The Origin of the Bantu

Author(s): H. H. Johnston
Source: Journal of the Royal African Society , Jul., 1907, Vol. 6, No. 24 (Jul., 1907), pp.
329-340
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Royal African Society

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/715061

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

and Oxford University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to Journal of the Royal African Society

This content downloaded from

41.204.172.27 on Tue, 06 Dec 2022 17:35:47 UTC2:34:56 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 JOURNAL OF THE
AFRICAN SOCIETY
VOL. VI. NO. XXIV.

JULY, 1907

NOTE.-There are many subjects in Africa, such as Racial C

and Industrial Conditions, Labour, Disease, Currency, Ban
on, about which information is imperfect and opinion di
complicated and difficult questions has Science said the
circumstances it has been considered best to allow those
opinion to express freely in this Journal the conclusions at
have arrived. It must be clearly understood that the obj
gather information, and that each writer must be held respo

THE ORIGIN OF THE BANTU

Review of a Preliminary,
Town), published Study
by theon this
Cape ofsubject by Mr.
Good Hope J. F.
Governm

MR. VAN OORDT received a small grant in

Government of Cape Colony in order to pros
into the history of the Bantu languages a
the results of his investigations have now b
by the Cape Government. The author ha
honour of requesting that I should review
I take this opportunity of doing so in the
JOURNAL OF THE AFRICAN SOCIETY. But t
altogether a happy one, as I find myself dif
strongly from the author's conclusions and
at the same time impressed with his zeal an
his researches, and deeply regret not to
agreement with him on all points. But th
of such importance to students of Africa

This content downloaded from

41.204.172.27 on Tue, 06 Dec 2022 17:35:47 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
330 JOURNAL OF THE AFRICAN SOCIETY

Oordt himself would agree that it would be a poor com

ment to his own interest in the subject if I subordin
my beliefs to a desire to express myself politely a
insincerely.
The main thesis of Mr. Van Oordt's work is to ascribe
the Bantu languages to the influence exercised on Afric
apparently at no very remote period-by what he cal
section of the Ugro-Altaic peoples. Under this heading
groups together a large number of Asiatic languages
those of the Turco-Finnish stock, of Tibet, Burma, the
Malay Peninsula, and parts of India; but in one or two
passages he apparently confuses with these the Dravidian
tongues of India, and again, he ascribes the dialects of
Madagascar to a Dravidian originl identifying the Sumerian
people of Mesopotamia with the Ugro-Altaic or Finnish
stock. The author assumes that these people as a conquer-
ing race crossed Arabia and entered North-East Africa,
eventually founding the amalgam of race and language
which became what we now know as Bantu. As regards
other connections between Africa and Asia, he attempts to
trace a linguistic relationship between the Hottentots and
the Semangs, a negroid people of the Malay Peninsula.
Incidentally he remarks (in a footnote on p. 41) that the
more the question is studied the more one must come to
the conclusion that the line between the Negro and the Bantu
is f5r too sharply drawn, and that in reality it is very diffi-
cult to find the borderland between these two; yet in other
passages he would seem to attach to the Bantu group of
languages a singularity and a special position as an essen-
tially non-African type of speech.
A great deal at the present day that is supported by
much less research than the theories of Mr. Van Oordt is
being printed and circulated on the subject of the Bantu
1 In fact on p. 4 he seems to state the case erroneously as regards Madagasca
asserting that the people of the western side of the island still speak Bantu dialec
There is undoubtedly a strong Negro intermixture in the population of all the wester
side and some of the south of Madagascar, but so far I cannot recall any record
existing Bantu dialects, except of course the Swahili or Comoro Island speech
traders, settlers or seamen coming from the East African coast. The exist
languages of Madagascar all belong to the Malayo-Polynesian stock, and apparent
came from the direction of Java or Sumatra.

