University of Virginia Library

I. THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
VOLUME I

I. Part I
THE NEGRO IN AFRICA

I. The Story of the Negro

CHAPTER I
FIRST NOTIONS OF AFRICA

SOME years ago, in a book called "Up From
Slavery," I tried to tell the story of my own
life. While I was at work upon that book the
thought frequently occurred to me that nearly all
that I was writing about myself might just as well
have been written of hundreds of others, who began
their life, as I did mine, in slavery. The difficulties
I had experienced and the opportunities I had discovered,
all that I had learned, felt and done, others
likewise had experienced and others had done. In
short, it seemed to me, that what I had put into the
book," Up From Slavery," was, in a very definite way,
an epitome of the history of my race, at least in the
early stages of its awakening and in the evolution
through which it is now passing.

This thought suggested another, and I asked
myself why it would not be possible to sketch the
history of the Negro people in America in much the
same way that I had tried to write the story of my

own life, telling mostly the things that I knew of
my own personal knowledge or through my acquaintance
with persons and events, and adding to that
what I have been able to learn from tradition and from
books. In a certain way the second book, if I were
able to carry out my design, might be regarded as
the sequel of the first, telling the story of a struggle
through two and one-half centuries of slavery, and
during a period of something more than forty years
of freedom, which had elsewhere been condensed
into the limits of a single lifetime. This is, then, the
task which I have set myself in the pages which
follow.

There comes a time, I imagine, in the life of every
boy and every girl, no matter to what race they
belong, when they feel a desire to learn something
about their ancestors; to know where and how
they lived, what they suffered and what they achieved,
how they dressed, what religion they professed and
what position they occupied in the larger world about
them. The girl who grows up in the slums of a
large city, the Indian out in the wide prairie, the
"poor white" boy in the mountains of the Southern
states, and the ignorant Negro boy on a Southern
plantation, no matter how obscure their origin, each
will feel a special interest in the people whose fortunes
he or she has shared, and a special sympathy
with all that people have lived, and suffered and
achieved.

The desire to know something of the country
from which my race sprang and of the history of my
mother and her people came to me when I was still
a child. I can remember, as a slave, hearing snatches
of conversation from the people at the "Big House"
from which I learned that the great white race in
America had come from a distant country, from which
the white people and their forefathers had travelled
in ships across a great water, called the ocean. As
I grew older I used to hear them talk with pride about
the history of their people, of the discovery of
America, and of the struggles and heroism of the
early days when they, or their ancestors, were fighting
the Indians and settling up the country. All
this helped to increase, as time went on, my desire
to know what was back of me, where I came from,
and what, if anything, there was in the life of my
people in Africa and America to which I might point
with pride and think about with satisfaction.

My curiosity in regard to the origin and history
of the dark-skinned people to which I belong, led me
at first to listen and observe and then, later, as I got
some schooling and a wider knowledge of the world,
to inquire and read. What I learned in this way only
served, however, to increase my desire to go farther
and deeper into the life of my people, and to find out
for myself what they had been in Africa as well as in
America.

What I was first able to hear and to learn did not,

I confess, take me very far or give me very much
satisfaction. In the part of the country in which I
lived there were very few of my people who pretended
to know very much about Africa. I learned,
however, that my mother's people had come, like
the white people, from across the water, but from
a more distant and more mysterious land, where
people lived a different life from ours, had different
customs and spoke a different language from that
I had learned to speak. Of the long and terrible
journey by which my ancestors came from their
native home in Africa to take up their life again
beside the white man and Indian in the New World,
I used to hear many and sinister references, but not
until I was a man did I meet any one, among my
people who knew anything definite, either through
personal knowledge or through tradition, of the
country or the people from whom my people sprang.
To most of the slaves the "middle passage," as the
journey from the shore of Africa to the shore of
America was called, was merely a tradition of a
confused and bewildering experience, concerning
whose horrors they had never heard any definite
details. Nothing but the vaguest notions remained,
at the time I was a boy, even among the older people
in regard to the mother country of my race.

In slavery days the traditions of the people who
lived in the cabins centred almost entirely about
the lives and fortunes of the people who lived in the

"Big House." The favourite stories around the
cabin fireside related to what this or that one had
seen on some distant journey with "old master,"
or perhaps to the adventures they had when master
and they were boys together.

It has often occurred to me that people who talk
of removing the Negro from the Southern states and
colonising him in some distant part of the world do
not reflect how deeply he is rooted in the soil. In
most that the white man has done on this continent,
from the time Columbus landed at San Salvador
until Peary penetrated farthest North, the Negro
has been his constant companion and helper. Any
one who considers what the Negro has done, for
example, in the Southern states alone, in cutting
down the forests, clearing the land, tilling the soil
and building up the farms and the cities, will recognise
that, directly and indirectly, his labour has been
an enormous contribution to the civilisation of the
Western world. Any one, on the other hand, who
will listen to the songs that we sing, and the anecdotes
that are told by the Negro and concerning him; any
one who will read the literature and the history of
the Southern states, will see that the Negro has
contributed, not merely his labour, but something
also of his inner life and temperament to the
character and quality of the South.

Until freedom came the life of the Negro was so
intimately interwoven with that of the white man

that it is almost true to say that he had no separate
history. To the slave on the plantation the "Big
House," where the master lived, was the centre of
the only world he knew. It was after freedom came
that the masses of the Negro people began to think
of themselves as having a past or a future in any way
separate and distinct from the white race. There
were always some among them, like Frederick
Douglass, who were different in this respect
from the masses. They became the fugitive
slaves.

After I began to go to school I had my first opportunity
to learn from books something further and
more definite about my race in Africa. I cannot say
that I received very much encouragement or inspiration
from what I learned in this way while I was in
school. The books I read told me of a people who
roamed naked through the forest like wild beasts,
of a people without houses or laws, without chastity
or morality, with no family life and fixed habits of
industry.

It seems to me now, as I recall my first definite
impressions of my race in Africa, that the books I
read when I was a boy always put the pictures
of Africa and African life in an unnecessarily cruel
contrast with the pictures of the civilised and highly
cultured Europeans and Americans. One picture
I recall vividly was in the first geography I studied.
It was the picture of George Washington placed side

by side with a naked African, having a ring in his nose
and a dagger in his hand. Here, as elsewhere, in
order to put the lofty position to which the white race
has attained in sharper contrast with the lowly
condition of a more primitive people, the best among
the white people was contrasted with the worst among
the black.

Naturally all this made a deep and painful impression
upon me. At this time I had the feeling, which
most of us are likely to have when we are young and
inexperienced, that there must be something wrong
with any person who was in any way, whether in
dress or manners, markedly different from the persons
and things to which I was accustomed. It
seemed to me at that time a mark of degradation that
people should go about with almost no clothes upon
their backs. It did not occur to me that, possibly,
the difference in the customs of wearing clothes in
Africa and in America, and the difference in the
feeling that people in Europe and in Africa have
about clothes, was largely a matter of climate. It
seemed to me that a human creature who would
willingly go about with a ring in his nose must be a
very fierce and terrible sort of human animal, but
it never occurred to me to have any such feelings in
regard to the persons whom I had seen wearing
ornaments in their ears. In spite of all this, I still
held fast to the notion that a race which could
produce as good and gentle and loving a woman as

my mother must have some good in it that the
geographers had failed to discover.

It is hard for one who is a member of another race
and who has not had a like experience to appreciate
the impression that has often been made upon me,
and upon other members of my race as they have
listened, as inexperienced boys and girls, to public
speeches in which the whole Negro race was
denounced in a reckless and wholesale manner, or
as they have read newspapers and books in which
the Negro race has been described as the lowest and
most hopeless of God's creation. Sometimes, when
I was a young man, I was driven almost to despair by
the hard and bitter, and frequently, as it seemed to
me, unjust statements about my race. It was
difficult for me to reconcile the ruthless denunciations
which men, with whom I was acquainted, would
make in their public speeches, with the uniform
courtesy and kindness which they had shown to me
and others of my race in all their private relations.
Even now it is difficult for me to understand why so
many Southern white men will allow themselves, for
the purpose of enforcing an argument or in the heat
of a political discussion, to go so far in the denunciation
of the Negro as to do injustice to their own better
natures and to their actual feelings toward coloured
people whom they meet, perhaps, in business, or
toward the servants employed in their own household,
the woman who cooks their food, looks after

their house and cares for their children. I mention
these facts because they serve to illustrate the singular
relations of interdependence and opposition in
which the white and black people of the South stand
to each other to-day, all of which has had and is having
a very definite influence upon the development of
my people in the South.

The hard and discouraging statements which I
was compelled to hear in regard to my race when I
was a boy, had, at different times, two very different
effects upon me. At first they sometimes made me
feel as if I wanted to go away to some distant part of
the earth and bury myself where I might be a stranger
to all my people, or at least where the thing that we
call race prejudice did not exist in the way it does in
the Southern states. Sometimes I thought of doing
something desperate which would compel the world,
in some way or other, to recognise what seemed to
me the wrongs of my race. But afterward, and on
second thought, the effect was to drive me closer to
my own people, to make me sympathise with them
more intimately and more deeply, to feel toward
them as I did toward my own dear mother who had
brought me into the world when she and they were
slaves.

