RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Afra Africa
negro races. Abyssinia, the Somali coast, and the Galla country contain a large block of people of the Hamite race, divided into groups, however, by language as well as by religion. Along the Upper Nile as far as the borders of Uganda and eastward well toward the coast are found tribes of another type of negroes generally called the Nilotic group. The negroes of the western part of Africa north of the equator are not all of the degraded type that appears along the western coast. The Fulahs are of an entirely different race, resembling the Hamites, excepting in language. The Mandingoes of the interior of Sierra Leone, Liberia, and the Ivory Coast, are also of a higher type, although their languages show no traces of northern or Asiatic influence.
Throughout Africa north of the equator small detached bodies of Arabs are found at different points; and in general the religious control of this whole great region is with the Mohammedans. For this reason north Africa is frequently spoken of as " Mohammedan Africa." It should be borne in mind, nevertheless, that throughout the region, many pagan tribes exist under Mohammedan rulers. South of the equator, generally speaking, the inhabitants of central Africa, and indeed to the borders of Cape Colony, are of the Bantu stock, often warlike and of a much higher type of intelligence than the negroes of the western coast. In the southwestern part of the continent are remnants of the Hottentots and Bushmen, once numerous in Cape Colony, while throughout Cape Colony proper the natives are known as " colored people," and represent a residue of mixtures of races during centuries. A considerable number of Dutch and of British are found in South Africa; and Portuguese, as well as many Portuguese half-breeds, are numerous in Angola and Portuguese East Africa. European colonists are slowly entering the country on all sides and from all nations, but more than half of the continent can never be a fit residence for Europeans and must remain in the hands of the negro races.
This mixture of races stands in the place of a historical record concerning the people of Africa. Neither the Africans nor any others can read the record. It is the misfortune of the people of this continent to have no history except as appendages to the outside world; and the whole mass of allusions to them in ancient history has the vague quality of tradition. Even the Roman records lack precision, and remain generalities which throw little light on the history of the actual people of the continent.
3. The Opening of Africa: The Mohammedan conquest, beginning about 640, added little to knowledge of the continent, although the « • The Arabs in time gave to the rest of Portu- ^e world information about the fertile guese. negro land beyond the desert in the unlimited region to which they gave the name Sudan, " the Country of the Blacks." Eight hundred years later the Portuguese undertook a wonderful series of explorations of the African coasts, which between 1446 and 1510 began the process of stamping the continent as a possession of Europe.
Portugal named every important feature of the African coast as though she owned the whole continent, which in fact she did as far as the coasts were concerned. She ruled the west coast and the Cape of Good Hope from Lisbon, and the east coast, as a part of India, from Goa; and there were none but the Arabs to dispute her sway. She introduced missions also into her African possessions. But, after the fashion of the times, a mission had no objections to raise against maltreatment of the people to whom the land belonged.
At last in the seventeenth century began what may be called the third period of the opening of Africa, the Arab invasion and the Por- 2. The tuguese occupation having been the European ^rs* anc^ second- The characteristic Invasion, of this third period was a rush by every European nation that could handle ships to make the most money possible out of a vast territory whose inhabitants had not the ability to object. The Dutch took the Cape of Good Hope; and the British, the French, and the Spaniards all gained foothold in different parts of the western coast, and imprinted the nature of their enterprises upon the region by names which persist to this day; such as the " Gold Coast," the " Ivory Coast," the " Grain [of Paradise] Coast " and the " Slave Coast." When the slave-trade began, in the seventeenth century, the Germans, the Swedes, and the Danes also made haste to acquire territory whence they could despoil the continent. North Africa, however, remained in the fierce grip of Islam. The history of Africa was still a history of outsiders working their will upon the country. At the end of the eighteenth century the nations of the lesser European powers had all been dispossessed. Portugal held to her ancient acquisitions about the mouths of the Kongo and the Zambesi and began to try to discover what lay back of these; Great Britain had replaced the Dutch at the Cape of Good Hope, thus securing an extensive region in which white men could live and thrive; while France and Spain had some small settlements on the northern part of the west coast of the continent.
The slave-trade, during nearly 200 years as far as Europe is concerned, and during uncounted centuries as concerns the Asiatic countries, sums up history for the African people. They know little else of their past; but they know that. That fearful traffic transported Africa westward, until from the Ohio River in the United States away southward to the valley of the Amazon in Brazil and throughout the West Indies, the population became strongly and often predominantly African. A fourth era begins for Africa with the prohibition of the slave-trade by Denmark, Great Britain, Holland, France, and Sweden (1792- 3. Prohi- 1819). It was the slave-trade and its of^the horrors which turned Protestant mis- Slave- sionary activity toward Africa in the Trade. earliest days of the nineteenth century; and it was the discussion which preceded the prohibition of slave-trading which suggested the beginning of a systematic exploration of Africa.
Africa