Identifier: journeytoashango01duch (find matches)
Title: A journey to Ashango-Land, and further penetration into equatorial Africa
Year: 1874 (1870s)
Authors: Du Chaillu, Paul B. (Paul Belloni), 1835-1903 Owen, Richard, 1804-1892
Subjects: Natural history Ethnology
Publisher: New York, Harper & brothers
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: The Library of Congress

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The African race doomed to extinction. Now I must give a general outline of the numeroustribes of men that inhabit this vast jungle. In these mountainous recesses man is what wemay call primitive; he is surrounded by denseforests; no trading caravan from the east or fromthe west, from the north or from the south, has pene-trated to him; he has been shut up from the worldaround him, and in the course of his slow migrationhe has taken the place of others who had disappearedbefore him. The individuals who leave the interiorcountry for the sea-shore never come back, to telltheir countrymen of the white man or of the sea.The path is closed to them, there is a gulf betweenthe sea and the interior^ but not between the interiorand the sea. What struck me in travelling through this greatwooded wilderness was the scantiness of the popula-tion, and the great number of tribes speaking differ-ent languages and dialects. Tribes bearing differentnames considering themselves different nations, though
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Chap. XXI. ISOLATION OF THE TRIBES. * 425 speaking the same language, and tribes speaking thesame language divided from each other by interveningtribes speaking another language. These tribes weredivided into a great number of clans, each clan inde-pendent of the others, and often at war with one orother of them; in some tribes villages of the sameclan were at war with each other. Part of one tribe in some cases have no knowledgewhatever of the other part; the further I wenttowards the east the less the people travelled, theless they knew of what surrounded them, for theyhad no trade to incite them to travel. I was never-theless struck by the great affinities these tribes pre-sented to each other. The patriarchal form of govern-ment was the only one known; each village had itschief, and further in the interior the villages seemedto be governed by elders, each elder, with his people,having a separate portion of the village to them-selves. There was in each clan the ifoumou, foumou,or a

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