In the end there grew up within me, as a result of
both these feelings, a determination to spend my life
in helping and strengthening the people of my race,
in order to prove to the world that whatever had

been its feelings for them in the past it should learn
to respect them in the future, both for what they were
and what they should be able to do. I made up my
mind, also, that in the end the world must come to
respect the Negro for just those virtues for which
some people say he is despised, namely because of
his patience, his kindliness, and his lack of resentment
toward those who do him wrong and injustice.

The feelings that divided my mind and confused
my purposes when I was a young man, have also
divided the members of my race. The continual
adverse criticism has led some of us to disavow our
racial identity, to seek rest and try our successes as
members of another race than that to which we were
born It has led others of us to seek to get away
as far as possible from association with our own race,
and to keep as far away from Africa, from its
history and from its traditions as it was possible
for us to do.

My attention was first called to this disposition of
members of certain section of my race to get away
from themselves, so to speak; to be ashamed, in other
words, of their history and traditions, when I found
them bashful or lukewarm in regard to singing the
old songs which are the peculiar and unique product
of Negro life and civilisation in this country. I have
heard musical critics, whose judgment the world
respects, say that the old plantation hymns and songs
were among the most original contributions that

America has made, not only to music but to any one
of the so-called fine arts, and this not merely for their
intrinsic charm and beauty but for their qualities,
which make it possible for the trained musician to
develop out of them more elaborate and refined
musical forms, such as have been given to them
recently by the Negro composer, Coleridge-Taylor.
For myself, though it has been my privilege to hear
some of the best music both in Europe and America,
I would rather hear the jubilee or plantation songs
of my race than the finest chorus from the works of
Handel or any other of the great composers that I
have heard. Besides, this music is the form in which
the sorrows and aspirations of the Negro people, all
that they suffered, loved, and hoped for, in short their
whole spiritual life, found its first adequate and satisfying
expression. For that reason, if for no other,
it should be preserved.

What I have said here of my own feelings in regard
to my race is representative of the feelings of thousands
of others of the black people of this country.
Adverse criticism has driven them to think deeper
than they otherwise would about the problems which
confront them as a race, to cling closer than they
otherwise would have done to their own people, to
value more highly than they once did, the songs
and the records of their past life in slavery. The
effect has been to give them, in short, that sort of
race pride and race consciousness which, it seems

to me, they need to bring out and develop the best
that is in them.

So it was that, thinking and studying about the
origin and the destiny of my people, and of all of the
forces that were working for and against them in my
own country and elsewhere, the desire to know more
about the history of my own people steadily increased
and I tried, as well as I was able, to understand the
Negro thoroughly, intimately, in those qualities
in which, as a race, he is weak, as well as in those
qualities in which he is strong.

This habit of observation and study of my own
race, in the way I have described, led me to inquire
into the personal histories of the men and women of
my own race whom I have met in all parts of the
United States. I sought to make myself acquainted
with their difficulties and their successes, to understand
their feelings and their habits of thought, to
discover the inner drift and deeper currents of their
lives; for any one who knows to any extent the
character of the Negro people, knows that they have,
just as other people, an outside and inside, and
one cannot always tell what is going on deep down
in their hearts merely from looking in their faces.
Sometimes the Negro laughs when he is angry and
cries when he is happy. Very often, has it seemed
to me, the Negro himself does not know or fully
understand what is going on in the depth of his own
mind and heart.

Perhaps it will not be out of place for me to say
here, at the beginning of this book, that the more
I have studied the masses of the race to which I
belong, the more I have learned not only to sympathise
but to respect them. I am proud and happy
to be identified with their struggle for a higher and
better life.

Now and then I have read or heard it said that, in
consequence of the inconveniences, the hardships
and the injustices that members of my race frequently
suffer, because of the colour of their skins, there was
something exceptional and tragic about the situation
of the Negro in America, "the tragedy of colour,"
as one writer has called it. No doubt there is much
that is exceptional in the situation of the Negro, not
only in America, but in Africa. No one is more
willing than I to admit this to be true. But hardships
and even injustice, when they concern the
relations of people who are divided by creed, by
class, or by race, are not exceptional. On the
contrary, they are common, and every race that has
struggled up from a lower to a higher civilisation has
had to face these things. They have been part of its
education. Neither is there, as far as my experience
goes, anything peculiarly tragic connected with the
life of the Negro, except in the situation of those
members of my race who, for one reason or another,
have yielded to the temptation to make a secret of
their lowly birth and appear before the world as

something other than they are. Every coloured
man knows, or has heard, of such cases, and in the
whole history of the Negro race there are few sadder
stories than some of these lives. I should say it was
only when an individual suffers from his own folly,
rather than the mistakes of others, that he is likely
to become the hero of a tragedy. This is just as true
of a race. The Negro race has suffered much
because of conditions for which others were responsible.
As a rule Negroes have had very little chance
thus far, to make mistakes of their own. We have
not been free long enough. While the world hears
a great deal about "the tragedy of colour" and
other phrases of the so-called Negro problem, I have
observed that the world hears little, and knows,
perhaps, less about the Negro himself. This is true
of white people but it is also true of coloured people.

Some time ago, I had the privilege of meeting at
Cambridge, Mass., a group of about twenty-five
young coloured men who were studying at Harvard
University. I found that most of these young men
had a high standing in the University, were respected
by their professors and, upon inquiring in regard to
the subjects of their studies, I learned that several of
them had taken extended courses in history. They
seemed to know in detail, the story of Greek and
Roman and English civilisations, and prided themselves
upon their knowledge of the languages and
history of the French and German peoples. They

knew a great deal about the local history of New
England and were perfectly familiar with the story
of Plymouth Rock and the settlement of Jamestown,
and of all that concerned the white man's civilisation
both in America and out of America. But I found
that through their entire course of training, neither
in the public schools, nor in the fitting schools, nor
in Harvard, had any of them had an opportunity
to study the history of their own race. In regard to
the people with which they themselves were most
closely identified, they were more ignorant than they
were in regard to the history of the Germans, the
French, or the English. It occurred to me that this
should not be so. The Negro boy and girl should
have an opportunity to learn something in school
about his own race. The Negro boy should study
Negro history just as the Japanese boy studies Japanese
history and the German boy studies German
history.

Let me add that my knowledge of the Negro has
led me to believe that there is much in the story
of his struggle, if one were able to tell it as it deserves
to be told, that it is likely to be both instructive and
helpful, not merely to the black man but also to the
white man with whom he is now almost everywhere,
in Africa as well as America, so closely associated.
In the last analysis I suppose this is the best excuse
I can give for undertaking to tell "The Story of
the Negro."

CHAPTER II
THE AMERICAN NEGRO AND THE NATIVE AFRICAN

THE stories which I heard as a child were
what the average American Negro boy is
likely to hear in regard to his African ancestors,
and my chief reasons for repeating them is
that they were very largely mistaken and need to be
corrected.

I had always heard Africa referred to as the
"Dark Continent"; I pictured it to myself as a
black, sunless region, with muddy rivers and gloomy
forests, inhabited by a people, who, like everything
else about them, were black. I supposed that the
nearer I got to the original African, the blacker I
would find him, and that all lighter coloured Negroes
I had seen were a spurious sort, whose blood had
been adulterated by mixture with some of the lighter
races. I was much surprised, therefore, to learn,
when I came to study the native races of Africa, that
the man, whom scientists believed to be the original
African, namely, the Bushman—and with him I
include his near relatives, the Dwarfs of Central
Africa—was not black but yellow; that the Negro,
the real black man, is after all merely one of the

earliest settlers of the continent, coming from somewhere
else, probably Asia, no one knows exactly
where or how.

In a recent volume upon "The Native Races of
South Africa," George W. Stow says in regard to
relations of the Bushmen and the other Negro people
of South Africa:

On the other hand it appears from native traditions
that, with the exception of the Bushmen, all the native
peoples emigrated from the North to the South.
Other traditions state that, "when their forefathers
migrated to the South, they found the land without
inhabitants, and that only the game and the Bushmen
were living in it."

It is an indication of the low estimate which the
other South African tribes put upon the Bushmen
that they did not count them as "inhabitants."

One who studies the books about Africa will read
a great deal about the true Negro who lives, as the
books tell us, in the Soudan, a part of Africa that is

often referred to as Negroland. After I had learned
that the original African was not a black man and
not a Negro, in the strict scientific sense of the word,
I was led to explore, as well as I was able by the aid
of books and maps, that part of Africa where the
Negro is supposed to be at home. I wanted to find
more about the real black man.

The true Negro, I learned, is only one section of
what is ordinarily known as the Negro race; the
other is the Bantu, a mixed people, generally brown
in colour, who were the first invaders of South Africa,
driving out the original Bushmen, and gradually
extending themselves over most of that part of the
continent below the equator.

Negroland, stretching clear across the country,
or at least from the Atlantic to the Nile, as
far north as the Desert of Sahara and as far
south as the equator, is a wide region, and there
are many different tribes and many different
types of people inhabiting it. From the North
Arab invaders and merchantmen have entered the
country and mingled with the earlier and darker
races. Wave after wave of conquest has poured
itself out over the rich lands between the desert
and the mountains that divide these inland regions
from the coast and hundreds of years of slave-raiding
have so broken up and intermingled the
different racial stocks that it is as hard for one, not
an expert, to find the "true Negro" in Africa—that

is without any mixture of foreign blood—as it is to
find the colour line in the United States.

