The Neg to of
the Earlier World
By
J. MAX BARBER, A. B., D. D. S.
Head of a statue of red sandstone excavated at
Memphis, from one of the tombs of the kings. This
is without doubt the head of a Negro.
The Negro of
the Earlier World
An Excursion Into Negro Ancient History
By
J. MAX BARBER, A. B., D. D. S.
Former Editor of "The Voice of the Negro" and Author of
"The Negro Dentist in Pennsylvania"
Printed by
THE A. M. E. BOOK CONCERN
631 Pine St., Philadelphia, Pa.
FOREWORD
This address has been put in pamphlet form
because of the repeated requests for its pub¬
lication wherever it his been delivered..
I have consulted freely a great number of
books of exploration . and histories on this
subject, all the way from the travel of Ibn
Batuta to "The Negro," by Dr. DuBois.
I have simply endeavored to assemble some
of the facts thus gleaned so as to hearten my
people by giving them the inspiration of tra¬
ditions.
J. MAX BARBER.
THE NEGRO OF THE EARLIER WORLD
Being an Excursion into Ancient Negro
History
By J. Max Barber, A.B., D.D.S.
Traditions and history are the background
of a people. A race without traditions and
without history is most likely to be a race
without backbone and without self-respect.
Minus these two elements ambition sags
and the people concerned sink into imitation
of those who have traditions, into servitude
into the loss of race pride and self, respect.
Hindsight and foresight go hand in hand,
for the past furnishes us guide-posts so that
we may take heed of the future.
In the light of these facts we will not won¬
der at the way the white world has con¬
spired to keep under cover the creditable
thing's that belong to the Negro race and to
inspire the world with the idea that the Ne¬
gro is now where he always has been—the
under-dog of the civilized world.
(S)
6 THE NEGRO OF THE EARLIER WORLD
Negroes do not themselves know that their
race has any history. It has only been within
the last dozen years of my life that I knew
that the Negro had any history. It is not
taught in the schools. It is not printed in the
newspapers. Our fathers did not tell it to us
because they did not know. Of course, we all
know of slavery and of the emancipation, of
reconstruction and the lies told about it.
We have heard of Nat Turner and Phillis
Wheatley and Benjamin Banaker. Fred
Douglass and his contemporaries are fairly
familiar with us.
But here ends our knowledge of Negro
history. We were taught to believe that the
history of the race began with slavery, that
we were snatched from the savagery of Af¬
rica to be sheltered under the protecting wing
of American Christianity while we were being
civilized; in short, that slavery was a great
blessing.
Nothing is farther from the truth. No insti¬
tution the world has ever seen did more dam¬
age to humanity than the rape of the continent
of Africa for the gratification of the laziness
and commercialism of the new world.
Back beyond the msytic meanderings of
history we come to paleolithic man in his
primitive home in Asia. Due to the fact that
writing did not come into the world until late,
we can only surmise the achievements and
THE NEGRO OF THE EARLIER WORLD 7
movements of prehistoric man by the skele¬
tons unearthed, by the impliments and instru¬
ments of rude art and industry he left and by
the monuments he built. Looking through
the hazy mists of the early centuries with
these evidences as dim guide marke, science
concludes that Asia was the primitive home
of the Negro as it is the home of all primitive
men. The first men, were not white nor black
but red like the reddish dwarfs of Central
Africa. Does not the name Adam in Hebrew
mean red—of the red earth ?
In the heart of Africa the natives believe
that the first man was black. A traveler once
heard of a native preacher explaining to his
audience on this wise the origin of the white
man:
"My breddren, you see white man bad too
much; ugly too much, no good. You want
sabby how man like dat come to lib in the
world? Well, I tell you. Adam and Eve dey
colored people, very hansum, lib in one beau¬
tiful garden. Dere dey hab all tings dat be
good. Plantians, yams, sweet potatoes, foo-
foo, palm wine—he-igh, too much! Den dey
hab two children, Cain and Able. Cain no like
Abel's palaver; one day he kill'm. Den God
angry, and he say, Cain! Cain go hide him¬
self; he tink him berry claber. Heigh-heigh!
