IV.] THE AFRICAN NEGRO : II. 97 



and general culture. They are graphically described by Mr Taylor 

 as " a seafaring, barter-loving race of slave-holders and slave- 

 traders, strewn in a thin line along a thousand miles of creeks 

 and islands ; inhabitants of a coast that has witnessed incessant 

 political changes, and a succession of monarchical dynasties in 

 various centres ; receiving into their midst for ages past a con- 

 tinuous stream of strange blood, consisting not only of serviles 

 from the interior, but of immigrants from Persia, Arabia, and 

 Western India ; men that have come to live, and often to die, as 

 resident aliens, leaving in many cases a hybrid progeny. Of one 

 section of these immigrants the Arabs the religion has become 

 the master-religion of the land, overspreading, if not entirely 

 supplanting, the old Bantu ancestor-worship, and profoundly 

 affecting the whole family life." 



The Waswahili are in a sense a historical people, for they 

 formed the chief constituent elements of the re- 

 nowned Zang (Zeng) empire 1 , which in Edrisi's Emp i re a 

 time (i2th century) stretched along the seaboard 

 from Somaliland to and beyond the Zambesi. When the 

 Portuguese burst suddenly into the Indian Ocean it was a great 

 and powerful state, or rather a vast confederacy of states, with 

 many flourishing cities Magdoshu, Brava, Mombasa, Melindi, 

 Kilwa, Angosha, Sofala and widespread commercial relations 

 extending across the eastern waters to India and China, and up 

 the Red Sea to Europe. How these great centres of trade and 

 eastern culture were one after the other ruthlessly destroyed by 

 the Portuguese corsairs cd* o ferro e fogo ("with sword and fire," 

 Camoens) is told by Duarte Barbosa, who was himself a Portu- 

 guese and an eye-witness of the havoc and the horrors that 

 not infrequently followed in the trail of his barbarous fellow- 

 countrymen 2 . 



1 The name still survives in Zangue-bar (" Zang-land ") and the adjacent 

 island of Zanzibar (an Indian corruption). Zang is "black," and bar is 

 the same Arabic word, meaning dry land, that we have in Mala-bar on the 

 opposite side of the Indian Ocean. Cf. also barran wa bahran, " by land and 

 by sea." 



Viage por Malabar y Costas de Africa, 1512, translated by the Hon. 

 Henry E. J. Stanley, Hakluyt Society, 1868. 



K. 7 