How difficult this sometimes is I may, perhaps,
illustrate by an experience of my own a few years
ago in Alabama. I was travelling at this time with
one of our students at Tuskegee, who was very light
in colour, when we had some distance to go in a
carriage. At the end of our journey, the owner of
the carriage, who was a white man, collected fifty
cents from me but called upon the student who was
with me for a dollar. After considerable argument
and some inquiry, we discovered that it was the
rule to charge white men a dollar for the same service
for which Negroes paid only fifty cents, and my
companion had been taken for a white man. But
even after this the student was not inclined to pay the
extra price. He seemed to think fifty cents was too
much pay for being a white man, at least for so short
a time.

Upon another occasion, when an important exposition
was being held in one of our Southern states,
I recall that, in order to encourage Negroes to attend,
the exposition authorities decided that on certain
days of the week coloured people could be admitted
at half price. The white people were to pay the
regular price, fifty cents. The notion of the managers
was that many coloured people were staying
away from the exposition because they were too
poor to pay the regular entrance fee, and that if the

price were lowered on certain days large numbers,
who could not otherwise afford it, would go. The
event proved that the calculations of the managers
were correct. Large numbers of coloured people
crowded into the exposition on Negro day, but at the
end of two weeks the doorkeepers had become desperate.
They wanted to throw up their jobs because,
as they said, it was too embarrassing work to pick
out, by their colour, the black people from the white.

As an illustration of the way in which the intermingling
of the racial stocks has come about in
Africa, I may mention the fact that, when Dr. Barth,
in 1850, first visited the Negro city of Kano, which is
the most important trading centre of Western Soudan,
he found it, a place of thirty to forty thousand
inhabitants, which at certain seasons of the year
was increased to sixty thousand, divided into
numerous quarters, each of which was inhabited by
a different type of people. One quarter was devoted
almost exclusively to Arab merchants; a second was
inhabited by Fellani, the ruling class; still other
quarters were taken up by different tribes of the
subject people, among them the merchant and
manufacturing people, the Hausas. In addition to
these, there were the slaves—gathered from all
portions of the country but principally from the
tribes living near the coast—who made up nearly
half the population.[2]

I cannot now remember where I first got the idea
that a man who was dark in colour was necessarily
more ignorant and in a lower stage of civilisation
than one who was lighter. At any rate there seemed
to be a general understanding to that effect, when I
was a boy—at least among most people. Perhaps
it was due to the fact that on the plantations, as a
rule, lighter coloured slaves were more often employed
as house servants, and, because of their more
intimate association with their masters, were held
in higher esteem and had more opportunities for
advancement than the field hands. Perhaps it was
merely a reflection of the general opinion, which
slaves somehow imbibed, that everything white was
good and everything black was bad. I recall that
in the matter of religion, although, it may never have
been directly referred to, we, always understood that
God was white and the Devil was black.

In any case I grew up with the idea that in Africa
the lowest and most degraded type of man was black,
and the blacker he was the further down in the scale
of civilisation I expected him to be. The fact seems
to be that this is nowhere true in Africa. For
instance, the Hausas, the great trading people of the
Soudan, who live in walled cities and carry on a trade
extending over the whole region between the West
Coast and the Nile, are, according to Dr. Charles
Henry Robinson, "as black as any people in the
world." The Bushmen, on the other hand, who,

as I have already said, are yellow, have nowhere
risen above the hunting stage of civilisation.

No one question, I may say right here, is more
frequently asked me than this: "What is the relative
ability of the Negro of mixed and unmixed blood?"
I usually answer that my experience and observation
convince me that, where the environment has been
equally favourable, there is no difference in ability.

As an illustration I may say that at Tuskegee it has
been customary to award the honour of delivering
the valedictory address to the student making the
highest average in scholarship, industrial work and
deportment, and during a period of about twenty
years, ten of those who gained this honour were
Negroes of pure blood. I understand that at
Hampton Institute, in Virginia, where they have had
an experience covering a considerably longer period,
the same thing has been found to be true. I might
add that the late J. C. Price, during his lifetime by
all odds the leading and most prominent man of his
race in North Carolina and one of the most eloquent
men in the country, was pure black. The two leading
and most progressive men, in commercial and
business directions, in the State of Mississippi,
Isaiah T. Montgomery and Charles Banks, have no
mixture of blood. W. W. Brown, who founded the
largest and most successful fraternal organisation
that has ever existed among the black people in
America, was a pure black. It would not be

difficult to multiply examples of this kind, but there
is one other name that should not be omitted—
Major R. R. Moten, Commandant at the Hampton
Institute, Hampton, Va., who is one of the few
Negroes in this country who can trace his ancestry,
in an unbroken chain, back to his people in Africa.
The most conspicuous example of a success in literature
is, perhaps, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, the poet,
who was a man of unmixed blood.

Let me add that, as my observation and experience
of human life have widened, I have learned
to doubt the wisdom of laying down any general
rules that fix for all times the status of any people,
or determine in advance the progress they are able
or likely to make under conditions different from
those in which they happened, at the present time,
to be found.

I had a lesson in this respect a few years ago at
Tuskegee. It happened that in one of the geography
classes, which at that time were studying Africa, the
students came one day upon a passage in which the
Bushmen were described as the lowest type of
human being to be found in Africa. The writer
went on to describe this people in a way which made
our students feel that the Bushmen were about as
low, degraded and hopeless a type of human nature
as could well be imagined.

While the class was discussing this passage, a boy
in the back of the room raised his hand and indicated

that he had something to say. It turned out that
he had recently come from South Africa and knew
something of the natives, and he did not agree with
the statements in the geography. He went on to
say that his mother was a Bushwoman and that his
father was a Hottentot, a tribe which is generally
supposed to be closely related to the Bushmen. He
had been born in the bush. Afterward, while he
was still a small boy, his father and mother had
moved into town and he had been enabled in this
way to get something of an education. As the
young Bushman happened to stand near the head of
his class and spoke with personal knowledge of both
his father's and mother's people, as well as of the
other tribes of South Africa, what he had to say was
listened to with the greatest interest and attention.
When he followed it up by going to his room and
bringing back photographs with which to illustrate
his statement, both the class and the teachers were
convinced that, however much truth there might be
in the general description given in geographies, the
Bushmen who, for a hundred years or more, had been
hunted like wild beasts by the other stronger tribes
of South Africa, were to a very large extent, the
victims of circumstances.[3]

This incident helped to confirm me in the belief
that in our efforts to help the weaker peoples of the
earth, we should not despair even in the case of the
most humble and backward of the human family.
In mathematics and in physical sciences it is possible
to make exact statements and lay down laws that are
universal and unchanging, but in what concerns
human life and history we cannot be so precise and
definite. Human beings are constantly doing
unprecedented things and it is usually, I suspect, the
unexpected and unprecedented things that men do
that are the most important.

As a boy I had been accustomed to hear Africa
referred to as one hears of Mexico, as if it were a
place where a comparatively homogeneous people
lives, having much the same customs, language, and
civilisation; in short, as if it were a country instead
of a continent. It was some time before I was able
to realise the vast extent and variety of the territory
over which the dark races of Africa are spread.
Africa is larger and considerably more varied in its
geographical structure than North America. The
territory occupied by the dark races of Africa, for
example is more than two times that occupied by the
United States.

I found also that I had only the vaguest notion of
the multitude of different peoples that inhabit Africa
and the variety of civilisations represented among
its inhabitants, not only among the more advanced
races along the Mediterranean but also among the
Negro peoples who still hold possession of nearly
seven-eighths of the continent. For instance, Sir
Harry H. Johnston says of the people inhabiting
the English protectorate of Uganda, where a careful
study has been made of the native peoples:

Speaking of the popular notion of the African
people to which I have referred, Professor Jerome
Dowd, a Southern white man who resides in Charlotte,
N. C., author of a recent sociological study
of the African races, says:

Another statement which one frequently hears,
made indiscriminately of the dark races of Africa,
is that they are constitutionally lazy and cannot be
induced to work. I shall have something to say
about the Negro as a labourer later in this work;
here it is, perhaps, sufficient to recall the fact that
in the greater portion of Africa the black man is still
almost the only labourer. It is he who builds the
railways and the bridges, digs the gold in the South
African mines, and collects the rubber in the Congo
forests. Miss Mary Kingsley, in her volume,
"Travels in West Africa," says of the Kruboys,

"that they are the most important people of West
Africa; for without their help the working of the
Coast would cost more lives than it already does,
and would be in fact practically impossible." In
his book on Tropical Africa, Henry Drummond,
describing the way in which the natives come from
far and near to try the sensation of methodical work
on the building of the Cape to Cairo railway, says:

The fact is, very little comes out of Africa, from an
elephant's tusk to a diamond, that is not the result
of the labour of the African. This does not mean that
the native labourer is always as persistent and
intelligent as he should be, nor that native labour is,

everywhere and for all purposes, of the same value.
Experience has shown that one tribe is more useful
in one form of labour and another tribe in some other
form. What the African has needed most to make
him a better labourer has been the same incentive
to work which the white man had. Where one stick
sharpened forms a spear, two sticks make a fire, and
fifty sticks a place to live, there is little incentive to
systematic and persistent work. This completeness
and modesty of wants is, in my opinion, at the bottom
of the difficulty in Africa. The truth is that the
Negro in Africa or out of it develops in industrial
efficiency, as other human beings do, in response to
his needs and his opportunities.

