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Cattle-Keeping and Milking in Eastern and Southern African History: The Linguistic Evidence1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

Christopher Ehret
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Extract

Cattle have been known in northern East Africa for a long time. A single people initiated the spread of cattle farther south through southern East Africa, and partly into southern Africa, at a time prior to the expansion of Bantu-speakers into these regions. This spread was not accompanied by knowledge of milking. The milking of cattle, although very likely practised by some northern East African peoples since a very early period, diffused to Bantu peoples after their advance into eastern and southern Africa was well under way. The practice was probably borrowed from Southern Cushites first by Bantu in northern Tanganyika and through them transmitted to the rest of the eastern and southern Bantu.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , March 1967 , pp. 1 - 17
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1967

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References

2 The nomenclature used in this paper is derived from that used by the Greenberg classification of African languages. This usage does not necessarily imply complete acceptance of the Greenberg scheme. In fact, if the reader is so inclined, he may, for most of the time at least, simply consider the Greenberg classification as a convenient index to the languages discussed. The naming of peoples is entirely linguistic; nothing whatsoever is implied in these names about culture or racial types.Google Scholar

3 A listing of non-Bantu and a few Bantu words for cattle in northern East Africa is found in Table I.Google Scholar

4 The Languages of Africa (Bloomington; Indiana University, 1963), p. 88.Google Scholar

5 Lendu zz in final position often corresponds to a high front vowel in other central Sudanic languages: e.g. Lendu dzz and Avukaya gyi, ‘to call’; Lendu ndzz and Avukaya ägyf, ‘yesterday’; and Lendu dzz and Avukaya zi, ‘to buy’. Lendu ts appears also to correspond to t elsewhere: e.g. Lendu tsu and Avukaya to, ‘to sweep’. (On the other hand, aifrication in Lendu ‘cow’ may be due to the neighbouring zz.) Thus Lendu tszz and Avukaya ti, ‘head of cattle’, appear to show regular correspondence.Google Scholar

6 The same root appears in Tswana nku and Zulu imvu, both meaning ‘sheep’.Google Scholar

7 For the demonstration of this correspondence see Table 3.Google Scholar

8 To connect this people with any of the modern-day peoples of East Africa would be a difficult problem, There is, however, one feature of the *(k)umbi root that may give a possible hint of genetic affiliations of the language or languages spoken by this people. This feature is the occurrence of an initial velar consonant in some forms of the root and its lack in others. It invites comparison with the so-called ‘movable k-’ of Greenberg's Central and Eastern Sudanic languages, a generally fossilized prefix element which may occur with a noun stem in one language but be lacking in a cognate noun stem in a related language, or which may even give rise to variants of the same word, one with the prefix and one without, within the same language. Thus we have Ban kiten and Acholi dyan, ‘cow’, and even Madi kari and ari, both meaning ‘blood’. The possibility should therefore be entertained that the people who initiated the southward spread of cattle may have spoken a language related to Eastern or Central Sudanic languages. In this light it is worth noting that the only other word for cattle in East African languages which is at all similar in shape to the base *-umbi is bi, which names cattle in certain of the Didinga-Murle languages of Eastern Sudanic, for instance in Tirma, spoken along the far southwest border of Ethiopia. (Greenberg has suggested possible cognates for this Didinga-Murle root among the Coman languages and in Kanuni.)Google Scholar

9 A select list of generic terms for milk in eastern and southern Africa is contained in Table 2.Google Scholar

10 Greenberg, J. H., ‘The Mogogodo, a Forgotten Cushitic People’, Journal of African Languages, II, 29–43.Google Scholar

11 For this correspondence, see Table 4.Google Scholar

12 See Table 5.Google Scholar

13 Introduction to the Phonology of the Bantu Languages (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer/Ernst Vohsen, 1932), p. 230.Google Scholar

14 Ibid. p. 197. If so, -kaka with the meaning ‘milk’ would probably derive from the second reconstructed form, *-kaka, since Meinhof's k–which appears in the first reconstructed form, *-kaka–is generally realized in modern Bantu languages as a palatal affricate or alveolar fricative. Nyakyusa, spoken nearby to languages with the stem -kaka for ‘milk’, does indeed have -khakha for ‘to coagulate’, a form reconstructing in Meinhof's terminology as *-kaka The presence of a reflex of this variant of the root in the area where -kaka is used today to name milk thus adds to the probability of the suggested derivation for the stem.