NILOTIC NEGROES 



763 



Bantu Negro stock, but which speaks in a slightly corrupted form a dialect 

 closely allied to the language of the Suk, the Suk again being negroes 

 near akin to the Masai, with a little less Hamitic blood in their veins. 



The unwritten history of the present distribution of these tribes and 

 forms of speech, and of the race movements which brought about the 

 existing mixture of peoples, may be something like this : Imagine Negro 

 Nileland to have been peopled at one time by the Pygmy-Prognathous 

 group in the territories now comprised in the Uganda Protectorate, and 

 perhaps by a kindred race of stunted stature — 



the ancestors of the Hottentots and Bushmen — ' ' 



away to the east in what is now British East 



Africa.* Into these regions came pouring some i ' 



three thousand years ago a horde of West African 

 Negroes speaking the mother-tongue of the Bantu 

 languages. The Bantu possibly came from the 

 north-west, from the region along the water-parting 

 between the Congo and the Nile systems. The 

 rush of the Bantu carried them not only all over 

 the basin of the Upper Nile and "Victoria Nyanza, 

 but they streamed away south-south-east towards 

 the coast of the Indian Ocean. From the north- 

 east, Hamitic people, of Caucasian stock tinged 

 with the Negro, trickled down slowly into the 

 northern territories of the Uganda Protectorate. 

 At one time, no doubt, these Hamites had only a 

 scattered population of Bantu (the Bantu having 

 previously absorbed the antecedent Congo Pygmies) 

 to deal with. They were received with reverence 

 by these then savage West African Negroes (the 

 Bantu), and mingled with them so much at first 

 as to create practically a new breed of Negro 

 such as we now style the Bantu. These Bantu 

 made their first great expansion in the countries between the Mctoria 

 and Albert Nyanzas. Strengthened and improved in mind and body by 

 this infiltration of Caucasian blood, they swejDt down over the southern 

 half of Africa, licking up and absorbing and exterminating the feebler 

 Pygmy races which had preceded them, and implanting their language 

 on other tribes of pure Negroes. This first outburst of Bantu energy 

 having spent its force to some extent, there came other people of allied 

 stock from the west (the ]Madi, for example), s[)eaking languages which 



* The dividing line between the two being drawn through the middle of ilount 

 Elgon down to the south-east corner of the Victoria Nyanza. 



410. A DINKA 



