all. One of the chief hardships of the slaves was the liability of being
put to death at their master's funeral in order that their spirits might
continue in his service. In such case it was customary on the Gold Coast
to give the victim notice of his approaching death by suddenly thrusting a
knife through each cheek with the blades crossing in his mouth so that he
might not curse his master before he died. With his hands tied behind him
he would then be led to the ceremonial slaughter. The Africans were in
general eager traders in slaves as well as other goods, even before the
time when the transatlantic trade, by giving excessive stimulus to raiding
and trading, transformed the native economy and deranged the social order.

[Footnote 3: Slavery among the Africans and other primitive peoples has
been elaborately discussed by H.J. Nieboer, _Slavery as an Industrial
System: Ethnological Researches_ (The Hague, 1900).]

Apart from a few great towns such as Coomassee and Benin, life in Guinea
was wholly on a village basis, each community dwelling in its own clearing
and having very slight intercourse with its neighbors. Politically each
village was governed by its chief and its elders, oftentimes in complete
independence. In occasional instances, however, considerable states of
loose organization were under the rule of central authorities. Such states
were likely to be the creation of invaders from the eastward, the Dahomans
and Ashantees for example; but the kingdom of Benin appears to have arisen
indigenously. In many cases the subordination of conquered villages merely
resulted in their paying annual tribute. As to language, Lower Guinea spoke
multitudinous dialects of the one Bantu tongue, but in Upper Guinea there
were many dialects of many separate languages.

Land was so abundant and so little used industrially that as a rule it
was not owned in severalty; and even the villages and tribes had little