The Rift Valley from the Kikuyu Escarpment.
The Rift Valley from the Kikuyu Escarpment.
Another hour or so and Lake Naivasha comes into view. This sheet of water is about ten miles square, and the rim of a submerged crater makes an odd, crescent-shaped island in its midst. Its brackish waters repel the inhabitants, but afford shelter to numberless wild-fowl and many hippopotami. At Naivasha there is the Government stock farm. One may see in their various flocks the native sheep, the half-bred English, the three-quarter-bred, etc. The improvement is amazing. The native sheep is a hairy animal, looking to the unpractised eye more like a goat than a sheep. Crossed with Sussex or Australian blood, hisdescendant is transformed into a woolled beast of familiar aspect. At the next cross the progeny is almost indistinguishable from the pure-bred English in appearance, but better adapted to the African sun and climate. It is the same with cattle. In the first generation the hump of the African ox vanishes. In the second he emerges a respectable British Shorthorn. The object of this farm is twofold: first, to find the type best adapted to local conditions; secondly, to supply the settlers and the natives with a steadily broadening fountain of good blood by which their flocks and herds may be trebled and quadrupled in value. The enthusiasm and zeal of those in charge of this work were refreshing. At present, however, their operations are restricted by insufficient funds and by the precautions which must be taken against East Coast fever. The first of these impediments may be removed; the second is less tractable.
East Coast fever came across the German border a year and a half ago, and since then, in spite of such preventive measures as our scanty means allow, it has been gradually and slowly spreading through the Protectorate. A diseased cow may take thirty days to die.In the meantime wherever it goes the swarming ticks are infected. They hold their poison for a year. If, during that time, other cattle pass over the ground the ticks fasten upon them and inoculate them with the sickness. And each new victim wanders off to spread the curse to new ticks, who cast it back to new cattle, and so on till the end of the story. At each point fresh areas of ground become distempered, and fresh cows begin to drop off one by one, leaving their evil inheritance to the ravening insects.
Government Farm at Naivasha.
Government Farm at Naivasha.
So here we see the two principles of Nature at work simultaneously—the blood-stock rams and bulls spreading their healthy, fruitful life in ever-widening circles through the land; the infected cattle carrying their message of death in all directions. Every point that either attains, becomes at once a new centre of vitality or dissolution. Both processes march deliberately forward to limitless multiplications. The native is helpless in the face of advancing ruin. Left to itself the evil would assuredly devour the good, till the cattle were exterminated and the sickness starved to death for lack of prey. But at this moment the white biped with faculties of ratiocinationintervenes from the tin-roofed Department of Agriculture; discovers, for instance, that ground may be purified by putting upon it sheep, into whom the ticks discharge their poison harmlessly and are thereafter purged; erects hundreds of miles of wire fencing to cut the country up into compartments, as a warship is divided by bulkheads; encloses infected areas; destroys suspected animals; searches methodically and ever more hopefully for prophylactics and remedies; with one hand arrests the curse, with the other speeds the blessing, and in so doing is surely discharging rather an important function from a good many points of view.
My friends and I took four days in travelling to the Victoria Nyanza, although the distance can be covered in twenty-four hours; for we turned aside every day for sport or business, while our train waited obligingly in a siding. Of the latter, indeed, there was no lack, for the Governor and the heads of several departments were in the train, and we laboured faithfully together at many prickly things. Then at the stations came farmers, surveyors, and others, with words of welcome or complaint, and a deputation of Boer settlers withmany expressions of loyalty to the Crown, and the chiefs of the Lumbwa and Nandi tribes, with a crowd of warriors, and their Laibon with his four wives, all in a row, till I was as tired of making "brief and appropriate" speeches as my companions must have been of hearing them.
The Laibon's Wives.
The Laibon's Wives.
Railhead at Kisumu.
Railhead at Kisumu.
But Elmenteita was all holiday. Lord Delamere met us at the station with Cape carts, ponies, and hog-spears, and we drove off in search of pig over an enormous plain thickly peopled with antelope and gazelle. I cannot pretend to the experience of both countries necessary to compare the merits of pig-sticking in India and in East Africa in respect of the fighting qualities of the animal, nor the ground over which he is pursued. But I should think the most accomplished member of the Meerut Tent Club would admit that the courage and ferocity of the African wart-hog, and the extreme roughness of the country, heaped as it is with boulders and pitted with deep ant-bear holes concealed by high grass, make pig-sticking in East Africa a sport which would well deserve his serious and appreciative attention. At present it is in its infancy, and very few even of the officers of the King's AfricanRifles can boast the proficiency of the Indian expert. But everything in East Africa is at its first page; and besides, the wart-hog is, at present at any rate, regarded as dangerous vermin who does incredible damage to native plantations, and whose destruction—by any method, even the most difficult—is useful as well as exciting.