God say again. Cain, you tink I no see you,
you bush-nigger—eh? Den Cain come out,
8 THE NEGRO OF THE EARLIER WORLD
and he say, 'Yes, massa, I lib here—what de
matter massa?' Den God say in one big voice
like de tunder in de sky, 'Where am thy brud-
der Abel? Den Cain turn white all ober with
fear—dat de first white man, breddren."
Who can positively affiirm that this Negro
was not as near right as are the Vardamans,
the Tillmans and the vile Tom Dixons?
According to DuBois and others, in these
early prehistoric times, there must have been
two movements of the mother race—a di¬
vision winding southward across Asia and
thence into Africa to form the great Negro
race, and a division moving northward and
eastward to form the Mongolian race. Condi¬
tions of heat and cold and moisture, scenery,
soil, maismatic and electrical influences work¬
ing for thousands of years through the skin
and organs slowly differentiated these two di¬
visions of the race of men so as to make one
branch black and brown with wooly or curly
straight hair. Either through the mixing of
these two types or through a third division
hair with the other brand yellow with
migrating westward and being influenced by
the climate and enviroments the founders of
the white race appeared.
There are authorities who declare that the
founders of the white race are an intermediate
type between the black and yellow races fur-
THE NEGRO OF THk EARLIER WORLD 9
ther differentiated by climate and other en-
viroments.
Wynewood Reade, an Englishman, who
was none too friendly disposed toward col¬
ored people, during the years between 1859
and 1863 made extensive explorations into
West, Central and Northwestern Africa. He
found many evidences, from Egypt to Sene-
gambia of the kinship of the coast Negroes
with the Egyptians. The gradual transition
could be traced. He says that the true and
original Africans were undoubtedly a red-
skinned race and that they still live in the
mountains. Before even history was in its in¬
fancy they passed down from Egypt and
Ethiopia and Lybia and descended into the
great plains and swamps of Central and West
Africa. It was here that they became black
and their hair short and curly.
This is a statement based on the investiga¬
tion of numerous ethnologists. Even in Af¬
rica today, the races in the morasses and
swamps are black, those on the plateaux brown
those higher up are yellow and those in the
mountains are red. Also those living in the
swampy morasses of the coast have better
hair, while many tribes have beautiful hair.
A change of features is also discernable.
The tribes that live in higher altitudes have
acquiline noses and sharp features, and are
really handsome and noble, while the Negro
10 THE NEGRO OF THE EARLIER WORLD
of the west coast swamps is dwarfed and de¬
formed and heavy featured. In the same way
the mentality changes. The movements from
the first, perhaps 50,00 years ago in Africa,
has been always westward and southward, so
that the coast Negro is undoubtedly the last
to develop in the history of the race.
What does this establish?
It solves a great riddle. It proves that the
Negro race, instead of being a child race, is
one of the most ancient of races and it shows
that what the white man calls the typical
Negro, is not at all typical of the race, but
rather represents the nadir of this degeneracy.
Ages ago, nations of Negroes sweeping over
the mountains descended into the swamps and
lowlands and through long ages degraded in
body and mind, and in time, the type com¬
pletely changed.
Types, even in historic times, have changed
in malarial regions. Think what must have
happened to those ancient races pushed over
the mountains into marshy districts to be poi¬
soned and weakened by the foul miasma of
age-old swamps, by deadly insects and ser¬
pents and by the poor quality of food the
region afforded! Think, also, of an awful sun
blazing upon the swamps and making of the
whole land a steaming oven!
External influences act upon all animals,
effecting changes principally in the epidemic
THE NEGRO OF THE EARLIER WORLD 11
or horny tissue. This tissue which forms the
hoofs, horns and hair of animals correspond
to the extraneous tissues in the man which
forms his hair and skin. Why would not a
germ of life with a living soul like man be
far more responsive to external influences
than an animal? Nature simply prepares her
children to resist the destructive influences
surrounding them.
