The Galla appear to have reached the African coast before the Danákil and Somali, but were driven south-east by pressure from the latter, leaving Galla remnants as serfs among the southern Somali, while the presence of servile negroid tribes among the Galla gives proof of an earlier population which they partially displaced. Subsequent pressure from the Masai on the south forced the Galla into contact with the Danákil, and a branch penetrating inland established themselves on the north and east of Victoria Nyanza, where they are known to-day as the Ba-Hima, Wa-Tusi, Wa-Ruanda and kindred tribes, which have been described on p. 91.
The Masai.
The Masai, the terror of their neighbours, are a mixture of Galla and Nilotic Negro, producing what has been described as the finest type in Africa. The build is slender and the height often over six feet, the face is well formed, with straight nose and finely cut nostrils, the hair is usually frizzly, and the skin dark or reddish brown. They are purely pastoral, possessing enormous herds of cattle in which they take great pride, but they are chiefly remarkable for their military organisation which was hardly surpassed by that of the Zulu. They have everywhere found in the agricultural peoples an easy prey, and until the reduction of their wealth by rinderpest (since 1891) and the restraining influence of the white man, the Masai were regarded as an ever-dreaded scourge by all the less warlike inhabitants of Eastern Africa[1147].
Abyssinian Hamites: Religion.
Amongst the Abyssinian Hamites we find the strangest interminglings of primitive and more advanced religious ideas. On a seething mass of African heathendom, already in pre-historic times affected by early Semitic ideas introduced by the Himyarites from South Arabia, was somewhat suddenly imposed an undeveloped form of Christianity by the preaching of Frumentius in the fourth century, with results that cannot be called satisfactory. While the heterogeneous ethnical elements have been merged in a composite Abyssinian nationality, the discordant religious ideas have never yet been fused in a consistent uniform system. Hence "Abyssinian Christianity" is a sort of by-word even amongst the Eastern Churches, while the social institutions are marked by elementary notions of justice and paradoxical "shamanistic" practices, interspersed with a few sublime moral precepts. Many things came as a surprise to the members of the Rennell Rodd Mission[1148], who could not understand such a strange mixture of savagery and lofty notions in a Christian community which, for instance, accounted accidental death as wilful murder. The case is mentioned of a man falling from a tree on a friend below and killing him. "He was adjudged to perish at the hands of the bereaved family, in the same manner as the corpse. But the family refused to sacrifice a second member, so the culprit escaped." Dreams also are resorted to, as in the days of the Pharaohs, for detecting crime. A priest is sent for, and if his prayers and curses fail, a small boy is drugged and told to dream. "Whatever person he dreams of is fixed on as the criminal; no further proof is needed.... If the boy does not dream of the person whom the priest has determined on as the criminal, he is kept under drugs until he does what is required of him."
To outsiders society seems to be a strange jumble of an iron despotism, which forbids the selling of a horse for over £10 under severe penalties, and a personal freedom or licence, which allows the labourer to claim his wages after a week's work and forthwith decamp to spend them, returning next day or next month as the humour takes him. Yet somehow things hold together, and a few Semitic immigrants from South Arabia have for over 2000 years contrived to maintain some kind of control over the Hamitic aborigines who have always formed the bulk of the population in Abyssinia[1149].
FOOTNOTES:
[1000] The Races of Europe: A Sociological Study, W. Z. Ripley, 1900, p. 437.
[1001] "Diese Namen sind natürlich rein conventionell. Sie sind historisch berechtigt ... und mögen Geltung behalten, so lange wir keine zutrefferenden an ihre Stelle setzen können" (Anthropologische Studien, etc., p. 15).
[1002] E. Meyer, Geschichte des Altertums, 1909, l. 2, discussing the original home of the Indo-Europeans (§ 561, Das Problem der Heimat und Ausbreitung der Indogermanen) remarks (p. 800) that the discovery of Tocharish (Sieg und Siegling, "Tocharish, die Sprache der Indo-skythen," Sitz. d. Berl. Ak. 1908, p. 915 ff.), a language belonging apparently to the centum (Western and European) group, overthrows all earlier conceptions as to the distribution of the Indogermans and gives weight to the hypothesis of their Asiatic origin.