AMERICA'S NEGROES.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 225, 23 September 1933, Page 11 (Supplement)

AMERICA'S NEGROES.

THEIR PLACE OF ORIGIN. PROBABLY. WEST AFRICAN COAST. Slave traders and plantation owners cared little whether their slaves came from this part of Africa or that. But Dr. Melville Herskovits (North-Western University) cared so much that he found out what lie could from old men still living in Africa and from customs that have survived.

The evidence all points to the Gold Coast, Dahoipey, Togoland, Nigeria—in a word, the West Coast of Africa. -No doubt sonic of the more energetic traders went further inland, but it stands to reason that neither time nor efTort would be lost in penetrating too far into the jungle.

It is strange how West African customs have survived among American negroes to this very day. "Negroes in tho United States are, Christians," Dr. Herskovits says, -"vet their dead nuist 'cross tho River Jordan' in a manner exactly parallel to that which West African dead must cross their rivers before they reach the spirit world. We find tho African importance of wakes for the dead, and we observe an entire complex of ritual surrounding burial so akin to the West African funeral'customs, even to- -'burying shallow/ until arrangements can be made for a proper funeral, tho passing of small children over the coffin as they do in the Suriliamo bush, and the inclusion of food and money in tho coffins." Dr. Herskovits disputes tho theory that tho southern negro drawl and syntax are derived from Elizabethan English. "Any grammar of a West African people explains the grammatical oddities." 1