One word of warning! If you should go to North Africa, be careful not to call all these people “Niggers” just because they are often rather dark-skinned. They might resent it and some of them are among the best fighters in the world. They have got the blood in them of those Egyptian warriors who conquered the whole of western Asia. They may even be the descendants of those Semitic Carthaginians who almost deprived Rome of the mastery of the Mediterranean. They may be the great-grandchildren of those Arab conquerors who not so very long ago overran the whole of southern Europe, or the children of those Algerian chieftains who put up such a terrific struggle when France tried to conquer Algeria and when Italy tried to get a foothold in Tunisia. Even if their hair be a little kinky, be careful and remember the fatal day in 1896 when the fuzzy-haired Ethiopians pushed the white-skinned Italians into the Red Sea.
So much for the Hamites, the first people the Europeans saw after they had sailed successfully across the Mediterranean. And little need be added about the Semites, with whom the Europeans came into very painful contact when Hannibal introduced the domesticated elephant to the plains of the Po. But once Carthage had been destroyed, the road to Africa lay open; and it is a curious fact that so few Europeans availed themselves of the opportunity to find out what lay beyond that vast sandy region to which the Romans had given the name of Numidia.
Nero, of all emperors, was the first to take a serious interest in African exploration. His expeditions apparently got as far as that village of Fashoda which some thirty years ago was almost the cause of a war between France and England. But the Nero-Nile expedition does not seem to have been the white man’s furthest south even in those long ago days. It now seems likely that the Carthaginians several centuries before had already crossed the Sahara and had visited the Gulf of Guinea. But Carthage had been destroyed and all knowledge about that central part of Africa was definitely lost. For the Sahara was a barrier which frightened even the hardiest explorers. They might, of course, have followed the coast regions. But these were so completely lacking in harbors that the problem of getting a fresh water supply became an almost insurmountable obstacle. Africa has a coast line of only 16,000 miles, while Europe, one third its size, has a coastline of 20,000 miles. As a result, navigators who wanted to land anywhere on the African coast were obliged to drop anchor several miles away from land and must then cross the surf in an open row-boat, a procedure so uncomfortable and so dangerous that few of them ever tried it.
And so we had to wait until the beginning of the nineteenth century before we learned a few definite facts about the geography of Africa. Even then these sources of information were merely incidental, for the Portuguese, the first explorers of the African west coast, were on their way to the Indies and had very little interest in the land of the naked blackamoors. Since they could not reach India and China without circumnavigating that big barrier of the south, they felt their way along the African coast as carefully as a blind man trying to get out of a dark room. Without in any way looking for them they stumbled upon several islands, the Azores and the Canary Islands and the Cape Verde Islands. Finally in 1471 they reached the equator. Then in 1488 Bartholomew Diaz spotted the Storm Cape, now the Cape of Good Hope or briefly, the Cape. In 1498 Vasco da Gama rounded that cape and definitely located the shortest route from Europe to the Indies.
When that had been done, Africa once more dropped out of sight. It was a hindrance o navigation. It was too hot and too dry or too hot and too damp. The people were savages. The skippers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, on their way to the Orient, called at the different islands, the Azores, Ascension, St. Helena, whenever scurvy and a high death rate among their sailors forced them to buy a few fresh vegetables. But African land to them was bad land. Give it a wide berth. And the poor heathen of that vast continent might have continued to dwell in peace if it had not been for the kindheartedness of the first man who was ever ordained a priest in the New World.
Bartolomé de las Casas was the son of a man who had accompanied Columbus on his original voyage to America. The son, appointed Bishop of Chiapa in Mexico, received as compensation for his service a piece of land with the Indian occupants attached to it. In other words, he became a plain, ordinary slave-holder. Every Spaniard then living in the New World had a certain number of Indians who worked for him. It was a bad system but, like so many bad systems, it was tolerated because, being everybody’s business, it was nobody’s business. It just happened that las Casas one day clearly realized just how bad the system was and how unfair it happened to be to the original owners of the land, who were now forced to work in the mines and perform all sorts of menial tasks which they never would have touched while they were still free.