l86 NATIVK IDEAS OF GOSMOLOGV. 



ganda anywhere in the country, and have not heard of any from 

 others with better opportunities of obtaining information than I 

 have. There may have been some going on amongst the mari- 

 time tribes, ever since the Arabs began creeping down the coast, 

 but it never penetrated the hinterland to any extent. I do not 

 think that Mohanmiedans, certainly the more intelligent of them, 

 would deny the immortality of women, as Mr. Heinans seems 

 to believe. This opinion seems to be unfounded. The mere 

 fact that the obligations of religion rest equally upon women 

 as well as men, proves that, they have souls entitling them to 

 entrance to Paradise. Mr. Hemans also writes of the elevation 

 and purity of the Abenanzwa belief. I think he is mistaken to 

 some extent in this. I have not found such individuals as I 

 have examined in the matter of religious belief so far above the 

 ordinary natives of the country. They are certainly supersti- 

 tious to some extent. We shall now consider shortly the deriva- 

 tion of these ideas of cosmogony. With the exception of the 

 story current among the Abenanzwa, the others have a fairly 

 close resemblance to each other, and are evidently different forms 

 of one original story. The water and the darkness are features 

 common to other cosmogonic myths of America as well as Asia- 

 Do their indicate, for exatuple, any connection with Egypt in 

 the remote past? This raises the question of the origin of the 

 Bantu themselves. It will be remembered that at the joint meet- 

 ing of the British and South African Associations for the Ad- 

 vancement of Science in 1905, two papers were read on the 

 " Racial Affinity of the Hottentots," by Prof. F. von Luschan, 

 and on the " Language of the Hottentots," by Prof. Carl Mein- 

 hof.* These writers gave strong reasons, both morphologically 

 and linguistically, for thinking that the Hottentots were Hamites, 

 and that their language was Hamitic. That being so, it was 

 probable that they originated in the north or north-east of Africa. 

 Dr. Theal, in his " Yellow and Black-skinned People of South 

 Africa," places the origin of the Hottentots in Somaliland very 

 probably as the result of a cross between Hamites (Egyptians) 

 and Bus'hwomen.f Meinhof and von Luschan further showed 

 that the Hottentot and Bushman languages were originally cjuite 

 distinct, that while Hottentot was Hamitic, Bushman belonged 

 to the isolating class of languages with its nearest analogues in 

 the isolating negro languages of the western Sudan. My own 

 investigations into some of the Bushman tongues of 

 the northern Kalahari have, however, led me to the 

 conclusion that originally there was some relationship 

 between the Hottentot and Bushman languages. Von 

 Luschan showed that there were other Hamitic tribes in 

 East Africa, such as the Warunda, Wahyma, and Masai, for- 



* Addresses and Papers, Rrit. and S.A. Assocs. for x\dv. of Sc. (iqo5). 

 3. iri-129. 

 t P. 60. 



