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Herausgeber: Parkstone International
Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
Sprache: Englisch

Beschreibung

African Art invites you to explore the dynamic origins of the vast artistic expressions arising from the exotic and mystifying African continent. Since the discovery of African art at the end of the nineteenth century during the colonial expositions it has been a limitless source of inspiration for artists who, over time, have perpetually recreated these artworks. The power of Sub-Saharan African art lies within its visual diversity, demonstrating the creativity of the artists who are continuing to conceptualize new stylistic forms. From Mauritania to South Africa and from the Ivory Coast to Somalia, statues, masks, jewelry, pottery and tapestries compose a variety of daily and ritual objects springing from these richly varied societies.

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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

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Leseprobe

Author:

Maurice Delafosse

Layout:

Baseline Co. Ltd

61A-63A Vo Van Tan Street

4th Floor

District 3, Ho Chi Minh City

Vietnam

Image-Barwww.image-bar.com

Acknowledgements to our photographers, particularly Klaus Henning Carl

No part of this publication may be reproduced or adapted without the permission of the copyright holder, throughout the world. Unless otherwise specified, copyright on the works reproduced lies with the respective photographers, artists, heirs or estates. Despite intensive research, it has not always been possible to establish copyright ownership. Where this is the case, we would appreciate notification.

Maurice Delafosse

African

Contents

Preface

Origins andPrehistory

Aim and Object of This Book

Origin of the Negro Peoples of Africa

Hypothetical Lemuria

Oceanic Migrations

Autochthonous Africans

Peopling of Africa

The Negroes of Africa at the Time of Herodotus

Development of Negro Civilisations in Antiquity

Paucity of Historical Documentation

“Aggry Beads”

Phoenician and Carthaginian Influence

Abyssinian Semites and the Beni-Israel

Romans and Berbers

Negro Africa inthe Middle Ages

The Empire of Ghana

The Almoravide Movement

The Kingdom of Diara

The Kingdom of Soso

The Beginnings of the Songhoy Empire

The Mandinka Empire

The Mossi Empires

West Africa from the 15thCentury to Today

Preface

Well-known and appreciated by Africanists, Maurice Delafosse (1870-1926) knew how to exceed the requirements of his environment and of his time for the benefit of an authentic Africa.

Colonialist administrator from 1894 to 1918, his degrees in naturalism and orientalism allowed him to lead historic, linguistic, and ethnographical research in the field and to restore the cultural values of the black world, just as Léopold Senghor did. A major writer of négritude, Delafosse exhibited a particular interest for these papers on which he established his first essays.

We chose to publish a selection of the research about the African civilisations which he explains in Les Noirs de l’Afrique (1922) and Les Nègres (1927). The writing style is authentic, the analysis from the time, and the vocabulary very frank and true to the time period in which it was written. Nevertheless, let there be no ambiguity: Maurice Delafosse, unquestionably, harboured a deep passion for the African continent and her cultures.

Statue (Kaka).

Wood, height: 100cm.

In African art, paternal statues are quite rare. The agressive expression displayed on this statue indicates its purpose to protect the child as well as the African people who created it.

Origins and Prehistory

Aim and Object of This Book

The aim of this book is to furnish a general view of the history, the civilisations, and the material, intellectual, and social character of the Negro race which inhabits the African continent.

There will be no question, therefore, of the peoples of the white race who, either in antiquity or since, have played such an important role in the development of North Africa, and whom we find today, more or less mixed and transformed, scattered from the Red Sea to the Atlantic Ocean and from the shores of the Mediterranean to the southern limits of the Sahara: ancient and modern Egyptians, Phoenician, and Punic peoples, Libyans or Berbers, Arabs, and Moors. More precisely, no mention will be made of them except in the measure of their influence on the progress of Negro societies, an influence which has often been considerable and which could not be too emphasised.

For the same reason, there will be no study, except incidentally, of the peoples who, however dark their pigmentation has become as the result of secular and repeated crossing with the Negroes, are nevertheless considered as belonging either to the Semitic branch of the white race, for example, the principal portion of the Abyssinians, or to an Indonesian branch of the yellow race, such as many of the Malagasy tribes. Moreover, the island of Madagascar is outside the geographical limits which I have assigned to myself.

