CHAPTER XIV 



ANGOLAN TRIBES THEIR ORIGIN AND RELIGION 



1~^HE natives of Angola, with the exception 

 of a few Aboriginal people, are Bant; : s, 

 a mixed Hamitic and Negro race, which 

 now occupies practically all Africa south of the 

 Equator. Physically akin to the three Sudanese 

 Negro groups, the Bantu differs from them in 

 culture and in his language of co-ordinated pre- 

 fixes, where a prefix placed before a noun is 

 equally applied to verb, adverb, and adjective in 

 a sentence. From the other races of Africa, 

 whether Hamitic, Semitic, Hova. or Aboriginal, 

 he differs not only in speech and culture, but in 

 physical character as well. 



From their original home somewhere between 

 Lake Tchad and the Congo, where, according to 

 Johnston, they had known both Egyptian and 

 Persian influence, the Bantu people migrated or 

 were driven long ago to found new and widely 

 distributed colonies. He considers that the date 

 of this migration could not have been more than 

 2000 years ago, because the word for fowl, a bird 

 only introduced to the Upper Nile about 400 B.C., 

 is similar among all Bantu peoples, who must 

 have known it in their original home before 

 dispersal. 



