OF THE TORUBA LANGUAGE. 



37 



arc sometimes met with " who are fully as light-colored as the American Indians. This 

 color ishereditary in certain families ; and it is a curious fact that, although it may seem to he 

 lost, it sometimes reappears in subsequent generations. Individuals of this color are found 

 not only among the Yorubas and other tribes of the interior, but among the Iboes, and 

 even among the Kroomen. They axe called 'red men' in Africa, though their color is not 

 exactly that of Indians, nor yet of mulattoes, and is something wholly distinct from albinism. 

 Several entire; tribes of red men axe found in the interior. The people of Uorin spoke of 

 a tribe of pastoral people called Alabawo, ' 1 Iide-wearcrs,' who are said to be decidedly light- 

 colored. They build no towns, but live in leather tents, which they pitch in the form of 

 a circular village, and remove from place to place for the sake of pasturage. 



8. "It seems reasonable to suppose that the red men among the Yorubas bad the 

 same origin as the red Pulohs and other red tribes of the interior. On the other band, it 

 is unnecessary to refer the light color of these people to climate, or to other conjectural 

 causes, when we have good evidence that an extensive amalgamation of the black and 

 white races has taken place in the countries where most of the mulattoes are now found. 

 We may admit in advance that some of the evidence of this amalgamation maybe spurious 

 or doubtful. For instance, King Belo, of Sokoto, may be mistaken, when he asserts in 

 bis history of Takroor that Bornu was peopled by an Egyptian colony. Still it is undeni- 

 able that a, strong Caucasian intermixture extends from the Red Sea through Nubia and 

 Darfur to the Shoas, southwest of Lake Tsad; and it is just here, at the last-named 

 point, that we first meet with the red Pulohs, who extend through Hansa, Bambara, &c, to 



the Senegal and the Atlantic Ocean It is a curious fact that some of the Pulohs at 



Ilorig are lighter colored, and more of the white man in every respect, than any half-blood 

 mulatto I have ever seen either in America or Africa."* 



i). That the ancient inhabitants of Yoruba had commercial intercourse with Egypt, is 

 rendered almost certain by the fact that " segi," a kind of ancient Egyptian beads, are dug 

 from the earth at Ife and other places. King Belo's assertion renders it probable that the 

 rrd Pulohs may be descended from the red race of nobles that is depicted in the Egyptian 

 monuments, and in my opinion this probability is increased by the certain antiquity of the 

 red race in America,, by the apparent association, among many ancient nations, between 

 the ideas of man and redness,f by the leather tents of the Alabawo, which may indicate 



:,c Bowen's Grammar and Dictionary of the Yoruba language, pp. xiv-xv. I am indebted to Mr. Bowcn's work 

 for all my information respeoting the Yorubas and their language. 



t '''■ ,'/■> DIN'; Egyptian, ruma, rt, man; r, (denoting redness or brilliancy), in the words that signified euti, 

 evening, heat, to /nun, a /lower ; SToruba, okonri, man; obiri, woman; (ako re, the red male; obi re, the red 

 female;) Dakota, widas'ta, man; (m6B,,male; &'&,red; stag, or s't&t), purple, dark;) G-r., &v6p-<aitos ? Clarkson, 

 in his "Essay on the Slavery and Commerce ol the Human Species" (3d Ed., Phila., 1787, p. 120), gives plausi- 



