The Negro | Page 7

develop the great state
a racial characteristic? This does not seem a fair conclusion. In four
great centers state building began in Africa. In Ethiopia several large

states were built up, but they tottered before the onslaughts of Egypt,
Persia, Rome, and Byzantium, on the one hand, and finally fell before
the turbulent Bantu warriors from the interior. The second attempt at
empire building began in the southeast, but the same Bantu hordes,
pressing now slowly, now fiercely, from the congested center of the
continent, gradually overthrew this state and erected on its ruins a
series of smaller and more transient kingdoms.
The third attempt at state building arose on the Guinea coast in Benin
and Yoruba. It never got much beyond a federation of large industrial
cities. Its expansion toward the Congo valley was probably a prime
cause of the original Bantu movements to the southeast. Toward the
north and northeast, on the other hand, these city-states met the
Sudanese armed with the new imperial Mohammedan idea. Just as
Latin Rome gave the imperial idea to the Nordic races, so Islam
brought this idea to the Sudan.
In the consequent attempts at imperialism in the western Sudan there
arose the largest of the African empires. Two circumstances, however,
militated against this empire building: first, the fierce resistance of the
heathen south made war continuous and slaves one of the articles of
systematic commerce. Secondly, the highways of legitimate African
commerce had for millenniums lain to the north. These were suddenly
closed by the Moors in the sixteenth century, and the Negro empires
were thrown into the turmoil of internal war.
It was then that the European slave traders came from the southwest.
They found partially disrupted Negro states on the west coast and
falling empires in the Sudan, together with the old unrest of
over-population and migration in the valley of the Congo. They not
only offered a demand for the usual slave trade, but they increased it to
an enormous degree, until their demand, added to the demand of the
Mohammedan in Africa and Asia, made human beings the highest
priced article of commerce in Africa. Under such circumstances there
could be but one end: the virtual uprooting of ancient African culture,
leaving only misty reminders of the ruin in the customs and work of the
people. To complete this disaster came the partition of the continent
among European nations and the modern attempt to exploit the country
and the natives for the economic benefit of the white world, together
with the transplanting of black nations to the new western world and

their rise and self-assertion there.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] Ham is probably the Egyptian word "Khem" (black), the native
name of Egypt. In the original myth Canaan and not Ham was Noah's
third son.
The biblical story of the "curse of Canaan" (Genesis IX, 24-25) has
been the basis of an astonishing literature which has to-day only a
psychological interest. It is sufficient to remember that for several
centuries leaders of the Christian Church gravely defended Negro
slavery and oppression as the rightful curse of God upon the
descendants of a son who had been disrespectful to his drunken father!
Cf. Bishop Hopkins: Bible Views of Slavery, p. 7.

III ETHIOPIA AND EGYPT
Having viewed now the land and movements of African people in main
outline, let us scan more narrowly the history of five main centers of
activity and culture, namely: the valleys of the Nile and of the Congo,
the borders of the great Gulf of Guinea, the Sudan, and South Africa.
These divisions do not cover all of Negro Africa, but they take in the
main areas and the main lines in development.
First, we turn to the valley of the Nile, perhaps the most ancient of
known seats of civilization in the world, and certainly the oldest in
Africa, with a culture reaching back six or eight thousand years. Like
all civilizations it drew largely from without and undoubtedly arose in
the valley of the Nile, because that valley was so easily made a center
for the meeting of men of all types and from all parts of the world. At
the same time Egyptian civilization seems to have been African in its
beginnings and in its main line of development, despite strong
influences from all parts of Asia. Of what race, then, were the
Egyptians? They certainly were not white in any sense of the modern
use of that word--neither in color nor physical measurement, in hair nor
countenance, in language nor social customs. They stood in
relationship nearest the Negro race in earliest times, and then gradually
through the infiltration of Mediterranean and Semitic elements became
what would be described in America as a light mulatto stock of
Octoroons or Quadroons. This stock