In attempting to describe the physical type of this people, one finds that there is so much variety as to make it difficult to fix on any one as specially characteristic. This is not to be wondered at, when we remember how the various tribes have been blended together in the course of the wars and migrations to which we shall come back in a later chapter. I think I may say I have noticed three well-marked varieties of physique among Anyanja, or men reckoned as such. Before considering these, it may be well, however, to glance at the characteristics possessed in common by the people with whom we have to do in this book.
They all belong to the ‘Bantu’ family of African natives, which, as regards language, is sharply distinguished from the ‘Negro’ peoples of West Africa and the Soudan. In other respects, it is more difficult to draw the line. As long as our ideas of the ‘Negro’ were taken from degraded and exaggerated types found in the unhealthy Niger delta and the slave-trading ports of the Guinea coast, it was easy to say that the Bantu were altogether on a higher level, and attribute the difference to some hypothetical admixture of Arab or other Asiatic blood. A better acquaintance with the inland peoples of the Guinea region shows that the difference is not so great as one had supposed. But the question which was the main stock whence the other parted off, and that as to the exact nature of the difference between them, need not be discussed here, as our concern is entirely with the Bantu.
Perhaps it is scarcely necessary to explain that this word, or something very like it, means ‘people,’ in the language of (roughly speaking) every tribe from the Cape of Good Hope to Lake Victoria and the great loop of the Congo, with the exception of the Kora and Nama (Hottentots), the Bushmen, and the Masai. It was adopted as a convenient designation when Bleek had shown how closely these languages were interrelated, and has never been superseded by any other.
The Bantu, then, are brown (not black), and have woolly hair, growing continuously over the head, and not in separate tufts, like the Bushmen. The nose is broad and somewhat flattened (but the last is by no means invariably the case), and the lips thick, from being turned outward more than they are in Europeans; but this, too, is not always very marked. The hair is black, and the eyes generally dark brown, sometimes hazel.
The colour of the skin varies very much in different tribes, and even in individuals of the same tribe. Sir Harry Johnston says: ‘There are extremes met with in the individual members of a tribe, as well as a general tendency to be detected in one tribe or another towards greater average darkness or lightness of skin. As a rule, the negro of British Central Africa is decidedly black, so far as any human skin is really black—the nearest approach to actual black being a deep, dull slaty-brown. I should say that the average skin-tint is ... a dark chocolate.’
If I can trust my recollection of the Anyanja, they were many of them not quite so dark as this; but in the Blantyre district they are intermixed with the Yaos, who are described by the same writer as ‘probably the lightest-tinted tribe’ in the region under review. The soles of the feet and palms of the hands are always much lighter, and give a curious impression, as if the colour had been washed out.
Among these Anyanja you find, chiefly on the River, tall, broad-shouldered, finely built men, with well-developed muscles, though rather smoother and more rounded in outline than an athletic European. The Rev. H. Rowley, who saw them before the Yao invasion, describes the Hill Mang’anja as smaller and poorer in physique than the River people, and lays stress on their small jaws and weak mouths and chins. Their physical inferiority and want of union among themselves fully account for their subjugation. This writer also says: ‘In stature, the Mang’anja were not a tall race, though you rarely met a little man.’ But tall individuals are fairly common. The length of the arms is particularly noticeable. Measurements show that very often the distance between the finger-tips of the outstretched arms is considerably greater than the height of the individual, whereas, in a well-proportioned European, they are supposed to be equal.
The second type is that of the people usually, but erroneously called ‘Angoni,’ who live in the districts west of the Upper Shiré, and are really Anyanja conquered by the Zulu Angoni and subject to their chiefs. These are small, active, wiry men, usually rather dark. They sometimes have good features and even, aquiline noses.
Here and there, among these last, you find yet a third kind, very tall men, over six feet, but painfully lean and slender, and perhaps a shade lighter in complexion than their neighbours. So far as it was possible to trace the history of these men, they seemed to come from a distance; but I will recur to this in a later chapter. I do not remember any women of this type, though one of the men in question had two daughters, slim, delicate-looking girls, who might have been like him when grown up. One of them, a really pretty creature, died suddenly—I fancy of consumption—aged, most likely, about fifteen or sixteen.
The description given by the writer already quoted will still serve fairly well for a good many of the Anyanja:—