The Journal of Negro History Volume V Part 56

WILLIAM RENWICK RIDDELL

JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT OF ONTARIO, OSGOOD HALL, TORONTO, February 5, 1920

FOOTNOTES:

[1] I had with the late Hon. Warwick Hough of St. Louis, Missouri, who had been an officer in the Southern Army, several conversations on the subject of slavery. He gave it as his firm conviction that, had the South succeeded in the Civil War, it would shortly have itself abolished slavery and sought readmission to the Union. His proposition was that the power and influence of the planter cla.s.s was waning, while the manufacturers, merchants and the like were increasing in number and influence and they would have for their own protection abolished slavery. I have not met a Northerner or a Canadian who agreed with this view; but a few Southerners have expressed to me their general concurrence with my friend's proposition.

BOOK REVIEWS

_Africa and the Discovery of America._ Volume I. By LEO WIENER, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. Innes & Sons, Philadelphia, Pa., 1920. Pp. i-xix, 1-290.

The present volume is the first of a series in which Professor Wiener will show that Arabicised Negroes, chiefly Mandingoes, brought to America as slaves, profoundly influenced the culture of the Indians, and were an important, if not always direct factor in establishing the _modus vivendi_ between the Indians and the Europeans, which made practicable the colonization of the New World.

The book is packed with valuable data, newly discovered, and brought together for the first time. It should be read slowly, and read through at least twice before judgment is pa.s.sed on it. With the first reading comes a shock. One learns that the _Journal of the First Voyage_, and the _First Letter of Columbus_ are literary frauds, though containing material which came from Columbus's own pen, and that tobacco, manioc, yams, sweet potatoes and peanuts are not gifts of the Indian to the European. Yet with a more intimate study of the subject matter, the conviction increases that the author has built upon the bed-rock of fact, and that his position is una.s.sailable.

It is impossible, within the limits of a review, to do more than to emphasise the most important of his discoveries. In his studies of the _First Letter_, and of the _Journals_ giving account of the first and the second voyages of Columbus, Professor Wiener seeks to determine how much testimony they give pertaining to Indian names and things, after the elimination of all that is not Indian. The non-Indian elements are of two sorts; the names of the Islands, and the words for "gold," etc. Columbus, dominated by the fixed idea, that, sailing westward, he would find a short cut to India, China and j.a.pan, began with the first sight of land, to be engrossed with the task of identifying each newly discovered country with some island or district of the Far East, named on his maps. He was an ignorant man, though he knew Ptolemy and Marco Polo by heart, credulous, uncritical, not consciously dishonest, but unready to correct false impressions caused by his ignorance and gullibility. His notes, as may be seen from a reproduction of a page of his ma.n.u.scripts (facing p. 38), were in an execrable hand. The forger of the _Journal of the First Voyage_ was no puzzle expert, and made mistakes in deciphering scrawls. Thus, for example, the note _Giaua min._, _i.e._, Java minor, was read _Guanahin_, the same destined to masquerade as _Guanahani_, the Indian name of the first island sighted on October 12, 1492.

Perhaps the best specimen of such ghost-words in the _Journal_ is the name _Carib_. This is nothing but Marco Polo's _Cambalu_, the capital of the Grand Khan, successively misread as Canibal, Caniba, Cariba. So also, "canoe" is a ghost-word, traced to a misreading of _scaphas_ as _canoas_ in the ma.n.u.script, or the Gothic text of the Latin version of the First Letter. It is interesting to learn that _maize_, in the forms _masa_, _maza_, ultimately from Portuguese _mararoca_, is the African name for Guinea corn. The transference of the name from Guinea corn to Indian corn, "rests on a misunderstanding of a pa.s.sage in Peter Martyr's _First Decade_" (p. 123).

The question arises whether or not there had been a colony of Europeans, with African slaves in America, before the arrival of Columbus.

