Bannu

“ Their places on the border have been taken by various corps of militia, military police, and levies raised locally; communications have been improved; strategic railways have crept further forward; another bridge has been thrown across the Indus; and the frontier is now defended by the Peshawar and Quetta divisions and the Kohat, Derajat and Bannu brigades, moveable columns being held always ready to move out at a moment’s notice from Peshawar, Kohat, Bannu and Dera Ismail Khan. ”

“ The total casualties at Maizar and in the subsequent operations amounted to twenty-nine killed and forty wounded; but during this expedition the troops suffered to an altogether unusual extent from sickness, chiefly diarrhoea and dysentery. The climate of the Tochi Valley is always trying, while the forced march in the hot weather from Khushalgarh to Bannu had no doubt affected the men’s constitutions. ”

“ Pashtu is the common language in Peshawar, Kohat, and Bannu, and is spoken on the western frontiers of Hazara and Dera Ismail Khan, and in the independent tribal territory in the west between the districts of the N.W.F. Province and the Durand Line and immediately adjoining the Peshawar district on the north. Rajasthani is a collective name for the dialects of Rajputana, which overflow into the Panjab, occupying a strip along the southern frontier from Bahawalpur to Gurgaon. ”

“ Between the Márgalla and Kálachitta hills is the Márgalla pass on the main road from Ráwalpindí to the passage of the Indus at Attock, and therefore a position of considerable strategical importance. The Kálachitta (black and white) chain is so called because the north side is formed of nummulitic limestone and the south mainly of a dark purple sandstone. The best tree-growth is therefore on the north side.
Pesháwar, Kohát, and Bannu.—Across the Indus the Pesháwar and Bannu districts are basins ringed with hills and drained respectively by the Kábul and Kurram rivers with their affluents. ”

“ They figure in history, though no modern force has ever made use of them. Tradition points to the former as the route sometimes selected by that arch-raider of the Indian frontier, Mahmud of Ghazni, early in the eleventh century, who is said to have swept down with hordes of irregular cavalry through the band of hills which heads the Tochi Valley with a rapidity that seems incredible in these days, and to have laid waste the Indus Valley from Bannu to Multan.... ”

“ The Bannavs believe in the existence of a multitude of spirits, some mischievous to man, others beneficent. According to their creed, every large tree, every mountain, every river, every rock, almost everything, has its particular genius; but they seem to have no idea of a superior being, sovereign and Creator of all things. ”

“ The women weave pieces of white or black cloth, which they use for coverings, and which, coarse as they are, form the principal article of commerce between the Bannavs and the Cédans.
“The villagers who live on the banks of the river Bla make light canoes, which are both solid and graceful, out of the trunks of trees. Such are the principal articles produced by the Bannavs, who are more backward than any of the other tribes, having little inventive genius. ”

“ A far more important native race than either of these, and one which has taken a place in history as distinct as that of the Indian in America or the Maori in New Zealand, is the Bantu, with its many tribal sub-divisions. ”

“ The Bantu, who include, among other better known tribes, the Zulus, Basutos, Matabele, Makua, Wa-swahili, Wa-nyamwezi, Ba-ganda, Ba-congo, Uepongwé, Fang, etc., present a great variety of types, due, no doubt, to divers mixtures of race, which, as a rule, it is difficult to trace very far back. Their manner of life seems to depend chiefly on the country they live in; they are farmers, shepherds, and fishermen. Certain tribes, such as the Ba-ganda, have formed, and still form, large communities with regular institutions, generally in the form of an autocratic government. ”

“ The legends and traditions of the Bantu peoples themselves invariably point to a northern origin, and a period, not wholly removed from their racial remembrance, when they were strangers in their present lands. Seemingly the Bantu, somewhat early in their migration down the east coast, took to the sea, and not merely occupied the islands of Pemba and Zanzibar, but travelled as far afield as the Comoro archipelago and even the west coast of Madagascar. ”

“ Bantu is the plural of mu-ntu, the general term for a human being common, with hardly any modification, to the languages spoken throughout South Africa, "from the Keiskamma River to the equator on the east, and from Walfish Bay to the Old Kalabar River on the fifth parallel of north latitude in the west"—that is, to the whole of the southern half of that vast continent, with the sole exception of the territories occupied by the Hottentot and Bushman tribes. The term Bantu, it should be added, is mainly used by the natives when speaking of themselves in contradistinction to white people. ”

“ In the north-west of the Bantu field, in the region between Cameroon and the north-western basin of the Congo, the Cross river and the Benue, there is an area of great extent occupied by languages of a “semi-Bantu” character, such as Nki, Mbudikum, Akpa, Mbe, Bayoñ, Manyañ, Bafut and Banshō, and the Munshi, Jaráwa, Kororofa, Kamuku and Gbari of the central and western Benue basin. The resemblances to the Bantu in certain word-roots are of an obvious nature; and prefixes in a very simple form are generally used for singular and plural, but the rest of the concord is very doubtful. ”

“ The Bantu, or as he calls them, Zenji, inhabited the country as far south as Sofala, where they bordered upon the Bushmen. These Bantus were under a ruler with the dynastic title of Waklimi. He was paramount over all the other tribes of the north and could put three hundred thousand men in the field. They used oxen as beasts of burden and the country produced gold in abundance, while panther skin was largely used for clothing. Ivory was sold to Asia and the Bantu used iron for personal adornment instead of gold or silver. ”

“ But not so the crowd of spirits with which the universe is peopled, they take only too much interest, and the Bantu wishes they would not and is perpetually saying so in his prayers, a large percentage whereof amounts to, ‘Go away, we don't want you.’ ‘Come not into this house, this village, or its plantations.’ ” Almost all these subordinate spirits are malevolent.241 A similar but fuller account of the West African creed is given by a German writer, whose statements apply particularly to the Ewe-speaking negroes of the Slave Coast. ”

