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Updated: June 27, 2025
Lenz , Bouet-Williaumez , Hecquard , Bosman , and Baker all bear witness to this, and Schweinfurth tells us of great cattle parks with two to three thousand head and of numerous agricultural and cattle-raising tribes. The Negroid Gallas have seven or eight cattle to each inhabitant. Livingstone bears witness to the busy cattle raising of the Bantus and Kaffirs.
The Bantus crowded more and more upon the primitive Bushmen, and probably a mingling of the Bushmen and the Bantus gave rise to the Hottentots. When South Africa was first discovered there were two distinct types of Hottentot. The more savage Hottentots were simply large, strong Bushmen, using weapons superior to the Bushmen, without domestic cattle or sheep.
All the people, of whatever color, were Mohammedans, and the richer were clothed in gorgeous robes of silk and velvet. They traded with the inland Bantus and met numerous tribes, receiving gold, ivory, millet, rice, cattle, poultry, and honey.
Hence, says the Tschwi proverb, "One day in this world is worth a year in Srahmandazi." The Tschwis, with their usual definiteness in this sort of detail, know all about their Srahmandazi. Its entrance is just east of the middle Volta, and the way down is difficult to follow, and when the sun sets on this world it rises on Srahmandazi. The Bantus are vague on this important and interesting point.
There are the Masai, chocolate-colored and frizzly-haired, organized for war and cattle lifting; and Negroids like the Gallas, who, blending with the Bantus, have produced the race of modern Uganda. It was in this region that the kingdom of Kitwara was founded by the Galla chief, Kintu. About the beginning of the nineteenth century the empire was dismembered, the largest share falling to Uganda.
The Negroes and Bantus are at one on these subjects in one particular only, and that is that no marriages take place there. The Tschwis say that this under-world, Srahmandazi, is just the same as this world in all other particulars, save that it is dimmer, a veritable shadow-land where men have not the joys of life, but only the shadow of the joy.
So far we have traced the history of the lands into which the southward stream of invading Bantus turned, and have followed them to the Limpopo River. We turn now to the lands north from Lake Nyassa. The aboriginal Negroes sustained in prehistoric time invasions from the northeast by Negroids of a type like the ancient Egyptians and like the modern Gallas, Masai, and Somalis.
The uniform custom among both Negroes and Bantus is that those who escape execution on the charge of having witched the husband to death, shall remain in a state of filth and abasement, not even removing vermin from themselves, until after the soul-burial is complete the soul of the dead man being regarded as hanging about them and liable to be injured.
"Hi, hi, don't you hear? come back, come back. See here. This is your place," etc. This custom holds good among both Negroes and Bantus; but the funeral ceremonies vary immensely, in fact with every tribe, and form a subject the details of which I will reserve for a separate work on Fetish.
The Calabar natives are notably behindhand in their medical methods, depending more on ju-ju than the Bantus. In a case of rheumatism, for example, instead of ordering the hot bath, the local practitioner will "woka" his patient and extract from the painful part, even when it has not been wounded, pieces of iron pot, millipedes, etc., and, in cases of dysentery, bundles of shred-up palm-leaves.
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