Fray Ramon Pane, Oviedo, and Las Casas give _conico_ as the Indian word for "farm, plantation." This is clearly the Mandingo _kunke_ "farm." The Indian word for "golo," according to the Journal entry for January 13, 1493, is _caona_. It is found also in the name of _Cacique Caonabo_, called in the _Journal of the Second Voyage_ "master of mines,"--the name being explained in the Libretto as "lord of the house of gold." Now the words for "gold" in the Negro languages are mostly derived from Arabic _din[=a]r_, which, through Hausa _zinaria_, and Pul _kanyera_, reaches Vei as _kani_. Evidently _canoa_, written also _guani_, is nothing but this Vei word. In "Cacique Caonabo," we have three Mande words in juxtaposition. _Cacique_ is not far removed from _kuntigi_, Soso _kundzi_, "chief,"--_caona_, that is _kani_, is "gold," and _boi_, from Arabic _beii_, _bai_, is "house." The chance that three such words should be identical in the dissimilar languages of Africa and America, is _nil_. The words are African, though represented as belonging to the spoken language of the New World.

Moreover, Ramon Pane, in the account he wrote for Columbus of the Indian religion, gives as Indian words, the Mande _toto_, "frog," and the Malinke _kobo_, "bug." What is more important, he imputes to the Indians, a knowledge of the terrible West African itch, or _craworaw_, which he calls by the supposed Indian name _caracaracol_. The critic faces a dilemma. Either Ramon Pane lied, or he told the truth. Either he fabricated stories of Indians, which he drew from books or ma.n.u.script relations by Spanish and Portuguese traders, who were writing about Negroes in Africa, or there had been in Hispaniola, a pre-Columbian colony of European adventurers, with their African slaves, who taught the Indians the Negro words for "farm, gold, frog, bug, itch," etc., and also African folk-lore. No other hypothesis is possible.

{Transcriber's Note: The following paragraphs contain a number of characters with diacritical marks which are represented as follows: [=a] a-macron [=o] o-macron [=e] e-macron [>e] e-caron [>z] z-caron}

The doc.u.mentary and philological history of tobacco smoking and the cultivation of edible roots, shows additional convincing evidence of the influence of Africa on the culture of America in the colonial period. Columbus never saw the Indians smoking tobacco. According to the _Journal of the First Voyage_, on October 15, 1492, an Indian brought him a ball of earth and certain precious dried leaves. On November 16, two Spaniards reported that the Indians, carrying firebrands and leaves, used them to "take incense." In the _Journal of the Second Voyage_, Columbus (this part of the Journal is definitely ascribed to him by his son) writes of Indians spreading powder on a table, and sniffing it through a forked reed, thereby becoming intoxicated. Now the first account is suspiciously like a book-story of Oriental hashish-taking.--the second has no implication of smoking at all, while the third describes nothing but the process of taking a sternutatory. Indeed this last account is clearly based on a book account, in which there was a play on the Arabic words _tubb[=a]q_ "styptic" and _tabaq_ "table." Ramon Pane, when he tells of Indians sniffing the powder, calls it _caboba_, a mere Italianisation of the Arabic _qasabah_ "reed," transferring the name of the inhaler to the drug. Smoking tobacco through a forked reed of the sort described, has been proved by trial, to be impossible. As late as 1535, Oviedo is unable to tell a straightforward story of Indians smoking tobacco, but he adds the significant fact that the Negroes in the West _Indies_ smoked and cultivated tobacco. Negroes, by the way were first allowed to come to America in 1501,--two years later, Ovando, the governor of Hispaniola complained that they joined with the Indians to make trouble. By 1545, "smoking had become fairly universal in America" (p.

127). It cannot be argued that half a century is too short a time for a new vice to become so widespread. Consider the case of banana culture. Oviedo says that the first bananas were introduced into America in 1516. Within twenty years, the fruit was universally cultivated, while the Spanish name _platano_ has survived in a large number of derivatives in the Indian languages.

As far as the linguistic history of the tobacco-words in the Indian languages is concerned, it leads back to an eastern origin. In Arabic, _tubb[=a]q_ means "styptic." Tobacco leaves were used as a styptic by the Indians of Brazil in the sixteenth century. The Low Latin equivalent of the Arabic _tubb[=a]q_ "styptic," is _bitumen_, whence Portuguese _betume_, and French _betun_, _petun_. "The French traders," says Professor Wiener, "at the end of the sixteenth century, carried the word and the Brazilian brand of tobacco to Canada, and _petun_ became imbedded in several Indian languages. The older Huron word for "tobacco" is derived from the Carib _yuli_, which itself is from a Mandingo word. Thus, while the Carib and Arawak influence is apparent in the direction from Florida, to the Huron country, the Brazilian influence proceeds up the St. Lawrence. The whole Atlantic triangle between these two converging lines was left uninfluenced by these two streams, and here, neither Carib nor Brazilian words for "tobacco," nor the moundbuilders' craft have been found. Here the "tobacco" words proceeded northward from Virginia, where the oldest form of the words is an abbreviated Span. _tabaco_, or Fr. _tabao_ (p.

