eceived new impetus and a wave
of Mohammedanism swept eastward, erecting the great kingdoms of Melle, the
Songhay, Bornu, and the Hausa states. The older Negro culture was not
overthrown, but, like a great wedge, pushed upward and inward from Yoruba,
and gave stubborn battle to the newer culture for seven or eight
centuries.

Then it was, in the fifteenth century, that the heart disease of Africa
developed in its most virulent form. There is a modern theory that black
men are and always have been naturally slaves. Nothing is further from the
truth. In the ancient world Africa was no more a slave hunting ground than
Europe or Asia, and both Greece and Rome had much larger numbers of white
slaves than of black. It was natural that a stream of black slaves should
have poured into Egypt, because the chief line of Egyptian conquest and
defense lay toward the heart of Africa. Moreover, the Egyptians,
themselves of Negro descent, had not only Negro slaves but Negroes among
their highest nobility and even among their Pharaohs. Mohammedan
conquerors enslaved peoples of all colors in Europe, Asia, and Africa, but
eventually their empire centered in Asia and Africa and their slaves came
principally from these countries. Asia submitted to Islam except in the
Far East, which was self-protecting. Negro Africa submitted only
partially, and the remaining heathen were in small states which could not
effectively protect themselves against the Mohammedan slave trade. In this
wise the slave trade gradually began to center in Africa, for religious
and political rather than for racial reasons.

The typical African culture was the culture of family, town, and small
tribe. Hence domestic slavery easily developed a slave trade through war
and commerce. Only the integrating force of state building could have
stopped this slave trade. Was this failure to develop the great state a
racial characteristic? This does not seem a fair conclusion. In four great
centers state building began in Africa. In Ethiopia several large states
were built up, but they tottered before the onslaughts of Egypt, Persia,
Rome, and Byzantium, on the one hand, and finally fell before the
turbulent Bantu warriors from the interior. The second attempt at empire
building began in the southeast, but the same Bantu hordes, pressing now
slowly, now fiercely, from the congested center of the continent,
gradually overthrew this state and erected on its ruins a series of
smaller a