Our first pig was a fine fellow, who galloped off with his tail straight up in the air and his tusks gleaming mischievously, and afforded a run of nearly three miles before he was killed. The risk of the sport consists in this—that the pig cannot be overtaken and effectively speared except by a horse absolutely at full gallop. The ground is so trappy that one hardly cares to take one's eyes off it for a moment. Yet during at least a hundred yards at a time the whole attention of the rider must be riveted on the pig, within a few yards of whom he is riding, and who may be expected to charge at any second. A fall at such a climax is necessarily very dangerous, as the wart-hog would certainly attack the unhorsed cavalier; yet no one can avoid the chance. I do not know whether Anglo-India will shudder, but I should certainly recommend the intending hunter inEast Africa to strap a revolver on his thigh in case of accidents. "You do not want it often," as the American observed; "but when you do, you want it badly."
We passed a jolly morning riding after these brutes and shooting a fewGazella GrantiandGazella Thomsoni, or "Grants" and "Tommies" as they are familiarly called, and in looking for eland in the intervals. At the end of Lake Elmenteita, a beautiful sheet of water, unhappily brackish, a feast had been prepared, to which a number of gentlemen from Lord Delamere's estates and the surrounding farms had been bidden. A long array of flocks and herds was marshalled on both sides of the track in due order, native-bred, half-bred, three-quarter-bred, pure. Through these insignia of patriarchal wealth, which would have excited the keenest interest in any traveller less hungry and more instructed in such matters than I, we made our way to an excellent luncheon, which, be sure, was not unaccompanied by the usual discussion on East African politics.
It was late in the afternoon when we started back to the train, which lay eight miles off in a siding. On the way we fell in with a mostfierce and monstrous pig, who led us a nice dance through bush and grass and boulder. As he emerged into a patch of comparatively smooth, open ground I made up my mind to spear him, urged my pony to her top speed, and was just considering how best to do the deed when, without the slightest provocation, or, at any rate, before he had been even pricked, the pig turned sharp round and sprang at me, as if he were a leopard. Luckily, my spear got in the way, and with a solid jar, which made my arm stiff for a week, drove deep into his head and neck before it broke, so that he was glad to sheer off with eighteen inches of it sticking in him, and after a dash at my companion he took refuge in a deep hole, from which no inducements or insults could draw him.
Later we rode and killed another pig and chased a fourth unsuccessfully, and it was nearly dark before the railway was reached. As I was getting into my carriage they calmly told me thatsix lionshad walked across the line a quarter of a mile away and a quarter of an hour before. A settler who had been to lunch at Elmenteita was loading a hastily-borrowed revolver before starting on his homewardride to Nakuru, and as I gave him some cartridges, I reflected that, whatever may be the shortcomings of East Africa, the absence of an interesting and varied fauna is certainly not among them.
Next day our train is climbing through dense and beautiful forests to the summit of the Mau Escarpment. Admiration of the wealth and splendour of the leafy kingdom is mingled with something very like awe at its aggressive fertility. The great trees overhang the line. The creepers trail down the cuttings, robing the red soil with cloaks of flowers and foliage. The embankments are already covered. Every clearing is densely overgrown with sinuous plants. But for the ceaseless care with which the whole line is scraped and weeded it would soon become impassable. As it is, the long fingers of the encroaching forest are everywhere stretching out enviously towards the bright metals. Neglect the Uganda Railway for a year, and it would take an expedition to discover where it had run.
At Nyoro station nearly nine hundred natives were at work cutting timber for the railway, which is entirely dependent on wood fuel. The contractor in charge, a youngEnglish gentleman, who was described to me as being a model employer of native labour in Government contracts, had taken the trouble to cut a path through the forest across a loop of the line in order that I might see what it was like inside. Through this leafy tunnel, about a mile and a half long, we all accordingly dived. There was nothing sinister in the aspect of this forest, for all its density and confusion. The great giants towered up magnificently to a hundred and fifty feet. Then came the ordinary forest trees, much more thickly clustered. Below this again was a layer of scrub and bushes; and under, around, and among the whole flowed a vast sea of convolvulus-looking creeper. Through all this four-fold veil the sunlight struggled down every twenty yards or so in gleaming chequers of green and gold.
On the way the method of fuel-cutting is explained. So far as the labourer is concerned, it is an elaborate system of piece-work, very accurately and fairly adjusted, and, as is so often the case where the white employer takes personal care of his men, there appeared to be no difficulty in finding any number of natives. But they are a plaguey company. Few willstay for more than a month or two, however satisfied they may be with their work and its rewards; and just as they begin to get skilful, off they go to their villages to cultivate their gardens and their families, promising to come back another year, or after the harvest, or at some other remote and indefinite date. And meanwhile the railway must have its fuel every day and day after day, with the remorseless monotony of the industrial machine.