191). The Carib _yuli_ "smoke," is found in Carib and Arawak, side by side with derivatives of Mande _tama_, _tawa_, which are also in the Algonkian languages. The fact that the Hurons, apparently the first Indians to plant tobacco, have no native word for the plant is significant. It shows that the Hurons learned to smoke from the Arawaks or Caribs, then already under Negro influence, and at a time prior to the introduction of the tobacco-plant into Canada by the French. When we consider, then, that tobacco is native to Africa, that _tubb[=a]q_ and _petun_ are the ancestors of the Indian names for the weed, that by 1503, Negroes in large numbers were living in America, deserting their masters to join the Indians, that the Negroes in America smoked and raised tobacco, the conclusion is inescapable that tobacco smoking was discovered and taught by them to the Indians and the Europeans.

"The tobacco-pipe in America," says Professor Wiener, "began its career as a Mandingo amulet" (p. 184). This statement will distress the American archaeologists, but the arguments in support of it cannot be overcome. A counter-claim of pre-Columbian antiquity for pipes found in the mounds cannot be made, since it is so clearly shown that the mounds are not prehistoric, but were fortifications erected along the lines of communication from Florida to the Huron country, to protect the overland trade established in the beginning of the sixteenth century.

In the _Journal of the First Voyage_, we find mention of _ajes_ and _niames_, as name of edible roots, but the account hopelessly confuses reports of yams, sweet potatoes and manioc. Neither yams nor sweet potatoes are native to America, and both bear in America, only African names. Oviedo indeed, says distinctly, that the _name_ is "a foreign fruit, and not native to these Indies,"--also, that "it came with that evil lot of Negroes, ... of whom there is a greater number than is necessary, on account of their rebellions" (pp. 203-4). Now in Africa the yam (Dioscorea), cultivated before the coming of the Europeans, is known by names derived from Arabic _arum_ and _gambah_, _e.g._, Ewe _ad[>e]_, _ad[>z]e_, Mandingo _nyambe_, Malinke _nyeme ku_,--whence the supposed Indian names, _aje_, _age_, _niame_, _igname_, used indiscriminately of any edible roots. The African names of the manioc have come from Arabic _'uruq_ "roots," notably in the Congo languages, _y[=o]ka_, _y[=e]ke_, _edioko_, plural _madioka_, whence, as the plant was introduced into America, it was known there as _vuca_, _mandioca_.

As to sweet potatoes and peanuts, the former were cultivated in Asia before the discovery of America, while the latter, mentioned by Ibn Batutah as an article of food in Africa, took to the New World, their African names _mandube_, _goober_ and _pinder_ (compare Mozambique _manduwe_, Basunde _nguba_, Nyombo _pinda_). Professor Wiener's conclusion is that manioc culture was taught to the Brazilian Indians before 1492 by Portuguese castaways, who knew of the economic importance of the plant in Africa, while the peanut, spreading north and south from the Antilles, may also have reached America a few years before Columbus.

The numerous full-page ill.u.s.trations are extremely helpful in aiding the reader to a clear understanding of difficult points in the discussion.

The book is epoch-making. To all seekers of the truth, the coming of the second volume, in which Professor Wiener will deal exhaustively with the Negro element in Indian culture, will be an eagerly antic.i.p.ated event.

PHILLIPS BARRY, A.M., S.T.B.

CAMBRIDGE Ma.s.sACHUSETTS

_A Comparative Study of the Bantu and Semi-Bantu Languages._ By SIR HARRY H. JOHNSTON, G.C.M.G., K.C.B., D.Sc. (Cambs). Oxford: at the Clarendon Press, 1919, pp. 815, 2 sketch maps.

The author of this monumental work, in the opinion of the reviewer, is in himself a composite of many of the capacities, which, combined or singly in her subjects have made the greatness of Britain. He has been a great colonial administrator, a distinguished African explorer; he is a talented artist, and has recently astonished the literary world by producing what H. G. Wells declares to be one of the best first novels he has ever read. The contributions of Sir Harry Johnston to the sciences of botany, zoology, and anthropology are truly prodigious. It is in the last named field that his major interests have lain, and a succession of important works have established him as the foremost authority upon the ethnology of Africa and upon the anthropology of the Negro race.

