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JSTOR helps people discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content through a powerful research and teaching platform, and preserves this content for future generations. JSTOR is part of ITHAKA, a not-for-profit organization that also includes Ithaka S+R and Portico. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE NEGRO TO HUMAN CIVILIZATION By Alexander Francis Chamberlain, Ph.D., Assistant Prof essor of Anthropology, Clark University, Worcester, Mass. That the black man should have contributed in the slight- est to the common fund of our human civilization is a thought quite foreign to the minds of some Americans afflicted with acute Anglosaxonism and Negrophobia. No amount of evidence would e.g., convince Mr. Thomas Dixon, Mr. Thomas Watson, or Professor W. B. Smith, that the Negro has done anything decidedly and recognizably human dur- ing the long millenniums of his existence as a race. That the world must be "white," by hook or by crook, is their motto, and they seek to persuade themselves that it has always been so. Surely no one, except him in whose veins still runs somewhat riotously the blood of the old task- master of the slave, or one whose myopic view of the facts of science permits him to set up a mere social prejudice, and that, too, of very recent origin, against world-truths, which it is entirely beyond the power of any race or people, not to say a section of one, to alter or to destroy, can speak or write in such terms. Only individuals immune to the teach- ings of evolution could imagine that a race, millenniums old, and numbering to-day after centuries of more or less brutal contact with the whites, more than 150,000,000, could have existed or could continue to exist, without in the slightest influencing the currents of human thought and action. It is with eyes blind to the results of the most recent investigations of the origki and the development of Negro culture in Africa, and to the achievements of the race in other parts of the globe that such people content 482 THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE NEGRO 483 themselves with repeating words of prejudiced origin, which have long since lost significance, and with seeing in the Negro only a beast or a half-man. There are various ways of estimating or judging the capacities of a race for progress and its contributions to our human civilization. Here we shall content ourselves with three, viz., (1) the appearance of individual Negroes, or of individuals with admittedly Negro hlood, from tims to time, in the midst of cultures not of native African origin; (2) the debt of man- kind to the Negroes in the matter of industry, inventions, art, etc., in the achievements of the Black Race as such in the various branches of human civilization; (3) the achievements of Negroes removed from their home-land in childhood and educated under European auspices, etc. Under each of these three heads there is now a considerable amount of data available which can be but briefly set forth here. I The contributions of the Negro to human civilization are innumerable and immemorial. Let us first get some glimpses of him, chiefly as an individual, in contact with the past of other cultures than his own. Ancient Egypt knew him, both bond and free, and his blood flowed in the veins of not a few of the mighty Pharaohs, Nefertari, the famous Queen of Aahmes, the King of Egypt, who drove the Hyksos from the land and founded the 18th Dynasty (ca. 1700 B. C), was a Negress of great beauty, strong person- ality, and remarkable administrative ability. She was for years associated in the government with her son, Amen- hotep I, who succeeded his father. Queen Nefertari was highly venerated and many moniunents were erected in her honor; she was venerated as "ancestress and founder of the 18th Dynasty" and styled "the wife of the god Ammon," etc. Another strain of Negro blood came into the line of the Pharaohs with Mut-em-ua, wife of Thothmes IV, whose son, Amen-hotep III, had a negroid physiog- nomy. Amen-hotep III was famous as a builder and his reign {ca. 1400 B. C.) is distinguished by a marked improve- 484 ALEXANDER FRANCIS CHAMBERLAIN ment in Egyptian art and architecture. He it was who built the great temple of Ammon at Luxor and the colossi of Memnon. Besides these marked individual instances, there is the fact that the Egyptian race itself in general had a considerable element of Negro blood, and one of the prime reasons why no civihzation of the type of that of the Nile arose in other parts of the continent, if such a thing were at all possible, was that Egypt acted as a sort of channel by which the genius of Negroland was drafted off into the service of Mediterranean and Asiatic culture. In this sense Egyptian civilization may be said, in some respects, to be of Negro origin. Among the Semitic peoples whose civilizations were so numerous and so ancient on the shores of the Mediterranean and throughout western Asia, the Negro, as in Egypt, made his influence felt, from the lowest to the highest walks of Ufe, sometimes as a slave, sometimes as the freest of citizens. As cup-bearer, or confidential adviser, he stood next to kings and princes and as faithful eunuch he enhanced and extended the power of the other sex in lands where custom confined them to the four walls of their dwellings or restricted to the utmost their appear- ance and their actions in public. And women from Ethi- opia, "black but