The Prehistory of South Africa 1

Abstract

THE bulk of Dr. McCall Theal's book is as valuable now as it was when first issued, twenty years ago. But though “illustrated and enlarged,” it is not “improved” so much as one would have expected. Dr. Theal does not make much use—though he alludes to its publication in 1911—of Dr. Péringuey's important study of the Stone age in South Africa, though the theories of Péringuey and Shrubsall would have materially helped him in his attempts to picture the first peopling of South Africa by Man. Also, in the scanty evidence he has gathered together of the origin and wanderings of the Bushman race he—as do most other historians of Africa— overlooks the statement of the Italian traveller, Ludovico di Varthema, who in his 1508 voyage across the Indian Ocean stopped at Mozambique, and, journeying a short distance inland to some table-topped mountain, described a short-statured savage people living on the mountain-top whose language consisted largely of “clicks,” “like the sounds used by Sicilian mule-drivers.” I have myself gathered up and recorded legends in South Nyasaland of a yellow-skinned, Bushman-like tribe that lived down to a few hundred years ago on the inaccessible upper parts of Mts. Mlanje and Chiperone.