NATIVES OF BRITISH CENTRAL AFRICA 393 
from this sweeping statement as showing an unmistakable mingling with a 
lighter race and being more Negroid than negro. 1 Nevertheless, within this 
wide domain of the black negro there is a remarkable general similarity of 
type ; though it is usually possible for the practised eye to distinguish one tribe 
from another by the physiognomy. Yet if you took a negro from the Gold 
Coast of West Africa and 
passed him off amongst a 
number of Nyasa natives, and 
if he were not remarkably 
distinguished from them by 
dress or tribal marks, it would 
not be easy to pick him out ; 
but though there is often an 
indefinable resemblance be¬ 
tween the individuals of one 
tribe which distinguishes them 
from the average individual 
of another tribe, still there 
are so many exceptions to 
this uniformity of type that 
the negro from a widely - 
removed part of Africa might 
pass muster in almost any 
people in the British Central 
Africa Protectorate as merely 
a slightly aberrant local type. 
The average individual of one 
tribe is taller or shorter than 
another, but all races of black 
negroes can exhibit very tall 
individuals and very short 
ones belonging to the same 
racial type. In the colour of 
the skin there is a consider¬ 
able amount of variation. 
Here again there are extremes 
met with in the individual 
members of a tribe, as well 
as a general tendency to be detected in one tribe or another towards greater 
av.erage darkness or lightness of skin. As a rule the negro of British Central 
Africa is decidedly black, so far as any human skin is really black — the 
nearest approach to actual black being a deep, dull, slatey-brown. I should 
say that the average skin tint is represented by No. 3 in Topinard’s specimens 
of the colours of skins,—that is to say it is a dark chocolate. But cases 
of a yellowish brown are not at all uncommon in individuals. This tint 
would be represented by No. 4 in Topinard’s scale, except that it has a 
little more of the raw sienna colour than is given in Topinard’s example. 
The negroes of the western parts of the regions under review, in Itawa, on 
1 The Galla and Somali are of course emphatically Negroid, and are not included in this statement 
at all. They are simply darker types of the Hamitic branch midway in type between Semite and the 
Negro. 
AN ARAB OF TANGANYIKA (kUMALIZA) 