I had this fact impressed upon me in a very
striking way during a recent visit to Cleveland,
Ohio, when I went to see a little brass foundry
run by a coloured man who is engaged in the
manufacture of those little brass wheels that run
along the trolley wires of our electric railways and,
by means of the trolley pole connect the cars with
the electric current.

The operation of casting these wheels, as I was
informed, requires unusual skill and experience,
because it is necessary to secure just the right degree
of hardness and toughness in the metal, and I was
the more interested in noticing the way in which
this man and his assistants did their work because
I recall that the art of working in iron was one of the

crafts that had been the special property, from time
immemorial, of the people of my race.

Dr. Franz Boas, Professor of Anthropology at
Columbia University, says that, "while much of the
history of early invention is shrouded in darkness,
it seems likely that at the time when the European
was still satisfied with rude stone tools, the African
had invented or adapted the art of smelting ore."

I had been reading a few days before a description
of the rude methods by which, with little more than
a simple bellows and a charcoal fire, native Africans
reduced the ores and forged the implements, many of
them of great beauty as well as usefulness, which one
may still meet with in many parts of Africa.

I am not sufficiently familiar with the detailed
methods of smelting ores and casting metals to be
able to even suggest the vast distance between the
primitive methods of the Native African and the
infinitely more intricate and complicated technique
of the modern industry. The thought, the study
and the invention of thousands, perhaps of millions
of minds, have contributed to create the very conditions
of the modern iron industry. The contrast
between the Native African, working laboriously
in the solitude of the African forests, with his primitive
tools, after a traditional method, and the
American Negro, in his own foundry, with the
advantage of all the machinery, knowledge, and the
skill that modern science and modern invention have

contributed to the improvement of iron industry,
is impressive enough. But this contrast does not
represent the difference in innate qualities in the
men themselves, but rather the difference in the
civilisations that surround them.

It probably requires just as much skill and just
as much patience to make one of those long and
graceful spearheads you may see on the end of an
African lance as it does to make the trolley wheel;
but it takes all our civilisation to make the trolley
wheel possible.

In what I have written thus far in regard to Africa
and African peoples I have sought to emphasise
the vastness of the territories which they inhabit;
the distances which divide them from one another;
the variety of physical types in which they are
represented; the complicated social relations that
sometimes exist among them, and the difficulty of
making general statements, laying down general
laws that hold good at all times and all places for all
of the African peoples.

There is, however, a tie which few white men can
understand, which binds the American Negro to the
African Negro; which unites the black man of
Brazil and the black man of Liberia; which is
constantly drawing into closer relations all the
scattered African peoples whether they are in the old
world or the new.

There is not only the tie of race, which is strong in

any case, but there is the bond of colour, which is
specially important in the case of the black man.
It is this common badge of colour, for instance, which
is responsible for the fact that whatever contributes,
in any degree to the progress of the American Negro,
contributes to the progress of the African Negro,
and to the Negro in South America and the West
Indies. When the African Negro succeeds, it helps
the American Negro. When the African Negro
fails, it hurts the reputation and the standing of the
Negro in every other part of the world.

I have rarely met in America any one of my race
who did not, in one way or another, show a deep
interest in everything connected with Africa. The
millions of Negroes in America are almost as much
interested, for example, in the future of Liberia and
Abyssinia, as they are in their own country. There
is always a peculiar and scarcely definable bond that
binds one black man to another black man, whether
in Africa, Jamaica, Haiti, or the United States.
One evidence of this interest of the Negro in America
in the Negro in Africa is the work that the
American Negro churches are doing in Africa to help
civilise and Christianise their brethren there. There
is scarcely any branch of the Negro church in America
that does not have an organisation through which it
is sending men and women and money into some
portion of Africa. The readiness with which some
of the strongest and brightest men and women in

America, who have had superior opportunities, are
ready to return to Africa and give their lives in an
effort to uplift their fellows, indicates the strong
racial tie that binds the black people of the world
together.

On the other hand, it is true that Negroes in other
parts of the world are beginning to interest themselves
more and more in the fortunes of the Negro
in America. In a very marked degree the one
hundred and thirty millions of black people outside
of America are looking to the ten millions of
Negroes in the United States for guidance and for
inspiration. They are watching closely the progress
of these American Negroes. They are beginning to
realise that if it is possible for the ten million black
men in America, surrounded by modern machinery
and all the other forces of civilisation, to get into line
and march with the procession, that it is also possible
for them, in time, to follow, somewhat more
slowly, perhaps, but in the same direction.

CHAPTER III
THE AFRICAN AT HOME

SOME time during the latter part of 1899,
or the early part of 1900, I received through
the German Embassy, in Washington, a
letter saying that the German Colonial Society
wanted a number of students from Tuskegee to go
out to German West Africa to teach the natives how
to produce cotton by American methods.

While I had been a student at Hampton Institute,
Virginia, it was one of my ambitions, as it has been
the ambition of a great many other Negro students
before and since, to go out some day to Africa as a
missionary. I believed that I had got hold at
Hampton of a kind of knowledge that would be
peculiarly helpful to the Native Africans and I felt
that my interest in the people out there, vague and
indefinite as it was, would in some way or other help
and inspire me in the task of lifting them to a higher
plane of civilisation.

After I went to Tuskegee I gave up my ambition
of going to Africa. I had not been long there,
however, before I was convinced that I could, perhaps,
be of larger usefulness through the work I was

able to do in this country, by fitting, for the same
service I wanted to perform, Africans who came as
students to America, and by sending from Tuskegee
men and women trained in our methods, as teachers
and workers among the native peoples. The
request I received through the German Embassy
was, therefore, particularly welcome to me, for
it gave me an opportunity to realise, in a direct
way, the ambition I had never wholly lost
sight of.

A group of our best students was selected for this
African mission. They went out to Togoland, West
Africa, and began to establish stations in different
points in that colony, and then started in to grow
cotton, using the native labour as far as they were
able, but necessarily, at first, doing a large part of the
work themselves.

They met all sorts of difficulties. They found the
American cotton was not suited to African soil, and
were compelled to cross it with native varieties in
order to produce an hybrid type that possessed the
valuable qualities of both. They had considerable
difficulty, at first, with the native labourers. I
remember that John Robinson, one of the party who
remained to carry out the work after the others had
returned home, told me of an incident, which made
me see, in a way in which I had not been able to see
before, that the education of the native African in
the white man's civilisation must begin much farther

back and with much simpler matters than most of us
are likely to imagine.

Among the other things this party had taken out to
Africa was a wagon, which had been manufactured
by the students at Tuskegee. While this wagon was
being unloaded and put together, the native porters
looked on with interest, never having seen anything
that went on wheels before. After the wagon had
been loaded ready to start the attention of members
of the party was turned for a time in another
direction. When they came back to the wagon
they were greatly surprised to see that the natives
had unloaded and taken it apart, and were busily
engaged in fastening its wheels and other parts on
their heads, preparatory to carrying them, along with
the other goods, to their destination in the interior.
Mr. Robinson explained to them, through an interpreter,
the use of the wagon, and tried to show them
the advantage of it. They were interested in seeing
this curious machine of the white man work, but
they were quite positive in their conviction that the
good old-fashioned way of carrying everything on
their heads was the better. Now that roads have
been opened up and the natives have actually seen a
wagon worked, Mr. Robinson tells me they take it
as a hardship if they are asked to carry anything.

During the time this experiment in educating the
Native African was going on, I followed its progress,
through the accounts I received from students on

the ground and from the reports of the German
Colonial Society, with close attention and intense
interest. It was the nearest I had come, up to that
time, to anything like a practical and intimate
acquaintance with the African at home.

Among the first thing the Tuskegee students did
in Africa was to build for themselves comfortable
houses, to supply them with well made but simple
furniture, to put in these houses not only the necessities,
but some of the comforts of life. I was interested
to note that, within a few months the Natives
and, especially the women, had gotten the notion
that they wanted the same kind of houses and some
of the same kind of furniture. The women naturally
made their wants known to the men, and before these
students had been in Africa half a dozen years the
Natives in their vicinity had reached the point where,
with the training they had received and with the
desire they had gained for better homes to live in,
better tools to work with, and for all the other advantages
which the black man in America seemed to
possess over the black man in Africa, they were
performing about as satisfactory service as the same
class of human beings would have performed in any
other part of the world.

Native Africans have been sent from Africa to
Tuskegee. Our Tuskegee students have returned
from time to time and made their reports of
successes. Thus in a very vital and practical manner

has our institution become connected with the
progress and civilisation of our brethren in the
darker continent.

Some time ago in looking through the pages of
some magazine or book of science, I ran across a
statement that, when men first began to study the
stars systematically and with telescopes, they discovered
a certain class of errors in their calculations
which were due to the personality of the observers.
One man's brain, acting quicker, would record the
stars as moving more rapidly; another would record
them as moving more slowly than their actual
movements. It became necessary, therefore, in
order to make the calculations correct, to study and
take account of these personal aberrations.

