Statuette (Lega).

Ivory, height: 15.5 cm.

 

 

Lega figurines were often used in the ceremonies of the Bwami society. The carved scarifications on this statuette are typical of this use.

 

 

Oceanic Migrations

 

In principle, there could be no opposition to the proposal that the current of population flowed in an inverse direction and that the Negroes of Melanesia should be considered of African origin. But an attentive examination of native traditions tends to favour the first of the two hypotheses. However vague these traditions, whatever their apparent incoherence and with whatever highly supernatural garments they have been clothed by the imagination and the superstition of the Negroes, they strike the most biased mind by their concordance and lead one to think that, once disengaged from their accessories, they possess a basis of truth.

 

All the Negro tribes of Africa claim that their first ancestors came from the east. Of course migrations have taken place in all directions; but, if we analyse methodically all the circumstances of which we have knowledge, we ascertain that the movements in any other direction than to the west took place as the result of local wars, epidemics, droughts, and always at an epoch later than that at which the particular group dates the beginning of its history. If we push the natives whom we interrogate to their last retrenchments, they invariably show us the rising sun as representing the point whence departed their most ancient patriarch.

 

It appears then, that one may, until proof to the contrary be forthcoming, admit as established the theory according to which the Negroes of Africa are not, properly speaking, autochthonous, but come from migrations having their point of departure towards the limits of the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. It is better to abstain from specifying the precise epoch or epochs of these migrations. All that we are permitted to affirm is that, when the existence of the African Negroes was revealed for the first time to the ancient peoples of the Orient and of the Mediterranean, they already occupied, and undoubtedly for a very long time, the same regions in which we find them in our day and they appear to have lost since that time the precise remembrance of their original habitat.