Even animals alter strangely in the marsh¬
lands of equatorial Africa. Scientists have ob¬
served that the dogs of civilization quickly
degenerate and in three or four years change
completely. Sheep's wool changes to hair in
that region. Most of the dogs have no hair
at all. The lion of Senegambia has no mane
and is inferior to the lion of the highlands of
Algeria. No animals in Western Africa have
long hair. No wonder changes took place in
man in that degenerating climate. The awful
sun consumed the screntions of the skin so
fast that nature provided a pigment in the skin
as a shield against the heat. In the same way
nature gradually provided a thick skull to
protect the brain against the sun. The moist
atmosphere curled the hair and the sun
broadened the hair follicles.
These men are the degraded type of a per¬
ished civilization, and the wonder is not that
they turned back and sank to the lowest
forms of men but that they survived at all
12 THE NEGRO OF THE EARLIER WORLD
amidst an energy-sapping sun and climate in
these reptile-infected lowlands.
These men do not represent a child race,
but a people in its dotage.
Reade found that the Negroes all believed
in a Supreme Being, that they possessed the
remnants of a noble and sublime religion, the
precepts of which they had degraded
Father Loyer writes of a tribe who every
morning go down to the river to wash, and
then clasping their hands look up and pray:
"Njamba, let us live. Let the dead rest in
peace and trouble us not. Give us this day
rice and yams, gold and bread, slaves and
riches and health, and grant that we may be
active and swift." That is not a bad prayer.
DuBiois says: "The primitive Negroid race
of man developed in Asia * * * entered
Burmah and the South Sea Islands on the one
hand, and on the other, they came through
Mesopotamia and gave curly hair and a Ne¬
groid type to the Jew, Syrian and Assyrian.
Ancient statutes of Indian divinities show the
Negro type with black face and close-curled
hair, and early Babylonian culture was Ne¬
groid * * * Traces of Negro types are
manifest in the brunette type of all South
Europe. The other branch of the race pro¬
ceeded to Egypt and tropical Africa."
We now come to the question, What is a
Negro? The white man has many definitions
THE NEGRO OF THE EARLIER WORLD 13
all calculated to suit the purposes he wishes
to serve at the time of the definition. His
original definition was that the type of human
being with wooly hair, • thick lips, flat nose,
prognathous jaw, receding forehead and black
skin, was a Negro. Only a small fraction of
the human race fits that definition. According
to that, a majority of the colored people of
America are not Negroes. Then, in order to
make Negroes of us, the definition was broad¬
ened so as to include everybody who had a
drop of blood of the black race in his veins.
All right. Then we claim the Egyptians, the
East Indians, the Filipinos, the Arabians, the
primitive Australians and the inhabitants of
the South Sea Islands.
Then they re-defined Negro. They make
some such hypothetical definition as this: If
a people in remote antiquity mingled its blood
with the blood of the black race and thereby
formed a separate type which finally and act-
pally acheived something, then they are no
longer Negroes, but Aryans or Himyarites of
Hamites.
A modern cross of half white and half black
is a mulatto. An ancient mixture of half and
half belongs to the white race because, for¬
sooth, it accomplished something! What mis¬
erable inconsistency! What dirty little, nar¬
row motives! If a mulatto is a Negro today,
then a mulatto has always been a Negro!
14 THE NEGRO OF THE EARLIER WORLD
And if a mixture makes a mulatto, then cer¬
tainly the Egyptians were mulattoes. Boaz,
Schweinfurth, Johnson, Petrie, Reisner, and,
in fact, almost all of the great archaeologists
and historians agree that the Egyptians were
the product of a mixture of primitive Negroes
and of Semites who crossed into Africa from
Asia and Europe. In other words, they were
a mulatto people.
Indeed, we do not have to go to these great
authorities. Go yourself, personally, to the
Museum of the University of Pennsylvania or
to the great Museum in London and see the
mummies, the statues and the paintings of
ancient Egypt. If they are not Negroes, then
I am not a Negro. Do you mean to tell me
that Rahotep, with his heavy features; Nefert
with both the nose and lips of a Zulu, Aahmes
and Nefertain were not Negroes?
