Man and His Migrations

by R. G. Latham

It is only the transitional character of the annihilated populations that is an assumption. I believe it—of course—to be a legitimate one; otherwise it would not have been made.

On the other hand I consider it illegitimate to assume, without inquiry, so broad and fundamental a distinction between the two stocks as to attribute all points of similarity to intercourse only—none to original affinity. Yet this is done largely. The Hottentot language contains a sound which I believe to be an in-aspirated h, i. e. a sound of h formed by drawing in the breath, rather than by forcing it out—as is done by the rest of the world. This is called the click. It is a truly inarticulate sound; and as the common h is found in the language as well, the Hottentot speech presents the remarkable phenomenon of two inarticulate sounds, or two sounds common to man and the lower animals. As a point of anthropology this may be of value: in ethnology it has probably been misinterpreted.

It is found in one Kaffre dialect. What are the inferences? That it has been adopted from the Hottentot by the Kaffre; just as a Kaffre gun has been adopted from the Europeans. This is one of them.

The other is that the sound in question is less unique, less characteristic, and less exclusively Hottentot than was previously believed.

Now this is certainly not one whit less legitimate than the former; yet the former is the commoner notion. Perhaps it is because it flatters us with a fresh fact, instead of chastening us by the correction of an over-hasty generalization.

Again—the root t-k (as in tixo, tixme, utiko) is at once Hottentot and Kaffre. It means either a Deity or an epithet appropriate to a Deity. Surely the doctrine that the Kaffres have simply borrowed part of their theological vocabulary from the Hottentots is neither the only nor the most logical inference here.

The Kaffre area is so large that it extends on both sides of Africa to the equator; and the contrast which it supplies when compared with the small one of the Hottentots is a repetition of the contrasts already noticed in America.

The peculiarities of the Kaffre stock are fully sufficient to justify care and consideration before we place them in the same class either with the true Negros, or with the Gallas, Nubians, Agows, and other Africans of the water-system of the Nile. Yet they are by no means of that broad and trenchant kind which many have fancied them. The undoubted Kaffre character of the languages of Angola, Loango, the Gaboon, the Mozambique and Zanzibar coasts is a fact which must run through all our criticism. If so, it condemns all those extreme inferences which are drawn from the equally undoubted peculiarities of the Kaffres of the Cape. And why? Because these last are extreme forms; extreme, rather than either typical, or—what is more important—transitional.

Let us, however, look to them. What find we then? Until the philological evidence in favour of the community of origin of the intertropical Africans of Congo on the west, and of Inhambame, Sofala, the Mozambique, &c. on the east, was known, no one spoke of the natives in any of those countries as being anything else but Negro, or thought of enlarging upon such differences as are now found between them and the typical Black.

Even in respect to the languages, there are transitional dialects in abundance. In Mrs. Kilham’s tables of 31 African languages, the last is a Kongo vocabulary, all the rest being Negro. Now this Kongo vocabulary, which is truly Kaffre, differs from the rest so little more than the rest do from each other, that when I first saw the list, being then strongly prepossessed by the opinion that the Kaffre stock of tongues was, to a great extent, a stock per se, I could scarcely believe that the true Kongo and Kaffre language was represented; so I satisfied myself that it was so, by a collation with other undoubted vocabularies, before I admitted the inference. And this is only one fact out of many[19].