The Arab and the African : experiences in eastern equatorial Africa during a residence of three years

Front matter

Open Knowledge Commons and Harvard Medical School

THE ARAB AND THE AFRICAN

EXPERIENCES IN EASTERN EQUATORIAL AFRICA DURING A RESIDENCE OF THREE YEARS

Preface

The author has endeavoured in this book to describe in detail the daily life of the natives of Central Africa who live in and around the districts which have so recently been brought under British influence. He has also discussed the results of endeavouring to bring the untutored native, all unprepared, suddenly under the influence of laws and customs which have been gradually developed elsewhere through thirty generations of progressive civilization. He believes that the facts thus brought forward will be of interest to all who thoughtfully consider the ever-widening boundaries, and everincreasing responsibilities of the great Empire to which they belong.

He also hopes that what he has written will supply two distinct wants ; the want felt by the Philanthropist at home, who wishes to study the Slave vi Preface

Trade in all its bearings, and that felt by the Missionary or Trader who, about to proceed to East Equatorial Africa, desires to know what he is likely to meet with there, and what preparations he should make before going.

He has limited himself, as far as possible, to describing what he has actually seen and heard. He hopes that his book may throw some new light upon the Slave Trade, and the daily life of the African, as it is written by one who has lived amongst the people as their friend and equal, and who has thus been permitted to see and hear things hidden from the passing traveller, and even from the resident who rules over rather than lives ■amongst the people with whom he is brought into daily contact. He has been much encouraged in this hope by a letter from Sir C. B. Euan-Smith, who, in kindly accepting the dedication of the book, expressed his opinion that it would supply a distinct want.

Uganda has been left entirely out of account in the descriptions, partly because the Waganda differ in so many points from other East African races, and partly because they have been so fully described by Mr. Ashe, in his interesting book, ' Two Kings of Uganda.'

The chapter on Diseases is necessarily incomplete

Preface vii

in a book intended for general circulation ; but the author hopes shortly to publish, for the use of nonmedical travellers, a separate pamphlet containing more full information on this point, together with hints on the diagnosis and treatment of the more common diseases met with in East Africa.

Lastly, the author wishes to acknowledge the debt of gratitude he owes to many kind friends who have helped him much in getting the book into shape. Especially is he indebted to his cousin, Mr. G. G. Pruen, of Cheltenham College, whose advice on many points has been invaluable ; to the lady who took much pains in arranging the music in Chapter III. ; to that other lady who, with very poor materials as copies, succeeded in producing illustrations both accurate and artistic ; and to Mr. Seeley, for whose kind encouragement and assistance he feels truly grateful.

Cheltenham, 1891,

Contents

CHAPTER PAGK

I. THE LAND - j

h. the vegetation and animals - - - l8

Chapter I

The tropical Africa of our childhood, with its unknown interior and imaginary sandy wastes stretching from sea to sea, is a thing of the past, and in its place we have a country containing great lakes and magnificent rivers ; whilst the maps which depict it are traversed by scores of lines, the routes of the soldier, the missionary and the explorer. Yet, notwithstanding all these advances, but few of us realize the home-life of the people, or rather peoples, of Central Africa, or understand the wide - reaching inclusive nature of the political system known as slavery, and the insurmountable barrier which it presents to the missionary and the trader.

An Englishman cannot grasp what is included under that one term ' slavery ' unless he first understands the people, and to understand them he needs to know the country. Slavery is no such simple system as we of the West are apt to understand by the term. It is not solely a question of the brutal Arab, with his semi- civilization, lording it over and ill-treating the innocent and ingenuous occupier of the soil. The Arab has right, as well as wrong, on his side. The system of slavery has its advantages few and far between, as well as its disadvantages many and frequent, some glaring and evident, others unknown and unsuspected. As a whole, the system is detestable — the slave-dealer is frequently brutal ; the slave often ill - treated. Yet, if we examine the matter fairly, we shall see that the dealer has something to say on his own behalf — has some points in his favour which we have no right to overlook, however much we may rightly abhor and condemn the system ; and that the slave is not always to be pitied, and must sometimes be condemned — and none the less condemned, because on many points he ought to be sympathised with and helped, and, above all things, freed. It would be a glorious deed to abolish African slavery in the century which gave birth to Livingstone, and saw him spend his life in the noble endeavour to heal the open sore of the world ; but a deed which

