The Negro | Page 2

Europe it has a coast line a fifth
shorter. Like Europe it is a peninsula of Asia, curving southwestward
around the Indian Sea. It has few gulfs, bays, capes, or islands. Even
the rivers, though large and long, are not means of communication with
the outer world, because from the central high plateau they plunge in

rapids and cataracts to the narrow coastlands and the sea.
The general physical contour of Africa has been likened to an inverted
plate with one or more rows of mountains at the edge and a low coastal
belt. In the south the central plateau is three thousand or more feet
above the sea, while in the north it is a little over one thousand feet.
Thus two main divisions of the continent are easily distinguished: the
broad northern rectangle, reaching down as far as the Gulf of Guinea
and Cape Guardafui, with seven million square miles; and the
peninsula which tapers toward the south, with five million square
miles.
Four great rivers and many lesser streams water the continent. The
greatest is the Congo in the center, with its vast curving and endless
estuaries; then the Nile, draining the cluster of the Great Lakes and
flowing northward "like some grave, mighty thought, threading a
dream"; the Niger in the northwest, watering the Sudan below the
Sahara; and, finally, the Zambesi, with its greater Niagara in the
southeast. Even these waters leave room for deserts both south and
north, but the greater ones are the three million square miles of sand
wastes in the north.
More than any other land, Africa lies in the tropics, with a warm, dry
climate, save in the central Congo region, where rain at all seasons
brings tropical luxuriance. The flora is rich but not wide in variety,
including the gum acacia, ebony, several dye woods, the kola nut, and
probably tobacco and millet. To these many plants have been added in
historic times. The fauna is rich in mammals, and here, too, many from
other continents have been widely introduced and used.
Primarily Africa is the Land of the Blacks. The world has always been
familiar with black men, who represent one of the most ancient of
human stocks. Of the ancient world gathered about the Mediterranean,
they formed a part and were viewed with no surprise or dislike, because
this world saw them come and go and play their part with other men.
Was Clitus the brother-in-law of Alexander the Great less to be
honored because he happened to be black? Was Terence less famous?
The medieval European world, developing under the favorable physical
conditions of the north temperate zone, knew the black man chiefly as a
legend or occasional curiosity, but still as a fellow man--an Othello or a
Prester John or an Antar.

The modern world, in contrast, knows the Negro chiefly as a bond
slave in the West Indies and America. Add to this the fact that the
darker races in other parts of the world have, in the last four centuries,
lagged behind the flying and even feverish footsteps of Europe, and we
face to-day a widespread assumption throughout the dominant world
that color is a mark of inferiority.
The result is that in writing of this, one of the most ancient, persistent,
and widespread stocks of mankind, one faces astounding prejudice.
That which may be assumed as true of white men must be proven
beyond peradventure if it relates to Negroes. One who writes of the
development of the Negro race must continually insist that he is writing
of a normal human stock, and that whatever it is fair to predicate of the
mass of human beings may be predicated of the Negro. It is the silent
refusal to do this which has led to so much false writing on Africa and
of its inhabitants. Take, for instance, the answer to the apparently
simple question "What is a Negro?" We find the most extraordinary
confusion of thought and difference of opinion. There is a certain type
in the minds of most people which, as David Livingstone said, can be
found only in caricature and not in real life. When scientists have tried
to find an extreme type of black, ugly, and woolly-haired Negro, they
have been compelled more and more to limit his home even in Africa.
At least nine-tenths of the African people do not at all conform to this
type, and the typical Negro, after being denied a dwelling place in the
Sudan, along the Nile, in East Central Africa, and in South Africa, was
finally given a very small country between the Senegal and the Niger,
and even there was found to give trace of many stocks. As Winwood
Reade says, "The typical Negro is a rare variety even among Negroes."
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