Note 199 — Chapter IV · —The Movements Of Peoples In Their Geographical Significance

The Semitic folk of Arabia and the desert Hamites of northern Africa, bred by their hot, dry environment to a nomadic life, have been drawn southward over the Sahara across the Tropic into the grasslands of the Sudan, permeating a wide zone of negro folk with the political control, religion, civilization and blood of the Mediterranean north. Here similar though better conditions of life, a climate hotter though less arid, attracted Hamitic invasion, while the relatively dense native population in a lower stage of economic development presented to the commercial Semites the attraction of lucrative trade. South of the equator the native Bantu Kaffirs, essentially a tropical people, spread beyond their zonal border to the south coast of Africa at 33° S.L., and displaced the yellow Hottentots199 before the arrival of the Dutch in 1602; while in the early nineteenth century we hear of the Makololo, a division of this same Kaffir stock, leaving their native seats near the southern sources of the Vaal River at 28° S.L. and moving some nine hundred miles northward to the Barotse territory on the upper Zambesi at 15° S.L.200 This again was a movement of a pastoral people across a tropic to other grasslands, to climatic conditions scarcely different from those which they had left.