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

Beni Amer--have from the earliest times occupied the whole region between the Nile and the Red Sea. G. Seligman has analysed the physical and cultural characters of the Beja tribes (Bisharin, Hadendoa and Beni Amer), the Barabra, nomad Arabs (such as the Kababish and Kawahla), Nilotes (Shilluk, Dinka, Nuer) and half-Hamites (Ba-Hima, Masai), in an attempt by eliminating the Negro and Semitic elements to deduce the main features which may be held to indicate Hamitic influence. He regards the Beni Amer as approximating most closely to the original Beja type which he thus describes. "Summarizing their physical characteristics it may be said that they are moderately short, slightly built men, with reddish-brown or brown skins in which a greater or less tinge of black is present, while in some cases the skin is definitely darker and presents some shade of brown-black. The hair is usually curly, in some instances it certainly might be described as wavy, but the method of hair dressing adopted tends to make difficult an exact description of its condition. Often, as is everywhere common amongst wearers of turbans, the head is shaved.... The face is usually long and oval, or approaching the oval in shape, the jaw is often lightly built, which with the presence of a rather pointed chin may tend to make the upper part of the face appear disproportionately broad. The nose is well shaped and thoroughly Caucasian in type and form[1143]." Among the Hadendoa the "Armenoid" or so-called "Jewish" nose is not uncommon. Seligman draws attention to the close resemblance between the Bejatype and that of the ancient Egyptians.

Through the Afars (Danakil) of the arid coastlands between Abyssinia and the sea, the Bejas are connected with the numerous Hamitic populations of the Somali and Galla lands. For the term "Somal," which is quite recent and of course unknown to the natives, H. M. Abud[1144] suggests an interesting and plausible explanation. Being a hospitable people, and milk their staple food, "the first word a stranger would hear on visiting their kraals would be 'So mal,' i.e. 'Go and bring milk.'" Strangers may have named them from this circumstance, and other tribal names may certainly be traced to more improbable sources.

The natives hold that two races inhabit the land: (1) ASHA, true Somals, of whom there are two great divisions, Darod and Ishak, both claiming descent from certain noble Arab families, though no longer of Arab speech; (2) HAWIYA, who are not counted by the others as true Somals, but only "pagans," and also comprise two main branches, Aysaand Gadabursi. In the national genealogies collected by Abud and Cox, many of the mythical heroes are buried at or near Meit, which may thus be termed the cradle of the Somal race. From this point they spread in all directions, the Darods pushing south and driving the Galla beyond the Webbe Shebel, and till lately raiding them as far as the Tana river. It should be noticed that these genealogical tables are far from complete, for they exclude most of the southern sections, notably the Rahanwin who have a very wide range on both sides of the Jub.

In the statements made by the natives about true Somals and "pagans," race and religion are confused, and the distinction between Asha and Hawiya is merely one between Moslem and infidel. The latter are probably of much purer stock than the former, whose very genealogies testify to interminglings of the Moslem Arab intruders with the heathen aborigines.

Despite their dark colour C. Keller[1145] has no difficulty in regarding the Somali as members of the "Caucasic Race." The Semitic type crops out decidedly in several groups, and they are generally speaking of fine physique, well grown, with proud bearing and often with classic profile, though the type is very variable owing to Arab and Negro grafts on the Hamitic stock. The hair is never woolly, but, like that of the Beja, ringlety and less thick than the Abyssinian and Galla, sometimes even quite straight. The forehead is finely rounded and prominent, eye moderately large and rather deep-set, nose straight, but also snub and aquiline, mouth regular, lips not too thick, head sub-dolichocephalic.

Great attention has been paid to all these Eastern Hamitic peoples by Ph. Paulitschke[1146], who regards the Galla as both intellectually and morally superior to the Somals and Afars, the chief reason being that the baneful influences exercised by the Arabs and Abyssinians affect to a far greater extent the two latter than the former group.

The Galla appear to have reached the African coast before the Danakil and Somali, but were driven south-east by pressure from the latter, leaving Galla remnants as serfs among the southern Somali, while the presence of servile negroid tribes among the Galla gives proof of an earlier population which they partially displaced. Subsequent pressure from the Masai on the south forced the Galla into contact with the Danakil, and a branch penetrating inland established themselves on the north and east of Victoria Nyanza, where they are known to-day as the Ba-Hima, Wa-Tusi, Wa-Ruanda and kindred tribes, which have been described on p. 91.

The Masai, the terror of their neighbours, are a mixture of Galla and Nilotic Negro, producing what has been described as the finest type in Africa. The build is slender and the height often over six feet, the face is well formed, with straight nose and finely cut nostrils, the hair is usually frizzly, and the skin dark or reddish brown. They are purely pastoral, possessing enormous herds of cattle in which they take great pride, but they are chiefly remarkable for their military organisation which was hardly surpassed by that of the Zulu. They have everywhere found in the agricultural peoples an easy prey, and until the reduction of their wealth by rinderpest (since 1891) and the restraining influence of the white man, the Masai were regarded as an ever-dreaded scourge by all the less warlike inhabitants of Eastern Africa[1147].