Expert Egyptologists have declared that
Khafra, Amenemhat I, and even the great
Rameses and Utersin of the Second Dynasty
were unmistakably Negroes. There is every
evidence that pure Negroes were in the dy¬
nasty and the upper classes of the First and
Second Empires.
The Sphinx in Egypt was a monument to
the King. The Sphinx of Gizeh overlooked
the plain where great Memphis once stood.
The Sphinx of Gizeh is the face of a Negro.
What kind of a king must have once ruled in
THE NEGRO OF THE EARLIER WORLD 15
Memphis? DuBois, basing his arguments on
very great authorities and evidences, says:
"The great Sphinx of Gizeh, the Sphinxes of
Tanis, the statutes from the Fayum, the
statutes of the Esquiline at Rome and the Col-
Statue of Mycerinus and his Queen, found in 1910
by Dr. Reisner in the cemetery of Gizeh and
now in the Boston Museum. They are
unmistakably Mulatto types
lossi at Bubastis all represent black full-
blooded Negroes."
The Egyptians themselves claimed their
16 THE NEGRO OF THE EARLIER WORLD
origin in Punt, which was in Ethiopia and
their religion and their gods were all Suda¬
nese. The very word "Khem," that ancient
name of Egypt, means black, swarthy. Hero¬
dotus says, the Egyptians were black with
wooly hair. Pinder says they were black.
Aeschylus speaks of their "sable limbs." Prich-
ard, one of the world's greatest ethnologists,
says, "they were like Negroes."
Thus we see the Negro in monuments of
Egypt, in their mummies, in their religion and
in their own history. Ancient historians, poets
and painters saw the Negro race in Egypt.
How can we class ancient Egypt as white?
The white man has tried to rob us of Egypt
because Egypt is the mother of modern civi¬
lization.
Ethiopia, Egypt and Africa have in times
been used as interchangeable terms. Black
Memnon, King of Ethiopia, is a character in
history and literature. Diodorus Siculus in his
third book, says that the Ethiopians claimed
greater antiquity than any other race;
claimed to have invented divine worship, fes¬
tivals, solemn assemblies, religious practices,
etc. Egypt was one of their colonies accord¬
ing to Siculus. If they did not invent these
things, certainly they knew and practiced
them. And yet, there are puerile asses who
speak of the Negro as a child race!
THE NEGRO OF THE EARLIER WORLD 17
Even according to Roman and Greek litera¬
ture, the gods and fairies had their home in
Ethiopia among "the most pious and the old¬
est of men." Hoskins declares that the arch
was invented in Ethiopia and almost all au¬
thorities give to Africa the credit for invent¬
ing the smelting of iron. For a whole cen¬
tury Egypt was under Ethiopia and was ruled
by Ethiopian princes. In Meroe, the capital
of Ethiopia, it is said that 4,000 artisans and
200,000 soldiers resided.
There are 7,000 years of known history in
the valley of the Nile. During that time three
great dynasties arose and reigned—the first
for 2,000 years, the second for 2,400 years and
the third for 1,500 years. Think of the dura¬
tion of the civilizations and governments of
other lands and compare. In comparison, they
are all transitory states
But Egypt is not the only contribution
Africa has made to the beginning of order
and culture. There are evidences that the
valley of the Congo has also had a grerat an¬
cient history, that a mighty civilization once
flourished on the coast of the Gulf of Guinea,
that even Egypt learned religion and culture
from the Sudan, the land of her cradle, and
that the Southern lure drew trekking masses
clear down to the land's end in South Africa,
there to found a government and some sort
of culture.
18 THE NEGRO OF THE EARLIER WORLD
Dr. Emil Holub, of Vienna, in 1872, and
years later, made extensive archeaological ex¬
plorations in South Africa. He rightly con¬
cluded that the original bushmen was far su¬
perior to the present bushmen. In South Af¬
rica he found engravings in caves and on
rocks which were so beautiful that he called
the age in which these things were done the
art age of this people. He took back to Vienna
a whole trainload of these treasures
In 1801 Tuttle and Somerville journeyed
into the country of the Bechuanus, and to
their utter surprise came upon a beautiful city
of more than 3,00 neat well-built houses.