comely," wives of favorite slaves of satraps and of kings, often were the real rulers of Oriental provinces and empires. Nor have the Negroes in these Asiatic countries been absent from the ranks of the musician and the poet, from the time of Solomon to that of Haroun al Raschid and beyond in the days of Emirs and Sultans. One must not forget the Queen of Sheba, with her dash of Negro blood, said, together with that of the great Solomon, to have been inherited by the sovereigns of Abyssinia. When under the brilliant dynasty of the Ommiades (661- 750 A.D.), the city of Damascus was one of the glories of the world, its galaxy of five renowned poets included Nos- seyeb, the Negro. And we can cross the whole of Asia and find the Negro again, for, when, in far-off Japan, the ancestors of the modern Japanese were making their way northward against the Ainu, the aborigines of that country. THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE NEGRO 485 the leader of their armies was Sakanouye Tamuramaro, a famous general and a Negro. Passing down European history, we find traces of the Negro in many high places. In France, during the reign of Louis XVI, we meet with the Chevalier Sainte-Georges, knighted by that monarch. Later on, the mulatto, Lislet Geoffroy, a corresponding member of the French Academy. In 1874, the doors of the Institut de France opened wide to Alexandre Dumas (fils), whose great-grandmother was a pure-bred Haitian Negress. Her grandson was also a distinguished man of letters. Among the favorites of Peter the Great and his famous consort Catharine, was an Abyssinian Negro educated in France, to whom was attached the name of Hannivalov, who became a general and received other honors from the Russian government. He married the daughter of a Greek merchant, and his son became a general of artillery, who built the harbor and fortress of Cherson. The grandson of Hannivalov was A. S. Pushkin (1799-183.7) perhaps the greatest of all Russian poets. In Spain, where, besides, some diluted Negro blood came in with the Moors, we find a remarkable remembrancer of the black man in the field of art. In one of the churches of Seville are to be seen four beautiful pictures (Christ bound to a column, with St. Peter kneeling at his side; St. Joseph; St. Anne; Madonna and Child), the work of the mulatto, Sebastian Gomez, the slave, then the pupil, the companion and the equal of his master, the great painter Murillo, who had him made a free citizen of Spain, and at his death (1682), left him part of his estate. And, in their voyages and travels the Spaniards in the New World had the services of the Negro. The first man to reach the land of the Seven Cities of Cibola, and open the Southwest of what is now the United States of America, was the Negro Estevancillo; and the ves- sel of Captain Arellano (1564-1565), the first to make the return voyage across the Pacific from the East Indies to Mexico was steered by a mulatto pilot. In our own day and generation, after one white man had gregiously tricked the world with his tale of Polar dis- 486 ALEXANDER FRANCIS CHAMBERLAIN covery, we must confess to not a little satisfaction that the account of the next one of our race, who claimed to have reached the top of the earth, was corroborated by the word of the black man who saw him do it. II Now let us turn more particularly to achievements of race en masse. In comparing the achievements of the African Negroes with those of the European and Asiatic whites, it must be remembered that the latter have had con- tinously the advantage of the best possible environment in the world, and the former as continuously the disadvantage of the worst. In other words, the whites have been notably bonused by nature at the start, and the number and char- acter of historical experiences which they must inevitably have undergone, quite regardless of their intellectual or other endowments, have been entirely in their favor. The tremendous effect of a favorable environment is seen in the history of the white race in the region of the Med- iterranean. Europe, Asia and Africa have furnished there examples of culture of a high grade in which all varieties of the so-called Caucasian type seem to have participated. Indeed, any people, sufficiently numerous to have estabUshed somewhat large fixed communities, was reasonably sure of being an important member of the Mediterranean series of great cities, kingdoms, empires, etc., and of being remem- bered for something of value in the civilization which the world has inherited from the nations of the Mediterranean past and present. From prehistoric times to our own day and generation, one race only, the Negro, by reason, pro- bably, of being cut off by desert or sea, during a long period of its existence, and, therefore secluded in Africa beyond the "thin line" of the white race on the north, seems never to have intruded into the Mediterranean area (or to have settled there in any locality) in sufficiently large numbers to have undergone the same historical experience, and to have submitted to the same genial influences of environment so stimulating to the other races, which, in that region. THE CONTEIBUTION OF THE NEGRO 487 reached so remarkable a stage of social, political, religious and intellectual evolution. Out of the coming and going of peoples in the Mediterranean area, from the necessities of intercommunication among its innumerable centers of cul- ture, arose things, which the more or less monotonous and secluded