On the other hand, there are African populations which can claim, in part at least, non-Negro ancestry but who are in some way incorporated into the Negro race and into Negro society: such peoples will find a place in this study. I will be content for the moment with citing from among them the Fulani of Sudan, the Hottentots of southern Africa and a certain number of more or less hybrid tribes of East Africa which are commonly called, without much reason, Hamitic or Chamitic.

Origin of the Negro Peoples of Africa

The object of the present work being thus defined, we must now begin by seeking to find out whence came the African Negroes. But is it possible to commit oneself as to their first origin? It seems that the actual state of our knowledge does not permit us, as yet, to answer this question in a definitive or even a satisfactory manner.

Edjo statue (Urhobo).

Nigeria.Wood, pigment,

height: 212cm.

Each Urhobo community has its own protectiveEdjostatue, which embodies natural spirits or those of theEshefounding ancestors. The tall Urhobo statues embodyEdjonatural spirits orEshefounding ancestors, who were offered annual celebrations and sacrifices in sanctuaries. Each community has its own protectiveEdjo, who lives in the wild and can also be materialised by pieces of wood, metal, or clay. These statues carry medicines on their belts and have military attributes.

Statue (Vezo).

Wood, height: c. 57cm.

Private collection.

Sakalava rules the region in which the Vezo population resides. These uniquely shaped statues likely played a funerary role, though it is impossible to know whether the strange positioning is the result of time or the artist’s will.

Figurine, 9th century CE.

Northern Province, South Africa.

Clay, 20x8.2x7cm.On loan

from the National Cultural

History Museum, Pretoria.

From a much larger collection, originally excavated from the Schroda farm along with the Lydenburg Heads, these figures are thought to be the best known artefacts from the Early Iron Age which indicate ritualistic behaviour. Ethnographers suggest that unusual figurines such as these likely imply the sites of former initiation schools for girls. Schroda, serving as a regional capital, was occupied by 300 to 500 people, which means large initiation schools were probably there and further explains the copiousness of these small clay sculptures. As a whole, they can best be divided into three groups, realistic and stylised anthropomorphic (male and female), zoomorphic (including birds, elephants, cattle, and giraffe), and mythological.

Hypothetical Lemuria

If the natives of Australia, of Papua, and of the Melanesian islands are to be ranked in the same human category as the African Negroes, it may be reasonably asked whether the first came from Africa and the second from Oceania, or indeed, if one and the other had not in the first ages of the world, a common habitat on some hypothetical continent, now disappeared, situated between Africa and the Oceanian archipelagoes but having formerly constituted a connection and a passage between them. This continent, the supposed cradle of the Negro race, has its partisans, like that other one which certain people claim to have anciently existed between the present European and the American seas; it has even received a name, Lemuria, as the other has been called Atlantis, and we are shown its remains, represented by Madagascar, the Mascarenes, and a number of islands of various sizes, just as the Canaries and the Azores are regarded as the debris of the ancient Atlantis.

The existence of Lemuria remains problematical. Even if it were proved it may be that this continent had already disappeared from the face of the globe before the appearance of the first man. Moreover, there is no need to have recourse to such a hypothesis in order to justify the theory according to which the African Negroes come from Oceania. We know today with certainty that a very important portion of the population of the island of Madagascar originally came from Indonesia and it seems well demonstrated that, for a part at least, the migration took place at an epoch when there were no more facilities of communication than exist today between Oceania and Madagascar, and that the migrations alluded to, took place by sea. One will object, it is true, that some one and a half million Malagasy of the Indonesian race 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: 15.5cm.

Lega figurines were often used in the ceremonies of theBwamisociety. 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.

Rock engraving (San), c. 2000-1000 BCE.

South Africa.Andesite rock, 53x54x24cm.

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 19thcentury.

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.

Rock engraving (San), c. 2000-1000 BCE.

South Africa.Andesite rock, 48x52x12cm.

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 and took sail during many months in the direction of the south. He could not complete his periplus and, on his return to the court of Xerxes, was crucified by the king’s order. Before dying he recounted that, on the farthermost coast he saw, he perceived “little men”, clothed in garments made of the palm tree, who had abandoned their cities and fled to the mountains as soon as they saw him approaching. These little men were most likely Negrillos, but we cannot know at what point of the western coast of Africa Sataspe met them. The story is told by Herodotus (Book IV, § XLIII).