It has occurred to me, in the course of my reading
about the African peoples, that it would contribute
much to the accuracy of our knowledge, if some study
were made of the sort of errors that creep into our
observations of human beings. Important as it is
that we should have a correct knowledge of the stars,
it is more important that we should have an accurate
knowledge of men. For instance, I have noticed that
a man born and reared in the Southern states
invariably looks upon the Negro with different eyes
from the man born and reared in the Northern
states. In their reports and interpretations of the
simplest facts they are often widely divergent in their
views. Even when they agree with each other about

the Negro, for instance, it has often seemed to me
that their agreement was due to a misunderstanding.

Frequently amusing situations occur in the discussion
of the Negro. Many of these have occurred
in my presence. It seldom occurs, for instance, when
I am travelling on a train that the discussion
does not turn on the question as to what is the
physical, moral, and mental effect on the individual
when he is of mixed blood. One man will argue
very seriously that there should be no mixture of
blood, for the reason that he is quite sure that wherever
there is a mixture it results in a weakened
individual, bodily, mentally, morally. Within ten
or fifteen minutes another man will begin, in the
absence of the first, to discuss the same subject and
will, in an equally serious and positive manner,
state that wherever in all history the Negro has been
able to accomplish anything of value to the world
it had been because he had some tincture of white
blood in his veins.

During these discussions I am sometimes reminded
of an incident that occurred during my early boyhood,
which, because it illustrates a phase in the development
of the Negro in America, I may be permitted
to mention it here. Very soon after the days of
slavery and even before the public school system had
been organised, there arose in the community a
discussion among our people as to whether the world
was round or flat. It lasted for several days, and

divided the community into two pretty stubborn
factions. During the discussion a coloured man
came along, a school teacher, who had very little
actual learning, and made application to open a
school. The question as to whether the world was
flat or round was submitted to him, or rather he was
asked how he would treat the question in the schoolroom,
and he replied that he was prepared to teach
either "flat," "round," or just as the individual
family requested.

The continual discussion of the Negro often
reminds me, as I have stated, of this story. The
Negro question or the Negro himself seems able to
be accommodated to almost any and every shade
of opinion. That explains how two men with
diametrically opposite views sometimes come to an
agreement about the Negro; one thinks he should be
flat and not round, the other thinks he should be
round and not flat; but both agree that there is
something wrong with him.

If it is difficult for people of the same race to understand
one another when they are talking about things
in regard to which their experience has been different,
it is still more difficult for one race to pass judgment
upon another, particularly when these races differ
so widely from one another as the white man and
the Negro. Dr. Franz Boas has called attention to
this difficulty in a paper before the American Association
of Science. "As the white race is the civilised

race," he says, "every deviation from the white type
is considered as the characteristic feature of a lower
type; . . . the greater the difference between
the intellectual, emotional and moral processes and
those found in our civilisation, the harsher the
judgment of the people."[1]

Under these circumstances it is natural enough
that the black man, who is furthest removed physically
from the white man, should suffer more than
others from the sort of prejudice Professor Boas describes.
With the possible exception of the Jew, no
race has ever been subjected to criticisms so
searching and candid, to state it mildly, as the Negro.
And yet I
have found that those who have known and understood
the Negro best, have usually been kindest in
their judgment of him and most hopeful of his future.

For instance, the late Miss Kingsley, an Englishwoman,
who seems to have entered deeper into
the mind of the West African than most others,
says of the West Coast Negro:

Concerning the affection which the African has
for his mother, Miss Kingsley quotes the Rev.
Leigh ton Wilson.

Mr. Wilson was born and educated in South
Carolina. In 1834 he went to Africa as a missionary
and remained there for eighteen years, in close
contact with the civilisation of the forefathers of the
present American Negroes. He was among the first
missionaries to Africa. He remained in the active
service of the Southern Presbyterian Church until
his death in 1886. While in Africa he studied the
languages and reduced the native tongue of some of
the tribes to writing. He says:

Mr. Wilson points out that the Africans of the
Grain Coast have long since risen above the hunting
life; they have fixed habitations, cultivate the soil
for means of subsistence, have herds of domestic
animals, construct for themselves houses which are
sufficient to protect them alike from the scorching
heat of the sun and the chilly damps of the night;
they show a turn for the mechanical arts, and in the
fabrication of implements of warfare and articles of
ornament they display surprising skill.

"As we see them in their native country," he
continues, "they show none of that improvidence
or want of foresight for which they have almost
become proverbial in this country, which shows that
circumstances have made them what they are in this
respect. They plant their crops with particular
reference to the seasons of the year, and they store
away provisions for their future wants with as much
regularity as any people in the world, so that times
of scarcity and want are less frequent among them

than among others who pretend to a much higher
degree of civilisation."

Referring to the farms of the Kru people, the
tribes from which the seamen of the West Coast
are drawn, Mr. Wilson says:

Of the mechanical skill of the neighbouring
Ashanti people, whose territory is in the English
Gold Coast colony, Mr. Wilson tells us, "that they
manufacture gold ornaments of various kinds and
many of them of much real taste. They fabricate
swords, agricultural implements, wooden stools, and
cotton cloths of beautiful figures and very substantial
texture."[4]

From time to time, as Tuskegee graduates have
returned from the various stations in Africa in which
they have been at work, they have brought back with
them specimens of native workmanship in iron,
wood and leather. I have frequently been impressed
with the beauty of some of the designs that native
craftsmen have worked out upon their spears and in
their homespun cotton cloth. The leather tanned
by some of these native tanners is often surprisingly

beautiful in colour, design and finish. Some of
the specimens of the native handicrafts have been
placed on exhibition in the museum at Tuskegee, and
in one or two cases we have been able to reproduce
in our classes in basketry the shapes and designs of
some of these native articles.

"Nothing, perhaps," says Professor Franz Boas,
"is more encouraging than a glimpse of the artistic
industries of the native African. A walk through
the African museums of Paris and London and
Berlin is a revelation. I wish you could see the
sceptres of African kings, carved of hardwood and
representing artistic form; or the dainty basketry
made by the people of the Kongo River and of the
region of the Great Lakes of the Nile, or the grass
mats of their beautiful patterns.

"Even more worthy of our admiration," he
continues, "is the work of the blacksmith who
manufactures symmetrical lance heads, almost a
yard long, or axes inlaid with copper and decorated
with filligree. Let me also mention in passing the
bronze castings of Benin and the West Coast of
Africa, which, although perhaps due to Portuguese
influences, have so far excelled in technique any
European work, that they are even now almost
inimitable."[5]

The blacksmith seems to occupy a very important
place in the social life of Africa. Travellers have

found these smiths at work in the most remote and
inaccessible parts of the continent, where they may
be seen collecting the native iron and copper ores;
smelting and reducing them, and then working them
in their primitive forges, into hoes, knives, spear and
arrow heads, battle-axes, wood-working tools, rings
and hatchets.

Just as everywhere in the Southern states to-day,
especially in the country districts, at the crossroads,
or near the country store, one finds the Negro black
smith, so, in some of the remote regions in Africa,
every village has, according to its size, from one to
three blacksmiths. Each smith has an apprentice
and his art is a craft secret most zealously guarded.

Samuel P. Verner, like the Rev. Leighton Wilson,
a Southern white man and missionary of the
Southern Presbyterian church, says in his book,
"Pioneering in Central Africa," of these African
blacksmiths:

Mr. Verner's mission station was in the Kongo
Free State, on the upper courses of the Kasai, in
the heart of savage Africa where the people have
never been touched by the influences of either the
European or Mohammedan civilisations. Speaking

of the carving and wood working of some of these
tribes, Mr. Verner says:

Throughout West Africa, wherever the European
has not established his trading factory, the native
market is an institution which is a constant source
of surprise to travellers. These markets are the
native clearing houses for the produce of the soil
and the fabricated articles of the land. They are
generally the centre of the trading operations of a
district ranging from ten to thirty miles. Here will
be seen vegetables and fruit, poultry, eggs, live pigs,
goats, salt of their manufacture, pottery of their own
make, strips of cloth, grass-woven mats, baskets
and specimens of embroidery and art work, besides
numberless other articles of various sorts and
kinds which are essential to African comfort and well
being. From the small group of native merchants
who travel with their wares within a radius of
thirty or fifty miles, to the large caravans of the Hausa
traders who cross the Desert of Sahara, and at times
reach the Eastern and Western confines of the
continent, everywhere in Africa the black man is a
trader.

Among the more primitive tribes the village markets
are confined to two or three hundred buyers or sellers,
but in the greater markets like that of Kano and
Upper Nigeria, twenty or thirty thousand traders
will be gathered together at certain seasons of the
year. It is an interesting fact, as indicating the
African's interest in trade, that in many tribes the
market place is considered sacred ground, and, in
order that trade may be carried on there without
interruption, no strife is permitted within its
precincts.