Lattakoo was the center of much culture.
In 1799 Mungo Park found Sego, the capital
of Bambarra inhabited by 30,000 people. The
houses were of clay and whitewashed, the
streets broad and commodious, canoes were
on the Niger and the soil round about was
under magnificent cultivation.
Africa was for long centuries shut off from
the rest of the world except through the Nile
valley. Thus ages of history passed on the
continent with none to record. We can only
surmise by the monuments and impliments
unearthed and by the present-day language
and customs of the people. During all of these
centuries of silence, there must have been
many a drama and tragedy of nations which
would fill the pages of history with lessons
THE NEGRO OF THE EARLIER WORLD 19
of power and pathos and pity, and of the
evanescence of things that seem stable.
Let us cross the jungles of this silence and
come to nearer times. If we come over into
the Christian era, we have civilizations and
cultures in Africa that can be spoken of with
definiteness and authority.
In Ethiopia we have a large Negro state
that was hammered to pieces under Egyptian
Persian, Roman and Byzantium avarice and
that finally succumbed to the ferocity of the
Bantu hordes. In like manner the Bantus
over-ran all Southeast and Central and South¬
ern Africa, erecting only petty empires that
soon crumbled into the dust.
The golden age of Negro power must have
begun a thousand years before Christ. The
death of African culture is coincident with the
rise of slavery in the Western World. Of this,
■we shall see more later. For the present, let
us learn some evidences of this golden age of
culture.
In the region between the Limpopo and the
Zambesi Rivers, there are hundreds of evi¬
dences of a former civilization such as fortifi¬
cations, mining galleries and 'stone buildings.
The people mined gold, silver, tin and copper
and made beautiful vases and pottery.
Travelers in the tenth century found strong
and well-organized feudal states on the East
cost of Africa.
20 THE NEGRO OF THE EARLIER WORLD
In the fourteenth century, Ibn Batuta, the
greatest Arab traveler of his day, visited East
Africa and the regions around Lake Tchad.
Kilwa, a city in East Africa, had 300 mosques.
Its houses were beautiful and well built. Its
industries were well organized and the people
were well dressed. Proceeding into the in¬
terior, Batuta came to the great kingdom
of Bornu. Both Ibn Batuta and writers con¬
temporaneous with him, declare that the Ne¬
gro empire of Bornu was so rich during the
reign of Ali Ghajidena that not only were the
platters, dishes, pots and drinking vessels of
his household of pure gold, but that his
spurs and bridles and the chains for his dogs
were all of gold. This profusion of gold was
symbolic of the times. It was the golden age
of the Central African Negro, and Bornu, a
Negro Empire, embracing eight million peo¬
ple around Lake Tchad, was the Rome of Cen¬
tral Africa, the dominating mistress of a very
wide area.
The Kanuri people (or Bornuese) traced
their ancestry back to the third century.
Practically cut off from civilization this Ne¬
gro people evolved a language and a govern¬
ment of their own. Thus, by the time Bornu
reached its zenith, in the sixteenth century,
her civilization was equal to the civilizations
of Europe of the middle ages. There was
abundant wealth in the land. There was or-
THT NEGRO OF THE EARLIER WORLD 21
ganization. There were traditions. There
was some semblance of learning. These facts
ought not to be without interest to modern
civilization.
The traditions of the Kanuri people were
handed down from generation to generation,
by a gray-bearded school of sages known as
kosgolimas or story-tellers.. One of the tradi¬
tions of Haussa, a tributary to Bornu, had to
do with the origin of that country. It was
that the land was originally settled by a man
who had six sons—Daura, Gober, Kano, Rano,
Katsena and Zeg Zeg. When these sons were
full-grown, their father called a council among
them in order to apportion to each one the
part he was to have in building an empire.
