advanced civilisation, who were not content, like their congeners
of Carthage and Abyssinia, to merely have commerce with the
Negroes and to promote the development of their civilisation by
radiation. Instead, they lived in large groups within the country of
the Negroes, or at least at the northern limits of this country,
bringing with them the zebu or humped ox and the wool-bearing
sheep; constructing in Sudan houses of masonry and wells
cemented by a special process; introducing the arts of cattle
raising and green gardening; contributing in a certain measure to
the population of the Sahel and the Massina and to the hybridis-
ation of the Negro populations already settled in these regions,
forming perhaps the kernel of pastoral tribes who, under the name
of Fulani, as we call them, or Fulbe, as they call themselves,later
spread out from the Sahel and the Massina on the one side as
far as the Atlantic and on the other beyond Lake Chad, finally
creating in the west of Timbuktu, at Ghana, a State whose
masters they long remained and which may be considered the
cradle and the model of that which has been the most perfected
in the civilisations of the Negroes of Africa.
Without either wishing or being able to commit myself on the
mystery which up to the present surrounds the origin of these
“Beni-Israel”, or pretended such, the role which they played in
Negro Africa, or at least the one that local tradition attributes to
them, seems to me to be too considerable to be passed over in
silence. Perhaps, after all, it is to them, rather than to the
Carthaginians or concurrently with the latter, that we ought to
attribute the importation into the Sudanese languages of the words
of ancient Semitic origin mentioned above.
RRoommaannss aanndd BBeerrbbeerrss
As for the Romans, whatever may be said of them, it seems indeed
that their intervention did not take place on the other side of the
Sahara and that their influence on the Negroes of Africa was nil.
Their only relations with the Negroes consisted in acquiring a
certain number of them as slaves, but they themselves never went
to fetch them, being content to buy them from the merchants of
Carthage or Numidia. It is possible that the Roman expedition
which pushed farthest towards the south was that of Julius
Maternus who, at the order of the Emperor Domitian, departed in
80 CE in search of the gold mines of Sudan, but it probably did
not go farther than the Aïr Mountains.
The Libyans or Berbers, more or less direct descendants – and
probably very mixed – of the ancient autochthonous whites of
North Africa, lived during many centuries in contact with the
most northern of the Negroes. However, it does not seem that
they ever had an appreciable influence on the development of
Negro society, just as the influence of Libyan Berber dialects on
the Sudanese languages seems to have been entirely negligible
except with respect to the Hausa. In the other Negro languages
along the edge of the Sahara, barely half a score of vocables
of Berber origin can be discovered: sometimes the name for
horse and nearly always that for camel (though not yet proved
with certainty), the name of the straight sword, that of a kind of
cake, one of the appellations given to the poor and those of little
means, and finally the name for Easter and for sin, the two latter,
moreover, having been borrowed by the Berbers from the Latin
during the ascendancy of Christianity in North Africa. And that
is all or almost all.This is not as surprising as one might suppose at first sight. On the
one hand, the nomad Berbers of the desert, the only ones who
were and who still are in contact with the Negroes, do not pass
for ever having had a very advanced civilisation: their mode of
life was not adapted to it. And then, one of the general charac-
teristics of the Berbers, as M. Henri Basset has very well shown
in a recent book^6 is to adopt easily the language and certain
exterior aspects of the civilisation and the religion of the
foreigners who momentarily dominate them and to exercise no
visible influence on this people or any other foreign population
living in contact with them. Thus the Negroes of Africa owe very
few obligations to their Berber neighbours, whereas they are
considerably indebted to the Semites, from the distant epoch
when a first current of Semitic influence made itself felt among the
prehistoric natives of North Africa up to the time of the
Islamisation of the same country by the Arabs and the expeditions
directed from Maskat along the coast of Zanzibar, in passing by
the periods of the Phoenician colonies, the splendour of Carthage
and the Israelite or pseudo-Israelite immigrations.But it is time to close this too long account devoted to the different
Mediterranean and Asiatic contributions which have introduced a
very important element of civilisation among the Negroes of
Sudan and of East Africa, from where it spread out little by little,
progressively attenuated, as far as southern Africa. Now, in a new
chapter, we will come to what is known of the history, properly
speaking, of the Negroes of Africa. We will begin with the State
of Ghana to which allusion has already been made.Sculpture (Nok), c. 500 BCE-500 CE.
Terracotta, 50 cm.
Musée du quai Branly, Paris.