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Proceedings of the Royal Society 
tlie reputation of being “ half men and half dogs, with a fan-like 
tail,” and of having a disposition to eat their fellow-creatures, 
prove, on nearer inspection by the traveller Piaggia, to be men of 
powerful, regular, and fine figure, of stately carriage, with bronze- 
coloured skin, long hair, and thick beard, barbarous indeed in their 
customs, but not cannibals. They are considered to be identical 
with the interesting race of the Fellatah, the dominating people of 
the western Soudan, or are perhaps a step between these and the 
G-allas of the east. 
Burton describes the peoples he met with between the east coast 
and the Lake Begion :—“ The Sawahili of the Zanzibar coast are 
sprung from the intercourse of foreign traders and emigrants, Phoe¬ 
nicians, Jews, Arabs, and Persians, with the African aborigines. 
The Balonda people of the kingdom of the Muata Yanvo, to the 
west of Lake Tanganyika, are almost pure negroes; and between 
these and the mixed east coast there is a tolerably regular grada¬ 
tion of negroid races from east to west, brought about partly by 
long intercourse with foreign settlers, and in part by intermixture 
with the non-negro races of North Africa. The high road from 
the coast to Ujiji runs through comparatively quiet and peaceful 
races.” “ Cannibalism,” says Burton, “ is rare in Eastern Africa, 
and results either from policy or necessity.” 
The aspect of the great mass of this negroid race is not unpre¬ 
possessing. They are tall and well-made mulattos, rather above 
the European standard. A giant or a dwarf is never seen. The 
people of the maritime regions have rough dirty skins of a dull 
pale black, like that of diluted Indian ink; from the central ele¬ 
vation of the eastern plateau the complexion improves, and further 
inland the yellow skin, so much prized in Eastern Africa, appears. 
From the Unyamwesi plateau to Tanganyika Lake, in those lower 
levels where heat and humidity are in excess, the people become 
lamp black, without a shade of brown. The negroid races appear 
to extend down the outer slope of the continent to near the Zam¬ 
bezi valley southward. 
Livingstone speaks of the negro peoples of the shores of Lake 
Nyassa; and Silva Porto describes the natives he met with in the 
northern watershed of the Zambezi valley as “hospitable negroes.” 
The Biver Zambezi is nearly the boundary between the negroes 
