the mixed race whom the Dutch call Bastards and the English Griquas, and who, though now dying out like the French-and-Indian half-breeds of western Canada, played at one time a considerable part in colonial politics. Along the south bank of the Orange River and to the north of it, in Great Namaqualand, small tribes, substantially identical with the Hottentots, still wander over the arid wilderness. But in the settled parts of the Colony the Hottentot, of whom we used to hear so much, and whom the Portuguese, remembering the death of the viceroy D'Almeida (who was killed in a ! skirmish in A.D. 1510), at one time feared so much, has vanished more completely than has the Red Indian from the Atlantic States of North America. And the extinction or absorption of the few remaining nomads will probably follow at no distant date.

It

Very different have been the fortunes, very different are the prospects, of the third and far more numerous South African race, those whom we call Kafirs, and who call themselves Abantu or Bantu ("the people"). The word " The word "Kafir" is Arabic. has nothing to do with Mount Kaf (the Caucasus), but means an infidel (literally, "one who denies "), and is applied by Mussulmans not merely to these people, but to other heathen also, as, for instance, to the idolaters of Kafiristan, in the Hindu-Kush Mountains. The Portuguese doubtless took the name from the Arabs, whom they found established at several points on the East African coast northward from Sofala, and the Dutch took it from the

good

Portuguese, together with such words as "kraal" (corral) and " assagai." The Bantu tribes, if one may include under that name all the blacks who speak languages of the same general type, occupy the whole of East Africa southward from the Upper Nile, where that river issues from the great Nyanza lakes, together with the Congo basin and most of South-west Africa. They include various 'Rautu be groups, such as the Ama-Kosa tribes (to which belong the Tembus and Pondos), who dwell on the coast of Cape Colony eastward from the Great Fish-ale River; the Ama-Zulu group, consisting of the Zulusulin proper (in Natal and Zululand), the Swazis, the Matabili, farther to the north, and the Angoni, in Nyassaland, beyond the Zambesi River; the Amatonga group, between Zululand and Delagoa Bay; the Bechuana group, including the Bamangwato, the Basuto and the Barolongs, as well as the Barotse, far off on the middle course of the Zambesi; the Makalaka or Maholi, and cognate tribes, inhabiting Mashonaland and Manicaland. The linguistic and ethnical affinities of these groups and tribes are still very imperfectly known, but their speech and their habits are sufficiently similar to enable us to refer them to one type, just as we do the Finnic or the Slavonic peoples in Europe. And they are even more markedly unlike the Hottentots or the Bushmen than the Slavs are to the Finns, or both of these to those interesting aborigines of northern Europe, the Lapps.

The Bantu or Kafirs-I use the term as syno

V

nymous-who dwell south of the Zambesi are usually strong and well-made men, not below the average height of a European. In colour they vary a good deal; some are as black as a Gulf of Guinea negro, some rather brown than black. All have the thick lips, the woolly hair, and the scanty beard of the negro, and nearly all the broad, low nose; yet in some the nose is fairly high, and the cast of features suggests an admixture of Semitic bloodan admixture which could be easily explained by the presence, from a pretty remote time, of Arab settlers, as well as traders, along the coast of the Indian Ocean. As the Bantu vary in aspect, so do they also in intelligence. No tribe is in this respect conspicuously superior to any other, though the Zulus show more courage in fight than most of the others, the Fingos more aptitude for trade, the Basutos more disposition to steady industry. But, while the general level of intellect is below that of the Red Indians or the Maoris or the Hawaiians (if rather above that of the Guinea negroes), individuals are now and then found of considerable talents and great force of character. Three such men as the Zulu Tshaka, the Basuto Moshesh, and the Bechuana Khama, not to speak of those who, like the eloquent missionary Tiyo Soga, have received a regular European education, are sufficient to show the capacity of the race for occasionally reaching a standard which white men must respect. And in one regard the Bantu race shows a kind of strength which the Red Indians and Polynesians lack. They

are a very prolific people, and under the conditions of peace which European rule secures they multiply with a rapidity which some deem alarming.

How long the various Bantu tribes have been in South Africa is a question on which no light has yet been thrown, or can, indeed, be expected. Some of them have a vague tradition that they came from the north; but the recollections of savages seldom go back more than five or six generations, and retain little except the exploits or the genealogy of some conspicuous chief. When the Portuguese arrived in the end of the fifteenth century, they found Kafirs already inhabiting the country from Natal northward. But apparently they did not then extend as far to the west of Natal as they do now, and there is reason to think that considerable parts of the interior, such as the region which is now the Orange Free State and Basutoland, were not yet occupied, but left to the wandering Bushmen. The Kafirs were then, and continued down to our own time, in a state of incessant tribal warfare; and from time to time one martial tribe, under a forceful chief, would exterminate or chase away some weaker clan and reduce wide areas to a wilderness. Of any large conquests, or of any steady progress in the arts either of war or of peace, there is no record, and, indeed, in the general darkness, no trace. The history of the native races, so far as ascertainable, begins with the advent of the whites, and even after their advent remains extremely shadowy until, early in this century, the onward march of settlement

G

gave the Dutch and English settlers the means of becoming better acquainted with their black neigh

bours.

Across this darkness there strikes one ray of light. It is a very faint ray, but in the absence of all other light it is precious. It is that which is supplied by the prehistoric ruins and the abandoned goldworkings of Mashonaland.