This content downloaded from

41.204.172.27 on Tue, 06 Dec 2022 17:35:47 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 THE ORIGIN OF THE BANTU 331

languages, and from want of anyone to

theories-German, French, and English-it m
to state my own views succinctly. As some
a little dogmatic, I might state that I have
a comparative grammar of the Bantu lang
(I began my studies of this group in Sou
in 1882), and that in order to state their position and
relationships in regard to other African speech groups, I
have carried my studies far beyond the Bantu field. I have
also visited personally a very considerable proportion of
Bantu Africa, and have thus been enabled to study at first
hand most of the leading racial types.
Now the Bantu languages are interesting even to non-
erudite people, for the patent fact that although spread
over an area almost equal to one-third of the African con-
tinent, they are closely interrelated as regards syntax and
word roots. There is an obvious relationship, for example,
between Runyoro at the north end of Lake Albert Nyanza
and the Kaffir dialects at Port Elizabeth in South Africa,
or between the Swahili of the island of Zanzibar and Duala
and Barundo of the north-west Cameroons. Yet it is at
once possible to distinguish a Bantu language from one
which is not Bantu, less perhaps as regards grammatical
structure or syntax as in the dissimilarity of word roots,
except in one or two pronouns and two or three numerals.
But whilst there is no doubt as to what is and is not a
Bantu language, it is practically impossible to say that
there is a Bantu " race"; that is to say, a racial type of
Negro or Negroid specially identified with the speaking of
Bantu languages. Now on this point we cannot be too
dogmatic (since our knowledge of African races has become
so intimate), and in making this declaration of belief I am
publicly recanting early opinions expressed some twenty to
twenty-three years ago, to the effect that there was a Bantu
physical type which could be distinguished from the Negro
proper. In those days I had only seen the Bantu races of
Angola and the western Congo, or rather mixed Bantu tribes
of Eastern Equatorial Africa. I would now state clearly that
just as " Aryan " languages are spoken in Asia and Europe

This content downloaded from

41.204.172.27 on Tue, 06 Dec 2022 17:35:47 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
332 JOURNAL OF THE AFRICAN SOCIETY

by a variety of distinct physical types-Dravidians, Mo

hybrids, Armenians, Iberians, Finns, North Europeans
true Aryans) and intermixtures between all these, and
underlying strata of earlier populations; so in the same
Bantu languages are spoken by Negroids like the Bah
of Uganda (half Caucasian in physical characteristics
Negroes of the long-legged Nilotic type, by short-legg
forest Negroes, by Congo Pygmies, by races that h
intermixed with the Hottentot and Bushman, by others
are impregnated with Arab blood, and by all the var
crosses and intermixtures of all these branches of the N
race. Through many of these people who speak Ban
languages at the present day there circulates a tiny ri
Northern blood, of the blood of some Hamitic race like
Gala, the Ancient Egyptian, possibly even the Libyan;
this tinge of a superior race has reached even the Ban
speaking Zulu-Kafirs of South and South-East Africa,
penetrated into remote parts of the southern basin of
Congo (the Bakuba); reveals itself on the western shor
Tanganyika and amongst the Fang and other canni
tribes at the back of the Cameroons, the Gaboon, and the
upper Cross River. But there is no Bantu physical type.
Take a Mandingo from West Africa and place him along-
side of a Swahili of the Zanzibar Coast or even next to certain
types of Zulu, and you would think that they were one and
all people of the same tribe. On the western shores of the
Victoria Nyanza you may see big black Negroes strikingly
similar in physiognomy to those of the Niger Delta and
the Guinea coast. The short-legged forest Negroes of the
Semliki valley and the north-east Congo basin can be
matched in the forests of Liberia, or in Portuguese Guinea,
and elsewhere in Senegambia. Even the Congo Pygmy
type is not confined to the Congo basin, but crops up in
many other holes and corners of Equatorial Africa; and
while one section of the Congo Pygmies will speak a Bantu
dialect, another section has as its language a dialect of
Momvu or of Mafibettu. The Bushman is a very distinct
and peculiar type of Negro. The Hottentot is not, as Mr.
Van Oordt seems to suggest, an original type, but rather

