertile in suggestion
to every art craftsman in Europe. Their weapons of iron were so perfectly
fashioned that no industrial art from abroad could improve upon their
workmanship. The iron blades were cunningly ornamented with damascened
copper, and the hilts artistically inlaid with the same metal. Moreover,
they were most industrious and capable husbandmen, whose careful tillage
of the suburbs made them able competitors of any gardener in Europe. Their
sexual and parental relations evidenced an amount of tact and delicacy of
feelings unsurpassed among ourselves, either in the simplicity of the
country or the refinements of the town. Originally their political and
municipal system was organized on the lines of a representative republic.
True, it is on record that these well-governed towns often waged an
internecine warfare; but in spite of this it had been their invariable
custom from time immemorial, even in times of strife, to keep the trade
routes open and to allow their own and foreign merchants to go their ways
unharmed. And the commerce of these nations ebbed and flowed along a road
of unknown age, running from Itimbiri to Batubenge, about six hundred
miles in length. This highway was destroyed by the 'missionaries of
civilization' from Arabia only toward the close of the eighteenth century.
But even in my own time there were still smiths who knew the names of
places along that wonderful trade route driven through the heart of the
'impenetrable forests of the Congo.' For every scrap of imported iron was
carried over it."[65]

In disposition the Negro is among the most lovable of men. Practically all
the great travelers who have spent any considerable time in Africa testify
to this and pay deep tribute to the kindness with which they were
received. One has but to remember the classic story of Mungo Park, the
strong expressions of Livingstone, the words of Stanley and hundreds of
others to realize this.

Ceremony and courtesy mark Negro life. Livingstone again and again reminds
us of "true African dignity." "When Ilifian men or women salute each
other, be it with a plain and easy curtsey (which is here the simplest
form adopted), or kneeling down, or throwing oneself upon the ground, or
kissing the dust with one's forehead, no matter which, there is yet a
deliberateness, a majesty, a dignity, a devoted earnestness in the manner
of its doing, which brings to light with every gesture, with every fold of
clothing, the deep significance and essential import of every single
action. Everyone may, without too greatly straining his attention, notice
the very striking precision and weight with which the upper and lower
native classes observe these niceties of intercourse."[66]

All this does not mean that the African Negro is not human with the
all-too-well-known foibles of humanity. Primitive life among them is,
after all, as bare and cruel as among primitive Germans or Chinese, but it
is not more so, and the more we study the Negro the more we realize that
we are dealing with a normal human stock which under reasonable conditions
has developed and will develop in the same lines as other men. Why is it,
then, that so much of misinformation and contempt is widespread concerning
Africa and its people, not simply among the unthinking mass, but among men
of education and knowledge?

One reason lies undoubtedly in the connotation of the term "Negro." In
North America a Negro may be seven-eights white, since the term refers to
any person of Negro descent. If we use the term in the same sense
concerning the inhabitants of the rest of world, we may say truthfully
that Negroes have been among the leaders of civilization in every age of
the world's history from ancient Babylon to modern America; that they have
contributed wonderful gifts in art, industry, political organization, and
religion, and that they are doing the same to-day in all parts of the
world.

In sharp contrast to this usage the term "Negro" in Africa has been more
and more restricted until some scientists, late in the last century,
declared that the great mass of the black and brown people of Africa were
not Negroes at all, and that the "real" Negro dwells in a small space
between the Niger and the Senegal. Ratzel says, "If we ask what justifies
so narrow a limitation, we find that the hideous Negro type, which the
fancy of observers once saw all over Africa, but which, as Livingstone
says, is really to be seen only as a sign in front of tobacco shops, has
on closer inspection evaporated from all parts of Africa, to settle no one
knows how in just this region. If we understand that an extreme case may
have been taken for the genuine and pure form, even so we do not
comprehend the ground of its geographical limitation and location; for
wherever dark, woolly-haired men dwell, this ugly type also crops up. We
are here in the presence of a refinement of science which to an
unprejudiced eye will hardly hold water."[67]

In this restricted sense the Negro has no history, culture, or ability,
for the simple fact that such human beings as have history and evidence
culture and ability are not Negroes! Between these two extreme
definitions, with unconscious adroitness, the most extraordinary and
contradictory conclusions have been reached.