Professor Boas, writing in 1904, said:

It may be safely said that the primitive Negro community
with its fields that are tilled with iron and wooden implements,
with its domestic animals, with its smithies, with its expert woodcarvers,
is a model of thrift and industry, and compares favourably
with the conditions of life among our own ancestors.[6]

It is just as true in America, as it is in Africa, that
those who know the Negro intimately and best have
been, as a rule, kindest and most hopeful in their
judgments of him. This may seem strange to those
who get their notion of the Southern white man's
opinion of the Negro, from what they see in the
press and hear from the platform, during the heat of a

political campaign, or from the utterances of men who,
for one reason or another, have allowed themselves
to become embittered. Southern opinion of the
Negro, particularly as it finds expression in the press
and on the platform, is largely controversial. It has
been influenced by the fact that for nearly a hundred
years the Negro has been the football in a bitter
political contest, and there are a good many Southern
politicians who have acquired the habit of berating
him. The Negro, in the South, has had very
little part in this controversy, either before or since
the war, but he has had a chance to hear it all, and
it has often seemed to me, if, after all that has taken
place, the Negro is still able to discuss his situation
calmly, the white man should be able to do so
also. But that is another matter.

Nineteen times out of twenty, I suppose, a stranger
coming South, who inquires concerning the Negro
from people he meets on the train or on the highways,
will get from these men pretty nearly the same
opinion he has read in the newspapers or heard in
political speeches. These criticisms of the Negro
have been repeated so often that people have come
to accept and repeat them again without reflection.
The thing that shows this to be true is, that the very
men who denounced all Negroes will very likely
before the conversation is ended tell of one, and
perhaps, half a dozen individual Negroes in whom
they have the greatest confidence.

A Southern white man may tell you, with the
utmost positiveness, that he never knew a single
Negro who would not steal—except one. Every
white man knows one Negro who is all right—a
model of honesty, industry, and thrift—and if he
tries to remember, he will think of other Negroes in
whom he has the greatest confidence, and for whom
he has a very genuine respect. Considering that
there are a good many more white people in the
South than there are Negroes, it seems to follow,
logically, that in spite of what one hears about the
Negro in general, there are a good many individual
Negroes who are pretty well thought of by their
white neighbours.

It is well to take into consideration, also, that
when Southern people express their confidence and
their respect for an individual black man, they are
speaking of one whom they know: on the contrary,
when they denounce in general terms the weakness
and the failure of the Negro race, they have in mind a
large number of whom they know a great deal less.

I do not mean to suggest that there is no justification
for the criticism of the Negro that one often hears
in the South. I have never thought or said that
the Negro in America was all that he should be. It
does seem to me, however, that the Negro in the
United States has done, on the whole, as well as he
was able, and as well as, under all the circumstances,
could be reasonably expected.

It was not unusual, particularly in the early part
of the last century, to find among the slaves men
who could read and write Arabic and were learned
in the lore of the Koran. W. B. Hodgson, a Southern
slave holder, published in 1857 a paper in which
he gave an account of a Negro slave who had translated
the gospel of John into Negro dialect, using
"the letters of the Koran, the book of his first religious
instruction, in transcribing the gospel, the book
of his second instruction and conversion, and in the
adopted dialect of his land of captivity." Most of
the slaves came from what were known as the pagan
tribes of the coast. In spite of the fact that so large
a proportion of the slaves came from these interior
tribes it was not until Mungo Park made his famous
first journey to the interior of the Soudan in 1795
that the Western world knew anything definite
about that region. The eminent German traveller
and scholar, Dr. Henry Barth, first reached the
famous commercial city of Kano in 1850, and until
1900 it was said not more than five Europeans had
ever visited that city. The accounts that travellers
give of the region and the people present a picture
of African life so different from that of the coast cities
that I am tempted to quote at some length from these
descriptions.

Several peoples, of strikingly different characteristics,
contributed to form the several loosely connected
states which now form the British Colony of Northern

Nigeria, of which Kano is the principal city.
The most important and interesting of these are the
Hausas and the Fulahs or Fellani, as they are sometimes
called. The Fulahs are noted for their military
spirit; the Hausas for their commercial enterprise.
One has a light complexion and the other is dark.

The Fulahs are an equestrian people, with a
cavalry armed with lances and swords. They are
zealous Mohammedans with a knowledge how to
"divide and govern." Their independent character
is described by the proverbial saying that "a Fulah
man slave will escape or kill his master, and that a
Fulah girl slave will rule the harem or die." The
Hausas are superior to the Fulahs in the arts of
peace. They are possessed of unusual industry,
judgment and intelligence and have a considerable
degree of literary taste. The Hausas carry on the
internal trade of the North and Central Soudan.
They are well clothed and have many well built
cities with population sometimes of from twenty
to sixty thousand. Barth, in describing Kano,
which is, perhaps, to West Africa, what Chicago is
to the United States, tells us that he mounted on
horseback, "rode for several hours round all the
inhabited quarters, enjoying at his leisure from the
saddle the manifold scenes of public and private
life, of comfort and happiness, of luxury and misery,
of industry and indolence, which were exhibited in
the streets, the market places, and in the interior of

the courtyards." Here he saw "a row of shops
filled with articles of native and foreign produce
with buyers and sellers in every variety of figure,
complexion, and dress." Now an "open terrace of
clay with a number of dye-pots and people busily
employed in various processes of their handicraft;
here a man stirring the juice and mixing with indigo
some colouring wood in order to give it the desired
tint, there another drawing a shirt from the dye-pot,
there two men beating a well-dyed shirt"; further
on, "a blacksmith busy with his tools in making a
dagger, a spear or the more useful ornaments of
husbandry," and, in another place, "men and women
hanging up their cotton thread for weaving."

The market of Kano, said to be the largest in
Africa, is celebrated for its cotton cloth and leather
goods. Traditions of Kano go back over a thousand
years. It is surrounded by walls of sun-dried clay
from twenty to thirty feet high and fifteen miles in
circumference.

The greatest chieftain that ever ruled in West
Africa, Mohammed Askia, lived in Kano. He
became ruler in 1492 and held sway over a region
probably as large as the German Empire. Barth
tells us that Mohammed Askia was an example of
the highest degree to which Negroes have attained in
the way of political administration and control.
His dynasty, which was entirely of native descent, is
the more remarkable if we consider that this Negro

king was held in the highest esteem and veneration
by the most learned and rigid Mohammedans. Not
only did he consolidate and even extend his empire,
but went in 1495 on a pilgrimage to Mecca accompanied
by 1,500 armed men, 1,000 on foot and 500 on
horseback, and founded there a charitable institution.
He extended his conquests far and wide from what
is now the centre of Nigeria, westward almost to
the borders of the Atlantic Ocean and northward to
the south of Morocco. Askia governed the subjected
tribes with justice and equity. Everywhere
within the borders of his extensive dominions his
rule spread well-being and comfort.[7]

The career of Mohammed Askia is possibly the
best example of the influence of Mohammedanism
on that portion of Africa from which our American
slaves were taken.

CHAPTER IV
THE WEST COAST BACKGROUND OF THE AMERICAN
NEGRO

SLAVES were probably brought to America
from every part of Africa, for the slave trade
seems to have penetrated, before it ended, to
every corner of the continent. But the larger number
of them came, undoubtedly, from the West Coast. It
is said that, at one time, 200,000 slaves sailed annually
from the West Coast of Africa, and during a
period of two hundred years, it is estimated that
3,200,000 slaves were shipped to America from a
single point in the Niger Delta.[1] These people of
the West Coast were, for the most part, the broken
fragments of races that had been driven to the sea
by the stronger races of the interior. They did not
represent the highest to which the black man had
attained in Africa, and their contact with the white
man of the slave-trading class during the four
hundred years or more that the foreign slave trade
was in existence, did not improve them.

The African slave trade was not the source of all
that was evil in the native life of the West Coast,

but it is responsible for a great deal of it. The slave
trade did not, for instance, cause the destructive
tribal wars among the Natives, but it incensed them.
It added the motive of gain and gave the savage
warfare the character of a commercial enterprise.
The evils of the traffic did not end, however, with
the immediate and tangible destruction that it
wrought. It corrupted the native customs and
destroyed the native industries. It substituted the
cheap machine-made European goods for the more
artistic native manufactures, which take a great deal
more time and energy to produce.

"At the present time," says Professor Boas, "the
distribution of Negro culture in Africa is such that
in all the regions where the whites have come in
contact with the Negro, his own industries have
disappeared or have been degraded. As a consequence,
all the tribes that live near the coast of
Africa are, comparatively speaking, on a low level
of industrial culture. It is but natural that the
blacksmith, who can exchange a small lump of rubber
picked up in the woods for a steel knife, prefers this
method of obtaining a fine implement to the more
laborious one of making a rather inefficient knife of
soft iron with his primitive tools. It is not surprising
that the cheap cotton goods replace the fine grass-cloth
and the bark-cloth which the African women
prepare. The European trader carries to the coast
of Africa only the cheap products of European

factories, but nothing that would give to the Negro
the white man's method of work."[2]

Of course the degradation of the native industries,
in the way Professor Boas has described it, is not confined
to Africa nor to the slave trade; it goes on
wherever machine-made goods come in contact with
native and home-made products. Much the same
thing may be seen among the Negro farmers in the
Southern states where they have yielded to the
temptation to raise nothing but cotton—what is
called the "money crop." For example, the Tuskegee
Institute is located in the midst of one of the
finest sweet potato growing soils in the world. Notwithstanding
this, canned sweet potatoes used to
be shipped into this part of Alabama. It requires
less work to use the canned sweet potatoes which
have been dug, cleaned, and cooked, than it does to
prepare the land, produce the sweet potato crop,
clean them, and cook them. But it makes the farmer
dependent upon the store-keeper or more frequently
on the money-lender.