English Slave-traders 3

we shall never hasten by shutting our eyes to the defects of the slave or the good points of the Arab. The Eastern mind resents injustice fiercely ; and in our condemnation of the slave-trade, we of the West are in danger of being unjust to the Arabs through insufficient knowledge of the conditions of life that prevail in Central Africa. It may help us perhaps to judge the Arab more justly, and with more of sorrow than anger, if we recollect that England has been one of the greatest of slavetrading nations ; and that even in the present century English enterprise and English capital have largely contributed to the maintenance of this traffic.

Tropical Africa is the great cradle of the slave-trade, and for a century it has been very largely at the mercy of the Arab ; but now the European has begun to step in, and its eastern half has become the sphere of operation of three great companies — two British companies to the north and to the south, with a German one between them. It is to this eastern half that our attention is to be directed.

As the traveller steams northward along the eastern coast from the southern limit of the dominions of the Sultan of Zanzibar, he notices

1 — 2 the low-lying region that skirts the Indian Ocean ; whilst lying behind, more or less dim in the perpetual African haze, he sees a range of hills, replaced in some parts by gently - rising ground. This marshy coast-line, malarious and deadly, which at Bagamoyo is about ten miles wide, becomes narrowed at Saadani, opposite the town of Zanzibar, to four miles, and finally terminates north of this before reaching Pangani, from which point northwards the coast rises abruptly in coral limestone rocks to a height of fifty feet or more. Thus the British company, whose territory does not reach so far south as Pangani, has no marshy coast-line, no unhealthy ports.

Behind the marsh to the south, and behind the shore to the north, the land rises by a gradual slope of eighty miles to a height of about fifteen hundred feet, from which, in the German region, stretches the first or coast plateau for eighty miles inland, in many parts broken up by spurs of the adjacent mountain-range, but in others extending for many days' march together in an almost unbroken levels with scenery not unlike that of the fen-country at home. It is a continuous swamp all through the rainy season, a monotonous plain in the dry one, traversed by a few large streams, and consequently

The Great Mountain Range better covered with vegetation than most parts. Having crossed this plain, the traveller is confronted by precipitous rocks, and a march or climb of eighty miles over rugged passes from four to five thousand feet above the sea-level, and along the sides of steep inclines, takes him over a narrowed portion of the great mountain-range which stretches in an almost unbroken chain from the Cape of Good Hope to Abyssinia. Once across this range, he is landed on the second or great plateau of Central Africa, which stretches across the Continent at an elevation of three to four thousand feet. A very striking feature is this mountain-chain, sharply cutting off the lower coast plateau and rising ground from the great central plain of the Continent, and leaving each flank with features peculiar to itself.

Like the low - lying coast - region, the first or narrow plateau, which is eighty miles wide in the German region, gradually narrows to unimportant dimensions as it passes northwards into the British district, being encroached upon by the great mountain-chain, which here widens its flanks, preparatory to rising in terrace after terrace to the clouds, and then piercing through and towering far above them in the giant hills of Kenia and Kilimanjaro.

Hitherto Bagamoyo and Saadani have been the ports from which most of the traffic has been carried on with the interior, along the great slave-routes stretching from these points to the ports on Tanganyika and Victoria Nyanza. ' Roads ' they are called, but the term ' paths ' would more correctly convey their condition to the Western mind ; for they are only narrow tracks from nine to fifteen inches wide, bared of vegetation by the frequent tramping of naked feet, but as uneven as when originally made.