Let it therefore be said, once for all, that racial inferiority is not the
cause of anti-Negro prejudice. Boaz, the anthropologist, says, "An
unbiased estimate of the anthropological evidence so far brought forward
does not permit us to countenance the belief in a racial inferiority which
would unfit an individual of the Negro race to take his part in modern
civilization. We do not know of any demand made on the human body or mind
in modern life that anatomical or ethnological evidence would prove to be
beyond the powers of the Negro."[68]

"We have every reason to suppose that all races are capable, under proper
guidance, of being fitted into the complex scheme of our modern
civilization, and the policy of artificially excluding them from its
benefits is as unjustifiable scientifically as it is ethically
abhorrent."[69] What is, then, this so-called "instinctive" modern
prejudice against black folk?

Lord Bryce says of the intermingling of blacks and whites in South
America, "The ease with which the Spaniards have intermingled by marriage
with the Indian tribes--and the Portuguese have done the like, not only
with the Indians, but with the more physically dissimilar Negroes--shows
that race repugnance is no such constant and permanent factor in human
affairs as members of the Teutonic peoples are apt to assume. Instead of
being, as we Teutons suppose, the rule in the matter, we are rather the
exception, for in the ancient world there seems to have been little race
repulsion."

In nearly every age and land men of Negro descent have distinguished
themselves. In literature there is Terence in Rome, Nosseyeb and Antar in
Arabia, Es-Sa'di in the Sudan, Pushkin in Russia, Dumas in France, Al
Kanemi in Spain, Heredia in the West Indies, and Dunbar in the United
States, not to mention the alleged Negro strain in AEsop and Robert
Browning. As rulers and warriors we remember such Negroes as Queen
Nefertari and Amenhotep III among many others in Egypt; Candace and
Ergamenes in Ethiopia; Mansa Musa, Sonni Ali, and Mohammed Askai in the
Sudan; Diaz in Brazil, Toussaint L'Ouverture in Hayti, Hannivalov in
Russia, Sakanouye Tamuramaro in Japan, the elder Dumas in France, Cazembe
and Chaka among the Bantu, and Menelik, of Abyssinia; the numberless black
leaders of India, and the mulatto strain of Alexander Hamilton. In music
and art we recall Bridgewater, the friend of Beethoven, and the
unexplained complexion of Beethoven's own father; Coleridge-Taylor in
England, Tanner in America, Gomez in Spain; Ira Aldridge, the actor, and
Johnson, Cook, and Burleigh, who are making the new American syncopated
music. In the Church we know that Negro blood coursed in the veins of many
of the Catholic African fathers, if not in certain of the popes; and there
were in modern days Benoit of Palermo, St. Benedict, Bishop Crowther, the
Mahdi who drove England from the Sudan, and Americans like Allen, Lot
Carey, and Alexander Crummell. In science, discovery, and invention the
Negroes claim Lislet Geoffroy of the French Academy, Latino and Amo, well
known in European university circles; and in America the explorers
Dorantes and Henson; Banneker, the almanac maker; Wood, the telephone
improver; McCoy, inventor of modern lubrication; Matseliger, who
revolutionized shoemaking. Here are names representing all degrees of
genius and talent from the mediocre to the highest, but they are strong
human testimony to the ability of this race.

We must, then, look for the origin of modern color prejudice not to
physical or cultural causes, but to historic facts. And we shall find the
answer in modern Negro slavery and the slave trade.

FOOTNOTES:

[35] "Some authors write that the Ethiopians paint the devil white, in
disdain of our complexions."--Ludolf: _History of Ethiopia_, p. 72.

[36] Ripley: _Races of Europe_, pp. 58, 62.

[37] Denniker: _Races of Men_, p. 63.

[38] G. Finot: _Race Prejudice_. F. Herz: _Moderne Rassentheorien_.

[39] Ratzel: quoted in Spiller: _Inter-Racial Problems_, p. 31.

[40] Spiller: _Inter-Racial Problems_, p. 35.

[41] Ratzel: _History of Mankind_, II, 380 ff.