But what a way to cut fuel! A floating population of clumsy barbarians pecking at the trees with native choppers more like a toy hoe than an axe, and carrying their loads when completed a quarter of a mile on their heads to the wood-stack, while the forest laughs at the feebleness of man. I made a calculation. Each of the nine hundred natives employed costs on the whole six pounds a year. The price of a steam tree-felling plant, with a mile of mono-rail tram complete, is about five hundred pounds. The interest and sinking fund on this capital outlay represent the wages of four natives, to which must be added the salary of a competent white engineer, equal to the wage of forty natives,and the working expenses and depreciation roughly estimated at the wage of twenty natives more; in all the wage of sixty-five natives. Such a plant, able to cut trees six feet in diameter through in four or five minutes, to cut timber as well as fuel, to saw it into the proper lengths for every purpose with the utmost rapidity, and to transport it by whole truck-loads when sawn to the railway siding, would accomplish a week's work of the sixty-five natives it replaced in a single day, and effect a sevenfold multiplication of power. It is no good trying to lay hold of Tropical Africa with naked fingers. Civilization must be armed with machinery if she is to subdue these wild regions to her authority. Iron roads, not jogging porters; tireless engines, not weary men; cheap power, not cheap labour; steam and skill, not sweat and fumbling: there lies the only way to tame the jungle—more jungles than one.
On this we talked—or at least I talked—while we scrambled across the stumps of fallen trees or waded in an emerald twilight from one sunbeam to another across the creeper flood. It is of vital importance that these forests should not be laid waste by recklessand improvident hands. It is not less important that the Uganda Railway should have cheap fuel. For a long time fuel alone was the object, but now that an elaborate Forestry Department has been established on the most scientific lines, there is a danger that forestry will be the only object, and the cost of fuel so raised by regulations, admirable in themselves, that the economy of the Uganda Railway may be impaired. And let us never forget that the Uganda Railway is the driving-wheel of the whole concern. What is needed here, as elsewhere, is a harmonious compromise between opposite and conflicting interests. That is all.
Presently our guide began to tell us of the strange creatures who live in the forest, and are sometimes seen quite close by the fuel-cutters—very rare antelope, enormous buffaloes, and astonishing birds and butterflies beyond imagination. He had managed to make friends with the Wandorobo—a tribe of forest-dwelling natives who live plunged in these impenetrable shades, who are so shy that, if once a stranger does but set eye upon their village, forthwith they abandon it; yet who are at the same time so teased by curiosity that theycannot resist peeping, peeping ever nearer and nearer to the fuel-cutters, until one day commercial relations are established on the basis of sugar for skins. I was just becoming interested in these wood-squirrels when we broke into the hot blaze of the noonday sun beating down on the polished railway track, and had to climb up on to our cowcatcher in order to hurry on to a real steam saw-mill ten miles farther up the line.
As the journey advances, the train mounts steadily higher and the aspect of the country changes. The forest, which has hitherto lapped the line closely on every side, now makes fair division with rolling hills of grass. And there is this extraordinary feature about it: where the forest areas end, they end abruptly. There is no ragged belt of trees less thickly grown; no transition. Smooth slopes of grass run up to the very edge of virgin forest, just as in England the meadow runs to the edge of the covert. The effect is to make the landscape surprisingly homelike. It is like travelling through a series of gigantic parks, where the hand of man has for hundreds of years decided exactly where trees shall grow and where they shall not.
Kavirondo Warriors at Kisumu.
Kavirondo Warriors at Kisumu.
Towards the west great plains are visible, in misty apparition, through rifts in the plateau. At length we arrive at the summit of the escarpment, and stop for luncheon by an indicator, which registers eight thousand two hundred and ninety feet above the sea-level. Southward rises a hill perhaps five hundred feet above us, from the top of which the waters of the Great Lake can be seen, like the waters of a distant ocean.
Geographically we have now reached the culminating point in this long journey. Henceforward, to find our way home, we have only to descend, guided by the force of gravity, first swiftly along the railroad to the Victoria Lake, then sedately with the stream of the Nile to the Mediterranean. The lofty table-lands of East Africa, with their crisp, chill air and English aspect, must now be left behind—not without many regrets—and the traveller will alight upon a middle world spread at a level of about four thousand feet, in which an entirely different order of conditions prevails. Downward then at thirty miles an hour, along the side of spacious valleys, around the shoulders of the hills, across thin-spun iron bridges, through whose girders one glancesdown at torrents flashing far below, onward to the Lake. Within an hour the temperature has sensibly altered. An overcoat is no longer necessary, even if you ride in front of the engine. In two hours the climate is warm and damp with the steamy heat of the Tropics. The freshness has gone out of the air, and in its place is that sense of sultry oppression which precedes the thunderstorms so common at this season of the year.
