The Negro in the South / His Economic Progress in Relation to his Moral and Religious Development

s. Its seven thousand villages are so near to one another that the chief of Jenne has no need of messengers. If he wishes to send a note to Lake Dibo, f

f the Niger, is a coast of six hundred miles, where a marvelous drama of world history has been enacted. The coast and its hinterland comprehends many well-known names. First comes ancient Guinea, then, modern Sierra Leone and Liberia; then follow the various "

with the Atlantis of the Greeks and as part of that great western movement in human culture, "beyond the pillars of Hercules," which thirteen centuries before Christ strove with Egypt and the East. It is, at any rate, cle

ward the north and west by the black West African type of Negro, while along the west

art and industry, which places them in some lines of technique abreast with the modern world. Behind them came the Mossi from the north, and many other peoples in recent

ars, now victorious, now stubbornly disputing every inch of retreat. The center of this culture lay probably, in oldest times, above the Bight of Benin, along the Slave Coast, and reached east, west, and

y significance that by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a local and monumental art had been learned in Ben

ced by these people; that iron was mainly used for decoration; that, whatever their purpose, they kept their glass beads in stoneware urns within their own locality, and that they manufactured both earthen and glass ware; that the art of weaving was highly developed among them; that the stone monuments, it is true

overy. Egypt and India have been evoked and Greece and Carthage. But all these explanations are far-fetched. If ever a people exhibited unanswerable evidence of indigenous civilizati

ties have one hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants and more. The Hausa cities are many of them important, but few are as large as the Yoruba cities and they lie farther apart. AH three centers, how

Mediterranean, and form nuclei of larger surrounding monarchial states. The Yoruba cities, on the other hand, remained comparatively autonomous organizations down

ng states like Nupe toward the northward. But the industrial democracy and city autonomy of Yoruba lent itself indifferently to con

e Yoruba come two states showing a fiercer and ruder culture, Dahomey and Ashanti. The state of Dahomey was founded by Tacondomi early in the seventeenth century, and developed into a fierce and bloody tyranny with wholesale murder. The king had a body of two thousand to five thousand Amazons renowned for their bravery and armed

ith its city democracy, its elevated religious ideas, its finely organized industry, and its noble art, came Ashanti and Dahomey. What wa

nized ramifications as to turn the attention and energies of men from nearly all other industries, encourage war and all the cruelest

. Modern Benin and Dahomey showed traces of skill, culture, and industry along with inexplicable cruelty and bloodthirstiness. But it was the slave trade that tur

rs considerately added sixty white prostitutes as wives. The climate on the low coast, however, was so deadly that new recruits were soon needed. An American Negro, Thomas Peters, who had served as sergeant under Sir Henry Clinton in the British army in America, went to England seeking an allotment of land for his fellows. The Sierra Leone Company welcomed him and offered free passage and land in Sierra Leone to the Negroes of Nova Scotia. As a result fifteen vessels sailed with eleven hundred and ninety Negroes in 1792. Arriving in Africa, they fo

nd founded January 1, 1817, with Bushrod Washington as President. It was first thought to encourage migration to Sierra Leone, and eighty-eight Negroes were sent, but they were not welcomed. As a result territory was bought in the present confines of Liberia, December 15, 1821, and colonists began to arrive. A little

out twenty-seven hundred and ninety, and with this as a beginning in 1847 Governor Roberts declared the independence of the state. The recognition of Liberian indep

ia was saddled with a debt of four hundred thousand dollars, of which she received less than one hundred thousand dollars in actual cash. Finally the Liberians turned to the United States for capital and protection. As a result the Liberian customs have

n of two million of which fifty thousand are civilized. The revenue amounted in 1913 to $531,500. The imports in 1912 were $1,667,857 and the

Blyden, who migrated in early life from the Danish West Indi

coast, set a stone at the mouth of a great river which he called "The Mighty," but which eventu

ay at first from the African world by known and unknown physical hindrances. Then it was penetrated by the tiny red dwarfs and afterwar

ns. They are not a unified people, but a congeries of tribes of considerable physical diversity, unite

culture around Lake Chad was at this time re?nforced by expansion of the Yoruba-Benin culture on the west coast. Perhaps, too, developing culture around the Great Lakes in the east beckoned or the riotous fertility of the Congo valleys became known. At any rate the movement commenced, now by slow stages, now in wild forays. There may have been a preliminary movement from east to west to the Gulf of Guinea. The main movement,

the Lualaba and Congo rivers to the Cameroons; the second column became the industrial and state-building Luba and Lunda peopl

oc, maize, yams, sweet potatoes, ground nuts, sorghum, gourds, beans, peas, bananas, and plantains. Everywhere they showed skill in mining and the welding of iron, copper, and other metals. They made weapons, wire and ingots, cloth, and pottery, and a widespread system of trade arose. Some tribes extracted rubber from the talamba root; other

y and unimpeachably honest, brave to foolhardiness, and faithful to each other and to their superiors." One of their kings, Calemba,

the narrow Nile valley or the Kong mountains or the forests below Lake Chad. Once the pathways to the valley were open and for hundreds of years the newc

ley. How early it started we cannot say, but when the Portuguese arrived in the fifteenth century, there had

ishop; others distinguished themselves at the universities. Thus suddenly there arose a Catholic kingdom south of the valley of the Congo, which lasted three centuries, but was partially overthrown by invading barbarians from the

ourteen rulers of this line was feudal lord of about three hundred chiefs, who paid him tribute in ivory, skins, corn, cloth, and salt. His territory included about one hundred thousan

d the cannibals of the northeast pressed down on the more settled tribes. The resu

th century and soon was aiding all the forces of unrest and turmoil. Industry was

to the heart of Africa. Consequently there was formed in 1878 an international committee to study the region. Stanley was finally commissioned to inquire as to the best way of introducing European trade and culture. "I am charged," he said, "to open and keep open, if possible, all such districts and countries as I may explore

ast the falls to the plateau, where thousands of miles of river navigation were thus opened. Stations were established, and by 1884 Stanl

international guarantees by the Congress of Berlin in the year 1885, and Leopold II was chosen its king. T

the upper Congo, and when the English and Congo state overthrew Mzidi, the reigning king in the Kantanga country, a general revolt of the A

and farmed out to private Belgian corporations. The wilder cannibal tribes were formed into a militia to prey on the industrious, who were taxed with specific a

n the Congo was the desolation and murder in the larger sense. The invasion of family life, the ruthless destruction of every social barrier, the shattering of every tribal law, the

finally in 1909 the Free State became a Belgian colony. Some reforms have been inaugurated and others may follo

TNO

in Du Bois

en der berliner Gesellschaft

s: Voice of A

Cf. p

: Africa,

Congo, I,

is: Dawn