NOTES ON THE EAST COAST BANTU OF EIGHTY 



YEARS AGO. 



By William Hammond Tooke. 

 /. Tonga. 



In 1822 the British Government dispatched two vessels of 

 war to the Indian Ocean on a cruise of survey and observation 

 of the East Coast of Africa, the coast of Muskat, Madagascar, 

 the Seychelles, and other islands in the Indian Ocean. This 

 service was carried out by His Majesty's ships Leven and Barra- 

 couta, commanded by a distinguished officer. Captain William 

 Fitzwilliam W. Owen, under great difficulties, owing mainly to 

 the deadly nature, in those days, of the East Coast malarial fever ; 

 and it was, after the greater number of the crews had fallen 

 victims of the disease, completed in 1825. 



The account of this cruise* gives some interesting informa- 

 tion relative to the geography and ethnology of the country round 

 Delagoa Bay and other portions of the South-East African coast 

 in the early portion of the last century. 



At that time the country was inhabited by a number of 

 tribes who spoke, from Maputa on the South of the bay to as 

 far north as Inhambane, what may be considered as one speech, 

 to which Dr. Bleek subsequently gave the name of Tekeza (a 

 Zulu epiithet derived from " tekeza, teketa," "childish prattle"), 

 but which is now more generally known as the Tonga (Thonga) 

 or Inhambane language group. For it is found to comprise 

 various dialects, known to us (principally through the inde- 

 fatigable labours and researches of M. Henri A. Junod, of the 

 Swiss Mission at Rikatla, Lourengo Marques) as the Hlengwe, 

 the Nwalungo, the Jonga, the Ronga, the Hlangenu, and the Bila 

 dialects.! 



This Tonga or Thonga group must be distinguished from the 

 Ba-Toka or Ba-Tonga of the Aliddle Zambesi basin, and also from 

 the Ba-Tonga (probably an outlying branch of that tribe), who 

 in the sixteenth century occupied a region lying south of Sena. 

 At that date the tribes of the Thonga group lived in what was 

 then called Otongwe under their chief Gamba, who was again 

 subject to the Monomotapa's vassal Sedanda; and the Jesuit 

 missionaries spoke of them as Botonga. Otongwe is now knovvn 

 as Inhambane, and is therefore far distant from the Sena district 

 occupied by the Ba-Tonga. There is nowadays a marked ^lis- 

 tinction between the Zambesi ^basin and the East Coast Tongn 

 languages ; that of the interior is the most archaic, and has 

 thirteen noun-classes as compared with eight in use among the 

 tribes of the littoral. Yet place-names like Pafuri and Panyele 



• " Narrative of Voyages to explore the Shores of Africa, Arabia and Mada- 

 gascar, performed in H.M ships Leven and Barracouia" ; London, 1833. 



t See M Junod's " Grammaire Ronga," " La Langue et la Tribu thonga; " 

 Lausanne, 1896. 



