though a good deal of
their blood has passed into the mixed coloured population of Cape Town
and its neighbourhood--a population the other elements of which are
Malays from the Dutch East Indies, and the descendants of slaves brought
from the West Coast of Africa in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. From unions between Hottentot women and the Dutch sprang the
mixed race whom the Dutch call Bastards and the English Griquas, and
who, though now dying out, like the French and Indian half-breeds of
Western Canada, played at one time a considerable part in colonial
politics. Along the south bank of the Orange River and to the north of
it, in Great Namaqualand, small tribes, substantially identical with the
Hottentots, still wander over the arid wilderness. But in the settled
parts of the Colony the Hottentot, of whom we used to hear so much, and
whom the Portuguese remembering the death of the viceroy D'Almeida (who
was killed in a skirmish in A.D. 1510), at one time feared so much, has
vanished more completely than has the Red Indian from the Atlantic
States of North America. And the extinction or absorption of the few
remaining nomads will probably follow at no distant date.

Very different have been the fortunes, very different are the prospects,
of the third and far more numerous South African race, those whom we
call Kafirs, and who call themselves Abantu or Bantu ("the people"). The
word "Kafir" is Arabic. It has nothing to do with Mount Kaf (the
Caucasus), but means an infidel (literally, "one who denies"), and is
applied by Mussulmans not merely to these people, but to other heathen
also, as, for instance, to the idolaters of Kafiristan, in the
Hindu-Kush Mountains. The Portuguese doubtless took the name from the
Arabs, whom they found established at several points on the East African
coast northward from Sofala, and the Dutch took it from the Portuguese,
together with such words as "kraal" (corral), and "assagai." The Bantu
tribes, if one may include under that name all the blacks who speak
languages of the same general type, occupy the whole of East Africa
southward from the Upper Nile, where that river issues from the great
Nyanza lakes, together with the Congo basin and most of South-west
Africa. They include various groups, such as the Ama-Kosa tribes (to
which belong the Tembus and Pondos), who dwell on the coast of Cape
Colony eastward from the Great Fish River; the Ama-Zulu group,
consisting of the Zu