This content downloaded from

41.204.172.27 on Tue, 06 Dec 2022 17:35:47 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 THE ORIGIN OF THE BANTU 333

the result of early crossings between the Nilotic Negro

stock and the Bushman Pygmy of Eastern and Southern
Africa. There does not appear to be any clearly marked
physical relationship between the Congo Pygmies and the
Bushmen. The latter seem to have been a type of primitive
Negro (of which the Congo Pygmy was another early
branch) that developed very anciently in the deforested
regions of North-Eastern, Eastern, and Southern Africa.
The black, brawny, hairy, short-legged, forest type of Negro
no doubt grew up out of the forest Pygmy type, and the
long-legged, smooth-skinned, equally black Nilotic Negro
developed-possibly-from the Bushman in North-Eastern
Africa, or, it may be, had already developed before the
Nigritic stock left Arabia to invade Africa. Mr. Van Oordt
is not departing widely from fact in the direction of theory
in assuming that a Negroid race once extended from India
along the coasts of the Persian Gulf and of Arabia, and
that the Mediterranean basin, itself, even as far north as
France and Spain, was once peopled by a Negroid stock
There are quite sufficient indications to permit us to enter.
tain the theory that southern Asia was the region in which
man originated, and in which he began to differentiate into
three principal sub-species-Caucasian, Negro, and Mongol:
and that the Negro stock after having originated in India
(possibly) branched out eastwards into the Negritos, Anda-
manese, Papuans, Melanesians, Tasmanians of the present
age; while westwards, in a type that may have been alike
the ancestor of the Pygmy, Bushman, and Negro, he
wandered through south-western Asia to the shores of the
Mediterranean and eventually to Africa south of the Sahara,
in which his home now lies. But all this is so incredibly
ancient as compared to the lapse of recorded history-some
seven or eight thousand years-that it is almost preposterous
to couple with the assertion of physical relationship between
the Negritos of south-eastern Asia and the African Pygmies
(a relationship easily exaggerated) an attempt to trace rela-
tionships in their forms of speech. It may well be that a
hundred thousand years have elapsed-and more-since the
ancestors of the Hottentots and the Congo Pygmies and

This content downloaded from

41.204.172.27 on Tue, 06 Dec 2022 17:35:47 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
334 JOURNAL OF THE AFRICAN SOCIETY

of the Negrito tribes of the Malay Peninsula were one

in southern India. Taking into consideration the rate at
which the speech of savages alters and changes, it is outside
the range of practical philology to suggest that there can be
any relationship between the speech of the Semangs of
Malaya and that of the Hottentots of southern Africa. I
am aware that Madagascar is mainly peopled by a race that
has come across several thousand miles of sea from Sumatra
or Java, and I might be asked why if this is an establishe
fact, the slightly more distant connection between th
Hottentots and the Semang, or the original Bantu and th
conjectural Sumerians of Babylonia, should be regarded
me as a wild impossibility. Apart from the clear linguis
proof of relationship between the dialects of Madagascar
and those of the Malay Archipelago, we are made awa
that in other directions, across the Pacific, the canoe
voyages of the same race-the Polynesian-were almost as
extraordTnary as the undated, unrecorded wanderings of the
Malagasy invaders of Madagascar. But the Polynesian
type (an early mixture, perhaps, of the Caucasian and
Mongol, with a dash of the Negrito) was, until a few
centuries ago, rn a far higher state of culture than the
unmixed Negro. Through the records of Egypt, of Meso-
potamia and of southern Arabia, as well as the later writings
of the Greeks, we are sufficiently acquainted with the state
of affairs in north-east Africa, southern Arabia, and the
Persian Gulf to be fairly certain that there could not have
occurred two invasions of Africa by way of Somaliland on
the part of tribes coming from Mesopotamia at a period
sufficiently late to coincide with the Bantu invasion of the
southern half of Africa. In my own writings I have given
linguistic evidence to show that although the mother
language of the Bantu may have been in existence several
thousand years ago, the extraordinary race movement which
led to the implanting of Bantu languages over nearly the
whole of the southern half of Africa (from a centre some-
where between the Nile, the Congo, and the Shari) could
not have occurred much more than two thousand years ago.
Mr. Van Oordt's theories about conjectured prehistoric race

