[255] See the admirable monograph on the Ba-Thonga, by H. A. Junod, The Life of a South African Tribe, 1912.
[256] Robert Codrington tells us that these A-Ngoni (Aba-Ngoni) spring from a Zulu tribe which crossed the Zambesi about 1825, and established themselves south-east of L. Tanganyika, but later migrated to the uplands west of L. Nyasa, where they founded three petty states. Others went east of the Livingstone range, and are here still known as Magwangwara. But all became gradually assimilated to the surrounding populations. Intermarrying with the women of the country they preserve their speech, dress, and usages for the first generation in a slightly modified form, although the language of daily intercourse is that of the mothers. Then this class becomes the aristocracy of the whole nation, which henceforth comprises a great part of the aborigines ruled by a privileged caste of Zulu origin, "perpetuated almost entirely among themselves" ("Central Angoniland," Geograph. Jour. May, 1898, p. 512). See A. Werner, The Natives of British Central Africa, 1906.
[257] Rev. J. Macdonald, Light in Africa, p. 194. Among recent works on the Zulu-Xosa tribes may be mentioned Dudley Kidd, The Essential Kafir, 1904, Savage Childhood, 1905; H. A. Junod, The Life of a South African Tribe (Ba-Thonga), 1912-3; G. W. Stow and G. M. Theal, The Native Races of South Africa, 1905.
[258] From Mwana, lord, master, and tapa, to dig, both common Bantu words.
[259] The point was that Portugal had made treaties with this mythical State, in virtue of which she claimed in the "scramble for Africa" all the hinterlands behind her possessions on the east and west coasts (Mozambique and Angola), in fact all South Africa between the Orange and Zambesi rivers. Further details on the "Monomotapa Question" will be found in my monograph on "The Portuguese in South Africa" in Murray's South Africa, from Arab Domination to British Rule, 1891, p. 11 sq. Five years later Mr G. McCall Theal also discovered, no doubt independently, the mythical character of Monomotapaland in his book on The Portuguese in South Africa, 1896.
[260] Proc. R. Geogr. Soc. May, 1892, and The Ruined Cities of Mashonaland, 1892.
[261] D. Randall-MacIver, Mediaeval Rhodesia, 1906. But R. N. Hall strongly combats his views, Great Zimbabwe, 1905, Prehistoric Rhodesia, 1909, and South African Journal of Science, May, 1912. H. H. Johnston says, "I see nothing inherently improbable in the finding of gold by proto-Arabs in the south-eastern part of Zambezia; nor in the pre-Islamic Arab origin of Zimbabwe," p. 396, "A Survey of the Ethnography of Africa," Journ. Roy. Anthr. Inst. XLIII. 1913.
[262] G. W. Stow, The Native Races of South Africa, 1905.
[263] The British Protectorate was limited in 1905 to about 182,000 square miles.
[264] Cf. A. St H. Gibbons, Africa South to North through Marotseland, 1904, and C. W. Mackintosh, Coillard of the Zambesi, 1907, with a bibliography.