Man and His Migrations

by R. G. Latham

But unequivocal as may be the Semitic elements of the Berber, Coptic and Galla, their affinities with the tongues of Western and Southern Africa are more so. I weigh my words when I say, not equally, but more. Changing the expression for every foot in advance which can be made towards the Semitic tongues in one direction, the African philologist can go a yard towards the Negro ones in the other[21].

Of course, the proofs of all this in full detail would fill a large volume; indeed, the exhaustion of the subject and the annihilation of all possible and contingent objections would fill many. The position, however, of the present writer is not so much that of the engineer who has to force his water up to a higher uphill by means of pumps, as it is that of the digger and delver who merely clears away artificial embankments which have hitherto prevented it finding its own level according to the common laws of nature. He has little fear from the results of separate and independent investigation, when a certain amount of preconceived notions have been unsettled.

To proceed with the subject—the convergence of the lines of migration in Africa is broken or unbroken, clear or indistinct, continuous or irregular, to much the same extent, and much in a similar manner, with those of America. The moral contrasts which were afforded by the Mexicans and Peruvians reappear in the case of the Ægyptians and the Semitidæ. As to the Hottentots—they, perhaps, are more widely separated from their next of kin than any Americans, the Eskimo not being excepted; so much so, that if the phænomena of their language be either denied or explained away, they may pass for a new species.

Now if the reader have attended to the differences between the Ethnological and the Anthropological principles of classification, he must have inferred the necessity of certain differences of nomenclature, since it is hardly likely that the terms which suit the one study will exactly fit the other. And such is really the case. If the word Negro mean the combination of woolly hair, with a jetty skin, depressed nose, thick lips, narrow forehead, acute facial angle, and prominent jaw, it applies to Africans as widely different from each other as the Laplander is from the Samoeid and Eskimo, or the Englishman from the Finlander. It applies to the inhabitants of certain portions of different river-systems, independent of relationship—and vice versâ. The Negros of Kordofan are nearer in descent to the Copts and Arabs than are the lighter-coloured and more civilized Fulahs. They are also nearer to the same than they are to the Blacks of the Senegambia. If this be the case, the term has no place in Ethnology, except so far as its extensive use makes it hard to abandon. Its real application is to Anthropology, wherein it means the effect of certain influences upon certain intertropical Africans, irrespective of descent, but not irrespective of physical condition. As truly as a short stature and light skin coincide with the occupancy of mountain ranges, the Negro physiognomy coincides with that of the alluvia of rivers. Few writers are less disposed to account for ethnological differences by reference to a change of physical conditions rather than original distinction of species than Dr. Daniell; nevertheless, he expressly states that when you leave the low swamps of the Delta of the Niger for the sandstone country of the interior, the skin becomes fairer, and black becomes brown, and brown yellow.

Of the African populations most immediately in contact with the typical Negro of the western coast, the fairest are the Nufi (conterminous with the Ibos of the Lower Niger) and the Fulahs who are spread over the highlands of Senegambia, as far in the interior as Sakatú, and as far south as the Nufi frontier.

On the other hand, the darkest of the fairer families are the Tuaricks of Wadreag, who belong to the Berber family, and the Sheyga Arabs of Nubia.

The Nubians themselves, or the natives of the Middle Nile between Ægypt and Sennaar, are truly transitional in features between the Ægyptians and the Blacks of Kordofan. So they are in language and apparently in civilizational development.

The best measure of capacity, in this respect, on the part of those Africans who have been less favoured by external circumstances and geographical position than the ancient Ægyptians, is to be found amongst the Mandingos and Fulahs, each of which nations has adopted the Mahometan religion and some portion of the Arabic literature along with it. Of large towns there are more in Negro Africa than there has ever been in Mongolia and Tartary. Yet the Tartars are neither more nor less than Turks like those of Constantinople, and the Mongolians are closely connected with the industrial Chinese.

That the uniformity of languages throughout Africa is greater than it is either in Asia or Europe, is a statement to which I have not the least hesitation in committing myself.