African land-areas seemed not to suggest or to demand. Thus the appearance of the alphabet was as natural in the Mediterranean region at a comparatively early period, as it was improbable and unexpected in pre- historic Negroland. So, too, the very same phenomena permitted an earUer disappearance from white civilization of many ideas and institutions, the retention of which among the African Negroes is more a natural result of their seclusion than an index of their intelligence. Such causes and factors of the retardation of Negro culture as slavery, polygamy, the belief in witchcraft, etc., are among these. Here, again, we must be just in our denunciation of these evils. Our own escape from the institution of slavery is still too recent to make us very honest boasters (and less than ten years ago we gave it a new lease of life under our flag in the Sulu Islands). The vagaries of mental healing in twentieth century America but too often suggest something quite like the ideas of the uncivilized African. And, are we quite sure that the honest simultaneous polygamy of Nigeria is so much less moral than the dishonest successive polygamy that coruscates from Reno, Nevada? Political and Social Oegani?ation That some of the Negro peoples of Africa possess actual genius for social and political organization has been demon- strated again and again, particularly in the Sudan (both before and after Arab influence), and among the Bantu peo- ples further to the South. An opinion long held in certain quarters that these developments of Negro civilization were entirely due to the Arab and Mohammedan influences of the period beginning with about 750 A.D., and to earlier Egyptian and Semitic contacts, can no longer be sustained. That there has been at the bottom of them a basis of real 488 ALEXANDER FRANCIS CHAMBERLAIN Negro culture is now apparent from the archeological and ethnological researches of German, French and English investigators in the Sahara, the Sudan and West Africa. What a few travellers at the closeof the Middle Ages reported they had seen has now been confirmed by unimpeachable evidence. "Negro culture" is now no more to be denied than the existence of the Pigmies, which once rested almost solely on the statements of Herodotus. The very recent investigations and studies of Desplagnes, von Luschan, Frobenius, Weule, etc., are adding more and more to the culture phenomena, which the Negroes may be said them- selves to have originated, or having borrowed from other peoples, to have skilfully adapted or improved for their own uses. Back of the stone figures of Sherbro, the mega- liths of the Gambia, the bronzes of Benin, and other little known aspects of West African art and architecture, as well as behind the organized political developments in the Sudan, etc., lie things that are not easily to be explained as merely waifs from Egypt or later unintentional gifts from the white race. Here, again, the view may open wide and far. Fro- benius, who believes that a Negro culture of a rather high type, once existed in West Africa, christens it "Atlantic," and is inclined to think that the Egyptian and Mediter- ranean legends immortaUzed in the "Atlantis" of Plato may have had a very real foundation in distorted accounts or forgotten memories of this African culture, which some day may have its Odyssey corroborated as Schliemann did for Troy. And West Africa is the real Negro country from which so many of the slave ancestors of the Afro-Americans were stolen away. Liberia, too, lies in this land, and her hopes of the future ought to be touched by some reflection from this great past. Long before the Mohanamedan advent, kings and empires existed in Negro Africa. It seems, too, that, subsequently, when the first rush of Arab contact was over, the pure Negro element again came into control in many cases and carried on indigenous culture, with the skilful adaptation of foreign elements, to still higher stages of development. The com- parison of Negro Africa with contemporary Medieval Europe THE CONTBIBUTION OF THE NEGRO 489 is most interesting and convincing here. The sociological and political phenonaena in both regions of the globe at that time are strikingly similar. Parallels for the feudal system, the rise and development of the judiciary, the evolution of international law, the r61e of the market and the fair, and many other things could as well be studied in the one as in the other. The rise of innumerable small states and their ultimate consolidation into large kingdoms and extensive empires are equally characteristic of both. Negro Africa, too, at this period, and since then also, has in like manner produced kings and political organizers, who have been men of genius possessing great personalities, and ranking in character and ability with the princes and sovereigns of Europe at the time. Such, e. g., were the men who ruled the great kingdoms and empires of the Sudan, some of which lasted down to the middle of the 19th century, when the European mass-contact with this part of the Dark Continent practically began. If anyone really wants to know (to use the words of Dr. F. Boas), "what the Negro has done in Africa," let him look into the history of the Negro kingdoms of Ghana and Songhai, the Empire of Lunda, Bornu, the Kingdom of Katsena, etc. Let him read of the great cities with Negro Africa, such as Engornu (in Bornu) and Tim- buktu, etc., with their from 30,000 to 50,000 inhabitants; Kana in Haussa-land, etc. Barth, the German