IV.] THE AFRICAN NEGRO : II. 87 



supreme being called S0, whose powers are manifested in the 

 dense woodlands, while minor deities preside over the village 

 and the hut, that is, the whole community and each separate 

 family group. Thus both their religious and political systems 

 present a certain completeness, which recalls those prevalent 

 amongst the semi-civilised peoples of the equatorial lake region, 

 and is evidently due to the same cause long contact or association 

 with a race of higher culture and intelligence. 



In order to understand all these relations, as well as the general 



constitution of the Bantu populations, we have to 



The North- 



consider that the already-described Black Zone, East Door to 



... . . .. . Bantuland. 



running from the Atlantic seaboard eastwards, has 

 for countless generations been almost everywhere arrested north 

 of the equator by the White Nile. Probably since the close of 

 the Old Stone Age the whole of the region between the main 

 stream and the Red Sea, and from the equator north to the 

 Mediterranean, has formed an integral part of the Hamitic 

 domain, encroached upon in prehistoric times by Semites and 

 others in Egypt and Abyssinia, and in historic times chiefly by 

 Semites (Arabs) in Egypt, Upper Nubia, Senaar, and Somaliland. 

 Between this region and Africa south of the equator there are no 

 serious physical obstructions of any kind, whereas farther west the 

 Hamitic Saharan nomads were everywhere barred access to the 

 south by the broad, thickly-peopled plateaux of the Sudanese 

 Black-Zone. All encroachments on this side necessarily resulted in 

 absorption in the multitudinous Negro populations of Central 

 Sudan, with the modifications of the physical and mental charac- 

 ters which are now presented by the Kanuri, Hausas, Sonrhays 

 and other Negroid nations of that region, and are at present 

 actually in progress amongst the conquering Fulah Hamites 

 scattered in small dominant groups over a great part of Sudan 

 from Senegambia to Waday. 



It follows that the leavening element, by which the southern 

 Negro populations have been diversely modified 



throughout the Bantu lands, could have been drawn 



6* 



only from the Hamitic and Semitic peoples of the B a a tu Ama1 ' 



north-east. But in this connection the Semites 



themselves must be considered as almost une quantite negligeable, 



