The Project Gutenberg eBook ofTropical AfricaThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Tropical AfricaAuthor: Henry DrummondRelease date: October 15, 2024 [eBook #74587]Language: EnglishOriginal publication: New York: The Columbian Publishing Co, 1890Credits: Al Haines*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TROPICAL AFRICA ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Tropical AfricaAuthor: Henry DrummondRelease date: October 15, 2024 [eBook #74587]Language: EnglishOriginal publication: New York: The Columbian Publishing Co, 1890Credits: Al Haines
Title: Tropical Africa
Author: Henry Drummond
Author: Henry Drummond
Release date: October 15, 2024 [eBook #74587]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: The Columbian Publishing Co, 1890
Credits: Al Haines
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TROPICAL AFRICA ***
[Transcriber's note: This book contains a few oddly spelled words, e.g. "poinded", which may have been intended as "impounded". This, and others, have been left as printed.]
Henry DrummondHenry Drummond
BY
HENRY DRUMMOND, LL.D., F.R.S.E.
AUTHOR OF "NATURAL LAW IN THE SPIRITUAL WORLD."
NEW YORKJOHN B. ALDEN, PUBLISHER1890
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
THE WATER-ROUTE TO THE HEART OF AFRICA: THE RIVERS ZAMBESI AND SHIRE
CHAPTER II.
THE EAST AFRICAN LAKE COUNTRY: LAKES SHIRWA AND NYASSA
CHAPTER III.
THE ASPECT OF THE HEART OF AFRICA: THE COUNTRY AND PEOPLE
CHAPTER IV.
THE HEART-DISEASE OF AFRICA: ITS PATHOLOGY AND CURE
CHAPTER V.
WANDERINGS ON THE NYASSA-TANGANYIKA PLATEAU: A TRAVELLER'S DIARY
CHAPTER VI.
THE WHITE ANT: A THEORY
CHAPTER VII.
MIMICRY: THE WAYS OF AFRICAN INSECTS
CHAPTER VIII.
A GEOLOGICAL SKETCH
CHAPTER IX.
A POLITICAL WARNING
CHAPTER X.
A METEOROLOGICAL NOTE
PREFACE.
It is the genial tax of literature upon Travel that those who have explored the regions of the uncivilised should open their bag of wonders before the world and celebrate their return to clothing in three or four volumes and a map. This exaction, in the nature of things, must shortly abolish itself.
As a minor traveller, whose assets are few, I have struggled to evade even this obligation, but having recently had to lecture on African subjects to various learned and unlearned Societies in England and America, it has been urged upon me that a few of the lecture-notes thrown into popular form might be useful as a general sketch of East Central Africa. Great books of travel have had their day. But small books, with the larger features of a country lightly sketched, and just enough of narrative to make you feel that you are really there, have a function in helping the imagination of those who have not breath enough to keep up with the great explorers.
The publication of "The White Ant" and "Mimicry" has been already forestalled by one of the monthly magazines; and the "Geological Sketch" is rescued, and duly dusted, from the archives of the British Association. If the dust of science has been too freely shaken from the other chapters, the scientific reader will overlook it for the sake of an over-worked public which has infinite trouble in getting itself mildly instructed and entertained without being disheartened by the heavy pomp of technical expression.
If anything in a work of this class could pretend to a serious purpose, I do not conceal that, in addition to the mere desire to inform, a special reason exists just now for writing about Africa—a reason so urgent that I excuse myself with difficulty for introducing so grave a problem in so slight a setting. The reader who runs his eye over the "Heart-Disease of Africa" will discover how great the need is for arousing afresh that truer interest in the Dark Continent which since Livingstone's time has almost died away. To many modern travellers Africa is simply a country to be explored; to Livingstone it was a land to be pitied and redeemed. And recent events on Lake Nyassa have stirred a new desire in the hearts of those who care for native Africa that "the open sore of the world" should have a last and decisive treatment at the hands of England.
HENRY DRUMMOND.
TROPICAL AFRICA.
THE ZAMBESI AND SHIRE.
Three distinct Africas are known to the modern world—North Africa, where men go for health; South Africa, where they go for money; and Central Africa, where they go for adventure. The first, the old Africa of Augustine and Carthage, every one knows from history; the geography of the second, the Africa of the Zulu and the diamond, has been taught us by two Universal Educators—War and the Stock-Exchange; but our knowledge of the third, the Africa of Livingstone and Stanley, is still fitly symbolized by the vacant look upon our maps which tells how long this mysterious land has kept its secret.
Into the heart of this mysterious Africa I wish to take you with me now. And let me magnify my subject by saying at once that it is a wonderful thing to see. It is a wonderful thing to start from the civilization of Europe, pass up these mighty rivers, and work your way into that unknown land—work your way alone, and on foot, mile after mile, month after month, among strange birds and beasts and plants and insects, meeting tribes which have no name, speaking tongues which no man can interpret, till you have reached its secret heart, and stood where white man has never trod before. It is a wonderful thing to look at this weird world of human beings—half animal half children, wholly savage and wholly heathen; and to turn and come back again to civilization before the impressions have had time to fade, and while the myriad problems of so strange a spectacle are still seething in the mind. It is an education to see this sight—an education in the meaning and history of man. To have been here is to have lived before Menes. It is to have watched the dawn of evolution. It is to have the great moral and social problems of life, of anthropology, of ethnology, and even of theology, brought home to the imagination in the most new and startling light.
On the longest day of a recent summer—midwinter therefore in the tropics—I left London. A long railway run across France, Switzerland, and Italy brings one in a day or two to the Mediterranean. Crossing to Alexandria, the traveller strikes across Egypt over the Nile, through the battlefield of Tel-el-Kebir, to the Red Sea, steams down its sweltering length to Aden, tranships, and, after three lifetimes of deplorable humiliation in the south-west Monsoons, terminates his sufferings at Zanzibar.
Zanzibar is the focus of all East African exploration. No matter where you are going in the interior, you must begin at Zanzibar. Oriental in its appearance, Mohammedan in its religion, Arabian in its morals, this cesspool of wickedness is a fit capital for the Dark Continent. But Zanzibar is Zanzibar simply because it is the only apology for a town on the whole coast. An immense outfit is required to penetrate this shopless and foodless land, and here only can the traveller make up his caravan. The ivory and slave trades have made caravaning a profession, and everything the explorer wants is to be had in these bazaars, from a tin of sardines to a repeating rifle. Here these black villains, the porters, the necessity and the despair of travellers, the scum of old slave gangs, and the fugitives from justice from every tribe, congregate for hire. And if there is one thing on which African travellers are for once agreed, it is that for laziness, ugliness, stupidness, and wickedness, these men are not to be matched on any continent in the world. Their one strong point is that they will engage themselves for the Victoria Nyanza or for the Grand Tour of the Tanganyika with as little ado as a Chamounix guide volunteers for the Jardin; but this singular avidity is mainly due to the fact that each man cherishes the hope of running away at the earliest opportunity. Were it only to avoid requiring to employ these gentlemen, having them for one's sole company month after month, seeing them transgress every commandment in turn before your eyes—you yourself being powerless to check them except by a wholesale breach of the sixth—it would be worth while to seek another route into the heart of Africa.