Lydenburg Head, c. 500-700 CE.

Eastern Transvaal, South Africa.Clay,traces of

white pigment, and specularite, 38x26x25.5cm.

University of Cape Town Collection,

South African Museum, Cape Town.

Seven fired earthenware heads, named after the site where they were discovered, were reconstructed from unearthed fragments which were dated using the radiocarbon method to the 6thcentury CE. According to later excavations which confirmed this date, it seems that the heads were intentionally hidden when they weren’t in use.

Moulded pieces of clay for the unique facial features. All of the heads have cowrie-like eyes, wide mouths, notched ridges that may represent cicatrisation, and raised bars across the forehead and temple which define the hairline. Of the seven heads, two of them are large enough to be worn as helmets and are surmounted by animal figurines, while the other five have a hole on either side of the neck which was likely used to attach them to a costume or structure.

While their actual use continues to be a mystery, archeologists have suggested that they were likely used during initiation rituals as in during the rites of enactment which signified the transition to a new social status or membership into an exclusive group.

Lydenburg Head, c. 500-700 CE.

Eastern Transvaal, South Africa.Clay,

traces of white pigment, and specularite,

24x12x18cm.University of Cape Town

Collection,South African Museum, Cape Town.

Kwayep maternity figure (Bamileke).

Wood, pigment, 61x24.9cm.

Musée du quai Branly, Paris.

About the same epoch, probably around the year 450 BC, the presence of Negrillos in the northern part of the country of the Negroes was noted by the same historian. He reports in Book II of his work (§ XXXII) that some young Nasamonians inhabiting Syrte, that is to say, the province situated between the present Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, traversed, as a wager, the Libyan desert and attained, at the other side of a vast extent of sand, a plain where there were trees and which was separated by marshes from a city watered by a great river containing crocodiles; the inhabitants of this plain and of this city were little men of dark colour, a stature below the medium, who did not understand the Libyan language. Some have wanted to identify the “great river” mentioned by Herodotus as the Niger, others have seen in it Lake Chad, still others, an arm or a western tributary of the Nile. However that be, the Nasamonians met the Negrillos at the southern limits of the Sahara, that is, at the north of a zone beyond which this race no longer exists.

Native traditions clarify the question with a ray of light that is not altogether negligible, almost permitting us to pass from the domain of simple conjectures to that of probabilities.

Everywhere, but principally in the countries where the Negrillos have already disappeared for a long time, the Negroes considered as the most ancient inhabitants of the soil say that this land does not really belong to them and that when their distant ancestors, coming from the east, established themselves there, they found it in possession of little men of reddish tint and large heads who were the veritable natives and who had, by means of certain treaties, accorded to the first Negroes arriving on a given piece of land the authorisation to use and cultivate it. In the course of time these little men have disappeared but the memory of them has remained fairly vivid. Generally they have been deified and identified with the gods or genii of the soil, the forest, the mountains, great trees, stones, and waters; often it is claimed that they live in certain species of animals having strange customs, such as the lamantin and varieties of little antelopes (Limnotragus gratus and Hycemoschus aquaticus). Sometimes, as among the Mandinka, the same word (man or ma) serves to designate these antelopes, the lamantin, the genii of the bush, the legendary little red men, and signifies equally ’ancestor’ and ‘master’, and more particularly, ‘master of the soil’. Thus the traditions of the natives tend to prove that the Negrillos preceded the Negroes on African soil and recognise the formers’ suzerain rights to the land – rights which the present occupants consider themselves to be only the precarious holders and usufructuaries.

In the absence of all certitude in this regard, it seems then that we should be permitted to suppose that the habitat of the African Negroes was originally peopled by Negrillos. Their domain probably did not extend much beyond the limits of what today constitutes in Africa the domain of the Negroes; however, it might have been prolonged a little more in the direction of the north, covering at least the southern part of the Sahara, which was undoubtedly less arid than it has since become, possessing, perhaps, rivers which in the course of centuries have dried up or been transformed into subterranean waters. It is probable that North Africa, very different already from the rest of the continent and in closer contact with Mediterranean Europe than with central and southern Africa, was inhabited by another race of men.

