Shooting Party at Thika Camp.From left to right—Capt. Sadler, Major Riddell, Mr. Marsh, Marquis Gandolfi-Hornyold, Hon. K. Dundas, Mr. Percival, Mr. Churchill, Mr. D. J. Wilson.
Shooting Party at Thika Camp.From left to right—Capt. Sadler, Major Riddell, Mr. Marsh, Marquis Gandolfi-Hornyold, Hon. K. Dundas, Mr. Percival, Mr. Churchill, Mr. D. J. Wilson.
The young Englishman, be he officer or settler in the East African Highlands, cuts a hardy figure. His clothes are few and far between: a sun hat, a brown flannel shirt with sleeves cut above the elbow and open to the chest, a pair of thin khaki knickerbockers cut short five inches—at least—above the knee, boots, and a pair of putties comprise the whole attire. Nothing else is worn. The skin, exposed to sun, thorns, and insects, becomes almost as dark as that of the natives, and so hardened that it is nothing to ride all day with bare knees on the saddle; a truly Spartan discipline from which at least the visitor may be excused.
This is the way in which they hunt lions. First find the lion, lured to a kill, driven from a reed-bed, or kicked up incontinently by the way. Once viewed he must never be lost sight of for a moment. Mounted on ponies of more or less approved fidelity, three orfour daring Britons or Somalis gallop after him, as in India they ride the pig—that is to say, neck or nothing—across rocks, holes, tussocks, nullahs, through high grass, thorn scrub, undergrowth, turning him, shepherding him, heading him this way and that until he is brought to bay. For his part the lion is no seeker of quarrels; he is often described in accents of contempt. His object throughout is to save his skin. If, being unarmed, you meet six or seven lions unexpectedly, all you need do—according to my information—is to speak to them sternly and they will slink away, while you throw a few stones at them to hurry them up. All the highest authorities recommend this.
But when pursued from place to place, chased hither and thither by the wheeling horsemen, the naturally mild disposition of the lion becomes embittered. First he begins to growl and roar at his enemies, in order to terrify them, and make them leave him in peace. Then he darts little short charges at them. Finally, when every attempt at peaceful persuasion has failed, he pulls up abruptly and offers battle. Once he has done this, he will run no more. He means to fight,and to fight to the death. He means to charge home; and when a lion, maddened with the agony of a bullet-wound, distressed by long and hard pursuit, or, most of all, a lioness in defence of her cubs, is definitely committed to the charge, death is the only possible conclusion. Broken limbs, broken jaws, a body raked from end to end, lungs pierced through and through, entrails torn and protruding—none of these count. It must be death—instant and utter—for the lion, or down goes the man, mauled by septic claws and fetid teeth, crushed and crunched, and poisoned afterwards to make doubly sure. Such are the habits of this cowardly and wicked animal.
It is at the stage when the lion has been determinedly "bayed" that the sportsman from London is usually introduced upon the scene. He has, we may imagine, followed the riders as fast as the inequalities of the ground, his own want of training, and the burden of a heavy rifle will allow him. He arrives at the spot where the lion is cornered in much the same manner as the matador enters the arena, the others standing aside deferentially, ready to aid him or divert thelion. If his bullet kills, he is, no doubt, justly proud. If it only wounds, the lion charges the nearest horseman. For forty yards the charge of a lion is swifter than the gallop of a racehorse. The riders, therefore, usually avoid waiting within that distance. But sometimes they do not; or sometimes the lion sees the man who has shot him; or sometimes all sorts of things happen which make good stories—afterwards.
After this general description no particular example is required, and the reader need not be disappointed to learn that our lion escaped what, no doubt, would have been his certain destruction by the breaking of a single link in the regular chain of circumstances. He was not found upon the kill. His place was taken by a filthy hyena, and it was not until we had beaten thoroughly for two hours more than three miles of reed-bed that we saw him—a splendid great yellow cat, looking as big as a bullock—bounding away up the opposite hill. Off started our riders like falcons; but alas!—if "alas!" is the proper word—a deep and impassable nullah intervened, necessitating large circuits and long delays; so that the lion got clean away out of sight of all men, and we were reduced to the slow and tediousprocess of tracking him footprint by footprint through waving grass, breast-high, hour after hour, always expecting to tread on his tail, and always—disappointed!
The Banda at Thika Camp.
The Banda at Thika Camp.
Colonel Wilson's Lion.
Colonel Wilson's Lion.
In the afternoon I had to ride to Fort Hall, where there was to be a great gathering of Kikuyu chiefs and thousands of their warriors and women. The country is much the same as that traversed on the previous day, but greener, smoother, and more pleasant-looking. Fort Hall is not a fort in any military sense, but the Commissioner's house with a ditch round it, a jail, a few houses, and an Indian bazaar. The station is hardly well selected, being perched up on a hill out of the reach of any railway—and unhealthy nevertheless. The whole place was crowded with natives in their most highly ornamented and elaborate nudity, waiting for the war-dance.
