204 galton.org
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Inquiries into Human Faculty
and gradually overspread it, where they are now estimated to number
more than three millions.
It must not be supposed that emigration on a large scale implies even a
moderate degree of civilisation among those who emigrate, because the
process has been frequently traced among the more barbarous tribes, to
say nothing of the evidence largely derived from ancient burial-places.
My own impression of the races in South Africa was one of a continual
state of ferment and change, of the rapid development of some clan here
and of the complete or almost complete suppression of another clan there.
The well-known history of the rise of the Zulus and the destruction of
their neighbours is a case in point. In the country with which I myself was
familiar the changes had been numerous and rapid in the preceding few
years, and there were undoubted signs of much more important
substitutions of race in bygone times. The facts were briefly these:
Damara Land was inhabited by pastoral tribes of the brown Bantu race
who were in continual war with various alternations of fortune, and the
several tribes had special characteristics that were readily appreciated by
themselves. On the tops of the escarped hills lived a fugitive black people
speaking a vile dialect of Hottentot, and families of yellow Bushmen were
found in the lowlands wherever the country was unsuited for the pastoral
Damaras. Lastly, the steadily encroaching Namaquas, a superior Hottentot
race, lived on the edge of the district. They had very much more
civilisation than the Bushmen, and more than the Damaras, and they
contained a large infusion of Dutch blood.
The interpretation of all this was obviously that the land had been
tenanted a long time ago by Negroes, that an invasion of Bushmen drove
the Negroes to the hills, and that the supremacy of these lasted so long
that the Negroes lost their own language and acquired that of the
Bushmen. Then an invasion of a tribe of Bantu race supplanted the
Bushmen, and the Bantus, after endless struggles among themselves, were
being pushed aside at the time I visited them by the incoming Namaquas,
who themselves are a mixed race. This is merely a sample of Africa;
everywhere there are evidences of changing races.