According to all probability, the Negrillos of the epoch anterior to the coming of the Negroes into Africa were hunters and fishermen, living in a seminomadic state suitable to people given exclusively to hunting and fishing. Their customs were probably similar to those of the Negrillos who still exist at present, and undoubtedly like these, they spoke languages which were half isolating, half agglutinating, characterised, from the phonetic point of view, by the phenomenon of “clicks” and by the employment of musical tones. The great trees of the forest, grottoes of the mountains, rock shelters, huts of branches or of bark, lake dwellings constructed on piles might have served them, according to the region, for more or less temporary habitations. Perhaps they were given to the industry of chipping or of polishing stones and it might be proper to attribute to them the hatchets, arrowheads, scrapers and numerous instruments of stone that are found nearly everywhere in contemporary Negro Africa and which the present Negroes, who are ignorant of their origin, consider as stones fallen from the skies and as material traces left by the thunder. It is possible again without being permitted the formulation of definitive affirmations, that the Negrillos knew only chipped stone, while their prehistoric neighbours of North Africa had already arrived at the art of polished stone.

Statue (Bamileke). Cameroon.

Wood, encrusted patina,

crust, height: 59cm.S. & J.

Calmeyn Collection.

Dschang, home of the Bamileke and western Bangwa, is where these ritual sticks of theLefemsociety were found lining the path to the sacred area of the chiefdom, which was forbidden for villagers. TheLefemsecret society was composed of important people who paid a high price for the right of entry; therefore, along with other communal activities, they are in charge of organising the royal and princely funerals.

The stick is topped with the shape of a seatedFwaking, his face is proportionally oversized with large eyelids and a half-open mouth, he is adorned with a hat and bracelets which were common attire of the time.

Crest (Ekoi). Wood, plant fibres, hair, leather, and ivory, height: 25 cm.

Private collection.

With a wooden core, this frightening crest is stylistically typical of the Ekoi’s artistic production. The head is covered with antelope skin and further adorned with hair, teeth, and eyes.

Statue (Tubwé). Wood, height: 36 cm.

Leloup archives.

Nyibita mask (Ngeendé).

Wood, height: 63cm.

Private collection.

Ekpu statue (Oron).

Nigeria.Wood, height: 117cm.

Private collection.

Upon the death of an important member of society,Ekpuancestors are represented with statues which carry in hand a familiar object. They embodied lineage identities and their rights of property and were lined in sanctuaries and honoured biannually.

Peopling of Africa

Next came the first Negroes, who reached the African continent by the southeast. They also must have been nomads or seminomads and hunters, principally because they were in a period of migration and were looking for territories in which to establish themselves, being obliged, in the course of their continual displacements, to nourish themselves with game; but they had almost certainly a tendency to be sedentary and to cultivate the soil as soon as they found favourable ground and could install themselves upon it. It is probable that they practiced the industry of polishing stone, be it that they had imported it or that they had later borrowed it from the natives of the north during the time that they had been in contact with them, or finally, that they had perfected the processes of the Negrillos. They must have possessed fairly pronounced artistic aptitudes and a strong religious impregnation. Perhaps it is to them that one must attribute the stone monuments that have been discovered in various regions of Negro Africa, monuments which have so greatly puzzled Africanists and whose origin remains a mystery, such as the edifices of Zimbabwe in Rhodesia and those raised stones and carved rocks of Gambia in which traces of a sun cult are considered to be revealed. They probably spoke languages employing prefixes, in which the names of various categories of beings or objects were divided into distinct grammatical classes.

Filtering themselves through the Negrillos without really mixing with them, they must have seized all the grounds which were then unoccupied. When they could not do this, either because there were no available lands or because of the resistance of the Negrillos, they pushed back the latter and installed themselves in their place, driving these Negrillos towards the desert regions, such as the Kalahari, where we still find them even to this day, or towards the forests of equatorial Africa; difficult areas to cultivate, where they have subsisted up to our time in sparse groupings, or else again towards the marshy regions of Lake Chad and of the upper Nile, where later they were met by the Nasamonians of Herodotus, or at last, towards the maritime coasts of northern Guinea, where they were seen by Hanno and Sataspe.

