268. The Influence of Other Cultures
Two other great cultural influences have long affected Africa. As far back as the strictly historic period extends, its Mediterranean shore has been generally under the control of peoples belonging to Western civilization—Carthaginians, Romans, or Arabs. As in the case of Egypt, it is unthinkable that the cultures thus planted in the north could have been wholly without effect on the remoter parts of the continent. In fact, for the Arabs, who both penetrated the farthest and are the most recent comers, influence far into the Sudan is manifest. The other exposure was toward the east, and here, as might be expected, Indian influences, chiefly sea-borne through Arab restlessness, have been potent. Eastern Africa has hump-backed cattle, cotton, the pit-loom, perhaps the fowl, from this source. Madagascar, though mainly Negro in race, is Malaysian in speech and prevailingly Malaysian in culture as the result of similar maritime influences from the east.
In these lights, much of African culture which cannot yet be definitely traced to an extra-African source and which until recently was generally assumed to be of purely native origin, may prove to be due to transmission from Asia or Europe. The powerful kingdoms repeatedly established by successful leaders among both Sudan and Bantu Negroes, kingdoms embracing diverse tribes and sometimes continuing under the same dynasty for several centuries, may be due to Egyptian or Mohammedan example. The same can be said for the prevalence of slavery, which is both more widespread and more important economically in Africa than in any other large region of similarly retarded cultural level. Possibly the frequency of polygyny belongs in the same category. It is true that Negro economic life is generally so organized that wives represent investment and create wealth. This fact might be the result of the influence of old economic tendencies upon introduced polygyny. Or the form of marriage might be the outcome of the economic scheme of life characteristic of Africa. Yet even in the latter case an indirect foreign causation can be suspected, since primitive peoples, at any rate those unquestionably beyond the influences of the Eur-Asian civilizations, like the Australians and Americans, generally do not place heavy social stress on wealth. The African point of view as regards economic success, with the African attitude toward marriage as a consequence, may therefore be partly due to extra-African stimulus and example.
Such stimulus seems more easily demonstrable for the proverbs and riddles which abound in Africa, since proverbs were completely and riddles almost wholly wanting in the western hemisphere, and are therefore not the native and spontaneous outflow of the human mind which our own familiarity with them might tempt us to take for granted (§ [90]).
The totemic and exogamic institutions of Negro Africa (§ [110]) are difficult to understand. Their distribution, both in totality and as regards their several forms, is patchy. Clans sometimes coexist with castes or occupational classes, sometimes tend to coincide with them. Matrilineal institutions crop up irregularly among prevailingly patrilineal ones. In several separate areas the totemic and exogamic groups are divorced, even following opposite lines of descent. The large blocks of peoples sharing substantially the same form of organization in Australia, the regularity of regional and typological graduation of forms of organization characteristic of North America, find no counterpart in Africa. The reason would seem to be that the Australian and American cultures developed in isolation and from within, undisturbed; whereas Africa has long been subjected to a cultural bombardment which constantly mingled new traits with old, foreign with acclimated, and acclimated with indigenous. The native cultures were therefore unable to follow the relatively smooth sequence of development by area or stage which occurred in Australia and America; the injected ferments caused a cultural bubbling in which elements dissociated, combined, intensified, or disappeared according to intricate circumstances. It is possible that other phases of African culture owe their appearance of randomness under classification to the same set of causes.[41]