One of my favourite ways of emphasising this
mistake, in my talks to the Negro farmers, is to get
a basket of canned vegetables from the store, show
them what they are buying, calculate what they are
paying for them, and make clear to them how much
they could save and how much more independent
they would be if they raised these things at home.

It may be interesting to note here exactly what it
was the white man gave the black man for those
cargoes of human beings that were shipped from
Africa to America. The list of trade goods was
somewhat different at different periods of the slave
traffic and for different parts of the coast. The
following is a list of trade goods as used in the latter
part of the seventeenth century for the region about
Sierra Leone:

In those early days it was customary to reckon the
value of slaves in hides and in bars or iron. A slave
was worth at Gambia from twelve to fourteen bars of
iron, which is equal in value to about one-half a
hogshead of brandy.

The slave trade brought to the surface the worst in

both the white and the black races. In the slave
marts of the coast towns it was usually the worst
elements of both races that met, but it was here that
the African got his first notion of the white man's
civilisation, and it was here also that the white man
gained his first and most intimate acquaintance with
the African.

There is, I understand, a very natural and a very
widespread distrust among the Natives of the coast
towns and of the civilisation they represent.

One hears so little from the Natives themselves in
regard to this subject, or any other for that matter,
that I am tempted to quote here a statement of Miss
Kingsley which gives an insight into the way the
African mother looks upon these matters:

The Negro people of the country districts in the
Southern states are, I suspect, much more like the
masses of the Africans, who live beyond the influences
of the coast towns, than any other portion of any race
in the United States. As often as I can find the time
to do so, I get out into the country among this class
of people. I like to sleep in their houses, eat their
food, attend their churches, talk with them as they
plant and harvest their crops. In this way I have
gotten the inspiration and material for much that I
have written and much that I have had to say from
time to time about the Negro in America.

In recent years I have noticed among the people,
in what I have called "the country districts," a
growing distrust for the city, not unlike that distrust
of the Africans in the bush for the coast towns.
Among the debating societies that are frequently
formed among the country people, and in the
churches and in the school houses, wherever the
people get together, as they are fond of doing, to
talk over their local affairs or discuss some abstract
question, one of the favourite topics of discussion
is the relative merits of the town and country. In
the absence of other forms of excitement it frequently
happens that a whole community will divide on some
purely abstract question of this kind, and the debate

will continue for months at a time. Usually the
younger people are for the city and its opportunities,
but the older people are for the country and its
independence.

The most self-reliant and substantial characters
among my race that I know in the South are those
who have been so surrounded as not to get hold of
the vices and superficialities of towns and cities,
but remained in the country where they lead an
independent life. I have seen many of these characters
who have come to our Tuskegee Negro
conferences. I have in mind one man in particular,
J.M. Sanifer, a farmer from Pickins County, Alabama,
who comes to our Negro conference every year.
The first thing that he usually exhibits when he
begins to speak is a new suit of clothes. The history
of this suit of clothes is interesting. The wool out of
which it has been made has been grown upon the
backs of sheep owned by himself and pastured on his
land. The wool has been woven into cloth by his
wife. The garments have been made entirely by his
wife and daughters. This man takes great pride in
explaining to his fellow members of the conference
how he produces his own clothes, his own food, and
I remember on one occasion he mentioned that during
the previous twelve months he had had, except
coffee, nothing in his home in the way of food that had
not been produced on his farm. Mr. Sanifer has had
very little of what we sometimes call "book learning,"

but there are some things that one learns from
the study of things as well as from the study of books.
There were some things that the African learned in
American slavery; there are some other and quite
different things the American Negro is now beginning
to learn in freedom. None of these more fundamental
matters are ordinarily taught from books;
but if they are to be counted as part of what we
call education, then Mr. Sanifer is educated.

I have suggested in what I have already written
some of the reasons why the white man has not found
the black man at his best on the West Coast and
particularly in the West Coast towns. To judge
the African by what one may see in these coast towns
or by what one may see in South Africa, or in the
Nile regions of the Soudan, or wherever the native
African has come in close contact with white civilisation,
is much the same as if one were to judge the
civilisation of America by what one can see in the
slums of great cities. The people who live in these
slums are, for the most part, uneducated, and have
lost many of the habits and customs that make life
decent and dignified. But few people, I dare say,
would wish to pass judgment, either on the future
of America or of the people who live in the city slums
merely from what they were able to see there during
a hurried or casual visit.

The descriptions of travellers often give one the
impression that the moral, religious, and intellectual

life of the African is a mere jumble of cruel and
fantastic superstitions. But the African religion is
not a mere superstition.

"After more than forty years' residence among
these tribes," says Rev. R. H. Nassau, "fluently
using their language, conversant with their customs,
dwelling intimately in their huts, associating with
them in the varied relations of teacher, pastor, friend,
master, fellow-traveller and guest, and in my special
office as missionary, searching after their religious
thought (and therefore being allowed a deeper
entrance into their soul life than would be accorded
to a passing explorer) I am able unhesitatingly to
say that among all the multitude with whom I have
met, I have seen or heard of none whose religious
thought was only a superstition."[4]

In reading Dr. Nassau's book, I was impressed
with the fact that Fetishism, as he defines it, is not
merely a West African religion, but a West African
system of thought, a general point of view and way
of looking at things which enters into all the Native's
ideas, and gives its colour to most of the affairs of
his daily life.

This way of looking at and interpreting things so
thoroughly pervades everything West African, is so
different from our way of looking at things and is, as
it seems to me, so important to any one who wants
to get at the back of the African's mind, and find

something consistent in his institutions and behaviour
that I am tempted to quote again here at some length
from Miss Kingsley on this subject. She says:

The fundamental difference between the African
and the European way of thinking seems to be that
for the African there is no such thing as dead matter
in the world. Everything is alive, and for that
reason there is no such thing as a machine, at least
in the sense that we think of it. We are inclined to
look at the physical world about us as if everything
that happened was turned out relentlessly by some

great passionless machine. But the African thinks
that the world is alive in every part; it is a world of
spirits and persons like ourselves.

Miss Kingsley continues:

African medicine, so far as it has any system at all,
is based on Fetish. The African believes that
diseases are caused by an evil spirit, and the efficacy
of drugs depends on the benevolent spirits, which,
being put into the body, drive away the malevolent
disease-causing spirits.

"There is," says Miss Kingsley, "as in all things

West African, a great deal of Fetish ceremonial
mixed up with West African medical methods.
Underlying them throughout there is the Fetish
form of thought, but it is erroneous to believe that
all West African native doctors are witch doctors,
because they are not. One of my Efik friends, for
example, would no more think of calling in a witch
doctor for a simple case of rheumatism than you
would think of calling in a curate or a barrister; he
would just call in the equivalent to our consulting
physician, the country doctor, the Abiadiong. But
if he started being ill with something exhibiting
cerebral symptoms he would have in the witch doctor
at once."

What Miss Kingsley calls the Abiabok is really
the village apothecary, who is also a sort of country
doctor whose practice extends over a fair-sized district,
wherein he travels from village to village.
Big towns have resident apothecaries, and these
apothecaries are learned in the properties of
herbs, and they are surgeons as far as surgery
is ventured upon. "A witch doctor," says Miss
Kingsley, "would not dream of performing an
operation."

Ex-President G. W. Gibson of Liberia, with whom
I have talked, who went out to Africa as a boy, shortly
after the colony was founded, speaks the native
language fluently and has a long and intimate
acquaintance with the native peoples, says that

certain of the African methods of dealing with disease
are very effective. For instance, the people in
Liberia are frequently troubled with rheumatism
and dropsy. For these diseases, he says, no
medicines have been found equal to those of the
Native doctor.

Like all the other crafts in Africa the use of drugs
is a trade secret, and the native doctor has to go
through a long apprenticeship before he is allowed
to practise. It is not unusual, Mr. Gibson
says, for some one living in the settlements,
white men as well as black, to go out to those
Bush doctors to obtain relief from certain kinds
of disease.

Sometimes the coloured people in America,
particularly those of the older generation, have had
very quaint notions about medicine, but many of
them, even those most ignorant of books, seem to be
natural doctors or nurses. Frequently at Tuskegee
a boy or girl having after been given the best care
by our resident physician has remained sick for
several months with few signs of recovery. Then
the mother of this student would come to the institution
and ask permission to take her child home for
a few weeks. Notwithstanding the fact that the
mother lived a long way in the country, miles from
any doctor, the student would return within a
few weeks in an apparently sound and healthy
condition.

The methods of the witch doctor, as distinguished
from the methods of the ordinary village doctor,
seem to me, to a certain extent, like those of the
Christian Scientist, at least in so far as he seeks to
work directly on the soul and to drive out the disease
by driving the idea of it out of the patient's mind.
The witch doctor has to do with malevolent spirits,
but as some of these malevolent spirits are human
beings, his methods often take the form of a criminal
proceeding, he being called in to assist in the conviction
of the persons who are responsible for the
disease. It is these criminal proceedings that
have given the witch doctor his present bad
reputation. And yet it is admitted that the witch
doctors, as a rule, are very skilful in ferreting
out crime.