This ponderous volume on the Bantu and Semi-Bantu languages is the first part of a work which represents the fruit of many years of study of mult.i.tudinous African languages and dialects. The major portion of the book consists of ill.u.s.trative vocabularies of 366 Bantu and 87 Semi-Bantu languages and dialects with an extensive bibliography. A competent criticism of this portion of the work can be made by no one but a philologist with a special knowledge of African languages. The present reviewer does not possess these qualifications. Nevertheless it is obvious to any student of Africa that the publication of this work places a mine of useful information at the disposal of the linguist, the grammarian, and the missionary, and will also be invaluable to the student of African ethnology and to the physical anthropologist.

The first chapter sketches the history of research into the Bantu laguages. The contributions of various philosophists are appraised.

The second chapter on the distribution and character of the Bantu languages is of greatest interest to the layman and to the general anthropologist. We are informed that the Bantu languages "const.i.tute a very distinct type of speech which, as contrasted with others amongst the group of Negro tongues, is remarkable as a rule for Italian melodiousness, simplicity and frequency of its vowel sounds, and the comparative ease with which its exemplars can be acquired and spoken by Europeans" (p. 15). "This one Negro language family now covers the whole of the southern third of Africa, with the exception of very small areas in the southwest (still inhabited spa.r.s.ely by Hottentot and Bushman tribes) and a few patches of the inner Congo basin" (p. 15). Throughout Africa, north of the Bantu border line, the traveller meets with numerous languages widely different and mutually incomprehensible whereas with a knowledge of one Bantu language it is not difficult to understand the structure and even the vocabulary of others. The importance of this language family in Africa is therefore obvious. The author defines clearly the special and peculiar characteristics of Bantu languages. There follows an interesting discussion of the origin and spread of these languages. Probably the parent speech was spoken originally in the very heart of Africa, somewhere between the basins of the Upper Nile, the Bahr-al-ghazal, the Mubangi, and the Upper Benue. The archaic Bantu seem first to have moved eastward, toward the Mountain Nile and the Great Lakes. Probably they remained in the Nile Valley north of the Albert Nyanza "till at least as late as three or four hundred years before Christ--late enough to have been in full possession of goats and oxen and to have received the domestic fowl from Egypt or Abyssinia. They then embarked upon their great career of conquering and colonizing the southern third of Africa" (p. 22).

The original Bantu invaders found before them in Central and South Africa other peoples--Negroes of different types, pygmies, Bushmen, and Hottentots. "The first great Bantu migrations undoubtedly emanated from the vicinity of the Victoria Nyanza and the north Tanganyika, and were directed round and not through the Congo forests" (p. 24). On the basis of linguistic, ethnological and anthropological evidence Sir Harry is led to deduce that at a critical period in their career the Negro speakers of the early Bantu languages were brought under the influence of a semi-Caucasian race from the north or northeast. This contact gave rise to the many handsome-featured pale-skinned castes and ruling clans in so many of the Bantu peoples.

The following statement is of great anthropological importance: "The Bantu-speaking peoples of Africa, ... do _not_ const.i.tute a race apart from the other negroes or offer any h.o.m.ogeneity of physical type. But on the whole they represent so much the average negro type that 'Bantu' is still in favor as a physical definition among craniologists. In reality, they are just fifty millions of Negroes whose speech belongs to one of the many language families of 'Negro type'; only in this case the language family instead of being confined in its range to a hundred villages or two hundred square miles, is spread over the southern third of Africa--say over 3,500,000 square miles--from the Cameroons, the Northern Congo, the Nyanzas, and the Mombasa coast to Cape Colony and Natal" (p. 25), Bantu languages are spoken by peoples of diverse physical types.

"Yet about the Bantu speech and the culture which accompanies it (ordinarily) there is a suggestion, strengthened by the a.s.sociation of these languages with metal working (iron more especially), with agriculture, cultivated plants, and cattle-keeping, that adds to the impression derived from their legends, their religious beliefs, games, and weapons. It is thought that the Bantu language family was finally moulded by some non-Negro incomers of possibly Hamitic affinities, akin at any rate in physique and culture, if not in language, to the dynastic Egyptians, the Galas, and perhaps most of all to those 'Ethiopians' of mixed Egyptian and Negro-Nubian stock that down to one thousand years ago inhabited the Nile basin south of Wadi Halfa and north of Kordofan." (Pp. 25-26.)

