The Rising Son; or, the Antecedents and Advancement of the Colored Race

by William Wells Brown

Rising into the interior, and climbing the tablelands, the evidence of decided improvement generally appears. Perhaps the most savage of these tribes is to be found on the coast of Congo. They are cannibals of great ferocity and brutality. But on the eastern coast are found a people called Kafirs, some tribes occupying the coast, and a few the mountain plains. Some of these tribes, “whose fine forms and easy attitudes remind the traveller of ancient statues,” inhabit large towns and cities, have made great progress in the arts of industry, cultivate vast fields of sugar and tobacco, manufacture various kinds of cutlery, and “build their houses with masonry, and ornament them with pillars and mouldings.”

They exhibit fine traits of intellectual and moral character. Mixed up with their superstitions, they have some lofty, religious ideas; believe in the immortality of the soul, in a Supreme Being, whom they call “The Beautiful,” who exercises a providence over mankind. Such are the nations of Central and Southern Africa; and if we can rely on the reports of the best travellers, they furnish some of the best material, out of which to build up prosperous states and empires, that is to be found on the face of the earth.

We come next to the Hottentots, including the Bushmen, who belong to the same race. In the scale of humanity, he probably sinks below the inhabitants of Guinea or Congo.

The Hottentot has long furnished a standard of comparison to moral writers by which to represent the lowest condition of man. He inhabits the desert, lives in caves, subsists on roots or raw flesh, has no religious ideas, and is considered by the European as too wretched a being to be converted into a slave. How came he thus degraded?

That is a question which we do not often see answered, and which must be answered, to the shame of Christian Europe. Before that evil hour when the Christian navigator neared the Cape of Good Hope, the Hottentots were “a numerous people, divided into many tribes under a patriarchal government of chiefs and elders.”

They had numerous flocks and herds, lived in movable villages, were bold in the chase, courageous in warfare, yet mild in their tempers and dispositions; had rude conceptions of religion, and exhibited a scene of pastoral life like that of the ancient Nomads of the Syrian plains. In a word, they were a part of that stream of emigration to which we have referred in a previous chapter, and who evidently were living somewhat as they had in the country of their ancestors.

Kolben, who saw the Hottentots in the day of their prosperity, enumerates eighteen tribes of the race. The European colonists hunted these tribes as they would hunt beasts of prey. Most of them they exterminated, and seized upon their possessions; the rest they robbed and drove into forests and deserts, where their miserable descendants exist as wandering Bushmen, exhibiting to good Christian people material for most edifying studies in “anatomy and ethnology.”

There is an immense region, comprising the greater part of interior Africa, two thousand miles in length, and one thousand in breadth, nearly equal to the whole of the United States, which has seldom been trodden by the foot of the Caucasian. It spreads out beneath the tropics, and is supposed by Humboldt to be one of the most interesting and fertile regions on the face of the earth.

“It must be,” he says, “a high table-land, rising into the cooler strata of the atmosphere, combining therefore the qualities of the tierra caliente of Mexico, with its ‘cloudless ethers,’ the luxuriant slopes of the Andes, and the pastoral plains of Southern Asia. It cannot be a sandy desert, though sometimes put down as such upon the maps, because vast rivers come rolling down from it into the surrounding seas.”

It has long been the land of romance, mystery, and wonder, and of strange and tantalizing rumors. The “blameless Ethiopians” of Homer, the favorites of the gods, and the wonderful Macrobians of Herodotus, are placed by Heeren on the outskirts of this region, where they would be most likely to be offshoots from its parent stock. This country is guarded from the European by forces more potent than standing armies.