HISTORY 
53 
that until recently the Bushman type was lingering on the upper plateau of the 
Mlanje mountain mass at the south-east corner of the Protectorate. The 
Mananja natives of that district assert positively that there used to live on the 
upper part of the mountain, a dwarf race of light yellow complexion with hair 
growing in scattered tufts, and with that large development of the buttocks 
characteristic of the Bushman-Hottentot type. They gave these people a 
specific name, “ Arungu,” but I confess that this term inspired me with some 
distrust of the value of their tradition, as 
it was identical with the word for “gods.” 1 
The resemblance, however, may have been 
accidental. They declare this people to 
have been found on the top of Mlanje 
until quite recently. Similar rumours were 
collected by a Portuguese officer stationed 
at Mlanje, and by him communicated to 
me, quite independently of my own re¬ 
searches, and the same idea occurred to 
him as to myself, that the traditions 
referred to a Bushman type. I have at 
different times exhaustively searched, or 
caused to be searched, the upper parts of 
the Mlanje mountain ; but although traces 
of human residence in some of the caves 
have been reported, no definite proof of 
the existence of any people differing from 
the modern type was discovered. That is 
to say, traces of human habitation in those 
caves and hollows consisted chiefly of 
fragments of pottery, which is certainly 
not a characteristic sign of Bushman 
habitation. It is probably known to my 
readers, however, that real undisputed portrait of a young bushman 
Bushmen are found (I have seen them 
myself) in South Western Africa, in the same latitudes as the southern 
part of the British Protectorate under review. Bushman tribes were discovered 
by Serpa Pinto and other explorers as far north almost as the 14th parallel 
south latitude, in the countries near the Upper Kunene river. 
Here and there, in Nyasaland, one meets with faces and forms amongst the 
natives which suggest a cropping out of the Hottentot type, as though the 
present Bantu races had, on their first invasion of these countries, absorbed 
their Bushman predecessors by intermarriage. This Bushman-Hottentot 
mixture, however, is not nearly so apparent as it is in the Basuto and 
certain Kafir tribes of South Africa. Indeed when South African negroes 
come to Nyasaland for work and one is able to contrast them with the 
local natives, one is struck at once by the resemblance they offer to 
Hottentots, in their paler skins, more prominent cheek bones, deep set eyes 
and flattened nose. It is evident that the Basuto - Bechuana people 
especially have much mingled with the Hottentots in times past. It would 
seem from the researches of Mr. Theodore Bent in the ruined cities of 
1 Murungu = a god. A-rungu = gods. Yet this is not the ordinary plural which is Mi-lungu or 
Mi-rungu, though it is A-rungu in the more northern dialects. 