As the traveller marches from Saadani westwards, he leaves at once behind him the two-storied houses of the coast and the tropical -looking cocoanutpalms ; and soon there is little to remind him that he has left his Western home so far away. He walks through continual woodland, not unlike the outskirts of Epping Forest in the late autumn, except for an occasional cactus-like euphorbia ; a baobob, looking for all the world like a tree put in the wrong way up ; or a still more occasional wild banana or fan-palm. Here and there at long intervals he comes upon some evidently betterwatered spot than usual — perhaps upon some long low valley amongst the hills, where typical tropical trees are thicker and more frequent, with an abundance of rank grass and undergrowth amongst

Native Villages y

them, giving the whole scene the appearance of one of our English country parks run wild.

On the first plateau, as we have noticed, there are a few large rocky streams, along whose banks rise fine and shady trees ; but elsewhere all up the hill and mountain sides, and in unending succession along the plains, come forest after forest of low scrub or dwarfed thorn -trees, whose spiny leaves and scanty foliage give little shelter from the tropical sun ; mile after mile of shadeless forest, a monotonous sameness broken only by the occasional euphorbia or baobob ; with a few scanty flowers and still fewer fruits, bitter and acid, or tasteless. At intervals of about ten miles from each other, and therefore, for porters with loads, at about a day's march distant, come villages, all constructed much in the same way. A double fence surrounds the village, and between the two fences, which are some ten yards apart, are tall shrubs and small trees. There are one or two entrances through the shrubbery, guarded at either end by narrow doorways, which can be easily blocked. Inside are the houses, low, circular huts of wickerwork and mud, with thatched roofs ; seldom over twenty houses in a village, sometimes not a dozen. Near the villages the ground is mostly cultivated, millet-seed, Indian corn, sweet potatoes, beans, pumpkins, and tobacco forming the staple products ; cassava, sugar-cane, rice, bananas, papaye, guavas, limes, and ground-nuts the exceptional ones. The uncultivated ground is used for grazing cattle, goats, a few sheep, and a very occasional donkey, besides which innumerable fowls pick up a scanty living. On the coast-plateau, however, there are hardly any cattle, as the tsetse fly holds almost undisputed sway over the whole of this belt of land. The tsetse is an insect in shape and size like an ordinary house-fly, and in colour not unlike the bee, with three or four dull-yellow bars across the back of the abdomen. This fly attacks man and animal indiscriminately, but the bite is dangerous only to some of the latter. We were frequently badly bitten by this little pest, which is very rapid in its movements, and very persistent in returning to the victim it has commenced to attack. It is only in the cool of the early morning, or in the late evening, before it has retired to its well-earned rest, that the lower temperature seems to partially benumb it, and render it an easy prey to the wrath of its victim. When it alights, the tsetse inserts its long proboscis into the skin of its victim, a somewhat painful proceeding, which, however, has no apparent effect bevond the transient pain of the insertion, except in

The Tsetse Fly 9

the case of horses, cattle, and dogs, and occasionally donkeys. When one of these animals has been bitten, it does not suffer at first ; and if it be in good health, it may not show any symptoms for a week or ten days, but at the end of this time it begins to refuse its food, and to fail in health. The first symptoms are variable, but usually flaccidity of muscles, and, consequently, a staggering walk are amongst the earliest. Next blindness ensues from commencing opacity in the internal media of the eye, the whole eye presenting a semi-transparent greenish appearance,. If the animal lives long enough, the fact that it is suffering from true blood-poisoning will be made evident by the appearance of abscesses in many of its joints, which enlarge quickly, but which do not appear to cause it much pain.

