-^ The Guinea Trade 



bronze, and brass.^ Bronze, which is an amalgam of copper and 

 thi, seems to owe its introduction into West Africa entirely to 

 the Portuguese. 



To many this proposition seems to be difficult of belief, 

 owing to the extraordinarily rapid way in which the bronze art 

 of Benin developed. Some writers therefore have ventured to 

 imagine an Egyptian commerce in bronze, carrying with it a 

 sculptural art which found its way from Egypt two or three 

 thousand years ago across Central Africa to the Lower Niger 

 and Benin. But there seems to be absolutely no evidence to 

 support such a theory. The art of Benin is entirely Negro, 

 without any hint of Egyptian influence. This is not altogether 

 the case, for example, with the Negroes or Negroids of the 

 Bahr-al-Ghazal, who possess ornaments of brass showing dis- 

 tinct signs of Ancient Egyptian influence, if indeed they are 

 not trade goods that came from Ancient Egypt. Absolutely 

 nothing of this kind, however, has as yet been discovered in 

 Benin, and the earliest Benin bronze work seems to consist 

 chiefly of portraits of the Portuguese soldiers. 



As early as the first Portuguese voyages to Guinea horses 

 were brought from Portugal and from the Moorish coast and 

 sold to the natives of the Gambia, even though it was remarked 

 by Ca' da Mosto that these people had an indigenous breed of 



' Brass, which is an amalgam of copper and zinc, seems to have been brought 

 to the regions of the Niger and Guinea by Arabs and Moors quite independently of 

 its introduction along the coast by Europeans. Copper is found in the rocks of 

 Liberia (copper pyrites) at the present day, and no doubt in other parts of West 

 Africa, but it has never been worked there by the natives so far as is known. Iron 

 of the best and most workable kinds is singularly abundant in Liberia and in all 

 the inner regions of West Africa, and was worked by the natives when Europeans 

 first came on the scene, though perhaps not so much as at the present day by the 

 unmixed Negroes, who still seem to have been using weapons of wood, bone, horn, and 

 stone in the fifteenth century, concurrently with the iron introduced from the north 

 It is possible that at that period they did not smelt iron to any great extent (in the 

 purely Negro countries), and so it was a particularly acceptable article of commerce, 

 as it is even at the present day. 



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