Читать книгу The Rising Son; or, the Antecedents and Advancement of the Colored Race - William Wells Brown - Страница 13

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In the desert between the Nile and the Red Sea, and among that range of mountains running parallel with the coast, are Hadharebe, the Ababdeh, and the Bishari, three very ancient tribes, the modern representatives of the Ethiopians of Meroe. The language of these people, their features, so different from the Arabs, and the Guinea Negro, together with their architecture, prove conclusively that they descended from Ethiopia; the most numerous and powerful of these tribes being the Bishari.

Leaving the shores of the Mediterranean, and passing south of Abyssinia, along the coast of Africa, and extending far into the interior over rich mountain-plains, is found the seat of what are called the “Galla nations.” They are nomadic tribes, vast in numbers, indefinable in their extent of territory, full of fire and energy, wealthy in flocks and herds, dark-skinned, woolly-haired, and thick-lipped.

Passing farther west into that vast region which lies between the Mountains of the Moon and the Great Desert, extending through Central Africa even to the western coast, we come into what may be more appropriately called “Negro-land.”

It is a widely-extended region, which abounds in the arts of civilization. Here are large cities containing from ten thousand to thirty thousand souls. Here is a great family of nations, some but just emerging out of barbarism, some formed into prosperous communities, preserving the forms of social justice and of a more enlightened worship, practicing agriculture, and exhibiting the pleasing results of peaceful and productive industry.

Mungo Park gives a glowing account of Sego, the capital of Bambuwa, a city containing thirty thousand inhabitants, with its two-story houses, its mosques seen in every quarter, its ferries conveying men and horses over the Niger. “The view of this extensive city,” he says, “the numerous canoes upon the river, the crowded population, and the cultivated state of the surrounding country, formed altogether a prospect of civilization and magnificence which I little expected to find in the bosom of Africa.”

Farther east he found a large and flourishing town called Kaffa, situated in the midst of a country so beautiful and highly cultivated that it reminds him of England. The people in this place were an admixture of light brown, dark brown, and dingy black, apparently showing the influence of the climate upon their ancestors.

The Mountains of the Moon, as they terminate along the western coast of Africa, spread out into a succession of mountain plains. These present three lofty fronts toward the sea, each surrounded with terraces, declining gradually into the lowlands, each threaded with fertilizing streams, and fanned with ocean breezes.

The most northern of these plateaus, with their declivities and plains, forms the delightful land of one of the most powerful and intelligent of the African tribes, namely, the Mandingoes. They are made up of shrewd merchants and industrious agriculturists; kind, hospitable, enterprising, with generous dispositions, and open and gentle manners. Not far from the Mandingoes, are the people called Solofs, whom Park describes as “the most beautiful, and at the same time the blackest people in Africa.”

But perhaps the most remarkable people among these nations are the “Fulahs,” whose native seat is the southern part of the plateaus above described. Here, in their lofty independence, they cultivate the soil, live in “clean and commodious dwellings,” feed numerous flocks of sheep and goats, and herds of oxen and horses, build mosques for the worship of one God, and open schools for the education of their children.

Timbri, their capital, is a military station, containing nine thousand inhabitants, from which their victorious armies have gone forth and subdued the surrounding country. They practice the mechanic arts with success, forge iron and silver, fabricate cloth, and work skilfully with leather and wood. Like the Anglo-Saxon, their capital has been the hive whence colonies have swarmed forth to form new settlements, and extend the arts of industry; and the “Fellatahs,” an enterprising people who dwell a thousand miles in the interior, are well known to belong to the same stock.

There are many other nations, or rather, tribes, in this vast central region, described by Pritchard more or less minutely, variously advanced in the arts of life, and exhibiting various degrees of enterprise and energy.

Passing along the western shore southward, we next come to the coast of Guinea, where we find the Negro in his worst state of degradation. Hither comes the slave-trader for his wretched cargo, and hence have been exported the victims of that horrible commerce, which supplied the slave-marts of the western world. The demonizing influence of this traffic on the character of the natives defies all description.