But there is a much graver objection to the Zanzibar route to the interior. Stanley started by this route on his search for Livingstone, two white men with him; he came back without them. Cameron set out by the same path to cross Africa with two companions; before he got to Tanganyika he was alone. The Geographical Society's late expedition, under Mr. Keith Johnstone, started from Zanzibar with two Europeans; the hardy and accomplished leader fell within a couple of months. These expeditions have all gone into the interior by this one fatal way, and probably every second man, by fever or by accident, has left his bones to bleach along the road. Hitherto there has been no help for it. The great malarious coast-belt must be crossed, and one had simply to take his life in his hands and go through with it.
But now there is an alternative. There is a rival route into the interior, which, though it is not without its dark places too, will probably yet become the great highway from the East to Central Africa. Let me briefly sketch it:
Africa, speaking generally, is a vast, ill-formed triangle. It has no peninsulas; it has almost no islands or bays or fjords. But three great inlets, three mighty rivers piercing it to the very heart, have been allocated by a kind Nature, one to each of its solid sides. On the north is the river of the past, flowing through Egypt, as Leigh Hunt says, "like some grave, mighty thought threading a dream"; on the west, the river of the future, the not less mysterious Congo; and on the east the little known Zambesi.
The physical features of this great continent are easily grasped. From the coast a low scorched plain, reeking with malaria, extends inland in unbroken monotony for two or three hundred miles. This is succeeded by mountains slowly rising into a plateau some 2000 or 3000 feet high; and this, at some hundreds of miles distance, forms the pedestal for a second plateau, as high again. This last plateau, 4000 to 5000 feet high, may be said to occupy the whole of Central Africa. It is only on the large scale, however, that these are to be reckoned plateaux at all. When one is upon them he sees nothing but mountains and valleys and plains of the ordinary type, covered for the most part with forest.
I have said that Nature has supplied each side of Africa with one great river. By going some hundreds of miles southward along the coast from Zanzibar the traveller reaches the mouth of the Zambesi. Livingstone sailed up this river once, and about a hundred miles from its mouth discovered another river twisting away northwards among the mountains. The great explorer was not the man to lose such a chance of penetrating the interior. He followed this river up, and after many wanderings found himself on the shores of a mighty lake. The river is named the Shiré, and the lake—the existence of which was quite unknown before, is Lake Nyassa. Lake Nyassa is 350 miles long; so that, with the Zambesi, the Shiré, and this great lake, we have the one thing required to open up East Central Africa—a water-route to the interior. But this is not all. Two hundred and fifty miles from the end of Lake Nyassa another lake of still nobler proportions takes up the thread of communication. Lake Tanganyika is 450 miles in length. Between the lakes stands a lofty plateau, cool, healthy, accessible, and without any physical barrier to interrupt the explorer's march. By this route the Victoria Nyanza and the Albert Nyanza may be approached with less fatigue, less risk, and not less speed, than by the overland trail from Zanzibar. At one point also, along this line, one is within a short march of that other great route which must ever be regarded as the trunk-line of the African continent. The watershed of theCongolies on this Nyassa-Tanganyika plateau. This is the stupendous natural highway on which so much of the future of East Central Africa must yet depend.
Ten days' languid steaming from Zanzibar brings the traveller to the Zambesi mouth. The bar here has an evil reputation, and the port is fixed on a little river which flows into the Indian Ocean slightly to the north, but the upper reaches of which almost join the Zambesi at some distance inland. This port is the Portuguese settlement of Quilimane, and here I said good-bye to the steamer and to civilization. Some distance in the interior stands a solitary pioneer Mission station of the Established Church of Scotland, and still farther in, on Lake Nyassa, another outpost of a sister church. My route led past both these stations, and I had the good fortune to pick up on the way two or three young fellow-countrymen who were going up to relieve the mission staff. For the latter part of my journey I was quite alone. All African work, as a rule, is done single-handed. It is not always easy to find a companion for such a project, and the climate is so pestilential that when two go, you and your friend are simply nursing each other time about, and the expedition never gets on. On the whole, however, the solitary course is not to be commended. An unutterable loneliness comes over one at times in the great still forests, and there is a stage in African fever—and every one must have fever—when the watchful hand of a friend may make the difference between life and death.
After leaving Quilimane, the first week of our journey up the Qua-qua was one long picnic. We had two small row-boats, the sterns covered with a sun-proof awning, and under these we basked, and talked, and read and prospected, from dawn to sunset. Each boat was paddled by seven or eight natives—muscular heathens, whose sole dress was a pocket-handkerchief, a little palm oil, and a few mosquitoes. Except at first the river was only a few yards broad, and changed in character and novelty every hour. Now it ran through a grove of cocoa-nut palms—the most wonderful and beautiful tree of the tropics. Now its sullen current oozed through a fœtid swamp of mangroves—the home of the crocodile and the hippopotamus, whose slimy bodies wallowed into the pools with a splash as our boats sped past. Again the banks became green and graceful, the long plumed grasses bending to the stream, and the whole a living aviary of birds—the white ibis and the gaunt fish eagle, and the exquisite blue and scarlet kingfisher watching its prey from the overhanging boughs. The businesslike air of this last bird is almost comical, and somehow sits ill on a creature of such gorgeous beauty. One expects him to flutter away before the approach of so material a thing as a boat, display his fairy plumage in a few airy movements, and melt away in the sunshine. But there he sits, stolid and impassive, and though the spray of the paddles almost dashes in his face, the intent eyes never move, and he refuses to acknowledge the intruder by so much as a glance. His larger ally, the black and white spotted kingfisher, if less beautiful, is much more energetic, and darts about the bank incessantly, coquetting with the boat from reach to reach, and seldom allowing an inspection close enough to take in the details of his piebald coat.
One interests oneself in these things more particularly because there is nothing at first especially striking about the river scenery itself. Ten or twenty feet of bank cuts off the view on either side, and large and varied features are wanting. The banks are lined with the densest jungle of mangroves and aquatic grasses, while creepers of a hundred kinds struggle for life among the interlacing stems. We saw crocodiles here in such numbers that count was very soon lost. They were of all sizes, from the baby specimen which one might take home in a bottle to the enormous bullet-proof brute the size of an 81-ton gun. These revolting animals take their siesta in the heat of the day, lying prone upon the bank, with their wedge-shaped heads directed towards the water. When disturbed they scuttle into the river with a wriggling movement, the precipitancy of which defies the power of sight. The adjustment of the adult crocodile to its environment in the matter of color is quite remarkable. The younger forms are lighter yellow, and more easily discoverable, but it takes the careful use of a good pair of eyes to distinguish in the gnarled slime-covered log lying among the rotting stumps the living form of the mature specimen. Between the African crocodiles and the alligators there is the slightest possible external difference; although the longer head, the arrangement of scales, the fringed feet with their webbed toes, the uniform teeth, and the protrusion of the large canine, distinguish them from their American allies.
Many of the ibises I shot as we moved along, for food for the men, who, like all Africans, will do anything for flesh in whatever form. For ourselves, we lived upon emaciated fowls and tinned meats, cooking them at a fire on the bank when the boat stopped. Eggs are never eaten by the natives, but always set; although, if you offer to buy them, the natives will bring you a dozen from a sitting hen, which they assure you were laid that very morning. In the interior, on many occasions afterwards, these protestations were tested, and always proved false. One time, when nearly famished and far from camp, I was brought a few eggs which a chief himself guaranteed had that very hour been laid. With sincere hope that he might be right, but with much misgiving, I ordered the two freshest looking to be boiled. With the despair of a starving man I opened them. They were cock and hen.
