Читать книгу Man, Past and Present - A. H. Keane - Страница 30

The Kattea or Vaalpens.

Among the ethnological problems of Africa may be reckoned the Vaalpens and the Strandloopers. Along the banks of the Limpopo between the Transvaal and Southern Rhodesia there are scattered a few small groups of an extremely primitive people who are generally confounded with the Bushmen, but differ in some important respects from that race. They are the "Earthmen" of some writers, but their real name is Kattea, though called by their neighbours either Ma Sarwa ("Bad People") or Vaalpens ("Grey Paunches") from the khaki colour acquired by their bodies from creeping on all fours into their underground hovels. But the true colour is almost a pitch black, and as they are only about four feet high they are quite distinct both from the tall Bantus and the yellowish Hottentot-Bushmen. For the Zulus they are mere "dogs" or "vultures," and are certainly the most degraded of all the aborigines, being undoubtedly cannibals, eating their own aged and infirm like some of the Amazonian tribes. Their habitations are holes in the ground, rock-shelters, or caves, or lately a few hovels of mud and foliage at the foot of the hills. Of their speech nothing is known except that it is absolutely distinct both from the Bantu and the Bushman. There are no arts or industries of any kind, not even any weapons beyond those procured in exchange for ostrich feathers, skins or ivory. But they can make fire, and are thus able to cook the offal thrown to them by the Boers in return for their help in skinning the captured game. Whether they have any religious ideas it is impossible to say, all intercourse with the surrounding peoples being restricted to barter carried on with gesture language for nobody has ever yet mastered their tongue. A "chief" is spoken of, but he is merely a headman who presides over the little family groups of from thirty to fifty (there are no tribes properly so called), and whose purely domestic functions are acquired, not by heredity, but by personal worth, that is, physical strength. Altogether the Kattea is perhaps the most perfect embodiment of the pure savage still anywhere surviving[292].

The Strandloopers.

When the Hottentots of South Africa were questioned by scientific men a hundred years ago and more regarding their traditions, they were wont to refer to their predecessors on the coast of South Africa as a savage race living on the seashore and subsisting on shellfish and the bodies of stranded whales. From their habits these were styled in Dutch the Strandloopers or "Shore-runners[293]." According to F. C. Shrubsall the Strandlooper of the Cape Colony caves preceded the Bushman in South Africa. They were a race of short but not dwarfish men with a much higher skull capacity than that of the average Bush race. The extreme of cranial capacity in the Strandloopers was a maximum of over 1600 c.c., while the extreme minimum among the Bush people descends as low as 955 c.c. The frontal region of the skull is much better developed than in the Bush race, and in that respect is more like the Negro. There is little or no brow prominence and one at least of the skulls is as orthognathous in facial angle as that of a European. L. Peringuey remarks also that the type was less dolichocephalic than the Bushmen and Hottentots, under 80 in cephalic index. "He was artistically gifted, like the race which occupied and decorated the Altamira ... and other caves of Spain and France. He painted; he possibly carved on rocks; he used bone tools; he made pottery; he perforated stones for either heading clubs or to be used as make-weights for digging tools; his ornaments consisted of sea-shells; and the ostrich egg-shell discs which he made may be said to be a typical product of his industry. And this culture is retained in South Africa by a kindred race, but more dolichocephalic—the Bushmen-Hottentots. Analogous are most of his tools and his expressions of culture to those of Aurignacian man."