Not many centuries ago there was a large number of so-called Christians among them, but their religion seems to have left little impression on their character.
At present they are professedly Mohammedans, but really either fetichists or indifferent. Their morals are not well-spoken of, though it is also said that the class with whom travellers usually come into contact are not favorable specimens of the population—as is apt to be the case everywhere.
The Puls, or Fellahs, and the Fans, who live to the west in the Sudan, removed to the regions they now occupy from the Nile valley, and belong to the Negroid type. They have made extensive conquests in the vast unexplored country between Timbuctoo and the equator. Abstaining from alcohol and tobacco, condemning music and dancing, and blindly adhering to the precepts of the Koran, they are unpopular among their negro neighbors, but have brought many of them under subjection. Their occupations are both pastoral and agricultural, while as commercial travellers, and wandering smiths, they roam from one end of the Sudan to the other. They weave cotton cloth, tan and dye leather, and work it into various articles of use which are widely celebrated for their excellence, and in times past were among the most extensive slave dealers of Central Africa.
The languages of this group belong to four diverse linguistic stocks, all of the agglutinative character. It has been called the equatorial family of central Africa. They are usually agreeable to the ear, the verbs are simple, and the syntax not complicated.[124]
2. The Bantu Group
Occupies nearly the whole of Africa south of the equator, except the territory of the Bushmen and Hottentots. It includes the Suahelis, the Mazimbas and the Caffres on the east coast, the Sakalavas of Madagascar, the Bechuanas west of the Caffres, the Zulus, and nearly all the numerous tribes of the Congo basin, the Angola and Zambesi rivers.[125]
Their ancestors at one period resided to the northeast, probably somewhere in Ethiopia, where a prolonged fusion of Hamitic blood with the genuine Negro produced their physical type. They are usually tall and well built, the color is a dark coppery brown, the head is long (74), the hair is frizzly, and the nose rather straight.
All the Caffre people are pastoral in habits, and have large herds of cows. Agriculture is practised on a limited scale. Their temperament is turbulent and warlike, and many of them are cannibals. Their social organization is military, but slavery is unusual. Singular to say, they do not know the bow and arrow, their weapons being the war-club and a lance called an assegai. Their religion is a fetichism, and polygamy is universal. On the whole, they are on a higher level of culture than the Negroes of the Sudan. All the Bantu tribes are mono-glottic, that is, they speak dialects traceable to one original stem. These have a peculiar alliteration, and form their words by means of prefixes of elements placed before the root, this being their special method of agglutination. It is divided into three principal dialects, and is the most widely extended of any of the African linguistic stocks, except the Libyan.
The vast basin of the Congo river, including over two million square miles, is now mostly included in the “Congo Independent State.” Its native inhabitants are connected by language with the Negroids of the Bantu group, and several of them retain traditions of their immigration into the districts they now inhabit. The Waganda, for instance, report that their ancestors came from the northeast, the Watuta and Masiti from near the Zambesi river. Many of them are of a light, bright brown, and are devoid of the peculiar odor of the true negro. All the tribes from Lake Tanganyika to the Atlantic speak dialects manifestly akin.
They are divided into independent nations, some of large extent, and are subject to chiefs, who rule with despotic power. Their religion is fetichistic, and though they generally are agricultural, and possess a certain degree of culture, cannibalism is or was frequent among them. Slavery also existed in some of its most deplorable forms, and up to a very recent date, if not still, there was a regular trade in young slaves to be fattened, killed and eaten on certain solemn occasions.