This feature has been dwelt upon because it serves to convey the point of view of the Negro, surrounded by the spirits of gods and devils and dead men, and living too; and the spirits of every life and force of Nature,—a perfect swarm of spirits, nearly all of whom are busy meddling with the affairs of men, and who must be outwitted or bribed or won over if disaster is to be avoided. Life is thus a tragic drama unending, whose comedy, however, is constantly realized in the outwitting of the cunning spirits, and the overcoming of the powerful by ingenious strategy.
Every tribe has a secret society, through which every freeman must pass. In the course of this education, should a boy be found who can see spirits, he is assigned to the medical profession, and is apprenticed to a witch-doctor to whom a good fee must be paid, and who instructs him in the mysteries of the spirit-world. He accompanies his teacher, picks up his bedside manner, learns to howl in a professional way, and, if possible, how to simulate epilepsy. A knowledge, also of the dispositions of the prospective patients, their financial standing, the scandals of the people, is of great value to the budding doctor. Perhaps this method of practice may seem absurd; but, in spite of this, many of the doctors possess a fund of wisdom in dealing with human nature, and also a store of knowledge of medical herbs, which has been of great value in later times to the white explorers and missionaries, as well as to the Negroes. According to the lights which they possess, they are guided often by the same motives which sway the civilized physician, and apply the same method of investigation employed by the enlightened scientist. The most that should be said is that the African doctor is behind the times. Yet, even here, it is interesting to know, and simple justice to Africa to repeat the record, that for many centuries men of the Yoruba tribe have known that smallpox is produced by the evil god Shank-panna whose agents are mosquitoes and flies; and there are not a few examples of doctors who examine their patients, locate the disease by scientific diagnosis, and prescribe both diet and medicine. In general terms, “religion and medicine” are one and the same in the mind of the African, since all medical practice is contact with the spirits.
A priestly caste, consisting of three orders, prevails in some of these tribes. Each order represents a class of gods. Their office is hereditary, but is replenished through the secret society of the tribe which forms a school of training for the priest, as for the doctor. Idols are much used, to whom sacrifices are offered in worship of the god represented.
The very high development in aesthetics is so conspicuous a characteristic of the Negro as to make a racial differentiation. No other race is so musical, no other more given to dancing, no other so profuse in personal decorations.
The boatman sings all day long, keeping time with his paddle; the woman pounds grain in time with her chants; the farmer, with his hoe. Joy, grief, love, pain, are all expressed in spontaneous song. In some regions, professional musicians chant the chronicles of their tribes. Sometimes the strolling minstrel sings the folklore, reciting the experiences of men with animals, of animals with animals, acting the parts as he sings the story. In writing of these, Miss Kingsley thus closes her vivid description: “O! that was something like a song! It would have roused a rock to enthusiasm; a civilized audience would have smothered its singer with bouquets!”
Dancing, too, is a mode of expressing feeling, almost universal. Scarcely a night but somewhere in a village the dance is in progress. Among all people, indeed, the bodily expression of inward emotion is the natural ritual of communication. The savage does not find vent for his emotions in the numberless ways acquired by civilized people—through writing, painting, the drama, discoursive language and the like; but he combines them all in the dance, just as at other times they are all expressed in music. It is a mistake to suppose that his dancing is always sensuous and frivolous. There is enough of this, it is true; but at times his deepest emotions are also thus expressed. There is the dance of religious fervor, of preparation for war, of celebration of victory, of lament for loss, in the planting time, and in the harvest. Such dances inspire devotion, courage, industry, patriotism, and tribal unity in a common cause.
But the aesthetics of the Negro are still more vividly and luridly illustrated in his personal decorations, at all times from a sense of beauty, sometimes as tribal insignia. Tattooing, in some tribes; painting, in most of them; the wearing of ornaments on foreheads, in cheeks or lips or ears or nose; the filing of teeth, or even the extraction of one or more, are usual forms of decorations. Body-painting is the practice of the Nile tribes; and, in the west, the dyeing of hands, feet, eyebrows, and lips. Artistic head-dresses and the dyeing of hair seem popular among many tribes. In the cotton area, the use of fancy dyed cloth prevails. The styles are graceful and picturesque. Where straw goods are made, the head-dress is both useful and ornamental a high degree.
A natural question is, to what is the backwardness of the Negro in Africa due? This is not a merely forensic question. To prejudiced people, it is dismissed as a waste of time, since to such people the Negro is incapable of anything better. But prejudice is, of all mental conditions, the least favorable to the satisfactory solution of any question. Our question has had varying answers from many students, among which the following, given in Dowd’s Negro Races, seems a conservative mean.
“The backwardness of the Negro in Africa is not due directly to lack of mental capacity, but to unfavorable environment. If any other race had peopled Africa in early neolithic times, and remained there until now, it would have advanced no higher than the present culture-level of the Negro.”
Africa lies almost wholly in the hot, humid zone of the Tropics, save for the vast Desert of Sahara to the north. There is, indeed, another vast area on the temperate side of the Tropic of Capricorn which, at sight, inspires hope for the development of a rich, virile civilization; but an examination of the isotherms reveals conditions uncongenial to the spontaneous development of a high type of civilization. Even as low as Natal and Cape Colony, the coastal belt produces tropical fruits like all the rest of Africa. In such environs the negro tribes lived in isolation from other races; cut off from the Mediterranean Empire by the Sahara Desert, and from Europe and Asia by the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Whatever stimulus to development may come from contact with other peoples—and there is much—was denied to the Negro, save that which arose from inter-racial conflict among themselves, an unceasing bar to higher development for any race, and seemingly inseparable from racial isolation.