Breakfast and luncheon and dinner are all the same in Africa. There is no beef, nor mutton, nor bread, nor flour, nor sugar, nor salt, nor anything whatever, except an occasional fowl, which an Englishman can eat. Hence the enormous outfit which he must carry with him. No one has any idea of what can be had in tins till he camps out abroad. Every conceivable digestible and indigestible is to be had tinned, every form of fish, flesh, fowl, and game, every species of vegetable, and fruit, every soup, sweet, andentrée; but after two or three months of this sort of thing you learn that this tempting semblance of variety is a gigantic imposition. The sole difference between these various articles lies, like the Rhine wines, in the label. Plum pudding or kippered herring taste just the same. Whether you begin dinner with tinned calves-foot jelly or end with tinned salmon makes no difference; and after six months it is only by a slight feeling of hardness that you do not swallow the tins themselves.
At the end of a too short week we left our boats behind. Engaging an army of shy natives at a few huts near the bank, we struck across a low neck of land, and after an hour's walk found ourselves suddenly on the banks of the Zambesi. A solitary bungalow was in sight, and opposite it the little steamer of the African Lakes Company, which was to take us up the Shiré. There is more in the association, perhaps, than in the landscape, to strike one as he first furrows the waters of this virgin river. We are fifty miles from its mouth, the mile-wide water shallow and brown, the low sandy banks fringed with alligators and wild birds. The great deltoid plain, yellow with sun-tanned reeds and sparsely covered with trees, stretches on every side; the sun is blistering hot; the sky, as it will be for months, a monotonous dome of blue—not a frank bright blue like the Canadian sky, but a veiled blue, a suspicious and malarious blue, partly due to the perpetual heat haze and partly to the imagination, for the Zambesi is no friend to the European, and this whole region is heavy with depressing memories.
This impression, perhaps, was heightened by the fact that we were to spend that night within a few yards of the place where Mrs. Livingstone died. Late in the afternoon we reached the spot—a low ruined hut a hundred yards from the river's bank, with a broad verandah shading its crumbling walls. A grass-grown path straggled to the doorway, and the fresh print of a hippopotamus told how neglected the spot is now. Pushing the door open, we found ourselves in a long dark room, its mud floor broken into fragments, and remains of native fires betraying its latest occupants. Turning to the right, we entered a smaller chamber, the walls bare and stained, with two glassless windows facing the river. The evening sun setting over the far-off Morumballa mountains, filled the room with its soft glow, and took our thoughts back to that Sunday evening twenty years ago, when in this same bedroom, at this same hour, Livingstone knelt over his dying wife, and witnessed the great sunset of his life.
Under a huge baobab tree—a miracle of vegetable vitality and luxuriance—stands Mrs. Livingstone's grave. The picture in Livingstone's book represents the place as well kept and surrounded with neatly-planted trees. But now it is an utter wilderness, matted with jungle grass and trodden by the beasts of the forest; and as I looked at the forsaken mound and contrasted it with her husband's tomb in Westminster Abbey, I thought perhaps the woman's love which brought her to a spot like this might be not less worthy of immortality.
The Zambesi is the great river of Eastern Africa, and, after the Congo, the Nile, and the Niger, the most important on the continent. Rising in the far interior among the marshes of Lake Dilolo, and, gathering volume from the streams which flow from the high lands connecting the north of Lake Nyassa with Inner Angola, it curves across the country for over a thousand miles like an attenuated letter S, and before its four great mouths empty the far-travelled waters into the Indian Ocean, drains an area of more than half a million square miles. As it cuts its way down the successive steps of the central plateaux its usually placid current is interrupted by rapids, narrows, cascades, and cataracts, corresponding to the plateau edges, so that like all the rivers of Africa it is only navigable in stretches of one or two hundred miles at a time. From the coast the Zambesi might be stemmed by steam-power to the rapids of Kebrabasa; and from above that point intermittently, as far as the impassable barrier of the Victoria Falls. Above this, for some distance, again follow rapids and waterfalls, but these are at length succeeded by an unbroken chain of tributaries which together form an inland waterway of a thousand miles in length. The broad lands along the banks of this noble river are subject to annual inundations like the region of the Nile, and hence their agricultural possibilities are unlimited. On the lower Zambesi, indigo, the orchila weed, and caluraba-root abound, and oil-seeds and sugar-cane could be produced in quantity to supply the whole of Europe. At present, owing to apathy and indifferent government, these magnificent resources are almost wholly undeveloped.
Next afternoon our little vessel left the Zambesi in its wake and struck up a fine lake-like expansion to the north, which represents the mouth of the Shiré. Narrower and deeper, the tributary is a better stream for navigation than the Zambesi. The scenery also is really fine, especially as one nears the mountains of the plateau, and the strange peoples and animals along the banks occupy the mind with perpetual interests. The hippopotami, prowling round the boat and tromboning at us within pistol-shot, kept us awake at night; and during the day we could see elephants, buffaloes, deer, and other large game wandering about the banks. To see the elephant at home is a sight to remember. The stupendous awkwardness of the menagerie animal, as if so large a creature were quite a mistake, vanishes completely when you watch him in his native haunts. Here he is as nimble as a kitten, and you see how perfectly this moving mountain is adapted to its habitat—how such a ponderous monster, indeed, is as natural to these colossal grasses as a rabbit to an English park. We were extremely fortunate in seeing elephants at all at this stage, and I question whether there is any other part of Africa where these animals may be observed leisurely and in safety within six weeks of London. Mr. Stanley in his Livingstone expedition was ten months in the country before he saw any; and Mr. Joseph Thomson, during his long journey to Tanganyika and back, never came across a single elephant. It is said that the whale which all travellers see in crossing the Atlantic is kept up by the steamboat companies, but I vouch that these Shiré valley elephants are independent of subsidy.
The question of the disappearance of the elephant here and throughout Africa is, as every one knows, only one of a few years. It is hard to think why this kindly and sagacious creature should have to be exterminated; why this vast store of animal energy, which might be turned into so much useful work, should be lost to civilization. But the causes are not difficult to understand. The African elephant has never been successfully tamed, and is therefore a failure as a source of energy. As a source of ivory, on the other hand, he has been but too great a success. The cost of ivory at present is about half-a-sovereign per pound. An average tusk weighs from twenty to thirty pounds. Each animal has two, and in Africa both male and female carry tusks. The average elephant is therefore worth in pounds sterling the weight in pounds avoirdupois of one of his tusks. I have frequently seen single tusks turning the scale upon ninety pounds, the pair in this case being worth nearly £100 sterling,—so that a herd of elephants is about as valuable as a gold mine. The temptation to sacrifice the animal for his tusks is therefore great; and as he becomes scarcer he will be pursued by the hunter with ever-increasing eagerness. But the truth is, sad though the confession be, the sooner the last elephant falls before the hunters bullet the better for Africa. Ivory introduces into the country at present an abnormal state of things. Upon this one article is set so enormous a premium that none other among African products secures the slightest general attention; nor will almost anyone in the interior condescend to touch the normal wealth, or develop the legitimate industries of the country, so long as a tusk remains. In addition to this, of half the real woes which now exist in Africa ivory is at the bottom. It is not only that wherever there is an article to which a fictitious value is attached the effect upon the producer is apt to be injurious; nor that wherever there is money there is temptation, covetousness, and war; but that unprincipled men, and especially Arabs, are brought into contact with the natives in the worst relation, influence them only in one, and that the lowest, direction, and leave them always worse than they find them—worse in greed, in knavery, in their belief in mankind, and in their suspicion of civilization. Further, for every tusk an Arab trader purchases he must buy, borrow, or steal a slave to carry it to the coast. Domestic slavery is bad enough, but now begins the long slave-march with its untold horrors—horrors instigated and perpetuated almost solely by the traffic in ivory. The extermination of the elephant, therefore, will mark one stage at least in the closing up of the slave-trade. The elephant has done much for Africa. The best he can do now for his country is to disappear forever.
In books of travel great chiefs are usually called kings, their wives queens, while their mud-huts are always palaces. But after seeing my first African chief at home, I found I must either change my views of kings or of authors. The regal splendor of Chipitula's court—and Chipitula was a very great chief indeed, and owned all the Shiré district—may be judged of by the fact that when I paid my respects to his highness his court-dress consisted almost exclusively of a pair of suspenders. I made this king happy for life by the gift of a scarlet tennis-cap and a few buttons. But poor Chipitula had not long to enjoy his treasures,—and I mention the incident to show what is going on every day in Africa. When I came back that way, on my return journey, I called again to receive a leopard skin which this chief had promised to trap for me, and for which he was to get in exchange certain dilapidated remnants of my wardrobe. He gave me the skin; I duly covered his, and we parted. A few days after, another white man came that way; he was a trader—the only one who has yet plied this hazardous calling in East Central Africa. He quarrelled with Chipitula over some bargain, and in a moment of passion drew his revolver and shot the chief dead on the spot. Of course he himself was instantly speared by Chipitula's men; and all his black porters, according to native etiquette, were butchered with their master. There is absolutely no law in Africa, and you can kill anybody and anybody can kill you, and no one will ask any questions.
Our next stoppage was to pay another homage—truly this is a tragic region—at another white man's grave. A few years ago Bishop Mackenzie and some other missionaries were sent to Africa by the English Universities, with instructions to try to establish a Mission in the footsteps of Livingstone. They came here; the climate overpowered them; one by one they sickened and died. With the death of the Bishop himself the site was abandoned, and the few survivors returned home. Among the hippopotamus-trampled reeds on the banks of the Shiré under a rough iron cross, lies the first of three brave bishops who have already made their graves in Equatorial Africa.
I have spoken of the Shiré as the great waterway into the interior of Eastern Africa. It has one defect. After sailing for five or six days we came to rapids which no boat can pass. These rapids were named by Livingstone the Murchison Cataracts, and they extend for seventy miles. This distance, accordingly, must be traversed overland. Half-way up this seventy miles, and a considerable distance inland from the river, stands the first white settlement in East Central Africa—the Blantyre Mission. Bribing about a hundred natives with a promise of a fathom of calico each, to carry our luggage, we set off on foot for Blantyre. The traditional characteristics of African caravaning were displayed in full perfection during this first experience, and darkness fell when we were but half-way to our destination. It was our first night in the bush, and a somewhat unusual introduction to African travelling marked it. At midnight we were roused by startling cries from our men, who lay sleeping on the ground around us. The watch-fires must have burned down, for a lion had suddenly sprung into the camp. Seizing the man who lay nearest the forest, the animal buried its claws in his breast, and was making off into the darkness, when the shouting frightened it and made it drop its prey. Twice during the night the lion came back, and we whites had to keep watch by turns till morning with loaded rifles. This is altogether an exceptional case, for with a good fire one can generally spread his mat anywhere in the tropics without fear of midnight attack. This is a famous place, however, for lions, and one can as certainly depend on their gruesome concert in the early morning as on the sparrows' chirp in England.
Towards sunset the following evening our caravan filed into Blantyre. On the beauty and interest of this ideal mission I shall not dwell. But if anyone wishes to find out what can be done with the virgin African, what can be done by broad and practical missionary methods, let him visit the Rev. D. Clement Scott and his friends at Blantyre. And if he wishes to observe the possibilities of civilization and colonization among an average African tribe living on an average African soil, let him examine the mission plantations, and those of Mr. John and Mr. Frederick Moir at Mandala, and of the Brothers Buchanan at Zomba. And, further, if he desires to know what the milk of human kindness is, let him time his attack of fever so that haply it may coincide with his visit to either of these centres of self-denying goodness and hospitality.
LAKES SHIRWA AND NYASSA.
Somewhere in the Shiré Highlands, in 1859, Livingstone saw a large lake—Lake Shirwa—which is still almost unknown. It lies away to the East, and is bounded by a range of mountains whose lofty summits are visible from the hills round Blantyre. Thinking it might be a useful initiation to African travel if I devoted a short time to its exploration, I set off one morning accompanied by two members of the Blantyre staff and a small retinue of natives. Steering across country in the direction in which it lay, we found, two days before seeing the actual water, that we were already on the ancient bed of the lake. Though now clothed with forest, the whole district has obviously been under water at a comparatively recent period, and the shores of Lake Shirwa probably reached at one time to within a few miles of Blantyre itself. On reaching the lake a very aged female chief came to see us, and told us how, long, long ago, a white man came to her village and gave her a present of cloth. Of the white man, who must have been Livingstone, she spoke very kindly; and, indeed, wherever David Livingstone's footsteps are crossed in Africa the fragrance of his memory seems to remain.
The waters of Shirwa are brackish to the taste, and undrinkable; but the saltness must have a peculiar charm for game, for nowhere else in Africa did I see such splendid herds of the larger animals as here. The zebra was especially abundant; and so unaccustomed to be disturbed are these creatures, that with a little care one could watch their movements safely within a very few yards. It may seem unorthodox to say so, but I do not know if among the larger animals there is any thing handsomer in creation than the zebra. At close quarters his striped coat is all but as fine as the tiger's, while the form and movement of his body are in every way nobler. The gait certainly, is not to be compared for gracefulness with that of the many species of antelope and deer who nibble the grass beside him, and one can never quite forget that scientifically he is an ass; but taking him all in all, this fleet and beautiful animal ought to have a higher place in the regard of man than he has yet received.
We were much surprised, considering that this region is almost uninhabited, to discover near the lake shore a native path so beaten, and so recently beaten by multitudes of human feet, that it could only represent some trunk route through the continent. Following it for a few miles, we soon discovered its function. It was one of the great slave routes through Africa. Signs of the horrid traffic soon became visible on every side; and from symmetrical arrangements of small piles of stones and freshly-cut twigs, planted semaphore-wise upon the path, our native guides made out that a slave-caravan was actually passing at the time. We were, in fact, between two portions of it, the stones and twigs being telegraphic signals between front and rear. Our natives seemed much alarmed at this discovery, and refused to proceed unless we promised not to interfere—a proceeding which, had we attempted it, would simply have meant murder for ourselves and slavery for them. Next day, from a hill-top, we saw the slave encampment far below, and the ghastly procession marshalling for its march to the distant coast, which many of the hundreds who composed it would never reach alive.