In the mountains and ravines of this portion of Africa lurk gangs of robbers, ever on the watch to seize the wives and children of the neighboring clans and sell them to the traders. Every corner of the land has been the scene of rapine and blood. Parents sell their children, and children sell their parents. Such are the passions stimulated by Christian gold, and such the state of society produced by contact with Christian nations. These people, degraded and unhumanized by the slaver, are the progenitors of the black population of the Southern States of the American Union.

Still we are to observe, that though the lowest type of Negro character is to be found on the Guinea coast and the adjacent region, it is not uniformly degraded. Tribes are to be found, considerably advanced in civilization, whose features and characters resemble those of the central region which we have just described.

Passing southward still farther, and crossing the line, we come into southern Africa. This whole region from the equator to the Cape, with the exception of the Hottentots, is, so far as discovered, occupied by what is called the “Great South African Race.” They are a vast family of nations, speaking dialects of the same language, furnishing incontrovertible evidence, so says Pritchard, of “a common origin.”

There is one fact, in reference to them, of absorbing interest; it is that among these nations, and sometimes among the same tribe, are found specimens of the lowest Negro type, and specimens of the same type elevated and transfigured so as to approximate far towards the European form and features. Between these two there is every possible variety, and the variations depend much on moral condition and physical surroundings. Along the coast humanity generally sinks down into its lowest shapes, and puts on its most disgusting visage.

Rising into the interior, and climbing the tablelands, the evidence of decided improvement generally appears. Perhaps the most savage of these tribes is to be found on the coast of Congo. They are cannibals of great ferocity and brutality. But on the eastern coast are found a people called Kafirs, some tribes occupying the coast, and a few the mountain plains. Some of these tribes, “whose fine forms and easy attitudes remind the traveller of ancient statues,” inhabit large towns and cities, have made great progress in the arts of industry, cultivate vast fields of sugar and tobacco, manufacture various kinds of cutlery, and “build their houses with masonry, and ornament them with pillars and mouldings.”

They exhibit fine traits of intellectual and moral character. Mixed up with their superstitions, they have some lofty, religious ideas; believe in the immortality of the soul, in a Supreme Being, whom they call “The Beautiful,” who exercises a providence over mankind. Such are the nations of Central and Southern Africa; and if we can rely on the reports of the best travellers, they furnish some of the best material, out of which to build up prosperous states and empires, that is to be found on the face of the earth.

We come next to the Hottentots, including the Bushmen, who belong to the same race. In the scale of humanity, he probably sinks below the inhabitants of Guinea or Congo.

The Hottentot has long furnished a standard of comparison to moral writers by which to represent the lowest condition of man. He inhabits the desert, lives in caves, subsists on roots or raw flesh, has no religious ideas, and is considered by the European as too wretched a being to be converted into a slave. How came he thus degraded?

That is a question which we do not often see answered, and which must be answered, to the shame of Christian Europe. Before that evil hour when the Christian navigator neared the Cape of Good Hope, the Hottentots were “a numerous people, divided into many tribes under a patriarchal government of chiefs and elders.”

They had numerous flocks and herds, lived in movable villages, were bold in the chase, courageous in warfare, yet mild in their tempers and dispositions; had rude conceptions of religion, and exhibited a scene of pastoral life like that of the ancient Nomads of the Syrian plains. In a word, they were a part of that stream of emigration to which we have referred in a previous chapter, and who evidently were living somewhat as they had in the country of their ancestors.

Kolben, who saw the Hottentots in the day of their prosperity, enumerates eighteen tribes of the race. The European colonists hunted these tribes as they would hunt beasts of prey. Most of them they exterminated, and seized upon their possessions; the rest they robbed and drove into forests and deserts, where their miserable descendants exist as wandering Bushmen, exhibiting to good Christian people material for most edifying studies in “anatomy and ethnology.”

There is an immense region, comprising the greater part of interior Africa, two thousand miles in length, and one thousand in breadth, nearly equal to the whole of the United States, which has seldom been trodden by the foot of the Caucasian. It spreads out beneath the tropics, and is supposed by Humboldt to be one of the most interesting and fertile regions on the face of the earth.

