726 BANTU NEGROES 



may be found on Mount Elgon. In these Masaba people the face is very 

 broad in its zygomatic measurement — that is to say, from the edge of one 

 cheek-bone to the other. The cranial development is relatively poor. There 

 is much prognathism, a large upper lip, and retreating chin. The hands 

 are long, the feet are large and clumsy. The knees turn in. and the shins 

 are much bowed. In the men there is a certain amount of scrubby hair 

 about the face, but I did not notice in any example the body-hair which 

 is so evident in the Congo Dwarfs. The colour of their skins ranges from dark 

 ■chocolate to yellowish brown. The legs, however, are not disproportionately 

 short, as they are among some of the forest Negroes in the Semliki Valley. 

 Neither they nor any other of the Bantu Kavirondo circumcise, nor do the 

 Masaba people (so far as I have seen) decorate the body with any pattern of 

 scars or weals. They have a way occasionally of burning the skin with a 

 red-hot iron as a counter-irritant to pain, and this leaves the body with 

 irregular scars on the chest or back, but these are not intended as ornaments. 

 In some of them the face is as much wrinkled as it is in an elderly Bush- 

 man. Those of the Masaba people that dwell more in contact with the 

 Nandi inhabitants of Elgon deck themselves with necklaces and bracelets of 

 iron and ivory ; but the poorer or more savage people seemed to mc to 

 wear nothing whatever in the shape of ornament, and to go almost entirely, 

 if not quite, naked. The "not quite'" is represented by a dirty piece of 

 bark-cloth slung over one shoulder, but generally slung in such a way as to 

 serve the purposes of decency. This is probably only due to the fact that 

 the prudish Baganda, who have been administering their country, have 

 insisted on all persons approaching the Uganda settlements putting on a 

 small amount of clothing. It was a curious fact among these people that 

 the more wild, savage, and degraded they appeared (as we advanced north- 

 wards), the more archaic became their Bantu dialect. 



On the other hand, what one might style the Kavirondo proper — the 

 peoples who dwell in the valley of the Nzoia River from near the south-east 

 •corner of Mount Elgon to the coast of the Victoria Xyanza — are, as a rule, 

 s, handsome race of negroes, exhibiting sometimes, especially among the 

 men, really beautiful physical proportions ami statuesque forms. Here and 

 there, as throughout most of the Negro races (and European, for the matter 

 •of that) there are reversions to an ugly and inferior type representing the 

 Pygmy-Prognathous element which formed the first stratum of the human 

 population in nearly all Negro Africa. Fig. 385, a Kakumega chief, illus- 

 trates this reversionary type with strongly developed brow ridges, a flattened 

 nose with broad, prominent wings, and a long upper lip. On the other 

 hand, Figs. 263 and 34 exhibit comely specimens of Negroes, very charac- 

 teristic of Kavirondo. The men's figures in these specimens are notably 

 fine and well-proportioned, and even the negresses of this type are, in 



