Berrv — The Sierra Lcr>ne Camiihrtls;. 29 



In another place Barbot describes the coast people as sorcerers, idolaters, 

 robbers, and drunkards, very savage, cruel, and treacherous, no better than 

 their country. They were gross pagans, said to worship demons more than 

 any other blacks, very low-class naked natives, barbarous, wild, bloody, 

 and treacherous, very savage cannibals who file their teeth, and married 

 indifferently any female member of their family, including their mothers. 



To this day there is in Africa a broad cannibal zone which stretches from 

 the G-ulf of Guinea eastwards to the Welle region, and from the Soudan far 

 into the Congo basin. This region is inhabited by more or less degraded races 

 which have been pushed back by the Berbers and Arabs, who have made 

 room for themselves at the expense of the blacks, capturing and making 

 slaves of them, thus causing a great intermixture of races. Looking to the 

 west we see Jolloff, Mandigo, and Susu, derived from a cross of FuUa and 

 negro stock, perhaps with a strain of Songhoi blood ; and to this latter race the 

 Temne of Sierra Leone may be related. The Temne displaced the Mendi, 

 and squeezed out and partly absorbed the Lokkos and BuUoms. The Bulloms 

 are the same people as the Sherbros, who have been pushed south, and partly 

 absorbed by the Mendi. The Sherbros and the Bulloms belong to the now 

 scattered but once powerful people called Mampas. The Mampas, who now 

 inhabit all the coast districts of Sierra Leone, with their kindred on either side 

 of them, once lived north of Port Lokko, which is a translation of Bacca Lokko, 

 sixty miles up the Sierra Leone Eiver to the northward. Between two and 

 three hundred years ago the Susus, a numerous, powerful, and civilized 

 Molrammedan trilje, attracted by the slave trade, pushed their way to the 

 head of the Sierra Leone River, where they established a port and sold slaves, 

 mostly Lokkos (from whom it takes its name), to the traders of Bunco Island. 

 During those slave-hunting wars the Mampas got split up and driven south. 

 There is a tradition that the Bulloms migrated from the south of the Eoquelle 

 Eiver, and occupying the district between the Elvers Skarsies and EoqueUe they 

 settled and divided it into five districts : the Samu BuUom, lying north of the 

 Great Skarsies; the Mambolo Bullom; the Medina BuUom; the north Bullom 

 or Lokko ilassama ; and the Kafu Bullom along the coast, which still retains 

 its independence as a separate Bullom organization ; but the other divisions 

 have been gradually absorbed — politically at least^by the Temnes who 

 intermarried with them. 



Next to the Mendi towards the east come the Eru, Ewe, Tshi, and Yoruba 

 people. The Yoruba, Beni, and Ashanti people have all been modified from 

 the north ; and higher up the Niger are many remnants of races, the most 

 curious of whom are the Angass, which show intermixture and influence from 

 the north and south. South of this region comes the decadent civilization of 



