-•) Anthropology : Historical 



interbred with the border tribes of Negroes. Pushed south- 

 wards by other arrivals from the north and east, they crossed 

 the Senegal, no doubt in small numbers, and for their long 

 hair and light skins were received possibly as reverentially by 

 the savage Negroes as were the Galas of a similar past in 

 Unyoro and Uganda. From out of one of these early mixtures 

 between the Libyan and the Negro arose that remarkable 

 people, the Fula.' Some of the Fula traditions or the stories 

 told by Arab or Berber historians about the Fula make out 

 that they were dwelling in the steppe country north of the 

 Senegal at one time, that they were formed there, in fact, by 

 some hybrid between the Libyan and the Negro, and that it 

 was only by the further impact of Libyan immigration that 

 they were forced to cross the Senegal to their first great centre 

 of development, the country of Futatoro.^ These legends may 

 be only the invention of Arab historians. On the whole, it 

 Is most probable that the Fula race was formed by the infiltra- 

 tion of Libyans into the Negro countries south of the 

 Senegal. 



The Fula race being once strongly established as a fairly 

 uniform Negroid type, almost half and half in Its equal pro- 

 portions of Caucasian and Negro blood, proceeded by further 

 intermixture with the surrounding Negro races to carry on the 

 infiltration of the Caucasian. This process no doubt continued 



' After some hesitation I decided that it would be most convenient to my 

 readers if throughout this book the form " Fula " was adopted as an unchanging 

 name for this race and its language. The actual forms which this root assumes 

 are as follows : Ptilo (sing.) is a Fula individual ; Fulbe, the same word in the 

 plural, means the Fula race ; Fulfulde is the language ; and so on : but the root 

 for all these being Ful or Pul, and this root being frequently turned into Fula 

 by the surrounding tribes, this last forms on the whole the most convenient 

 general designation in a European language. 



' This district along the Lower Senegal is still the largest agglomeration of 

 the Fulbe. Futa Jalo or Jalon is the next largest : the geographical term 

 " Futa " seems to be much connected with the distribution of the Fula people. 



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