Zanzibar; city, island, and coast. Vol. 2 (of 2)Burton, Richard Francis, Sir
History
Zanzibar; city, island, and coast. Vol. 2 (of 2)
Burton, Richard Francis, Sir
Africa, East -- Description and travel; Ethnology -- Tanzania -- Zanzibar; Zanzibar -- Description and travel
Physically the Wanyika race is not inferior to other negroids, nor
degraded as is the Congo negro. Like the Galla and the Somal, the skull
is pyramido-oval, flattened and depressed at the moral region of the
phrenologist—a persistent form amongst savages and barbarians—and
straight or ‘wall-sided’ above the ears, a shape common both to ‘Semite’
and negro. The features are ‘Hamitic’ only from the eyes downwards: the
brow is moderately high, broad, and conical; the orbits are tolerably
distant; the face is somewhat broad and plain, with well-developed
zygomata; the nose is depressed with patulated nostrils, coarse and
ill-turned; the lips are bordés, fleshy and swelling, and the jaw is
distinctly prognathous. The beard is scant; the hair, which though wiry,
yet grows comparatively long, is shaved off the forehead from ear to
ear, and hangs down in the thinnest of corkscrews, stiffened with fat.
The skin is soft, but the effluvium is distinctly African; the colour is
chocolate-brown and rarely black, unless the mother be a slave from the
South. The figure is, like the features, Semitic above and negrotic
below. The head is well seated upon broad shoulders; the chest is ample,
and the stomach, except in early boyhood or in old age, does not
protrude or depend. But the bunchy calf is placed near the ham; the
shin-bone bends forward, and the foot is large, flat, and lark-heeled.
Nothing is more remarkable than the contrast between form and face in
the woman-kind: upon the lower limbs, especially the haunches, of the
Medicean Venus a hideous ape-like phiz meets the disappointed eye: above
hangs a flaccid bosom, below
wand-like is
Her middle falling still,
And rising whereas women rise—
Imagine nothing ill!
There is not, as amongst the Hottentots, that exaggeration of the
steatopyga which assimilates the South African man to his ovines: the
subcutaneous fat overlying the gluteian muscles and their adjacents,
forms in early life a cushion rather ornamental than otherwise. Young
men often show a curious little crupper which gives a whimsical
appearance to the posterior surface—I have observed this also amongst
the Somal. The favourite standing position is cross-legged, a posture
unknown to Europe; sometimes the sole of one foot is applied to the
ankle or to the knee of the other leg: the gait—no two nations walk
exactly alike—is half-stride, half-lounge. Eyes wild and staring, abrupt
gestures, harsh, loud, and barking voices, still evidence the ignoble
savage.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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