The Human Race

by Louis Figuier

The intellectual inferiority of the Negro is readable in his countenance, devoid of expression and mobility. The black man is a child, and like a child he is impressionable, fickle, easily affected by good treatment, and capable of self-devotion, but capable also of hatred in some cases, as well as of working out his revenge. The people of the Black Race living in a free condition in the interior of Africa, demonstrate by their habits and the state of their mind that they can hardly get beyond the level of tribe life; and on the other hand such difficulty is experienced in many colonies, in endeavouring to induce the Negroes (so indispensable has the guardianship of Europeans become to them) to maintain among themselves the benefits of civilization, that the inferiority of their intelligence, compared with that of the rest of mankind, is a fact not to be disputed.

Several instances might doubtless be adduced of Negroes who have surpassed Europeans by their capacity of mind. Generals Toussaint Louverture, Christofle, and Dessalines were no ordinary men, and Blumenbach has preserved to us the names of many illustrious blacks, among whom he mentions Jacob Captain, whose sermons, and theological writings, in Latin and Dutch, are truly remarkable. It is not from individual cases, however, but from the whole, that a judgment must be arrived at, and experience has proved that the Negroes are inferior in intelligence to all known races, not even excepting the savage people of America and the Oceanian islands.

The Negro tribes would be excessively numerous if their children lived, but negligence and laziness cause a notable proportion of their offspring to perish. The continual wars, too, in which they indulge against each other, equally impede the spread of their species, and notwithstanding the fertility of the soil in a great part of Africa, the improvidence and carelessness of the natives bring on real famines which decimate their numbers.

Another cause of depopulation that happily becomes less important every day is the trade which the blacks themselves are most eager to keep up. They sell their children for a packet of beads or for a few flasks of “fire-water.”

Thought grows sad as it carries itself back to the time, not yet very remote, when Negro traffic and slavery, which to-day form the exception, were the universal rule along the whole coast of Western Africa. Negroes then were torn ruthlessly from their country and transported to other climes to be reduced to bondage, or in other words to sacrifice life and strength for their master, and in serving him, to exhaust themselves by toil without gaining as much pity as is extended to beasts of burden. With our animals, in fact, repose succeeds fatigue and food restores vigour; whilst, in colonies subject to Europeans, dread of punishment, the lash, and the most shocking usage, subdued the Negro to forced labour.

This horrible traffic having excited universal indignation for half a century, most States decreed its abolition. France by laws passed between the years 1814 and 1848, definitively emancipated the slaves in all her possessions, and since 1860 or so, almost the whole of America has followed this example. Cruisers are now kept permanently on the coasts of Africa both by England and France, which renders the slave trade, if not impossible, at least difficult and dangerous for the grasping, barbarous men who are not afraid to devote themselves to it still.

This commerce, against which European nations have effected so much, nevertheless, reckons as its partizans the Negroes themselves. The tribes are, in fact, incessantly waging war on each other in order to take prisoners and sell them to the traders who pay prohibited visits to their shores. Even now, convoys of captives, chained together by means of forked sticks, are too often to be seen traversing the forests on their way to a slave-ship moored in some unfrequented creek.

Since the almost general abolition of slavery, many Negro tribes have been remarked to live in better accord among themselves. Fathers have some little love for their children, as they no longer entertain the hope of selling them for a bottle of rum or a glass necklace!

This bondage of the Negroes is not, we may add, a social institution of recent date. The Romans possessed black slaves, and had been preceded by the Egyptians in a custom which, at a period yet more remote, prevailed among the Assyrians and Babylonians. Three thousand years ago the Arabians and Turks carried off Negroes. They ascended the Nile in large vessels, collecting, as they went, the blacks that were delivered up to them in Nubia and Abyssinia, and returning to Lower Egypt with this cargo of human cattle, sold it for slaves.