This content downloaded from

41.204.172.27 on Tue, 06 Dec 2022 17:35:47 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 THE ORIGIN OF THE BANTU 335

movements remind one a little too much o

chapters of the Mormon Bible, or the prepost
pology of the Theosophists, though it is only
out that these theories occupy but a small space in his
interesting compilation.
I do not wish to imitate the fault I am condemning in
theorising too much as to the routes followed by the original
invaders of Africa, or the approximate date at which the
Bantu languages spread like a flood over Southern Africa,
absorbing, assimilating, extinguishing all the previous
idioms except those of the Bushman and the Hottentot. It
is necessary to bear in mind that however young the Bantu
languages may be, Southern Africa has been inhabited by
man from a relatively remote epoch, probably from a not
much later date than Europe. As to the actual human type
that raised those kitchen middens along the South African
coast, that dwelt in South African caves, or that used the
stone implements found in the basin of the Congo, we
know nothing. It may have been Negro (possibly Bushman
or Pygmy); it may have been a less differentiated type of
man, like -the Veddah, the Australian, or the earliest inhabi-
tants of the Rhine valley. Mr. Van Oordt in his essay does
not give sufficient prominence to the obvious fact that
Southern Africa was not without population before it was in-
vaded by people speaking Bantu languages. The primitive
"Bantu " were perhaps a superior type of Negro dashed
with the Hamite, like the modern Nyam-Nyam, Fang, or
even the Hima of the Victoria Nyanza. They invaded the
southern half of Africa two or three thousand years ago (no
doubt in repeated surges) just as at an even later date the
Mandingo tribes rushed across Nigeria from Hausaland to
Senegambia, implanting on many an autochthonous people
a dialect of Mandingo speech. In fact, the Mandingo in
Western Africa has only repeated on a smaller scale the
Bantu conquest of the Southern Third. Tradition and
history show us a Western Nigeria peopled first by red-
skinned dwarfs, then invaded by races of Caucasian affinities
akin to the modern Fula, Libyan, Egyptian or Gala:
also, before and after the Caucasian, by long-legged

This content downloaded from

41.204.172.27 on Tue, 06 Dec 2022 17:35:47 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
336 JOURNAL OF THE AFRICAN SOCIETY

black Negroes, and broad-shouldered, short-legged Negroes

(the familiar Forest and Nilotic types, who probably spoke
languages not far removed from the mother type of the
Bantu-languages that employed prefixes or suffixes or
both, and, above all, used the concord as it is used at the
present day in so many non-Bantu West African languages
and also in the Bantu itself). At different periods from
about two thousand to one thousand years ago (the last
dates are practically historical) the people speaking
Mandingo languages-languages which may be distantly
related to the Nubian and even the Nilotic stock-crossed
the middle Niger and pressed onwards into the hinterl
of the Ivory Coast, Liberia, Sierra Leone, the Gamb
the Senegal, and across the Upper Niger right away
the Sahara Desert, almost midway across that desert in
direction of Morocco. By the fourteenth Century of
present era the amalgam of peoples now known as th
Mandingo ruled in the great Muhammadan Niger empir
Mali, or Melle (formerly Songhai). At the present day
cannibal savages almost entirely outside the circle of the
white man's culture (a rare condition, even in savage Africa)
are speaking languages of the Mandingo type, though they
are obviously autochthonous.
We may pass now from Mr. Van Oordt's theories to the
etymological evidence which he brings forward to support
them, chiefly supposed resemblances between the Mongolian,
North Asiatic, Finnish, and Babylonian (Sumerian) lan-
guages on the one hand, and the roots of the Bantu on
the other. Of course, there is only a limited number of
sourfds that can be uttered by the human tongue, teeth, and
lips, and coincidences must occur. There are vocables in
North and South American languages which are used to
express almost the same thing as similar sounding words
do in African languages, or in English, Welsh, or Hindus-
tani. Yet from these isolated coincidences of human inven-
tion, few people would be daring enough at the present
day to connect in origin the indigenous languages of
America with those of Africa. Similar coincidences-
parallelisms, accidents-Mr, Van Oordt finds betwe

