The testimonies of the explorers
"In 1906, when I entered the territory of Kassai Sankuru, I found again villages whose main streets were bordered on each side, for leagues, with four rows of palm trees, and whose squares, each charmingly adorned, were as many works of art. No man who did not carry sumptuous arms of iron or copper, with encrusted blades, sleeves covered with snakeskin. Everywhere velvets and silk fabrics. Each cup, each pipe, each spoon was an object of art (…) Was it any different in the great Sudan? Not at all (…) The particular organization of the states of Sudan existed long before Islam, the reflective arts of field cultivation and politeness… the bourgeois orders and corporate systems of Negro Africa are thousands older. years than in Europe (...) It is a fact that exploration in Equatorial Africa has only encountered vigorous ancient civilizations.
“The people (…) seem to us… very black, all dressed in white cotton shirts (…) several blacks (…) are transported in our caravels, some to see new things, others to sell us gold rings and a few small tasks which they use among themselves as shirts, nets, cotton sheets, fashionable fabrics, some white, others variegated with green, white and blue, and others still red, white and blue, very well made . " O. Dapper, a Dutchman famous for his descriptions of African societies, reveals to us new crucial information about the dress habits of the inhabitants of Volta, Monomotapa and Guinea [3]:“In the Aborea, near the Volta, all the men among the Negroes wear a cotton canvas dress… and the women wear a dress made more or less like that of the men (…)
At the Monomotapa, the kings do not change their fashion, they wear a long robe of a sheet of silk fabric in the country; they carry to their side a billhook with ivory handles (…) The common people dress in cotton cloth and the adults, Indian embroidered with gold (…) The inhabitants of the kingdom of Guinea exchange the cloths they make (with their cotton) (...)
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Negro Nations and Culture: From Egyptian Nepot Antiquity to the Cultural Problems of Today's Black Africa
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Release Date | 2000-07-11T00:00:01Z |
Edition | 4e edition |
Language | Français |
Number Of Pages | 564 |
Publication Date | 2000-07-11T00:00:01Z |