This ceremony was performed the next morning. Long before daylight the beating of drums, the blowing of horns, and the rhythm of loud, yet not altogether unmelodious chanting awakened the weariest sleeper; and when, at eight o'clock theindababegan, the whole space in front of the fort was densely packed with naked, painted, plumed,and gyrating humanity, which seethed continually to and fro, and divided from time to time as particular chiefs advanced with their followers, or as gifts of struggling sheep and bulls were brought forward. In his war dress the Kikuyu, and, still more, the Masai warrior, is a striking, if not impressive, figure. His hair and body are smeared with the red earth of his native land, compounded into a pigment by mixture with the slimy juice of the castor-oil plant, which abounds. Fantastic headdresses, some of ostrich feathers, others of metal or leather; armlets and leglets of twisted wire; stripes of white clay rubbed across the red pigment; here and there an old pot-hat or some European garment, incongruously contrasted with leopard-skins and bulls' horns; broad, painted cow-hide shields, and spears with soft iron blades nearly four feet long, complete a grotesque and indecorous picture. Still, there is a sleek grace about these active forms—bronze statues but for their frippery—which defeats all their own efforts to make themselves hideous. The chiefs, however, succeed in reducing themselves to regular guys. Any old, cast-off khaki jacket or tattered pair of trousers; any fragment ofweather-stained uniform, a battered sun-helmet with a feather stuck lamely into the top of it, a ragged umbrella, is sufficient to induce them to abandon the ostrich plume and the leopard-skin kaross. Among their warriors in ancient gear they look ridiculous and insignificant—more like the commonest kind of native sweeper than the hereditary rulers of some powerful and numerous tribe.
"Durbar" at Kiambu.
"Durbar" at Kiambu.
It is unquestionably an advantage that the East African negro should develop a taste for civilized attire. In no more useful and innocent direction could his wants be multiplied and his desires excited, and it is by this process of assimilation that his life will gradually be made more complicated, more varied, less crudely animal, and himself raised to a higher level of economic utility. But it would surely be worth while to organize and guide this new motive force within graceful and appropriate limits. A Government runs risks when it intrudes upon the domain of fashion; but when a veritable abyss of knowledge and science separates the rulers from the ruled, when authority is dealing with a native race still plunged in its primary squalour, without religion, without clothes, without morals,but willing to emerge and capable of emerging, such risks may fairly be accepted; and the Government might well prescribe or present suitable robes for ceremonial occasions to the chiefs, and gradually encourage, and more gradually still enforce, their adoption throughout the population.
After the dance it had been arranged that I should go as far as the bank of the Tana River to see the view of Mount Kenya, and then return to the Thika camp before night. But when the whole splendid panorama of the trans-Tana country opened upon us, I could not bring myself to stop short of the promised land; and, casting away material cares of luncheon and baggage, I decided to ride through to Embo, twenty-eight miles from Fort Hall, and our most advanced post in this direction. We crossed the Tana by a ferry which travels along a rope under the impulsion of the current. The ponies swam the deep, strong, sixty-yard stream of turbulent red water. On the farther bank the country is really magnificent in quality and aspect. The centre of the picture is always Mount Kenya; but there never was a mountain which made so little of its height. It risesby long gentle slopes, more like a swelling of ground than a peak, from an immense upland plain, and so gradual is the acclivity that, but for the sudden outcrop of snow-clad rock which crowns the summit, no one would believe it over eighteen thousand feet high. It is its gradual rise that imparts so great a value to this noble mountain; for about its enormous base and upon its slopes, traversed by hundreds of streams of clear perennial water, there grows, or may grow, in successive, concentric belts, every kind of crop and forest known in the world, from the Equator to the Arctic Circle. The landscape is superb. In beauty, in fertility, in verdure, in the coolness of the air, in the abundance of running water, in its rich red soil, in the variety of its vegetation, the scenery about Kenya far surpasses anything I have ever seen in India or South Africa, and challenges comparison with the fairest countries of Europe. Indeed, looking at it with an eye fresh from Italy, I was most powerfully reminded of the upper valleys of the Po.
We rode on all day through this delicious country, along a well-kept native road, smooth enough for a bicycle, except where it crossedstream after stream on primitive bridges. On every side the soil was cultivated and covered with the crops of a large and industrious population. It is only a year since regular control was established beyond the Tana, not without some bloodshed, by a small military expedition. Yet so peaceful are the tribes—now that their intertribal fighting has been stopped—that white officers ride freely about among their villages without even carrying a pistol. All the natives met with on the road were armed with sword and spear, and all offered us their customary salutations, while many came up smiling and holding out long, moist, delicate-looking hands for me to shake, till I had quite enough of it. Indeed, the only dangers of the road appear to be from the buffaloes which infest the country, and after nightfall place the traveller in real peril. We were very glad for this reason, and also because we had eaten nothing but a banana each since early morning, to see at last on the top of the next hill the buildings of Embo just as the sun sank beneath the horizon.
