E.—GEOGRAPHY 107 
consumption is enormous and must be responsible for the destruction of 
thousands of trees and saplings every year.’ Finally, there is the damage 
to seedlings and young trees caused by the annual grass fires which sweep 
the territory. These are started for various reasons. Fire may be 
allowed unintentionally to spread from the garden burning. Hunters 
use fire for two purposes : first, to promote rapid growth of young grass 
to attract game, and, secondly, in the case of organised hunts, to drive the 
animals in required directions. Stock-keepers also start fires to accelerate 
the appearance of fresh pasture, and, furthermore, long grass is disliked 
near villages for various reasons. 
MIGRATIONS. 
While no information was asked for regarding the physical or other 
characteristics of the inhabitants of Northern Rhodesia, yet a consider- 
able amount of data of this kind has been received, and it will be placed 
at the disposal of the anthropologists. Nevertheless it is pertinent 
here to mention some of the geographical effects upon the migrations 
into and within the territory as revealed by tribal tradition and reported 
in the present documents. Most of the migrations referred to have taken 
place within the last two centuries, and the dominant direction appears 
to have been south-easterly from the southern part of the Congo basin. 
Thus the way seems to have been easy for tribes from the Congo-Zambezi 
watershed, either south-eastward through the upper Zambezi area or 
southward, over the peneplane drained by the Kafue, as far as the escarp- 
ment. The north-eastern plateau also seems to have been peopled by the 
present Bantu tribes chiefly from this same Katanga region of Congo, but 
here approach had to be either to north or to south of the Bangweolo 
swamps. The Awemba, who are now dominant in the centre, took the 
northern route, but have pressed south across the Chambezi, driving a 
wedge in the Awisa folk. Other tribes like the Lungu and Mambwe have 
penetrated south-westward from east of Lake Tanganyika. The most 
notable invasion from the south is that of the Makololo from Basutoland 
in the mid-nineteenth century to the country of the Aluyi, whom they 
conquered ; their men were later massacred, yet Sikololo in a modified 
form remains the language of the region. 
British rule has, of course, gradually brought these mass movements to 
an end; but there is one outstanding exception in the Barotse plateau, 
where there has been a steady infiltration of people from Angola from 
1917 onwards, which represents a resuscitation of the older south-eastward 
drift. These immigrants, known collectively as the Mawiko or ‘ People of 
the West,’ and now numbering 100,000 or more, have left Portuguese 
territory when discontented with its administration, and they have now 
penetrated Barotse Province to a depth of nearly two hundred miles. 
A striking feature of human geography throughout Central Africa is 
the relegation of the weaker or more primitive peoples to the least desirable 
areas. In Northern Rhodesia these areas were the swamps of the plateau, 
and the hot lowlands of the Luangwa and the Zambezi below the Falls. 
In the former we find the backward Batwa or marsh folk, whose culture, 
however, has greatly advanced in recent years ; in the Luangwa, the Senga 
