seem to experience a real pleasure in endlessly repeating or
hearing the same air, as in intoxicating themselves with the same
liquor, while we like to vary our wines.
NNa at tiivvee LLi itteer raat tuur ree iinn AAr raabbi icc
It would not be rigorously exact to say that the Negroes possess
only an oral literature and that this literature is necessarily of the so-
called popular type. Without doubt it is the popular oral literature
that has the dominating place in Negro Africa, but we also find a
learned oral literature and a written literature.
The latter manifests itself particularly under the cover of Arabic,
known by very few Negroes as a spoken language, but serving
as the written language for the majority of the educated Muslim
Negroes. Proportionally, their number is much greater than is
usually imagined. For the most part, it is true, they do not use
Arabic except in correspondence among themselves, and their
epistolary style, though generally florid, does not merit consid-
eration as a literary form, although certain series of letters ex-
changed between such personages as the askia Mamadu Toure
and the Algerian reformer El Meghili, or the Tukulor conqueror
El-Hadj Omar and the Fulani king Hamadu-Hamadu, deserve to
be pointed out as models of dialectic and scholastic subtlety.
But a great many Muslim Negroes of tropical Africa have
composed and still compose, in a correct and sometimes
elegant Arabic, works of theology, hagiology, law, history,
sometimes in prose, sometimes in verse, sometimes in prose
mixed with verse.
I have spoken above of the intellectual flowering that distinguished
Timbuktu in the 16thcentury, but this epoch and this city did not
have the monopoly of such literature. Even in our days, the
“Marabouts”, as the educated Muslims are commonly called in
Africa, edit chronicles of local history that are often highly inter-
esting, treatises on exegesis and learned works that constitute a
veritable literature, some examples of which would not detract
from Arabic literature as a whole. Among other observations
which must be made in this regard, there is one that is singularly
striking. For all Negro writers, Arabic is a foreign language; they
can only learn it by practice as they possess no grammars except
those written in Arabic, nor any dictionaries giving the Arabic
translation of the words of their mother tongues. So, in order to
assimilate the Arabic language to the point of sufficient familiarity
for the interpretation of their own concepts, they require a consid-
erable intellectual effort, far superior to that necessary for a Euro-
pean to arrive at the same result, since the latter has grammars and
dictionaries edited in his own tongue. This is all to the honour of
the intellectual faculties of the Negro race. There also exist, in
much more recent times, embryos of written literature in one or the
other of the languages of the European nations who possess
colonies in Negro Africa.WWr riitttteenn LLi itteer raat tuur ree iinn NNa at tiivvee TToonnggu uee
Finally, there is another category of written literature, more inter-
esting perhaps from the point of view of the information it can
furnish regarding the congenital aptitudes of the Negroes,
because it is native in its expression. In certain regions of Africa,
the signs of the Arabic alphabet, adapted sometimes by means of
added diacritical marks and new conventions to the representation
of vowel or consonant sounds that do not exist in Arabic, are
employed for writing an African Negro language. At other times,
it is not an alphabet borrowed from a foreign language, but a
graphic system of local invention, which serves to represent the
sounds. In truth, this procedure is not widespread. Up to the
present it has not been met with except among the Vai at the
frontier of Liberia and Sierra-Leone, who use, for probably more
than a century already, a syllabic form of writing of their own
invention; among the Bamom or Bamoun of the Cameroons who
used a system thought out around the year 1900 by Njoya, king
of Foumban, a system at first ideographic, but rapidly becoming
phonetic and at present tending to pass from the syllabic to an
alphabetic stage; finally among the Nubians of the districts of
Korosko and Mahas who, according to the English author H.A.
MacMichael, use a special alphabet, more or less directly derived
from an oriental writing. It would be desirable to possess a certain
number of specimens of productions written by means of this purely
native process. As a matter of fact, we know very few of them
aside from some letters and edicts of the king Njoya, which are
without literary interest. Nevertheless, it is certain that there exist,
in the Vai language and writing, sort of novels or tales that are
passed from hand to hand in the villages.^22““GGr riioot tss”” oor r LLi ivvi inngg EEnnccyyccl looppaaeeddi iaas s
Far more widespread and representative of the native civili-
sation is the unwritten, learned literature. Perhaps the epithet ofZoomorphic sconce jewellery (Baoulé).
Ivory Coast.
Gold, investment casting, 6.7 x 9.8 cm.
Musée du quai Branly, Paris.