Amongst the Abyssinian Hamites we find the strangest interminglings of primitive and more advanced religious ideas. On a seething mass of African heathendom, already in pre-historic times affected by early Semitic ideas introduced by the Himyarites from South Arabia, was somewhat suddenly imposed an undeveloped form of Christianity by the preaching of Frumentius in the fourth century, with results that cannot be called satisfactory. While the heterogeneous ethnical elements have been merged in a composite Abyssinian nationality, the discordant religious ideas have never yet been fused in a consistent uniform system. Hence "Abyssinian Christianity" is a sort of by-word even amongst the Eastern Churches, while the social institutions are marked by elementary notions of justice and paradoxical "shamanistic" practices, interspersed with a few sublime moral precepts. Many things came as a surprise to the members of the Rennell Rodd Mission[1148], who could not understand such a strange mixture of savagery and lofty notions in a Christian community which, for instance, accounted accidental death as wilful murder. The case is mentioned of a man falling from a tree on a friend below and killing him. "He was adjudged to perish at the hands of the bereaved family, in the same manner as the corpse. But the family refused to sacrifice a second member, so the culprit escaped." Dreams also are resorted to, as in the days of the Pharaohs, for detecting crime. A priest is sent for, and if his prayers and curses fail, a small boy is drugged and told to dream. "Whatever person he dreams of is fixed on as the criminal; no further proof is needed.... If the boy does not dream of the person whom the priest has determined on as the criminal, he is kept under drugs until he does what is required of him."

To outsiders society seems to be a strange jumble of an iron despotism, which forbids the selling of a horse for over L10 under severe penalties, and a personal freedom or licence, which allows the labourer to claim his wages after a week's work and forthwith decamp to spend them, returning next day or next month as the humour takes him. Yet somehow things hold together, and a few Semitic immigrants from South Arabia have for over 2000 years contrived to maintain some kind of control over the Hamitic aborigines who have always formed the bulk of the population in Abyssinia[1149].

 

FOOTNOTES:

[1000] The Races of Europe: A Sociological Study, W. Z. Ripley, 1900, p. 437.

[1001] "Diese Namen sind natuerlich rein conventionell. Sie sind historisch berechtigt ... und moegen Geltung behalten, so lange wir keine zutrefferenden an ihre Stelle setzen koennen" (Anthropologische Studien, etc., p. 15).

[1002] E. Meyer, Geschichte des Altertums, 1909, l. 2, discussing the original home of the Indo-Europeans (Sec. 561, Das Problem der Heimat und Ausbreitung der Indogermanen) remarks (p. 800) that the discovery of Tocharish (Sieg und Siegling, "Tocharish, die Sprache der Indo-skythen," Sitz. d. Berl. Ak. 1908, p. 915 ff.), a language belonging apparently to the centum (Western and European) group, overthrows all earlier conceptions as to the distribution of the Indogermans and gives weight to the hypothesis of their Asiatic origin.

[1003] "Io non dubito di denominare aria questa stirpe etc." (Umbri, Italici, Arii, Bologna, 1897, p. 14, and elsewhere).

[1004] Anthrop. Studien, p. 15, "Diese Gemeinsamkeit der Charakteren beweist uns die Blutverwandtschaft" (ib.).

[1005] Sir W. Crooke's anticipation of a possible future failure of the wheat supply as affecting the destinies of the Caucasic peoples (Presidential Address at Meeting Br. Assoc. Bristol, 1898) is an economic question which cannot here be discussed.

[1006] Ph. Lake, "The Geology of the Sahara," in Science Progress, July, 1895.

[1007] This name, meaning in Berber "running water," has been handed down from a time when the Igharghar was still a mighty stream with a northerly course of some 800 miles, draining an area of many thousand square miles, in which there is not at present a single perennial brooklet. It would appear that even crocodiles still survive from those remote times in the so-called Lake Miharo of the Tassili district, where von Bary detected very distinct traces of their presence in 1876. A. E. Pease also refers to a Frenchman "who had satisfied himself of the existence of crocodiles cut off in ages long ago from watercourses that have disappeared" (Contemp. Review, July, 1896).

[1008] Recherches sur les Origines de l'Egypte: L'Age de la Pierre et des Metaux, 1897.

[1009] Bul. Soc. d'Anthrop. 1896, p. 394. This indefatigable explorer remarks, in reference to the continuity of human culture in Tunisia throughout the Old and New Stone Ages, that "ces populations fortement melangees d'elements neanderthaloides de la Kromirie fabriquent encore des vases de tous points analogues a la poterie neolithique" (ib.).

[1010] The Antiquity of Man, 1915, p. 255.

[1011] Africa, Antropologia della Stirpe Camitica, Turin, 1897, p. 404 sq.

[1012] "Le nord de l'Afrique entiere, y compris le Sahara naguere encore fort peuple," i.e. of course relatively speaking, "Du Dniester a la Caspienne," in Bul. Soc. d'Anthrop. 1896, p. 81 sq.

[1013] Ibid. p. 654 sq.

[1014] Resume de l'Anthropologie de la Tunisie, 1896, p. 4 sq.

[1015] This identity is confirmed by the characters of three skulls from the dolmens of Madracen near Batna, Algeria, now in the Constantine Museum, found by Letourneau and Papillaut to present striking affinities with the long-headed Cro-Magnon race (Ceph. Index 70, 74, 78); leptoprosope with prominent glabella, notable alveolar prognathism, and sub-occipital bone projecting chignon-fashion at the back (Bul. Soc. d'Anthrop. 1896, p. 347).

[1016] He shows ("Exploration Anthropologique de l'Ile de Gerba," in L'Anthropologie, 1897, p. 424 sq.) that the North African brown brachycephalics, forming the substratum in Mauretania, and very pure in Gerba, resemble the European populations the more they have avoided contact with foreign races. He quotes H. Martin: "Le type brun qui domine dans la Grande Kabylie du Jurjura ressemble singulierement en majorite au type francais brun. Si l'on habillait ces hommes de vetements europeens, vous ne les distingueriez pas de paysans ou de soldats francais." He compares them especially to the Bretons, and agrees with Martin that "il y a parmi les Berberes bruns des