Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER H. THE BTJLTT A tribe of The tribes of our neighborhood belong the Bantu. to tne ])antu race. If, as is supposed at this writing to be the case, the Bantu-speaking tribes occupy the southern half of Africa from the 7th degree north of the equator, our neighborhood is in the northern limit of their present occupancy. They are migratory; their drift has been south and west from the heart of Central Africa. Sir Harry Johnston fixes the approximate date at which the Bantu negro left his primal home as not more than two thousand years ago, and notes that he has overrun in his migrations the forest negro, the Nilotic negro, the Hottentot and the Bushman. A Bantu The Bantu is betrayed entirely by speech. fas speech. He has no history except as traced and exhibited in his speech; he has no physical distinction or type?only a typical language, and no cohesion except the cohesion of Ian-, guage. He has wandered spear in hand and the spotted skin of a leopard on his shoulder, not in a horde but in broken companies?through the forests and in thegrass countries of Africa?these two thousand years. At the crossings of rivers tribes have divided, clans have divided, even families have divided as the bolder members have dared to make a crossing which the weaker ones have evaded; until today there are unnumbered tribes, speaking unnumbered dialects, differentiated by local customs, and governed in minor matters by dissimilar traditions. They see each other as through a glass, darkly. But the white man is a mighty hunter and has tracked them to many a secret lair by his instinct for the spoken word. By him they, who have no care beyond the tribe, are discerned as a race and are endowed with a history; and this constructive work is based not upon a written word, or a syst…