604 SCIENCE IN AFRICA 



modern variations are derived from one original tongue. Infer- 

 ences from an examination of the ur-Bantu roots are that, prior 

 to their separation, the people kept cattle, not sheep, cultivated 

 the soil, used canoes, that they had the idea of taboo and believed 

 in ghosts. 



The common possession of such cultural traits has often been 

 quoted as evidence of a common racial origin, a method of reason- 

 ing criticized by Edwin Smith, who suggests that there has been 

 a tendency to exaggerate the importance of 'Hamitic blood'. 

 C. G. Seligman (1930) holds that, apart from Semitic influence, 

 African history is a record of the Hamites and their mingling with 

 the more primitive Negroes and Bushmen. Others, including 

 Torday (1930), think that Bantu civilization cannot be due to the 

 ancestors of such primitive pastoral Hamites as the Hadendoa and 

 Beja, ignorant, as they must have been, of agriculture, arts, and 

 crafts. The existence of the two racial stocks, Hamite and Negro, 

 is itself an inference from superficial traits and from the present 

 distribution of the people. It is thought that the brown Hamites 

 spread over North Africa, intermingling with Negroes, and thus 

 formed a series of hybrid peoples. J. H. Driberg (1930) has put 

 forward a reconstruction of this movement. The unrest and war- 

 fare which must have occurred about the beginning of the six- 

 teenth century, when the Portuguese were attempting to gain con- 

 trol in Ethiopia, involved various peoples, including the Galla. 

 These disturbances started the Shilluk warriors and pastoralists 

 on their wanderings north and south, till they invaded the fertile 

 plains to the west of Lake Victoria. There they dominated the 

 Bantu agriculturalists and established the kingdom of Kitara in 

 Ruanda-Urundi, and Ankole, from whence it spread to Buganda 

 and Bunyoro. They set themselves up as an aristocracy ov^er the 

 conquered peoples, with a king and a royal family. Gradually 

 separate kingdoms were created, and the resultant cultures varied 

 according to the number of the invaders in the diiferent legions. 

 Thus in Ankole, the two peoples have kept distinct to the present 

 day, whereas in Buganda there was a blending of cultures. 



The date of the entry of the Semites, the other branch of the 

 white or brown race, into Africa is unknown, but the migration 

 of Arabs into Ethiopia was probably at its height between 1 500 



