4O MAN : PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



cities and flourishing marts centuries before the appearance of the 

 Portuguese in the eastern seas. To the Minaeans or Sabaeans, 

 kinsmen of the Moors, must also be credited the Zimbabwe monu- 

 ments and other ruins explored by Theodore Bent in the mining 

 districts south of the Zambesi. But in all the Negro lands free 

 from foreign influences no true culture has ever been developed, 

 and here cannibalism, witchcraft, and sanguinary "customs" are 

 either still rife, or have been but recently suppressed by the direct 

 action of European administrations. 



Numberless authorities have described the Negro as un- 

 progressive, or, if left to himself, incapable of progress in his 

 present physical environment. Sir H. H. Johnston, who knows 

 him well, goes much further, and speaks of him as a fine animal, 

 who, " in his wild state, exhibits a stunted mind and a dull 

 content with his surroundings, which induces mental stagnation, 

 cessation of all upward progress, and even retrogression towards 

 the brute. In some respects I think the tendency of the Negro 

 for several centuries past has been an actual retrograde one. As 

 we come to read the unwritten history of Africa by researches into 

 languages, manners, customs, traditions, we seem to see a back- 

 ward rather than a forward movement going on for some thousand 

 years past a return towards the savage and even the brute. I 

 can believe it possible that, had Africa been more isolated from 

 contact with the rest of the world, and cut off from the immigra- 

 tion of the Arab and the European, the purely Negroid races, left 

 to themselves, so far from advancing towards a higher type of 

 humanity, might have actually reverted by degrees to a type 

 no longer human ' ". I do not say that this is so, but I give it as 

 the matured opinion of an administrator, who has had a wider 

 experience of the natives of Africa than almost any man living. 



There is one point in which the Bantus somewhat unaccount- 

 ably compare favourably with the Sudanese. In all other regions 

 the spread of culture has tended to bring about linguistic unity, as 

 we see in the Hellenic world, where all the old 



Sudanese . . 



and Bantu idioms were gradually absorbed in the ' common 



Areas 1Stl dialect" of the Byzantine empire, again in the 



Roman empire where Latin became the universal 

 1 British Central Africa^ p. 472. 