Embo is a model station, only five months old—one small, three-roomed house for the District Commissioner, one for the militaryofficer, an office, and a tiny jail, all in good dressed stone; two Indian shops in corrugated iron; and seven or eight long rows of beehive grass huts for a hundred and fifty soldiers and police. Two young white officers—a civilian and a soldier—preside from this centre of authority, far from the telegraph, over the peace and order of an area as large as an English county, and regulate the conduct and fortunes of some seventy-five thousand natives, who have never previously known or acknowledged any law but violence or terror. They were uncommonly surprised to see four horsemen come riding up the zigzag path to their dwelling; but their astonishment was no bar to their hospitality, and we were soon rewarded for our journey and our fasting in most excellent fashion.
I had just time before the darkness flooded the land and blotted out the mighty mountain and its wreaths of fire-tipped cloud to walk round this station. The jail consisted of a single room, barred and bolted. Inside not a prisoner was to be seen. I inquired where they were, and was shown two little groups seated round fires in the open. They were chained together by a light running chain, andafter a hard day's miscellaneous work about the station they chatted peacefully as they cooked and ate their evening meal. The prison was only their shelter for the night—primitive arrangements, no doubt, but are they more barbarous than the hideous, long-drawn precision of an English convict establishment?
The African protectorates now administered by the Colonial Office afford rare scope for the abilities of earnest and intelligent youth. A man of twenty-five may easily find himself ruling a large tract of country and a numerous population. The Government is too newly established to have developed the highly centralized and closely knit—perhaps too closely knit—hierarchy and control of the Indian system. It is far too poor to afford a complete Administration. The District Commissioner must judge for himself, and be judged upon his actions. Very often—for tropical diseases make many gaps in the ranks, and men must often return to England to recruit their health—the officer is not a District Commissioner at all, but a junior acting in his stead or in some one's stead, sometimes for a year or more. To him there come day by day the natives ofthe district with all their troubles, disputes, and intrigues. Their growing appreciation of the impartial justice of the tribunal leads them increasingly to carry all sorts of cases to the District Commissioner's Court. When they are ill they come and ask for medicine. When they are wounded in their quarrels it is to the white man they go to have the injuries dressed. Disease and accident have to be combated without professional skill. Courts of justice and forms of legality must be maintained without lawyers. Taxes have to be collected by personal influence. Peace has to be kept with only a shadow of force.
All these great opportunities of high service, and many others, are often and daily placed within the reach of men in their twenties—on the whole with admirable results. It was most pleasant to hear with what comprehension and sympathy the officers of the East Africa Protectorate speak about their work; and how they regard themselves as the guardians of native interests and native rights against those who only care about exploiting the country and its people. No one can travel even for a little while among the Kikuyu tribes without acquiring a liking for these light-hearted, tractable, if brutishchildren, or without feeling that they are capable of being instructed and raised from their present degradation. There are more than four million aboriginals in East Africa alone. Their care imposes a grave, and I think an inalienable, responsibility upon the British Government. It will be an ill day for these native races when their fortunes are removed from the impartial and august administration of the Crown and abandoned to the fierce self-interest of a small white population. Such an event is no doubt very remote. Yet the speculator, the planter, and the settler are knocking at the door. There are many things which ought to be done—good, wise, scientific, and justly profitable. If the Government cannot find the money to develop the natural economic strength of the country, to make its communications, to start its industries, can it with any reason bar the field to private enterprise? Can it prevent the ingress of a white population? Ought it to do so, and for how long? What is to happen when there are thirty thousand white people in East Africa, instead of the three thousand or so who make so much stir at the present time? Perhaps the course of these chapters will lead us backagain to these questions. I am very doubtful whether it will supply their answers.
We have a discussion in the evening on a much more manageable subject. The District Commissioner at Embo has been ordered by the High Court of the Protectorate to retry a criminal case which he had settled some months before, on account of an informality in the report of the proceedings, which had excited the attention of the revising authority. It is pointed out that neither the accused nor his fellow-natives understand, or can ever be made to understand, the meaning of this repetition of a trial; that they are bewildered; that their confidence in their personal ruler may be weakened; that endless practical difficulties—for instance, the collection of witnesses scattered about in distant villages, and the disquietude caused to them by a second summons from the strange, mysterious power called "Government"—arise out of an error which only a lawyer could detect, and which only appears upon a piece of paper. "Some one," quaintly says a young civil officer, who has ridden over with us, "forgot to say 'Bo!' in the right place." I ask the nature of the "Bo!" It is certainly substantial. Nomention was made in the report of the trial that the accused was given the opportunity of cross-examining the hostile witnesses. Therefore, although this was in fact done, the trial is held to be no trial, and ordered anew.
