Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. THE BANTU OR KAFFIHS OF SOUTH AFRICA. 'A. Vastly more important element of the population of the country than either of the two races already mentioned consisted of the dark-skinned tribes now commonly termed Bantu. The word Bantu means simply people, being the plural form of umntu, a person, but as they had no name for themselves collectively, the eminent philologist Dr. Bleek proposed that it should be adopted to signify the whole race, and so it came into general use with Europeans for that purpose. They were of more importance than the others because, first, they were numerically at least as fifteen to one, and secondly, becaxise they were a robust and aggressive people, not destined to dwindle away before the white man like the Bushmen and the Hottentots. Their original home was somewhere in the north, where their kindred at the present day possess the continent from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic, but they must have crossed the Zambesi long before the commencement of the Christian era. Their settlement south of the Limpopo, however, cannot date back more than a few hundred years. When, in the middle of the sixteenth century, the crews of some Portuguese ships wrecked on the coast travelled north-eastward to Delagoa Bay, they found that the vanguard of this race had reached the Umzimvubu, and a hundred years later it had got as far as theKei. That river was crossed in the time of the chief Palo, whose descendants in the fifth generation are now living. Thus ever since white people became acquainted with them, the eastern Bantu tribes have been steadily and surely pressing southward, and they are doing so still. There are no means of ascertaining how far south they had reached in the interior of the continent before the close of the sixteenth century...