Abstract
ON this subject a most valuable paper has been contributed to the last number of the Zeitschrift der esellschaft für Erdkunde by Dr. G. Nachtigal, one of he few living writers entitled to speak with authority on he ethnography of Sudan. While the great problems now being rapidly solved in the portion of Africa lying south of the equator are almost exclusively of a strictly geographical nature, those still awaiting solution in the northern half of the Continent are on the contrary mainly of an ethnological character. The reason of this pointed difference is very obvious. Although there are vast regions south of the line still unexplored, enough is already known to warrant the conclusion that what remains to be there discovered is peopled by the same great race holding almost exclusive possession of the parts already opened up by the spirit of modern enterprise. With the sole exception of the extreme south-western corner, occupied by the Namaqua and Cape Hottentots, and of some districts also in the south still haunted by a few straggling Bushman tribes, the whole of Africa from the equator southwards would seem to be the domain of what is now conventionally known to philologists as the Bantu family. Whatever be their origin, all the countless ribes here settled are now at least linguistically united into one group, all of them, with the exceptions already specified, apparently speaking dialects of some one common mother tongue now extinct. Hence however interesting the questions that still remain to be settled relating to the physical geography of Africa south of the equator, its ethnography, so far as that can be determined by the test of language, presents little or no further difficulty.
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KEANE, A. The Races and Tribes of the Chad Basin . Nature 15, 550–552 (1877). https://doi.org/10.1038/015550b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/015550b0