All these beginnings were gradually overthrown by Islam except among the Copts in Egypt, and in Abyssinia.  The Portuguese in the sixteenth century began to replant the Christian religion and for a while had great success, both on the east and west coasts.  Roman Catholic enterprise halted in the eighteenth century and the Protestants began.  To-day the west coast is studded with English and German missions, South Africa is largely Christian through French and English influence, and the region about the Great Lakes is becoming christianized.  The Roman Catholics have lately increased their activities, and above all the Negroes of America have entered with their own churches and with the curiously significant “Ethiopian” movement.

Coming now to other spiritual aspects of African culture, we can speak at present only in a fragmentary way.  Roughly speaking, Africa can be divided into two language zones:  north of the fifth degree of north latitude is the zone of diversity, with at least a hundred groups of widely divergent languages; south of the line there is one minor language (Bushman-Hottentot), spoken by less than fifty thousand people, and elsewhere the predominant Bantu tongue with its various dialects, spoken by at least fifty million.  The Bantu tongue, which thus rules all Central, West, and South Africa, is an agglutinative tongue which makes especial use of prefixes.  The hundreds of Negro tongues or dialects in the north represent most probably the result of war and migration and the breaking up of ancient centers of culture.  In Abyssinia and the great horn of East Africa the influence of Semitic tongues is noted.  Despite much effort on the part of students, it has been impossible to show any Asiatic origin for the Egyptian language.  As Sergi maintains, “everything favors an African origin."[60] The most brilliant suggestion of modern days links together the Egyptian of North Africa and the Hottentot and Bushmen tongues of South Africa.

Language was reduced to writing among the Egyptians and Ethiopians and to some extent elsewhere in Africa.  Over 100 manuscripts of Ethiopian and Ethiopic-Arabian literature are extant, including a version of the Bible and historical chronicles.  The Arabic was used as the written tongue of the Sudan, and Negroland has given us in this tongue many chronicles and other works of black authors.  The greatest of these, the Epic of the Sudan (Tarikh-es-Soudan), deserves to be placed among the classics of all literature.  In other parts of Africa there was no written language, but there was, on the other hand, an unusual perfection of oral tradition through bards, and extraordinary efficiency in telegraphy by drum and horn.

The folklore and proverbs of the African tribes are exceedingly rich.  Some of these have been made familiar to English writers through the work of “Uncle Remus.”  Others have been collected by Johnston, Ellis, and Theal.

A black bard of our own day has described the onslaught of the Matabili in poetry of singular force and beauty: