60 THE DIAMOND MINES OF SOUTH AFRICA
From
that year nothing of note was attempted from the stretch of seaboard
loosely held by a few feeble garrisons. Beyond the vague traditions and
romances there were no guidebooks to the rich realm of any African
monarch, and there was no point on the South African coast outside of
the Portuguese strip where the least enticement was shown to any
visiting ship. Nowhere was there any evidence of an approach to
civilization, and there was not even the gilding of barbarism. The
shore tribes were
filthy, famine-hunted negroes, who had, at most, a little ivory or a
handful of feathers to barter for trinkets. There was an intermixture
of blood and a medley of tribes and tribal names that
confounds any tracing of distinction beyond a few blurred divisional lines.
When
the Dutch and English began to tread upon the heels of the Portuguese
in Africa, in the opening years of the seventeenth century, the tribes
of the extreme south and along the southwesterly Atlantic coast might
be roughly grouped under the name of Hottentots, or, as they called
themselves with monstrous conceit, Kwa-Kwa, men of men. In this
assertion there is plainly to be seen the origin of the Arabic Vakvak,
the name sketched in by Edrisi on his map beyond Sofala. The southeast
African coast was held by tribes of the wide-spreading Bantu family,
lumped together by the Arabs as Kafirs. Filtered in between the Bantus
and Hottentots were the pigmy Sana,
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