346
Negro
importance. In fact this form of religion is typical of all the eastern and southern portion of the continent (see Africa: Ethnology). With the negro, as with most primitive peoples, it is the malignant powers which receive attention from man, with a view to propitiation or coercion. Beneficent agencies require no attention, since, from their very nature, they must continue to do good. The negro attitude towards the supernatural is based frankly on fear; gratitude plays no part in it. A characteristic feature of the western culture area, among both negro and Bantu negroid tribes, is the belief that any form of death except by violence must be due to evil magic exercised by, or through the agency of, some human individual; to discover the guilty party the poison ordeal is freely used. A similar form of ordeal is found in British Central Africa to discover magicians, and the wholesale “smelling-out” of “witches,” often practised for political reasons, is a well-known feature of the culture of the Zulu-Xosa tribes. Everywhere magic, both sympathetic and imitative, is practised, both by the ordinary individual and by professional magicians, and most medical treatment is based on this, although the magician is usually a herbalist of some skill. Where the rainfall is uncertain, the production of rain by magical means is one of the chief duties of the magician, a duty which becomes paramount in the eastern plains among negroes and Bantu negroids alike. But the negroes and negroids have been considerably influenced by exotic religions, chiefly by Mahommedanism along the whole extent of country bordering the Sahara and in the east. Christianity has made less progress, and the reason is not far to seek. Islam is simple, categorical and easily comprehended; it tends far less to upset the native social system, especially in the matter of polygyny, and at the same time discourages indulgence in strong drink. Moreover the number of native missionaries is considerable. Christianity has none of these advantages, but possesses two great drawbacks as far as the negro is concerned. It is not sufficiently categorical, but leaves too much to the individual, and it discountenances polygyny. The fact that it is divided into sects, more or less competitive among themselves, is another disadvantage which can hardly be overrated. This division has not, it is true, as yet had much influence upon the evangelization of Africa, since the various missions have mostly restricted themselves each to a particular sphere; still, it is a defect in Christianity, as compared with Islam, which will probably make itself felt in Africa as it has in China.
As regards language, the Bantu negroids all speak dialects of one tongue (see Bantu Languages). Among the negroes the most extraordinary linguistic confusion prevails, half a dozen neighbouring villages in a small area often speaking each a separate language. All are of the agglutinating order. No absolutely indigenous form of script exists; though the Hausa tongue has been reduced to writing without European assistance.[1]
Authorities.—J. Deniker, Races of Man (London, 1900); A. H. Keane, Ethnology (London, 1896); Man Past and Present (London, 1900); A. B. Ellis, The Tshi-speaking Peoples (1887); The Ewe-speaking Peoples (1890); The Yoruba-speaking Peoples (1894); B. Ankermann, “Kulturkreise in Afrika,” Zeit. f. Eth. (1905), p. 54. See also Africa: § 3, Ethnology.
(T. A. J.)
Negroes in the United States.
After the migration of the European fair-skinned races in large numbers to other parts of the earth occupied by people of darker colour, the adjustment of relations between the diverse races developed a whole series of problems almost unknown to the ancient world or to the life of modern Europe. The wider the diversity of physique and especially of skin colour, the greater the danger of friction. The more serious the effort to secure industrial and social co-operation under representative institutions, the graver have become the difficulties. They have been and are perhaps more acute in the United States than elsewhere, because there the lightest and the darkest races have commingled, because of the theory on which the government of the country nominally rests, that each freeman should be given an equal chance to improve his industrial position and an equal voice in deciding political questions, and because of the almost irreconcilable differences in the public opinion of the two great sections to only one of which do the problems come home as everyday matters. They were not solved by the Civil War and emancipation, but their nature was radically altered. Neither the earlier system of slavery nor the governmental theory during the radical reconstruction period that race differences should be ignored has proved workable, and the trend is now towards some modus vivendi between these extremes.
The only definition of negro having any statutory basis in the United States is that given in the legislation of many Southern states prohibiting intermarriage between a white person and “a person who has one-eighth or more of African blood.” Census enumerators in their counts of the American people since 1790 have distinguished the two main races of whites and negroes, but in so doing they have never been given a definition or criterion of race. Consequently they followed the judgment of the community enumerated, which usually classes as negro all persons known or believed to have in their veins any admixture of negro blood. It is probable that this line, the so-called “colour line,” which is emphasized in regions where negroes are numerous by many legal, economic and social discriminations between the races, is drawn with substantial accuracy. Far different has been the result of governmental efforts to draw another line within the group of negroes as thus defined, that between the negroes of pure African blood and those of mixed negro and white blood. This distinction has no legal significance, for negroes of pure blood and negroes of mixed blood are subject to the same provisions of law, and at least for the whites it has little social or economic significance. An attempt to draw it was made at each census betweeen 1850 and 1890 inclusive, and the results, so far as they were published, indicate that between one-sixth and one-ninth of the negroes in the United States have some admixture of white blood. The figures were reached through thousands of census enumerators, nearly all of whom were white. Of recent years an effort has been made on the part of negro investigators to get an answer to the same question by the careful study of communities selected as typical. The classification of about 39,000 coloured people, most of them in different parts of Georgia, with a study of the other available data and inferences from a somewhat wide observation, led Dr Dubois to the conclusion that “at least one-third of the negroes of the United States have recognizable traces of white blood.”
Perhaps we may believe with some confidence that the information from white sources understates, and that from negro sources overstates, the proportion, and that the true proportion of mulattoes in the United States is between one-sixth and one-third of all negroes. To infer that the true proportion in 1850, 1860, 1870 and 1890, the dates to which the census figures relate, was much less than the true proportion in 1895 to 1900, to which the unofficial figures relate, is contrary to the general trend of the evidence. As the law and the social opinion of the Southern whites make little or nothing of this distinction between negroes of pure blood and mulattoes, it is often regarded as less important than it really is. The recognized leaders of the race are almost invariably persons of mixed blood, and the qualities which have made them leaders are derived certainly in part and perhaps mainly from their white ancestry. Wherever large numbers of full-blooded negroes and of persons of mixed central or north European and negro blood have lived in the same community for some generations, there is a strong and growing tendency to establish a social line between them.
The difficulty of ascertaining the number of mulattoes in the United States and the tendency of the testimony to be modified by the opinion or desire of the race from which it comes are typical. There is hardly any important aspect of the subject upon which the testimony of seemingly competent and impartial witnesses is not materially affected by the influence of the race
- ↑ The Vai alphabet, “invented” by a native, Doalu Bukere, in the first half of the 19th century, owed its inspiration to European influence and of the characters “many … are clumsy adaptations of Roman letters or of conventional signs used by Europeans” (Sir H. H. Johnston, Liberia, p. 1107 foll., London, 1906).
