Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/173

 THE NEGRO RACE AND EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION 1 57

the interior were naturally anxious to obtain the goods which added to the not very extreme luxury of their existence. They gave up their slaves in payment, and reimbursed themselves by making slave-raids into neighboring territories. The mutual hos- tility of the African populations was thus increased a hundred fold. Negroes themselves, converted to Islam, or negro and Arab half-breeds, often became the most cruel slave-hunters. One of the most notorious of these Tippu Tib had an escort of ten thousand armed slaves when he made his raids in the neighborhood of Nyangwe on the upper Congo. Whole countries were in this way depopulated, among them the fertile and prosperous region of the upper Congo, whose entire population was driven from its villages, murdered, or carried off into slavery. The entire Mako- lolo tribe, which Stanley had visited, was in this way annihilated, with the exception of the women and children, who were carried to the slave-markets. The cruelty of this traffic and the suffering inflicted upon the captives pass description and comprehension. It is therefore clear that the Moslems acted as a civilizing influ- ence only in the countries where they settled down permanently, and that they brought only woe and destruction to the regions invaded by their slave-trade.

The religion of Islam has been adopted by most of the negro tribes that are subject to Mohammedan rule. But the conversions are usually superficial; a few ceremonious observances are adopted, but for the rest the old customs and practices of fetish continue. Many observers believe that Islam is destined to con- quer all of tropical Africa, and that Christianity will not there make any progress. It seems, however, that in the forest region, where the negro race exists in its original form, the rule of fetish is not as yet seriously threatened by either of the two great Aryan religions. Christianity has one advantage over Islam : it can use images to typify noble qualities and characteristics, and thus can make its teachings more comprehensible to the mind of the African, who is not trained to deal with abstract ideas. This Islam cannot do because of its iconomachy; on the other hand, the latter cult has a great advantage in the fact that it demands only a few concrete observances of prayer and fasting, whereas