One of the most interesting books in regard to
Africa which I have been able to lay my hands on is
Sarbah's "Fanti Customary Laws," a collection made
by a native lawyer and member of the English bar,
from cases tried under English jurisdiction in
native courts. This customary law corresponds, in
the life of the Fanti people, a tribe inhabiting
what is known as the Gold Coast, to the common
law of England, and Mr. Sarbah, in collecting it in a
permanent form has performed a service for his
people not unlike that of Blackstone for the English
common law. Everywhere in Africa where the life
of the people has not been disturbed by outside

influences, the people are governed by law. There
is law relating to property, to morality, to the protection
of life, in fact, in many portions of Africa
law is more strictly regarded than in many civilised
countries.[7]

"No other race on a similar level of culture," says
Professor Boas, "has developed as strict methods
of legal procedure as the Negro has. Many of his
legal forms remind us strongly of those of mediæval
Europe. For instance, it is hardly a coincidence
that the ordeal as a means of deciding legal
cases when all other evidence fails, has been
used in Europe as well as throughout Africa,
while it seems to be entirely unknown in ancient
America."

In looking at the social institutions of the African
we must not ignore his popular assemblies that are
generally held in the palaver house or in the open air.
Here matters legislative as well as judicial are settled.
Though there are no written laws, certain ancient
customs and usages form the precedent for discussion
and settlement. When a law has been agreed
upon, it is customary in some of the coast tribes
for a public crier to proclaim it through the town.
This is repeated at dusk when all the people are
supposed to be at home so that no one can
plead ignorance in case the law is violated. In

trial cases the witness takes an oath of which the
following is an example:

The native African tribes, which have never been
touched by the Mohammedan civilisation have,
as is generally known, no written literature. Only
one tribe, the Vei people who live in the hinterland
of Sierra Leone and Liberia, have invented an
alphabet.[8] But Africans are great story-tellers and,
according to Leighton Wilson, they have almost
any amount of "unwritten lore, in the form of
fables, allegories, traditionary stories and proverbial
sayings, in which is displayed no small share of
close observation, lively imagination and extraordinary
shrewdness of character." He describes one
famous African story-teller, Toko, by name, who
might have been an ancestor of Joel Chandler
Harris's "Uncle Remus."

"Toko," he says, "has a very remarkable and
intelligent countenance, strongly marked with the

deep vein of natural humour which pervades his
whole composition. He is careless in dress, unpretending
in his manners, but his shrewdness and
unbounded humour, almost in spite of himself,
peer out at every turn in conversation. When he
sets out to rehearse one of his favourite fables, all his
humour is at once stirred up, and he yields himself
to the spirit of the story. He is all glee himself, the
hearer cannot for his life avoid being carried along
with him. The wild animals of the woods are
summoned before his audience, they are endowed with
all the cunning and shrewdness of man and before
you are aware of it, you have before your imagination
a perfect drama."

Heli Chatelain, who has collected some of this
unwritten literature in a volume entitled "Folk
Tales of Angola," says that those who "think the
Negro is deficient in philosophical faculties ignore
their proverbs which both in direction and depth of
meaning, equal those of any other race."

"At the bottom of patience," says one of these
proverbs, "there is heaven." "Hold a true friend
with both hands," says another. "Hope is the pillar
of the world," and, "He is a heathen who bears
malice," are others.

Perhaps the Native African, except under
Mohammedan influences, has been less successful
in building up and maintaining permanent and lasting
governments than in other directions, but he has been

more successful in this respect than is generally
supposed.

Professor Boas, speaking of some Negro Central
African tribes that have never come under Mohammedan
influence, says:

One reason for the instability of the kingdoms
that have grown up and flourished from time to
time on the Western Coast is, as Mr. Dowd has
pointed out, that the forests and rivers cut the
population into fragments and prevent cooperation.

It is interesting to note that Negro freedmen have
not only established governments in Haiti in
America, Liberia in Africa, but from 1630 to 1700
fugitive slaves maintained the Negro State of
Palmares in what is now Brazil, against all the other
slave-holding provinces of that colony. Negro
slaves, imported from East Africa to become guards
of palaces and fighting seamen for the Indian princes,
became so powerful that they carved out states for
themselves, one or more of which are still ruled by
Negro princes, as dependencies of the government
of India.[9]

Of the native states of Central Africa none have
been more studied, or better known than the

Kingdom of Uganda. In a recent article Mr.
Winston Churchill, M. P., writes concerning the
country and the people:

This description of conditions in Uganda strikes
me as the more interesting because this progress has
been made in a land where the white man cannot
live. "Every white man," says Mr. Churchill,
"seems to feel a sense of indefinable depression.
A cut will not heal, a scratch festers. In the third
year of residence even a small wound becomes a
running sore. One day a man feels perfectly well;
the next, for no apparent cause, he is prostrated
with malaria, and with malaria of a peculiarly
persistent kind, turning often in the third or fourth
attack to blackwater fever. In the small European

community at Entebbe there have been quite recently
two suicides. Whether, as I have suggested in
East Africa, it be the altitude, or the downward ray
of the Equatorial sun, or the insects, or some more
subtle cause there seems to be a solemn veto placed
upon the white man's permanent residence in these
beautiful abodes."

It has often seemed to me that, in estimating the
possibilities of the Negro race, one should not overlook
the extraordinary capacity of the Negro for
adapting himself, whether in Africa or in America,
to the conditions in which he finds himself. It is
this power of fitting himself into, and adapting himself
to, new conditions, which has enabled him to survive
under conditions in which other peoples have
perished. The Indian in the West Indies, in South
America and North America, the Sandwich Islanders,
the Australians and the New Zealanders have
steadily receded before the advance of the white
civilisation. The Negro is the only primitive people,
as I have said elsewhere, which has looked the white
man in the face and lived.

The Natives of South Africa are an illustration of
the quality I refer to. The changes which the white
man has made, during the last fifty years in South
Africa, have brought enormous hardship to the native
peoples. Against these changes they have frequently
rebelled, but in the end, as they saw they were facing
the inevitable, they have sought to adapt themselves

to it. And they have not become discouraged; and
they have not died out. On the contrary, they have
steadily increased in numbers as the inter-tribal wars
died out.

I remember some years ago meeting a young
African who had come to Tuskegee as a student from
the region around Johannesburg, South Africa. He
had managed to save a considerable sum of money
at the time of the late Boer war in South Africa, and
he had made use of that money to come to America
to get an education. He had not learned, at this
time, to speak our language fluently, and it was with
some difficulty that he expressed himself in English.
I managed to get from him, however, a vivid impression
of the change that had come over him and his
people since the white men first invaded their country.
He had grown up, he said, in the kraal, with no
thought and no ambition to do otherwise, than his
father had done before him—to till a little strip of
land, to tend the cattle, and, as he said, "to play."
In the simplicity of this life there was no thought and
no care for the future, no notion that life could ever
be other than it was. Looking back upon it, this
seemed one long, unbroken holiday. He very well
understood how crude and how aimless this savage
life was likely to seem to people who lived in a higher
stage of civilisation, but he made no apologies for it.
He said it was "glorious"; that was his word.

But the white man came, and soon all was changed.

At first his people welcomed the strangers, for they
had long been acquainted with the missionaries and
liked them. But after the discovery of gold and
diamonds the white man came in ever increasing
numbers, bringing with him strange customs and
wonderful machinery.

At the same time came the drought and pestilence
and a great war. For the first time within his
memory people began to die of hunger. Many of
the young men left their villages and went into the
mines and then wandered away into the cities and
never came back. The old men were much troubled
and began to sit long in council considering what was
to be the future of the people and what was the best
thing to do.

Out of all this unrest there has grown up among
the Natives an ardent desire for education. It is
pathetic to note the earnestness with which, at the
present time, these people are seeking the white
man's education in order that they may fit themselves
and their people for the white man's civilisation.
And this desire for education, so far as I can learn,
is not confined to those who live in the settlements
but it has taken hold, also, of the people living in the
remote regions, wherever a Christian missionary has
penetrated.

Some of the African chiefs have sent their sons as
students to Tuskegee and I have frequently been
touched by the appeals for assistance in the way of

teachers that have come to us through these students
and from other sources.[10]

An incident quoted by Archibald Colquhoun in a
recent book on South African affairs, gives some
idea of the earnestness of this desire of the Natives
for education.

A Native family, squatting on a Dutch Africander
farm, earned between them a small sum weekly for
rooting up prickly pear, the farmer's pest. Not
being near any school, they paid the whole sum,

their entire income, to a Native teacher (a half
educated man from the nearest kraal) to act as
tutor to their children, and they subsisted on what
they could glean, or (it is to be feared) steal. When
they were questioned on the subject these people were
perfectly clear as to their motive, which was to give
their children a better chance in the world. "In the
face of such a strong demand," says Mr. Colquhoun,
"it is useless to make any attempt to stop the tide of
progress. If Natives cannot get the education they
demand in South Africa, they can and will go to
America for it."[11]