“It must be,” he says, “a high table-land, rising into the cooler strata of the atmosphere, combining therefore the qualities of the tierra caliente of Mexico, with its ‘cloudless ethers,’ the luxuriant slopes of the Andes, and the pastoral plains of Southern Asia. It cannot be a sandy desert, though sometimes put down as such upon the maps, because vast rivers come rolling down from it into the surrounding seas.”

It has long been the land of romance, mystery, and wonder, and of strange and tantalizing rumors. The “blameless Ethiopians” of Homer, the favorites of the gods, and the wonderful Macrobians of Herodotus, are placed by Heeren on the outskirts of this region, where they would be most likely to be offshoots from its parent stock. This country is guarded from the European by forces more potent than standing armies.

Around it stretches a border on which brood malaria, pestilence, and death, and which the English government for half a century have expended lives and treasure to break through. In one expedition after another sent out from the island of Ascension, nine white men out of ten fell victims to the “beautiful, but awful climate.”

Nevertheless, news from the interior more or less distinct has found its way over this belt of danger and death. Being a land of mystery, it should be borne in mind that there is a strong tendency to exaggeration in all that comes from it. The Niger, one of the noblest of rivers, skirts this unknown country for some hundreds of miles, after sweeping away through the middle portion of Central Africa already described.

The “Colonial Magazine,” speaking of the exploration of this river by the English expeditions, says: “They have found that this whole tract of country is one of amazing fertility and beauty, abounding in gold, ivory, and all sorts of tropical vegetation. There are hundreds of woods, invaluable for dyeing and agricultural purposes, not found in other portions of the world.

“Through it for hundreds of miles sweeps a river from three to six miles broad, with clean water and unsurpassable depth, flowing on at the rate of two or three miles an hour, without rock, shoal, or snag to intercept its navigation. Other rivers pour into this tributary waters of such volume as must have required hundreds of miles to be collected, yet they seem scarcely to enlarge it. Upon this river are scattered cities, some of which are estimated to contain a million of inhabitants; and the whole country teems with a dense population. Far in the interior, in the very heart of this continent, is a portion of the African race in an advanced state of civilization.”

In the year 1816, Captain Tuckey, of the English Navy, made a disastrous expedition up the Congo. In 1828, Mr. Owen, from the opposite coast, attempted to penetrate this land of mystery and marvel, with a like result. But they found a manifest improvement in the condition of the people the farther they advanced, and they met with rumors of a powerful and civilized nation still farther inward, whose country they attempted in vain to explore.

In 1818, John Campbell, agent of the London Missionary Society, tried to reach this country by journeying from the Cape northward; and later still, Captain Alexander led an expedition, having the same object in view. They found large and populous cities situated in a fertile and highly-cultivated country, but they did not reach the land of marvel and mystery, though they heard the same rumors respecting its people. A writer in the “Westminster Review,” who lived several years on the western coast, gives an interesting description of the interior of the country. He says:—

“A state of civilization exists among some of the tribes, such as had not been suspected hitherto by those who have judged only from such accounts as have been given of the tribes with which travellers have come in contact. They cannot be regarded as savages, having organized townships, fixed habitations, with regular defences about their cities, engaging in agriculture and the manufacture of cotton cloths for clothing, which they ornament with handsome dyes of native production, exhibit handicraft in their conversion of iron and precious metals into articles of use and ornament.”

But to no traveller is the cause of African civilization more indebted than to Dr. Livingstone. Twenty-six years of his life have been spent in exploring that country and working for the good of its people. In August, 1849, he discovered Lake Ngami, one of the most beautiful sheets of water in that sunny land. His discovery of the source of the Zambesi River and its tributaries, the Victoria Falls, the beds of gold, silver, iron and coal, and his communication with a people who had never beheld a white man before, are matters of congratulation to the friends of humanity, and the elevation of man the world over.

Along the shores of the Zambesi were found pink marble beds, and white marble, its clearness scarcely equaled by anything of the kind ever seen in Europe. In his description of the country through which this splendid river passes, Dr. Livingstone says: “When we came to the top of the outer range of the hills, we had a glorious view. At a short distance below us we saw the Kafue, wending away over a forest-clad plain to the confluence, and on the other side of the Zambesi, beyond that, lay a long range of dark hills.

