-»t The Languages of Liberia 



allied to this is the Sanda-wi speech which lingers in the northern 

 parts of German East Africa, and which is said to contain clicks 

 like those of Hottentot and Bushman. 



3. The clear-cut Bantu family, which has occupied all 

 Africa, more or less, south of the Equator, excepting the 

 diminishing area retained by the Hottentots and Bushmen. 

 The Bantu family is essentially a Negro speech, remarkable for 

 the use which it makes of pronominal prefixes with their corre- 

 sponding particles and pronouns. It may or may not have been 

 created (not very anciently) by a Hamitic invasion of the 

 southern parts of what is now the Egyptian Sudan, ot the 

 regions on either side of the Mountain Nile. It is possible that 

 hereabouts a laiiguage of West African type existed, allied in its- 

 vocabulary and phonology to some of the great groups still 

 existing in the region of the River Benue, on the Lower Niger, 

 and thence westwards to the Gold Coast. This speech was taken 

 hold of and remoulded by invaders of some superior race,, 

 possibly allied to the Ancient Egyptian or Gala. Once created, 

 the original Bantu mother-tongue resembled somewhat closely 

 the existing languages of Ru-Nyoro, Lu-Ganda, and the Bantu 

 dialects on the western slopes of Mount Elgon. The Bantu 

 mother language must have been the speech of a most powerful 

 and vigorous Negro race, slightly tinged with Hamitic blood. 

 From somewhere in the region between the Victoria and Albert 

 Nyanzas, Mount Elgon and the White Nile, the Bantu Negroes 

 with their harmonious and logical type of language swept in a 

 vast tide of conquest over the southern half of Africa, at a 

 period not perhaps more than three thousand years ago. They 

 rushed down the eastern section of this southern projection of 

 Africa, and attacking the Congo Forest firstly from the south,, 

 they penetrated to the Atlantic coast, and so worked their way 

 up till they were in the region of the Cameroons, from which 



