108 MAN : PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



were lavished honours and Portuguese titles still borne by his 

 present degenerate descendant, the Portuguese State pensioner, 

 " Dom Pedro V., Catholic King of Kongo and its Dependencies." 

 But Christianity never struck very deep roots, and, except in the 

 vicinity of the Imperial and vassal Courts, heathenish practices 

 of the worst description were continued down to the middle of 

 the nineteenth century. About 1870 fresh efforts were made 

 both by Protestant and Catholic missionaries to re-convert the 

 people, who had little to remind them of their former faith except 

 the ruins of the cathedral of San Salvador, crucifixes, banners, 

 and other religious emblems handed down as heirlooms and 

 regarded as potent fetishes by their owners. A like fate, it may 

 be incidentally mentioned, has overtaken the efforts of the Portu- 

 guese missionaries to evangelise the natives of the east coast, 

 where little now survives of their teachings but snatches of un- 

 intelligible songs to the Blessed Virgin, such as that still chanted 

 y the Lower Zambesi boatmen and recorded by Mrs Pringle:- 



Sina matna, sina mamai, 



Sina mama Maria, sina mamai... 



Mary, I'm alone, mother I have none, 



Mother I have none, she and father both are gone, &C. 1 



It is probable that at some remote period the ruling race 

 reached the west coast from the north-east, and 

 imposed their Bantu speech on the rude aborigines, 

 by whom it is still spoken over a wide tract of 

 country on both sides of the Lower Congo. It is an extremely 

 pure and somewhat archaic member of the Bantu family, and the 

 Rev. W. Holrnan Bentley, our best authority on the subject, is 

 enthusiastic in praise of its " richness, flexibility, exactness, 

 subtlety of idea, and nicety of expression," a language superior to 

 the people themselves, " illiterate folk with an elaborate and 

 regular grammatical system of speech of such subtlety and exact- 

 ness of idea that its daily use is in itself an education 2 ." Kishi- 

 Kongo has the distinction of being the first Bantu tongue ever 

 reduced to written form, the oldest known work in the language 

 being a treatise on Christian Doctrine published in Lisbon in 



Towards the Mountains of the Moon, 1884, p. 128. 

 Dictionary and Grammar of the Kongo Language, 1887, p. xxiii. 



