Page:West African Studies.djvu/500

The thing you must always bear in mind when observing institutions and so on from Sierra Leone down to Lagos, is that the fertile belt between the salt sea of the Bight of Benin and the sand sea of Sahara is but a narrow band of forest and fertile country, while, when you get below Lagos—Lagos itself is a tongue of the Western Soudan coming down to the sea—you are in the true heart of Africa, the Equatorial Forest Belt; and that it is in this belt that you will get your materials at their purest. Therefore take the regions inhabited by the true Negro. In the regions from Sierra Leone to the Gold Coast, you have, it is true, not much white influence or adulteration, mainly because of the rock-reefed shore being dangerous to navigators. There is in this region undoubtedly a great and yearly increasing so-called Arab, but really Mohammedanised Berber, influence working on the true Negro. The natives themselves have their State-form in a state of wreckage from the destruction of the old Empire of Meli, which fell, from reasons we do not know, some time in the 16th century. We have, however, miserably little information on this particular region of Sierra Leone, the Pepper and Ivory Coasts, owing to its never having been worked at by a competent ethnologist; but the accounts we have of it show that the secret societies have here got the upper hand to an abnormal extent for the Negro state. Then we come to the Gold Coast region which has been so excellently worked at by the late Sir A. B. Ellis. Here you have a heavy amount of adulteration in idea, and, moreover, the long-continued white influence—1435-1898—has decidedly tended to a disorganisation of the Negro State-form, and to an undue development of the individual chief; nevertheless the law-form now existent on the Gold Coast is, when tested against a