LANGUAGES 899 



Masaba dialects, " Ga-" becomes " Ka-." There is also a tendency for " t " 

 to degenerate into " %," " k," or " r." 



All things considered, with the present knowledge we possess I think 

 we may come to a preliminary conclusion that the territories of the Uganda 

 Protectorate were the seat of the first concentration of the Bantu Negro 

 and his peculiar development of speech. It is possible that in the northern 

 part of these territories, now occupied by Nilotic-speaking peoples, there 

 dwelt a section of the West African Negro which, under powerful influence 

 from the Hamitic north, developed a West African form of speech (akin 

 to some of the existing West African languages) into a tongue using 

 pronominal prefixes and their corresponding chain of particles, and 

 employing a change in the last syllable of verb-roots to modify and 

 extend the meaning of the verb (a very " Hamitic " feature). Rapid 

 increase and a development of warlike energy no doubt carried the 

 ancestors of the Bantu in many directions away from their original home 

 in East Central Africa. They followed to some extent the line of least 

 resistance, and no doubt for a long time respected the barrier of the Congo 

 Forest. As their invasion proceeded westwards towards the Gulf of Guinea, 

 the pioneers, carrying the Bantu forms of speech with them, got inevitably 

 much mixed with the antecedent West African Negro. Elsewhere in the 

 east and south they absorbed numbers of peoples of Dwarfish stock or of 

 Nilotic affinities. The ease with which bands of Zulus at the beginning 

 of the nineteenth century swept up in a few years from South Africa to 

 the vicinity of the Victoria Nyanza, and constituted themselves ruling 

 castes of peoples (in many cases implanting their language at the same 

 time) shows us how rapidly these race movements can be carried out. 

 Elsewhere I have given reasons for supposing that the Bantu invasion of 

 the southern third of Africa does not date further back than 2,000 years. 

 As the Bantu pioneers set forth on their original career southwards, 

 eastwards, and westwards, their original home in the valley or basin of 

 the Nile was occupied by modified types of West African Negroes, such 

 as the Nyam-Nyam and Madi, and by various blends of the Nilotic stock ; 

 so that at the present day the centre from which the Bantu arose to 

 conquer the southern third of Africa is now hidden from our researches by 

 this country having become the home of Negro peoples whose languages 

 betray no connection with the Bantu whom they have superseded. 



