CHAP. XVII WHAT IS A NEGRO? 335 



descendant of the black, woolly-headed races of man in Africa," a 

 definition which probably correctly expresses the popular significance 

 of the term. This is not, however, the sense in which it is used by 

 most ethnographers. As popularly understood the term includes the 

 Bushmen, who are Negrillo, and the inhabitants of Madagascar, who 

 are Malays ; while it excludes all people not inhabitants of Africa, 

 except the descendants of the slaves in America, and the " Sidi " 

 colonies of India. But in ethnology the term Negro is used in three 

 different ways, (i) One school restricts it to a group of tribes which 

 inhabit a comparatively narrow belt of Africa, that stretches with 

 certain breaks from the mouth of the Senegal river (18° N. lat.) on the 

 west coast of Guinea, to near the Equator on the Upper Nile. Their 

 most striking features are a long narrow head, black woolly hair, dark 

 brown or sometimes black skin, and thick lips and broad nose. But 

 the tribes are not united, either by their features or languages, into a 

 homogeneous group. (2) Ratzel distinguishes by the name all the 

 dark, woolly-haired Africans from the light-coloured or long-haired races, 

 such as the Bushmen of the Cape, and the inhabitants of Northern and 

 North -Eastern Africa.^ (3) A third use of the name, and the one 

 which I have followed, includes under it all people with very dark- 

 coloured skins, frizzly hair, and protruding jaws, and most of whom 

 have also broad noses and thick lips. 



According to the use of the term here adopted, the people included 

 as Negro are divided into two groups — the frizzly-haired Papuans of 

 Polynesia, and the Negroes of Africa. The former may be at once 

 dismissed, as they are unrepresented in Africa ; the latter can be 

 divided into four sub-groups — 



1. The North-Western or Soudanese. 



2. The Southern or Bantu. 



3. The Negroid. 



4. The Negrilloid. 



The Soudanese group includes the typical tribes of Negroes, to 

 which Keane and some other ethnographers restrict the term. The 

 members of this group have certain physical characters in common, 

 although these are not easily defined. The languages, however, are 

 extraordinarily numerous, and belong to many distinct groups. This 

 division of the Negro race need not concern us, for although repre- 

 sentatives of it are met with on the western bank of the Upper Nile, 

 none are known to occur in Eastern British East Africa. 



The second group, or the Bantu, occupies nearly the whole of 

 Africa south of a line drawn from the Cameroons to the mouth of the 

 Juba. Here and there in this vast area occur isolated tribes who are 

 not Negro at all. Some of these, like the Bushmen and the dwarfs, are 

 remnants of the aboriginal inhabitants ; others are Hamitic invaders 



1 Ratzel, Volkerkunde, Bd. i. p. 129. 



