Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 1.djvu/286

Rh 264 AFRICA [ETHNOLOGY. their features but they are woolly haired, and while some are almost black, others are comparatively fair, although some of their tribes might have been mixed with the East ern Negroes. They have been very wrongly classed with the Negroes. They are a strong, muscular, active people, addicted to plunder and warfare. The Eastern Kaffres, among whom the Amakosah and Amazulah are best known to us, on account of their frequent invasions of the Cape Colony, are much more savage than the western and north ern, or the Bechuana and Sichuana tribes. All Kaffres are pastoral, keeping large herds of cattle ; but the last-named tribes inhabit large towns, well-built houses, cultivate the ground carefully, and exhibit every appearance of being capable of entire civilisation. The word Kaffre, or Kafir, as it ought to be written, is Arabic, and was first applied by the Europeans to the inhabitants of the coast of Mozam bique, because they were so called by the Mohammedans, in whose eyes they were Kafirs, that is infidels. We conclude this sketch with the Hottentot race, which is entirely different from all the other races of Africa, Where they originally came from, and how they happened to be hemmed in and confined entirely to this remote corner of the earth, is a problem not likely to be ever satisfactorily solved. The only people to whom the Hottentot has been thought to bear a resemblance, are the Chinese or Malays, or their original stock the Mongols. Like these people they have the broad forehead, the high cheek-bones, the oblique eye, the thin beard, and the dull yellow tint of complexion, resembling the colour of a dried tobacco leaf ; but there is a difference with regard to the hair, which grows in small tufts, harsh, and rather wiry, covering the scalp somewhat like the hard pellets of a shoe-brush. The women, too, have a peculiarity in their physical conforma tion, which, though occasionally to be met with in other nations, is not universal, as among the Hottentots. Their constitutional &quot;bustles&quot; sometimes grow to three times the size of those artificial stuffings with which our fashionable ladies have disfigured themselves. Even the females of the diminutive Bosjesmen Hottentots, who frequently perish of hunger in the barren mountains, and are reduced to skele tons, have the same protuberances as the Hottentots of the plains. It is not known even whence the name of Hotten tot proceeds, as it is none of their own. It has been con- jestured that hot and tot frequently occurring in their singu lar language, in which the monosyllables are enunciated with a palatic clacking with the tongue, like that of a hen, may have given rise to the name, and that the early Dutch settlers named them hot-en-tot. They call themselves qui- qucc, pronounced with a clack. They are a lively, cheerful, good-humoured people, and by no means wanting in intel lect; but they have met with nothing but harsh treatment I since their first connection with Europeans. Neither Bar tholomew Diaz, who first discovered, nor Vasco de Gama, who first doubled, the Cape of Good Hope, nor any of the ^ubsequent Portuguese navigators, down to 1509, had much communication with the natives of this southern angle of 1 Africa ; but in the year above mentioned, Francisco d Al- meyda, viceroy of India, having landed on his return at Saldanha (now Table) Bay, was killed, with about twenty of his people, in a scuffle wtih the natives. To avenge his death, a Portuguese captain, about three years afterwards, is said to have landed a piece of ordnance loaded with grape shot, as a pretended present to the Hottentots. Two ropes were attached to this fatal engine ; the Hottentots poured down in swarms. Men, women, and children flocked round the deadly machine, as the Trojans did round the wooden horse, &quot;funemque manu contingere gaudent.&quot; The brutal Portuguese fired off the piece, and viewed with savage delight the mangled carcasses of the deluded people. The Dutch effected their ruin by gratifying their propensity for brandy and tobacco, at the expense of their herds of cattle, on which they subsisted. Under the British sway they have received protection, and shown themselves not unworthy of it. They now possess property, and enjoy it in security. One of the most beautiful villages, and the neatest and best-cultivated gardens, belong to a large community of Hottentots, under the instruction and guidance of a few Moravian missionaries. These forlorn people are of Hottentot origin. Of them Buslimc also several tribes have been discovered much farther north, and intelligence has lately reached Europe, that between the Portuguese possessions, in the very centre of South Africa, there is a nation of dwarfish appearance who possess large herds, and who seem to belong to the original Bushmen stock. The island of Madagascar is inhabited by a race of Malay origin, exhibiting traces of Negro and Arabic mixture. The area and population of Africa and its divisions are Fopulat thus estimated: l .DIVISIONS. Area in English square miles. 1 Population. Average Density. No. to a sq. mile. NORTH AFRICA, .... 4,003,600 20,420,000 5 259,600 2 750 000 10 Algeria. . 258,300 2,921,146 11 45,700 2,000,000 43 Tripoli, with Barca and ) Fezzan, .... Egyptian territory, . . Sahara, The MOHAMMEDAN STATES of CENTRAL SOUDAN, . WESTERN SOUDAN, from the Senegal to the Lower Niger, including Upper Guinea, and .... French Senegamliia, . . Liberia, 344,400 659,100 2,436,500 631,000 818,600 96,530 9,580 750,000 8,000,000 4,000,000 38,800,000 38,500,000 209,162 718,000 2 12 1-6 61 47 2 72 3,880 180,000 47 British possessions, . . Portuguese possessions, . EAST AFRICA 17,100 35,880 1,595,000 577,313 8,500 29,700,000 34 0-2 18 158,400 3,000,000 19 SOUTH AFRICA, .... Portuguese ) East coast, territory, West coast, Cape Colony, .... Natal 1,966,000 382,000 312,500 221,310 17,800 16,000,000 300,000 9,000,000 682,600 269,362 8 0-8 29 3 15 Orange R. Free State,. Transvaal Republic,. . EQUATORIAL REGIONS,. . ISLANDS in the ATLANTIC ) 42,500 114,360 1,522,200 2,720 37,000 120,000 43,000,000 99,145 0-8 1 29 37 C. Verd Islands, . . . St Thomas and Principe, Fernando Po & Annobon, 1,650 454 488 38 67,347 19,295 5,590 400 42 42 11 10 47 6,860 145 Tristan da Cunha, . . ISLANDS in the INDIAN OCEAN, 45 233,870 1,700 53 6,000,000 3,000 1 25 2 Abd-el-Kuri, .... 64 616 100 380,000 2 616 Madagascar, .... Comoro Islands (with j Mayotta), . . . J The Arco Islands, &c., . 228,575 1,062 150 970 5,COO,000 64,600 209,737 22 64 216 Mauritius and its de- ) pendencies,. . . } DESERT of KALAHARI and the GREAT INLAND LAKES, .... 70S 783, 6 &quot; ) 322,924 456 AFRICA, . . . 11,556,600 192,520,000 16 1 Compiled from the Tables in Behin and Wagner s Bevijlkej-ung d&r Erde. Gotha, 1872.