Now, here is again a balancing of disadvantages; but without here examining whether a simple release would not have been better than a retrial, I find myself plainly on the side of the "Bo!" There is scarcely anything more important in the government of men than the exact—I will even say the pedantic—observance of the regular forms by which the guilt or innocence of accused persons is determined. Those forms are designed to protect the prisoner, not merely from the consequences of honest forgetfulness in his judges, but from systematic carelessness and possible oppression. Once they are allowed to be loosely construed the whole system of civilized jurisprudence begins to crumble, and in its place there is gradually erected a rough-and-ready practice dependent entirely for its efficiency and fairness upon the character and intelligence of the individual responsible. Necessary as it is to trust to personal authority in the control of native races of the lowest standard, it is notless necessary to assign well-marked limits to that authority, and, above all, to place the simple primary rights of accused persons to what we at home are accustomed to call a "fair trial" outside its scope. Nor does the administrator really suffer in native eyes from the apparition into his domain of superior authority. The tribesmen see that their ruler—to them all-powerful, the man of soldiers and police, of punishment and reward—is himself obedient to some remote external force, and they wonder what that mysterious force can be and marvel dimly at its greatness. Authority is enhanced and not impaired by the suggestion of immense reserves behind and above the immediate ruler—strong though he be. But upon this, as upon other matters, it is not necessary for every one to be of the same opinion; and even lawyers are not always wise.
On our homeward ride in the early morning we passed a Swahili village. These Mohammedans have penetrated deeply and established themselves widely in the Eastern parts of Africa. Armed with a superior religion and strengthened with Arab blood, they maintain themselves without difficulty at a far higher level than the pagan aboriginals among whomthey live. Their language has become a sort oflingua francaover all this part of the world. As traders they are welcomed, as fighting men they are respected, and as sorcerers they are feared by all the tribes. Their Khan had supplied us with bananas on the previous day with many expressions of apology that, as we were unexpected, he had no "European food." To-day all this was repaired. The men of the village, to the number of perhaps fifty, walked sedately out to meet us, their long white smocks in striking contrast to the naked, painted barbarians who surrounded them. The Khan led up a white Arab stallion, of vicious temper and tripling gait, to replace my wearied pony; and then produced tea and a familiar tin of mixed biscuits, which he had over-night sent runners to procure, that his hospitality might incur no reproach.
While we were eating and parleying with the Khan there arrived on the scene a mounted Kikuyu chief, with chair, umbrella, khaki helmet, and other insignia, and attended by about a hundred warriors in full feather. In order to show their respect they began at once their war-dance, and we left them a quarter of an hour later still circling and hopping to andfro with quivering spears and nodding plumes to their monotonous chorus, while the white-robed Swahilis stood gravely by and bade us farewell in the dignified manners of the East. I reflected upon the interval that separates these two races from each other, and on the centuries of struggle that the advance had cost, and I wondered whether that interval was wider and deeper than that which divides the modern European from them both; but without arriving at any sure conclusion.
Our journey to Embo had been so delightful that I was not inclined to hanker after rejected alternatives. But when we drove in to the Thika camp as the sun was setting, tired out by fifty miles of road, the first spectacle which saluted my eyes was a lion's skin spread out upon the ground and Colonel Wilson engaged in sprinkling it with arsenical powder. Then we were told the tale, which in brief was that they were driving a long reed-bed, when the lion sprang out and ran obliquely across the line of beaters. Wilson fired and the lion bounded back into the reeds, whence stones, fires, shoutings, shots, and all other disturbances failed to move him. Whereupon, after two hours, being impatient and venturesome, they had marched inupon him shoulder to shoulder, to find him, fortunately, quite dead.
My friends endeavoured to console me by the news that lions had now been heard of in two other places, and that we should be sure to find one in the morning; and next day, after we had driven three miles of reeds, it seemed that their hopes were well founded, for a large animal of some kind could be seen moving swiftly to and fro under cover, and every one declared this must be the lion. At last only one more patch of reeds remained to beat, and we took up our positions, finger on trigger, about sixty yards from the farther edge of it, while the beaters, raising an astonishing tumult with yells and the beating of tin cans, plunged boldly in.Parturiunt montes—out rushed two enormous wart-hogs. Let no one reproach the courage of the pig. These great fierce boars, driven from their last shelter, charged out in gallant style—tusks gleaming, tails perpendicular—and met a fate prepared for a king. With these and another which we galloped down and pistolled on the way home I had to be content, and can now, so far as I am concerned, sadly write, in the expressive words of Reuter, "No lions were 'bagged.'"
