African Art. Maurice Delafosse
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form Between the Arabic word and the word incorporated into the Sudanese languages, one does not find the alternating phonetics which are the law for the passage from Arabic into the Sudanese dialects of the words belonging to the first category: it seems, then, that the borrowing has been made from a Semitic language other than Arabic and, apparently, at a date far anterior to the introduction of Arabic into Africa. May not these words have been borrowed from Phoenician or Punic?
Whatever has been the scope of maritime expeditions undertaken by the Phoenicians and the Carthaginians and no matter how far Hanno and his companions may have gone towards the south, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, it is improbable that Carthage and other Phoenician colonies of Africa should have been able to establish continuous relations by sea with the Negroes. But it was certainly not the same by the way of land.
Carthage took from the Phoenicians, her founders, exceptional aptitudes for what one might call “long distance commerce”. Her citizens were not slow to perceive the advantages which they could procure by trading with the Negroes who, beyond the unproductive desert, inhabited fertile regions, rich in men and gold. They organised caravans which must have very closely resembled those which still circulate today across the Sahara and which travelled to Sudan in search of slaves, gold dust, ostrich feathers, and ivory, in exchange for textiles, clothing, copper and beads. These Carthaginian merchants undoubtedly did the same as their Tripolitanian and Moroccan successors do in our day: they were not content to escort their convoys of camels, they sojourned some little time in the country of the Negroes, settling in temporary colonies in the principal centres along the edge of the desert and, from there, just as the Moroccans do today, went out into the neighbouring provinces.
During hundreds and hundreds of years, there must have been other affairs than the exchange of products between Carthage and Sudan: there was contact between the still very rude Negroes and the representatives of one of the most refined civilisations known to antiquity. This contact could not but be fruitful. As I have just suggested, these Carthaginian merchants introduced among the Negroes, together with the new words designating or expressing them, new objects and new ideas. Undoubtedly, the horse, coming from Libya, was already known in Sudan but, also without doubt, was hardly utilised there: the Carthaginians taught the Negroes the art of equitation and the use of the bit, stirrups and saddle. At the same time that they sold them textiles and a sort of chemise, and they probably brought them the seeds of the cotton plant and taught them to weave cotton fibres and to sew goods. They also showed them how to work the gold which the Negroes had been content until then to extract from alluviums and, by imitation, the copper and bronze industries developed, while those of iron and clay became perfected and the glass industry was born and still existed in the last century in some localities of the Nupe on the lower Niger. Of course, all this is only supposition,[5] but it is probable supposition nonetheless.
Mask (Bangwa). Cameroon.
Wood, encrusting, height: 27 cm.
Private collection, Brussels.
This mask from the secret society of Troh, in charge of maintaining order and fighting against criminals, was kept in a hut and watched by a servant.
Mask of the Troh Society (Bangwa).
Western Province, Cameroon.
Wood with a blackish encrusted patina, 27 × 19.7 × 27.5 cm.
Musée du quai Branly, Paris.
The guardians of the tradition of the secret society of Troh, who supervised funerals, the selection of a new chief, and his enthronement, consists of a council of nine dignitaries. Part of their attire, this helmet is passed through families from father to son, which implies that only nine masks are in existance. This mask consists of various spherical shapes for the brow, eyes, cheeks, and so on; we see a man in a pointed headdress whose face is in a slight, open-mouthed grimace, showing his filed teeth. The thick coating, proof of the great age of the mask, comes from years of ritual libation and fumigation. The Troh member to whom this belonged guarded it with great care.
Abyssinian Semites and the Beni-Israel
In East Africa, another civilisation of equally Semitic origin accomplished an analogous work among the Negroes and Negroid populations of its neighbourhood. I speak of the Abyssinian civilisation which, born in the south of the Arabian peninsula, passed into Africa with Yemenite immigrants at a very remote epoch and developed in contact with Egyptian civilisation, on which, in turn, it did not fail to react more than once. It introduced among the, more or less, mixed Negroes on the coast of the Red Sea, as well as among the Negroes scattered in eastern Sudan and between the mountains of Ethiopia and the Great Lakes, a transformation comparable to that which the Phoenician colonies of the Mediterranean produced from afar among the Negroes of central and western Sudan.
Local traditions have conserved the memory of other Semites, whom they call by the name of Israelites (Beni-Israel), without our being able to decide whether this name is of Muslim importation and therefore relatively recent, or if it really answers to the origin of this mysterious element. It is very possible, indeed, that the Semites in question came from the land of Abraham and were a branch of that population, in part Hebraic, whose astonishing destinies have not troubled Bossuet alone. Should we relate them to the Hebrews whom Joseph, son of Israel, brought to Egypt and who did not all return to the Holy Land with Moses, a certain number, on the contrary, making their way towards the west? Should we see in them the remains of those Hyksos mentioned in the Egyptian annals who, after all, were perhaps not distinct from the Hebrews of Joseph? Should they be identified with the Jews who, as a consequence of religious quarrels, emigrated from Tripolitania towards the end of the 1st century CE in the direction of the Aïr Mountains and towards the beginning of the following century in that of Tuat and who afterwards did not leave any real historical traces of their passage? Should we admit several successive migrations, the first of which goes back to the epoch of Moses and the dispersion of the Hyksos, that is, to about the 16th century BC, and the last of which are as recent as the 1st century CE?
However it be, and whatever name be given to the so-called “Beni-Israel”, it appears very certain that they were Semites who were at once shepherds, farmers, and artisans of a very advanced civilisation, who were not content, like their congeners of Carthage and Abyssinia, to merely have commerce with the Negroes and to promote the development of their civilisation by radiation. Instead, they lived in large groups within the country of the Negroes, or at least at the northern limits of this country, bringing with them the zebu or humped ox and the wool-bearing sheep; constructing in Sudan houses of masonry and wells cemented by a special process; introducing the arts of cattle raising and green gardening; contributing in a certain measure to the population of the Sahel and the Massina and to the hybridisation of the Negro populations already settled in these regions, forming perhaps the kernel of pastoral tribes who, under the name of Fulani, as we call them, or Fulbe, as they call themselves, later spread out from the Sahel and the Massina on the one side as far as the Atlantic and on the other beyond Lake Chad, finally creating in the west of Timbuktu, at Ghana, a State whose masters they long remained and which may be considered the cradle and the model of that which has been the most perfected in the civilisations of the Negroes of Africa.
Without either wishing or being able to commit myself on the mystery which up to the present surrounds the origin of these “Beni-Israel”, or pretended such, the role which they played in Negro Africa, or at least the one that local tradition attributes to them, seems to me to be too considerable to be passed over in silence. Perhaps, after all, it is to them, rather than to the Carthaginians or concurrently with the latter, that we ought to attribute the importation into the Sudanese languages of the words of ancient Semitic origin mentioned above.
Go gé mask (Dan).
Wood, metal, and hair, height: 26 cm.
Private collection.
Talismans have been placed atop this beautiful go gé mask. It is a perfect example of the refined beauty of Dan art that was only used for ceremonies which were linked to the
Translator’s italics.