Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/877

Rh Z U L Z U L 827 iii. . . . (1868), and, for further references to ancient and modern sources, the editions of the Periplus by C. Miiller (Geoff. Gr. Min., i. 259) and Fabricius (1883). An Italian protectorate over the district of Zulla was proclaimed in 1888. ZULULAND, a territory of South Africa, lying to the north of the colony of Natal, with a coast-line of about 130 miles (see vol. i. pi. II.). It is occupied chiefly by Zulu tribes; but since its conquest by England in 1879 a Boer republic, known as the New Republic, has been carved out of it, which extends into the centre of the country from the Transvaal on its north-west, and comprises an area equal to nearly one-half of the remaining portion of Zululand. This portion is composed of a strip of country adjacent to Natal, lying to the south of the Umhlatuzi river, and the district extending along the coast to the north of that river for a distance inland varying from 50 to 70 miles. The former piece of country has been known since 1882 as the Zulu Reserve. It is bounded on the south-west by the Tugela, Buffalo, and Blood rivers, the last-named being one of the borders of the Transvaal Republic. Zululand presents very varied physical features : undu lating country covered with mimosa &quot; bush,&quot; in some parts very densely, alternates with wild and fantastically broken scenery, and thickly-wooded precipices and ravines, and these again with grass-clad hills. Two considerable forests exist in the country, one, the Ingome Forest, lying in northern Zululand, just within the territory recently ceded to the Boers, the other upon the Natal border. These pro duce the varieties of timber mentioned under NATAL. The Avholesale destruction of woods for domestic purposes, which has robbed that colony of much of its beauty, and is believed to have seriously affected its rainfall, has not proceeded very far at present in Zululand. The mineral resources of the country have yet to be investigated, but gold has been recently found in the Reserve. The rivers, like those in Natal, are rapid streams of small volume, running over rocky beds ; the Tugela river is the most considerable. The climate differs but little from that of Natal. The country is very healthy for the most part ; but horse sickness prevails in the valleys in the hot season, and the swampy neighbourhood of St Lucia Bay, a lagoon Iving at the mouth of the Umfolosi river, is uninhabitable. Like the Natal natives, the Zulus cultivate the ground very superficially, planting maize, gourds of several kinds, and a grain from which a light beer is prepared. Cattle, the sole wealth of the people, were at one time very numerous in the country, and also goats. A few of the chiefs use horses. Long after big game had become scarce in Natal, Zulu- land offered excellent opportunities to the sportsman. It still has antelopes of various kinds, including a few koodoo, and, at the mouths of the more northern rivers, hippopota muses ; but the buffalo and rhinoceros are not met with farther south than the densely-wooded hills near the Um folosi river. The lion is not seen south of the Lebombo Mountains in the north of Zululand, but the leopard and smaller carnivores are plentiful enough in the country. Its natural history is similar to that of Natal ; but indica tions are not wanting in its fauna and flora of its closer proximity to the tropics. Language. With the exception of the tongues spoken by the Hottentot- Bushman tribes of the south-west, the languages of Africa from about 5 north of the equator southwards are now recognized as forming one great family, for which the designation Bantu has been adopted, the word abantu in Zulu and other members of the group denoting &quot; people &quot; (plural inflex aba, root ntu). The Zulu tongue, as that of a conquering and superior race, extends beyond the river Zambesi, and is often understood even where another language is the vernacular. In the kingdoms of Lobengula and Umxila it is the language of the ruling classes. Philologists speak highly of the beauty and flexibility of the Bantu languages, and of their grammatical structure. To the student of comparative philology they offer a field of inquiry of the highest importance, both on account of the vast domain occupied by them and of the deep insight they afford into the structure and growth of human speech in general. This great linguistic family occupies about one-half of Africa, extending from near the Niger delta in the north-west, and from Lake Albert Nyanza farther east, to the south-eastern ex tremity of the continent. It thus comprises such widely separated peoples as the Ba-Farami and Ba-Kwiri of the Cameroons region and the Zulu-Kaifres of the south-east coast on the one hand, and on the other the Wa-Ganda of the Somerset Nile and the Ova-Herero of Damaraland on the south-west coast. But, notwithstanding this widespread