CHAPTER IV
Congo and Guinea
One of the great cities of the Sudan was Jenne. The chronicle says that “its markets are held every day of the week and its populations are very enormous. Its seven thousand villages are so near to one another that the chief of Jenne has no need of messengers. If he wished to send a note to Lake Dibo, for instance, it is cried from the gate of the town and repeated from village to village, by which means it reaches its destination almost instantly.”1
From the name of this city we get the modern name Guinea, which is used today to designate the country contiguous to the great gulf of that name—a territory often referred to in general as West Africa. Here, reaching from the mouth of the Gambia to the mouth of the Niger, is a coast of six hundred miles, where a marvelous drama of world history has been enacted. The coast and its hinterland comprehend many well-known names. First comes ancient Guinea, then modern Sierra Leone and Liberia; then follow the various “coasts” of former traffic—the grain, ivory, gold, and slave coasts—with the adjoining territories of Ashanti, Dahomey, Lagos, and Benin; and farther back, such tribal and territorial names as those of the Mandingoes, Yorubas, the Mossi, Nupe, Borgu, and others.
If ever a people exhibited unanswerable evidence of indigenous civilization, it is the west-coast Africans. Undoubtedly they adapted much that came to them, utilized new ideas, and grew from contact. But their art and culture are Negro. Recent investigation makes it certain that an ancient civilization existed on this coast, which may have gone back as far as three thousand years before Christ. Frobenius, perhaps fancifully, identified this African coast with the Atlantis of the Greeks and as a part of that great western movement in human culture, “beyond the pillars of Hercules,” which thirteen centuries before Christ strove with Egypt and the East.
It is, at any rate, clear that ancient commerce reached down the west coast. The Phoenicians, 600 B.C., and the Carthaginians, a century or more later, record voyages, and these may have been attempted revivals of still more ancient intercourse. These coasts at some unknown prehistoric period were peopled from the Niger plateau toward the north and west by the black West African type of Negro, while along the west end of the desert these Negroes mingled with the Berbers, forming various Negroid types.
We have already noted in the main the history of black men along the wonderful Niger and seen how, pushing up from the Gulf of Guinea, a powerful wedge of ancient culture held back Islam for a thousand years, now victorious, now stubbornly disputing every inch of retreat. The center of this culture lay probably, in oldest time, above the Bight of Benin, along the Slave Coast, and reached west and north. We trace it today not only in the remarkable tradition of the natives, but in stone monuments, architecture, industrial and social organizations, and works of art in bronze, glass and terra cotta.
Down the west coast of Africa, south of the Senegal, came first the Wolofs and then the Serer, remarkable for their organization. Beyond that were similar groups and a flourishing agriculture. Further along between the Gambia River and French Guinea we come to a number of backward half savage tribes, who are the remains of populations overthrown and driven back by the Mandingo and Fulani. Sometimes they have taken refuge on islands and up the branches of rivers. From these, their more powerful neighbors drew thousands of slaves who crossed the Atlantic to the American colonies.
From French Guinea toward Liberia, the Mandingoes and allied tribes like the Susu pushed toward the sea. With them were the Vai, who invented a written language with an alphabet toward the end of the eighteenth century. In the hinterland behind Liberia and Sierra Leone there were a series of primitive people, sometimes cannibals, who cultivated the kola nut. Near them in the dense forests were other primitive people, who on the coast were known as the Kru men and who for five centuries have been sailors and workers on ships.
East of the Kru, from the Bambara River to the Volta, are a group of people with striking intellectual development, later debased by imported liquor. They include the Agni, the Abron, who have a well-organized state dating from the fifteenth century; and the Ashanti and Fanti. The Ashanti organized a, well-constituted kingdom with its capital at Kumasi, which lasted from 1700 to 1895. Beyond the Volta River are peoples with intellectual and artistic gifts and excellent political organization. Among them are the Ewe, the Yoruba, and people of Benin, Dahomey and Nupe.
