Bantu peoples

“ 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. ”

“ The Bantu-speaking peoples of Africa, ... do not constitute a race apart from the other negroes or offer any homogeneity of physical type. But on the whole they represent so much the average negro type that 'Bantu' is still in favor as a physical definition among craniologists. ”

“ A characteristic trait of the eastern populations is their love of personal ornament, which is gradually replaced by amulets and fetishes. Notwithstanding the assumed incapacity of the Negro peoples to develop ex- tensive political systems, some large Bantu states have been founded within as well as beyond the Congo basin. At the arrival of the Portuguese, towards the end of the fifteenth century, both sides of the estuary as well as a large part of the southern plateau recognised a sovereign who resided in a capital now known by the Portuguese name of San Salvador. ”

“ If the Bantu and Bushmen are so sharply differentiated in all respects, the reason is simply that the former are relatively recent arrivals in southern Africa. The two peoples developed in complete isolation from each other; their present propinquity is too recent for the slow process of cultural and racial assimilation to have set in very powerfully. As we go back in time, we shall have to assume that relatively scanty populations occupied large territories for untold generations and that contact with other masses of population was not as insistent and prolonged as it later became. ”

“ In reality, they are just fifty millions of Negroes whose speech belongs to one of the many language families of 'Negro type'; only in this case the language family instead of being confined in its range to a hundred villages or two hundred square miles, is spread over the southern third of Africa—say over 3,500,000 square miles—from the Cameroons, the Northern Congo, the Nyanzas, and the Mombasa coast to Cape Colony and Natal" (p. 25) , Bantu languages are spoken by peoples of diverse physical types. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Thus in outline was seen the mission of The People—La Bantu as they called themselves. They migrated, they settled, they tore down, and they learned, and they in turn were often overthrown by succeeding tribes of their own folk. They rule with their tongue and their power all Africa south of the equator, save where the Europeans have entered. They have never been conquered, although the gold and diamond traders have sought to debauch them, and the ivory and rubber capitalists have cruelly wronged their weaker groups. ”

“ 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 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 ”

“ 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, 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Three such men as the Zulu Tshka, 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Fundamental experimenting of this kind may, for a season, appear to satisfy, but the day is coming when the Natives, in spite of all our education and evangelization, our concessions of the franchise and other so-called privileges, will remember that they, for the most part, are members of the Bantu family, in spite of the fact that some have already been persuaded to think, and speak, and act like Europeans,—at least, that is what is naïvely supposed by their teachers, as well as by themselves, to be the case. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ To us these relationships are strange and inexplicable; they form categories that we do not understand. To the native these categories are familiar by immemorial association; they have become part of the texture of his mind; and thereby they have acquired emotional values, from the bonds of which he can hardly deliver himself. So it seems that the West African Bantu comprise their entire social system, every activity of their mental and physical life, and every aspect of the external universe under a limited number of categories wholly alien to our modes of thought. ”

“ When these triumphs, analogous to those witnessed amongst the Lacustrians and in other parts of Bantuland, are contrasted with the dull weight of resistance everywhere opposed by the full-blood Negro populations to any progress beyond their present low level of culture, we are the better able to recognise the marked intellectual superiority of the negroid Bantu over the pure black element. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The chief Bantu Negro race of German South-west Africa, tall and well-proportioned, with regular features—a fine Negro type. They are industrious agriculturists, given to raiding and inter-tribal warfare. ”