"Colour" is already the dominant question at Nairobi. "We mean to make East Africa a white man's country," cries, in strident tones, the Colonists' Association on every occasion. Truly a respectable and impressive policy; but one which seems, at first sight, rather difficult to achieve in a land where there are, so far, fewer than two thousand five hundred whites and more than four million black aboriginals. Can East Africa ever become a white man's country? Can even the Highlands, with their cool and buoyant breezes and temperate, unchanging climate, become a white man's country? Never, certainly, in the sense that Canada, or, indeed, the United Kingdom, are white men's countries—that is to say, countries inhabited wholly by white people and subsisting upon an economic basis of white unskilled labour.
It is scarcely worth while even to imagine the Highlands of East Africa denuded of their native inhabitants and occupied solely by Europeans. Such an idea is utterly impossible. Whatever may be the increase in the white population in the future, it is safe to say that it will be far more than counter-balanced by the multiplication of the natives, as they are guarded against famine and prevented from civil war. But were such a solution possible, it would be almost the last thing in the world desired by those who clamour for "a white man's country." For observe it is not against the black aboriginal that the prejudices and interests of the white settler or trader are arrayed. The African, it is conceded, is welcome to stay in his own country. No economic competition has yet arisen or is likely to arise between him and the new-comers. Their spheres of activity lie wholly apart, for the white man absolutely refuses to do black man's work; not for that harsh toil does he exile himself from the land of his birth; while the native could not, in his present state of development, displace the white man in skilled employments and the superintendence and the organization ofindustry—even if he would—and nothing is farther from his ambitions.
It is the brown man who is the rival. The European has neither the wish nor the power to constitute a white proletariat in countries like East Africa. In his view the blacks should be the private soldiers of the army, but the non-commissioned officers and the commanders must be white. This should not be dismissed as a mere assertion of racial arrogance. It is an obstinate fact. It is already a grave defect for a community to found itself upon the manual labour of an inferior race, and many are the complications and perils that spring therefrom. But what of the second storey? If there is to be any kind of white society dwelling together year after year within the standards of life and comfort to which Europeans have universally been accustomed to aspire, and largely to attain, this middle stage in the economic system must provide that white society with the means of earning—as professional men, as planters, merchants, traders, farmers, bankers, overseers, contractors, builders, engineers, accountants, clerks—a living for themselves and their families. And here strikes in theAsiatic. In every single employment of this class, his power of subsisting upon a few shillings a month, his industry, his thrift, his sharp business aptitudes give him the economic superiority, and if economic superiority is to be the final rule—as it has never been and never will be in the history of the world—there is not a single employment of this middle class, from which he will not, to a very large extent, clear the white man, as surely and as remorselessly as the brown rat extirpated the black from British soil.
Then what remains? What sort of social organizations shall we be building up with so much thought and labour in these new lands under the British Crown? There is already no white working class. There is to be no white middle class. Room is left only for the capitalistpure and simple—if one may so describe him. A vast army of African labourers, officered by educated Indians or Chinese, and directed by a few individuals of diverse nationalities employing cosmopolitan capital—that is the nightmare which haunts the white population of South Africa, and at which what there is of a white population in East Africa is already shrieking vigorously.
Yet hear the other side. How stands the claim of the British Indian? His rights as a human being, his rights as a British subject, are equally engaged. It was the Sikh soldier who bore an honourable part in the conquest and pacification of these East African countries. It is the Indian trader who, penetrating and maintaining himself in all sorts of places to which no white man would go or in which no white man could earn a living, has more than any one else developed the early beginnings of trade and opened up the first slender means of communication. It was by Indian labour that the one vital railway on which everything else depends was constructed. It is the Indian banker who supplies perhaps the larger part of the capital yet available for business and enterprise, and to whom the white settlers have not hesitated to recur for financial aid. The Indian was here long before the first British official. He may point to as many generations of useful industry on the coast and inland as the white settlers—especially the most recently-arrived contingents from South Africa (the loudest against him of all)—can count years of residence. Is it possible for any Government with a scrap of respect for honest dealingbetween man and man, to embark upon a policy of deliberately squeezing out the native of India from regions in which he has established himself under every security of public faith? Most of all must we ask, is such a policy possible to the Government which bears sway over three hundred millions of our Indian Empire?
We are in presence of one of those apparently hopeless antagonisms of interests which baffle and dispirit all who are concerned in their adjustment. And these questions are not confined to East Africa or to South Africa. A whole series of new problems has arisen, and will grow graver and larger as the immediate history of the British Empire unfolds. They erect themselves upon a field almost wholly unstudied, and familiar only by the prejudices which in every direction obstruct movement and view. The entry of the Asiatic as labourer, trader, and capitalist into competition in industry and enterprise not onlywith, butin, the Western world is a new fact of first importance. Cheap, swift, easy means of communication, the establishment of peace and order over land and sea, the ever-growing inter-dependence of all men and allcountries upon one another, have given wings to Asiatic commercial ambition and rendered Asiatic manual labour fluid, as it has never before been fluid since the beginning of things.