The kingdom of Yoruba can be traced back to the early eighteenth century when it invaded Dahomey twice but finally made peace in 1847, at which time the king of Dahomey undertook to pay annual tribute. The kings of Yoruba, Egba, Ketu and Jebu were closely allied, the title of the first being Alafin, and the king of the Egba being known as the Alake. About 1800 the Yoruba kingdom began to break up. The Fulani and others had entered the territory of the Hausa, and they, driven southward, pressed upon Yoruba.
The Yoruba, moving southward because of this and because of the rebellion of the Mohammedan party in their own territory, came to their present capital Oyo; and the Egbas, declaring independence, moved to their present capital Abeokuto. Ibadan in the old province of Egba declared its independence, and other secessions took place, making seven independent states; while the former Yoruba province was inhabited by Fulani and people of Bornu and Hausa.
Meantime Lagos and the coast had been colonized by Yoruba at the beginning of the eighteenth century and was noted as a slave market; and the captives in these wars were sent down there and sold to the slave traders.
West of Yoruba on the lower courses of the Niger is Benin, a state which in 1897 traced its twenty-three kings back a thousand years; some legends even named a line of sixty kings. It seems probable that Benin developed the imperial idea and once extended its rule into the Congo Valley.
Benin was one of the most carefully organized of the Negro states on the West Coast with a rare native culture. The Portuguese discovered the country about 1585 and traded with it in slaves and other produce. Lagos and other coast towns were first established by the Beni. It was a small country but its influence extended from Sierra Leone to the mouth of the Congo because of the widespread belief in the power of its Juju or chief spirit. The king was in the hands of the priesthood and the worship of the Juju demanded human sacrifice by crucifixion. Nevertheless the deaths were mercifully inflicted and the Beni had a high culture. They were noted for their work in brass and ivory. The British came in contact with Benin in 1553 and dealt in ivory, palm oil and other goods. The Dutch established factories near and engaged in the slave trade.
The slave trade long centered here and, after its abolition, explorers like Mungo Park and the Lander Brothers penetrated the interior. Between 1840 and 1860 European merchants of several nations were trading up these rivers and after the pause that followed the Indian mutiny and the Franco-Prussian War, British companies began to be formed.
The British attacked Lagos and after severe losses drove out one king and proclaimed another. Traders and missionaries flocked in. Finally in 1861 by force and bribes the king was induced to cede the territory to the protection of Great Britain. Benin still resisted.
Later and also to the west of Yoruba come two states showing a fiercer and ruder culture, Dahomey and Ashanti. Dahomey was probably founded before the sixteenth century and is mentioned by Leo Africanus. The kings at the capital, Abomey, were warriors and slave traders and celebrated for human sacrifice, but had an extraordinary well-organized state and were good farmers and artisans with high intellectual capacity.
The known history of Dahomey begins with the seventeenth century when the three sons of a Negro monarch established states of which one, Dahomey, in 1724−28, conquered the other two. King Gezo from 1818 to 1858 raised the power of Dahomey to the highest point and made a treaty with the French. There had been a widespread custom of human sacrifice based on filial piety and loyalty to the chief. These sacrifices Gezo greatly reduced. When England annexed Lagos in 1861, France began to intrigue for Dahomey and German agents also appeared. Finally in 1889 the French and the English agreed, and the French claimed Dahomey. There was severe fighting in which the Amazons took part. Peace was made in 1890, but war broke out again in 1892 when the mulatto General Dodds with French and Senegalese soldiers finally defeated the Dahomey troops and the king set fire to his capital. The country was divided and the royal family restored. Gradually the hinterland toward the north was added.
In the interior and to the north between these people and the bend of the Niger are a large number of tribes, primitive and chaotic in organization, sometimes included in the empire-building states and at other times repelling them by their wild independence. They are chiefly notable for their excellent farming. Further up on the Volta, near the beginning of the great forest, are little states founded by the Sunufo, noted for the iron industry, pottery, agriculture and the art of music.
