Who are the folk who live here?  They are brown and black, curly and crisp-haired, short and tall, and longheaded.  Out of them in days without date flowed the beginnings of Egypt; among them rose, later, centers of culture at Ghana, Melle, and Timbuktu.  Kingdoms and empires flourished in Songhay and Zymbabwe, and art and industry in Yoruba and Benin.  They have fought every human calamity in its most hideous form and yet today they hold some similar vestiges of a mighty past,—­their work in iron, their weaving and carving, their music and singing, their tribal government, their town-meeting and marketplace, their desperate valor in war.

Missionaries and commerce have left some good with all their evil.  In black Africa today there are more than a thousand government schools and some thirty thousand mission schools, with a more or less regular attendance of three-quarters of a million school children.  In a few cases training of a higher order is given chiefs’ sons and selected pupils.  These beginnings of education are not much for so vast a land and there is no general standard or set plan of development, but, after all, the children of Africa are beginning to learn.

In black Africa today only one-seventeenth of the land and a ninth of the people in Liberia and Abyssinia are approximately independent, although menaced and policed by European capitalism.  Half the land and the people are in domains under Portugal, France, and Belgium, held with the avowed idea of exploitation for the benefit of Europe under a system of caste and color serfdom.  Out of this dangerous nadir of development stretch two paths:  one is indicated by the condition of about three per cent of the people who in Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, and French Senegal, are tending toward the path of modern development; the other path, followed by a fourth of the land and people, has local self-government and native customs and might evolve, if undisturbed, a native culture along their own peculiar lines.  A tenth of the land, sparsely settled, is being monopolized and held for whites to make an African Australia.  To these later folk must be added the four and one-half millions of the South African Union, who by every modern device are being forced into landless serfdom.

Before the World War tendencies were strongly toward the destruction of independent Africa, the industrial slavery of the mass of the blacks and the encouragement of white immigration, where possible, to hold the blacks in subjection.

Against this idea let us set the conception of a new African World State, a Black Africa, applying to these peoples the splendid pronouncements which have of late been so broadly and perhaps carelessly given the world:  recognizing in Africa the declaration of the American Federation of Labor, that “no people must be forced under sovereignty under which it does not wish to live”; recognizing in President Wilson’s message to the Russians, the “principle