AFRICA
THE CONTINENT OF CONTRADICTIONS AND CONTRASTS
AFRICA, like Australia, is the remnant of a much older continent, the greater part of which disappeared beneath the waves the sea a great many millions of years ago. Until comparatively recent geological times it was still connected with Europe. Arabia, geographically speaking a continuation of the Sahara and Madagascar, which has the fauna and flora of Africa, Asia and Australia, seem to indicate that there may have been a land connection between these three continents as recently as the era during which life first appeared upon our planet.
It is all very complicated and we shall have to discover a great many more data before we shall be able to say, “It was thus and thus and not otherwise.” In the meanwhile it is not a bad idea to mention these theories. They show us that the surface of our planet is constantly changing – that nothing is today quite as it was yesterday and that our descendants a million years hence will look at our maps (if they are still interested in our funny little globe, having long since learned to fly to other and bigger planets) with ill-concealed surprise, just as we contemplate a hypothetical map of the Tertian or Silurian age and ask ourselves, “Can such things ever have been?”
What finally remained of all this ancient territory and what has not changed since the beginning of our so-called “historical times” consists of two parts, a large square of land north of the equator and a smaller triangle south of the equator. But both the square and the triangle suffer from the same geographical disadvantage. Their outer rims are higher than the interior and as a result the interior resembles a gigantic saucer. Such a condition, as we have already seen in the case of Australia, is very bad for the country at large. The high edges of the saucer prevent the sea winds from penetrating into the interior, which is therefore apt to turn into a desert and furthermore they deprive that interior of its natural outlets to the sea. For when the African rivers finally reach the ocean, after having wandered all over the landscape, they must break their way through the rim series of mountain-range. That means that they suffer from waterfalls and cataracts where they are least wanted. It means that ships cannot use these rivers to reach the interior of the country. It means that trade must wait until artificial harbors have been constructed and until railroads have been built that circumnavigate the waterfalls. In short, it means isolation.
To most of us Africa is merely the “black continent” and we usually associate it with tropical forests and Negroes. As a matter of fact, one-third of the 11,300,000 square miles which the continent occupies (it is therefore three times as large as Europe) are desert and of absolutely no value. The population of 140,000,000 is divided into three groups of which one, that of the Negroes, is black, while the other two, the Hamites and the Semites, vary all the way from a dark chocolate to the whiteness of polished ivory.
It is natural, however, that the Negro should have forced himself more upon our attention than his lighter-coloured neighbours. Not only does he impress us as something queer when we first see him, but the mistaken economic conceptions of our ancestors have dragged him all over the globe as a cheap and docile form of labour and it is not always pleasant to be reminded of this disgraceful error of judgment. For Negro slavery has been one of the worst misfortunes that could possibly have overtaken both races, that of the white man as well as that of the black. We shall return to it a little later but we must first talk of Africa as it was before the invention of Negro slavery.
The Greeks were familiar with Egypt and with the Hamitic race which inhabited the valley of the Nile. The Hamitic races had occupied northern Africa at a very early date and had pushed the original, darker-skinned instants southward in the general direction of the Sudan while keeping the northern border of the Mediterranean for their own exclusive use. The term Hamitic is a very vague one. There are no typical Hamites as there are typical Swedes or Chinamen. The Hamites are a mixture of Aryans and Semites with a heavy sprinkling of Negro and a number of older races that were already on the premises when these invaders from the east made their first entry.
When they reached Africa they were probably still in the nomadic stage of development and as a result they spread all over the valley of the Nile and went further southward into Abyssinia and westward as far as the Atlantic seaboard. The Berbers of the Adas Mountains are pure Hamites – or as pure as any Hamite can possibly be – and several of the wandering tribes of the Sahara are of Hamitic origin. The Abyssinians, on the other hand, are now so hopelessly mixed with Semites as to have lost a great many of their Hamitic traits. While the Fellahs, the small-boned farmers of the Nile valley, are also of Hamitic stock although mixed beyond recognition by thousands of years of intermarriage with other races.
As a rule, when we try to classify different races, language comes to our rescue. But in northern Africa the spoken tongue is of very little help. There are Semitic tribes which speak only Hamitic and Hamitic tribes which speak only Arabic, while the Copts, the ancient Christians of Egypt, are the only people who have retained a knowledge of the ancient Hamitic tongue. The Greeks and Romans were apparently just as much puzzled as we are. They solved the difficulty by calling all the people who came from this neck of the woods “Ethiopians” or “burnt faces”. They wondered at their pyramids and at the negroid lips of their Sphinx (or are the lips Hamitic? Ask the professors!) and admired the patience of their long-suffering peasants and the wisdom of their mathematicians and the learning of their physicians, but they never seemed to have bothered to ask where these people might have come from. They spoke of them as Ethiopians.