The Akan people formed one tribe and lived originally further to the north toward the great bend of the Niger. The expanding imperialism there drove them south and divided them into various tribes. The first known king of Ashanti, a part of the Akans, reigned about 1600. He had been preceded by at least two kings. Gold was then unknown and iron was currency. Osai Tutu came to the throne in 1697 and founded Kumasi. The Ashanti were at war with the Denkara early in the eighteenth century and overcame them, thus coming in contact with the Dutch at Elmina on the coast. The next important king, Osai Kwesi, came to the throne in 1742 and kept up conquest and the putting down of revolts. Osai Tutu Kwamina was the first Ashanti king who came in contact with the English. By this time the Ashanti ruled over a vast extent of country with many tribes, calling for great activity in order to put down various rebellions.
The Portuguese arrived on the Guinea coast in the middle of the sixteenth century and were expelled by the Dutch in the seventeenth century. The Dutch quarreled with the English and eventually the English took possession of the coast and the slave trade. There ensued between 1803 and 1874 six Ashanti wars with the English. Ostensibly they were aimed at the customs of human sacrifice in Ashanti and to put down aggression upon the Fanti tribes who owed allegiance to Ashanti, but became allied with the English. In reality these wars all aimed at trade monopoly and economic empire for the English.
The records of the action of the English on the Gold Coast, “the earliest beginnings of which had their inception in the dark days of the slave trade, cannot but hold many things that modern Englishmen must recall with mingled shame and horror. The reader will find much to deplore in the public and private acts of many of the white men, who, in their time, made history on the Coast; and some deeds were done which must forever remain among the most bitter and humiliating memories of every Britisher who loves his country and is jealous of its fair fame.”2
When the first Ashanti war took place under King Osai Tutu Kwamina between 1803 and 1807 it began characteristically with the theft of gold and valuables from a grave—a blasphemy of death and eternal life. The King of Ashanti demanded redress, but his messengers to the accused Fanti were killed. This led to a war between the Ashanti and the Fanti in which the English governor promised to defend some of the allies of the Fanti. The Ashanti advanced toward the sea and captured a fort belonging to the Dutch. The English governor tried to defend the allies of the Fanti and as a result his supporters were shut up in the fort and besieged by the Ashanti. Although the fort made a brilliant defense, 10,000 or more of the Fanti were killed. The governor sent for English ships to support him, but the officer in charge insisted on coming to terms with the Ashanti king. Eventually hostages from the Fanti allies were delivered to the Ashanti and a peace was planned, in which it was acknowledged that the coast and the territory of the Fanti belonged exclusively to the empire of the Ashanti, and that while the whites might have judicial authority in the forts, nevertheless the Ashanti were the rulers of the country.
This treaty was never actually signed, but the Ashanti withdrew, and the British trade on the Gold Coast was safe. The second Ashanti war was really a continuation of the first and lasted from 1808 to 1813. The Ashanti army had withdrawn after the proposed peace in 1807 because of the outbreak of smallpox and scarcity of supplies. Thereupon the Fanti began another rebellion, and peoples of the Gold Coast were warned by the English governor to take no part. Nevertheless they did, and attacked the Elminas who were allies of the Ashanti. The Ashanti king sent messengers declaring that he desired peace and trade, which were being interfered with by the Fanti. Nothing was done and the Ashanti after two weeks came to the support of the Elminas with a large army. Eventually they were victorious but lived up to their promise not to harm Europeans. Their allies, however, the Elminas, killed the Dutch governor, and the Fanti murdered the mulatto commandant of one of the forts and eventually killed an Englishman. As a result English ships destroyed the fort.
Certain of the tributaries of the Ashanti rebelled in 1811, and in 1814 the King of Ashanti determined to crush them. He especially demanded the surrender of three recalcitrant chiefs and came down to the coast to find them. The English governor sent to inquire the reason and promised that if he could find the rebels he would return them. The Ashanti, on the other hand, promised not to molest any of the people living under the protection of the forts. Eventually the chiefs were found and killed. In this way peace was restored between the Ashanti and the Fanti and great numbers of the Ashanti came down to Cape Coast and there was a brisk trade.
