Liberia <«- 



very mixed origin, often no doubt due to direct intermixtures 

 between the Tawareq and Arabs from north of the Niger 

 and the Western Sudan Negroes, as well as through descent 

 from the Fulas. At some time or other, however, the 

 Mandingos developed a very distinct group of languages, 

 which is nowadays the dominant speech (in a great many 

 different tongues and dialects) of inner West Africa, all about 

 the sources of the Niger, and along the main Niger nearly 

 as far north as Lake Debo ; on the Upper Senegal and 

 Gambia, and in the northern hinterland of Liberia. 



At a distant period in the unwritten history of West 

 Africa this vigorous Mandingo Negroid race was impelled to 

 push its way to the sea-coast, and it must have thus found 

 an outlet in the north-western part of Liberia and the eastern 

 part of Sierra Leone. ^ The Mandingos seem to have been 

 shut out from the Atlantic coast farther north by the savage 

 and warlike Negroes that are still the main stock of western 

 and southern Sierra Leone, FVench and Portuguese Guinea, 

 and the Lower Gambia — peoples speaking a peculiar West 

 African type of prefix-governed language. The Moors of the 

 desert, the Fulas and the Wolofs, prevented the Mandingos 

 reaching the sea-coast in Senegal. Consequently, at an early 

 date they were compelled to force their way through the dense 

 forests of Sierra Leone and Liberia, and there they have left 

 traces of their former incursions in the existing Vai and Mende 

 peoples, whose languages are members of the Mandingo group. 

 In a general way it may also be said that the other tongues of 

 Liberia, belonging chiefly to the Kpwesi and Kru families, offer 

 faint and distant resemblances to the Mandingo languages. 

 Perhaps these peoples also sprang from the original Mandingo 

 stock. Through the Mandingo, at any rate, a small proportion 



1 Through the Mende and Vai countries. 

 i6 



