III.] THE AFRICAN NEGRO: I. SUDANESE. 49 



single people by the first European settlers. The Felups proper 

 display the physical and mental characters of the typical Negro 

 even in an exaggerated form black colour, flat nose, wide 

 nostrils, very thick and everted lips, red on the inner surface, stout 

 muscular frame, correlated with coarse animal passions, crass 

 ignorance, no arts industry or even tribal organization, so that 

 every little family group is independent and mostly in a state of 

 constant feud with its neighbours. All go naked, armed with 

 bow and arrow, and live in log huts which, though strongly built, 

 are indescribably filthy 1 . 



Matriarchal usages still prevail, rank and property being trans- 

 mitted in the female line. There is some notion of a superhuman 

 being vaguely identified with the sky, the rain, wind or thunder- 

 storm. But all live in extreme terror of the medicine-man, who 

 is openly courted, but inwardly detested, so that whenever it can 

 be safely done the tables are turned, the witch-doctor is seized 

 and tortured to death. 



Timni, Kru, Sierra-Leonese, Liberians. Somewhat similar 

 conditions prevail all along the seaboard from Sierra Leone to, 

 and beyond, Cape Palmas, disturbed or modified by the Liberian 

 intruders from the North American plantations, and by the 

 slaves rescued in the thirties and forties by the British cruisers 

 and brought to Sierra Leone, where their descendants now 

 live in settled communities under European influences. These 

 " coloured " citizens of Sierra Leone and Liberia, who are so 

 often the butt of cheap ridicule, and are themselves perhaps 

 too apt to scorn the kindred "niggers" of the bush, have to be 

 carefully distinguished from these true aborigines who have never 

 been wrenched from their natural environment. 



In Sierra Leone the chief aboriginal groups on the coastlands 

 are the Timni of the Rokelle river, flanked north and south by two 

 branches of the Bulams, and still farther south the Gallinas, Veys 

 and Golas ; in the interior the Lokkos, Limbas, Konos, and Knssas, 

 with Kurankos, Mendis, Hubus, and other Mandingans and Fulahs 

 everywhere in the Hinterland. 



Bertrand-Bocande, Sur les Floups ou Felonps, in But. Soc. de Gt'ogr. 

 1849. 



K. 



4 