The English, thereupon, began to make efforts to extend their jurisdiction on the coast. On the conclusion of peace in 1816, the English felt that a regular treaty with the Ashanti ought to be made. They, therefore, sent an embassy to Kumasi under Bowdich. It was received in state with an assembling of 30,000 Ashanti soldiers and chiefs under gorgeous silk umbrellas. The description of the Ashanti court is worth quoting:
“The sun was reflected, with a glare scarcely more supportable than the heat, from the massy gold ornaments, which glistened in every direction…. The Caboceers, as did their superior captains and attendants, wore Ashantee cloths of extravagant price from the costly foreign silks which had been unravelled to weave them,… and massy gold necklaces intricately wrought…. Some wore necklaces reaching to the navel, entirely of aggry beads; a band of gold and beads encircled the knee, from which several strings of the same depended; small circles of gold like guineas, rings, and casts of animals, were strung round their ankles… and rude lumps of rock gold hung from their left wrists, which were so heavily laden as to be supported on the head of one of their handsomest boys. Gold and silver pipes and canes dazzled the eye in every direction. Wolves’ and rams’ heads as large as life, cast in gold, were suspended from their gold-handled swords, which were held around them in great numbers.”3
The king showed his readiness to come to understanding with the English, but the question of the payments for the occupation of forts came up. For more than a century the kings of Ashanti had received payment for Elmina Castle, and lately for the English and Dutch forts of Accra and the Danish fort. The king, however, showed that he had been cheated in these payments and most of the rentals had been retained by local chiefs. Bowdich, however, reassured the king, and the governor was communicated with and the payments were readjusted.
As a result a treaty was signed in 1817 in ten articles, promising peace between the British and Ashanti, security for the people of Cape Coast, and redress by the governor for any case of aggression on the part of the natives under British protection. A British officer was to reside at Kumasi as a means of communication with the governor. Trade was to be encouraged and the governor was to have the right to punish subjects of Ashanti for secondary offenses but not serious crimes. Two children of the king were to be sent to Cape Coast for education.
Here was a chance for peace and civilization on the Gold Coast through the alliance of one of the leading white civilized nations of Europe and a powerful black kingdom of Africa, independent and self-assertive, but eager to know the new white world. Inevitably war and blood sacrifice must have in the end succumbed to normal industry and philanthropic effort. The Ashanti king of the day was a man of unusual ability and high character, honorable and desiring peace. He never broke his word to the English. Claridge says:
“Osai Tutu Kwamina is, of all the Ashanti monarchs, the one on whom the Englishman should look with the most interest, for he was the first of the line who came into contact with Europeans, and by observing the attitude which he adopted towards them before the occurrence of those hostilities by which the relations of the two powers were subsequently embittered, we may learn what was the position that the Ashantis would have spontaneously adopted towards the white men.”4
The English did not understand Negro customs nor did their changing officials know or try to know what promises their government had made. As a result, the Fanti and other tribes, although the sworn vassals of the king of Ashanti, were struggling for freedom. They tried to gain their independence of Ashanti by putting themselves under the protection of the English, and thus led the English to interfere with the Ashanti power in ways which they had specifically promised not to use.
The fourth and fifth Ashanti wars were due entirely to such action on the part of the Fanti, and to the English breaking the treaty which they signed. The English went into the fourth war without right and without appreciating the power of Ashanti. The result was that at the battle of Insamankow, in 1824, the English Governor McCarthy was killed and his army beaten, on the same day that the Ashanti king himself died a natural death at Kumasi. This defeat was partially retrieved by a later English success and the withdrawal of the Ashanti. It was a double disaster.
The English were now disposed to give up efforts on the Gold Coast. The war had cost a large sum; the slave trade had been forbidden, and while not stopped it was ceasing to be profitable to the English. The English merchants on the coast, however, saw further possibilities. They, therefore, got permission to carry on, and under a far-seeing governor, George Maclean, a new start was made, although trade had been nearly annihilated and the Ashanti were sullen. Nevertheless a peace was signed in 1831 and trade reopened. Two princes of the Ashanti royal family were sent to England to be educated. A serious attempt was made to introduce Christianity bv sending missionaries in 1827, 1835, and 1843.
