Man, Past and PresentKeane, A. H. (Augustus Henry)
History
Man, Past and Present
Keane, A. H. (Augustus Henry)
Anthropology; Ethnology
M. Clozel, who regards them as mentally and morally superior to most of
the Middle and Lower Congo tribes, tells us that the Bayas, that is, the
"Red People," came at an unknown period from the east, "yielding to that
great movement of migration by which the African populations are
continually impelled westwards." The Yangere section were still on the
move some twelve years ago, but the general migration has since been
arrested by the Fulahs of Adamawa. Human flesh is now interdicted to the
women; they have domesticated the sheep, goat, and dog, and believe in a
supreme being called _So_, whose powers are manifested in the dense
woodlands, while minor deities preside over the village and the hut,
that is, the whole community and each separate family group. Thus both
their religious and political systems present a certain completeness,
which recalls those prevalent amongst the semi-civilised peoples of the
equatorial lake region, and is evidently due to the same cause--long
contact or association with a race of higher culture and intelligence.
In order to understand all these relations, as well as the general
constitution of the Bantu populations, we have to consider that the
already-described Black Zone, running from the Atlantic seaboard
eastwards, has for countless generations been almost everywhere
arrested north of the equator by the White Nile. Probably since the
close of the Old Stone Age the whole of the region between the main
stream and the Red Sea, and from the equator north to the Mediterranean,
has formed an integral part of the Hamitic domain, encroached upon in
prehistoric times by Semites and others in Egypt and Abyssinia, and in
historic times chiefly by Semites (Arabs) in Egypt, Upper Nubia, Senaar,
and Somaliland. Between this region and Africa south of the equator
there are no serious physical obstructions of any kind, whereas farther
west the Hamitic Saharan nomads were everywhere barred access to the
south by the broad, thickly-peopled plateaux of the Sudanese Black Zone.
All encroachments on this side necessarily resulted in absorption in the
multitudinous Negro populations of Central Sudan, with the modifications
of the physical and mental characters which are now presented by the
Kanuri, Hausas, Songhai and other Negroid nations of that region, and
are at present actually in progress amongst the conquering Fulah Hamites
scattered in small dominant groups over a great part of Sudan from
Senegambia to Wadai.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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