Talking of native footpaths leads me to turn aside for a moment to explain to the uninitiated the true mode of African travel. In spite of all the books that have been lavished upon us by our great explorers, few people seem to have any accurate understanding of this most simple process. Some have the impression that everything is done in bullock-wagons—an idea borrowed from the Cape, but hopelessly inapplicable to Central Africa, where a wheel at present would be as great a novelty as a polar bear. Others at the opposite extreme suppose that the explorer works along solely by compass, making a bee-line for his destination, and steering his caravan through the trackless wilderness like a ship at sea. Now it may be a surprise to the unenlightened to learn that probably no explorer in forcing his passage through Africa has ever, for more than a few days at a time, been off some beaten track. Probably no country in the world, civilized or uncivilized, is better supplied with paths than this unmapped continent. Every village is connected with some other village, every tribe with the next tribe, every state with its neighbor, and therefore with all the rest. The explorer's business is simply to select from this network of tracks, keep a general direction, and hold on his way. Let him begin at Zanzibar, plant his foot on a native footpath, and set his face towards Tanganyika. In eight months he will be there. He has simply to persevere. From village to village he will be handed on, zigzagging it may be sometimes to avoid the impassable barriers of nature or the rarer perils of hostile tribes, but never taking to the woods, never guided solely by the stars, never in fact leaving a beaten track, till hundreds and hundreds of miles are between him and the sea, and his interminable footpath ends with a canoe, on the shores of Tanganyika. Crossing the lake, landing near some native village, he picks up the thread once more. Again he plods on and on, now on foot, now by canoe, but always keeping his line of villages, until one day suddenly he sniffs the sea-breeze again, and his faithful foot-wide guide lands him on the Atlantic seaboard.
Nor is there any art in finding out these successive villages with their intercommunicating links. Hemustfind them out. A whole army of guides, servants, carriers, soldiers and camp-followers accompany him in his inarch, and this nondescript regiment must be fed. Indian corn, cassava, mawere, beans, and bananas—these do not grow wild even in Africa. Every meal has to be bought and paid for in cloth and beads; and scarcely three days can pass without a call having to be made at some village where the necessary supplies can be obtained. A caravan, as a rule, must live from hand to mouth, and its march becomes simply a regulated procession through a chain of markets. Not, however, that there are any real markets—there are neither bazaars nor stores in native Africa. Thousands of the villages through which the traveller eats his way may never have victualled a caravan before. But, with the chief's consent, which is usually easily purchased for a showy present, the villages unlock their larders, the women flock to the grinding stones, and basketfuls of food are swiftly exchanged for unknown equivalents in beads and calico.
The native tracks which I have just described are the same in character all over Africa. They are veritable footpaths, never over a foot in breadth, beaten as hard as adamant, and rutted beneath the level of the forest bed by centuries of native traffic. As a rule these footpaths are marvellously direct. Like the roads of the old Romans, they run straight on through everything, ridge and mountain and valley, never shying at obstacles, nor anywhere turning aside to breathe. Yet within this general straightforwardness there is a singular eccentricity and indirectness in detail. Although the African footpath is on the whole a bee-line, no fifty yards of it are ever straight. And the reason is not far to seek. If a stone is encountered no native will ever think of removing it. Why should he? It is easier to walk round it. The next man who comes that way will do the same. He knows that a hundred men are following him; he looks at the stone; a moment, and it might be unearthed and tossed aside, but no; he also holds on his way. It is not that he resents the trouble, it is the idea that is wanting. It would no more occur to him that that stone was a displaceable object, and that for the general weal he might displace it, than that its feldspar was of the orthoclase variety. Generations and generations of men have passed that stone, and it still waits for a man with an altruistic idea. But it would be a very stony country indeed—and Africa is far from stony—that would wholly account for the aggravating obliqueness and indecision of the African footpath. Probably each four miles, on an average path, is spun out by an infinite series of minor sinuosities, to five or six. Now these deflections are not meaningless. Each has some history—a history dating back, perhaps, a thousand years, but to which all clue has centuries ago been lost. The leading cause, probably, is fallen trees. When a tree falls across a path no man ever removes it. As in the case of the stone, the native goes round it. It is too green to burn in his hut; before it is dry, and the white ants have eaten it, the new detour has become part and parcel of the path. The smaller irregularities, on the other hand, represent the trees and stumps of the primeval forest where the track was made at first. But whatever the cause, it is certain that for persistent straightforwardness in the general, and utter vacillation and irresolution in the particular, the African roads are unique in engineering.
Though one of the smaller African lakes, Shirwa is probably larger than all the lakes of Great Britain put together. With the splendid environment of mountains on three of its sides, softened and distanced by perpetual summer haze, it reminds one somewhat of the Great Salt Lake simmering in a July sun. We pitched our tent for a day or two on its western shore among a harmless and surprised people who had never gazed on the pallid countenances of Englishmen before. Owing to the ravages of the slaver the people of Shirwa are few, scattered and poor, and live in abiding terror. The densest population is to be found on the small island, heavily timbered with baobabs, which forms a picturesque feature of the northern end. These Wa-Nyassa, or people of the lake, as they call themselves, have been driven here by fear, and they rarely leave their Lake-Dwelling unless under cover of night. Even then they are liable to capture by any man of a stronger tribe who happens to meet them, and numbers who have been kidnapped in this way are to be found in the villages of neighboring chiefs. This is an amenity of existence in Africa that strikes one as very terrible. It is impossible for those at home to understand how literally savage man is a chattel, and how much his life is spent in the more safeguarding of his main asset,i.e., himself. There are actually districts in Africa wherethreenatives cannot be sent a message in case two should combine and sell the third before they return.
After some time spent in the Lake Shirwa and Shiré districts, I set out for the Upper Shiré and Lake Nyassa. Two short days' walk from the settlement at Blantyre brings one once more to the banks of the Shiré. Here I found waiting the famous littleIlala, a tiny steamer, little bigger than a large steam launch. It belonged originally to the missionaries on Lake Nyassa, and was carried here a few years ago from England in seven hundred pieces, and bolted together on the river bank. No chapter in romance is more interesting than the story of the pioneer voyage of theIlala, as it sailed away for the first time towards the unknown waters of Nyassa. No keel had ever broken the surface of this mighty lake before, and the wonderment of the natives as the Big Canoe hissed past their villages is described by those who witnessed it as a spectacle of indescribable interest. TheIlalais named, of course, after the village where David Livingstone breathed his last. It indicates the heroic mission of the little ship—to take up the work of Civilization and Christianity where the great explorer left it. TheIlalanow plies at intervals between the Upper Shiré—above the cataracts—and the shores of Lake Nyassa, carrying supplies to the handful of missionaries settled on the western shore. Though commanded by a white man, the work on board is entirely done by natives from the locality. The confidence of the black people once gained, no great difficulty seems to have been found in getting volunteers enough for this novel employment. Singularly enough, while deck hands are often only enlisted after some persuasion, the competition for the office of fireman—a disagreeable post at any time, but in the tropical heat the last to be coveted—is so keen that any number of natives are at all times ready to be frizzled in the stokehole. Instead of avoiding heat, the African native everywhere courts it. His nature expands and revels in it; while a breath of cold on a mountain slope, or a sudden shower of rain, transforms him instantly into a most woebegone object.
After leaving Matope, just above the Murchison cataracts, theIlalasteams for a couple of days in the river before Lake Nyassa is reached. The valley throughout this length is very broad, bounded on either side by distant mountains which at an earlier period probably formed the shores of a larger Lake Nyassa. The fact that Lake Nyassa is silting up at its southern end becomes more apparent as one nears the lake, for here one finds a considerable expanse already cut off from the larger portion, and forming a separate sheet of water. The smaller lake is Lake Pomalombe, and it is already so shallow that in the dry season theIlala'sscrew stirs the gray mud at the bottom. The friendship of the few villages along the bank is secured by an occasional present; although the relations between some of them and the Big Canoe are at times a little strained, and in bad humors doubtless they would send it to the bottom if they dared. It is to be remembered that this whole region is as yet altogether beyond the limits, and almost beyond the knowledge of civilization, and few white men have ever been in the country, except the few agents connected with the Lakes Company and the Missions. Beyond an occasional barter of cloth or beads for firewood and food, theIlalahas no dealings with the tribes on the Upper Shiré, and at present they are about as much affected by the passing to and fro of the white man's steamer as are the inhabitants of Kensington by an occasional wild-fowl making for Regent's Park. One is apt to conclude, from the mere presence of such a thing as a steamer in Central Africa, that the country through which it is passing must be in some sense civilized, and the hourly reminders to the contrary which one receives on the spot are among the most startling experiences of the traveller. It is almost impossible for him to believe, as he watches the native life from the cabin of theIlala, that these people are altogether uncivilized; just as it is impossible for him to believe that that lurch a moment ago was caused by the little craft bumping against a submerged hippopotamus. A steel ship, London built, steaming six knots ahead; and grass huts, nude natives, and a hippopotamus—the ideas refuse to assort themselves, and one lives in a perpetual state of bewilderment and interrogation.
It was a brilliant summer morning when theIlalasteamed into Lake Nyassa, and in a few hours we were at anchor in the little bay at Livingstonia, My first impression of this famous mission-station certainly will never be forgotten. Magnificent mountains of granite, green to the summit with forest, encircled it, and on the silver sand of a still smaller bay stood the small row of trim white cottages. A neat path through a small garden led up to the settlement, and I approached the largest house and entered. It was the Livingstonia manse—the head missionary's house. It was spotlessly clean; English furniture was in the room, a medicine chest, familiar-looking dishes were in the cupboards, books lying about, but there was no missionary in it. I went to the next house—it was the school, the benches were there and the blackboard, but there were no scholars and no teacher. I passed to the next, it was the blacksmith shop; there were the tools and the anvil, but there was no blacksmith. And so on to the next, and the next, all in perfect order, and allempty. Then a native approached and led me a few yards into the forest. And there among the mimosa trees, under a huge granite mountain, were four or five graves. These were the missionaries.
I spent a day or two in the solemn shadow of that deserted manse. It is one of the loveliest spots in the world; and it was hard to believe, sitting under the tamarind trees by the quiet lake shore, that the pestilence which wasteth at midnight had made this beautiful spot its home. A hundred and fifty miles north, on the same lake-coast, the remnant of the missionaries have begun their task again, and there, slowly, against fearful odds, they are carrying on their work. Travellers have been pleased to say unkind things of missionaries. That they are sometimes right, I will not question. But I will say of the Livingstonia missionaries, and of the Blantyre missionaries, and count it an honor to say it, that they are brave, efficient, single-hearted men, who need our sympathy more than we know, and are equally above our criticism and our praise.
Malarial fever is the one sad certainty which every African traveller must face. For months he may escape, but its finger is upon him, and well for him if he has a friend near when it finally overtakes him. It is preceded for weeks, or even for a month or two, by unaccountable irritability, depression and weariness. On the march with his men he has scarcely started when he sighs for the noon-day rest. Putting it down to mere laziness, he goads himself on by draughts from the water-bottle, and totters forward a mile or two more. Next he finds himself skulking into the forest on the pretext of looking at a specimen, and, when his porters are out of sight, throws himself under a tree in utter limpness and despair. Roused by mere shame, he staggers along the trail, and as he nears the mid-day camp puts on a spurt to conceal his defeat, which finishes him for the rest of the day. This is a good place for specimens he tells the men—the tent may be pitched for the night. This goes on day after day till the crash comes—first cold and pain, then heat and pain, then every kind of pain, and every degree of heat, then delirium, then the life-and-death struggle. He rises, if he does rise, a shadow; and slowly accumulates strength for the next attack, which he knows too well will not disappoint him. No one has ever yet got to the bottom of African fever. Its geographical distribution is still unmapped, but generally it prevails over the whole east and west coasts within the tropical limit, along all the river-courses, on the shores of the inland lakes, and in all low-lying and marshy districts. The higher plateaux, presumably, are comparatively free from it, but in order to reach these, malarious districts of greater or smaller area have to be traversed. There the system becomes saturated with fever, which often develops long after the infected region is left behind. The known facts with regard to African fever are these: First, it is connected in some way with drying-up water and decaying vegetation, though how the germs develop, or what they are, is unknown. Second, natives suffer from fever equally with Europeans, and this more particularly in changing from district to district and from altitude to altitude. Thus, in marching over the Tanganyika plateau, four or five of my native carriers were down with fever, although their homes were only two or three hundred miles off, before I had even a touch of it. Third, quinine is the great and almost the sole remedy; and, fourth, no European ever escapes it.
The really appalling mortality of Europeans is a fact with which all who have any idea of casting in their lot with Africa should seriously reckon. None but those who have been on the spot, or have followed closely the inner history of African exploration and missionary work can appreciate the gravity of the situation. The malaria spares no man; the strong fall as the weak; no number of precautions can provide against it; no kind of care can do more than make the attacks less frequent; no prediction can be made beforehand as to which regions are haunted by it and which are safe. It is not the least ghastly feature of this invisible plague that the only known scientific test for it at present is a human life. That test has been applied in the Congo region already with a recklessness which the sober judgment can only characterize as criminal. It is a small matter that men should throw away their lives, in hundreds, if need be, for a holy cause; but it is not a small matter that man after man, in long and in fatal succession, should seek to overleap what is plainly a barrier of Nature. And science has a duty in pointing out that no devotion or enthusiasm can give any man a charmed life, and that those who work for the highest ends will best attain them in humble obedience to the common laws. Transcendentally, this may be denied; the warning finger may be despised as the hand of the coward and the profane. But the fact remains—the fact of an awful chain of English graves stretching across Africa. This is not spoken, nevertheless, to discourage missionary enterprise. It is only said to regulate it.
To the head of Lake Nyassa in a little steam yacht is quite a sea-voyage. What with heavy seas, and head-winds, and stopping to wood, and lying-to at nights, it takes longer time than going from England to America. The lake is begirt with mountains, and storms are so incessant and so furious that Livingstone actually christened Nyassa the "Lake of Storms." The motion on anchoring at night was generally so unpleasant that one preferred then to be set on shore. My men—for I had already begun to pick up my caravan whenever I could find a native willing to go—would kindle fires all round to keep off beasts of prey, and we slept in peace upon the soft lake sand.
Instead of being one hundred and fifty miles long, as first supposed, Lake Nyassa is now known to have a length of three hundred and fifty miles, and a breadth varying from sixteen to sixty miles. It occupies a gigantic trough of granite and gneiss, the profoundly deep water standing at a level of sixteen hundred feet above the sea, with the mountains rising all around it, and sometimes sheer above it, to a height of one, two, three, and four thousand feet. The mountains along the west coast form an almost unbroken chain, while the north-east and north are enclosed by the vast range of the Livingstone Mountains. The anchorages on the lake are neither so numerous nor so sheltered as might be wished, but theIlalahas picked out some fair harbors on the west coast, and about half as many are already known on the east.
