by the Negroes in the valley of the Nile, whom he calls
“Ethiopians”. These limits are sensibly identical with those
attained by them in our day. The Negroes were already found,
he tells us, “above Elephantine”, upstream from the first cataract,
some sedentary, others nomadic, living side by side with the
Egyptians; but their true homeland began a little farther to the
north of the present city of Khartoum, at Meroe, which, according
to Herodotus, was their capital, and to the south of which lived
the “Automoles”, Egyptians in the service of the king of the
“Ethiopians”, who had established themselves in the adopted
country, marrying Negro women and causing the Negroes of the
region to benefit by Egyptian civilisation.
Further on (Book VII, § LXIX), passing in review the cosmopolitan
contingents who made up the army of Xerxes, Herodotus tells us
that the “Ethiopians” – a word which must always be under-
stood to mean the African Negroes – were “clothed in leopard
and lion skins, had bows made of the stems of palm-leaves at
least four cubits in length, and long arrows of reed at the
extremity of which was, instead of iron, a pointed stone which
they also used for carving their seals. Besides this, they carried
javelins armed with the horns of antelopes, pointed and worked
like an iron lance-head and clubs full of knots. When they went
into battle, they rubbed half of their body with chalk and the
other half with vermilion”.
Who would not recognise in this portrait of Negro warriors
many of the present tribes of the Gulf of Guinea, of the bend of
the Niger and of equatorial or southern Africa? Apart from the
arrow-heads and the javelin points which are now of iron in-
stead of stone or horn, and by replacing the terms “chalk” and
“vermilion” of the French translator^3 with “white earth” and “red
earth”, it is striking to ascertain how little the equipment of the
Negroes of the army or Xerxes, four and a half centuries BCE,
differed from that which we can see, twenty-four centuries later,
on many of their descendants. And we make no mistake about
it: the “Ethiopians” in question were indeed the Negroes and not
the ancestors of the present Abyssinians, to whom we commonly
give the name Ethiopians. Herodotus himself specifies this detail
a little further on (same Book, § LXX) by designating the
Abyssinians as “Oriental Ethiopians” and in observing that they
differed from the other “Ethiopians” in that they had straight hair,
while the Negroes or western Ethiopians, whom he calls simply
“Ethiopians” or “Ethiopians of Libya”, had hair “more frizzled
than all other men”. He adds that these two peoples spoke
different languages.
According to these diverse testimonies of Herodotus, joined to
those of Hanno and of Sataspe, it can be inferred that, since the
5 thcentury BCE, the Negroes occupied in the same territories of
Africa where we meet them today, that they had almost achieved
their ethnic formation, although their absorption of the Negrillos
was not quite as complete as it has since become, and finally,
that the customs and the material civilisation of the most
advanced among them were essentially that which can be
observed in our day among the Negroes who have remained
the most primitive.This will be the conclusion of the first chapter, which, as can be
seen, is more filled with conjectures^4 than with facts. As the title
indicates, we are dealing with prehistory, and prehistory
remains inevitably within the domain of hypothesis, whatever be
the human society to which it pertains. Only, in what concerns
the Negroes of Africa, prehistory has lasted much, much longer
than history and history does not begin until an epoch very near
to our own time.Eyema Byeri statue (Fang).
Cameroon.
Wood, brass, mirror, black patina, height: 50 cm.
ABG Collection.All of the communities among the several groups which make up the “Fang”
area practised the same ancestral worship. These groups are comprised of
people from the three countries of the African Atlantic Equatorial and were
named after the 19thcentury population of the North-Gabon and Equatorial
Guinea. Their worship consists of preserving the skulls of the dead which are
symbolically guarded by wooden statues and include several levels of initiation,
as found in So.
Between the Nyong and Lokounjué rivers, north of the Ntumuarea in
Southern Cameroon, many Betipopulations (Ewondo, Ngumba, Eton) and their
costal neighbours (Mabea) developed. The geometric stylisation of their original
statues is easily recognisable with rounded, hull shoulders, conical breasts, and
an abundance of metal adornment. The round head, reflective heart-shaped
eyes, hat of shells, and remarkable femininity make this particular Byerieffigy
among the most beautiful examples of the Ngumba style.