In order to avoid a hot night on the Lake shore we stopped at Fort Ternan, a placeless name, some forty miles from Kisumu, and rather more than a thousand feet above it. And here the storm which had been brooding all the afternoon over the western face of the Mau Escarpment burst upon us. Even after ten months on the South African veldt I was astonished by its fury. For nearly two hours the thunder crashed and roared in tremendous peals—
"Like water flung from some high crag,The lightning fell with never a jag,A river steep and wide,"
"Like water flung from some high crag,The lightning fell with never a jag,A river steep and wide,"
"Like water flung from some high crag,
The lightning fell with never a jag,
A river steep and wide,"
while the rain dashed down in sheets of water, one single gust of which would drench you to the skin. But our train is an effective shelter.We dine comfortably in the midst of the tempest, and afterwards in a cooler atmosphere look up towards repentant stars and a tear-stained sky.
At dawn we are at Kisumu. There is a stir of men, a crowded platform, soldiers in order, groups of Indian traders, hundreds of Kavirondo natives in their fullest undress, bunting, and introductions. Large white steamers lie alongside the jetty, and beyond these the waters of the Lake gleam their broad welcome to the sunrise. Kisumu, or Port Florence as it is sometimes called, is the western terminus of the Uganda Railway and the chief port on Lake Victoria. It possesses what I am told is the highest dockyard in the world, and is the place at which all the steamers now plying on the Lake have been put together. One eight-hundred-ton cargo boat is actually in process of construction, and will be launched in a few months' time to meet the growing traffic of the Nyanza. The station itself is pretty; its trim houses and shady trees, backed against the hills, overlook the wide expanse of Kavirondo Bay and its encircling promontories. Unluckily, it is unhealthy, for the climate is depressing and the sewage accumulates in the tideless and shallow inlet. Some day one of two thingswill happen: either the waters of the Victoria Nyanza will be raised by a dam across the Ripon Falls and Kavirondo Bay will be proportionately deepened and cleansed, or the railway will be deflected and prolonged to its natural terminus on the deep waters of the lake at Port Victoria.
The Kavirondo tribe, the greatest in this part of the country, had organized an imposing demonstration. In dense array they lined the road from the station to the Commissioner's house, and our party walked through their midst in a perfect hubbub of horns and drums and shrill salutations. All the warriors carried their spears, shields, and war-paint, and most of them wore splendid plumes of ostrich feathers. The Kavirondo are naked and unashamed. Both sexes are accustomed to walk about in the primitive simplicity of Nature. Their nudity is based not upon mere ignorance but reasoned policy. They have a very strong prejudice against the wearing of clothes, which they declare lead to immorality; and no Kavirondo woman can attire herself even in the most exiguous raiment without sullying her reputation. They are said to be the most moral of all the tribes dwelling on the Lake shore. It is a pity that Herr DiogenesTeufelsdröckh, of the University of Weissnichtwo, did not meet them in his rugged wanderings, for they would surely have enabled him to add another page to his monumental work on the functions of the tailor.
Nandi and Kavirondo Warriors at Kisumu.
Nandi and Kavirondo Warriors at Kisumu.
I wake up the next morning to find myself afloat on a magnificent ship. Its long and spacious decks are as snowy as those of a pleasure yacht. It is equipped with baths, electric light, and all modern necessities. There is an excellent table, also a well-selected library. Smart bluejackets—with ebon faces—are polishing the brasswork; dapper, white-clad British naval officers pace the bridge. We are steaming ten miles an hour across an immense sea of fresh water as big as Scotland, and uplifted higher than the summit of Ben Nevis. At times we are in a complete circle of lake and sky, without a sign of land. At others we skirt lofty coasts covered with forest and crowned with distant blue-brown mountains, or thread our course between a multitude of beautiful islands. The air is cool and fresh, the scenery splendid. We might be yachting off the coast of Cornwall in July. We are upon the Equator, in the heart of Africa, and crossing the Victoria Nyanza, four thousand feet above the sea!
The East Africa Protectorate is a country of the highest interest to the colonist, the traveller, or the sportsman. But the Kingdom of Uganda is a fairy tale. You climb up a railway instead of a beanstalk, and at the end there is a wonderful new world. The scenery is different, the vegetation is different, the climate is different, and, most of all, the people are different from anything elsewhere to be seen in the whole range of Africa. Instead of the breezy uplands we enter a tropical garden. In the place of naked, painted savages, clashing their spears and gibbering in chorus to their tribal chiefs, a complete and elaborate polity is presented. Under a dynastic King, with a Parliament, and a powerful feudal system, an amiable, clothed, polite, and intelligent race dwell together in an organized monarchy upon the rich domain between the Victoria and AlbertLakes. More than two hundred thousand natives are able to read and write. More than one hundred thousand have embraced the Christian faith. There is a Court, there are Regents and Ministers and nobles, there is a regular system of native law and tribunals; there is discipline, there is industry, there is culture, there is peace. In fact, I ask myself whether there is any other spot in the whole earth where the dreams and hopes of the negrophile, so often mocked by results and stubborn facts, have ever attained such a happy realization.
Kisumu.
Kisumu.
Three separate influences, each of them powerful and benevolent, exercise control over the mass of the Baganda nation. First, the Imperial authority, secular, scientific, disinterested, irresistible; secondly, a native Government and feudal aristocracy, corrected of their abuses, yet preserving their vitality; and thirdly, missionary enterprise on an almost unequalled scale. Under the shelter of the British Flag, safe from external menace or internal broil, the child-King grows to a temperate and instructed maturity. Surrounded by his officers of State, he presides at the meetings of his council and Parliament,or worships in the huge thatched cathedral which has been reared on Namirembe Hill. Fortified in their rights, but restrained from tyrannical excess, and guided by an outside power, his feudatories exercise their proper functions. The people, relieved from the severities and confusions of times not long ago, are apt to learn and willing to obey. And among them with patient energy toils a large body of devoted Christian men of different nations, of different Churches, but of a common charity, tending their spiritual needs, enlarging their social and moral conceptions, and advancing their education year by year.
An elegance of manners springing from a naïve simplicity of character pervades all classes. An elaborate ritual of friendly salutations relieves the monotony of the wayfarer's journey. Submission without servility or loss of self-respect is accorded to constituted authority. The natives evince an eagerness to acquire knowledge and a very high observant and imitative faculty. And then Uganda is from end to end one beautiful garden, where the staple food of the people grows almost without labour, and where almost everything else can be grown betterand easier than anywhere else. The planter from the best islands in the West Indies is astonished at the richness of the soil. Cotton grows everywhere. Rubber, fibre, hemp, cinnamon, cocoa, coffee, tea, coca, vanilla, oranges, lemons, pineapples are natural or thrive on introduction. As for our English garden products, brought in contact with the surface of Uganda they simply give one wild bound of efflorescence or fruition and break their hearts for joy. Does it not sound a paradise on earth? Approach and consider it more closely.
The good shipClement Hill, named after a well-known African explorer, has carried us smoothly and prosperously across the northern corner of the Victoria Nyanza, and reaches the pier of Entebbe as the afternoon draws towards its close. The first impression that strikes the eye of the visitor fresh from Kavirondo is the spectacle of hundreds of natives all dressed in long clean white garments which they wear with dignity and ease. At the landing-place a sort of pavilion has been erected, and here come deputations from the Chamber of Commerce—a limited body of Europeans—from the Goanese community, and from the numerous Indian colony of merchants. A tonga drawn by twomules takes me to Government House, and from a wide mosquito-proof veranda I am able to survey a truly delightful prospect. The most beautiful plants and trees grow in profusion on all sides. Beyond a blaze of violet, purple, yellow, and crimson blossoms, and an expanse of level green lawns, the great blue lake lies in all its beauty. The hills and islands on the horizon are just beginning to flush to the sunset. The air is soft and cool. Except that the picture actually looks more English in its character, one would imagine it was the Riviera. It must be too good to be true.
Itistoo good to be true. One can hardly believe that such an attractive spot can be cursed with malignant attributes. Yet what is true of the East Africa Protectorate is even more true of Uganda. The contrast between appearance and reality is more striking and more harsh. Behind its glittering mask Entebbe wears a sinister aspect. These smiling islands which adorn and diversify the scenery of the lake supported a few years ago a large population. To-day they are desolate. Every white man seems to feel a sense of undefinable oppression. A cut will not heal; a scratchfesters. In the third year of residence even a small wound becomes a running sore. One day a man feels perfectly well; the next, for no apparent cause, he is prostrate with malaria, and with malaria of a peculiarly persistent kind, turning often in the third or fourth attack to blackwater fever. In the small European community at Entebbe there have been quite recently two suicides. Whether, as I have suggested in East Africa, it be the altitude, or the downward ray of the Equatorial sun, or the insects, or some more subtle cause, there seems to be a solemn veto placed upon the white man's permanent residence in these beautiful abodes.
Government House, Entebbe.
Government House, Entebbe.
