4IO 



NATURE 



[November 25, 1920 



Negro Life in South Central Africa.* 



By Sir H. H. Johnston, G.C.M.G., K.C.B. 



THKRE have l)cen very few books like the 

 two volumes before us published about 

 any people of arrested development, even in 

 Germany, where, before the war, a certain 

 standard of perfection was reached in ethnological 

 treatises. It is difficult to find any 

 fault with the work, in regard to 

 either what has been put in or what 

 left out. The authors are the Rev. 

 Edwin VV. Smith, an honorary chap- 

 lain to the Forces and a Church of 

 England missionary to the Ba-iia, and 

 Capt. Andrew Murray Dale, a magis- 

 trate in the British South Africa 

 Company's administration. Capt. Dale 

 died (unhappily) last year of black- 

 water fever, worn out with much 

 war service. The Rev. E. W. Smith, 

 if I mistake not, saw considerable 

 war service in Italy and elsewhere, 

 and his work with the Forces kept 

 this remarkable book back from 

 publication for some little time. Inci- 

 dentally, I might mention him as 

 well known to students of Bantu. He 

 was the author of a handbook of the 

 Ila language, and an important con- 

 tributor to the information on South- 

 west African languages in my "Com- 

 parative Study of the Bantu." 



The Ila people inhabit the central 

 part of Northern Rhodesia, especially 

 the region through which flows the 

 great river Kafue. (This name seems 

 to be a corrupted and abbreviated 

 form of Kavuvu or Kafubwe, which 

 means "Hippopotamus.") They have 

 evidently been a conquering race of 

 invaders from the north-east which 

 has imposed its language and customs 

 on less courageous tribes of inferior 

 physique. The true Mu-ila is — for a 

 pure Bantu negro — rather a hand- 

 some type, at any rate in beautifully 

 formed and proportioned body and 

 limbs; but other tribes speaking the 

 Chila language to-day are of differ- 

 ent stocks ; some may even go back 

 for their ancestry to Bushmen or to 

 Congo pygmies, and in remembrance 

 of this they are called " Batwa " (dwarfs) to this 

 day. Others, again, belong to the Luba group, 

 the men of which have almost an Arab cast of 

 features and a full beard. 



This most noteworthy work deals with the 

 history, the physical characteristics, clothing 

 (often lacking in the males), building operations, 



J "The !U-speakinij Peop'es of Northern Rhodesia." By the Rev. Edwin 

 W. Smith and *^apt Andrew Murray Dale. In two vols. Vol. i., i>P- xxvii + 

 423: Vol. ii., pp. xiv+433. (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1930.) 

 Price 50J. net two vols. 



NO. 2665, VOL. 106] 



food, domestic animals (their cattle are straight- 

 backed, and seem to have come to them from the 

 west and south, the old Damara-Ngami breed 

 and Portuguese), hunting, warfare, medicine, 

 iron-work, pottery, social organisation, terms of 



I'll.. I. — A Baluba type, from ''The lla-speaking Peoples of Northern Rhodesia.' 



relationship, religious beliefs, relations of the 

 sexes, folk-lore — and what perhaps is most in- 

 teresting and novel, their ideas about psychology, 

 astronomy, biology, the undefined external forces 

 of Nature, thaumaturgy, and therapeutics. The 

 chapter on etiquette brings home to one how 

 minutely these seemingly savage men and women 

 m.ay order their lives by prescribed custom, and 

 what slaves they can be to convention. No newly 

 enriched person in our own land, wishing to move 



J 



