Benin or the neighbouring lands.
Head (Sokoto), c. 200 BCE-20 °CE.
Nigeria.
Terracotta.
Private collection.
Sokoto sculptures are sometimes limited in ornament. The delicate features and heavy brow combined with a fine beard offer a severe aspect. The thin pottery walls of this head bear witness to a highly developed technique.
“Aggry Beads”
One meets nearly everywhere in Africa, either in the tombs or in the tumuli reputed to be ancient, or on the bodies of the living who claim to have received them from their most distant ancestors, beads to which the Negroes attribute a very great value which strangely resemble in form, colouration and material, analogous beads worn by the Egyptians and with which they often decorated their mummies. In the 16th and 17th centuries, this sort of bead, generally cylindrical, was the object of an active commerce on the part of English and especially Dutch navigators, who bought them from the natives of the countries where they were relatively abundant and sold them at a profit in the countries where they were rarer. These navigators gave them the name of “pierres d‘aigris” or “aggry beads”, the exact origin of which is not known. At various times the glassworkers of Venice and of Bohemia have manufactured counterfeits by which the Negroes did not allow themselves to be deceived.
However it be, the presence among the African Negroes of these certainly very ancient beads, the value which they represent in their eyes and the mystery which surrounds their original provenance are not sufficient for forming a conclusion as to the existence of commercial relations between the Egypt of the Pharaohs and western and central Africa. On the one hand, in fact, Assyrian and Phoenician tombs contain identical beads, so that we are left perplexed as to the place of their manufacture and, in consequence, as to the point of departure which might be sought at Nineveh or Tyre as well as at Memphis. On the other hand, they have been found in northern Europe and eastern Asia, which indicates a considerable area of dispersion, certainly out of proportion to the limits which might be reasonably assigned to the influence of Egyptian civilisation.
In most of the countries where, even today, the Negroes find “aggry beads” by ransacking ancient burial places, there is a tradition that these beads have been imported by long-haired men of light colour who, according to legend, came from the sky and whom their congeners interred after decorating their corpses with the beads in question. At first this tradition suggested to me the possibility of caravan relations between the ancient Egyptians and populations as far removed from the Nile as those, for example, of the Gold Coast and the Ivory Coast. I have reflected since, that, if it be admitted that men of the white race, carriers of “aggry beads”, advanced at one time as far as those distant regions, it would be much more probable that they came from Berbery – in the geographical sense today given to the word – than from Egypt. It has not come to our knowledge that the Egyptians had a great amount of commerce with the Negroes, except those of the Nile valley from among whom they procured slaves for themselves, while at all times, as at the present, the inhabitants of what Herodotus called Libya and what we denominate as Berbery or the Barbary Coast (Tripoly, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco) have not hesitated to cross the Sahara and to adventure as far as the Negroes to buy from them principally goldpowder in exchange for various sorts of merchandise. Among this merchandise, Arab geographer, Yakut mentions copper rings and blue glass beads as being very much in honour at his time, that is to say, at the beginning of the 13th century. More recently, the Negroes most admire and value “aggry beads” made of blue glass.
Statue, Katsina region, 1st-4th century CE. Nigeria.
Terracotta, height: 295 cm.
Protruding eyes and rounded features characterise the terracottas of the Katsina region. Here, the elongated neck emphasises its majestic head.
Jonyeleni female figure (Bamana).
Mali.
Wood, cotton, beads, string, iron, height: 65 cm.
Musée du quai Branly, Paris.
Statue, Kambari style (Dogon).
Wood, height: 34 cm.
Typical of Dogon art’s Kambari style, this statue represents an important time of a binu priest’s inauguration. Its acute stylisation is reinforced by the thick finish left behind by various libations of chicken blood and eggs.
Gelede mask (Yoruba).
Nigeria.
Wood, pigment, 36 × 35 cm.
Musée du quai Branly, Paris.
The Yoruba wear the gelede mask on their head. The lower part represents a face while the upper part depicts a scene.
Phoenician and Carthaginian Influence
We have, therefore, the right to suppose that these beads, perhaps of Phoenician manufacture, but in any case abundant among the Phoenicians, were first imported by them into the settlements that they had founded as early as the 12th century BC on the Mediterranean coast of Africa; that their colonists, Carthaginians and others, later introduced them into the Sahara even as far as Sudan; that Berber merchants, and then Arabs and Arabo-Berbers of Tripolitania, Tuat, Tafilalet and Dara or Draa continued this traffic, and that, after all, the men with long hair and of light colouration, of so-called celestial origin, mentioned by the Negro traditions, may have been successively Phoenicians, Punic, Berber, and Moorish caravan merchants.
As for the trace of Egyptian influence that voyagers have claimed to find in the houses of Djenné and in the pyramidal minarets of Sudanese mosques, it is useless to demonstrate its non-existence otherwise than in recalling that the constructions in question are subsequent to the Islamisation of the country of the Negroes and remind one singularly of a type of architecture which is widely spread in the Arabo-Berber country north of the Sahara. It is necessary to mention again the fantasy of those who have tried to discover the origin of the name Fula, Fulbe, or Fulani in that of the fellah of Egypt, without considering that fellah is an Arabic word serving to designate the peasants of any country and of any nationality and that there is no more a fellah of Egypt than of Morocco or Syria or any other place where there are people given to the cultivation of the land.
On the contrary, an attentive study of the facts leads me to formulate a hypothesis which, without doubt, will be verified with time and which would tend to attribute to the Phoenician colonies of North Africa, notably Carthage, a very considerable influence on the development of Sudanese civilisations, much more considerable and also much more direct, at least in that which concerns western and central Africa, than the influence having its point of departure in Egypt. This hypothesis does not rest only on simple conjectures.
In studying the words of Semitic origin which have acquired rights of citizenship in most of the Negro languages of Sudan and its hinterland, I have ascertained that, on the whole, they are divisible into two large categories which are very distinct from each other. The one relates almost exclusively to the dogmas and rites of the Muslim religion or to legal notions, hagiography and magic, which constitute the accessory baggage of all Islamisation; these, because of their meanings and the ideas which they represent, could not have been introduced except subsequently to the Hegira, they have not been borrowed from spoken Arabic but from written Arabic, and have passed into the Sudanese languages with the form – altered only by the Negro pronunciation – that they have in grammatical Arabic; they are thus words of scholarly formation. The other category comprises words serving to designate material objects – for example, pieces of harness, arms, utensils, clothing, etc. – or general ideas which are most often abstract, objects and ideas which the Negroes did not possess and hence borrowed at the same time as the vocables meant to represent them. These words have corresponding forms in Arabic, since, as I have said, they are incontestably Semitic; but they never answer to the grammatical form and they often depart enormously