[42] _Industrial Evolution_, p. 47.

[43] These and other references in this chapter are from Schneider:
Culturfaehigkeit des Negers.

[44] Atlanta University Leaflet, No. 19.

[45] _Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute_, XLIII, 414, 415.
Cf. also _The Crisis_, Vol. IX, p. 234.

[46] Buecher: _Industrial Revolution_ (tr. by Wickett), pp. 57-58.

[47] Hayford: _Native Institutions_, pp. 95-96.

[48] Ratzel, II, 376.

[49] Hayford: _Native Institutions_, pp. 76 ff.

[50] _Impressions of South Africa_, 3d ed., p. 352.

[51] William Schneider.

[52] _West African Studies_, Chap. V.

[53] _Op. cit._

[54] _Impressions of South Africa._

[55] Frobenius: _Voice of Africa_, Vol. I.

[56] _West African Studies_, p. 107.

[57] Nassau: _Fetishism in West Africa_, p. 36.

[58] _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, 9th ed., XX, 362.

[59] _The African Provinces_, II, 345.

[60] _Mediterranean Race_, p. 10.

[61] Stowe: _Native Races_, etc., pp. 553-554.

[62] Quoted in Schneider.

[63] Frobenius: _Voice of Africa_, Vol. I, Chap. XIV.

[64] Frobenius: _Voice of Africa_, Vol. I.

[65] Frobenius: _Voice of Africa_, I, 14-15.

[66] Frobenius: _Voice of Africa_, I, 272.

[67] Ratzel: _History of Mankind_, II, 313.

[68] Atlanta University Publications, No. 11.

[69] Robert Lowie in the _New Review_, Sept., 1914.

IX THE TRADE IN MEN

Color was never a badge of slavery in the ancient or medieval world, nor
has it been in the modern world outside of Christian states. Homer sings
of a black man, a "reverend herald"

Of visage solemn, sad, but sable hue,
Short, woolly curls, o'erfleeced his bending head,...
Eurybiates, in whose large soul alone,
Ulysses viewed an image of his own.

Greece and Rome had their chief supplies of slaves from Europe and Asia.
Egypt enslaved races of all colors, and if there were more blacks than
others among her slaves, there were also more blacks among her nobles and
Pharaohs, and both facts are explained by her racial origin and
geographical position. The fall of Rome led to a cessation of the slave
trade, but after a long interval came the white slave trade of the
Saracens and Moors, and finally the modern trade in Negroes.

Slavery as it exists universally among primitive people is a system
whereby captives in war are put to tasks about the homes and in the
fields, thus releasing the warriors for systematic fighting and the women
for leisure. Such slavery has been common among all peoples and was
wide-spread in Africa. The relative number of African slaves under these
conditions was small and the labor not hard; they were members of the
family and might and did often rise to high position in the tribe.

Remembering that in the fifteenth century there was no great disparity
between the civilization of Negroland and that of Europe, what made the
striking difference in subsequent development? European civilization, cut
off by physical barriers from further incursions of barbaric races,
settled more and more to systematic industry and to the domination of one
religion; African culture and industries were threatened by powerful
barbarians from the west and central regions of the continent and by the
Moors in the north, and Islam had only partially converted the leading
peoples.

When, therefore, a demand for workmen arose in America, European
exportation was limited by religious ties and economic stability. African
exportation was encouraged not simply by the Christian attitude toward
heathen, but also by the Moslem enmity toward the unconverted Negroes. Two
great modern religions, therefore, agreed at least in the policy of
enslaving heathen blacks, while the overthrow of black Askias by the Moors
at Tenkadibou brought that economic chaos among the advanced Negro peoples
and movement among the more barbarous tribes which proved of prime
advantage to the development of a systematic trade in men.

The modern slave trade began with the Mohammedan conquests in Africa, when
heathen Negroes were seized to supply the harems, and as soldiers and
servants. They were bought from the masters and seized in war, until the
growing wealth and luxury of the conquerors demanded larger numbers. Then
Negroes from the Egyptian Sudan, Abyssinia, and Zanzibar began to pass
into Arabia, Persia, and India in increased numbers. As Negro kingdoms and
tribes rose to power they found the slave trade lucrative and natural,
since the raids in which slaves were captured were ordinary inter-tribal
wars. It was not until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the
demand for slaves in Christian lands made slaves the object, and not the
incident, of African wars.

