United States or American Samoa ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The Jolofs, Mandingoes, and Kafirs, are African examples, where a natural and independent origin for the improvement which exists is as unavoidably to be presumed as in the case of the Mandans.
Of the operations on the Gambia an intimate view may be had from the journal of Francis Moore, a factor of the Royal African Company from 1730 to 1735. Here the Jolofs on the north and the Mandingoes on the south and west were divided into tribes or kingdoms fronting from five to twenty-five leagues on the river, while tributary villages of Arabic-speaking Foulahs were scattered among them.
Thereafter, a celebrity on the river, he spread among his fellow Foulahs and the neighboring Jolofs and Mandingoes his cordial praises of the English nation.
In the next year the Lagos Company sent a great expedition of twenty-six vessels which discovered the Senegal River and brought back many natives taken in raids thereabout; and by 1448 nearly a thousand captives had been carried to Portugal. Some of these were Moorish Berbers, some negroes, but most were probably Jolofs from the Senegal, a warlike people of mixed ancestry.
So were the Jolofs, handsome, black as jet, with features more regular than the Mandingoes, almost European, excepting the lips: a nonchalant air, very warlike upon occasion, but not disposed to labor. They have magistrates, and some forms for the administration of justice, but a civilization less developed than the Mandingo, in consequence of early contact with Christians.
The separate traders also had more frequent quarrels with the natives. In 1732 a Yankee captain was killed in a trade dispute and his crew set adrift. Soon afterward certain Jolofs took another ship's officers captive and required the value of twenty slaves as ransom.
In Africa, there are Negro nations, that is, nations of intensely black complexion, as the Jolofs, Mandingoes, and Kafirs, whose features and limbs are as elegant as those of the best European nations.
The "Affiches Américaines," which was published weekly at Port-au-Prince, had always a column or two describing fugitive negroes; but local disturbances or insurrectionary attempts were very rare: a half-dozen cannot be counted since the Jolofs of Diego Columbus frightened Spaniards from the colony.
Word Of The Day