Maclean also tried to get at the root of the trouble by signing with the Fanti chiefs, who were at the bottom of so much of the trouble, the celebrated Bond of 1844. This bond acknowledged the power and jurisdiction exercised hitherto “for and on behalf of Her Majesty the Queen of Great Britain” and was signed by the chiefs and the governor. This bond really conferred no territorial rights but legalized and defined jurisdiction in criminal matters. The Fanti then took another interesting step. Their chiefs met and formed a legislative body which proposed a poll tax to be used for education and public improvements. It looked as though a new start for peace and advancement was being made on the Gold Coast through the chiefs who had been longest working in alliance with the English.
But two difficulties overthrew this: first, the English complicated the poll tax collection by establishing municipal corporations and local taxation; and, secondly, the Ashanti still considered that their jurisdiction over the Fanti had been interfered with. The Ashanti finally went to war again in 1860, capturing a number of Fanti prisoners, and the English gave up the attempt to punish them. The home agitation to withdraw from the Gold Coast was renewed.
In the meantime the Dutch and English had come to an understanding on the coast and had arranged an exchange of territory; but this meant that Elmina, which under the Dutch had always been the acknowledged property of the Ashanti, was now to be turned over to the English, and trouble between the Ashanti and Elminas broke out.
The Fanti as has been noted organized a confederation which if recognized by the English would have consolidated their power and made an organized center of defense against the power of Ashanti; but the English at that time in charge upon the coast were short-sighted and alarmed. The chiefs and educated Fanti natives had adopted a constitution to promote friendly intercourse between the kings and chiefs; to improve the country with roads and schools; and to have a representative assembly for preparing laws. The governor promptly arrested some of the leaders, although they were afterwards released by the home secretary of state. But the Confederation failed, leaving a great deal of bad feeling. All this irritated the Ashanti, and the war which had apparently stopped in 1863 broke out into new hostilities in 1873, when Elmina was occupied by the English. The Ashanti army began to march in 1873, and fought two hard battles which led to the retirement of the British. The British bombarded Elmina and brought in reinforcements.
This finally led the British to appoint Sir Garnet Wolseley to take charge. He came and demanded the withdrawal of the Ashanti. The Ashanti complained that their vassals refused to serve the king and ran away to the English, and that the Fanti plundered the agents of the Ashanti when they came down to the coast. “They fought with me six times and I drove them away and they escaped to be under you,” said the king. Nevertheless the Ashanti retreated and Wolseley slowly followed; but he did not have European troops and the Fanti allies did not respond. Some indecisive battles took place and the Ashanti finally withdrew, but lost a large number of men and chiefs.
The English now determined to reduce Ashanti to complete submission. The whole European situation had changed: the Franco-Prussian war had been fought; Germany was a great power and England was consolidating her economic empire. Wolseley imported a well-equipped modern army from England and invaded Ashanti in 1873. In February he was at Kumasi and burned the town. The king of Ashanti renounced all his rights over subject tribes and over Elmina and promised heavy indemnities.
Between 1875 and 1880 the power of Ashanti partially revived but the English now were determined on domination. The Ashanti sent an embassy representing the king direct to England in 1894, but the colonial officials refused to receive it and recognized the head of the Ashanti state only as “King of Kumasi.” Against him at last an expeditionary force was sent and he was surrounded in his capital.
“The scene was a most striking one. The heavy masses of foliage, that solid square of red coats and glistening bayonets, the artillery drawn up ready for any emergency, the black bodies of the Native levies, resting on their long guns in the background, while inside the square the Ashantis sat as if turned to stone, as Mother and Son, whose word was a matter of life and death, and whose slightest move constituted a command which all obeyed, were thus forced to humble themselves in sight of the assembled thousands.”5
Not only was King Prempeh arrested and deported and the Ashanti humiliated, but the English governor even demanded the Golden Stool upon which kings of Ashanti always sat and which represented the “soul of the nation.” To secure it they besieged Kumasi after a revolt in 1900, captured the city and overthrew the government; but the Golden Stool had disappeared. Years later when the King was brought back from exile the Golden Stool was found and surrendered.