“ On the contrary, though there is a certain physical resemblance among those tribes who speak clearly-marked Bantu dialects (the Babangi of the upper Congo, the people of the Great Lakes, the Ova-herero, the Ba-tonga, Zulu-Kaffirs, Awemba and some of the East Coast tribes) , there is nevertheless a great diversity in outward appearance, shape of head and other physical characteristics, among the negroes who inhabit Bantu Africa. Some tribes speaking Bantu languages are dwarfs or dwarfish, and belong to the group of Forest Pygmies. Others betray relationship to the Hottentots ”

“ On the other hand, deport the Wahuma into the woods, and supply them with the finest vegetables, and always with plenty of food, and the result is, that they get depressed, their fine brown-black colour changes into ashen gray, the proud haughty carriage is lost, they contract an aspect of misery, and die in despair and weariness. Yet these two opposites of humanity are called Bantu, or men, a term which is perfectly meaningless, and yet as old as the story of the Creation. ”

“ The Bantu woman, tending her garden by day and preparing food in the evening, which she may not partake of herself until her husband and his friends have eaten, is regarded as an unhappy drudge by her European sister. In her own opinion her lot is far more enviable than that of the white woman, whom she regards as being always in a state of anxiety. ”

“ There are countless tribes of Bantu, each tribe having its own language, yet there was originally a primeval Bantu mother-tongue, from which all the dialects of this immense region are undoubtedly derived. The idioms of this family are generally known as the alliteral class of languages. North of the Bantu are the Negroes proper, occupying the greater part of Africa between 5° and 15° north latitude. The negro tribes are multitudinous, and, though alike in their main physical features, are diverse in their speech. ”

“ The Bantu race and languages cannot be an evolution from something inferior; they are a degradation from something superior. Coastwards there are traditions of change and movement on the part of the people; in the east and on the south marauding tribes and slave-hunters have devastated large tracts of country, but there is no sign of general movement on the part of the Bantus.
The traditions of countries along the coast where white men have long settled speak of much greater, more powerful kingdoms in the past ”

“ At the present day the population is, as a rule, of a black or chocolate-coloured Negro type, and belongs, linguistically, entirely and exclusively to the Bantu family. The languages spoken offer several very interesting forms of Bantu speech, notably in the districts between the north end of Lake Nyasa, the south end of Lake Tanganyika, and the river Luapula. ”

“ Even the Bantu people, who probably came later and were certainly more advanced, for they carried on some little cultivation of the soil, remained at a low level. Nature gave them, except in dry years, as much corn as they needed in return for very little labour. Clothing they did not need, and their isolation from the rest of the world left them ignorant of luxuries. When the European voyagers found them at the end of the fifteenth century, they were making little or no advance in the arts of life. ”

“ The proportions of the limbs of the Europeans seem, on the average, to be nearer to the supposed prototype of man than those of the Bantu. The specifically human development of the red lips is more pronounced in the African than in the European, [3] and if there is anything in what has been called the "god-like erectness of the human carriage" then it must be admitted that the Bantu women exhibit a straightness of form which may well be envied by the ladies of civilisation. ”

“ In colour they vary a good deal; some are as black as the 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 [Pg 68] broad, low nose; yet in some the nose is fairly high, and the cast of features suggests an admixture of Semitic blood—an 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. ”

“ The Bandē went on the road and met two men quarrelling over a precious-stone as big as a sheep's eye. Bandē said to them that they should hand him the stone, and that he should run with it, and whoever first caught him should be given the stone. They prepared to race; then Bandē swallowed the stone and disappeared. He came to the territory of a certain khan. In a poor tent lived an old man and an old woman; he lived with them; the old man adopted him as a son to his house. Bandē spit and vomited gold. The old man took the gold to the khan to ask him for his daughter for wife to Bandē. ”

“ Over nearly all this area the Bantu swept; and they assimilated or absorbed the vast majority of the preceding populations, of which, physically or linguistically, the only survivors are the scattered tribes of pygmies in the forests of south-west Nile land, Congo basin and Gabun, the central Sudanese of the N.E. Congo, a few patches of quasi-Hottentot, Hamitic and Nilotic peoples between Victoria Nyanza and the Zanzibar coast, and the Bushmen and Hottentots of south-west Africa. ”

“ There are many superstitions concerning the banyan. One is that lightning never strikes it; 'a notion,' says George Johnstone in his 'Stranger in India,' 'probably founded on experience. The fact, if truth it be, is to be accounted for by the resinous non-conducting quality of its leaves and wood.' With its many stems and evergreen foliage it is the emblem of immortality. The tradition is that all nature will pass away except one big mystic banyan tree. Under this tree the Diety will be enthroned and glorified. ”

“ The Native is not a savage. Even before the whites came to South Africa the Bantu lived in social order under a political system in which the principles of constitutionalism were clearly recognised. To-day the Bantu are simply a race of barbarians in various stages of transition from a crude civilisation to a highly developed civilisation, and we shall do well to remember that the process of transition which we are now witnessing is one in which individual mistakes and failures will be more conspicuous, though no more significant, than the general advance. ”

“ They have large and flourishing schools, from which a considerable number of young Kafirs go out every year among their countrymen and become an effective civilizing influence. There is among the Bantu tribes so little religion, in the European sense of the word, that the natives seem never to have felt the impulse to persecute, and hardly ever to obstruct the preaching of Christianity. When opposition comes, it comes from the witch-doctor or medicine-man, who feels his craft in danger, seldom from the chief. ”