African Art. Maurice Delafosse
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should be put on a parallel with the 150 millions of Africans of the Negro race. But this latter figure has not been reached in a day and it is permissible to suppose that migrations, comparable in total importance to those which have brought the Malays and other Oceanians to Madagascar, but having taken place thousands of years previously, had also imported a Negro element of sufficient numbers to Africa, who, after multiplying in the new habitat, from millennium to millennium, and amalgamating with autochthonous elements, arrived in the long run at the above figure, which is only roughly approximate.
Statuette (Lega).
Ivory, height: 15.5 cm.
Lega figurines were often used in the ceremonies of the Bwami society. The carved scarifications on this statuette are typical of this use.
Oceanic Migrations
In principle, there could be no opposition to the proposal that the current of population flowed in an inverse direction and that the Negroes of Melanesia should be considered of African origin. But an attentive examination of native traditions tends to favour the first of the two hypotheses. However vague these traditions, whatever their apparent incoherence and with whatever highly supernatural garments they have been clothed by the imagination and the superstition of the Negroes, they strike the most biased mind by their concordance and lead one to think that, once disengaged from their accessories, they possess a basis of truth.
All the Negro tribes of Africa claim that their first ancestors came from the east. Of course migrations have taken place in all directions; but, if we analyse methodically all the circumstances of which we have knowledge, we ascertain that the movements in any other direction than to the west took place as the result of local wars, epidemics, droughts, and always at an epoch later than that at which the particular group dates the beginning of its history. If we push the natives whom we interrogate to their last retrenchments, they invariably show us the rising sun as representing the point whence departed their most ancient patriarch.
It appears then, that one may, until proof to the contrary be forthcoming, admit as established the theory according to which the Negroes of Africa are not, properly speaking, autochthonous, but come from migrations having their point of departure towards the limits of the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. It is better to abstain from specifying the precise epoch or epochs of these migrations. All that we are permitted to affirm is that, when the existence of the African Negroes was revealed for the first time to the ancient peoples of the Orient and of the Mediterranean, they already occupied, and undoubtedly for a very long time, the same regions in which we find them in our day and they appear to have lost since that time the precise remembrance of their original habitat.
Rock engraving (San), c. 2000–1000 BCE.
South Africa. Andesite rock, 53 × 54 × 24 cm.
McGregor Museum, Kimberley.
Southern Africa has an immensely diverse and abundant wealth of rock art. These engravings, though less widely acknowledged than the rock paintings, exhibit an incredible variety of technique, content, and history. Spanning centuries, the oldest dated rock engravings go back to around 12,000 BCE, while oral history leads us to believe some were made as recently as the 19th century.
Human, animal, and geometric forms, as seen here, were found in various areas, starting with just a few on hilltop boulders and ranging to many hundreds or thousands in larger sites, like near Kimberley close to where these were found. It is believed that the symbolism of San art is associated with religious beliefs and trance experiences. It is possible that these engravings are the result of tranceenduced visions, which were displayed on strategically chosen rocks that were made to spiritually inspire others. Today, extensive efforts are made to preserve these rocks, especially for their contribution to the landscape in honour of the topophilia which is discussed in some 19th-century San folklore.
Autochthonous Africans
Who were, then, the people inhabiting the African continent before the Negroes, whom the latter found there at the moment of their arrival, and what has become of them?
Here again we are reduced to suppositions.[1] However, they can be supported by some facts, though of an altogether relative certitude, some furnished by local traditions, others by the accounts of ancient authors and the observations of modern travellers, and still others by the works of prehistorians and anthropologists.
These latter have scientifically demonstrated that the dwarfs or pygmies, who have been pointed out at all times in certain regions of Africa, belong to a human race distinct from the Negro. Not only are they lighter in colour and slighter in build than the generality of Negroes, but they are differentiated from them by a number of other physical characteristics, notably by the more disproportionate relation of the respective dimensions of the head, the trunk and the limbs. Scientists refuse to call them “dwarfs”, a term which is suitable rather to exceptional individuals in a given race and not to the whole of a race; they reject the term “pygmies”, which represents to our mind an extremely small stature as an essential and predominant characteristic, because the men in question, although rarely exceeding 1.55 metres [61 inches], are not generally shorter than 1.40 metres [about 55 inches]. They have, therefore, been given the name of “Negrillos”.
Rock engraving (San), c. 2000–1000 BCE.
South Africa. Andesite rock, 48 × 52 × 12 cm.
McGregor Museum, Kimberley.
At present, the number of Negrillos relatively free from all crossing is not considerable in Africa. They are met, however, in a dispersed state, in the forests of Gabon and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in the valleys of the high effluents of the Nile and in other portions of equatorial Africa. Farther south, under the name of Hottentots or Bushmen[2] that is to say, “men of the bush”, they form more compact groupings. Elsewhere, particularly on the Gulf of Guinea, many travellers have pointed out the presence of tribes of a light colour, a well developed head, an abundant hairy system, which seem to come from a relatively recent crossing between Negroes and Negrillos, sometimes with a predominance of the latter element. It seems very certain that these are the remains, destined to diminish from century to century and perhaps one day to disappear totally, of a population which was formerly much more extensive.
There is no accord as to the point which marked the terminus of the famous voyage accomplished in the 6th century BC by the Carthaginian general Hanno along the west coast of Africa. Extreme estimates place it, at farthest, in the neighbourhood of the island of Sherbro, between Sierra-Leone and Monrovia, but the more rigorous not far from the mouth of the Gambia. However it may be, this hardy navigator terminated his so-called periplus in a region where Negrillos are no longer found today, but where they still existed in his time. For it is impossible not to identify with the Negrillos that we know, whose arboreal habits have been mentioned by all who have studied them, those little hairy creatures similar to men and living in trees, described by Hanno towards the end of his voyage out and called gorii by his interpreter. Of this word, at least as it has come to us from the pen of Greek and Latin authors who revealed to us the adventures of Hanno, we have made “gorilla”; we have applied it to a species of anthropomorphous apes, which are not met with, at least in our day, except very much to the south of the southernmost point that was attained by the Carthaginian general, and we have supposed that the little hairy creatures resembling men, which this navigator mentions, were gorillas, without considering that the gorilla, even seen from a distance, has in no resemblance the aspect of a little man, but indeed much more that of a giant. Perhaps it is not presumptuous to recall that gorii or gor-yi, in the mouth of a Wolof of Senegal, corresponds exactly to our expression “these are men” and to suggest that Hanno’s interpreter, probably hired on the Senegalese coast, spoke the language that is still employed there in our day.
In the following century, the Persian Sataspe, condemned to go around Africa in order to escape the death penalty pronounced against him, crossed the Strait of Gibraltar
Translator’s italics
It ought, perhaps, to be pointed out that many authorities would object to classifying Bushmen and Hottentots with the African Negrillos.