by Robert Hamill Nassau · 1904
Classics · History
Forty years of notes by an American missionary-doctor on the beliefs and practices of the Bantu peoples of the Gabon and Corisco coast: spirits, charms, witchcraft, dreams, proverbs and rites of passage.
Content note: Written in 1904 by a missionary, so the view of African religion is his own and the language is outdated. It describes witchcraft trials, sacrifice and cannibalism.
CONSTITUTION OF NATIVE AFRICAN SOCIETY—SOCIOLOGY
That stream of the Negro race which is known ethnologically as “Bantu,” occupies all of the southern portion of the African continent below the fourth degree of north latitude. It is divided into a multitude of tribes, each with its own peculiar dialect. All these dialects are cognate in their grammar. Some of them vary only slightly in their vocabulary. In others the vocabulary is so distinctly different that it is not understood by tribes only one hundred miles apart, while that of others a thousand miles away may be intelligible.
In their migrations the tribes have been like a river, with its windings, currents swift or slow; there have been even, in places, back currents; and elsewhere quiet, almost stagnant pools. But they all—from the Divala at Kamerun on the West Coast across to the Kiswahile at Zanzibar on the East, and from Buganda by the Victoria Nyanza at the north down to Zulu in the south at the Cape—have a uniformity in language, tribal organization, family customs, judicial rules and regulations, marriage ceremonies, funeral rites, and religious beliefs and practice.
