1905.] on Native Races of the British East Africa Protectorate. 109 



nineteenth century, and the Portuguese made hardly any attempt to 

 penetrate into the interior, and merely held a series of ports to facili- 

 tate their voyages to India. There seem to be no clear proofs of 

 Egyptian, Malay, or Indian influence, though perhaps there may have 

 been a slight and indirect connection between Egypt and Uganda 

 through the Sudan. But the connection of the whole East African 

 coast with Ai'abia is certain and continuous. It is highly probable 

 that the gold miners who erected the temples of Zimbabwe and started 

 that ancient civilisation came from Aralia, and, however that may be, 

 we know that from the tenth century of our era onwards, a stream of 

 colonists flowed from Oman and Maskat to the east coast and founded 

 a long line of cities and fortresses, such asMakdishu, Lamu, Mombasa 

 and Kilwa. When the Portuguese arrived, at the end of the fifteenth 

 centmy, they found a series of independent towns, peopled by Arabs 

 and possessed of a considerable degree of civilisation. After about 

 two centmies of Portuguese rule, the Arabs of the coast invoked the 

 assistance of the niling house of Oman, and about the beginning of 

 the eighteenth century expelled the Portuguese from all their ports 

 except Mozambique. The East African coast then became a nominal 

 dependency of Maskat, and this rather shadowy connection was made 

 a reality in the early part of the nineteenth centmy, when Seyyid 

 Said, the Sultan or Imam of Maskat, took up his residence at Zanzi- 

 ])ar. Though the settlements of the Arabs were almost exclusively 

 on the coast, they penetrated far inland in the prosecution of the 

 slave trade, reached the basin of the Congo, and had a much better know- 

 ledge of the position of the great central lakes than European geogra- 

 phers of the same period. But their one occupation was slave trading. 

 They made no attempt to introduce Mohammedanism or conquer the 

 countries of the interior, but merely deported the inhabitants to the 

 coast or elsewhere. 



Yet another invasion of Eastern Africa from Arabia is represented l)y 

 the kingdom of Abyssinia. The population of this country is mixed and 

 largely Hamitic, both in speech and physique, but the kingdom which 

 still survives in the empire of Menelik was founded by Semitic in- 

 vaders from Arabia some time before the Christian era, and the 

 Ethiopian language, which is still used by the Abyssinian church and 

 survives in more modern dialects, is akin to the language of the 

 Himyaritic inscriptions of southern Arabia. 



Let us now return to the narrower limits of our Eastern African 

 Protectorates, and consider their inhabitants in the light of what has 

 been said. If one makes a journey right across these territories, say 

 from the Indian Ocean to lake Albert, one of the most striking facts 

 is the difference between white and black taste as to what constitutes 

 an eligible residence. The low malarious shores of lake Victoria, and 

 most swampy and steaming localities, are thickly populated by natives, 

 whereas the high cool districts of the interior are very sparsely in- 

 habited, and there are large districts, such as the range of the Mau, 



