The first rationalization that is given is that the physical conditions of sub-Saharan Africa imposed such fearful disadvantages that the development of a “civilization” was patently impossible. The argument simply will not hold up. As many geographers and anthropologists have observed (in a day before such observations were reviewed as blasphemy), parts of Africa were perhaps “uninhabitable,” but other parts were not. In any event, the jungles of the Congo imposed no obstacles to Negroid peoples greater than those faced by the Mayans in the jungles of Chiapas.
And consider the Mayans: They carved out of the rain forests of Yucatán--out of an area Van Hagen has termed “the least likely place one would choose for developing a culture”--a civilization that can be identified, and studied, and photographed to this day. They raised great temple cities: Tikal, Uaxactun, Calakmul. They built roads and reservoirs. They developed complex ideographic writing, a twenty-day lunar calendar, a code of laws for crime and punishment, a flourishing industry in dyeing and weaving. To compare the crude phallic fetishism of Negroid tribes with the highly developed art of the Mayan and the Incan civilizations is to engage in a travesty upon critical judgment.
It is complained of the early Negroes that they were “isolated,” that no maritime access was possible to the African interior, hence that they had no opportunity for contact with the cultures of Europe and the Mediterranean. This is a specious argument, too. Every standard history of Africa makes plain, implicitly or explicitly, that early Negroes did indeed have contact with the outer world. Phoenicians, Arabs, Libyans, Hamites all found their way across Africa. Romans came, and Persians, Chinese, Turks, Berbers, Indians, Portuguese. Nothing aroused the Negro from his primitive sleep. He did not adapt. He did not copy. He did not profit.
In 1525, when Pizarro invaded Peru, he found a magnificent Incan civilization flourishing in the almost impenetrable fastness of the Andes. Here, indeed, was isolation from the currents of European thought! No maritime access here! Yet the Incas had built temples and labyrinths and massive palaces of stone. The palace at Cuzco offered fountains, heated pools, intricate goldwork, and polished stones. There were public granaries, a three-hundred-mile road, a decimal system, an advanced astronomy. European explorers who sought trade in Africa found nothing there to compare with this. As Nathaniel Weyl has written, the decisive fact is that centuries of intermittent contact with the growing culture and technology of the West “did not serve to stir the Negroes from their millennial torpor, to quicken their minds and prod their curiosity, to induce them at least to borrow if not to invent.”