I only visited one native village on the lake, and I should hope there are none others like it—indeed it was quite exceptional for Africa. I tumbled into it early one morning, out of theIlala'sdingy, and lost myself at once in an endless labyrinth of reeking huts. Its filth was indescribable, and I met stricken men, at the acute stage of smallpox, wandering about the place at every turn, as if infection were a thing unknown. The chief is the greatest slaver and the worst villain on the lake, and impaled upon poles all round his lodge, their ghastly faces shrivelling in the sun, I counted forty human heads.
This village was not African, however. It was Arab. The native villages on Nyassa are rarely so large, seldom so compact, and never so dirty. Everywhere they straggle along the shore and through the forest, and altogether there must be many hundreds of them scattered about the lake. On the western shore alone there are at least fifteen different tribes, speaking as many different languages, and each of them with dialects innumerable.
The bright spot on Lake Nyassa is Bandawé, the present headquarters of the Scotch Livingstonia Mission. The phrase "headquarters of a mission" suggests to the home Christian a street and a square, with its overshadowing church; a decent graveyard; and a reverent community in its Sunday clothes. But Bandawé is only a lodge or two in a vast wilderness, and the swarthy worshippers flock to the seatless chapel on M'lunga's day dressed mostly in bows and arrows. The said chapel, nevertheless, is as great an achievement in its way as Cologne Cathedral, and its worshippers are quite as much interested, and some of them at least to quite as much purpose. In reality no words can be a fit witness here to the impression made by Dr. Laws, Mrs. Laws, and their few helpers, upon this singular and apparently intractable material. A visit to Bandawé is a great moral lesson. And I cherish no more sacred memory of my life than that of a communion service in the little Bandawé chapel, when the sacramental cup was handed to me by the bare black arm of a native communicant—a communicant whose life, tested afterwards in many an hour of trial with me on the Tanganyika plateau, gave him perhaps a better right to be there than any of us.
THE COUNTRY AND ITS PEOPLE.
We are now far enough into the interior to form some general idea of the aspect of the heart of Africa. I shall not attempt to picture any particular spot. The description about to be given applies generally to Shirwa, the Shiré Highlands, Nyassa, and the Nyassa-Tanganyika plateau—regions which together make up one of the great lobes of the heart of Africa.
Nothing could more wildly misrepresent the reality than the idea of one's school days that the heart of Africa is a desert. Africa rises from its three environing oceans in three great tiers, and the general physical geography of these has been already sketched—first, a coast-line, low and deadly; farther in, a plateau the height of the Scottish Grampians; farther in still, a higher plateau, covering the country for thousands of miles with mountain and valley. Now fill in this sketch, and you have Africa before you. Cover the coast belt with rank yellow grass, dot here and there a palm; scatter through it a few demoralized villages; and stock it with the leopard, the hyena, the crocodile, and the hippopotamus. Clothe the mountainous plateaux next—both of them—with endless forest,—not grand umbrageous forest like the forests of South America, nor matted jungle like the forests of India, but with thin, rather weak forest,—with forest of low trees, whose half-grown trunks and scanty leaves offer no shade from the tropical sun. Nor is there anything in these trees to the casual eye to remind you that you are in the tropics. Here and there one comes upon a borassus or fan-palm, a candelabra-like euphorbia, a mimosa aflame with color, or a sepulchral baobab. A close inspection also will discover curious creepers and climbers; and among the branches strange orchids hide their eccentric flowers. But the outward type of tree is the same as we have at home—trees resembling the ash, the beech, and the elm, only seldom so large, except by the streams, and never so beautiful.[1] Day after day you may wander through these forests with nothing except the climate to remind you where you are. The beasts, to be sure, are different, but unless you watch for them you will seldom see any; the birds are different, but you rarely hear them; and as for the rocks, they are our own familiar gneisses and granites, with honest basalt-dykes boring through them, and leopard-skin lichens staining their weathered sides. Thousands and thousands of miles, then, of vast thin forest, shadeless, trackless, voiceless—forest in mountain and forest in plain—this is East Central Africa.
[1] The more important of these trees are—Napaca Kirkii,Brachystegia longifolia,Vitex umbrosa,Erythrina speciosa,Ficus sycamorus,Khaya senegalensis,Nuxia congesta,Parinarium mobola, andErythrophlœum guineensis.
The indiscriminate praise formerly lavished on tropical vegetation has received many shocks from recent travellers. In Kaffirland, South Africa, I have seen one or two forests fine enough to justify the enthusiasm of armchair word-painters of the tropics; but so far as the central plateau is concerned, the careful judgment of Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace respecting the equatorial belt in general—a judgment which has at once sobered all modern descriptions of tropical lands, and made imaginative people more content to stay at home—applies almost to this whole area. The fairy labyrinth of ferns and palms, the festoons of climbing plants blocking the paths and scenting the forests with their resplendent flowers, the gorgeous clouds of insects, the gaily-plumaged birds, the paroquets, the monkey swinging from his trapeze in the shaded bowers—these are unknown to Africa. Once a week you will see a palm; once in three months the monkey will cross your path; the flowers on the whole are few; the trees are poor; and, to be honest, though the endless forest-clad mountains have a sublimity of their own, and though there are tropical bits along some of the mountain-streams of exquisite beauty, nowhere is there anything in grace and sweetness and strength to compare with a Highland glen. For the most part of the year these forests are jaded and sun-stricken, carpeted with no moss or alchemylla or scented woodruff, the bare trunks frescoed with few lichens, their motionless and unrefreshed leaves drooping sullenly from their sapless boughs. Flowers there are, small and great, in endless variety; but there is no display of flowers, no gorgeous show of blossom in the mass, as when the blazing gorse and heather bloom at home. The dazzling glare of the sun in the torrid zone has perhaps something to do with this want of color-effect in tropical nature; for there is always about ten minutes just after sunset, when the whole tone of the landscape changes like magic, and a singular beauty steals over the scene. This is the sweetest moment of the African day, and night hides only too swiftly the homelike softness and repose so strangely grateful to the over-stimulated eye.
Hidden away in these endless forests, like birds' nests in a wood, in terror of one another, and of their common foe, the slaver, are small native villages; and here in his virgin simplicity dwells the primeval man, without clothes, without civilization, without learning, without religion—the genuine child of nature, thoughtless, careless, and contented. This man is apparently quite happy; he has practically no wants. One stick, pointed, makes him a spear; two sticks rubbed together make him a fire; fifty sticks tied together make him a house. The bark he peels from them makes his clothes; the fruits which hang on them form his food. It is perfectly astonishing when one thinks of it what nature can do for the animal-man, to see with what small capital after all a human being can get through the world. I once saw an African buried. According to the custom of his tribe, his entire earthly possessions—and he was an average commoner—were buried with him. Into the grave, after the body, was lowered the dead man's pipe, then a rough knife, then a mud bowl, and last his bow and arrows—the bow string cut through the middle, a touching symbol that its work was done. This was all. Four items, as an auctioneer would say, were the whole belongings for half a century of this human being. No man knows what a man is till he has seen what a man can be without, and be withal a man. That is to say, no man knows how great man is till he has seen how small he has been once.
The African is often blamed for being lazy, but it is a misuse of words. He does not need to work; with so bountiful a nature round him it would be gratuitous to work. And his indolence, therefore, as it is called, is just as much a part of himself as his flat nose, and as little blameworthy as slowness in a tortoise. The fact is, Africa is a nation of the unemployed.
This completeness, however, will be a sad drawback to development. Already it is found difficult to create new wants; and when labor is required, and you have already paid your man a yard of calico and a string of beads, you have nothing in your possession to bribe him to another hand's turn. Nothing almost that you have would be the slightest use to him. Among the presents which I took for chiefs, I was innocent enough to include a watch. I might as well have taken a grand piano. For months I never looked at my own watch in that land of sunshine. Besides, the mere idea of time has scarcely yet penetrated the African mind, and forms no element whatever in his calculations. I wanted on one occasion to catch the little steamer on the Shiré, and pleaded this as an excuse to a rather powerful chief, whom it would have been dangerous to quarrel with, and who would not let me leave his village. The man merely stared. The idea of any one being in a hurry was not only preposterous but inconceivable, and I might as well have urged as my reason for wishing away that the angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles.
This difference in ideas is the real obstacle to African travelling, and it raises all sorts of problems in one's mind as to the nature of ideas themselves. I often wished I could get inside an African for an afternoon, and just see how he looked at things; for I am sure our worlds are as different as the color of our skins.
Talking of skins, I may observe in passing that the highland African is not a negro, nor is his skin black. It is a deep full-toned brown, something like the color of a good cigar. The whole surface is diced with a delicate pattern, which gives it great richness and beauty, and I often thought how effective a row of books would be bound in native-morocco.
No one knows exactly who these people are. They belong, of course, to the great Bantu race; but their origin is obscure, their tribal boundaries are unmapped, even their names are unknown, and their languages—-for they are many—are unintelligible. A fine-looking people, quiet and domestic, their life-history from the cradle to the grave is of the utmost simplicity. Too ill armed to hunt, they live all but exclusively on a vegetable diet. A small part of the year they depend, like the monkeys, upon wild fruits and herbs; but the staple food is a small tasteless millet-seed which they grow in gardens, crush in a mortar, and stir with water into a thick porridge. Twice a day, nearly all the year round, each man stuffs himself with this coarse and tasteless dough, shoveling it into his mouth in handfuls, and consuming at a sitting a pile the size of an ant-heap. His one occupation is to grow this millet, and his gardening is a curiosity. Selecting a spot in the forest, he climbs a tree, and with a small home-made axe lops off the branches one by one. He then wades through the litter to the next tree, and hacks it to pieces also, leaving the trunk standing erect. Upon all the trees within a circle of thirty or forty yards diameter his axe works similar havoc, till the ground stands breast-high in leaves and branches. Next, the whole is set on fire and burned to ashes. Then, when the first rains moisten the hard ground and wash the fertile chemical constituents of the ash into the soil, he attacks it with his hoe, drops in a few handfuls of millet, and the year's work is over. But a few weeks off and on are required for these operations, and he may then go to sleep till the rains are over, assured of a crop which never fails, which is never poor, and which will last him till the rains return again.
Between the acts he does nothing but lounge and sleep; his wife, or wives, are the millers and bakers; they work hard to prepare his food, and are rewarded by having to take their own meals apart, for no African would ever demean himself by eating with a woman. I have tried to think of something else that these people habitually do, but their vacuous life leaves nothing more to tell.
Apart from eating, their sole occupation is to talk, and this they do unceasingly, emphasizing their words with a marvellous wealth of gesticulation. Talking, indeed, is an art here—the art it must once have been in Europe before the newspaper drove it out of fashion. The native voices are sometimes highly musical, though in the strict sense the people have no notion whatever of singing; and the languages themselves are full of melody. Every word, like the Italian, ends in a vowel, and when well spoken they are exceedingly effective and full of character.
Notwithstanding their rudimentary estate, the people of Africa have the beginnings of all the more characteristic things that make up the life of civilized man. They have a national amusement, the dance; a national musical instrument, the drum; a national drink,pombé; a national religion, the fear of evil spirits. Their chamber of justice is a council of head-men or chiefs; their court of appeal, themuavi, or poison cup. No new thing is found here that is not in some form in modern civilization; no new thing in civilization but has its embryo and prophecy in the simpler life of these primitive tribes. To the ignorant these men are animals; but the eye of evolution looks on them with a kindlier and more instructed sense. They are what we were once; possibly they may become what we are now.
What, then, is to become of this strange people and their land? With the glowing figures of a very distinguished traveller in our minds, are we to expect that the Shiré and Congo routes have but to be connected with New York and Manchester to cause at once a revolution among the people of Africa and in the commerce of the world? We hear two criticisms upon that subject. One complains that while Mr. Stanley emphasizes in the most convincing way the thousands of miles of cloth the African is waiting to receive from Europe, he is all but silent as to what Europe is to get in return. A second remark is that Africa has nothing to give in return, and never will have.
The facts of the case briefly, as it seems to me, are these:—
First, The only thing of value the interior of Africa produces at present in any quantity is ivory. There is still, undoubtedly, a supply of this precious material in the country—a supply which may last yet for fifteen or twenty years. But it is well to frame future calculation on the certainty of this abnormal source of wealth ceasing, as it must do, in the immediate future.
Second, Africa already produces in a wild state a number of vegetable and other products of considerable commercial value; and although the soil can only be said to be of average fertility, there is practically no limit to the extent to which these could be developed.
Wild indigo—the trueindigofera tinctoriais already growing on the hills of the interior. The Londolphia, an indiarubber-bearing creeper, is to be seen on most of the watercourses; and a variety of theFicus elastica, the well-known rubber plant, abounds on Lake Nyassa. The orchilla weed is common. The castor-oil plant, ginger, and other spices, the tobacco-plant, the cotton-plant, and many fibre-yielding grasses, are also found; and oil-seeds of every variety and in endless quantity are grown by the natives for local use.
The fatal drawback, meantime, to the further development of these comparatively invaluable products is the transit, carriage to the coast from Nyassa or Tanganyika being almost prohibitive. Up till very recently only two native products have ever been exported from this region—indiarubber and beeswax, and these in but trifling quantity. But there is no reason why these products should not be largely developed, and freights must become lower and lower every year. In addition to the plants named, the soil of Central Africa is undoubtedly adapted for growing coffee; and the Cinchona would probably flourish well on the higher grounds of the Tanganyika plateau.
I must not omit to mention in this connection that an attempt is now being made, and so far with marked success, to form actual plantations in the interior of Africa; and the result of the experiment ought to be watched with exceptional interest. Mr. Moir, on behalf of the African Lakes Company, and the Brothers Buchanan on their own account, and also Mr. Scott, with remarkable industry and enterprise have each formed at Blantyre a coffee plantation of considerable size. The plants, when I saw them, were still young, but very healthy and promising, and already a first crop of fine coffee-berries hung from the trees, and has since been marketed. These same gentlemen have also grown heavy crops of wheat; and Mr. Buchanan has succeeded well with sugar-cane, potatoes and other English vegetables. The manual work here has been entirely done by natives; and an immense saving to resident Europeans will be effected when the interior is able to provide its own food supplies, for at present wheat, coffee, and sugar, have all to be imported from home.