Page:George McCall Theal, Ethnography and condition of South Africa before A.D. 1505 (2nd ed, 1919).djvu/167



more important to a student of South African history than information upon either the Bushmen or the Hottentots is a knowledge of the people termed by us the Bantu, because the former are nearly extinct, while the latter to-day outnumber by more than threefold all the other inhabitants of the country put together, and are still increasing at a marvellous rate. The Bantu tribes of Africa south of the Zambesi vary so greatly in appearance, in speech, in customs, and in intellect, that it is evident they do not form one homogeneous race, still the manner of construction of the various dialects in use by them being the same, and one ruling tenet in the religion of them all being identical, they can be classed as a family group by themselves. Of late years a flood of light has been thrown upon the condition of their kindred in Central Africa, and by applying the knowledge thus gained to occurrences which have taken place since the settlement of Europeans in the southern part of the continent, the history of the Bantu family can be traced backward in general terms, though not in a detailed form.

There is only one way of accounting for the existence of the tribes as they are seen to-day all over Africa south of the equator and even some distance north of it. At some time not exceedingly remote a band of people speaking the parent language of the various dialects now in use, and having ancestor worship as their religion, must have entered North-Eastern Africa, as so many bands had done before. The hamitic family had long possessed the land from the valley of the Nile to the Atlantic ocean, and from the Mediterranean sea to the Sahara, negroes had entered the continent, perhaps not very long before, and