spirits might continue in his service.  In such case it was customary on the Gold Coast to give the victim notice of his approaching death by suddenly thrusting a knife through each cheek with the blades crossing in his mouth so that he might not curse his master before he died.  With his hands tied behind him he would then be led to the ceremonial slaughter.  The Africans were in general eager traders in slaves as well as other goods, even before the time when the transatlantic trade, by giving excessive stimulus to raiding and trading, transformed the native economy and deranged the social order.

[Footnote 3:  Slavery among the Africans and other primitive peoples has been elaborately discussed by H.J.  Nieboer, Slavery as an Industrial System:  Ethnological Researches (The Hague, 1900).]

Apart from a few great towns such as Coomassee and Benin, life in Guinea was wholly on a village basis, each community dwelling in its own clearing and having very slight intercourse with its neighbors.  Politically each village was governed by its chief and its elders, oftentimes in complete independence.  In occasional instances, however, considerable states of loose organization were under the rule of central authorities.  Such states were likely to be the creation of invaders from the eastward, the Dahomans and Ashantees for example; but the kingdom of Benin appears to have arisen indigenously.  In many cases the subordination of conquered villages merely resulted in their paying annual tribute.  As to language, Lower Guinea spoke multitudinous dialects of the one Bantu tongue, but in Upper Guinea there were many dialects of many separate languages.

Land was so abundant and so little used industrially that as a rule it was not owned in severalty; and even the villages and tribes had little occasion to mark the limits of their domains.  For travel by land there were nothing but narrow, rough and tortuous foot-paths, with makeshift bridges across the smaller streams.  The rivers were highly advantageous both as avenues and as sources of food, for the negroes were expert at canoeing and fishing.

Intertribal wars were occasional, but a crude comity lessened their frequency.  Thus if a man of one village murdered one of another, the aggrieved village if too weak to procure direct redress might save its face by killing someone in a third village, whereupon the third must by intertribal convention make common cause with the second at once, or else coerce a fourth into the punitive alliance by applying the same sort of persuasion that it had just felt.  These later killings in the series were not regarded as murders but as diplomatic overtures.  The system was hard upon those who were sacrificed in its operation, but it kept a check upon outlawry.