Bantu people

“ Again, in the Bantu culture you will find the slaves living in villages apart: inside the true Negro they live with their owners; and there are other points which mark the domestic cultures of these people as being different from each other, which I need not detain you with now. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Before it was split up into its present large number of tribes, the Bantu family believed in the existence of a powerful invisible God; and by no people has the conception been so well preserved as by the Marutse, inasmuch as they retain an idea, however indistinct, of an Omnipotent Being who observes every action and disposes of every individual at his own will. ”

“ 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 ”

“ I have lived amongst the Bantu for nearly thirty years and I have studied them closely, and I have come to the conclusion that there is no Native mind distinct from the common human mind. The mind of the Native is the mind of all mankind; it is not separate or different from the mind of the European or the Asiatic any more than the mind of the English is different from that of the Scotch or Irish people. ”

“ If it is true that the human nature of the Bantu is no whit different from the human nature of the Europeans then it is a fair question to ask why the two races should not be able to live together in liberty, equality and fraternity as people of one nation or body politic. It is because human nature is governed by laws which, unlike the laws of mathematics, cannot be laid down with certainty that we find ourselves unable to give a positive answer to this question. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Negro will adopt, as well as language; but there seem to be two points he does not readily adopt, or rather two points in his own culture to which he clings. One is the religious: in Bantu you find a great female god, who, for practical purposes, is more important than the great male god, in so far as she rules mundane affairs. In the true Negro the great gods are male. There are great female gods, but none of them occupy a position equal to that occupied by Nzambi, as you find the Bantu great female god called among the people who are undoubtedly true Bantu, the Fjort. ”

“ People who, however often they have been displaced, still cling so firmly to the soil, must certainly have great potentialities for good, or all the teachings of racial psychology and history are falsified. This unexpectedly high stage of culture can only be explained by an evolution extending over a period of incalculable length. There is nothing to disprove the great antiquity of agriculture among the Bantu; they are conservative, as their continent is conservative ”

“ There is a more or less indefinite notion abroad that the Bantu languages, as compared with those of Europe, are but poor and ineffective vehicles for the conveyance of abstract ideas, wherefore the capacity to form and entertain such ideas may be taken to be innately inferior in the Native brain. That the language of a people embodies, so to speak, in objective form the intellectual progress made by it is certainly true, and it will be well, therefore, to state briefly the actual and potential value of the Native speech as compared with that of the whites. ”

“ As with most of the tribes of Africa, the chief element [Pg 193] of disturbance in their lives was war. The hand of the Bushman was usually against every man, and every man's hand was against him. The Hottentot tribes were constantly robbing one another of cattle, and on their eastern border were struggling in vain against the advancing Bantu. Most of the time every Bantu clan was at war with its nearest neighbors, whoever these might be. ”

“ The Bantu tribes were healthy and vigorous, but they were rarely at peace.
The three classes of people who occupied South Africa before its settlement by the white man "enjoyed the lives they were leading quite as much as Europeans enjoy their lives, though their pleasures were of a lower kind. Given freedom from disease and a slain antelope, and there could be no merrier creature than a Bushman. He was absolutely devoid of harassing cares.
"A Hottentot kraal, in the clear moonlight of Africa, with men, women, and children dancing to the music of reeds, was a scene of the highest hilarity. ”

“ Many of the distinguishing characteristics of the two regions are doubtless due simply to environment, even the difference in religion. Ancestor-worship occurs most naturally among a people where tribal organization has reached a fairly advanced stage, and is the natural outcome of patriotic reverence for a successful chief and his councillors. Rain-making, too, is of little importance in a well-watered region, but a matter of vital interest to an agricultural people where the rainfall is slight and irregular.
Within the eastern and southern Bantu area certain cultural variations occur ”

“ In fact, taken altogether, it is quite a question whether the higher sections of the Bantu peoples are not our equals. Of course, we have learned more things, and our best men are their betters. But, on the other hand, among them there is nothing so low as the inhabitants of our slums, nor have they any vices which can surpass our vices. Is an assegai so much more savage than a shell? Is there any great gulf fixed between a Chaka and a Napoleon? At least they are not hypocrites, and they are not vulgar; that is the privilege of civilised nations.
Well, with these folk Rachel was intimate. ”

“ No other result apparently can flow from a wanton ignoring of, or running counter to, the immutable principles of nature. Let us but continue as we are doing, to suppress and eradicate the habits, customs, languages, traditions, ideals, etc., etc., of the people, and our ultimate expulsion or absorption by the Bantu races who, in our present ascendancy, we so much [Pg 531] neglect, will follow as surely as day follows night. ”

“ That Negro folk-song is indeed an offshoot from an African root, nobody who has heard Africans sing or even beat the drum can deny. The American Negroes are sprung, of course, from many tribes; but whereas the native traffic in slaves and captives brought individuals from widely separated parts of the continent to the coasts and thus to the European slavers, the great mass of Negroes that filled the slave ships destined for America probably belonged—according to some authorities—to the big linguistic stock called Bantu, comprising some fifty million people south of the equator. ”

“ Many different dialects are spoken by the Bantu tribes, Swahili being the most widely known (see Bantu Languages) . Their religion is the worship of spirits, ancestral and otherwise, accompanied by a vague and undefined belief in a Supreme Being, generally regarded as indifferent to the doings of the people.
The task of civilizing the natives is undertaken in various ways by the numerous Protestant and Roman Catholic missions established in the colony, and by the government. ”

“ The foregoing authoritative opinions serve to show that the Bantu, as compared with other races, labour under no apparent physiological disabilities to hinder them in the process of mental development. Let us now consider in the light of modern psychology upon first-hand and reliable evidence the allegation of mental inferiority that is constantly brought against these people. ”

“ The names by which these people are called vary in each locality, but the most widely used term is Batwa. The name Bantu is the word meaning people in a large area of Central Africa. The singular of this is Muntu, meaning a man. These two terms apply to the large or normal people, not to the pygmies. But curiously enough, the name Batwa is the plural for people with the Batwa pygmies, and the singular of this is Mutwa. These last two terms seem to the writer to be diminutives of the words Bantu and Muntu, so that they mean little people and little man, respectively. ”

“ One must not, therefore, conclude that the Bahima are an irreligious people; like most of the Bantu tribes their religion consists chiefly in dealing with ghosts of departed relatives, and in standing well with them; [pg 191] from the king to the humblest peasant the ghosts call for daily consideration and constant offerings, whilst the deities are only sought in case of great trials or national calamities.”489
The worship of dead chiefs or kings among the Bantu tribes of Northern Rhodesia. To return, now, to the worship of dead chiefs or kings among the Bantu tribes of Northern Rhodesia. ”

“ They have been always a despised race and regarded as outcasts by the Bantu peoples. They were threatened with extermination during the Kaffir wars, but were protected by the British. At present they live in settled communities under civil magistrates without any tribal organization, and in some districts could be scarcely distinguished from the other natives but for their broken Hottentot-Dutch-English speech. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Agriculture is practised on a limited scale. Their temperament is turbulent and warlike, and many of them are cannibals. Their social organization is military, but slavery is unusual. Singular to say, they do not know the bow and arrow, their weapons being the war-club and a lance called an assegai. Their religion is a fetichism, and polygamy is universal. On the whole, they are on a higher level of culture than the Negroes of the Sudan. All the Bantu tribes are mono-glottic, that is, they speak dialects traceable to one original stem. ”

“ 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. ”