traveler, who visited this part of Negro Africa in 1851-1855, has left on record his impressions of its civilization and of the men who created and sustained it. Men like King Askia of Son- ghai and Bello, the Sultan of Katsena, who has been called "the Napoleon of the Sudan" deserve rank among the great figures of the world's history. They are the undeniable proof that the Negro race is thoroughly human in its ability to produce men of genius. In personal character, in admin- istrative ability, in devotion to the welfare of his subjects, in open-mindedness towards foreign influences, and in wisdom in the adoption of non-Negro ideas and institutions. King Askia, who ruled over Songhai in the early part of the 16th century, was certainly the equal of the average Euro- pean monarchs of the time and the superior of many of them. 490 ALEXANDEE FBANCIS CHAMBEEliAIN Among the Bantu peoples of South Africa {e.g., the Zulus, etc.), great capacity for survival by means of pohtical and social organization has been shown in some cases and also considerable advance toward the ultimate creation of a Christian Negro nation at some time in the future. One of the Bantu peoples, the Ovampo, has already proceeded so far along the road to self-government, after our own ideas, that it has got rid of its old line of hereditary kings and set up a sort of republic. Commerce, etc. At the period of early contact with the whites, the great skill and finesse of the African Negroes in matters of trade were constantly in evidence and became a thing to be de- scribed epigrammatically in proverbs, one of which ran to the effect that a Negro could beat a Jew or an Armenian. And in the chronicles of the period of European advance, we meet frequently the question, what will happen "if the blacks got full possession of our culture," seeing they can already outdo us with their own? It has been said epigrammat- ically on this point that "the African's weakness is not in getting wealth, but in keeping it." The institution of the market and the fair, e.g., among the Negro peoples of the Sudan and the development out of it of the village, the town and the city, are one of the most interesting phenomena in all the history of human culture. Among the questions involved in the evolution of the market and the fair are : the greater share of women in public and semi-public activities; the breaking down of the narrowness of mere tribal boundaries and clan-instincts, consequent upon the gathering together of so many people at repeated intervals; the movement toward abolition of war through the institution of the mar- ket-peace and the prohibition of all hostile acts during the time of prevalence of fairs, markets, etc.; the amalgama- tion of peoples resulting from the ultimately permanent character of these markets and fairs, and the absorption of those conducting them more or less into the general popula- tion by the consolidation of the temporary city without the THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE NEGRO 491 walls with the old city within them; the influence upon the general honesty and morality of the community of the in- creasing importance of the right of asylum, the protection of the stranger within and without the gates, the necessity of honest weights and measures; the autonomy of the market, the market-tax with its corollary of protection or free-trade; the question of the laborer and his hire; the market-holiday and its relations to religious and other festivals and cere- monial occasions, etc. Indeed, as one looks over the long hst of questions here at issue, one sees that practically no question that is at present a matter of discussion among ourselves, or has been such in the progress of our civiliza- tion, can be mentioned, which has not been involved in the commercial and the economic development of Negro Africa. Domesticated Animals Africa is undoubtedly the home of the wild ancestors of several species of domestic animals and likewise the continent which saw the first shaping of some of them under the hands of man. And it is quite reasonable to suppose that in certain cases the beginnings of such domestication are to be traced to the Negro peoples, whose achievements in this field were added to and given wide extension by the Egyptians, espec- ially, and by the races of other lineage who took part in the civilizations of the Mediterranean and of Western Asia. Cattle-keeping and cattle-breeding is an art ancient and now widespread in Negro Africa. With some tribes cattle have entered into the economic and the ideal life of the people as has the horse, or the sheep, with certain Semitic and Aryan nations, and, as with them, given a distinct color and tone to language and literature. The skill attained by some of the Bantu tribes in the maintenance and the utilization of domestic cattle is remarkable. Cattle-milking, an accom- plishment, which is far from being universally human, either in the individual or in the race, is old in parts of Negro land. And here, it is worth noting that a civilization as ancient and as important as that of China has not yet been added to its common factors of economic survival the dairy and its 492 ALEXANDER FRANCIS CHAMBERLAIN attendant developments. And the same might be said of the younger civilization of the Japanese, as it could also have been said of more than one of the ancient civilizations of the Occident, whose range of culture did not include the employment of the milk of the cow in human economy. The