256 ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH. 



do not trouble about any other food. The territory inhabited by 

 this tribe is dreary in the extreme, and for a people devoid of 

 proper home and with insufficient clothing, it is very unhealthy, 

 owing to the rapid changes of temperature, the violent winds 

 which bring clouds of dust, and the heavy damp fogs at night. It 

 is little wonder, then, that the people are saturated with disease, 

 and are in every sense degenerate. 



Their pastoral habits have been almost entirely abandoned since 

 the German occupation of Great Namaqualand, as the boundary 

 between British and German territory cuts right through their 

 original tribal grounds, and they can no longer wander where they 

 will. Thus the whole tribe has been reduced to the condition of 

 the Strandloopers of early Dutch days. 



In spite of such unpromising material and such dismal sur- 

 roundings, my best results were olitained in Walfish Bay. 



It is very probable that the Topnaars broke away from the 

 main stream of Hottentot migration many centuries ago. As they 

 wandered southwards with their flocks they came upon these 

 'Naras fields, where food was to be had six months in the year 

 for the simple picking of it. Yielding to the temptation they 

 remained in the neighbourhood of Walfish Bay in the desert 

 coastal zone. For years they must have been isolated, and when 

 other people broke in upon them it was American and English 

 sailors who were hunting whales along the West Coast. 



The coming of the white man was the beginning of their ruin, 

 but their degeneration has been unaccompanied by much contami- 

 nation of tribal custom. It has become gradually laxer and less 

 complicated and tribal lore less rich, but what there is is pure. 

 Hence I was able to make fairly complete studies of their social 

 and tribal organisation, their sociology, and partly, too, of new 

 aspects of their religious and magical beliefs. 



Law and government could not be studied here, as the tribe 

 has been too long under English influence and jurisdiction. I 

 therefore went inland to Berseba, in German South-West. where 

 the Gai Khauas, a tribe which originally inhabited the Tulbagh 

 district in the Cape Colony, and migrated across the Orange River 

 after 1809, when chieftainship was abolished by the British, still 

 nominally retain their old tribal organisation, and are governed 

 by their own laws under their own captain. The tribe is unfor- 

 tunately not pure, as many of the families were bastardised before 

 ever they crossed the river. Their customs are, therefore, much 

 modified by Dutch influence, and great caution has to be used in 

 coming to any conclusions regarding their original culture. How- 

 ever I gained many new lights upon their culture here. 



All the other tribes which originally inhabited German South- 

 West are now disintegrated, and the whole people is fast degene- 

 rating and becoming bastardised. Unlike the Bushmen, who died 

 out pure, the Hottentot is disappearing only to leave a rapidly 

 increasing tainted population of Bastards behind him. Indeed,. 