There are many who advocate the abandonment of Entebbe as the administrative capital and the restoration of the seat of Government to Kampala. But the expense of transferring public offices and buildings lately erected to another site is altogether beyond the slender resources and not among the most urgent needs of the Uganda Protectorate. Great improvements have been effected recently in the sanitation of Entebbe. The bush and trees, which added so greatly to its picturesque appearance, have been ruthlessly cut down;and with them,mirabile dictu, have vanished the mosquito and the sleeping-sickness tsetse-fly. Half a mile away on either side of the settlement are groves which it might easily be death to enter; but the inhabited area is now quite clear.
Besides, the general unhealthiness of the country so far as the European is concerned is not local to Entebbe. It is widely spread in slightly different degrees throughout the whole of Uganda; and Kampala is certainly not exempt. Finally, there is a reason of a different character which ought to impose a final bar on any return of the Imperial Government to the native city. Uganda is a native state. Much of our success in dealing with its population arises from the fact that we work through and by the native Government. And that Government could not fail to lose much, if not all, of its separate and natural identity if it were overwhelmed by the immediate proximity of the supreme Administration.
UGANDAFounded by permission of the War Office on the Map of Africa No1539.Stanford's GeogrEstabt. London.View larger map.
UGANDAFounded by permission of the War Office on the Map of Africa No1539.Stanford's GeogrEstabt. London.View larger map.
For a new station in an almost unknown land, Entebbe certainly presents many remarkable evidences of progress. The slopes of the lake shore are covered with pretty villas, each standing in its own luxuriant garden. Thereis an excellent golf course, and a very bright and pleasant society. Guardian over all this stands the Sikh. There are two companies of these soldiers, one at Entebbe and the other at Kampala, who, being entirely immune to local influences of all kinds, constitute what Mr. Gladstone used to call the "motor muscle" of Imperial authority. I have always admired the Sikh in India, both in his cantonments and in the field. But somehow his graceful military figure and grave countenance under the turban as he stands erect beside his rifle on guard over British interests six thousand miles from the Punjab, impresses the eye and the imagination with an added force. He is a picked volunteer from all the Sikh regiments, who delights in Uganda, thrives under its, to him, milder sun, lives on nothing, saves his doubled pay, and returns to India enriched and proud of his service across the sea. If at any time considerations of expense, or the desire to obtain a complete homogeneity in the military forces of the Protectorate, should lead to the disbandment or withdrawal of these two companies, those who take the decision will have incurred a responsibility which few would care to share with them.
So far as human force is concerned, the British power in these regions is at present beyond challenge. No man can withstand it. But a new opponent has appeared and will not be denied. Uganda is defended by its insects. It would even seem that the arrival of the white man and the increased movement and activity which his presence has engendered have awakened these formidable atoms to a realization of their powers of evil. The dreadedSpirillumtick has begun to infest the roads like a tiny footpad, and scarcely any precautions avail with certainty against him. This tick is a dirty, drab-coloured creature the size and shape of a small squashed pea. When he bites an infected person he does not contract the Spirillum fever himself, nor does he transmit it directly to other persons. By a peculiarly malevolent provision of Nature this power is exercised not by him but by his descendants, who are numbered in hundreds. So the poison spreads in an incalculable progression. Although this fever is not fatal, it is exceptionally painful in its course and distressing in its consequences. There are five or six separate and successive attacks of fever, in which the temperature of the victimmay rise even to 107 degrees; and afterwards the eyes and hearing are temporarily affected by a kind of facial paralysis. Road after road has been declared infected by this scourge, and officer after officer struck down as he moves on duty from place to place. The only sure preventive seems to be the destruction of all old grass-huts and camping-grounds, and the erection along the roads of a regular system of stone-built, properly maintained and disinfected rest-houses, in which the traveller may take refuge from the lurking peril. And this will have to be done.
But a far more terrible shadow darkens the Uganda Protectorate. In July, 1901, a doctor of the Church Missionary Society Hospital at Kampala noticed eight cases of a mysterious disease. Six months later he reported that over two hundred natives had died of it in the Island of Buvuma, and that thousands appeared to be infected. The pestilence swiftly spread through all the districts of the lake shore, and the mortality was appalling. No one could tell where it had come from or what it was caused by. It resisted every kind of treatment and appeared to be universally fatal. Scientific inquiries of various kinds wereimmediately set on foot, but for a long time no results were obtained, and meanwhile the disease ran along the coasts and islands of the great lake like fire in a high wind. By the middle of 1902 the reported deaths fromTrypanosomiasis, or "sleeping sickness," as it has come to be called, numbered over thirty thousand. It was still spreading rapidly upon all sides, and no clue whatever to its treatment or prevention had been obtained. It seemed certain that the entire population of the districts affected was doomed.
