It is certain that the whole of the continent of Africa at a remote period was occupied solely by people of the Bushman race. In the gloomy forest west of the Albert Nyanza they are found by European travellers of the present day, and the descriptions of them given by Schweinfurth, Junker, Stanley, Casati, Von Wissmann, and many others could be applied with perfect accuracy to the Bushmen of the southern extremity of the continent.[1] They could not have migrated to that locality through a country inhabited by stalwart negroes, by whom they were always regarded as noxious animals, and as such destroyed, nor could the section of their race south of the Zambesi have moved down through Bantu tribes. They must have occupied the country alone for countless generations, before invaders of greater strength destroyed or absorbed all of their kindred except
- ↑ Some ethnographers are of a different opinion. For instance Deniker, in The Races of Man: an Outline of Anthropology and Ethnography, by J. Deniker, Sc.D., Chief Librarian of the Museum of Natural History, Paris, a crown octavo volume of 611 pages, says: “Several authors confound in one group of Pigmies the Negrilloes and the Bushmen. Nothing, however, justifies their unification. The colour of the skin in Bushmen is a fawn yellow, while in Negrilloes it is of a chocolate tablet or of coffee slightly roasted; the hair of the former is black and tufted, while the hair of the latter is like extended fleece and often of a more or less light brown. The face of the Bushman is lozenge-shaped, the cheeks are prominent, and the eyes are often narrowed and oblique, which traits are not met with at all in Pigmies. Steatopogy, a special trait of the Bushman race, has not been noted among Negrilloes except in individual cases among the women, and to a less degree than among Bushmen. At the same time the profile of the sub-nasal space, always convex in the Akkas according to Stuhlmann, is often to be observed among Bushmen. Thus, therefore, a slight degree of steatopogy in individual cases and the profile of the sub-nasal space would be the sole characters connecting the two races.” It is well to take the differences into consideration, but let any one who is at all acquainted with Bushmen read the account of Blasiyo by Mrs. Ruth B. Fisher in her volume On the Borders of Pigmy Land (demi octavo, 215 pages), and I feel sure that doubt will be dispelled. See further the marked steatopogy in the photographs reproduced in James J. Harrison's Life among the Pygmies of the Ituri Forest, Congo Free State.
