L'ÉTUDE DES LANGUES AFRICAINES: RÉSULTATS ACTUELS ET CEUX QUE L'ON ESPÈRE DANS L'AVENIR

It is only the span of one man's lifetime since the veil which had shrouded the heart of Africa from the knowledge of the outer world was torn aside by the great explorers. Between 1858 and 1872 the dominant physical features of Central Africa were discovered. Little more than ten years later, all this vast new-found area had been ‘partitioned’, together with the previously known and partly occupied country on the seaboard, between the colonial Powers of Europe. Since that time a variety of governments have been grappling according to their lights with the wide range of problems, physical and social, political and economic, involved in the administration of African peoples. They have had little to guide them. In South Africa, it is true, a great body of Africans, racially akin to those of Tropical Africa, had long been under European government; but the fact that the climate of South Africa had permitted Europeans to make it the homeland of a new European nation meant that the lessons of South African experience were largely inapplicable to that greater part of Tropical Africa which is unsuited for European settlement.

In the closing phrases of the Introduction to his book, The Modern Languages of Africa, R. N. Cust says: ‘The actual out-turn of Languages admitted on my Schedule represent a very small portion of the Great Unknown.’ That was in 1883. To-day, more than half a century later, Africa has, linguistically as well as in other ways, ceased to be the ‘Great Unknown’, and yet we are far from possessing an exhaustive knowledge of the languages of Africa and their interrelations. It is impossible in this article to show in detail what has since been achieved; its main purport is rather to point to what is lacking and to direct attention to those spheres of study which appear to be of particular importance in the near future.

Anthropology is an aggressive science. It has infected the study of contemporary social conditions with its outlook and methods. Witness the work done in Middletown, on the Irish countryman, and at Newburyport; the gradual pervasion of European folk-lore research with the methods of exotic field-work; and such a movement as Mass-Observation in England. Anthropology is now turning to the full sociological study of the great oriental cultures in China, India, and Japan. Nor is the reason for its effective aggressiveness difficult to find. The anthropologist among all other students of humanism was forced to obtain his material at first-hand through the direct observation of primitive races. For in his subjectmatter, there is no relying on written documents. Thus the strongest asset and the most inspiring force of the anthropological point of view is its thorough-going empiricism. Ethnography is the laboratory of social science.

Existing accounts of the Masai may be broadly grouped under three heads: (1) The popular impressionist accounts of the tribe by travellers in East Africa; the numerous travel works on this part of Africa nearly all contain some mention of the tribe, but in the main, these descriptions are calculated for their dramatic effect, and thus become largely inaccurate and valueless for the serious student. (2) Studies of the tribe such as those contained in the works of N. Leys and W. M. Ross. These authors approach the subject rather from the political angle, and make a study of the tribe largely for the purpose of criticizing Kenya's native policy. (3) The works dealing with the tribe from the ethnographic and anthropological standpoint; of the older works, the most important are those by A. C. Hollis and M. Merker. Among the more recent contributions the most outstanding are those by L. S. B. Leakey and S. Storrs-Fox. Daryll Forde has also given an account of the tribe from the point of view of the social geographer.

Si vous demandez à un Mbali ce que signifie ce nom, il vous répondra fièrement: Kimbali veut dire, ‘Noir civilisé’. Si vous poussez plus loin votre curiosité et voulez savoir si ce terme même signifie ‘civilisé’, et en quelle langue, le plus intelligent de vos interlocuteurs ne saura vous donner une explication satisfaisante. Tout au plus dira-t-il: C'est ainsi que les non-civilisés, les ‘gentios’, appellent les Noirs qui vivent au service des Blancs. C'est exact, mais insuffisant comme explication. Du reste eux-mêmes se désignent volontiers par le même mot. En tenant compte de tous les éléments constitutifs on pourrait ainsi définir les Mbali: Des Noirs descendants d'anciens esclaves et travailleurs de plantations ayant assimilé un grand nombre d'éléments culturels de leurs anciens maîtres et qui aujourd'hui encore cherchent facilement leur gagne-pain chez les Blancs comme domestiques et comme artisans.