LANGUAGES 
479 
jeraha kwa ku-pigwa risasi na Askari yako: natafuta hakki yako. (I should 
not dare to come and see you, Master , were it not that {but) I have got a 
wound through being struck with a bullet (shot) by your soldier: I seek your 
justice .) 
But the basis of Ki-swahili is thoroughly “ Bantu,” and Bantu of a fairly old 
and uncorrupted type. Consequently it is singularly well adapted for a 
universal language in East-Central Africa, as so much of its vocabulary can 
be understood by the Yao, the A-nyanja, the Makua, the Ba-bisa, the 
Awemba, the Wa-nyamwezi, the Ba-ganda, and the tribes of all the coast 
regions of East Africa. It is impossible for the traveller to learn all the many 
different dialects of British Central Africa; equally impossible to expect that 
all the natives for a hundred years to come shall learn to speak English. 
Therefore Ki-swahili—like Hindustani in India—presents itself as a solvent 
of the difficulty. Anyone speaking the language of Zanzibar well and fluently 1 
cannot fail to make himself understood wherever he may go from the Zambezi 
to the White Nile. 
The languages of the country I am describing are allied to Kiswahili as 
Bengali, Hindi, Panjabi, Sindi, Mahratti, Gujrati, are allied to Hindustani: that 
is to say, they are pure Bantu (with, it may be, some deep-disguised infusion 
from the older stock of languages ? Bushman ? Hottentot which they displaced 
one to two thousand years ago), just as the Indian dialects above named are 
pure Aryan (save for some prehistoric absorption of Dravidian elements). 
Before proceeding to describe the principal languages here illustrated I 
may be allowed, perhaps, to say a few words on the Bantu family of African 
tongues. 
Some three thousand years ago we may imagine the southern half of Africa 2 
but sparsely peopled. In the great Congo forests a few pigmies wandered ; 
Eastern, South-Central, and Southern Africa were given up to Hottentot and 
Bushman races ; the Nilotic negroes, perhaps, extended in their range to the 
latitude of Zanzibar, and the West African negro crept down the west coast as 
far as Angola. Then somewhere in the very heart of Africa—north of the 
Congo Basin, west of the Nile Valley, south of the Shari River, and east of the 
Benue—a small tribe of negroes arose speaking a language remarkable for its 
development of governing prefixes, and for the concord system by which the 
pronominal prefix which begins the noun prefaces or is inserted into all the 
adjectives, pronouns, and verbs in the sentence which refer to that noun. The 
“ Bantu ” 3 mother-tongue spoken by this tribe was a sister language to other 
Central and West African forms of speech—related to the stock from which the 
Sierra Leone, Gold Coast, Dahome, Lower Niger, Benue, Niger Delta 4 languages 
sprang. In a more distant way the archaic Bantu tongue must have had 
relationships with the Ful or “Fulfulde” language (of the so-called “Fulahs”), 
with the Tumale speech of Northern Darfur; even with the Hausa. 5 
1 Any diligent person can master Ki-swahili in three months’ study. Too often, however, this 
harmonious, apt, and concise language is misrepresented in Central Africa by a vile jargon picked up 
in the bazaars of Zanzibar—the “ Mimi kwenda huku, wewe kuja hapa” style. 
2 South of the northern parts of the Congo Basin, the Victoria Nyanza and Zanzibar. 
3 Bantu is a representative name applied to this great group of languages by Dr. Bleek, the first philo¬ 
logist to study them. It means literally “ people ”— Ba-ntu (Mu-ntu=a person) and is illustrative of 
the prefix system. 
4 With the exception of the Bonny and Benin languages. These are quite isolated and highly peculiar. 
5 The most remarkable Hausa speech is a connecting link between the Hamitic and the Negro 
language groups. Even at the present day there are many links existing which show the original con¬ 
nection—both physical and linguistic—between the Arab and the Negro. 
