University of Virginia Library

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]