Unless these new elements in the economic life of mankind can be scientifically and harmoniously controlled and assimilated, great and novel dangers menace alike the Asiatic and the European he supplants. On the one hand we see the possible exploitation under various unhealthy conditions of immense masses of Asiatic labour, to the moral injury of the employer and to the degradation and suffering of the employed; on the other the overturn of the standards of living laboriously achieved or long obstinately battled for among Europeans. Superadded to these we must foresee the confusion of blood, of manners, of morals, amounting, where operative upon any extensive scale, almost to the disintegration of the existing order of society. And behind—very close behind—lie the appeals to force, by mobs or Empires, to decide in a brutal fashion the brutal question which of two sets of irreconcilable interests shall prevail. It is not easy to measure the degree of political instability that will be introduced into internationalrelations, when the subjects of a powerful military and naval State are continually exposed to penal legislation and open violence, and into private life when the white artisan is invited to acquiesce in his own extinction, in virtue of laws which he himself controls, by a competitor whom, he believes, he could strike down with his hands.
Yet the Asiatic, and here I also include the African native, has immense services to render and energies to contribute to the happiness and material progress of the world. There are spacious lands whose promise can never be realized, there are unnumbered harvests which can never be garnered, without his active co-operation. There are roads and railways and reservoirs which only he can make. There are mines and forests which will slumber for ever without his aid. The mighty continent of tropical Africa lies open to the colonizing and organizing capacities of the East. All those new products which modern industry insistently demands are offered in measureless abundance to the West—if only we could solve the Sphinx's riddle in its newest form.
And is it after all beyond our reach toprovide, if not a perfect, at any rate a practical answer? There ought to be no insuperable difficulty, in the present state of political knowledge and social organization, in assigning different spheres to the external activity of different races. The Great Powers have partitioned Africa territorially; is it beyond the wit of man to divide it economically? The co-operation of many different kinds of men is needed for the cultivation of such a noble estate. Is it impossible to regulate in full and intricate detail the conditions under which that co-operation shall take place? Here white men can live and thrive; there they cannot. Here is a task for one, there the opportunity of another. The world is big enough. [I write as the stream of the Nile bears me between the immense spaces of beautiful, fertile, unpopulated country that lie north of the Albert Lake.] There is plenty of room for all. Why cannot we settle it fairly?
It must be noted that the question of Asiatic immigration presents itself to the Imperial point of view in several quite distinct forms. There are, first of all, colonies which stand on the basis of a white proletariat, and whose inhabitants, rich and poor, employers andemployed, are all Europeans. The right of such colonies to forbid the entry of large numbers of Asiatics, and to preserve themselves from the racial chaos and economic disturbance inseparable from such immigration, cannot be denied, although its exercise ought no doubt to be governed by various prudential and other considerations. But these colonies differ markedly from those where the mass of the population is not white, but black. Again, there are colonies which possess responsible government, and where the number of the white middle-class inhabitants very largely exceeds the Asiatic community. It is evident that these stand in a wholly different position from that of places like the tropical Protectorates of East and West Africa.
Indeed, it may be contended that the very fact that the native of British India will undoubtedly, wisely or unwisely, rightly or wrongly, be refused access in any large numbers to several South African and all Australian Colonies by their respective Governments, makes it all the more desirable that the Imperial Government should afford in the tropical Protectorates outlet and scope to the enterprise and colonizing capacity of Hindustan.And, as I have written, these countries are big enough for all. There is no reason why those Highland areas which promise the white man a home and a career, and where alone he can live in comfort, should not, as a matter of practical administration, be in the main reserved for him. Nor, on the other hand, why the Asiatic, if only he does not teach the African natives evil ways—a contingency which must not be forgotten—should not be encouraged to trade and settle as he will in the enormous regions of tropical fertility to which he is naturally adapted. Somewhere in this direction—I do not wish to dogmatize—the immediate course of sound policy would seem to lie, and, guided by the lights of science and tolerance, we may easily find it.
But the course of these reflections has carried me a good deal farther than the politics of Nairobi would seem to justify; and I hasten to return to the question with which I started: "Can the Highlands of East Africa be made 'a white man's country'?" Let us examine this by a fresh process. As one rides or marches through the valleys and across the wide plateaux of these uplands, braced by their delicious air, listening to the music of their streams, andfeasting the eye upon their natural wealth and beauty, a sense of bewilderment overcomes the mind. How is it they have never become the home of some superior race, prosperous, healthy, and free? Why is it that, now a railway has opened the door and so much has been published about them, there has not been one furious river of immigration from the cramped and insanitary jungle-slums of Europe? Why, most of all, are those who have come—the pioneers, the men of energy and adventure, of large ambitions and strong hands—why are they in so many cases only just keeping their heads above water? Why should complaint and discontent and positive discouragement be so general among this limited class?