In these states, and in later years, the whole character of West Coast culture had changed. In place of the Yoruban culture, with its city democracy, its elevated religious ideas, its finely organized industry, and its noble art, came cruder exhibitions of force and fetish in Ashanti and Dahomey. What was it that thus changed the character of the West Coast from developing culture to increased war and blood sacrifice, such as we read of later in these lands? There can be but one answer: the slave trade. Not simply the sale of men, but an organized effort to turn the attention and energies of men from nearly all other industries; to encourage war and all the cruelest passions of war; and to concentrate this traffic in precisely that part of Africa farthest from the ancient Mediterranean lines of contact.
We need not assume that the cultural change was sudden or absolute. Ancient Yoruba had the cruelty of a semi-civilized land, but it was neither aggressive nor tyrannical. Modern Benin and Dahomey showed traces of art, skill, and industry along with cruelty and insensibility to suffering. But it was the slave trade that turned the balance and set these lands backward. Dahomey was the last word in a series of human disasters in Africa which began with the defeat of the Askias at Tondibi.
From the middle of the fifteenth to the last half of the nineteenth centuries the American slave trade centered in Guinea and devastated the coast morally, socially, and physically. European rum and fire-arms were traded for human beings, and it was not until 1787 that any measures were taken to counteract this terrible scourge. In that year the idea arose of repatriating stolen Negroes on the coast and establishing civilized centers to supplant the slave trade. About four hundred Negroes from England were sent to Sierra Leone, to whom the promoters considerately added sixty white prostitutes as wives. The climate on the low coast, however, was so deadly that new recruits were soon needed.
An American Negro, Thomas Peters, who had served as sergeant under Sir Henry Clinton in the British army in America, went to England seeking an allotment of land for his fellows. The Sierra Leone Company welcomed him and offered free passage and land in Sierra Leone to the Negroes of Nova Scotia. As a result fifteen vessels sailed with eleven hundred and ninety Negroes in 1792. Arriving in Africa, they found the chief white man in control there so drunk that he soon died of delirium tremens. John Clarkson, the abolitionist, eventually assumed the lead, founded Freetown, and the colony began its checkered career. Later the colony was saved from insurrection by the exiled maroon Negroes from Jamaica. After 1833, when emancipation in English colonies began, severe measures against the slave trade were possible and the colony began to grow. Today its imports and exports amount to fifteen million dollars a year.
Liberia was a similar American experiment. In 1816 American philanthropists decided that whether slavery persisted or died out, the main problem lay in getting rid of the freed Negroes, of which there were then two hundred thousand in the United States. Accordingly the American Colonization Society was proposed this year and founded January 1,1817, with Bushrod Washington as president. It was first thought to encourage migration to Sierra Leone, and eighty-eight Negroes were sent, but they were not welcomed. As a result territory was bought in the present confines of Liberia, December 15,1821, and colonists began to arrive. A little later an African depot for recaptured slaves taken in the contraband slave trade, provided for in the Act of 1819, was established and an agent sent to Africa to form a settlement. Gradually this settlement was merged with the settlement of the Colonization Society, and from this union Liberia was finally evolved.
The last white governor of Liberia died in 1841 and was succeeded by the first colored governor, Joseph J. Roberts, a Virginian. The total population in 1843 was about twenty-eight hundred and with this as a beginning in 1847 Governor Roberts declared the independence of the state. The recognition of Liberian independence by all countries, except the United States, followed in 1849. The United States, not wishing to receive a Negro minister, did not recognize Liberia until the Civil War.
No sooner was the independence of Liberia announced than England and France began a long series of aggressions to limit her territory and sovereignty. A new conception of the role of Africa in European economy was emerging and an independent Negro republic did not fit into it. The English implied promise of independence for Sierra Leone was lost sight of, and the difficulties which Liberia has since encountered are not due to the American Negro immigrant and his ability, as much as to the fact that a free Negro state and European industrial imperialism clashed here in West Africa; and the little Negro state was almost overthrown. Only the intrusion of American capital after the World War saved Liberia from English, French, and German determination to dominate this rich remnant of the continent.
