3 Sierra Leone. Head. Stone. Height 9¾ in.

4 Nigeria. Nok. Head. Terracotta. Height 8¾ in.

aura of the Mediterranean cultures. One immigrant wave of 'historic' peoples after
another has found its way here, and through them the land has been wholly estranged
from its continent. At times these immigrants have shown considerable historical activ-
ity: Berbers, Phoenicians, Romans, Germanic Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs and with
the last names the world-power of Islam, which was eventually of decisive significance
for the historical destiny of wide areas of the north right over to the Sudan. North
Africa found itself in closer contact with the other countries of the Mediterranean shores
than with its own continent, and this outlasted the loss by Islam of all its European
possessions.

Finally, however, there came Europe with its trading settlements, with firearms and
the slave trade, with civilization and Christianity. At first Africa withstood the in-
vasion of this superior power, even where it sacrificed its traditions to the foreign hab-
its and even to Christianity, as in the old sixteenth-century Kingdom of the Congo,
which went over to Christianity with all its rulers, and which gave its capital the Por-
tuguese-Christian name of San Salvador; even in such places however the outwardly
surviving shell of Christianity was laid aside in the course of time and today only
isolated customs and art-forms remind us of the former ascendancy of the foreign re-
ligion. More and more, however, Africa became merely an object in the hands of
extra-African interests, being parcelled out into colonial territories and its culture

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