I have always experienced a feeling of devout thankfulness never to have possessed a square yard of that perverse commodity called "land." But I will confess that, travelling in the East African Highlands for the first time in my life, I have learned what the sensation of land-hunger is like. We may repress, but we cannot escape, the desire to peg out one of these fair and wide estates, with all the rewards they offer to industry and inventiveness in the open air. Yet all around are men possessing thousandsof fertile acres, with mountains and rivers and shady trees, acquired for little or nothing, all struggling, all fretful, nervous, high-strung, many disappointed, some despairing, some smashed.
What are the true lineaments concealed behind the veil of boundless promise in which this land is shrouded? Are they not stamped with mockery? Is not the eye that regards you fierce as well as bright? "When I first saw this country," said a colonist to me, "I fell in love with it. I had seen all the best of Australia. I had prospered in New Zealand. I knew South Africa. I thought at last I had struck 'God's own country.' I wrote letters to all my friends urging them to come. I wrote a series of articles in the newspapers praising the splendours of its scenery and the excellence of its climate. Before the last of the articles appeared my capital was nearly expended, my fences had been trampled down by troops of zebra, my imported stock had perished, my title-deeds were still blocked in the Land Office, and I myself had nearly died of a malignant fever. Since then I have left others to extol the glories of East Africa."
These second thoughts err, no doubt, as much on the side of extravagant depression as the first impression was over-sanguine. But that there is a rude reverse to the East African medal is a fact which cannot be disputed, and which ought not, in the interests either of the immigrant or of the country to be concealed. It is still quite unproved that a European can make even the Highlands of East Africa his permanent home—that is to say, that he can live there without sensible degeneration for fifteen or twenty years at a stretch without ever returning to the temperate zones; still less that he can breed and rear families through several generations. The exhilaration of the air must not lead people to forget that an altitude of from five to eight thousand feet above the sea-level is an unusual condition, producing results, not yet ascertained, upon the nervous system, the brain, and the heart. Its coolness can never remove the fact that we are upon the Equator. Although the skies look so familiar and kindly with their white fleecy clouds and passing showers, the direct ray of the sun—almost vertical at all seasons of the year—strikes down on man and beast alike, and woe to the white man whom he findsuncovered! Although sheep and oxen multiply so rapidly, although crossing them with imported stock produces in each generation astonishing improvements in quality, they are subject to many perils little understood and often fatal. And if the landscape recalls to the pensive traveller the peaceful beauties of gentler climes at home, let him remember that it nurses with blithe fecundity poisonous reptiles, and pest-spreading insects, and terrible beasts of prey.
There is no reason, however, for doubting that modern science possesses, or will discover, the means of eradicating or mitigating many of these evils. As the development of the country and the scientific investigation of tropical agriculture and tropical disease proceed, the difficulties which beset the early settler will gradually be removed. He will learn how to clothe and house himself; what to plant, what to breed, and what to avoid. The spread of East Coast fever, now carried by the ticks from one animal to another, and carried by the infected animals from one district to another, will be arrested, and controlled by a proper system of wire-fencing and quarantine. Remedies will be discoveredagainst the various diseases which attack sheep or horses. Zebra, rhinoceros, buffalo, and other picturesque and fascinating nuisances will be driven from or exterminated within the settled areas, and confined to the ample reserves of uninhabited land. The slow but steady growth of a white population will create a market for local agricultural produce. The powerfully equipped Scientific Departments, the Veterinary and Forestry Departments, and the Department of Agriculture newly established on a considerable scale, will be able to guide and assist the enterprise of the new-comer, and save him from repeating the ill-starred experiments of the pioneer. Roads will improve, and railways and mono-rail tramways will extend. Step by step life and the means of living will become easier and more secure. Still it will not be proved that the pure-bred European can rear his children under the Equatorial sun and at an elevation of more than six thousand feet; and till that is proved "the white man's country" will remain a white man's dream.