milk-using Africans would have stood high in the clas- sification of Lippert, the German culture-historian who maintained, though quite mistakenly, that the use of the milk of domestic animals was the sine qua non of qualifica- tion for the higher reaches of human civilization. But some of the black Africans have done more than drink milk fresh from the cow. The Hereros, e.g., who well illustrate the development if individuaUty from a basis of pastoral cul- ture, as Deh^rain informs us, "live upon sour milk," having thus anticipated the ideas of Metchnikof, the Russian biol- ogist and author of a theory of longevity. Perhaps, if they had first heard of its virtues from the Hereros, our patriotic American Negrophobes might have declined to have any- thing whatever to do with it. And maybe the Herero die- tarians are justified in ascribing to their favorite food the strength and the skill exhibited by them in their revolt a few years ago against the German authorities in South-West Africa. In the field of the domestication of animals and their utilization in human economics the Negro has done enough to entitle him to both the gratitude and the admiration of mankind. Indeed, some have gone so far as to maintain with A. von Frantzius, who in 1878 discussed this topic in the Archiv fiir Anthropologie, that Africa was the original home of the cow and the Negro its domesticator. Whether this be true or not, it is certain that the black man is well qualified to have been such. Art, etc. Far from possessing no art, the African Negroes have created some of the most beautiful art-objects to be found in any museum in the wide world. We have not yet, as Dr. Boas has pointed out, in this country a museum to illustrate fully and adequately the art of the native Africans, but in sev- THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE NEGRO 493 eral of the European museums, these are admirably, if not exhaustively, represented. Dr. Frobenius, in his study of African civihzations, says: "The real African need by no means resort to the rags and tatters of bygone European splendor. He has precious ornaments of his own, of ivory and feathers, fine plaited willow-ware, weapons of superior workmanship. Nothing more beautiful, for instance, can be imagined than an iron club carefully wound round with strips of metal, the handle covered with snake-skin." And Dr. Boas has recently called attention to the "dainty bas- ketry" of the Congo and the Nile Lakes, the "grass mats of most beautiful patterns" made by some of the Negro tribes, and "the beautiful iron weapons of Central Africa, which excel in symmetry of form, and many of which bear elabo- rate designs inlaid in copper, and are of admirable workman- ship." The famous bronzes of Benin, about which there has recently been so much discussion, have, perhaps, been stimulated in form and in the figures designed by Portuguese and Hindu art, but they "are far superior in technique to any European work (Boas)," and their existence indicates an artistic past for certain regions of West Africa hitherto quite unsuspected. Musical Instruments, etc. While the question of our musical instruments is as yet far from being satisfactorily settled, it would be strange indeed if so musical race as the African Negroes had had nothing to do with their origin or their development. Negro Africa possesses many varieties of drums, and of stringed instruments akin to the harp and the violin, etc. Indeed all stages necessary for the development of the harp from the simplest form to the instrument as we find it among the ancient Egyptians previous to its dispersal over Asia and Europe are to be met with on African soil, and the attribu- tion of its invention to some Negro people is quite reason- able, on the evidence in hand. And the same thing, with somewhat less certainty, perhaps, may be said of the violin. In the characteristically African marimba, or xylophone, we 494 ALEXANDER FRANCIS CHAMBERLAIN may have the beginnings of the piano and closely related musical instruments, in which case, one of its names, "the Negro piano " assumes a new significance. The "pot drum ' ' so-called, and perhaps another variety or two of that instru- ment, originated also in Negro Africa. The goura of cer- tain South African peoples is a curious musical instrument which still awaits adoption or modification by civilized man. Iron-Smelting, etc. The ars artium, however, of Negro Africa is the use of iron. The question of the origin of the art of iron-smelting is now being treated in detail by ethnologists, apd, while general agreement has not been reached, the mass of evi- dence so far disclosed, has convinced eminent men of science like Boas and von Luschan that the smelting of iron was first discovered by the African Negroes, from whom, by way of Egypt and Asia Minor, this art made its way into Europe and the rest of the Old World. Among the argu- ments in favor of this view are the fact that, at the time of the contact of the African Negroes with white men for the first time, iron-smelting was common and widespread among them, the work of the smith having almost everywhere reached a somewhat high degree of perfection; the evidence in the hieroglyphic records and elsewhere in ancient Egypt of the derivation of iron from the south at a comparatively late stage of civilization; and the comparative lateness also of its appearance in the ancient cultures of Asia, the Med- iterranean region and Northern and Occidental Europe. It should check