Considerable territory was lost by treaty, and in the effort to get capital in England to develop the rest, Liberia was saddled with a debt of four hundred thousand dollars, of which she received less than one hundred thousand dollars in actual cash. A second effort to redeem the first failure was equally unsuccessful, and international market control and monopoly freight rates brought the Liberians near despair. Finally, the Liberians turned to the United States for capital and protection. As a result the Liberian customs were put under international control and Charles Young, the ranking Negro officer in the United States army, with several colored assistants, was put in charge of the making of roads and drilling a constabulary to keep order in the interior, where “incidents” of tribal disorder, often deliberately incited, were continual excuses for foreign aggression. The debt was consolidated and control of customs was vested in a general receiver appointed by the United States.
Turning now from Guinea we pass down the West Coast. In 1482 Diego Cam of Portugal, sailing this coast, set a stone at the mouth of a great river which he called “The Mighty,” but which eventually came to be known by the name of the powerful Negro kingdom through which it flowed—the Congo.
We must think of the valley of the Congo, with its intricate interlacing of water route and jungle of forest, as a vast caldron shut away at first from the African world by known and unknown physical hindrances. It was first penetrated by the tiny red drawfs and afterward horde after horde of tall black men swirled into the valley like a maelstrom, moving usually from north to east and from south to west. The Congo Valley became, therefore, the center of the making of what we know today as the Bantu nations. They are not a unified people, but a congeries of tribes of considerable physical diversity, united by the compelling bond of language and other customs imposed on the conquered by invading conquerors.
The history of these invasions we must today largely imagine. Between two and three thousand years ago the wilder tribes of Negroes began to move out of the region south or southeast of Lake Chad. This was always a land of shadows and legends, where fearful cannibals dwelt and where no Egyptian, Ethiopian or Sudanese armies dared to go. It is possible, however, that pressure from civilization in the Nile Valley and rising culture around Lake Chad was at this time reinforced by expansion of the Yoruba-Benin culture on the West Coast. Perhaps, too, developing culture around the Great Lakes in the east beckoned, or the riotous fertility of the Congo valleys became known. At any rate the movement commenced, now by slow stages, now in wild forays.
There may have been a preliminary movement from east to west to the Gulf of Guinea. The main movement later, however, was eastward, skirting the Congo forests and passing down by the Victoria Nyanza and Lake Tanganyika. Here two paths beckoned: the lakes and the sea to the east, the Congo to the west. A great stream of men swept toward the ocean and, dividing, turned northward and fought its way down the Nile Valley and into the Abyssinian highlands; another branch turned south and approached the Zambesi, where we shall meet it again. Another horde of invaders turned westward and entered the valley of the Congo in three columns. The northern column moved along the Lualaba and Congo Rivers to the Cameroons; the second column became the industrial and state-building Luba and Lunda peoples in the southern Congo Valley and Angola; while the third column moved into Damaraland and mingled with Bushman and Hottentot.
The kingdom of Loango lay between Cape Lopez and the mouth of the Congo River. East of Loango and northwest of the Congo was the kingdom of Ansika, whose inhabitants were the Bateke. The kingdom of Lunda extended into the valley of the Kasai and the Zambesi. This kingdom was the realm of Mwata-Yanvo. Between this kingdom and the Monomotapa on the middle Zambesi were the Barotse; and north of that, the Katanga. The Ba-Luba were found northwest of Lake Tanganyika and east of that lake was the realm of the Wanyamwezi. North of Lake Victoria was Uganda. Most of these kingdoms have been preserved even to our day.
These beginnings of human culture were, however, peculiarly vulnerable to invading hosts of later comers. There were no natural protecting barriers like the narrow Nile Valley or the Kong Mountains or the forests below Lake Chad. Once the pathways to the valley were open, for hundreds of years the newcomers kept arriving, especially from the welter of tribes south of the Sudan and west of the Nile, which rising culture beyond kept in unrest and turmoil.
Against these intruders there was but one defense, the State. State building was thus forced on the Congo Valley. How early it started we cannot say, but when the Portuguese arrived in the fifteenth century there had existed for centuries a large state among the Ba-Congo, with its capital at the city now known as San Salvador. This Kingdom of Congo dates back to the fourteenth century and extended over modern Angola as far east as the Kasai and Upper Zambesi Rivers.
