NEGRO (from Lat. niger, black), in anthropology, the designation of the distinctly dark-skinned, as opposed to the fair, yellow, and brown variations of mankind. In its widest sense it embraces all the dark races, whose original home is the intertropical and sub-tropical regions of the eastern hemisphere, stretching roughly from Senegambia, West Africa, to the Fijian Islands in the Pacific, between the extreme parallels of the Philippines and Tasmania. It is most convenient, however, to refer to the dark-skinned inhabitants of this zone by the collective term of Negroids, and to reserve the word Negro for the tribes which are considered to exhibit in the highest degree the characteristics taken as typical of the variety.
These tribes are found in Africa; their home, being south of the Sahara and north of a not very well-defined line running roughly from the Gulf of Biafra with a south-easterly trend across the equator to the mouth of the Tana. In this tract are found the true negroes; and their nearest relatives, the Bantu-negroids, are found to the south of the last-mentioned line. The relation of the yellowish-brown Bushman and Hottentot peoples of the southern extremity of Africa to the negro is uncertain; they possess certain negroid characters, the tightly curled hair, the broad nose, the tendency towards prognathism; but their colour and a number of psychological and cultural differences would seem to show that the relation is not close. Between the two a certain affinity seems to exist, and the Hottentot is probably the product of an early intermixture of the first Hamito-Bantu immigrants with the Bushman aborigines (see Africa: Ethnology). The relation of the negroids of Africa to those of Asia (southern India and Malaysia) and Australasia cannot be discussed with profit owing to lack of evidence; still less the theories which have been put forward to account for the wide dispersal from what seems to be a single stock. It will be sufficient to say that the two groups have in common a number of well-defined characteristics of which the following are the chief: A dark skin, varying from dark brown, reddish-brown, or chocolate to nearly black; dark tightly curled hair, flat in transverse section,[1] of the “woolly” or the “frizzly” type; a greater or less tendency to prognathism; eyes dark brown with yellowish cornea; nose more or less broad and flat; and large teeth.
Sharing these characteristics, but distinguished by short stature and brachycephaly, is a group to which the name Negrito (q.v.) has been given; with this exception the tendency among the negroids appears to be towards tall stature and dolichocephaly in proportion as they approach the pure negro type. As the most typical representatives of the variety are found in Africa, the Asiatic and Australasian negroids may be dismissed with this introduction. The negro and negroid population of America, the descendants of the slaves imported from West Africa, and in a less degree, from the Mozambique coast, before the abolition of the slave-trade, are treated separately below.
In Africa three races have intermingled to a certain extent with the negro; the Libyans (Berbers: q.v.) in the Western Sudan, and the Hamitic races (q.v.) and Arabs (q.v.) in the east. The identity of the people who have amalgamated with the negro to form the Bantu-speaking peoples in the southern portion of the continent is not certain, but as the latter appear to approach the Hamites in those characteristics in which they differ from the true negroes, it seems probable that they are infused with a proportion of Hamitic blood. The true negroes show great similarity of physical characteristics; besides those already mentioned they are distinguished by length of arm, especially of fore arm, length of leg, smallness of calf and projection of heel; characteristics which frequently fail to appear to the same degree among the Bantu, who are also as a rule less tall, less prognathous, less platyrrhine and less dark. A few tribes in the heart of the negro domain (the Welle district of Belgian Congo) show a tendency to round head, shorter stature and fairer complexion; but there seems reason to suppose that they have received an infusion of Libyan (or less probably Hamitic) or Negrito blood.
The colour of the skin, which is also distinguished by a velvety surface and a characteristic odour, is due not to the presence of any special pigment, but to the greater abundance of the colouring matter in the Malpighian mucous membrane between the inner or true skin and the epidermis or scarf skin.[2] This colouring matter is not distributed equally over the body, and does not reach its fullest development until some weeks after birth; so that new-born babies are a reddish chocolate or copper colour. But excess of pigmentation is not confined to the skin; spots of pigment are often found in some of the internal organs, such as the liver, spleen, &c. Other characteristics appear to be a hypertrophy of the organs of excretion, a more developed venous system, and a less voluminous brain, as compared with the white races.
In certain of the characteristics mentioned above the negro would appear to stand on a lower evolutionary plane than the white man, and to be more closely related to the highest anthropoids. The characteristics are length of arm, prognathism, a heavy massive cranium with large zygomatic arches, flat nose depressed at base, &c. But in one important respect, the character of the hair, the white man stands in closer relation to the higher apes than does the Negro.
Mentally the negro is inferior to the white, The remark of F. Manetta, made after a long study of the negro in America, may be taken as generally true of the whole race: “the negro children were sharp, intelligent and full of vivacity, but on approaching the adult period a gradual change set in. The intellect seemed to become clouded, animation giving place to a sort of lethargy, briskness yielding to indolence. We must necessarily suppose that the development of the negro and white proceeds on different lines. While with the latter the volume of the brain grows with the expansion of the brainpan, in the former the growth of the brain is on the contrary arrested by the premature closing of the cranial sutures and lateral pressure of the frontal bone.[3] This explanation is reasonable and even probable as a contributing cause; but evidence is lacking on the subject and the arrest or even deterioration in mental development is no doubt very largely due to the fact that after puberty sexual matters take the first place in the negro’s life and thoughts. At the same time his environment has not been such as would tend to produce in him the restless energy which has led to the progress of the white race; and the easy conditions of tropical life and the fertility of the soil have reduced the struggle for existence to a minimum. But though the mental inferiority of the negro to the white or yellow races is a fact, it has often been exaggerated; the negro is largely the creature of his environment,
- ↑ This point has been fully determined by P. A. Brown (Classification of Mankind by the Hair, &c.), who shows conclusively that, unlike true hair and like true wool, the negro hair is flat, issues from the epidermis at a right angle, is spirally twisted or crisped, has no central duct, the colouring matter being disseminated through the cortex and intermediate fibres, while the cortex itself is covered with numerous rough, pointed filaments adhering loosely to the shaft; lastly, the negro pile will felt, like wool, whereas true hair cannot be felted.
- ↑ It is also noteworthy that the dark colour seems to depend neither on geographical position, the isothermals of greatest heat, nor even altogether on racial purity. The extremes of the chromatic scale are found in juxtaposition throughout the whole negro domain, in Senegambia, the Gabun, upper Nile basin, lower Congo, Shari valley, Mozambique. In the last region M de Froberville determined the presence of thirty-one different shades from dusky or yellow-brown to sooty black. Some of the sub-negroid and mixed races, such as many Abyssinians, Galla, Jolof and Mandingo, are quite as black as the darkest full-blood negro. A general similarity in the outward conditions of soil, atmosphere, climate, food charged with an excess of carbon, such as the fruit of the butter-tree, and other undetermined causes have tended to develop a tendency towards dark shades everywhere in the negro domain apart from the bias mainly due to an original stain of black blood. Perhaps the most satisfactory theory explains the excessive development of pigment in the dark-skinned races as a natural protection against the ultra-violet rays in which tropical light is so rich and which are destructive of protoplasm (see C. E. Woodruff, Tropical Light, London, 1905). The expression “jet black” is applied by Schweinfurth to the upper-Nilotic Shilluk, Nuer and Dinka, while the neighbouring Bongo and Mittu are described as of a “red-brown” colour “like the soil upon which they reside” (Heart of Africa, vol. i. ch. iv.).
- ↑ La Razza Negra nel suo stato selvaggio, &c. (Turin, 1864), p. 20.