our racial pride a little to consider the pos- sibility, perhaps, rather, the certainty, that "at a time when our own ancestors still utilized stone implements or, at best, when bronze implements were first introduced, the negro had developed the art of smelting iron," and that "his race has contributed more than any other to the early development of the iron industry" (Boas). And, when we remember all that the discovery and utilization of iron has meant for human civifization, it should bring the blush to shame to our cheeks to learn from the public prints that, THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE NEGRO 495 when the great iron-master of Pittsburg, the foremost of American philanthropists, visited the city of Atlanta, Ga., to see the result of his labors, he was ostentatiously shown all over one library over whose threshold no Negro may ever pass, while his hosts in their automobile hurried him by the door of the other his money had erected "for black men only." Ill The achievements of individual Negros, taken from Africa in childhood and educated in lands where the Negro was looked upon as a man like the rest is another source of val- uable information on our subject. In illustration of the point at issue the following cases may be cited : Miguel Kapranzine. In 1631 the Portuguese finally established as chief of the Kalanga, a Bantu tribe, of South- east Africa, a native convert, who, a few years before, had been proclaimed by the army and the Dominican mission- aries ,"Manuza, Emperor of Monomotapa." The Christian forces were completely successful in a great battle, and among the captives taken was the young son of Kapranzine, really the rightful claimant to the throne. This boy was sent to Goa, technically a prisoner, and handed over to the Dom- inicans of that city to be educated at the expense of the crown. He was baptized by the name of Miguel, became a member of the order of the Dominicans, devoted himself arduously and successfully to study, and won fame as one of the greatest preachers in Portuguese India. In 1670, when he was still in the prime of life, the General of the Dominican Order conferred upon him the degree of Master in Theology, which would correspond to our D.D. When he died, he held the position of Vicar of the convent of Santa Barbara in Goa. As Mr. Theal, the historian of South Africa, observes, "fiction surely has no stranger story than his." From a Kaffir kraal to high office in the religious life of a city, of which the saying went, "If you have seen Goa, you do not need to see Lisbon!" 496 ALEXANDER FRANCIS CHAMBERLAIN J. E. J. Captein. The story of Jacques Elisa Jean Cap- tein is certainly one of the most interesting in all the long annals of human education. When only seven years of age, he was taken from his home on the Andreas River, in Western Africa, by a slave-trader, who presented him to a friend. This man, when he returned to Holland, brought the Negro boy with him, had him baptized as a Christian, and made arrangements for his education in the best manner of the times. Young Captein proved an excellent scholar, and soon obtained a good knowledge of Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Chaldean. At the University of Leyden he studied theology, obtaining his degree there, in that faculty, in 1742. Afterwards he went as missionary to Elmina in Guinea, a settlement which since 1637, had been in pos- session of the Dutch. The title of his thesis is worth quot- ing in full: Dissertatio politico-theologica de servitute liber- tati christianae non contraria, quam sub praes. J. van den Honert, puhl. disput. subj. J. E. J. Captein, afer. Lugd. Bat. 1742. This thesis, in which slavery is defended as not con- trary to Christian liberty is said to be learned and skilful even for the days in which it was written. Captein also wrote a Latin elegy on the death of the Rev. Mr. Manger of The Hague, his friend and instructor. He was likewise the author of an appeal to the heathen to accept Christianity, and of a volume of sermons in Dutch, delivered by him at different times in various cities of the country. A. W. Amo. Even more remarkable was the career of a native of Axim on the Gold Coast, West Africa, known as Anton Wilhelm Amo. When quite young, he was brought as a slave in 1707 to Amsterdam, and was soon afterwards presented by Duke Anton Ulrich von Braun- schweig to his son, August Wilhelm, who provided for his education in generous fashion. He attended both the Universities of Halle and Wittenberg. At Halle, he took his degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a dissertation, De jure Maurorum, which is praised in the programme by the Dean of the Philosophical Faculty in these words: Excussis tarn veterum quam novorum placitis, optima quaeque selegit, selecta enucliate ac dilucide interpretatus est. He was THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE NEGRO 497 also spoken of as "vir nobilissimus et clarissimus." After taking his degree, he seems to have qualified as a University lecturer, or professor, and to have delivered regular courses. The title of his Inaugural Address at Wittenberg is as fol- lows: Dissertatio inauguralis philosophica de humanae men- tis APATHIA, seu sensionis vel facultatis sentiendi in mente humana absentia, et earum in corpore nostra organico ac vivo praesentia, quam praes. etc. publ. def. autor Ant. Guil. Amo, Guinea- Afer, phil. etc. Mag. Wittenbergae 1734. It is inter- esting that this Negro should have chosen "Apathy" as the subject of his discourse. He was also the author of other philosophical treatises in Latin. Like Captein, Amo was noted for his linguistic attainments. He is said to have been able to speak Dutch, German, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and was certainly able to write several of these tongues. The Prussian government of the time conferred upon him the high honor of "Geheim-Rat," something over and above his merely scholastic achievements. The death of his benefactor, the Duke of Brunswick, seems to have affected him deeply, and, after some thirty years' residence in Europe, he returned to his home in Africa. There he found that his father and sister were still alive. Amo him- self was still living there in isolation in 1753, when he was visited by Dr. D. H. Gallaudat. Here, again, from a Negro hut on the Gold Coast to a degree from one German Uni- versity and a position in the Faculty of another, and the title of "Excellency" from the Government of the country that was soon to dominate all Central Europe, is a career almost incredible. No wonder Gr^goire, in his mono- graph in defence of the Negro, published at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the German anatomist, Tiede- mann, in his work on the brain of the Negro (1837), cited the cases of Captein and Amo as settling the question of the intellectual capacity of the black man. Negroes at the Universities of Portugal and Spain. The history of Angola under the rule of the Portuguese shows that many Negroes from that part of Africa studied successfully at Coimbra. It may not be out of place to mention here also the fact that among the distinguished graduates of 498 ALEXANDER FRANCIS CHAMBERLAIN this ancient institution of learning is to be counted A. C. G. Crespo (1846-1883) poet and man of letters, with both an American and a European reputation, and at one time a member of the Portuguese Chamber of Deputies. His father was a white man, his mother a black slave in Brazil. The University of Seville in Spain is said to have had at one time a Negro as a member of its Faculty, viz., Don Juan Latino, a noted Professor of Latin. It is probable that a complete record of the activities of the Universities of Latin Europe would reveal other interesting instances of the par- ticipation of Negroes in the academic world. Adjai Crowther. In 1812 there was born at Uchugu, in the Yoruba country of West Africa, a boy named Adjai, whose life is significant for the interpretation of Negro capacities and achievements. At the age of seven, he was carried off by slave traders, passing from hand to hand until 1822, when he was rescued by the Captain of a British frigate, and given over for the purposes of education, to the missionary authorities at Bathurst, the chief place of Gambia, then a part of the colony of Sierra Leone. After three years' study, he became a Christian, adding to his native appellation of Adjai, the name of Samuel Crowther, a clergyman of the Anglican Church. He was afterwards connected with the mission school at Regent's Town and the Fourah Bay College. He also served in Nigeria, and was with the first Niger Expedition in 1841. In 1842 he went to England, and, having studied a year at the Church Missionary College at Islington, was ordained a clergyman of the Anglican Church by the Bishop (Blomfield) of London. Returning to Africa, he labored among his own people at Abbeokuta, etc. He took part in the second and third Niger Expeditions of 1854 and 1857, and, from this time on, contributed much to our knowledge of the geography and the philology of West Africa. While on another visit in 1864 to England, he was consecrated Bishop of the Niger Territory and, when he returned to the scene of his mission- ary labors, he gathered round him a corps of native assis- tants and continued active until his death, which occurred, in 1891. Besides being remembered as a missionary and THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE NEGBO 499 teacher, Bishop Crowther deserves fame as an explorer and geographer, and also as a philologist. The journal of his Niger explorations contains some of the first reliable infor- mation concerning the peoples of that region, and, in 1879, the Royal Geographical Society of London, on the motion of Dr. R. N. Gust, voted him a gold watch for his services to geographical science. In 1881 he made a linguistic map of the Niger Region, which was used to good advantage by Mr. Gust in the preparation of his monograph on The Modern Languages of Africa. It is to Bishop Growther that we owe the first knowledge of the existence of some of the numerous languages and dialects of this region of West Africa. He is the author of several religious tracts, school- books, etc., and also of a translation of the Bible and the Prayer-Book in the Yoruba language, his mother-tongue. In 1882 he again visited England, being received with the honors due him. To have read a paper before a distin- guished audience, under the auspices of the Royal Geo- graphical Society, was a great distinction for one who had been a slave in far-off West Africa. To receive the degree of D.D. from the famous University of Oxford was one still greater. Many of the details of this man's remarkable life may be read in. his autobiography, published at London, in 1888, under the title of the Slave hoy who became Bishop. Dr. Gust does not hesitate to say that he was "fully the equal of the European in intellect," and his achievements surely lifted