People of African descent

“ But in our examination of African tribes we shall not confine ourselves to that class of people known as Negroes, but call attention to other tribes as well. And while, in this country, all persons with a visible admixture of Negro blood in them are considered Negroes, it is technically incorrect. For the real Negro was not the sole subject sold into slavery: very many of the noblest types of mankind in Africa have, through the uncertainties of war, found their way to the horrors of the middle passage, and finally to the rice and cotton fields of the Carolinas and Virginias. ”

“ Yet the slaves in the colonies, particularly in those of England, were brought from the west coast of intertropical Africa, where the peculiarities of figure, which in our eyes constitute deformity in the Negro, are chiefly prevalent. The black people imported into the French and to some of the Portuguese colonies, from the eastern coast of the African continent, and from Congo, are much better made. The most degraded and savage nations are the ugliest. ”

“ What is true of the Africa continent has been emphatically true of the people. The world has always seen the African race in its lowest form. This seems true as far back as Egyptian monumental times. One is struck, when looking at copies of ancient hicroglyhics, with the degraded type of negro feature which always appears when these captive people are delineated. The African race seems to have been fated to be always represented by a slave, and, as was inevitable, it has been judged by the example seen. ”

“ We need not go so far away from home, indeed, to see little black children with woolly, kinky hair and flat noses like the little African. In the sunny South of our own land are many negro children as like the little negro cousin in Africa as one pea is like another. Years and years ago slave-ships brought to this country negroes, stolen from their own African homes to be the slaves and servants of the white people here. ”

“ So she must be not only very populous but very prolific. It would be safe to estimate her people at 200,000,000, counting the Ethiopic or true African race, and the Caucasian types, which embrace the Nubians, Abyssinians, Copts and Arabs. ”

“ As a matter of fact the Africans are the only contemporaneous primitive people who have anywhere achieved race consciousness and civilization without losing their racial identity. As a consequence almost every fundamental process and stage of civilization, from the most primitive to the most cosmopolitan man, is somewhere represented in the contemporary life of the Negro in Africa and America. ”

“ For a study of the acculturation process, there are probably no materials more complete and accessible than those offered by the history of the American Negro. No other representatives of a primitive race have had so prolonged and so intimate an association with European civilization, and still preserved their racial identity. Among no other people is it possible to find so many stages of culture existing contemporaneously. It has been generally taken for granted that the Negro brought a considerable fund of African tradition and African superstition from Africa to America. ”

“ Though the negro of this country may not be of the best races of Africa, yet he is not of the worst, and as we shall have occasion to remark, he has had influences exerted, both as to race and character which much more than compensate for any possible inferiority of descent. We may fairly take the estimate of the native African as we find him at his best estate at home, and build a promise of the future of the African here upon it. ”

“ The American Negroes are the aristocrats of the Negro world. It may be a paradox to assume that a proletariat can become an aristocracy, but an aristocracy is the best a race can produce in culture and manners. No doubt African Negrodom is made up of a great number of races, but all seem to have one common interest and to yield more homage to the name of Africa itself than to any constituent part, kingdom, or state or pasture. The American Negro is beginning to lead Africa as he is leading the Indies. ”

“ Still some principles may be laid down for the great negroid population of Africa which, as far as my experience goes, apply in most instances. I will ignore platitudes as to the equality of men irrespective of colour and progress, and take as an hypothesis what is patent to all who have observed the African native, that he is fundamentally inferior in mental development and ethical possibilities (call it soul if you will) to the white man. ”

“ But we all can be Afro-Americans, because we all were of Africa and now are of America. In other words, our forefathers were Africans by birth and became Americans by adoption. We are Africans by descent and Americans both by birth and adoption. This addition, Africans plus Americans, equals Afro-Americans. We conclude, therefore, that the term "Negro," although honorable and significant, is too narrow to be adopted as a national appellation. We need a name that will include every man that came from Africa, regardless of the section or territory from which he came, and that name is "African." ”

“ In Africa, the home of the negro, there has been a monotonous repetition of the same old facts which historians learned from monumental inscriptions and indestructible tablets thousands upon thousands of years old.
The African negro has always been a distinct type, an inferior type, a savage type, a non-progressive type. ”

“ The above traits are inborn and fundamental, belonging to the race everywhere, in Africa as well as America. Strict correctness requires, however, that attention be called to the fact that there are tribal differences among African Negroes that amount almost to the national variations of Europe; and these are reflected in American Negroes, who are the descendants of these different tribes. ”

“ It is a philanthropic and consoling reflection that the moral and physical condition of the African race in the U. States, even in a state of Slavery, is far better than it would have been if their ancestors had not been brought from their native land. ”

“ To return to Africa people who could contribute to her betterment; indeed, to return to Africa the descendants of her enslaved sons and daughters improved by contact with the civilization of the whites would be a recompense to that continent for the wrongs perpetrated, during a period of two hundred years, on her population. It was only America's moral obligation, said the colonizationists, to return the black population to Africa. ”

“ THE vast territory stretching from the Volta River on the west to the Niger in the Gulf of Benin on the east, the Atlantic Ocean on the south, and the Kong Mountains on the north, embraces the three powerful Negro kingdoms of Benin, Dahomey, and Yoruba. From this country, more than from any other part of Africa, were the people sold into American slavery. Two or three hundred years ago there were several very powerful Negro empires in Western Africa. They had social and political government, and were certainly a very orderly people. ”

