ously summoned at my request, when I say to him, 'I have come to
speak to your people,' I do not need to begin by telling them that there
is a God. Looking on that motley assemblage of villagers,--the bold, gaunt
cannibal with his armament of gun, spear, and dagger; the artisan with
rude adze in hand, or hands soiled at the antique bellows of the village
smithy; women who have hasted from their kitchen fire with hands white
with the manioc dough or still grasping the partly scaled fish; and
children checked in their play with tiny bow and arrow or startled from
their dusty street pursuit of dog or goat,--I have yet to be asked, 'Who
is God?'"[57]

The basis of Egyptian religion was "of a purely Nigritian character,"[58]
and in its developed form Sudanese tribal gods were invoked and venerated
by the priests. In Upper Egypt, near the confines of Ethiopia, paintings
repeatedly represent black priests conferring on red Egyptian priests the
instruments and symbols of priesthood. In the Sudan to-day Frobenius
distinguishes four principal religions: first, earthly ancestor worship;
next, the social cosmogony of the Atlantic races; third, the religion of
the Bori, and fourth, Islam. The Bori religion spreads from Nubia as far
as the Hausa, and from Lake Chad in the Niger as far as the Yoruba. It is
the religion of possession and has been connected by some with Asiatic
influences.

From without have come two great religious influences, Islam and
Christianity. Islam came by conquest, trade, and proselytism. As a
conqueror it reached Egypt in the seventh century and had by the end of
the fourteenth century firm footing in the Egyptian Sudan. It overran the
central Sudan by the close of the seventeenth century, and at the
beginning of the nineteenth century had swept over Senegambia and the
whole valley of the Niger down to the Gulf of Guinea. On the east Islam
approached as a trader in the eighth century; it spread into Somaliland
and overran Nubia in the fourteenth century. To-day Islam dominates Africa
north of ten degrees north latitude and is strong between five and ten
degrees north latitude. In the east it reaches below the Victoria Nyanza.

Christianity early entered Africa; indeed, as Mommsen says, "It was
through Africa that Christianity became the religion of the world.
Tertullian and Cyprian were from Carthage, Arnobius from Sicca Veneria,
Lactantius, and probably in like manner Minucius Felix, in spite of their
Lati