54 
BRITISH CENTRAL AFRICA 
Mashonaland that those earlier settlers from Southern Arabia, who mined 
for gold some two thousand years ago and less, in South Central Africa, 
were only acquainted with native inhabitants of a Bushman-Hottentot type, 
to judge by the drawings, engravings and models they have left, intended to- 
depict natives engaged in the chase. 
The evidence which I have quoted at length in my book on Kilimanjaro, 1 
and in the prefatory chapters to the Life of Livingstone, derived from a com¬ 
parative study of the Bantu languages, leads me to believe that the invasion 
of the southern half of Africa by big black negro races, nowadays so familiar 
to us, was relatively recent in the history of man—perhaps not much more than 
2000 years ago. Some cause, such as the dense forests of the Congo Basin, 
must have checked their descent of the continent from the Sudan. They 
may also have been held back for a long time—especially on the eastern side 
of the continent where the forests could never have been in recent times a 
serious obstacle —by the sturdy opposition of the prior inhabitants of Bushman- 
Hottentot type. Be that as it may, I do not think the black negroes, the 
present inhabitants of South Central Africa, have been in possession of those 
countries from time immemorial, and in their own traditions they vaguely recall 
a descent from the North. 
It is possible that when the Sabmans and Arabs traded with South-east 
Africa, during the first half of the Christian era, one or another of them may 
have penetrated into the countries round Lake Nyasa. With this proviso, 
however, as to the possibility of such a journey having taken place, it must 
be stated that as far as we know, the Arabs did little more in regard to British 
Central Africa than to settle on the coast of the Indian Ocean,- or to establish 
a trading depot at Sena, on the Lower Zambezi. 
It would seem to me as though 3000 years ago the distribution of races 
in Africa had stood thus. The southern half of the continent, from a little 
north of the Equator to the Cape of Good Hope, was very sparsely populated 
with a low Negroid type, of which the Bushmen and Hottentots, and possibly 
the pigmy tribes of the Congo forests, 2 are the descendants. The North and 
North-east of Africa, from Morocco to Egypt and Egypt to Somaliland, was 
peopled mainly by the Hamites, a race akin in origin and language to the 
Semitic type, which latter was certainly a higher development from a parent 
Hamitic stock. The Hamites themselves, however, obviously originated as a 
superior ascending variety of the Negritic species, from which basal stock 
had been derived in still earlier times the Bushman-Hottentot group, whose 
languages—especially that of the Hottentot—are thought by some authorities 
to show remote affinities in structure to the Hamitic tongues. Westward of 
the Hamites, and an earlier divergence from the original Negritic group, were 
the true black negroes, more closely allied in origin perhaps to the Bushmen- 
Hottentots than to the more divergent Hamites. But 3000 years ago, I am 
inclined to believe that the true negroes were bounded in their distribution 
by the northern limits of the Sahara Desert, the Atlantic Ocean, the great 
forests of the Congo Basin, and either the Nile Valley or the Abyssinian 
Highlands on the East. Here and there these different sections of the Negritic 
stock mingled, producing races superior to the pure negro, like the Nubians, 
the Somalis, and the Fulbe, which dwell more or less on the borderland between 
the negro and the Hamite. When the true negroes invaded the southern half 
1 The Kilimanjaro Expedition, pp. 478-4S3. 
2 These latter much mixed I am sure with the black negroes. 
