African Art. Maurice Delafosse

      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. 57 cm.

      Private collection.

      This is another Vezo funerary statue, similar to the one depicted above. Like the other, it is difficult to know whether the strange positioning is the result of time or the artist's will.

      Statue (Lulua), 19th century.

      Democratic Republic of the Congo.

      Wood, height: 74 cm.

      Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin.

      Asie Usu statue (Baoulé).

      Wood, height: 40.5 cm.

      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: 66 cm.

      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.

      It is also highly probable that the Negro invaders who had advanced the farthest towards the north found themselves in contact with the primitive natives of the white Mediterranean race who were, from the central Sahara onwards, in the countries which later became Egypt and Libya, the contemporaries of the Negrillos of the southern Sahara and of the rest of Africa.

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