WHEN and how the Negroes took possession of Africa, and where they
came from, are things we do not know. Whether, for instance, there is a racial con-
nexion between the Negroes and the Melanesians of Oceania, as is assumed, is of little
interest from the point of view of the history of culture or art, as there is here no kind
of influencing of one culture by the other, and as common cultural characteristics re-
quire an explanation in just the same way as isolated ones; the one is not to be ex-
plained by the other.

We must therefore accept without more ado the fact that Africa is the land of the
African Negroes, with the limitation that we distinguish from them the preceding non-
Negro hunting and collecting cultures, and thus with the further limitation that in
their myths, and therefore also in certain art forms, there still lives a memory of the
original inhabitants of the country who were supplanted by them. (One of these
myths has been examined in great detail in the Dogon of Western Sudan.) The firm
base of the African world is formed not by the lower or higher levels of hunting peoples
but by the Negroes with their own particular economy, namely cultivation of the soil.
The Negro cultures are, originally at least, all peasant cultures, though here and there
the old hunting civilization still glimmers fitfully through their heavy covering layer.
After the simple digging-stick their most important cultivating tool is the hoe, and thus
we may call Africa south of the Sahara and its neighbouring savannah zone the classical
land of hoe cultivation. The more primitive form of hoe cultivation, which might also
be called cultivation by clearing, and in which the process of clearing, allowing of
only relative sedentariness, still leaves considerable room for hunting, has in many
areas (of the Sudan for example) slowly developed into higher forms. These forms
make use of manuring and artificial irrigation and only with them does permanent
settlement also come. In them the hunting element recedes more and more into the
background, and in proportion as hunting loses its importance as a source of food it
can become the privileged sport of a developing aristocracy. Such higher forms of
economy usually first appear during the course of fairly important historical events
and changes, the impetus to which was in Africa given as a rule by foreign conquests or
at least by strong influences from without. One may, however, picture the Africa of
the primitive form of hoe cultivation as remaining stationary for very long periods of

-16-