Beyond This Commencement Of Honest Trade, I Cannot
Offer A Suggestion, As No Produce Of The Country Except Ivory Could
Afford The Expense Of Transport To Europe.
IF Africa is to be civilized,
it must be effected by commerce, which, once established, will open the
way
For missionary labour; but all ideas of commerce, improvement, and
the advancement of the African race that philanthropy could suggest must
be discarded until the traffic in slaves shall have ceased to exist.
Should the slave-trade be suppressed, a field would be opened, the
extent of which I will not attempt to suggest, as the future would
depend upon the good government of countries now devoted to savage
anarchy and confusion.
Any Government that would insure security would be the greatest
blessing, as the perpetual hostilities among the various tribes prevent
an extension of cultivation. The sower knows not who will reap, thus he
limits his crop to his bare necessities.
The ethnology of Central Africa is completely beyond my depth. The
natives not only are ignorant of writing, but they are without
traditions - their thoughts are as entirely engrossed by their daily
wants as those of animals; thus there is no clue to the distant past;
history has no existence. This is much to be deplored, as peculiarities
are specific in the type of several tribes both in physical appearance
and in language. The Dinka; Bari; Latooka; Madi; and Unyoro or Kitwara,
are distinct languages on the east of the Nile, comprising an extent of
country from about 12 degrees north to the Equator.
The Makkarika have also a distinct language, and I was informed in
Kamrasi's country, that the Malegga, on the west of the Albert lake,
speak a different tongue to that of Kitwara (or Unyoro) - this may
possibly be the same as the Makkarika, of which I have had no experience
by comparison. Accepting the fact of five distinct languages from the
Equator to 12 degrees N. lat., it would appear by analogy that Central
Africa is divided into numerous countries and tribes, distinct from each
other in language and physical conformation, whose origin is perfectly
obscure. Whether the man of Central Africa be pre-Adamite is impossible
to determine; but the idea is suggested by the following data. The
historical origin of man, or Adam, commences with a knowledge of God.
Throughout the history of the world from the creation of Adam, God is
connected with mankind in every creed, whether worshipped as the
universal sublime Spirit of omnipotence, or shaped by the forms of
idolatry into representations of a deity. From the creation of Adam,
mankind has acknowledged its inferiority, and must bow down and worship
either the true God or a graven image; or something that is in heaven or
in earth. The world, as we accept that term, was always actuated by a
natural religious instinct. Cut off from that world, lost in the
mysterious distance that shrouded the origin of the Egyptian Nile, were
races unknown, that had never reckoned in the great sum of
history - races that we have brought to light, whose existence had been
hidden from mankind, and that now appear before us like the fossil bones
of antediluvian animals. Are they vestiges of what existed in a
pre-Adamite creation?
The geological formation of Central Africa is primitive; showing an
altitude above the sea-level averaging nearly 4,000 feet. This elevated
portion of the globe, built up in great part of granitic sandstone
rocks, has never been submerged, nor does it appear to have undergone
any changes, either volcanic or by the action of water. Time, working
through countless ages with the slow but certain instrument of
atmospheric influence, has rounded the surface and split into fragments
the granite rocks, leaving a sandy base of disintegrated portions, while
in other cases the mountains show as hard and undecayed a surface as
though fresh from Nature's foundry. Central Africa never having been
submerged, the animals and races must be as old, and may be older, than
any upon the earth.
No geological change having occurred in ages long anterior to man, as
shown by Sir R. I. Murchison theoretically so far back as the year 1852,
when Central Africa was utterly unknown, it is natural to suppose that
the races that exist upon that surface should be unaltered from their
origin. That origin may date from a period so distant, that it preceded
the Adamite creation. Historic man believes in a Divinity; the tribes of
Central Africa know no God. Are they of our Adamite race? The equatorial
portion of Africa at the Nile sources has an average altitude above the
sea-level of about 4,000 feet; this elevated plateau forms the base of a
range of mountains, that I imagine extends, like the vertebrae of an
animal, from east to west, shedding a drainage to the north and south.
Should this hypothesis be correct, the southern watershed would fill the
Tanganika lake: while farther to the west another lake, supplied by the
southern drainage, may form the head of the river Congo. On the north a
similar system may drain into the Niger and Lake Tchad: thus the
Victoria and the Albert lakes, being the two great reservoirs or sources
of the Nile, may be the first of a system of African equatorial lakes
fed by the northern and southern drainage of the mountain range, and
supplying all the principal rivers of Africa from the great equatorial
rainfall. The fact of the centre of Africa at the Nile sources being
about 4,000 feet above the ocean, independently of high mountains rising
from that level, suggests that the drainage of the Equator from the
central and elevated portion must find its way to the lower level and
reach the sea. Wherever high mountain ranges exist, there must also be
depressions; those situated in an equatorial rainfall must receive the
drainage from the high lands and become lakes, the overflow of which
must form the sources of rivers, precisely as exemplified in the sources
of the Nile from the Victoria and the Albert lakes.
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