Each man was asked to choose his part. Go¬
ber became war chief. Kano and Rano, twin
brothers, chose jointly to become the minis¬
ters of industry, such as weaving and dyeing.
Katsena and Daura became the ministers of
intercourse and commerce. Zeg Zeg chose to
be minister of labor or the slave-catcher.
And it is significant of the reliability of the
kosgolimas that even to-day in Haussa there
are cities named Daura, Gober, Kano, Rano,
Katsena and Zeg Zeg. It is further signifi¬
cant that Kano has always excelled in her dye
pots, Rano in her weaving and Katsena in her
learning. There was a great university at
Katsena as far back as the sixteenth century.
22 THE NEGRO OF THE EARLIER WORLD
Bornu had a representative government
perhaps before the English wrung the Magna
Charta from old King John.
In Birni, the capital of Bornu, there was a
well-organized law-making body. It consisted
of two branches corresponding verily to our
Senate and House of Representatives or per¬
haps wore nearly to the English Parliament
with a royal branch and a branch representing
the people. The royal branch was known as
the Kokenawa and was composed of the
prices royal and generals of the land. One of
their number was elected as the Digma or pre¬
siding officer. The other branch of the legis¬
lative body was known as the Nogana, and it
was composed of tribal chiefs. There sat in
Birni the Supreme Court of the nation with a
Fuguma or chief justice at its head, and
throughout the land lesser magistrates inter¬
preted and enforced the law. Some writers
assert that even the king was elective.
One of the mighty kingdoms of the middle
ages in Africa was the Congo Free State.
Thousands of years ago migrating Negroes
from Central and Southwestern Africa moved
into the Congo Valley and formed an empire.
These Negroes called themselves La Bantu
(the people). Perhaps at the height of the
power of the Ba-Conga there were 20,000,000
people under a Negro emporer. They were
farmers, miners, sculptors, cattle and fowl
THE NEGRO OF THE EARLIER WORLD 23
breeders, smiths, bootmakers, cabinetmakers,
and in fact, they did about what the average
ancient and middle age nation did. They
built great cities and carried on commerce
and trade systematically. In other words,
they were a great people.
Time will not permit me to tell you, in de¬
tail, of the ancient kingdom of Melle and
Songhay, in Northwest Africa, of the great
states of Yoruba and Benin, of Baghirmi,
Wadia, Darfur and Uganda. These have all
been great African states whose civilizations
were remarkable in their day.
I have elsewhere spoken of Ghana or Jenne
on the Gulf of Guinea, at the western end of
the Sudan. Ghana was superseded in power
in the Western Sudan by the great Mandingo
Kingdom of Melle. The Mellestine kingdom
lasted for about three centuries when the
great Songhay Empire supplanted it. This
was the greatest of these black empires. It is
said that there is 1000 years of recorded his¬
tory of Songhay. The beginning of the em¬
pire dates from 700. The glory of Songhay
was its great university of Sankore, where all
of the studies of that day were taught, includ¬
ing law, literature, languages and the arts. At
one time this empire had a territory as large
as all Europe.
How many great explorers have died trying
to reach the golden city of Timbuctoo stand-
24 THE NEGRO OF THE EARLIER WORLD
ing there at the desert's gate! And even to¬
day Timbuctoo remains as the mystic city of
Africa.
I show you something of the splendor of a
noble past of the Negro. Where, then, you
ask has all this magnificence gone? Why has
Africa slunk back in the dark, like a man
afraid and failed to keep pace with the on-
rushing advance of the new electric age?
Don't bear too heavy on that question. Be
cause they are not great now is no evidence
that they were not great. Nobody would dis¬
pute the ancient greatness of Greece, of
Rome, of Egypt, of Tyre and Sidon. But
where is their greatness to-day? Gone.
Greece is great only in the ruins and monu¬
ments of another age. Egypt lives in her
Sphinxes and the ruins of her ancient
temples. Fishermen dry their nets on the
rocks where Tyre and Sidon once stood.
God has had a purpose in all of this, and He
will bring it to pass that all men shall have
their turn at the wheel.
