426 
THE KILIMA NJARO EXPEDITION. 
force them to till the soil. Then, as my old Masai 
friend prophesied, they will all become Wa-kwavi, and 
if the original nomad Masai be a fierce, intractable, 
insolent bully, he no sooner becomes a settled agricul¬ 
turist than he changes into the nicest, quietest, honest- 
est, mildest inhabitant in Africa. Therefore, although 
they may fail to see it, the greatest boon En-gai can 
confer upon them is to sweep their cattle off the land. 
Almost exclusively the Masai inhabit the plains round 
the Kilima-njaro district, while the uplands still retain 
the older population of the country. This consists of 
people belonging linguistically and racially to the great 
Bantu family, which occupies nearly all Africa south 
of the Equator. From a linguistic point of view the 
Bantu are absolutely homogeneous—there is no mis¬ 
taking a Bantu tongue for a member of any other 
family. But ethnologically the distinction is much 
disputed. Some good authorities maintain that the 
Bantu races (Kaffirs, Congo, Swahili people, and the 
inhabitants of the great lakes) do not agree amongst 
themselves in any particular type, nor differ markedly 
from other negroes on the Nile or the west coast. 
This is a question of such intricacy, and needing so 
much careful argument, that I am not prepared to enter 
into it here, nor am I ready or anxious to prove the 
racial homogeneity of the Bantu-speaking people. 
While I recognize that there is certainly a great physical 
similarity between the Ovampo, Ovaherero (Damaras), 
the inhabitants of the Upper Congo, the Ba-ganda of 
the Victoria Nyanza, and the Zulus, I admit at the 
same time that there are many other tribes and races 
speaking Bantu languages who differ markedly from 
the fine types above cited. I have seen natives from 
the borders of Lake Nyassa, from the Lower Congo, 