In Mohammedan countries there were gleams of hope in slavery. In fiction
and in truth the black slave had a chance. Once converted to Islam, he
became a brother to the best, and the brotherhood of the faith was not the
sort of idle lie that Christian slave masters made it. In Arabia black
leaders arose like Antar; in India black slaves carved out principalities
where their descendants still rule.

Some Negro slaves were brought to Europe by the Spaniards in the
fourteenth century, and a small trade was continued by the Portuguese, who
conquered territory from the "tawny" Moors of North Africa in the early
fifteenth century. Later, after their severe repulse at Al-Kasr-Al-Kabu,
the Portuguese began to creep down the west coast in quest of trade. They
reached the River of Gold in 1441, and their story is that their leader
seized certain free Moors and the next year exchanged them for ten black
slaves, a target of hide, ostrich eggs, and some gold dust. The trade was
easily justified on the ground that the Moors were Mohammedans and refused
to be converted to Christianity, while heathen Negroes would be better
subjects for conversion and stronger laborers. In the next few years a
small number of Negroes continued to be imported into Spain and Portugal
as servants. We find, for instance, in 1474, that Negro slaves were common
in Seville. There is a letter from Ferdinand and Isabella in the year 1474
to a celebrated Negro, Juan de Valladolid, commonly called the "Negro
Count" (El Conde Negro), nominating him to the office of "mayoral of the
Negroes" in Seville. The slaves were apparently treated kindly, allowed to
keep their own dances and festivals, and to have their own chief, who
represented them in the courts, as against their own masters, and settled
their private quarrels.

Between 1455 and 1492 little mention is made of slaves in the trade with
Africa. Columbus is said to have suggested Negroes for America, but
Ferdinand and Isabella refused. Nevertheless, by 1501, we have the first
incidental mention of Negroes going to America in a declaration that Negro
slaves "born in the power of Christians were to be allowed to pass to the
Indies, and the officers of the royal revenue were to receive the money to
be paid for their permits."

About 1501 Ovando, Governor of Spanish America, was objecting to Negro
slaves and "solicited that no Negro slaves should be sent to Hispaniola,
for they fled amongst the Indians and taught them bad customs, and never
could be captured." Nevertheless a letter from the king to Ovando, dated
Segovia, the fifteenth of September, 1505, says, "I will send more Negro
slaves as you request; I think there may be a hundred. At each time a
trustworthy person will go with them who may have some share in the gold
they may collect and may promise them ease if they work well."[70] There
is a record of a hundred slaves being sent out this very year, and Diego
Columbus was notified of fifty to be sent from Seville for the mines in
1510.

After this time frequent notices show that Negroes were common in the new
world.[71] When Pizarro, for instance, had been slain in Peru, his body
was dragged to the cathedral by two Negroes. After the battle of Anaquito
the head of the viceroy was cut off by a Negro, and during the great
earthquake in Guatemala a most remarkable figure was a gigantic Negro seen
in various parts of the city. Nunez had thirty Negroes with him on the top
of the Sierras, and there was rumor of an aboriginal tribe of Negroes in
South America. One of the last acts of King Ferdinand was to urge that no
more Negroes be sent to the West Indies, but under Charles V, Bishop Las
Casas drew up a plan of assisted migration to America and asked in 1517
the right for immigrants to import twelve Negro slaves, in return for
which the Indians were to be freed.

Las Casas, writing in his old age, owns his error: "This advice that
license should be given to bring Negro slaves to these lands, the Clerigo
Casas first gave, not considering the injustice with which the Portuguese
take them and make them slaves; which advice, after he had apprehended the
nature of the thing, he would not have given for all he had in the world.
For he always held that they had been made slaves unjustly and
tyrannically; for the same reason holds good of them as of the
Indians[72]."

