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]
269. The Bushmen
Two local culture-areas, as they would be called on American soil, emerge with fair distinctness: The Bushman and the West African.
The Bushmen of the far south about the Kalahari desert are distinctive in both race (§ [26]) and speech. Culturally they also stand apart as an exceptionally primitive people, lacking the agriculture, cattle and fowls, and iron working of the Negroes. They are expert hunters, stalking or wearing down game until it is within range of their poisoned bone or stone pointed arrows, while the women pry up roots with stone weighted digging sticks. They live under rock shelters or on the leeward side of rude windbreaks. Subterranean water is sucked up through reeds and kept in ostrich egg shells. All this suggests an early Neolithic or even largely Palæolithic culture type, which accords well with the remote and environmentally unfavorable habitat. It is as if the peripherally situated Bushmen had retained up to the present, and with few additions, the culture that prevailed in Europe ten thousand years ago. It is certainly striking that they carve and paint animal figures on rock faces and in caves with a fidelity and unconstrained naturalism that remind of Magdalenian art.
The Hottentots, who are neighbors of the Bushmen and approach them in physical type, appearing to be a mixture of Bushman and other blood, are culturally less retarded, having cattle and iron. In central Africa another dwarf black race, the Pygmies or Negrillos, probably represent a people of once primitive status. But their actual cultural condition is parasitic rather than natively primitive, thus resembling that of their relatives the East Indian Negritos. They live among Negro tribes, acknowledge their kings, trade forest and hunting products for the agricultural yield and manufactures of the Negroes, and speak dialects of the latter’s languages. They thus constitute a racially accentuated caste or economic class within Bantu culture; and although shy and backward, cannot be said to preserve a relatively pure early culture as do the Bushmen.
270. The West African Culture-area and Its Meaning
Over the larger northern portion of the Congo drainage and along the Guinea coast from the Niger mouth to the Senegal, there prevails a well defined West African culture. This is marked by a number of traits which within Africa are approximately confined to it. These traits include the cultivation of the banana but general absence of millet and cattle; gabled houses of thatch, other Africans building domed or conical structures or mud dwellings; clothing of palm fiber or bark; straight self-bows with pointed ends and encircling ridges for the attachment of the looped cord of rattan; shields of wood or cane, in place of which other Africans employ leather bucklers, shields of hide, or parrying sticks; face masks for religious purposes; carvings of the human form; slit wooden drums; xylophones; and a number of other traits.
Two interpretations can be suggested for this consistent and geographically limited association of traits. One makes use of the recurrence of many of the elements in the Indo-Oceanic and especially the Melanesian area. As the latter is also Negroid territory, an ancient connection is conceivable. This would obviously have to be old enough to precede the Egyptian, west Asiatic, and Indian-East African culture developments. These later growths would be interpreted as having spread less far, although obliterating the antecedent Negroid culture so far as they did diffuse. This explanation fits well with the principle that, other things equal, superposed culture strata appear centrally, underlying ones survive marginally. Proof, however, must depend on whether the parallel traits are really specifically similar, whether they constitute a reasonably large proportion of the culture of the two areas, and whether they are lacking in the intervening region. This evidence is naturally difficult to assemble.
The other interpretation is less incisive. It looks upon the resemblances as at least partly conditioned by environment; and would tend to explain the remainder as due to a diffusion, early indeed, but gradual and applying to single elements or small clusters of traits rather than to an association of traits large enough to form a culture and moving as a single block. In this connection it is significant that the Oceanic area is one of tropical forest, and the West African area the only large forested tract in its continent. Hence the absence of cattle and open-country grains, the use made of the banana. Hence too the possibility of bark cloth; and the extremely serviceable rattan cord, which in turn may have demanded a certain type of bow; whereas other types, like the sinew-backed bow, would be unsatisfactory in the humid climate. And the carving of wood, while not due to the forest, was at least made possible by it. In short, diffusion may have been the motive power involved, but like environmental conditions in the two areas caught and helped to preserve such elements as were diffused—stabilized the culture once it was adapted to the soil and rendered it more resistive to importations of traits worked out in different climates. This interpretation at any rate makes smaller assumptions than its competitor, and serves as an illustration of the need of environmental conditions being kept in mind in the explanation of culture, even though the essential explanation be in social or cultural terms.