Nature and Man in Eastern Africa ¹

Abstract

(1) MR. KITCHING is already favourably known to students of Africa as the author of an outline grammar of the Gang language, the Gang, or Gan, being one of the Nilotic tribes of central Uganda known previously by the Luganda name of Baked!—“the naked ones.” One might at first classify the work under review as a study of the Nilotic peoples of the northern and central parts of the Uganda Protectorate; but as it includes passages dealing with the Bantu races of the same region, especially in regard to the Banyoro, the more general descriptive title is the better. Still, the most valuable part of the book is the study of the Teso and Gan peoples. (In regard to this last, I have fault to find with the author in that, instead of following well-established systems of orthography for dealing with African languages, such as were good enough for Barth and other African philologists of the first rank, he starts a variant of his own, in which n is used in the Spanish acceptation, and not, as it should be, to express the nasal consonant in words like “ringing” and “bang.” This he expresses by another symbol, the n'—most confusing and misleading to the reader, the more so as apparently in some passages by an oversight ñ is to be taken as representing the nasal after all.)