Mental Qualities.
Although Islám has made considerable progress, throughout the greater part of the Sudanese region, though not among the Nilotic tribes, the bulk of the people are still practically pagan. Witchcraft continues to flourish amongst the equatorial peoples, and important events are almost everywhere attended by sanguinary rites. These are absent among the true Nilotics. The Dinka are totemic, with ancestor-worship. The Shilluk have a cult of divine kings.
Cannibalism.
Cannibalism however, in some of its most repulsive forms, prevails amongst the Zandehs, who barter in human fat as a universal staple of trade, and amongst the Mangbattu, who cure for future use the bodies of the slain in battle and "drive their prisoners before them, as butchers drive sheep to the shambles, and these are only reserved to fall victims on a later day to their horrible and sickly greediness[218]."
The Cannibal Zone.
In fact here we enter the true "cannibal zone," which, as I have elsewhere shown, was in former ages diffused all over Central and South Africa, or, it would be more correct to say, over the whole continent[219], but has in recent times been mainly confined to "the region stretching west and east from the Gulf of Guinea to the western head-streams of the White Nile, and from below the equator northwards in the direction of Adamáwa, Dar-Banda and Dar-Fertit. Wherever explorers have penetrated into this least-known region of the continent they have found the practice fully established, not merely as a religious rite or a privilege reserved for priests, but as a recognised social institution[220]."
Arts and Industries.
Yet many of these cannibal peoples, especially the Mangbattus and Zandehs, are skilled agriculturists, and cultivate some of the useful industries, such as iron and copper smelting and casting, weaving, pottery and wood-carving, with great success. The form and ornamental designs of their utensils display real artistic taste, while the temper of their iron implements is often superior to that of the imported European hardware. Here again the observation has been made that the tribes most addicted to cannibalism also excel in mental qualities and physical energy. Nor are they strangers to the finer feelings of human nature, and above all the surrounding peoples the Zandeh anthropophagists are distinguished by their regard and devotion for their women and children.
High Appreciation of Pictorial Art.
In one respect all these peoples show a higher degree of intelligence even than the Arabs and Hamites. "My later experiences," writes Junker, "revealed the remarkable fact that certain negro peoples, such as the Niam-Niams, the Mangbattus and the Bantus of Uganda and Unyoro, display quite a surprising understanding of figured illustrations or pictures of plastic objects, which is not as a rule exhibited by the Arabs and Arabised Hamites of North-east Africa. Thus the Unyoro chief, Riongo, placed photographs in their proper position, and was able to identify the negro portraits as belonging to the Shuli, Lango, or other tribes, of which he had a personal knowledge. This I have called a remarkable fact, because it bespoke in the lower races a natural faculty for observation, a power to recognise what for many Arabs or Egyptians of high rank was a hopeless puzzle. An Egyptian pasha in Khartum could never make out how a human face in profile showed only one eye and one ear, and he took the portrait of a fashionable Parisian lady in extremely low dress for that of the bearded sun-burnt American naval officer who had shown him the photograph[221]." From this one is almost tempted to infer that, amongst Moslem peoples, all sense of plastic, figurative, or pictorial art has been deadened by the Koranic precept forbidding the representation of the human form in any way.