The Negro | Page 4

in history,
appearance, and to some extent in spiritual gift.
We cannot study Africa without, however, noting some of the other
races concerned in its history, particularly the Asiatic Semites. The
intercourse of Africa with Arabia and other parts of Asia has been so
close and long-continued that it is impossible to-day to disentangle the
blood relationships. Negro blood certainly appears in strong strain
among the Semites, and the obvious mulatto groups in Africa, arising
from ancient and modern mingling of Semite and Negro, has given rise
to the term "Hamite," under cover of which millions of Negroids have
been characteristically transferred to the "white" race by some eager
scientists.
The earliest Semites came to Africa across the Red Sea. The
Phoenicians came along the northern coasts a thousand years before

Christ and began settlements which culminated in Carthage and
extended down the Atlantic shores of North Africa nearly to the Gulf of
Guinea.
From the earliest times the Greeks have been in contact with Africa as
visitors, traders, and colonists, and the Persian influence came with
Cambyses and others. Roman Africa was bounded by the desert, but at
times came into contact with the blacks across the Sahara and in the
valley of the Nile. After the breaking up of the Roman Empire the
Greek and Latin Christians filtered through Africa, followed finally by
a Germanic invasion in 429 A.D.
In the seventh century the All-Mother, Asia, claimed Africa again for
her own and blew a cloud of Semitic Mohammedanism all across North
Africa, veiling the dark continent from Europe for a thousand years and
converting vast masses of the blacks to Islam. The Portuguese began to
raise the veil in the fifteenth century, sailing down the Atlantic coast
and initiating the modern slave trade. The Spanish, French, Dutch, and
English followed them, but as traders in men rather than explorers.
The Portuguese explored the coasts of the Gulf of Guinea, visiting the
interior kingdoms, and then passing by the mouth of the Congo
proceeded southward. Eventually they rounded the Cape of Good Hope
and pursued their explorations as far as the mountains of Abyssinia.
This began the modern exploration of Africa, which is a curious fairy
tale, and recalls to us the great names of Livingstone, Burton, Speke,
Stanley, Barth, Schweinfurth, and many others. In this way Africa has
been made known to the modern world.
The difficulty of this modern lifting of the veil of centuries emphasizes
two physical facts that underlie all African history: the peculiar
inaccessibility of the continent to peoples from without, which made it
so easily possible for the great human drama played here to hide itself
from the ears of other worlds; and, on the other hand, the absence of
interior barriers--the great stretch of that central plateau which placed
practically every budding center of culture at the mercy of barbarism,
sweeping a thousand miles, with no Alps or Himalayas or
Appalachians to hinder.
With this peculiarly uninviting coast line and the difficulties in interior
segregation must be considered the climate of Africa. While there is
much diversity and many salubrious tracts along with vast barren

wastes, yet, as Sir Harry Johnston well remarks, "Africa is the chief
stronghold of the real Devil--the reactionary forces of Nature hostile to
the uprise of Humanity. Here Beelzebub, King of the Flies, marshals
his vermiform and arthropod hosts--insects, ticks, and nematode
worms--which more than in other continents (excepting Negroid Asia)
convey to the skin, veins, intestines, and spinal marrow of men and
other vertebrates the microorganisms which cause deadly, disfiguring,
or debilitating diseases, or themselves create the morbid condition of
the persecuted human being, beasts, bird, reptile, frog, or fish."[2] The
inhabitants of this land have had a sheer fight for physical survival
comparable with that in no other great continent, and this must not be
forgotten when we consider their history.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Von Luschan: in _Inter-Racial Problems_, p. 16.
[2] Johnston: Negro in the New World, pp. 14-15.

II THE COMING OF BLACK MEN
The movements of prehistoric man can be seen as yet but dimly in the
uncertain mists of time. This is the story that to-day seems most
probable: from some center in southern Asia primitive human beings
began to differentiate in two directions. Toward the south appeared the
primitive Negro, long-headed and with flattened hair follicle. He spread
along southern Asia and passed over into Africa, where he survives
to-day as the reddish dwarfs of the center and the Bushmen of South
Africa.
Northward and eastward primitive man became broader headed and
straight-haired and spread over eastern Asia, forming the Mongolian
type. Either through the intermingling of these two types or, as some
prefer to think, by the direct prolongation of the original primitive man,
a third intermediate type of human