The Negro Mfumu, or emperor, was eventually induced to accept Christianity. His sons and many young Negroes of high birth were taken to Portugal to be educated. There several were raised to the Catholic priesthood and one became bishop; others distinguished themselves at the universities. Thus suddenly there arose a Catholic kingdom south of the valley of the Congo, which lasted three centuries, but was partially overthrown by invading barbarians from the interior in the seventeenth century. A king of Congo still reigns as pensioner of Portugal, and on the coast today are the remains of the kingdom in the civilized blacks and mulattoes, who are intelligent traders and boat builders.6
The original Bushongo stock belongs to the Ba-Luba family, which extends from the Kasai River to Lake Nyasa and from the Sankuro River to Lake Bangweulu. A race of roving warriors or hunters came from the north and established a domination over the Ba-Luba. These Sudanese conquerors gave political security under which artistic gifts were encouraged and allowed to develop. One of their greatest kings, Shamba Bolongongo (about 1600), before his accession traveled for years in the west and visited among other places the kingdom of Congo where Ntotila, king of Congo, was reigning. The pomp and ceremonial of this country greatly impressed Shamba either because of this actual visit or from reports of embassies. Long before 1700 the greatest of Congo kingdoms was thus reflected in central Africa.
One of the remarkable characteristics of the Bushongo is the organization of its national council, which contains representatives of various arts and crafts. Trade representation is not usual among the Bantu. Torday thinks that this representation of trades and crafts comes from the Kingdom of Congo. There originally every clan had its special crafts, such as weavers, palm wine-makers, potters, smiths. In common they had only agriculture, the women’s share; and hunting and fishing, the men’s. Every chief of a clan who lived was not only the representative of a territorial division, but also voiced the wishes of some particular art or craft in the council of the king.
The Bushongo learned the use of the loom, as well as the arts of damask weaving, embroidery, and pile-cloth making from the Bapende. The use of the loom in Africa reached the coast after its use inland had become general. Velvets, brocades, satins, taffetas, and damasks were imported to Congo by those great traders, the Bateke.
“It seems to be fairly well established that peaceful penetration of Central Africa from the West Coast, particularly from the Kingdom of Congo, had begun quite early in the seventeenth century. As far as Bushongo is concerned, somewhere between 1600 and 1614, it must have fallen under the spell of Congo.”7
The Luba-Lunda people to the eastward had founded Katanga and other states, and in the sixteenth century the larger and more ambitious realm of the Mwata Yanvo. The last of the fourteen rulers of this line was feudal lord of about three hundred chiefs, who paid him tribute in ivory, skins, corn, cloth and salt. This included about one hundred thousand square miles and two million or more inhabitants. Eventually this state became torn by internal strife and revolt, especially by attacks from the south across the Congo-Zambesi divide. Farther north, among the Ba-Lolo and the Ba-Songo, the village policy persisted but the cannibals of the northeast pressed down on the more settled tribes. The result was a curious blending of war and industry, artistic tastes and savage customs.
The organized slave trade of the Arabs penetrated the Congo Valley in the sixteenth century and soon was aiding all the forces of unrest and turmoil. Industry was deranged and many tribes forced to take refuge in caves and other hiding places. Here, as on the West Coast, disintegration and retrogression followed, for as the American traffic lessened, the Arabian traffic increased.
In following the history of human development on the Guinea Coast and in the Congo Valley one cannot but feel, as elsewhere in Africa, that the outcome was not simply a matter of racial ability or natural human development; on the other hand, it is clear that the impact of a great movement which initiated the Industrial Revolution in Europe and started the hegemony of the white race over the world was accomplished at the expense of human culture in West Africa. Further, in the Congo Valley efforts at integration, civilization and state building crowded upon each other. There seemed no lack of human ability and ingenuity but there was rivalry and conquest and the intrusion of elements from other parts of Africa pouring in like waves, started by upheavals in the Sudan and on the West Coast. Finally there came to the Congo not simply a slave trade quite as destructive as the American traffic, but also the new economic imperialism of Africa built on American slavery and destined to build a new agricultural and industrial slavery in Africa.