range, and although none of the dialects have possessed any written standard till quite recent times, being in fact every where spoken by peoples of low culture, the Bantu is distinguished above all other great linguistic families, except perhaps the Semitic, for its astonishing homogeneous character. So close is the resem blance the different branches bear to each other that philologists have been able to describe in broad traits the more salient features of the phonetic system, structure, and syntax common alike to all. They speak unconsciously of the Bantu language, as if it were every where essentially one, and this surprising uniformity is reflected in the geographical, and especially the ethnological, terminology of the southern half of the continent. Thus the national or tribal place prefix in its various dialectic forms aba, ba, ama, bua, vua, ova, wa, mu, ap, &c., is of constant occurrence throughout the whole of this region. Their close uniformity is further shown in their common phonetic system, which is at once simple and harmonious, requiring all words to end in a vowel, rejecting all consonantal juxtapositions, except a few characteristic nasal combinations, such as ng, mb, nd, nt, nw, mf, nk, ns, throwing the accent as a rule on the first vowel of the stem (meso), and lastly repelling all harsh sounds, except the three intruding Hottentot clicks in the Zulu-Kaffre group. Nearly all the consonantal sounds, ranging from about eighteen to twenty, occur in English, while the vowel system everywhere corresponds to that of Italian. But the most marked feature of the Bantu tongues is their so-called alliterative concord, which has been com pared both to the gender concordance of Aryan and the progressive vowel harmony of Ural-Altaic. But it differs from the former inasmuch as it is initial and not final, and extends to the verb as well as to noun, adjective, participle, and pronoun, as if we should say in Latin, Domina mea pulchra, ama cum. Thus, in the Kongo dialect, c kinluku kiaku kiavididi ezono kisolokele=&quot;ie coat you lost yesterday it turned up.&quot; It differs from the Ural-Altaic system inasmuch as the concordance is regulated, not by the root vowel influencing those of the agglutinated postfixes (see URAL-ALTAIC), but by the prefixed particle, the true nature of which has not yet been determined. But a comparative study of the Bantu tongues shows that in the archaic language whence all descend each noun had a proper prefix of its own, which prefix determined both the class to which the noun belonged and the concordance of all words in the sentence dependent on that noun. That such is the correct view is evident from the fact that, even where the noun has lost its prefix, as sometimes happens, this prefix nevertheless reappears in the dependent adjective, thus revealing its original form. We see, for instance, that nti &quot;tree&quot; was originally in the plural mi- nti, because the following adjective still takes mi, as in nti minndioelo = &quot; small trees.&quot; Bleek, the true founder of Bantu philology, has determined in the organic language eighteen such prefixes which still persist to a greater or less extent in the different branches, and have in some even been added to, as fi, for instance, in Kongo (W. H. Bentley). The analogy of this alliterative concord with the so-called Aryan grammatical gender is obvious, showing that the Aryan languages themselves were originally non-gender lan guages and that their present gender agreement is essentially a ques tion of phonetic harmony and not of sex in any intelligible sense of the term. Hence also the extraordinary phenomenon of sex in this system apparently applied to inanimate objects. Another remarkable feature of Bantu grammar is the wonderful development of verbal inflexion, which is both final and initial. The final, which in some groups yields as many as 300 distinct forms, each conjugated throughout, belongs to the verb itself in its various active, passive, middle, negative, repetitive, reciprocal, causative, and other meanings. The initial expresses mood, tense, person, number, and alliterative concord, and the whole system is immensely complicated by the fact that, as in Basque, the Caucasian, American, and some Ural-Altaic languages, the verb incorporates the direct pronominal object. Thus: ikuntala = &quot; I-see-him ;&quot; tukutala= &quot; we-see-you ; &quot; bckwatala= &quot; they-see-them ; &quot; and so on. Hence the form kuntonda= &quot; to-see-her,&quot; for instance, will be conjugated throughout, the result being a luxuriant growth of verbal forms fully comparable to that of the richest Ural-Altaic languages. Bleek has subjected to a comparative study twenty-five members of the family, selected from almost every region that had been ex plored up to his time (1862). Since then further geographical dis covery, especially in the Congo and Ogoway basins, lias revealed
 * / O