Beyond the herding of cattle he had no instinct for accumulation. His normal state was that of warfare against some other black tribe. His religion was the grossest superstition. He offered up to his heathen gods the sacrifice of the negro child; and when his appetite for four-legged animals was sated, he changed his diet by cooking and eating another negro.
Where the sexual relations of the men and women were not promiscuous, they were polygamous. Strictly speaking, there was no such thing as morals known among them. Property rights which certain men had, or claimed, in certain women might be respected, but the conception of virtue was not reached.
They never evolved an alphabet. They never advanced beyond the crudest, rudest, most brutal tribe-life.
They had chiefs, or kings; and these kings exercised, despotically, the power of life and death over their ignorant subjects.
They had conjurers and witch doctors, and it was one of the time-honored customs that the witch doctors should “smell out,” for death, the wretched creatures whom the king wanted to kill, or whom the witch doctors themselves wished to put out of the way.
Thousands upon thousands of years ago, negro warriors sold their negro captives into slavery. Negro husbands would offer their wives and daughters to foreign travelers. Negro fathers would sell their children. In some of the oldest monumental inscriptions of the human race, the negro appears as the chained slave of foreign masters.
Anybody on earth who wanted to buy him could do it. His king was ready to sell him; his father was ready to sell him. The Egyptian, the Greek, the Roman owned black slaves as far back as the records go; and the historian Gibbon did no more than express the universal experience and opinion of the ages when he wrote that the negro was a distinctly inferior race.
“His normal state was that of warfare against some other black tribe.”
Of all the negroes that have ever lived Tchaka was the greatest. He ruled in Africa, in the eighteenth century.