The streams of this plateau are not many in number, and are all fordable, most of them being only one or two feet deep. The fish in them are said to be few and small, but I have never seen a specimen, so cannot vouch for the truth of this statement. I do not think fishing can be much practised, as, though I took a great many fishhooks up country with me for barter, I never managed to dispose of one. Apparently, the crocodile and the hippopotamus are the only inhabitants of these io The Land

waters. The former do not seem dangerous to people, to adults, at least, but are so to goats and dogs. The European must look sharply after his dogs, or they may be snapped up, as they are not so wary as the native dog, who, when he goes to drink, first looks carefully this way and that before venturing to slake his thirst. The European dog has no such instinct, but boldly plunges in ; he likes not only to drink, but to lie down in the shallow waters, and cool his burning skin, and unfortunately the crocodile likes to do the same. Along these same rivers grow ferns which cannot flourish in the drier districts. Up amongst the hill - streams different varieties of maiden-hair are common ; here, too, are orchids, which, abounding in East Africa, naturally grow more plentifully on the well-foliaged trees, which are only to be found along the river sides.

In the wet season the ground is swampy for miles along the plateau, but during the dry season many of the smaller streams are empty, and water can only be obtained by digging in their beds wells of a depth which it is necessary gradually to increase as the dry months pass by. At one place where we camped towards the end of the dry season, the natives had to dig fifteen feet below the river bed before they struck water. Again, in the wet season, such

A Marshy District 1 1

is the abundance of water under the surface everywhere that it sends up a mist in the mornings unknown in the drier regions of the central plateau. I remember on one occasion some Wagogo from the dry and almost waterless region of Ugogo, who were coming down to the coast for the first time, were amazed beyond measure to see the sun look a reddish-yellow through the early morning mist, a condition absolutely unknown to them in the whole of their experience. No one could persuade them that it was not the moon, and it was not until it rose far above the horizon, and the mists began to disappear, that they were convinced that we had not been endeavouring to impose upon them.

The smell from these swampy districts is at times quite sickening ; but for pungency of odour and really disgusting foetor, there is nothing to equal that resulting from the first rains, which at the end of a dry season begin to soak into, and thereby decompose, the accumulated surface refuse of months.

Wild animals are plentiful all along this plateau, but they are much more plentiful and varied in the hills, and will be better considered in the description of those regions.

After eighty miles of the dead level we have been describing, the traveller reaches the commencement of the great mountain range, and now for another eighty miles his way lies over hill after hill, bare rugged paths across the sharp granite and quartz rocks, and still through unending forest. Here he is amongst the Wasagara, and gradually the style of huts begins to change. At first he sees the usual villages, but with only a single surrounding fence, perched on the top of ridges or conical eminences or other commanding situations for safety ; but these gradually give place to the well-known buildings called 'tembes,' the regulation house or hut of Central Africa. These tembes are all alike, except in size. Each consists of a kind of covered passage built round a square courtyard. The passages are built of stout, upright poles, less than six feet high, with strong wickerwork in between, the interstices being filled in with mud. The doors are also constructed of stout wickerwork, and slide clumsily from side to side. The upright poles are so short that an ordinarysized man cannot stand upright inside. I think the natives do not stay indoors much ; indeed, there is not much to tempt them to do so, the huts being very stuffy in dry weather, while in wet weather they let in the rain. Each passage is sub-divided by incomplete partitions of strong wickerwork, and several families live in one tembe, having each of

Mpwapwa 1 3

them two or three divisions, as not only they, but all their herds come inside at night for protection from the wild animals.

Once over this range the traveller finds himself on the grand plateau, and begins to realize that he is truly in Central Africa, cut off from even the semi-civilization of Zanzibar, and in an altogether new world.

By far the most important village along the western flank of the range is Mpwapwa, the great junction for the trade routes, or in other words for the slave routes, of Eastern Equatorial Africa. Many routes converge here from the Victoria Nyanza and Tanganyika, and diverge again as they pass eastward to the different ports on the East African Coast. Stanley, in his ' Dark Continent,' describes Mpwapwa as lying in ' a deep indentation in the great mountain chain that extends from Abyssinia, or even Suez, down to the Cape of Good Hope.' This indentation is about twenty miles deep, and does not by any means cut through the ridge ; the hill of Mpwapwa standing boldly up as the Eastern rampart against the encroaching plain. This great undulating plain, the central plateau of which we have been speaking, formed locally of red sands and clay, reaches in one unbroken level to the shores of Tanganyika and the Victoria Nyanza ; whilst the gentle declivities down the valleys of the Nile and Congo give it an exit to the Mediterranean and Atlantic. Hence it is that swallows which leave our coasts in October can pass up the Nile and across the great plain to Mpwapwa and other villages at the base of the mountain chain, where they stay until February. Numbers of them reach this western flank, but none ever pass further east. I have lived amongst the hills only four miles east of Mpwapwa for an entire winter without ever seeing a single swallow there, although each time that I crossed the hill to Mpwapwa, I saw them in numbers.

As a rule the same variety of bird is common to the greater part of the central plateau ; for instance the same varieties occur at Mpwapwa and on the shores of Tanganyika and the Victoria Nyanza ; whilst varieties which abound in Zanzibar and on the East coast are much less common on the plateau. There are, however, exceptions to this rule, as many birds do not seem to find the hills, with their many passes at an elevation of only five thousand feet, any real barrier. This mountain chain, as has been mentioned before, abounds in game of all kinds, the descriptions of which will come more naturally in the Chapter on Animals.

I know no one familiar with the western flank of

The German Territory 15

the chain higher up in the German and English districts, but I expect the description of the country round about Mpwapwa answers fairly well for the flank further north.

The difference between the British and German districts appears to be caused by the varying width of the mountain chain. The coast swamp which is such a feature in the German is wanting in the British territory. The marshy coast plateau, which is something under one hundred miles wide in the German, almost disappears in the English territory, encroached upon, as we have seen, by the widening eastern flanks of Kilimanjaro and Kenia. The high tableland of the great central plateau is also pushed further westward towards the north, encroached upon in the same way by the western flanks of these great mountains. With the presence of the marshy plateau, the Germans have also a monopoly of the tsetse fly, which is absent, I believe in the British territory, or at the worst, exists only in a narrow belt, easily passable in one night, and is therefore avoidable by caravans passing through.

The annexed map represents the difference between the two districts ; but very diagrammatically. From the regions which I have visited myself in the southern German territory, and from the descriptions i6 given me by friends who have travelled in the northern portions of the German and in the English territories, it seems evident that the features of the country are much the same in any latitude where

Equator

Eastern Sub-equatorial portion of Central plateau of Africa 3,300-4,000 ft.

Very little water.

\Tanganyika

G E R

Nyassa

the same elevation is reached. Thus the features of the incline are the same whether north or south, and so are the features of the central plateau. But although it is east and west not north and south

Gold 1 7

that really determines the different features, yet the narrowing of some districts from east to west in different latitudes completely alters the conditions existing north and south, when^ Eastern Equatorial Africa is considered as a whole. The German physical districts are all, with the exception of the coast marsh, represented in the English territory, and vice versa ; but the districts which are wide in one are narrow in the other, hence the marked difference north and south, and hence also, the marked superiority of the British over the German territory. The mountain chain at the latitude of Mpwapwa, which abounds in granite, gneiss, schists and serpentine, is also rich in metals, amongst which I believe I have seen gold in the quartz not far from Mpwapwa. After finding much pyrites, the German in command at Mpwapwa, Herr Krieger (who was killed soon afterwards by the Arabs at Kilwa, to which port he had been sent to take charge of it), showed me a specimen of what I thought at the time was native gold, and examination of museum specimens since my return to England has convinced me that it was really so. The formation being the same, there is, I suppose, a probability of gold being discovered in the same chain further north in British territory.

Chapter II

After leaving the coast, the first feature in the landscape that strikes the European is, as mentioned in the last chapter, the similarity of the vegetation to that met with at home, especially in districts where conifers predominate. At the coast itself, and on the adjacent islands, the palms, baobobs, mangoes, oranges, limes, cloves, bananas, pineapples, and jack-fruit give the landscape a truly tropical appearance, quite unlike that with which the dweller in temperate climes is familiar ; but elsewhere all this changes, and there are few edible fruits, the natives of the interior paying little or no attention to their culture. In a very few villages the banana, the papaye, and the guava are cultivated ; and in one or two isolated spots where the Arab or European has settled, he has brought seeds or cuttings, and planted a few other fruit-trees. Tamarinds, wild grapes, and species of wild cherry

Scanty Fruits and wild mango are not uncommon ; but they are not very acceptable to the European palate, nor do they appear to be prized even by the native. This absence of fruit of any kind is very trying to the

BAOBOB TREE traveller in such a hot climate, and almost as trying is the want of colour to refresh the eye. A few flowering aloes, and flowers of the order Solanaceae or Atropacese are very abundant ; but except in the depth of the rainy season when creepers abound everywhere, there is not much other floral display. Orchids, though far from uncommon, are unobtrusive in the localities they select, and very quiet in appearance. There is, in fact, nothing of that wealth and brilliancy of colour that one naturaily associates with the tropics. Most of the hills are covered with short trees, amongst which acacias predominate, whilst gigantic baobobs stand out prominently here and there. The larger trees, amongst which the fig-sycamores are the most conspicuous, prefer the plains, especially the sides of the streams. It is here, too, that the ebony-tree is so abundant, and in some districts the indiarubber-tree. Higher up, the brush and scrub are usually very close and well interspersed with thorn bushes bearing thorns from one to three inches long, a quite impenetrable thicket in many places except to knife and hatchet. It is in these hillside fastnesses that the wild beasts repose by day, and, except when pressed by hunger, rarely leave them until the sun has set, and the short twilight has been followed by the dim light of the stars, or the more brilliant but by no means exposing light of even a tropical moon. The leopards especially have the credit of selecting these hillside fastnesses for their lairs : a fact referred to

Abundant Game 21

by Solomon, ' Come with me from the lions' dens, from the mountains of the leopards.' The district around and near Mpwapwa, and, I believe, all along the range, abounds in lion, leopard, hyena, rhinoceros, elephant, giraffe, buffalo, zebra, antelope, eland, gazelle, monkey, wild boar, porcupine, coney, jackal, serval, genet, mongoose, civet cat, and other small carnivora. In the small lakes near and among the hills there are also hippopotamus and crocodile.

In the frequent visits which at one time I used to pay to Kisokwe, a village seven miles from Mpwapwa, where I was living, I had to walk five miles across a plain, three of the miles being along a well-worn caravan path through the jungle. Going by night it was a rare thing to see wild animals except hyenas, as they all seem to shun proximity to man ; but, returning in the morning, my native boy often showed me the tracks of the different animals which had crossed our path the night before. It was some time before I learned to distinguish the different footprints myself, and to the last I could not recognise them with anything like the facility which the natives showed in doing it.

The hyenas are the animals most frequently seen and heard. Sometimes • they can be heard soon after sunset, and they whine at intervals through the night. About three in the morning the whining becomes more frequent, and alters in character ; they are calling to each other to go home, the natives say. Then it becomes more and more distant, and finally ceases ; and the hyenas have returned to their homes before the first rays of the dawn. I never so fully realised before the description in the Psalms : ' Thou makest darkness and it is night, wherein all the beasts of the forests do creep forth. The young lions roar after their prey, and seek their meat from God. The sun ariseth ; they get them away, and lay them down in their dens. Man goeth forth unto his work, and to his labour until the evening.' This last sentence exactly describes one's hours in Central Africa. I frequently travelled by night to avoid the hot sun, yet rarely met a native. I only once went a long walk by night alone, though there is very little if any danger of being attacked, the wild beasts have such a dread of man. I suppose it is that man's original dominion over animals still survives to a large extent ' over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.' I have heard that a variety of leopard sometimes attacks man; but could hear of no instance of it. Also that the man-eating lion does ; if so, he certainly is a