If you ask what was the cause of the slink¬
ing of Africa back into the shadows, I'll tell
you. It was the iniquitous slave trade. You
have seen how there was all over Africa the
outline and fabric of a coherent social sys¬
tem, governments and something of culture.
The discovery of America was a heart stab to
Africa for it was due to this that the Dutch,
THE NEGRO OF THE EARLIER WORLD 25
the Portuguese and the English began that
awful rape of Africa to supply labor for the
new world.
All ties were disregarded by the slave-
catchers. Tribes were torn to pieces, mothers
were torn from husbands, children from
fathers and even kings from subjects. The na¬
tives themselves were corrupted so that
through rum and red beads they aided in the
capture of their fellow-men.
Two great savage nations, Dahomey and
Ashantee, on the West coast, through agree¬
ments with Europeans, made slavecatching
their chief industry. These people were to all
West Africa the very children of old Zeg Zeg,
that old iron-jawed, oven-mouthed slave-
hound of Haussa. The standing armies of
these nations, more than 100,000 strong, were
used mostly in slave-catching. Whole tribes
were captured as prisoners of war and sold
to the white slave merchants and Christian
sons of civilization. In one instance alone 300
towns and villages in the Ebga district, on the
slave coast, were destroyed by the slave-
catchers in 50 years. One hundred thousand
refugees from these ruined towns gathered on
a high hill and built the fortified city of Abeo-
kuta.
Do not these figures tell an awful tale?
All the paths that wound to the sea during
that awful era became congested with the
26 THE NEGRO OF THE EARLIER WORLD
slave traffic. In the harbors of the West
coast, there hovered like vultures, the ships of
civilization waiting for their human prey. The
ships were packed with human beings very
much as a sardine tin is packed. Crossing the
ocean the crew of the ships would go down in
the hold each morning and sort out the dead
and half dead and thiow them into the water.
Never before nor since until the German ruth¬
less submarine war, have the hungry sharks
feasted on so much human flesh. And this
monstrous crime, this diabolical rape of a con¬
tinent went on for 400 years while Europe and
this collossal cancer ate the heart out of the
natives.
America assumed to be a beacon of civiliza¬
tion to all the world! Holy God! It was dur¬
ing this period that Europe's greatest bards
sang, her noblest painters gave vent to their
inward idealism, the voices of her mightiest
preachers thundered anathema at sin and the
American declaration of Independence was
written!
Probably 10,000,000 Negroes were brought
to America during that time and perhaps 50,-
000,000 more died while being driven to the
sea, or being captured or in the filthy slave
ships. All told, perhaps the infamous slave
ships cost Africa in four centuries, 100.000,000
souls! Is there any wonder that government
and order ceased, that in their efifort to flee
THE NEGRO OF THE EARLIER WORLD 27
the red fangs of slavery, men forgot culture
and history, and to save their lives fled
hither and yon in great swarming masses,
trampling down, uprooting and thinking never
of building? Men fled from cities to caves and
to huge forest fortresses and every vestige of
ancient greatness was lost.
Imagine all the bleached bones of those
who were killed in the chase or who dropped
by the way while being driven down the West
African winding paths to the sea piled and
fire set to them! The pyre would make a bon¬
fire that would reach to heaven! If all the
dead and half-dead bodies thrown into the
sea at dawn and early day from the scurrying
slave ships should suddenly, by some divine
decree float to the top of the waters a
thousand square miles of the ocean would be
covered with bloated, bobbing, black corpses.
If all the chains that were forged on slave
limbs were linked into one mighty chain it
would' make a belt that woul($ girdle the
globe. If all the blood drawn by the slave lash
was poured into some awful gully, it would
make a red river running through the land.
If all the energy and money and brains that
have been spent to make cowards and slaves
of Negroes had been spent in altruistic enter¬
prises, in the uplift of man, in education and
inspiration, my God! to-day the fair fields of
France and the sunny hills of Italy would not
28 THE NEGRO OF THE EARLIER WORLD
Statuette found at Gizeh. Eckley B. Coxe, Jr., Ex¬
pedition to Egypt. Who would consider this as
anything else but that of a Negro. This woman
was perhaps the wife of some Egyptian Prince.