This content downloaded from

41.204.172.27 on Tue, 06 Dec 2022 17:35:47 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 THE ORIGIN OF THE BANTU 337

languages of Asia and those of Africa. H

daunted, since he would trace a resemblance between the
Mongolian word burzk, meaning " dark," and the Nyanja
word dera, meaning the same thing, or between the
Mongolian dobo (hill) and the Zulu intaba, or between the
Magyar so6mo (eye), the root of which is sm, and the Bantu
-iso, or between the Sumerian word zum (meaning
" abundance ") and the Kafir zonke, meaning " all (things)."
(Z- being a separable concord and -onke being a variant
of the Bantu root -onte=all). The fact is, over and over
again Mr. Van Oordt is misled in his analogies by con-
fusing the separable prefix or concord of Bantu words with
the essential root, a very great mistake, as all students of
Bantu languages will readily understand. In like manner
he sometimes includes as part of the original root in a verb
what is a changeable suffix, quite distinct from the
unchangeable root expressing the simplest signification of
the verb. Or he bases deductions of resemblances between
Bantu and some Asiatic language on Arab or Portuguese
words imported into Swahili, or some other East African
language.' These remarks equally apply to the comparisons
between the Sakai and Semang words of the Malay Penin-
sula with Bantu or Hottentot roots. Of course, as regards
the vocables for father and mother, these are of world-wide
similarity, as Tylor pointed out forty years ago.
Perhaps without being ungracious I might point out a
final instance of wrong deductions on the part of Mr. Van
Oordt. He makes a great deal in his theories out of the
syllable lu, which he says means man, and is identical with

1 Examples of these three types of mistake :-He compares the Finnish word sapo
(meaning dress) with the Sechuana se-aparo, in which se is a removable prefix ; or the
Sumerian mul (abyss) with the Sechuana mo-leto. Example of the second: Finnish
kisa= to dance, compared with Swahili ckeza, also meaning to dance. But the za is
merely the changeable termination of a root which may also become cheka, to laugh.
The Finnish word tula is compared with the Sechuana tla. The tl in this Sechuana
root is only a lisping corruption of an older z, of the widespread Bantu root za= come.
As an example of the frequently repeated mistake of confusing foreign words with
Bantu roots, I would cite his use of the Swahili "Isura" meaning picture (though
Mr. Van Oordt describes it as " face "), which is an Arabic word, or the Nyanja
nsapato (compared with the Finnish word sahas= boot), which is nothing else than the
Portuguese zapato= slipper,

22 Vol. 6

This content downloaded from

41.204.172.27 on Tue, 06 Dec 2022 17:35:47 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
338 JOURNAL OF THE AFRICAN SOCIETY

