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424
AFRICAN PROPERTY
chap.

was when he fell in with the Ghagas. Well, these Ghagas, Andrew Battel and the Portuguese historians say, were a fearful people, who came from behind Sierra Leone, and when the Kingdom of Congo was discovered by Diego Caŏ in 1484, the Ghagas were attacking it so severely that, but for the timely arrival of the Portuguese and the help they gave Congo, there would in a very short time have been no Kingdom of Congo left to discover; and to this day Dr. Blyden, who went there on a Government mission, says that up by Fallaba, in the Sierra Leone hinterland, you will now and then see a Ghaga—a man feared, a man of whom the country people do not know where his home is, nor what he eats or how he lives, but from whom they shrink as from a superior terrible form of human being—a remnant, or remainder over, of those people whose very name struck terror throughout Central Equatorial Africa in the 15th century, when, for some reason we do not know, they made a warlike migration down among the peaceful feeble Bantu.

If you will carefully study the account given of the organisation of the Ghagas and also of the organisation of the Kingdom of Congo, I think you will see that in the Ghagas you have a true Negro State form, while in the Congo Kingdom you have something different; something that is nowadays called Bantu. What became of the Ghagas when foiled by the Portuguese in destroying the Kingdom of Congo is not exactly known, but there is a definite ground for thinking that, modified by intermarriage and a different environment, they split up, and are now represented by the warlike South African tribes and East African tribes, such as the Matabele, and the Massai, and so on. The modification of this portion of the true Negro stem in the