The Label This One Replaced

Before Nilotic settled into its present form, colonial ethnography divided these peoples using a scheme built on the Hamitic hypothesis. The hypothesis began as a reading of Genesis, in which the descendants of Noah's sons populated the continents, and it was reworked in the nineteenth century into a racial theory: that the achievements found in Africa, states, cattle keeping, monotheism, must have arrived with lighter-skinned migrants from the north, who were classed as Hamites and treated as Caucasian rather than African. Peoples who did not fit either the Hamitic or the Negro category were called Nilo-Hamitic, a term applied to the Maasai and their neighbours.

Edith Sanders traced the history of the idea in a 1969 article that remains the standard account, and the theory it describes is wholly discarded. Its consequences were not confined to books. Colonial administrations in the Great Lakes region used Hamitic reasoning to rank the populations they governed, with results that ran into the twentieth century and beyond. The atlas keeps this on the record because the vocabulary of a discarded theory outlives the theory, and a reader meeting Nilo-Hamitic in an older source should know what it was doing there.