Sir Harry attributes most of the higher cultural elements a.s.sociated with the Bantu languages to the non-Negro invaders. He believes that the Bantu invasions of southern and central Africa cannot be referred back much earlier than the second century B. C., and that the differentiation of the more than two hundred forms of Bantu speech occurred subsequently and rapidly.

To the student of African ethnography this volume is a great disappointment in one respect. The sketch map showing the distribution of Bantu and Semi-Bantu languages is absurdly inadequate. The writer of this review had confidently expected an authoritative large-scale map showing the distribution of linguistic families, dialects, and tribes. It is to be hoped that such a map will form a part of the completed work.

E. A. HOOTON.

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

_History of the United States from Hayes to McKinley, 1877-1896._ By JAMES FORD RHODES, LL.D., D.Litt. Volume VIII, 1877-1896. The Macmillan Company, New York, 1919. Pp. 484.

This is supposed to be a continuation of Mr. Rhodes _History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the Final Restoration of Home Rule at the South in 1877_. As one, however, considers the treatment of the former work in comparison with this recent treatise, he must conclude that the author has not maintained the standard set in his earlier volumes which show deeper insight and a more scientific point of view. Persons who have looked forward to the continuation of Mr. Rhodes's comprehensive history from the transition period of Hayes' administration will certainly be disappointed in observing how he has failed in tracing the threads of history, which in our time, have become momentous. After reading the volume one is still at a loss as to what forces in our national life the author considers as being actually in the making during the period which the volume covers.

The work begins with a treatment of Hayes' administration setting forth facts which have appeared elsewhere in the author's studies in this particular period. As in other works, the author defends almost everything Hayes did and arraigns the Reconstruction Republicans who were opposed to him. He then presents in an unscientific way the brief discussion of economic questions bearing on railroad rates, wages, strikes, mobs and riots. Financial depression, the silver question and the valuable service of John Sherman are given considerable attention.

Valuable facts are set forth in his discussion of civil service reform, the tariff commission and the Chinese question. Too much of the book, however, is devoted to merely political matter involving a detailed discussion of campaigns and elections at the expense of the economic, const.i.tutional and diplomatic movements decidedly influencing the history of this country.

In this work the author pays very little attention to the Negro except as he leaves the impression that the race was justly deprived of the suffrage and of holding office. He makes reference to the complaint of the Republicans to show that in disfranchising the Negro in the South to make that section solidly Democratic that every white voter in the South thereafter possessed the political power of two white voters in the North. He mentions also the federal election laws and the Force Bill but finally concludes that the experiment of making the Negro a citizen was a failure. Here again Mr. Rhodes shows his lack of knowledge of human affairs in that he studies history only in the present tense. No man at present is wise enough to say whether we shall finally obtain more good than bad results from the Reconstruction, for we are too close to that part of our history to make a proper estimate of these events.

_The Negro Year Book._ Edited by MONROE N. WORK, Director of Department of Records and Research, Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Inst.i.tute. The Negro Year Book Publishing Company, Tuskegee Inst.i.tute, Alabama, 1919. Pp. 523.

There has appeared for 1918-1919 a new edition of the _Negro Year Book_ to which students of Negro Life and History have learned to look for information concerning the Negro. This volume appears with a table of contents and a useful index to the numerous facts compiled. The volume not only covers the field of former editions but includes also much up to date material throwing light on Negro current history. The very first portion of the work is ent.i.tled _Fifty-three Years of Progress, 1866-1919_. This is a statistical study of Negro schools, Negro ownership of property, and Negro enterprise. The reader will be interested in such information as illiteracy, music, painters, actors, occupations, agriculture, business, and the study of crime.

The Negro Year Book is a desirable step in the right direction. Mr.

Work and his coworkers deserve unusual praise for this undertaking in a field where for a number of years yet to come the returns must necessarily be meagre. The work meets a long felt want of statistical information as to exactly what the Negro people are doing. These facts will serve not only as an inspiration to the race itself but to refute so much misinformation often circulated to do Negroes injury. It is earnestly hoped that the managers of this work will find it possible in the near future to publish an annual volume and to this end the public should give the movement unstinted support to make such an undertaking financially profitable.

NOTES