“ The Arabs, the Banyans, and the Mohammedan Hindis, represent the higher and the middle classes. These classes own the estates, the ships, and the trade. To these classes bow the half-caste and the negro.
The next most important people who go to make up the mixed population of this island are the negroes. They consist of the aborigines, Wasawahili, Somalis, Comorines, Wanyamwezi, and a host of tribal representatives of Inner Africa. ”

“ The fact that the Negro brought with him from Africa so little tradition which he was able to transmit and perpetuate on American soil, makes that race unique among all peoples of our cosmopolitan population. Other peoples have lost, under the disintegrating influence of the American environment, much of their cultural heritage. None have been so utterly cut off and estranged from their ancestral land, traditions and people. ”

“ Neither Phoenician nor Roman culture seems to have penetrated into Africa beyond the Atlantic region and the desert. The activity and enthusiasm of the propagators of Islam have reached farther. In the fertile low countries beyond the Sahara, watered by rivers which descend northward from the central highlands, Africa has contained for centuries several Negro empires, originally founded by Mohammedans. The Negroes of this part of Africa are people of a very different description from [pg 25] the black pagan nations farther towards the South. ”

“ It was forgetfulness of God, idolatry! "Righteousness exalteth a nation; but sin is a reproach to any people."
The Negro tribes of Africa are as widely separated by mental, moral, physical, and social qualities as the Irish, Huns, Copts, and Druids are. Their location on the Dark Continent, their surroundings, and the amount of light that has come to them from the outside world, are the thermometer of their civilization. It is as manifestly improper to call all Africans Negroes as to call, Americans Indians. ”

“ For what seems probable is that had these, say twenty degrees, of solid Equatorial Africa originally filled up that Central American sea space, the greater part of the entire continent would to-day have belonged to the negro race.
The Aztec has gone, the Indian is going, but the imported African black man is going ahead.
At the end of the Civil War less than three million negroes were in the United States. There are now, I am told, ten millions. In spite of old slavery and modern race-exclusion and outrage, the African is making his way in the new world. ”

“ Colonization has taken the negro from under his disabilities here, and placed him where he has developed to an intellectual and moral stature never reached before by his race, and now holds him up as the optical demonstration of what the negro may easily become. Whole nebula of phrenological speculations and scientific infidelities have thus been dissipated; and there, star-like, shines out the negro intellect, clear and bright. There, intelligence, freedom, and religion, flourish amongst the descendants of Ham—amidst the much maligned Ethiopian race. ”

“ The most striking feature of the African Negro is the low forms of social organization, the lack of industrial and political cooperation, and consequently the almost entire absence of social and national self-consciousness. ”

“ They reflect no memories of a far off happier land. Before the Negro gained his emancipation Africa had, so far as he was concerned, almost ceased to exist. Furthermore, the whole tone and emphasis of these songs and of all other religious expressions of the American Negro are in marked contrast with the tone and emphasis of African religious ideas. The African knew of the existence of another world, but he was not interested in it. The world, as the African understood it, was full of malignant spirits, diseases and forces with which he was in constant mortal struggle. ”

“ Mentally they are bright and quick-witted, though only as concerns the reproductive powers of the mind; for independent thinking they have little capacity. The memory powers are especially strong and persistent. The black man keeps in his head records that a white man would be compelled to write in a book.
The native African has few ambitions beyond the satisfying of his appetites, and the gratification of his sensual desires. ”

“ Then, too, there is another question which the ecclesiastical authorities may never, it is true, find it possible frankly to confront, but which laymen, it seems to me, are bound to do—those, at any rate, who are persuaded that the African race is one of the great races of mankind, not intended by the Almighty Architect to disappear from the scene of human affairs. ”

“ More than ten millions of Africans are scattered over the wide area indicated, and possess amongst them instances of mental and other qualifications which render them remarkable among their fellow-men. But like the essential parts of a complicated albeit perfect machine, these attainments and qualifications so widely dispersed await, it is evident, some potential [260] agency to collect and adjust them into the vast engine essential for executing the true purposes of the civilized African Race. ”

“ But by the side of "New-Africa" are States and Territories in which the black race has little or no foothold. Free, civilized, and prosperous communities are brought face to face, as it were, with the mixed and degenerating populations of the Slave country. ”

“ On the other hand, no attempt to assess the qualities and capacities of the native African, living in his isolated and primitive environment, will be adequate which does not take account of the Negro's progress under the conditions of a civilized environment. ”

“ The millions, he says, of African negroes that have, during three centuries, been transported to the New World and its islands, are the same in colour as the present inhabitants of the parent country of their forefathers. ”

“ That black Africa will, ere long, be about all red, about all British—at least in language, in sentiment, in human sympathy, in social, industrial and political methods and aspiration, if not in allegiance—can hardly be doubted ”

“ If they could see the wretched conditions and surroundings of the black people of Africa today, the contrast would be apparent and the fact clearly evident that the black race in America enjoys incomparable advantages. The comfort and civilization under which they live here are due to the white man’s effort and sacrifice. ”

“ For five years the Universal Negro Improvement Association has been advocating the cause of Africa for the Africans—that is, that the Negro peoples of the world should concentrate upon the object of building up for themselves a great nation in Africa. ”