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.
Boyo statue (Pre-Bembe).
Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Wood, height: 43 cm.
Aura Collection.
Once part of what is now the Bembe territory, the Boyo lived west of Lake Tanganyika. Specific statues are used to ask their ancestors for protection, especially in times of misfortune. The statues are kept in the hut of the village or lineage chief.
Torso (Igbo). Nigeria.
Wood, height: 66 cm.
Private collection.
Most likely part of an ensemble of life-sized painted wood figures, this fragment of a masked head on a torso may have once adorned a men’s meeting-house. The mask appears to be a calabash, the neck of which slightly projects over the forehead. The curvilinear patterns on the mask were guidelines for pigment.
The shrine and meeting-houses represented an idealised community and once contained numerous figures. Many shrine meeting-houses existed among the eastern Igbo communities near the turn of the century. Since then, most of the sculptures have been dispersed and the houses dismantled, though some have been rebuilt in cement and now have modern carvings and figures lining the walls.
Negro Africa in the Middle Ages
Seated figure (Yoruba), 13th-14th century. Tada, Nigeria.
Copper, 53.7 × 34.3 × 36 cm.
The National Commission for Museums and Monuments, Lagos.
The naturalistic proportions and life like qualities of this figure make it a clear masterpiece of Ife art, particularly when compared to other examples in which the head comprises at least a quarter of the figure’s height. The right foot may have once protruded below the base level, intending for it to sit atop a rounded stone throne. This piece was cast in nearly pure copper, making it too heavy to join the mould to the crucible, so it is likely that the mould was partially buried underground and the metal melted in several sealed crucibles. The figure wears a wrap which is overlain with a beaded net.
The smooth appearance can be attributed to the Friday ritual of taking the figure to the river and scrubbing it with gravel to ensure the fertility of their wives as well as the fish they consumed.
The Empire of Ghana
We do not know at what epoch or exactly by whom was founded the kingdom which later gave birth to the Empire of Ghana. Local traditions, confirmed by the works of scholars of Timbuktu and of Arab historians, only let us conjecture that this State goes back at least to the 4th century CE, that its first sovereigns belonged to the white race and that, a certain time after the Hegira, the power passed into the hands of a family of the black race belonging to the Sarakolle people. Arab authors, moreover, inform us that the Empire of Ghana was flourishing in the 9th and the 10th centuries CE, that its decline began towards the middle of the 11th century under the conquering and destructive movement of the Almoravides, that its debris fell under the yoke of the Mandinka and that its capital, last vestige of its sunken glory, ceased to exist after about the middle of the 13th century.
This capital, whose name is mentioned for the first time, it seems, in the Golden Prairies of Masudi, who died in 956, was visited in the second half of the 10th century by the celebrated Arab geographer lbn-Haukal, and Bekri gives a fairly detailed description of it in the following century. It was called Ghana only by the foreigners and notably the Arabs, who made it known by this name in Europe and Asia. This was not its name but, as Bekri expressly says and as Sudanese traditions confirm, one of the titles borne by the sovereign, who was further designated by that of kaya-maga or simply maga or magan (the master) or again by that of tounka (the prince). The city itself was known to the inhabitants under the name of Kumbi-Kumbi (the butte or tumulus), by which even today its site is pointed out. It is situated between Goumbu and Walata, about a hundred kilometres to the north-northeast of the first of these localities, in a region of the Hodh which the Moors call Howker or Howkar (a geographical term common to many sub-Saharan regions), the Mandinka and the Bambara calling it Bagana or Mara, the Kassonke Bakhunu, and the Sarakolle Wagadu.[7] It extends in a general fashion to the north and to the northeast of Goumbu.
The explorer Bonnel de Mezieres, who visited and excavated this locality in 1914, found there the vestiges of a great city corresponding very exactly to that described by Bekri, with ruins of hewn stone constructions, sometimes sculptured. The region where Ghana or Kumbi was built is now very arid. In truth, it rains there every year, but there are no rivers and, except at a few points where pools or sheets of not very deep subterranean water exist, the vegetation, although fairly thick in spots, is reduced to thin pasturage, gum-trees, and other spiny bushes. The region contains no village and is traversed only by nomadic Moors and hunters of the Nemadi or Nimadi tribe. But very numerous and extended traces of former habitations and burial places which turn up at every instant, show that the country was formerly inhabited, in part at least, by sedentary peoples, and lead us to suppose that it was better watered than it is today and more suitable for tillage. Besides, Bekri speaks of vast and prosperous fields which extended to the east of Ghana and local traditions are unanimous in attributing the decline of the kingdom and the dispersion of its inhabitants to the drying up of the Wagadu and consequent famine. It is probable that these circumstances had much more influence on the end of the Empire of Ghana than the successive pillages to which the city was subjected by the Almoravides in 1076, by the king of Soso, Sumanguru Kannte, in 1203, and finally by the king of the Mandinka, Sundiata Kelta, towards 1240. A populous city and a flourishing State survived pillage and defeat, but could not resist lack of water and nourishment.
At that distant epoch when they lent themselves to tillage and a sedentary life, the Bagana or Wagadu and most of the sub-Saharan districts which we unite today under the name of Hodh in the east and Mauritania in the west, must have been inhabited by the Negroes, more or less mixed with Negrillos and white natives of North Africa. These Negroes formed an ensemble, fairly disparate perhaps in certain aspects, which Moorish traditions generally designate by the term Bafur; from them have without doubt gone forth, by ramification, the Songhoy or Songai towards the east, the Serers towards the west and, towards the centre, a great people called Gangara (Gangari in the singular) by the Moors, Wangara by Arab authors and writers of Timbuktu, and more recently comprising, as its principal divisions, the Mandinka properly speaking or the Malinke, the Bambara, and the Jula.
The word
