Man, Past and Present - Agustus Henry Keane, A. Hingston Quiggin, Alfred Court Haddon (most popular novels txt) 📗

rather with the Wa-Nyika, Wa-Boni, Wa-Duruma, Wa-Giryama, and the other coast tribes between the Tana and Mombasa. All of these tribes have more or less adopted the habits and customs of the Masai.

We learn from Sir A. Harding[245] that in the British East African Protectorate there are altogether as many as twenty-five distinct tribes, generally at a low stage of culture, with a loose tribal organisation, a fully-developed totemic system, and a universal faith in magic; but there are no priests, idols or temples, or even distinctly recognised hereditary chiefs or communal councils. The Gallas, who have crossed the Tana and here encroached on Bantu territory, have reminiscences of a higher civilisation and apparently of Christian traditions and observances, derived no doubt from Abyssinia. They tell you that they had once a sacred book, the observance of whose precepts made them the first of nations. But it was left lying about, and so got eaten by a cow, and since then when cows are killed their entrails are carefully searched for the lost volume.

Exceptional interest attaches to the Wa-Giryama, who are the chief people between Mombasa and Melindi, the first trustworthy accounts of whom were contributed by W. E. Taylor[246], and W. W. A. Fitzgerald[247]. Here again Bantus and Gallas are found in close contact, and we learn that the Wa-Giryama, who came originally from the Mount Mangea district in the north-east, occupied their present homes only about a century ago "upon the withdrawal of the Gallas." The language, which is of a somewhat archaic type, appears to be the chief member of a widespread Bantu group, embracing the Ki-nyika, and Ki-pokomo in the extreme north, the Ki-swahili of the Zanzibar coast, and perhaps the Ki-kamba, the Ki-teita, and others of the interior between the coastlands and Victoria Nyanza. These inland tongues, however, have greatly diverged from the primitive Ki-giryama[248], which stands in somewhat the same relation to them and to the still more degraded and Arabised Ki-swahili[249] that Latin stands to the Romance languages.

But the chief interest presented by the Wa-Giryama is centred in their religious ideas, which are mainly connected with ancestry-worship, and afford an unexpected insight into the origin and nature of that perhaps most primitive of all forms of belief. There is, of course, a vague entity called a "Supreme Being" in ethnographic writings, who, like the Algonquian Manitu, crops up under various names (here Mulungu) all over east Bantuland, but on analysis generally resolves itself into some dim notion growing out of ancestry-worship, a great or aged person, eponymous hero or the like, later deified in diverse ways as the Preserver, the Disposer, and especially the Creator. These Wa-Giryama suppose that from his union with the Earth all things have sprung, and that human beings are Mulungu's hens and chickens. But there is also an idea that he may be the manes of their fathers, and thus everything becomes merged in a kind of apotheosis of the departed. They think "the disembodied spirit is powerful for good and evil. Individuals worship the shades of their immediate ancestors or elder relatives; and the k'omas [souls?] of the whole nation are worshipped on public occasions."

Although the European ghost or "revenant" is unknown, the spirits of near ancestors may appear in dreams, and express their wishes to the living. They ask for sacrifices at their graves to appease their hunger, and such sacrifices are often made with a little flour and water poured into a coconut shell let into the ground, the fowls and other victims being so killed that the blood shall trickle into the grave. At the offering the dead are called on by name to come and partake, and bring their friends with them, who are also mentioned by name. But whereas Christians pray to be remembered of heaven and the saints, the Wa-Giryama pray rather that the new-born babe be forgotten of Mulungu, and so live. "Well!" they will say on the news of a birth, "may Mulungu forget him that he may become strong and well." This is an instructive trait, a reminiscence of the time when Mulungu, now almost harmless or indifferent to mundane things, was the embodiment of all evil, hence to be feared and appeased in accordance with the old dictum Timor fecit deos.

At present no distinction is drawn between good and bad spirits, but all are looked upon as, of course, often, though not always, more powerful than the living, but still human beings subject to the same feelings, passions, and fancies as they are. Some are even poor weaklings on whom offerings are wasted. "The Shade of So-and-so's father is of no use at all; it has finished up his property, and yet he is no better," was a native's comment on the result of a series of sacrifices a man had vainly made to his father's shade to regain his health. They may also be duped and tricked, and when pombe (beer) is a-brewing, some is poured out on the graves of the dead, with the prayer that they may drink, and when drunk fall asleep, and so not disturb the living with their brawls and bickerings, just like the wrangling fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream[250].

Far removed from such crass anthropomorphism, but not morally much improved, are the kindred Wa-Swahili, who by long contact and interminglings have become largely Arabised in dress, religion, and general culture. They are graphically described by Taylor as "a seafaring, barter-loving race of slave-holders and slave-traders, strewn in a thin line along a thousand miles of creeks and islands; inhabitants of a coast that has witnessed incessant political changes, and a succession of monarchical dynasties in various centres; receiving into their midst for ages past a continuous stream of strange blood, consisting not only of serviles from the interior, but of immigrants from Persia, Arabia, and Western India; men that have come to live, and often to die, as resident aliens, leaving in many cases a hybrid progeny. Of one section of these immigrants--the Arabs--the religion has become the master-religion of the land, overspreading, if not entirely supplanting, the old Bantu ancestor-worship, and profoundly affecting the whole family life."