As soon as the plan was broached a Savoyard, Lorens de Gomenot, Governor
of Bresa, obtained a monopoly of this proposed trade and shrewdly sold it
to the Genoese for twenty-five thousand ducats. Other monopolies were
granted in 1523, 1527, and 1528[73]. Thus the American trade became
established and gradually grew, passing successively into the hands of the
Portuguese, the Dutch, the French, and the English.

At first the trade was of the same kind and volume as that already passing
northward over the desert routes. Soon, however, the American trade
developed. A strong, unchecked demand for brute labor in the West Indies
and on the continent of America grew until it culminated in the eighteenth
century, when Negro slaves were crossing the Atlantic at the rate of fifty
to one hundred thousand a year. This called for slave raiding on a scale
that drew upon every part of Africa--upon the west coast, the western and
Egyptian Sudan, the valley of the Congo, Abyssinia, the lake regions, the
east coast, and Madagascar. Not simply the degraded and weaker types of
Negroes were seized, but the strong Bantu, the Mandingo and Songhay, the
Nubian and Nile Negroes, the Fula, and even the Asiatic Malay, were
represented in the raids.

There was thus begun in modern days a new slavery and slave trade. It was
different from that of the past, because more and more it came in time to
be founded on racial caste, and this caste was made the foundation of a
new industrial system. For four hundred years, from 1450 to 1850, European
civilization carried on a systematic trade in human beings of such
tremendous proportions that the physical, economic, and moral effects are
still plainly to be remarked throughout the world. To this must be added
the large slave trade of Mussulman lands, which began with the seventh
century and raged almost unchecked until the end of the nineteenth
century.

These were not days of decadence, but a period that gave the world
Shakespeare, Martin Luther, and Raphael, Haroun-al-Raschid and Abraham
Lincoln. It was the day of the greatest expansion of two of the world's
most pretentious religions and of the beginnings of the modern
organization of industry. In the midst of this advance and uplift this
slave trade and slavery spread more human misery, inculcated more
disrespect for and neglect of humanity, a greater callousness to
suffering, and more petty, cruel, human hatred than can well be
calculated. We may excuse and palliate it, and write history so as to let
men forget it; it remains the most inexcusable and despicable blot on
modern human history.

The Portuguese built the first slave-trading fort at Elmina, on the Gold
Coast, in 1482, and extended their trade down the west coast and up the
east coast. Under them the abominable traffic grew larger and larger,
until it became far the most important in money value of all the commerce
of the Zambesi basin. There could be no extension of agriculture, no
mining, no progress of any kind where it was so extensively carried
on[74].

It was the Dutch, however, who launched the oversea slave trade as a
regular institution. They began their fight for freedom from Spain in
1579; in 1595, as a war measure against Spain, who at that time was
dominating Portugal, they made their first voyage to Guinea. By 1621 they
had captured Portugal's various slave forts on the west coast and they
proceeded to open sixteen forts along the coast of the Gulf of Guinea.
Ships sailed from Holland to Africa, got slaves in exchange for their
goods, carried the slaves to the West Indies or Brazil, and returned home
laden with sugar. In 1621 the private companies trading in the west were
all merged into the Dutch West India Company, which sent in four years
fifteen thousand four hundred and thirty Negroes to Brazil, carried on war
with Spain, supplied even the English plantations, and gradually became
the great slave carrier of the day.

The commercial supremacy of the Dutch early excited the envy and emulation
of the English. The Navigation Ordinance of 1651 was aimed at them, and
two wars were necessary to wrest the slave trade from them and place it in
the hands of the English. The final terms of peace, among other things,
surrendered New Netherlands to England and opened the way for England to
become henceforth the world's greatest slave trader.

The English trade began with Sir John Hawkins' voyages in 1562 and later,
in which "the Jesus, our chiefe shippe" played a leading part. Desultory
trade was kept up by the English until the middle of the seventeenth
century, when English chartered slave-trading companies began to appear.
In 1662 the "Royal Adventurers," including the king, the queen dowager,
and the Duke of York, invested in the trade, and finally the Royal African
Company, which became the world's chief slave trader, was formed in 1672
and carried on a growing trade for a quarter of a century. Jamaica had
finally been captured and held by Oliver Cromwell in 1655 and formed a
West Indian base for the trade in men.

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