As for West Africa, Songhay with its capital, Timbuctoo, which flourished in 1500 A.D., and was more advanced than most countries of Western Europe, was known only to rare schollars. Other civilizations as the Mandingo Empire, Yoruba, and Ife were totally forgotten. Ghana, one of the greatest, had its name corrupted to Guinea. Then the world’s richest producer of gold, its name was given to England’s largest gold coin — the guinea. All that part of Africa came to be known as the Slave Coast.
Prince Rahotep, about 3000 B.C., of Egypt.
Upper Tirhaqua (Taharka) Ethiopian ruler of Egypt and conqueror of Palestine, 525 B.C. (Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen). Lower: Egyptians of 1180 B.C. and their dress.
Interest in Africa was not really revived until the nineteenth century when warships of the so-called Barbary States dominated in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic off the coasts of Spain and Portugal, and forced the United States to pay tribute to them to sail those waters; also the seizure of Algeria by France in 1830. But it wasn’t until the 1870’s that the interest of the West, and principally of the United States, was really captured. What did this was Stanley’s search for Livingstone. Stanley’s sensational dispatches to the New York Herald and the English press aroused the European powers to the immense potentialities of this undeveloped continent and a race for Africa began that reminds one of that for America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But Stanley’s tales and use of the term “Darkest Africa,” made it appear a land of wildest savagery. It was not until the 1910’s that a German scholar and explorer, Leo Frobenius, by his researches, restored humanity to the people of Africa, and changed the popular concept for those minds susceptible to change. In his principal work “Und Afrika sprach,” translated into English as “The Voice of Africa,” Frobenius urged:
“Let there be light!
“Light in Africa. In that portion of the globe to which the stalwart Anglo-Saxon Stanley gave the name of ‘dark’ and ‘darkest’. Light upon the people of that continent whose children we are accustomed to regard as types of natural servility with no recorded history.” But “The spell has ben broken. The buried treasures of antiquity again revisit the sun.” He gives abundant proof of rich archaeologic and other finds, which since have been supplemented by the Mond expedition in the Sudan; the researches of Professor L. S. Leakey in East Africa; and Professors Broom and Dart in South Africa. Leakey discovered remains of the Boskop Man, a Bushman type of some 30,000 years ago; and Broom and Dart types that go still farther back. Their researches appear to bear out what an earlier anthropologist, Prichard, said in his “Physical History of Man,” namely, “The primitive stock of men were probably Negroes and I know of no argument to be set on the other side.” Europe, itself, when it was still joined to Africa, was tropical and was inhabited by Negroes. Abundant evidence of them have been found as far north as Russia. I have given in my other books, principally the first volume of Sex and Race, what leading archaeologists have said on this together with pictures of their finds.
As regards the title, “Africa’s Gift to America,” it is fitting to recall, also, that Africa played a role, perhaps the chief role in the earliest development of America — a period that antedates Columbus by many centuries, namely Aztec, Maya and Inca civilizations. About 500 A.D. or earlier, Africans sailed over to America and continued to do so until the time of Columbus. This does not call for any particular stretch of the imagination. Africa is only 1600 miles distant from South America with islands in between among them St. Paul and Fernando Noronha. This also wasn’t as great a feat as that of the Polynesians (also a Negroid people) who crossed the Pacific to Easter Island, off the coast of Chile.
Most United States archaeologists will deny that Negroes could possibly have been here before Columbus even though figures with pronounced Negro features appear on the most ancient American monuments. They say that the American Indian is of Mongolian stock, having come by way of the Bering Strait. This might be true of the North American Indians but it certainly is not of those that lived below the Rio Grande.
If we say that the Negro wasn’t here before Columbus, why the typically Negro faces on the monuments? Deny that they were here and the only explanation left is that the American artist before Columbus dreamed up those features. Yes, one must either deny it or be forced to make an explanation as ridiculous as that made by Ignatius Donnelly in his book, “Atlantis,” published in 1882. Donnelly’s theory was that the New World was peopled from the western part of the Old, and in proof gives pictures of Negroes on the ancient monuments. He calls these “idols.” But to square with the doctrine of “Negro inferiority,” he says that these blacks were “slaves” brought from Africa since “Negroes are not a sea-going race.” If the blacks were “idols” the only conclusion left is that ancient Americans worshipped their slaves!
Mameluke and his children from a drawing by Baron Denon. The Mamelukes were the rulers of Egypt at Napoleon’s invasion in 1798. Note Negroid features of the children.
However, most South and Central American archaelogists do agree the Negroes were here before Columbus. I have given in two of my earlier books quotations from these Latin-American scholars and will repeat some of them:
C. C. Marquez says, “The Negro type is seen in the most ancient Mexican sculpture … Negroes figure frequently in the most remote traditions.” Riva-Palacio, Mexican historian, says, “It is indisputable that in very ancient times the Negro race occupied our territory (Mexico) when the two continents were joined. The Mexicans recall a Negro god, Ixtilton, which means ‘black-face’.”
Colonel Braghine says in “The Shadow of Atlantis” that he saw in Ecuador a statuette of a Negro that is at least “20,000 years old … Hitherto the ethnologists imagined that Negroes appeared in the New World only during our own epoch as slaves. Some statues of the Indian gods in Central America possess typical Negro features …”
N. Leon says, “The almost extinction of the original Negroes during the time of the Spanish conquest and the memories of them in the most ancient traditions induce us to believe that the Negroes were the first inhabitants of Mexico.”
As late as 1650 the South Atlantic was called the Ethiopic, or Ethiopian Ocean, and most of Africa as far as South Africa was called Ethiopia.
Columbus in his “third Voyage” tells of seeing Negroes and when Balboa discovered the Pacific Ocean in 1513, he found Negroes in Panama. Peter Martyr, historian of the expedition, says “These were the first Negroes seen in the Indies.” Balboa found them at war with the Indians and thought they had sailed over from “Ethiopia.” A notable exception to the United States’ archaeologists and their denial that Negroes were here before Columbus was the late Leo Wiener, professor of philology at Harvard University. In his three-volume work “Africa and the Discovery of America,” he gives abundant proof that they were. He says, “The presence of Negroes before Columbus is proved by the representation of Negroes in American sculpture and design; by the occurence of a black nation at Darien early in the 16th Century and more specifically by Columbus’ emphatic reference to Negro traders from Guinea (Ghana), who trafficked in gold alloy of precisely the same composition and bearing the same name (Guanin), is frequently referred to by early writers on Africa.”
Professor Wiener, found that these Negro traders travelled as far north as New England. Their relics