The Wa-Swahili are in a sense a historical people, for they formed the chief constituent elements of the renowned Zang (Zeng) empire[251], which in Edrisi's time (twelfth century) stretched along the seaboard from Somaliland to and beyond the Zambesi. When the Portuguese burst suddenly into the Indian Ocean it was a great and powerful state, or rather a vast confederacy of states, with many flourishing cities--Magdoshu, Brava, Mombasa, Melindi, Kilwa, Angosha, Sofala--and widespread commercial relations extending across the eastern waters to India and China, and up the Red Sea to Europe. How these great centres of trade and eastern culture were one after the other ruthlessly destroyed by the Portuguese corsairs co' o ferro e fogo ("with sword and fire," Camoens) is told by Duarte Barbosa, who was himself a Portuguese and an eyewitness of the havoc and the horrors that not infrequently followed in the trail of his barbarous fellow-countrymen[252].

Beyond Sofala we enter the domain of the Ama-Zulu, the Ama-Xosa, and others whom I have collectively called Zulu-Xosas[253], and who are in some respects the most remarkable ethnical group in all Bantuland. Indeed they are by common consent regarded as Bantus in a preeminent sense, and this conventional term Bantu itself is taken from their typical Bantu language[254]. There is clear evidence that they are comparatively recent arrivals, necessarily from the north, in their present territory, which was still occupied by Bushman and Hottentot tribes probably within the last thousand years or so. Before the Kafir wars with the English (1811-77) this territory extended much farther round the coast than at present, and for many years the Great Kei River has formed the frontier between the white settlements and the Xosas.

But what they have lost in this direction the Zulu-Xosas, or at least the Zulus, have recovered a hundredfold by their expansion northwards during the nineteenth century. After the establishment of the Zulu military power under Dingiswayo and his successor Chaka (1793-1828), half the continent was overrun by organised Zulu hordes, who ranged as far north as Victoria Nyanza, and in many places founded more or less unstable kingdoms or chieftaincies on the model of the terrible despotism set up in Zululand. Such were, beyond the Limpopo, the states of Gazaland and Matabililand, the latter established about 1838 by Umsilikatzi, father of Lobengula, who perished in a hopeless struggle with the English in 1894. Gungunhana, last of the Swazi (Zulu) chiefs in Gazaland, where the A-Ngoni had overrun the Ba-Thonga (Ba-Ronga)[255], was similarly dispossessed by the Portuguese in 1896.

North of Zambesi the Zulu bands--Ma-Situ, Ma-Viti, Ma-Ngoni (A-Ngoni), and others--nowhere developed large political states except for a short time under the ubiquitous Mirambo in Unyamweziland. But some, especially the A-Ngoni[256], were long troublesome in the Nyasa district, and others about the Lower Zambesi, where they are known to the Portuguese as "Landins." The A-Ngoni power was finally broken by the English early in 1898, and the reflux movement has now entirely subsided, and cannot be revived, the disturbing elements having been extinguished at the fountain-head by the absorption of Zululand itself in the British Colony of Natal (1895).

Nowhere have patriarchal institutions been more highly developed than among the Zulu-Xosas, all of whom, except perhaps the Ama-Fingus and some other broken groups, claim direct descent from some eponymous hero or mythical founder of the tribe. Thus in the national traditions Chaka was seventh in descent from a legendary chief Zulu, from whom they take the name of Abantu ba-Kwa-Zulu, that is "People of Zulu's Land," although the true mother-tribe appear to have been the now extinct Ama-Ntombela. Once the supremacy and prestige of Chaka's tribe were established, all the others, as they were successively reduced, claimed also to be true Zulus, and as the same process went on in the far north, the term Zulu has now in many cases come to imply political rather than blood relationship. Here we have an object lesson, by which the ethnical value of such names as "Aryan," "Kelt," "Briton," "Slav," etc. may be gauged in other regions.

So also most of the southern section claim as their founder and ancestor a certain Xosa, sprung from Zuide, who may have flourished about 1500, and whom the Ama-Tembus and Ama-Mpondos also regard as their progenitor. Thus the whole section is connected, but not in the direct line, with the Xosas, who trace their lineage from Galeka and Khakhabe, sons of Palo, who is said to have died about 1780, and was himself tenth in direct descent from Xosa. We thus get a genealogical table as under, which gives his proper place in the Family Tree to nearly every historical "Kafir" chief in Cape Colony, where ignorance of these relations caused much bloodshed during the early Kafir wars:

Zuide (1500?) ______________________/______________________ / Tembu Xosa (1530?) Mpondo | | _____|_____ Ama-Tembus Palo (1780?) / (Tembookies) ______________|____________ Mpondumisi (Mpondos) / Galeka Khakhabe | _______________|______________ Klanta / | Omlao Mbalu Ndhlambe Hinza | | ____/ | Gika (ob. 1828) Gwali | Kreli | | Ama-Ndhlambes ______/ | | (Tslambies) | Macomo Velelo Ama-Galekas | | Sandili Baxa ______/ ______/ | | Ama-Gaikas Ama-Mbalus

But all, both northern Zulus and southern Xosas, are essentially one people in speech, physique, usages and social institutions. The hair is uniformly of a somewhat frizzly texture, the colour of a light or clear brown amongst the Ama-Tembus, but elsewhere very dark, the Swazis being almost "blue-black"; the head decidedly long (72.5) and high (195.8); nose variable, both Negroid and perfectly regular; height above the mean 1.75 m. to 1.8 m. (5 ft. 9 in. to 5 ft. 11 in.); figure shapely and muscular, though Fritsch's measurements show that it is sometimes far from the almost ideal standard of beauty with which some early observers have credited them.

Mentally the Zulu-Xosas stand much higher than the true Negro, as