PPaauucci ittyy oof f HHi isst toor riiccaal l DDo occuumme ennt taat tiioonn
I was obliged in the course of the preceding chapter to almost
exclusively use the hypothetical mode. In this one and the
following, I will again be forced to have very frequent recourse
to it, so rare are the documents on which we can rely with suffi-
cient confidence to make deductions from them. Until now, in
fact, Negro Africa has revealed to us no monument except for
some ruins which do not recount their history or their creators, and
some tombs which might go back from fifty to five thousand
years, in which everything is found except precise indications, un-
less an Arabic inscription informs us that we have to do with
modern burial places. The Negroes have written nothing with the
exception of rare works in Arabic, the most ancient of which we
possess dates from the 16thcentury. Marginally copied one from
the other, they do not contain more than a few pages on the
history of the country and whatever may be true is obscured by
legend and the pains taken to relate everything to Islam and the
family of Mohammed.
Much more numerous and rich are the traditions conserved orally
among the natives, but they become very confused as soon as
they relate to facts going back several centuries and, without in
any way denying their value, this source of information cannot be
used except with the utmost prudence.
From the Greek and Latin authors, bits of documentation, often
contradictory and supported by nothing very solid, can at least
furnish some vague and incohesive indications, sometimes a few
benchmarks. The names of the countries, localities, and peoples
are generally difficult to identify and when they are examined
impartially it is found that they all refer to countries, localities and
peoples belonging to North Africa and not to Negro Africa.
When, by chance, geographical or ethnical information seems to
refer to the Negroes or to their country, it is drowned in an
amalgam of impossibilities or obscurities from which it is extremely
difficult to obtain any light.
For the period of the Middle Ages, we are a little better informed
by Muslim geographers and historians of Berbery, Spain, Egypt,
and the Arabian Peninsula, and by some works later re-edited in
Arabic by the Sudanese, to which I have alluded above. This infor-
mation is also very imperfect and entirely fragmentary, being limited
to the borders of the Sahara and the west coast of Africa which
were in more or less direct relations with the Arabs of the
Mediterranean or the Gulf of Oman. Concerning the more distant
Negro peoples, those of Guinea, of the Congo, of southern Africa,
there is almost absolute night up to the day when they began to be
visited by Europeans, that is to say, up to the 15thcentury CE. In the
preceding chapter we saw how much we are permitted to
conjecture as to the situation of the African Negroes at the time of
Herodotus. We have also seen – according to the testimony of this
author – that Egyptian civilisation was not without influence on that
of the Negroes in the region of Meroe. It may be admitted that the
influence of ancient Egypt went still further and penetrated even into
the upper part of the valley of the Nile. Perhaps, gradually, it made
itself felt as far as the Great Lakes, as certain artistic manifestations
seem to testify by recalling the manner and processes of ancient
Egypt. It is even possible that, transmitted indirectly from people to
people, infiltrations of an industrial or religious order, having their
point of departure at Memphis or Thebes, had gained the farthest
lands of the Nile, probably without ever having been in direct
relations with Egypt, such as certain regions of the Gulf of Benin or
the neighbouring lands.““AAggggrryy BBeeaaddss””
One meets nearly everywhere in Africa, either in the tombs or
in the tumuli reputed to be ancient, or on the bodies of theMask (Kongo-Yombe).
Democratic Republic of Congo.
Wood, 24.8 cm.
Royal Museum of Central Africa, Tervuren.