him far above the average. The same thing might be said also of some of his colleagues and co-adjutors, such, e.g., as Archdeacon Johnson, etc. The cases of individuals like Miguel Kapranzine, Gaptein, Amo and Growther show what had been accomplished when the Negro has been treated as a man, even when the things to be done, and the criteria of judgment concerning their accomplishment and value belong not to his own, but to our race. Such things as these, together with the facts to be won from the study of Negro culture in Africa itself, and with the undoubted evidence of progress displayed by the Negro in America since the days of slavery, prove alike the 500 ALEXANDER FRANCIS CHAMBERLAIN generically human endowment of the black race and its capacity for specific culture-development. IV We have now passed in review the contribution of the Negro to the general stock of the world's culture, individually and racially, and it must be admitted by all that his share in it is as thoroughly human as has been that of any other branch of mankind. When one sums up his gifts to the common stock, through his toil as a slave in many lands, through the mixed races of Northern and Eastern Africa in their contact with the Semites and the Aryans, and the claim his blood has upon some of the great men of civilized Europe, and adds to this the toll of his achievements as a race in the African home-land and in the New World of America, one can find no reason for excluding him from an important role in the future development of mankind. Mankind is one; there is but one human race. The orig- inal unity of human beginnings has been lost in the spreading of man all over the face of the earth. But the time for emphasizing the differences thus developed, or rather thus acquired, is past. The day of the specially and the self- ishly racial is disappearing, to be succeeded by the era of the generically and altruistically human, in the highest and noblest sense. The way of redintegration is already begin- ning to be trod. The future of the Negro is the future of all other numerous and culture-bearing races of the world, ultimate absorption into that re-unified humanity, with whose advent, evolution, properly so called, will really begin. He has the same right to lose the ephemerally racial in the eternally-human, that the brown man, the red man, the yellow man, and the white man have, no more and no less. There shall, indeed, come a time when there will be no question of race, and when the loose threads of evolution will be gathered together into one skein of infinite beauty and loveliness. Such things must be. The ideal of the world's hopes is not the domination of so-called "lower" races by the "higher," not the "new nationalism," or the "old im- THE CONTBIBUTION OF THE NEGBO 501 perialism," but the humaaity that was intended in the be- ginning and shall be in the end. For the selfish race, our own, no less than others, there waits some divine transform- ation, such as the poet saw for the individual when he told how "Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with might; Smote the chord of Self, that, ti-embling, passed in music out of sight." The divine artist who is to make music out of the present discord of the races of men, may seem to linger, but his coming is sure. Let us prepare to welcome him! Note. lor other material along the lines of argument here presented the reader may be referred to the following: Barth, H. Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa, being a Journal of an Expedition undertaken under the Auspices of H. B. M.'s Government in the Years 1849- 1855. London, 1857-1858. 5 vols. Also German edi- tion (Gotha 1857-1859, 5 vols.), and condensed German edition (Gotha, 1859-1860, 2 vols.). Barth, H. The Minerva Library of Famous Books. Edited by G. T. Bettany, M.A., B.Sc. Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa. Including Accounts of Tripoli, the Sahara, the Remarkable Kingdom of Bornu, and the Countries around Lake Chad. By Henry Barth, Ph.D., D.C.L. . , London, 1890, pp. xxxii, 608. Boas, F. The Anthropological Position of the Negro. Van Nor- den Mag., April, 1907. vol. ii, pp. 40-47. Boas, F. Human Faculty as Determined by Race. Proc. Amer. Assoc. Advt. Sci., vol. xliii, 1894, pp. 301-327. Also Reprint, pp. 27. Boas, F. What the Negro has done in Africa. Ethical Record, (N. Y.), vol. V, 1904, pp. 106-109. Boas, F. The Negro and the Demands of Modern Life. Ethnic and Anatomical Considerations. Charities (N. Y.), vol. XV, 1905, pp. 85-88. Boas, F. Commencement Address at Atlanta University, May 31, 1806. Old African Civilization. Atlanta University Leaflet, no. 19, Atlanta, Ga., 1906. Pp. 15. Boas, F. Industries of the African Negroes. Southern Workman (Hampton, Va.), vol. xxxviii, 1909, pp. 217-229. Chamberlain, A. F. African and American: The Contact of the Negro and the Indian. Science (N. Y.), vol. xvii, 1860, pp. 85-eO. 502 ALEXANDEE FRANCIS CHAMBERLAIN Chamberlain, A. F. The Negro Question in Africa and America. The Voice (Chicago), vol. iv, 1907, pp. 104-108. Chamberlain, A. F. Scientific Notes on the Negro. Ibid., pp. 202-203. Chatblain, H. Some causes of the Retardation of African Pro- gress. Journ. Amer. Folk-Lore, vol. viii, 1895, pp. 177- 184. Reinach, p. S. Negro Race and European Civilization. Amer. J. Soc. vol. xi, 1905, pp. 145-167. Wright, R. R. Negro Companions of Spanish Explorers. Amer. Anthrop. vol. iv, N. S., 1902, pp. 217-228.
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