THE NEGRO OF THE EARLIER WORLD 29
be piled with ruins and the civilized nations
of the world would not be at each other's
throats! The ships that crossed the singing
seas would not be burdened with soldiers and
shells of all of the implements and instru¬
ments of destruction, but rather with the fruit
of research, with literature and paint¬
ings and all of those things which promote
the amity of nations and the brotherhood of
man.
The present is thfe white man's, regardless
of his morality, but the future belongs,
not to the degenerating, morally putrid
and cruelly avaricious white man, but to
the virile, puissant races in whose hearts
there is mercy and justice. Time's alembic
works many changes. Surely we must be
moving towards another age where loss will
be counted gain, where injustice to the Ne¬
gro, this great unsolved tragedy of the uni¬
verse, will be explained, and when the sons of
Africa again will tutor the nations of the
world.
To hear the white man talk one would be
led to think that his race is a race of kings
and super-men who have wielded the rod of
sovereignty since time began. He is a brazen
liar! Egypt was before Greece and Rome and
black Memnon and Amnehat were before
Caesar and Alexander. The Negro in Africa
was building cities, carving stone monuments
30 THE NEGRO OF THE EARLIER WORLD
and making glass when the so-called Anglo-
Saxon was living in caves and decorating him¬
self with blue mud.
Among the earliest races who first lifted
their faces to the chill mystery of the stars
was the Negro. In the dawn of the world he
saw the foundations of morality shift and
change and he helped to demarcate a line be¬
tween love and greed. He helped to rescue
the earth from the mastodon and the ptero¬
dactyl. His beaked triremes plowed the seas
when the ocean was yet forbidden territory
to the present masters of the water.
When the white man points me to his sky¬
scrapers, his telephones and telegraph wires I
point to the pyramids, that have stood in the
sunshine for 4000 years, and the sphinxes and
the wonders at Thebes and Tanis. I tell him
that when the world was yet young and with¬
out the accumulated wisdom of the ages to
guide us, we invented the smelting of iron,
without which it would be impossible for his
domes and sky scrapers to fret the heavens.
By drum and horn we could send a message
through the 7,000 villages of Jenne almost as
quickly as he could telephone them, and we had
a sense of beauty and form and music when
he was yet a dirty, naked savage. We were
singing and praying and our priests were mes¬
merizing the people when he was savagely
dancing around a stone and a fire for a god
THE NEGRO OF THE EARLIER WORLD 31
When they tell me of William, the Con-
querer, and Queen Elizabeth, I tell them of
Amenhotep III and Queen Nefertari; of Can-
dance and Ergames, Mansa Musa and Mo¬
hammed Askia. When they speak of Shakes-
pear, I point to Pushkin. He also founded
the literature of a nation. I am not ashamed
to put Dumas beside Balzac. If they speak of
soldiers, my race has always been great in
soldiers. To say nothing of our ancient great
fighters, I may refer them to Chaka, the great
Zulu general, and to Toussaint L'Ouverture.
Negroes have distinguished themselves in
every age and in every land. Back down the
paths of an unknown age they set the pace
for the world. They rocked civilization in the
cradle.
The scepter has passed from their hands.
For what reason, God knows. He seems to
give races turns at the wheel. We follow the
scepter from Egypt, to Greece, to Rome, to
Spain and France, to England and the Teuton¬
ic races. They seem to be making no better of
it than we did. I think our time is coming
again. The day will come when Africa will
be redeemed. Her morasses will be drained.
Canals from the sea will make the Sahara a
vast inland sea. The Niger will be as pictur¬
esque and historic as the Rhine or Seine, and
guide books will be published about Timbuc-
too.
32 THE NEGRO OF THE EARLIER WORLD
Africa shall be restored some day to her
youth and power, for the prophecy must yet
be fulfilled, "Ethiopia shall stretch forth lier
hands unto God!"