an the work at Dhlodhlo. Hard by is a
modern Kafir fort, Chitikete, with a plastered and loop-holed rough
stone wall, quite unlike this wall at Chipadzi's grave. This place is
further described in Chapter XVI.]

[Footnote 8: Maspero (_Histoire ancienne des Peuples d'Orient_, p. 169)
conjectures Somaliland]

CHAPTER X

THE KAFIRS: THEIR HISTORY AND INSTITUTIONS

The curtain rises upon the Kafir peoples when the Portuguese landed on
the east coast of Africa in the beginning of the sixteenth century. Arab
sheiks then held a few of the coast villages, ruling over a mixed race,
nominally Mohammedan, and trading with the Bantu tribes of the interior.
The vessels of these Arabs crossed the Indian Ocean with the monsoon to
Calicut and the Malabar coast, and the Indian goods they carried back
were exchanged for the gold and ivory which the natives brought down.
The principal race that held the country between the Limpopo and the
Zambesi was that which the Portuguese called Makalanga or Makaranga, and
which we call Makalaka. They are the progenitors of the tribes who, now
greatly reduced in numbers and divided into small villages and clans,
occupy Mashonaland. Their head chief was called the Monomotapa, a name
interpreted to mean "Lord of the Mountain" or "Lord of the Mines." This
personage was turned by Portuguese grandiloquence into an emperor, and
by some European geographers into the name of an empire; so Monomotapa
came to figure on old maps as the designation of a vast territory.

When, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Dutch at the Cape
began to learn something of the Kafirs who dwelt to the eastward, they
found that there was no large dominion, but a great number of petty
tribes, mostly engaged in war with one another. Some were half nomad,
none was firmly rooted in the soil; and the fact that tribes who spoke
similar dialects were often far away from one another, with a tribe of a
different dialect living between, indicated that there had been many
displacements of population of which no historical record existed. Early
in the present century events occurred which showed how such
displacements might have been brought about. In the last years of the
eighteenth century Dingiswayo, the exiled son of the chief of the
Abatetwa tribe, which lived in what is now Zululand, found his way to
the Cape, and learned to admire the military organization of the British
troops who were then holding the Colony.