Note 1 — Chapter II · FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF MASHONALAND

In this theory, formed on the spot from intercourse with the natives, I was glad to find afterwards that I am ably supported by the Portuguese writer Father dos Santos, to whom frequent allusion will be made in these pages. He says, ‘The Monomatapa and all his vassals are Mocarangas, a name which they have because they live in the land of Mocaranga, and talk the language called Mocaranga, which is the best and most polished of all Kaffir languages which I have seen in this Ethiopia.’ Couto, another Portuguese writer, bears testimony to the same point, and every one knows the tendency of the Portuguese to substitute r for l. Umtali is called by the Portuguese Umtare;1 ‘blanco’ is ‘branco’ in Portuguese, and numerous similar instances could be adduced; hence with this small Portuguese variant the names are identical. Father Torrend, in his late work on this part of the country, states, ‘The Karanga certainly have been for centuries the paramount tribe of the vast empire of Monomatapa,’ and the best derivation that suggests itself is the initial Ma or Ba, ‘children,’ ka, ‘of,’ langa, ‘the sun.’ They are an Abantu race, akin to the Zulus, only a weaker branch whose day is over. Several tribes of Bakalanga came into Natal in 1720, forced down by the powerful Zulu hordes, with traditions of having once formed a part of a powerful tribe further north. Three centuries and a half ago, when the Portuguese first visited the country, they were then all-powerful in this country, and were ruled over by a chief with the dynastic name of Monomatapa, which community split up, like all Kaffir combinations do after a generation or so, into a hopeless state of disintegration.2 Each petty chief still has his high-sounding dynastic name, like the Monomatapa or the Pharaoh of his day. Chibi, M’tegeza, M’toko, and countless lesser names are as hereditary as the chiefdoms themselves, and each chief, as he succeeds, drops his own identity and takes the tribal appellative. Such, briefly, is the political aspect of the country we are about to enter.