Education of the Negro | Page 3

of Providence, and add to our faith patience.
It seems to be the rule in all history that the elevation of a lower race is
effected only by contact with one higher in civilization. Both reform
and progress come from exterior influences. This is axiomatic, and
applies to the fields of government, religion, ethics, art, and letters.
We have been taught to regard Africa as a dark, stolid continent,
unawakened, unvisited by the agencies and influences that have
transformed the world from age to age. Yet it was in northern and
northeastern Africa that within historic periods three of the most
powerful and brilliant civilizations were developed,--the Egyptian, the
Carthaginian, the Saracenic. That these civilizations had more than a
surface contact with the interior, we know. To take the most ancient of
them, and that which longest endured, the Egyptian, the Pharaohs
carried their conquests and their power deep into Africa. In the story of
their invasions and occupancy of the interior, told in pictures on temple
walls, we find the negro figuring as captive and slave. This contact may
not have been a fruitful one for the elevation of the negro, but it proves
that for ages he was in one way or another in contact with a superior
civilization. In later days we find little trace of it in the home of the
negro, but in Egypt the negro has left his impress in the mixed blood of
the Nile valley.

The most striking example of the contact of the negro with a higher
civilization is in the powerful medieval empire of Songhay, established
in the heart of the negro country. The vast strip of Africa lying north of
the equator and south of the twentieth parallel and west of the upper
Nile was then, as it is now, the territory of tribes distinctly described as
Negro. The river Niger, running northward from below Jenne to near
Timbuctoo, and then turning west and south to the Gulf of Guinea,
flows through one of the richest valleys in the world. In richness it is
comparable to that of the Nile and, like that of the Nile, its fertility
depends upon the water of the central stream. Here arose in early times
the powerful empire of Songhay, which disintegrated and fell into tribal
confusion about the middle of the seventeenth century. For a long time
the seat of its power was the city of Jenne; in later days it was
Timbuctoo.
This is not the place to enlarge upon this extraordinary piece of history.
The best account of the empire of Songhay is to be found in the pages
of Barth, the German traveler, who had access to what seemed to him a
credible Arab history. Considerable light is thrown upon it by a recent
volume on Timbuctoo by M. Dubois, a French traveler. M. Dubois
finds reason to believe that the founders of the Songhese empire came
from Yemen, and sought refuge from Moslem fanaticism in Central
Africa some hundred and fifty years after the Hejira. The origin of the
empire is obscure, but the development was not indigenous. It seems
probable that the settlers, following traders, penetrated to the Niger
valley from the valley of the Nile as early as the third or fourth century
of our era. An evidence of this early influence, which strengthened
from century to century, Dubois finds in the architecture of Jenne and
Timbuctoo. It is not Roman or Saracenic or Gothic, it is distinctly
Pharaonic. But whatever the origin of the Songhay empire, it became in
time Mohammedan, and so continued to the end. Mohammedanism
seems, however, to have been imposed. Powerful as the empire was, it
was never free from tribal insurrection and internal troubles. The
highest mark of negro capacity developed in this history is, according
to the record examined by Barth, that one of the emperors was a negro.
From all that can be gathered in the records, the mass of the negroes,

which constituted the body of this empire, remained pagan, did not
become, except in outward conformity, Mohammedan and did not take
the Moslem civilization as it was developed elsewhere, and that the
disintegration of the empire left the negro races practically where they
were before in point of development. This fact, if it is not overturned
by further search, is open to the explanation that the Moslem
civilization is not fitted to the development of the African negro.
Contact, such as it has been, with higher civilizations, has not in all
these ages which have witnessed the wonderful rise and development
of other races, much affected or changed the negro. He is much as he
would be if he had been left to himself. And left to himself, even in
such a favorable environment as America, he is