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DE. THEAL AND THE RECORDS OF SOUTH-EAST 



AFRICA. 



BY 



Rev. \\'. A. Norton, M.A., B.Litt. 



Unirersity of Cape Toini. 



head July 13, 19:^:^. 



Looking up Dr. Theal's Records of South-East Africa once 

 more, in connection with Sir H. Johnston's expressed expecta- 

 tion of philological remains of that historian, it occurred to me 

 that some knowledge of comparative Bantu philology is just what 

 we need in historians of South Africa. I was speaking to one 

 of these not long ago, who mispronounced Bantu names con- 

 sistently, making it almost impossible to recognise them. Yet, 

 working on the early Portuguese records, 1 was convinced that 

 a knowledge of Bantu philology, brought to bear on the place 

 names therein occurring, would throw a flood of hght on the 

 history. We need a critical edition of these records, with refer- 

 ence to the original MSS. Take Dr. Theal's edition of them, 

 which have done such splendid service in their time: in Vol. I., 

 pp. 58 — 60 (1898), the personal name of one of the Monomotapas 

 appears in the Portuguese as Quesaryingo, Quesarimgo, Quecary- 

 nugo, Quecarimugo, Quecarinuto, and Dr Theal's English gives 

 the further forms Kwesaringo, Kwekarimugo, etc., though the 

 prefix is rightly Bantuised by him in the case of Quiloa (Kilwa) 

 on a previous page. Probably a re-examination of the MS. by 

 someone expert in comparative Bantu would clear up the diflti- 

 culty. It may be said that the name of a Kafir Chief does not 

 matter, but it will hardly be an historian who says so, seeing 

 that similar difficulties are thickly strewn over these records. 



Dr. Theal, that veteran scholar, whose recent loss we 

 deplore, expressed his belief that Oriental sources also would be 

 found to produce a mass of evidence in Arabic, Swaheli, etc., 

 bearing on the history of Africa, if onW these could be searched 

 for, but there, again, the Bantu comparative philologist would 

 be needed, as well as the Oriental scholar. In recent work on 

 the early geographers, that has certainly been my experience. 

 Such kind of work should be in a high degree ancillary to African 

 history, yet we have almost none of it at present, and it is work 

 that can only be done by comparative students of Bantu and 

 Semitic, etc., whom at present, so far as South Africa goes, we 

 can number, I might almost say, on the fingers of one hand ; 

 and until the public mind gives more encouragement to this 

 branch of research, that state of things is likely to continue. 



One reason is the enormous width of the subject of Com- 

 parative Philology, even in regard to African languages (the 

 Bantu and Semi-Bantu alone now reach nearly 300), and its 

 practical incompatibility with a really complete and perfected 

 stud,y of even one language in all branches of its comparative 

 literature. Yet we hear academics, blamelessly qualified to teach 

 the classics, or some one modern language, with all the aids 

 which centuries, nay millenia of study (in the former case) may 



