Liberia <^ 



for centuries and centuries before the religion of Islam sent 

 Arabs and Berbers plunging into the regions of the Niger to 

 bring great reinforcements to the white race. Quite probably 

 in the early days, before the time of Christ — at such a period, 

 for example, as that in which Hanno sailed down the West 

 Coast of Africa — the Fulas, and that earlier Negroid, the Wolof, 

 may have been the intermediaries who carried on the limited 

 commerce between the Libyans on the north (with whom the 

 Carthaginians had much in common) and the Negroes to the 

 south of the Senegal. When dealing with the history of the 

 discovery of West Africa in earlier chapters, I have Indicated 

 that some of the interpreters alluded to by Hanno may have 

 been of Fula or Wolof origin, and that the very word gorilla 

 (applied to the "wild men" or apes captured by the Carthaginian 

 expedition on the island of Sherbro) was possibly from the Fula 

 or Wolof languages, very likely a combination simply meaning 

 "wild man," derived from the Fula and Wolof root gor, which 

 means " man." 



The Mandingo race may have originated from one of these 

 minglings of the Fula with the Negro. No doubt the physical 

 type, which is three-quarters or seven-eighths Negro in its 

 average aspect, was further modified by those invasions of 

 Arabs and Tawareq which so profoundly affected the history 

 of the whole Niger basin after the ninth century of the present 

 era. Pilgrimages to and from Mecca, which took thousands 

 and thousands of Muhammadanised Negroes from the Mandingo 

 countries to Arabia and the Egyptian Sudan, reinforced this — 

 one might almost say Semitic — element in the Mandingo ; 

 because many of the pilgrims brought back with them from the 

 countries round the Red Sea slave-wives of Negroid type resulting 

 from Arab and Egyptian intermixture with the Nile Negroes. 

 The Melli (.? Mandingo) empire — the first great Muhammadan 



896 