On April 28th, 1903, Colonel Bruce, whose services had been obtained for the investigation of "sleeping sickness" through the instrumentality of the Royal Society, announced that he considered the disease to be due to a kind of trypanosome, conveyed from one person to another by the bite of a species of tsetse-fly calledGlossina palpalis. His theory was strongly supported by the fact that the disease appeared to be confined to the localities infested by the fly. The fly-belt also could be defined with precision, and was rarely found to extend more than a mile or two from water. The news that Europeans could no longer consider themselves immune from theinfection caused, as might be imagined, much consternation in the white community. Nearly everybody had been bitten by tsetses at one time or another, but whether by this particular species when actually infected, remained in suspense. Moreover, tsetse-flies abounded in such numbers on all parts of the lake shore that their wholesale destruction seemed quite impossible. What then?
For a time Colonel Bruce's discovery almost paralyzed all preventive and restrictive measures. The scourge fell unchecked. By the end of 1903 the reported deaths numbered over ninety thousand, and the lake shores were becoming fast depopulated. Whole villages were completely exterminated, and great tracts in Usoga, which had formerly been famed for their high state of cultivation, relapsed into forests. The weakness of the victims and the terror or apathy of the survivors permitted a sudden increase in the number of leopards, and these fierce animals preyed with daring and impunity upon the living, the dying, and the dead.
Further investigations, which were anxiously pushed on in many directions, revealed the existence of the tsetse-fly over widespreadareas. In the interior of Usoga, on the banks of many rivers, in swamps on the shores of the Albert Lake and Lake Albert Edward, these swarming emissaries of death were found to be awaiting their message. All that was needed to arm them with their fatal power was the arrival of some person infected with the microbe. The Albert shores and several parts of the Upper Nile soon became new centres of pestilence. Thousands of deaths occurred in Unyoro. By the end of 1905 considerably more than two hundred thousand persons had perished in the plague-stricken regions,out of a populationin those regionswhich could not have exceeded three hundred thousand.
Any decrease in the mortality in any district up to the present time is due, not to any diminution in the virulence of the disease, but simply to the reduction of possible victims, owing to the extermination of the inhabitants. Buvuma, a few years ago one of the most prosperous of all the islands, contains fewer than fourteen thousand out of thirty thousand. Some of the islands in the Sesse group have lost every soul, while in others a few moribund natives, crawling about in the last stages ofthe disease, are all that are left to represent a once teeming population.
"It might have been expected," writes Sir H. Hesketh Bell, the Governor of Uganda, to whom I am indebted for much valuable information on this subject, "that, even though the negroes showed inability to grasp the theory of the transmission of disease by the agency of insects, the undeniable deadliness of the countries bordering on the lake shore would have induced them to flee from the stricken land and to have sought in the healthier districts inland a refuge from the pestilence that was slaying them by thousands. An extraordinary fatalism, however, seems to have paralyzed the natives, and, while deploring the sadness of their fate, they appear to have accepted death almost with apathy."
The police of science, although arrived late on the scene of the tragedy, were now following many converging clues. Therapeutic investigation into the treatment and origin of the disease, entomological examination of the resorts, habits, dangers, and life-history of the fly, and thirdly administrative measures of drastic authority are now being driven sternly forward. Knowledge has accumulated.Fighting the sleeping sickness is like laying a vampire. To make the spell work, five separate conditions must be present—water, bushes, trees, the tsetse-fly (Glossina palpalis), and one infected person. Remove any one of these and the curse is lifted. But let them all be conjoined, and the sure destruction of every human being in the district is only a matter of time.
The Government of Uganda is now pursuing a policy based on the appreciation of these facts. Wherever it is necessary to come to the lake shores, as at Entebbe, Munyonyo, Ripon Falls, Fajao, etc., the tsetse-fly is banished or eliminated by cutting down the trees, clearing away the bush, and planting in its place the vigorous, rapid-growingcitronellagrass, which, once firmly established, holds its own against invading vegetation. Wherever it is not possible to clear the shores of tsetse-flies, they must be cleared of inhabitants. And the extraordinary operation of moving entire populations from their old homes to new places—often against their will—has been actually accomplished within the last year by a combined dead-lift effort of these three tremendous forces of Government whichregulate from such different points of view the lives and liberties of the Baganda.
It does not follow that the lake shores will have to be abandoned for ever. In a very short time—some say two days, some eleven hours—the infected tsetse is free from poison and can no longer communicate it; and once the disease has been eradicated from the population, healthy people might return and be bitten with impunity. Nor, on the other hand, can we hope, unless some cure capable of being applied on a large scale can be perfected, that the mortality in the immediate future will sensibly diminish. For there are many thousands of persons still affected, and for these segregation, nursing, and compassion comprise the present resources of civilization.
