n names, were natives of Africa, and not less so Augustine. In Africa
the Church found its most zealous confessors of the faith and its most
gifted defenders."[59]

The Africa referred to here, however, was not Negroland, but Africa above
the desert, where Negro blood was represented in the ancient Mediterranean
race and by intercourse across the desert. On the other hand Christianity
was early represented in the valley of the Nile under "the most holy pope
and patriarch of the great city of Alexandria and of all of the land of
Egypt, of Jerusalem, the holy city, of Nubia, Abyssinia, and Pentapolis,
and all the preaching of St. Mark." This patriarchate had a hundred
bishoprics in the fourth century and included thousands of black
Christians. Through it the Cross preceded the Crescent in some of the
remotest parts of black Africa.

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 o