“A line of fleecy clouds appeared, lying along the course of that river at their base. The plain below us, at the left of the Kafue, had more large game on it than anywhere else I had seen in Africa. Hundreds of buffaloes and zebras grazed on the open spaces, and there stood lordly elephants feeding majestically, nothing moving apparently, but the proboscis. I wish that I had been able to take a photograph of the scene so seldom beheld, and which is destined, as guns increase, to pass away from earth. When we descended, we found all the animals remarkably tame. The elephants stood beneath the trees, fanning themselves with their large ears, as if they did not see us.”

The feathered tribe is abundant and beautiful in this section of Africa. Dr. Livingstone says: “The birds of the tropics have been described as generally wanting in power of song. I was decidedly of the opinion that this was not applicable to many parts of Londa. Here the chorus, or body of song, was not much smaller in volume than it is in England. These African birds are not wanting in song; they have only lacked poets to sing their praises, which ours have had from the time of Aristophanes downward.”

Speaking of the fruits, he says: “There are great numbers of wild grape-vines growing in this quarter; indeed, they abound everywhere along the banks of the Zambesi. They are very fine; and it occurred to me that a country which yields the wild vines so very abundantly might be a fit one for the cultivated species. We found that many elephants had been feeding on the fruit called mokoronga. This is a black-colored plum, having purple juice. We all ate it in large quantities, as we found it delicious.”

While exploring the Zambesi, Dr. Livingstone visited the hot spring of Nyamboronda, situated in the bed of a small rivulet called Nyaondo, which shows that igneous action is not yet extinct. The spring emitted water hot enough to cook a fish that might accidentally get into it.

Dr. Livingstone represents the inhabitants, throughout his long journey of more than one thousand miles, as well disposed toward strangers, and a majority of them favorable to civilization and the banishment of the slave-trade, that curse of Africa.

The population of this immense country has been estimated at from fifty to one hundred and fifty millions; but as we have no certain data from which to compute anything like a correct estimate of its inhabitants, it is difficult to arrive at a proper conclusion. Yet from all we can learn, I should judge one hundred and fifty millions is nearest to it.

Recent travellers in Africa have discovered ruins which go far to show that the early settlers built towns, and then abandoned them for more healthy locations. In September, 1871, the South African explorer, Carl Mauch, visited the ruins of an ancient and mysterious city in the highland between the Zambesi and Limpopo Rivers, long known by native report to the Portuguese, and situated in a land, which from its gold and ivory, has long been identified by some authorities, as the Ophir of Scripture. Zimbaoe lies in about lat. 20 degrees 14 seconds S.; long. 31 degrees 48 seconds E.

One portion of the ruins rises upon a granite hill about four hundred feet in relative height; the other, separated by a slight valley, lies upon a somewhat raised terrace. From the curved and zigzag form still apparent in the ruined walls which cover the whole of the western declivity of the hill, these have doubtless formed a once impregnable fortress. The whole space is densely overgrown with nettles and bushes, and some great trees have intertwined their roots with the buildings.

Without exception, the walls, some of which have still a height of thirty feet, are built of cut granite stones, generally of the size of an ordinary brick, but no mortar has been used. The thickness of the walls where they appear above ground is ten feet, tapering to seven or eight feet. In many places monolith pilasters of eight to ten feet in length, ornamented in diamond-shaped lines, stand out of the building. These are generally eight inches wide and three in thickness, cut out of a hard and close stone of greenish-black color, and having a metallic ring.

During the first hurried visit, Mauch was unable to find any traces of inscription, though carvings of unknown characters are mentioned by the early Portuguese writers. Such however, may yet be found, and a clue be thus obtained as to the age of the strange edifice. Zimbaoe is, in all probability, an ancient factory, raised in very remote antiquity by strangers to the land, to overawe the savage inhabitants of the neighboring country, and to serve as a depot for the gold and ivory which it affords. No native tribes dwelling in mud huts could ever have conceived its erection.