the Tibetan word klu. He is annoyed, however, at finding

that the prefix Lu is used in the language of Buganda to
indicate language; thus, Luganda is the Ganda tongue. (As
a matter of fact, Lu is a softening of an older Du, a variant
which is often heard in the Nyoro group of dialects: it
may even be traced further back to Ndu: in some Bantu
dialects it appears as Nu, in others Ru, in a few as U). So
he proceeds to inform us on page 66 that " The prefix Lu
as the prefix for a language in Bantu is absolutely unknown,
and in accordance with Bantu etymology the language
should be called Siganda or Seganda." Also that the name
of the country itself is "Uganda." This shows very
imperfect acquaintance with the Bantu languages as a whole
and with Luganda in particular. The proper name of the
country is Buganda, which British ignorance long ago
converted into Uganda. So far from the prefix Lu being
seldom or never associated with language, it is almost the
commonest prefix applied to language in the Bantu family,
at any rate as regards all the tongues round the Victoria
Nyanza, and many of them in the Congo basin. The Si
or Se prefix mentioned by Mr. Van Oordt is merely a South
African corruption of the older prefix Ki: it is not an
original prefix.
Though I cannot agree with Mr. Van Oordt in some of
his instances and in most of his theories, I feel it is only
right to state that his pamphlet is of great interest, and
that while he has not proved his case (in my opinion) he
has collected much interesting information which inci-
dentally illustrates the wonderful interrelations between
far-separated Bantu languages. I welcome his book, if only
as the first contribution to African philology (so far as I,
in my ignorance, am aware) as yet given to the world by
a South African born. There has hitherto lain this reproach
on the Afrikander, of British, Dutch, or German descent,
that he has taken but little interest in the speech, the
folklore, or even the natural history of the land of his
father's adoption. Of the great contributions to African
philology that have been composed south of the Zambezi,
all-so far as I am aware-owe their origin to men not born

This content downloaded from

41.204.172.27 on Tue, 06 Dec 2022 17:35:47 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 THE ORIGIN OF THE BANTU 339

in South Africa, and until quite recently n

was ever given to South African research by a native
government, merely by one or two Britishers who were
there as Governors. It is gratifying to see that Mr. Van
Oordt's work is published as a Government Blue Book;
and, lest we should seem self-righteous, I would ask, " Has
our own Home Government ever published Blue Books
dealing with the equally interesting and equally little studied
indigenous languages, Gaelic or British ? "
But the point I would like to insist on in regard to all
African philological studies at the present day is that what
we should seek to accomplish first of all is the comparison
of African languages inter se, and not distract ourselves
by going beyond Africa for affinities in speech. Most of
all, Afrikanders like Mr. Van Oordt should devote them-
selves heart and soul to the accurate study of the African
languages and dialects between the Zambezi on the north
and the coasts of the Indian and Atlantic oceans. Although
Zulu and KosaI Kafir are well known, what we do not
yet know--those of us who live away from South Africa-
are the dialectal variations among the types of Kafir
speech. It would be most interesting to record these, as
we might thus find lingering old Bantu roots which have
disappeared from the Zulu and Kosa standard speech.
Something the same may be said about the many dialects
of the Secuana group, or the degree of relationships between
the Zulu-like dialects of the Transvaal, Lourengo Marques,
and the Nyanja-(Nyasa)-like dialects of Inhambane, Sofala,
Manika, Mashonaland, and the Central Zambezi. The
languages in the debatable ground between the country of
the Ovaherero and the Upper Zambezi have never been
studied (unless it is in unpublished records of Livingstone
locked up in the Grey Library at Cape Town). Nothing
is known of the dialect of the Vaalpens, if this supposed
aboriginal tribe on the Limpopo is not a myth. There is
a vast deal yet to seek for in the way of Bushman and
1 This should really be written with a click in place of the K, but such an ortho-
graphy is inconvenient in ordinary print and the "X" adopted in South Africa is
misleading.

This content downloaded from

41.204.172.27 on Tue, 06 Dec 2022 17:35:47 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
340 JOURNAL OF THE AFRICAN SOCIETY

Hottentot and Berg-Damara dialects---and the pity of

whole thing is that these precious records are disappea
with such appalling rapidity that unless South Africa awak
to what she is losing, and unless Mr. Van Oordt dev
himself to what is around him and not what is in the M
Peninsula, human knowledge may sustain an irreparab
loss.
H. H. JOHNSTON.

This content downloaded from

41.204.172.27 on Tue, 06 Dec 2022 17:35:47 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms