Fauna.—The fauna also has many West African affinities in the hot, forested regions. In the adjoining Kisumu province of Kenya Colony there are several West African mammals, such as the broad-horned tragelaph and the forest pig. These are also found in part of the Semliki forests. As a rule, however, the fauna of the Upper Semliki valley, of parts of Ankole, Buganda and Bunyoro, of the Northern, Rudolf and Eastern provinces, is of that "East African," "Ethiopic" character which is specially the feature of South and East Africa and of the Sudan right across from Abyssinia to the river Senegal. Among notable mammals the chimpanzee is found in Bunyoro, Toro and north-west Ankole, and has only recently become extinct in Buganda; the gorilla is found in the Mfumbiro region; the okapi inhabits the Semliki forests on the Congo frontier; the giraffe (the male sometimes developing five horn cores) is common in the Northern, Eastern and Rudolf provinces ; there are three types of buffalo—the Cape, the Congo and the Abyssinian; two species of zebra—one of them Grevy's—the African wild ass, the square-lipped ("white") and pointed-lipped ("black") rhinoceroses, the elephant—in 1928 it was estimated that there were 20,000 elephants in the protectorate —hippopotamus, water tragelaph ("Speke's antelope"), Cape ant bear, aard-wolf (Proteles), hunting-dog, and nearly every genus and most of the species of African antelopes. The birds are more West African than the mammals, and include the grey parrot, all the genera of the splendidly-coloured turacoes, the unique "whale headed stork" and the ostrich.
They are reddish-yellow and brownish-black (according to indi vidual variation) in skin colour, with head hair often tending to russet, and body hair of two kinds—black and bristly on the upper lip, chin, chest, axillae and pubes ; and yellowish and fleecy on the cheeks, back and limbs. Their faces are remarkable for
the long upper lip and the depressed broad nose with enormous alae. Associated with these pygmies is the "Forest negro" type (Lendu, Lega, Baamba, Banande), of normal human stature, but short-legged and unusually prognathous. The Bantu negroes in clude the remarkable Baganda people. These last, before the ar rival of Arabs and Europeans, displayed a nearer approach to civilization than has as yet been attained by an unaided negro people. Their dynasty of monarchs can be traced back with tol erable certainty to a period coincident with the reign of Henry IV. of England (A.D. 1400). The first Buganda king was probably a Hamite of the Hima stock (from Bunyoro). Until the coming of the white man the Baganda and most of the other Bantu peoples of the protectorate worshipped ancestral and nature spirits, who had become elevated to the rank of gods and goddesses. The Baganda are now mainly Christian. A "totem" system is still in vogue. All the Baganda belong to one or other of 29 clans, or "Bika," which are named after and have as totem familiar beasts, birds, fish or vegetables. The Baganda are not sexually a very moral people, but they have an extreme regard for decency, and are always scrupulously clothed (formerly in bark cloth, now in calico). As a general rule all the Bantu tribes in the western half of the protectorate, including the Basoga, are careful to consider decency in their clothing, while the Nilotic negroes are, or until recently were, often completely nude in both sexes. More or less nudity among men is characteristic even of the Bahima (Ham ites). But in this caste the women are scrupulously clothed.
The Nile negroes and Hima are tall people. The Bahima are often markedly handsome, even to European eyes. In the Bahima the proportion of Caucasian blood is about one-fourth ; in the Nile negroes and Bantu from one-sixteenth to none at all. The aboriginal stock of the Uganda Protectorate is undoubtedly the pygmy-prognathous, which has gradually been absorbed, overlaid or exterminated by better developed specimens of the negro sub species, or by Negro-Caucasian hybrids from the north and north east.
The languages spoken in the Uganda Protectorate belong to the following stocks: (1) Hamitic (Murle and Rendile of Lake Ru dolf) ; (2) Masai (Bari, Elgumi, Turkana, Suk, etc.) ; (2a) Sabei on the northern slopes of Elgon and on Mt. Debasien ; (2b) Nilotic (Acholi, Aluru, Gang, etc.) ; (3) Madi (spoken on the Nile between Aluru and Bari, really of West African affinities) ; (4) Bantu (Lu-ganda, Runyoro, Lu-konjo, Kuamba, Lihuku, the Masaba languages of west Elgon and Kavirondo, etc.) ; and lastly, the unclassified, isolated Lendu and Mbuba spoken by some of the pygmy-prognathous peoples. Among the Baganda a knowledge of English is common, and Kiswahili is used by the trading classes.