I have written of Europeans and Asiatics. What of the African? About four millionsof these dark folk are comprised within the districts of the East Africa Protectorate which are actually or partially administered. Many more lie beyond those wide and advancing boundaries. What is to be their part in shaping the future of their country? It is, after all,theirAfrica. What are they going to do for it, and what is it going to do for them? "The natives," says the planter, "evince a great reluctance to work, especially to work regularly." "They must be made to work," say others. "Made to work for whom?" we innocently ask. "For us, of course," is the ready answer; "what did you think we meant?" And here we run into another herd of rhinoceros questions—awkward, thick-skinned, and horned, with a short sight, an evil temper, and a tendency to rush blindly up wind upon any alarm. Is the native idle? Does he not keep himself and pay his taxes? Or does he loll at his ease while his three or four wives till the soil, bear the burden, and earn his living? And if idle, has he a right to remain idle—a naked and unconscious philosopher, living "the simple life," without cares or wants,—a gentleman of leisurein a panting world? Is that to be the last word? Is civilization to say definitely that when the African native has kept himself, or made his women keep him, she has no further claim upon him? The white man shall do the rest. He shall preserve the peace, that the tribes may prosper and multiply. His watchful and foreseeing eye, strained and weary with the effort, shall still make provision against famine; his science, though he himself goes down in the struggle, shall grapple with pestilence and cure disease. Far from his home or from his family he shall hew the trees and dig the wells, shall dam the streams and build the roads, with anxious heart and "in the sweat of his brow," according to the curse laid upon the child of many wants, while the child of few wants watches him from the shade and thinks him mad.
And to compare the life and lot of the African aboriginal—secure in his abyss of contented degradation, rich in that he lacks everything and wants nothing—with the long nightmare of worry and privation, of dirt and gloom and squalour, lit only by gleams of torturing knowledge and tantalizing hope, which constitutesthe lives of so many poor people in England and Scotland, is to feel the ground tremble under foot. "It would never do to have a lot of 'mean whites' in this country," I heard one day a gentleman say. "It would destroy the respect of the native for the white man, if he saw what miserable people we have got at home." So here, at any rate, the boot is on the other leg, and Civilization is ashamed of her arrangements in the presence of a savage, embarrassed lest he should see what lies behind the gold and purple robe of State, and begin to suspect that the all-powerful white man is a fraud. But this is an irrelevancy!
I am clearly of opinion that no man has a right to be idle, whoever he be or wherever he lives. He is bound to go forward and take an honest share in the general work of the world. And I do not except the African native. To a very much larger extent than is often recognized by some who discuss these questions, the natives are industrious, willing to learn, and capable of being led forward. Live for a few weeks, as I have done, in close association with the disciplined soldiers of the King's African Rifles, or with the smart sailors of the Uganda Marine, and it seemswonderful to contrast them with the population from which they have emerged. How strong, how good-natured, how clever they are! How proud their white officers are of them! What pains they take to please the travellers whom they escort; how frankly they are delighted by a word of praise or thanks! Just and honourable discipline, careful education, sympathetic comprehension, are all that is needed to bring a very large proportion of the native tribes of East Africa to a far higher social level than that at which they now stand. And why should men only be taught to be soldiers? Is war always to have the best of everything? Cannot peaceful industry be made as attractive, be as highly organized, as carefully studied as the combined use of deadly weapons? "Why," as Ruskin asks, "cannot men take pride inbuildingvillages instead of onlycarryingthem?"
I wonder why my pen slips off into these labyrinths, when all I set out to do was to give some general idea of politics at Nairobi? But in truth the problems of East Africa are the problems of the world. We see the social, racial, and economic stresses whichrack modern society already at work here, but in miniature; and if we choose to study the model when the whole engine is at hand, it is because on the smaller scale we can see more clearly, and because in East Africa and Uganda the future is still uncompromised. The British Government has it in its hands to shape the development and destiny of these new countries and their varied peoples with an authority and from an elevation far superior to that with which Cabinets can cope with the giant tangles at home. And the fact stirs the mind. But by this time the reader will have had as much of East African politics as I had when, after three days of deputations and disputations, the train steamed out of Nairobi to take us to the Great Lake and beyond.
We are off again on the Uganda Railway. Interesting and beautiful as is the country through which the line passes from Mombasa to Nairobi, it is surpassed by the magnificent scenery of the journey to the Lake. First in order and in rank is the Great Rift. This curious fault in the earth's surface, which geologists trace across the four thousand miles of land and sea which separate us from Palestine, and onward still to the southern end of Lake Tanganyika, is traversed by the Uganda Railway at one of its most remarkable stages. For sixty miles the Highland plateau has been rising steadily by a succession of wooded undulations to a level of over six thousand feet. Now it falls abruptly, almost precipitously, more than two thousand feet. This frowning wall of rock and forest, which extends straight as a ruler farther than eyecan see, is the Kikuyu Escarpment. As the train claws its way downwards by slant and zigzag along its face, a majestic panorama breaks upon the view. Far below, bathed in sunshine, stretching away to misty purple horizons, lie the broad expanses of the Rift Valley. Its level surface is broken by strangely moulded volcanic hills and shattered craters. The opposite mountain wall looms up in the far distance, brown and blue. We gaze down upon the plain as from a balloon, mistaking forests for patches of green grass, and mighty trees for thorn-scrub.