One thing is, however, above all things important. There must be no losing heart. At any moment the researches which are being conducted in so many laboratories, and in which Professor Koch has taken a leading part, may produce an absolute therapeutic remedy. By the administrative measures now vigorously enforced it is believed that the fatal contact between infected persons anduninfected flies, between infected flies and uninfected persons, will have been effectively broken. We cannot fail to learn more of the tsetse. The humble black horse-fly, indistinguishable to the casual observer from harmless types, except that his wings are folded neatly like a pair of shut scissors, instead of splaying out on either side of his back, is now under a bright, searching, and pitiless eye. Who are his enemies? What are his dangers? What conditions are essential to his existence? What conditions are fatal or inimical? International Commissions discuss him round green tables, grave men peer patiently at him through microscopes, active officers scour Central Africa to plot him out on charts. A fine-spun net is being woven remorselessly around him. And may not man find allies in this strange implacable warfare? There are fishes which destroy mosquitoes, there are birds which prey upon flies, there are plants whose scent or presence is abhorrent or injurious to particular forms of insect life. In what places and for how long will the tsetse continue to fly, as he is wont, over the smooth, gleaming water, just above the reeds and bushes, just below the branches of theoverhanging trees?Glossina palpalis contra mundum!
The Governor with Baganda Group.
The Governor with Baganda Group.
I have not sought to conceal the perils in describing the riches and the beauties of Uganda. The harsh contrasts of the land, its noble potentialities, its hideous diseases, its fecundity alike of life and death, are capable of being illustrated by many more facts and examples than I can here set down. But what an obligation, what a sacred duty is imposed upon Great Britain to enter the lists in person and to shield this trustful, docile, intelligent Baganda race from dangers which, whatever their cause, have synchronized with our arrival in their midst! And, meanwhile, let us be sure that order and science will conquer, and that in the end John Bull will be really master in his curious garden of sunshine and deadly nightshade.
Two days after I had arrived at Entebbe the Governor took me over to Kampala. The distance between the ancient and the administrative capital is about twenty-four miles. The road, although unmetalled, runs over such firm, smooth sandstone, almost polished by the rains, that, except in a few places, it would carry a motor-car well, and a bicycle is an excellent means of progression. The Uganda Government motor-cars, which are now running well and regularly, had not then, however, arrived, and the usual method was to travel by rickshaw. Mounted in this light bicycle-wheeled carriage, drawn by one man between the shafts and pushed by three more from behind, we were able to make rather more than six miles an hour in very comfortable style.
The rickshaw-boys, who were neatly dressedin white tunics and red caps, were relieved every eight miles. They have their own way of doing business. From the moment when the travellers are seated in the rickshaw and their labour begins, they embark upon an ever-varying but absolutely interminable antiphony, which, if it exhausts their breath, serves undoubtedly to keep their spirits up. "Burrulum," cry the pushers; "Huma," says the puller. "Burrulum," say the pushers again, and so on over and over again for a very long time. All these chaunts have their meanings, and if the traveller is found to be heavy or known to be ignorant of the language, he would not always be complimented by a correct translation. The phrase I have quoted means "iron upon wood"; and its signification is that the iron of European strength and skill, however superior, yet cannot get along without the wood of native labour and endurance. With such unexceptionable sentiments no one would quarrel. Yet even these lose their flavour by repetition, and after half an hour of "Burrulum" and "Huma" I was constrained to ask the singers whether they could not possibly manage to convey us in silence. They tried their best, but I could see they were unhappy,and after a while, out of compassion and to improve the pace, I withdrew the ban, and the chorus was joyfully resumed in a new and more elaborate form.
The manners of the Baganda are ceremonious to a degree. They well deserve Sir Harry Johnston's description of them as "the Japanese of Africa." If you say "Good morning" to a stranger on an English road, it is as like as not that his surprise will throw him into a posture of self-defence; but when two Baganda meet they begin to salute each other as soon as they come within earshot. "How are you?" cries the one. "Who am I that you should care to know?" replies the other. "Humble though I be, yet I have dared," rejoins the first. "But say first how areyou," continues the second. "The better for the honour you have done me," is the answer. By this they have already passed each other, and there is only time for the Parthian affability, "The honour is mine, and I shall treasure it," and a quavering of delicately-modulated, long-drawn "A—a—a's" of contentment and goodwill which gradually die away in the distance, leaving neither of them the worse circumstanced, nor the betterinformed. I must add, for the reader's caution, that the aforesaid dialogue is not an invariable ritual. The phrases may be variedad infinitumto suit the occasion; but it will suffice as an illustration of these roadside courtesies.