These first migrations of the Negroes must have been composed of the type called Bantu, whose almost pure descendants are still found in a compact group, with the exception of an island formed by the Hottentots, between the Equator and the Cape of Good Hope. Subsequently to this first wave of Negro immigrants, another one was unfurled over Africa, of the same origin and in the same direction, but made up of slightly different elements. However, this difference is undoubtedly attributable only to the long lapse of time between the first and second invasions, a space of time that cannot be evaluated but which perhaps was represented by thousands of years, during which an evolution necessarily took place in the primitive Negro stock.

Statue (Vezo).

Wood, height: c. 57cm.

Private collection.

Statue (Lulua), 19th century.

Democratic Republic of

the Congo.Wood, height: 74cm.

Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin.

Asie Usu statue (Baoulé).

Wood, height: 40.5cm.

Private collection.

Meant to represent a spirit, this statue seems to have been carved for a particular person who maintained it well in his home. The encrusted finish appears to have been left behind by chicken blood and egg libations being poured on it.

Classical style statue (Nok), 4th century BCE-2nd century CE.

Terracotta, height: 66cm.

The enlarged head, almond-shaped eyes, and precise details of this terracotta statue classically distinguish it as being of the Nok style. Its unmatched sophistication is a clear testimony to the talent of the Nok sculptors of 2,000 years ago.

If we presume that the new arrivals reached the African continent at about the same localities as those who preceded them, that is to say, on the east coast and about as high up as the Comoros Islands, we are led to think that they found the best lands already occupied by the first immigrants. Thus, the newcomers found themselves constrained to push farther towards the north and towards the west and to settle among the Negrillos, remaining there in possession of the soil, demanding a hospitality of them which probably was not refused: hence the tradition, reported above, of the Negrillos being regarded by the Negroes of Sudan and of Guinea as the real masters of the land. They chose their domicile by preference in the uncovered regions, well watered and easily cultivated, situated between the Equator and the Sahara, absorbing the few Bantu elements which were already settled there or pushing them back towards the Northeast (Kurdufan) or towards the northwest (Cameroon, Gulf of Benin, Ivory Coast, Grain Coast, Rivieres du Sud, Gambia and Casamance), where today we still find, here and there, languages, such as certain dialects of Kurdufan, for example the Diola of Gambia and Casamance, which are closely related to the Bantu type.

This second wave must have mixed with the Negrillos much more so than did the first Negro immigrants and little by little become assimilated with them, at the same time that they perfected the technical processes of the natives and of the Bantu, developing agriculture, introducing a rudiment of cattle and poultry raising, domesticating the guinea-fowl, importing or generalising the practice of making fire and its utilisation for the cooking of food, inventing the working of iron and the making of pottery. Their languages must have possessed the same system of classifying names as those of the Bantu but proceeding by means of suffixes instead of employing prefixes. From the linguistic point of view as well as from the anthropological, both the Negro and the Negrillo elements, in all places where they became fused, very certainly reacted upon one another in variable proportions, accordingly varying as one or the other predominated. Of these unequal fusions were probably born the often profound differences that we note today between the various populations of Guinea and a part of Sudan, such as the differences between their languages.

Statue (Sokoto), c. 400 BCE.

Terracotta, height: 74cm.Kathrin and

Andreas Lindner Collection.

The conical shape of this terracotta implies that it may have once been used as a cover for a funeral urn. The heavy eyelids constitute one of the archetypes of the terracottas found north of Nigeria in the Sokoto region.

To sum up, in remaining within the limits of our study, this is more or less how one may suppose that the peopling of Sub-Saharan Africa took place, at least in its broad lines. To the south of the Equator, the Negroes of the first wave of invasion settled almost everywhere, conserving in their midst islets of Negrillos who remained almost pure, and remaining themselves almost free from all crossing with the Negrillos as well as with the Negroes of the second invasion and with the autochthonous whites of the north: these are the Negroes of the type called Bantu. To the north of the Equator, in the southern part of Sudan and along the Gulf of Guinea, the Negroes of the second migration, more or less mixed with the Negrillos and with the most advanced elements of the Bantu, have constituted the extremely varied type that we call the Negroes of Guinea. Farther to the north again, Negroes coming equally from the second wave of invasion, by mixing with the Negrillos and with the autochthonous Mediterranean race, formed the type, also highly varied, which we designate as Sudanese. In many regions the passage from one of these three primordial types to the other takes place by gradations which are often imperceptible, giving birth to a great number of intermediate types which are very difficult to define.

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