Africa and the American Flag

by Andrew H. Foote

The other of these two tongues offers also circumstances of peculiar interest. We may consider it, first, as it is found in use by the Hottentot or Bushman race, of South Africa. It has even among them regular and well-constructed forms of inflection, and as distinguishing it from the negro dialects, it has the sexual form of gender, or that which arises from the poetical or personifying view of all objects—considering them as endowed with life, and dividing them into males and females. In this respect it is analogous to the Galla, the Abyssinian, and the Coptic. Nay, at this distant extremity of Africa, not only is the form of gender thus the same with that of the people who raised the wonderful monuments of Egypt, but that monumental tongue has its signs of gender, or the terminations indicating that relation, identical with those of the Hottentot race.

We have, therefore, the evidence of a race of men, striking through the other darker ones, on perhaps nearly a central line, from one end of the continent to the other. The poor despised Bushman, forming for himself, with sticks and grass, a lair among the low-spreading branches of a protea, or nestling at sunset in a shallow hole, amid the warm sand of the desert, with wife and little ones like a covey of birds, sheltered by some ragged sheepskins from the dew of the clear sky, has an ancestral and mental relationship to the builder of the pyramids and the colossal temples of Egypt, and to the artists who adorned them. He looks on nature with a like eye, and stereotypes in his language the same conclusions derived from it. He has in his words vivified external things, as they did, according to that form which, in our more logical tongues, we name poetical metaphor. The sun—“Soorees”—is to him a female, the productive mother of all organic life; and rivers, as Kuis-eep, Gar-eep, are endowed with masculine activity and strength.

To this scattered family of man, which ought properly to be called the Ethiopic race, as distinguished from the negro, may probably be ascribed the fierce invasions from the centre, eastward and westward, under the names of Galla Giagas, and other appellations, which occasionally convulsed both sides of Africa; and, perhaps, by intermixture of races, gave occasion to much of the diversity found among native tribes, in disposition, manners, and language. The localities occupied by it have become insulated through the intrusion of the negro. Its southern division, or the Hottentot tribes, were being pressed off into an angle, and apparently in the process of extinction or absorption by the Zambezan Kaffirs from the north and east, when Europeans met and rolled them away into a small corner of desert.

Egypt was evidently the artery through which population poured into the broad expanse of Africa. That the progenitors of the negro race first entered there, and that another race followed subsequently, is one mode of disposing of the question, which, however, only removes its difficulties a little farther back.

This supposition is unnecessary. Any number of human families living together, comprises varieties of constitution, affording a source from which, by the force of external circumstances, the extreme variations may be educed. If we examine critically the representations of the oldest inhabitants of Egypt, we shall see in the form of man which they exhibit, a combination of characteristics, or a provision for breaking into varieties corresponding to the conditions of external nature in the interior regions.

The dissatisfied, the turbulent, the defeated and the criminal would in these earliest times be thrown off from a settled community in Egypt, to penetrate into the southern and western regions. They would generally die there. Many ages of such attempts might pass before those individuals reached the marshes of the great central plateau, whose constitutions suited that position. Many of them, moreover, would die childless. Early death to the adult, and certain death to the immature, would sweep families off, as the streams bounding from southern Atlas intrude on the desert, and perish there. The many immigrants to whom all external things were adverse would be constantly weeded out; so it would be for generation after generation, until the few remained, whom heat, exposure, toil, marsh vapor, and fever left as an assorted and acclimated root of new nations.

Such seems to have been the process in Africa by which a declension of our nature took place from Egypt in two directions; one through the central plains down to the marshes of the Gaboon or the Congo river, where the aberrant peculiarities of the negro seem most developed; and the other along the mountains, by the Nile and the Zambeze, until the Ethiopian sank into the Hottentot.

The sea does not deal kindly with Africa, for it wastes or guards the shores with an almost unconquerable surf. Tides are small, and rivers not safely penetrable. The ocean offered to the negro nothing but a little food, procured with some trouble and much danger. Hence ocean commerce was unknown to them. Only in the smallest and most wretched canoes did they venture forth to catch a few fish. If strangers sought for regions of prosperity, riches, or powerful government, their views were directed to the interior. Benin, in 1484, confessed its subordination to a great internal sovereign, who only gave responses from behind a curtain, or permitted one of his feet to be visible to his dependents, as a mark of gracious favor. It was European commerce in gold and slaves, received for the coveted goods and arms they bought, which ultimately gave these monarchs an interest in the sea-shore.

Cruelty and oppression were everywhere, as they still are. It is not easy for us to conceive how a living man can be moulded to the unhesitating submission in which a negro subject lives, so that it should be to him a satisfaction to live and die, or suffer or rejoice, just as his sovereign wills. It can be accounted for only from the prevalence and the desolating fury of wars, which rendered perfect uniformity of will and movement indispensable for existence. It is not so easy to offer any probable reason for the eagerness to share in cruelty which glows in a negro’s bosom. Its appalling character consisted rather in the amount of bloodshed which gratified the negro, than in the studious prolongation of pain. He offers in this respect a contrast to the cold, demoniac vengeance of the North American Indian. Superstition probably excused or justified to him some of his worst practices. Human sacrifices have been common everywhere. There was no scruple at cruelty when it was convenient. The mouths of the victims were gagged by knives run through their cheeks; and captives among the southern tribes were beaten with clubs in order to prevent resistance, or “to take away their strength,” as the natives expressed it, that they might be more easily hurried to the “hill of death,” or authorized place of execution.

The negro arts are respectable, and would have been more so had not disturbance and waste come with the slave-trade. They weave coarse narrow cloths, and dye them. They work in wood and metals. The gold chains obtained at Wydah, of native manufacture, are well wrought. Nothing can be more correctly formed for its purpose than the small barbed lancet-looking point of a Bushman’s arrow. Those who shave their heads or beards have a neat, small razor, double-edged, or shaped like a shovel. Arts improve from the coast towards the northeast.