Cairo to Kisumu

Mombasa is the terminus of the Uganda Railway as it comes down from Lake Victoria. It is the port of entry for all the sea-borne trade of the seven provinces of British East Africa, or Kenya Colony, as it is now called, Uganda, and adjacent territory. It is on an island halfway down the coast of East Africa and just below the Equator, where old Mother Earth is widest and thickest. If I should stick a peg down under the chair in which I am writing into the old lady’s waist, and then travel westward in a straight line I would soon reach the upper end of Lake Tanganyika, and a little later come out on the Atlantic Ocean just above the mouth of the Congo. Crossing that great sea, I should make my next landing in South America, at the mouth of the Amazon, and, going up the Amazon valley, I should pass Quito, in Ecuador, and then drop down to the Pacific. From there on the trip to the peg stuck in at Mombasa would comprise sixteen or more thousand miles of water travel. I should cross the Pacific and Indian oceans, and the only solid ground on the way would be the islands of New Guinea, Borneo, and Sumatra.

Three thousand miles from Port Said and more than six thousand miles from London, Mombasa is far below the latitude of the Philippines. It is just about a day by ship north of Zanzibar and thirty days’ sailing from New York.

So far, most of my travels in Africa have been in the sands, with only a patch of green now and then. I was close to the Sahara in Morocco, and I travelled many hundreds of miles over it while in Algeria and Tunisia. In Tripoli my eyes were made sore by the glare of the Libyan wastes and their dust blew across the Nile valley during my stay in Egypt and the British Sudan. The Arabian desert was on both sides of us as we came down the Red Sea and its sands several times covered the ship. We had the rockiest of all deserts in southern Arabia while that of Italian Somaliland was not any better.

Here at Mombasa we are in the luxuriant tropics where the surroundings remind me of Solomon’s song. All nature seems joyful. The rain has conquered the sun and there are mosses, vines, and trees everywhere, The shores of the mainland are bordered with coconuts, we have mighty baobab trees loaded with green scattered over the island, and even its cliffs are moss grown.

A jungle of green on a foundation of coral, Mombasa is only a mile or so wide and three miles in length, but it rises well up out of the sea and is so close to the continent that one can almost hear the wind blow through the coconut groves over the way. On the island itself the jungle has been cut up into wide roads. There is a lively town with a polyglot population at one end of it, and the hills are spotted with the homes of the British officials. The island has two good harbours, a little one and a big one. The little one, which is in the main part of the town, is frequented by small craft. The big one could hold all the ships that sail the East Coast, and the people here say it is to be the great port of this side of the continent. The larger harbour is called Kilindini, a word that means “the deep place,” It has only a few warehouse sheds and a pier above it, the main settlements being across the island four miles away.

It was in Kilindini that I landed, and that under difficulties. Our ship was anchored far out and our baggage was taken ashore in native boats. Finding the main quay was crowded, I had my boatman go direct to the custom house and let us out on the beach. The custom house is a little shed about big enough for one cow situated so high up above the water that our trunks had to be carried out upon the heads of the Negroes. The water came up to their middles, but nevertheless they waded through it and brought both us and our baggage to the land. The customs examination was lenient. The officers looked through our trunks for guns and ammunition and warned us that we could not hunt elephants and hippopotami without a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar license. A little later the natives again took our trunks and lugged them about a quarter of a mile to the top of a hill, where we got the cars for Mombasa.

The word “cars” savours of electricity or steam. The cars I took were run by men. Here in East Africa human muscle forms the cheapest power. The wages of the natives run from five cents a day upward, while in the interior there are many who will work eight or nine hours for three cents. The result is that the trolley cars are propelled by men. Each car consists of a platform about as big as a kitchen table, with wheels underneath and an awning overhead. In the middle of the platform there is a bench accommodating two to four persons. The wheels run on a track about two feet in width, and each car is pushed from behind by one or more bare-legged and bare-headed men who run as they shove it up hill and down. There are such car tracks all over the island, with switches to the homes of the various officials. There are private cars as well as public ones, and everyone who is anybody has his own private car with his coolies to push him to and from work. At the beginning and closing of his office hours, which here are from eight until twelve and from two until four, the tracks are filled with these little cars, each having one or more officials riding in state to or from the government buildings.

I wish I could show you this old town of Mombasa. It began before Columbus discovered America, and the citizens can show you the very spot where Vasco da Gama landed when he came here from India shortly after he discovered the new route to Asia by the Cape of Good Hope. He landed here in 1498 at just about the time that Columbus was making his third voyage to America. Even then Mombasa was a city and Da Gama describes it. A little later it became the property of the Portuguese. The most prominent building in the town is the great red Fort of Jesus, built by the Portuguese in 1593, when the city was made the capital of their East African possessions. It was later the scene of massacres and bloody fights between Portuguese and Arabs. To-day the red flag of the Sultan of Zanzibar flies over the old fort, now used as a prison, admission to which is forbidden.

After the Portuguese were driven out the Arabs held Mombasa for many years, and it was an Arab ruler, the Sultan of Zanzibar, who owned it when the British came in. It still belongs to him in a nominal way. He has leased it to the British for so much a year, but his flag floats above John Bull’s ensign everywhere on the island.

Most of the population of Mombasa is African. Of the twenty-six thousand inhabitants, only about three hundred and fifty are white. There are people here from all parts of the interior, some of them as black as jet, and a scattering few who are chocolate brown or yellow. These natives live in huts off by themselves in a large village adjoining the European and Asiatic quarters. Their houses are of mud plastered upon a framework of poles and thatched with straw. The poles are put together without nails. There is not a piece of metal in any of them, except on the roof, where here and there a hole has been patched up with a rusty Standard Oil can. Very few of the huts are more than eight feet high, while some are so low that one has to stoop to enter them. They are so small that the beds are usually left outside the house during the daytime, and the majority of each family sleep on the floor.

I find this African village the most interesting part of Mombasa. Its inhabitants number over twenty-five thousand and comprise natives of perhaps one hundred tribes, each of which has its own dress and its own customs. Most of the women are bare-headed and bare-legged; and some of the men are clad in little more than breech cloths. Now and then one sees a girl bare to the waist, and the little ones wear only jewellery. On the mainland all go more or less naked.

It is amazing how these people mutilate themselves so as to be what they consider beautiful. The ears of many of the women are punched like sieves, in order that they may hold rings of various kinds. At one place I saw a girl with a ring of corks, each about as big around as my little finger, put through holes in the rims of her ears. She had a great cork in each lobe and three above that in each ear. There was a man beside her who had two long sticks in his ears; and in another place I saw one who had so stretched the lobe holes that a good-sized tumbler could have been passed through them. Indeed, I have a photograph of a man carrying a jam pot in his ear.

The most numerous of the natives here in Mombasa are the Swahilis. These are of a mixed breed found all along the central coast of East Africa. They are said to have some Arab blood and for this reason, perhaps, are brighter and more businesslike than the ordinary native. The Swahilis are found everywhere. They have little settlements in the interior in the midst of other tribes, and the Swahili language will carry one through the greater part of Central and East Africa. The British officials are required to learn it, and one can buy Swahili dictionaries and phrase books. During most of my journey I shall take a Swahili guide with me, or rather a black Swahili boy, who will act as a servant as well as guide.

Let me give you a picture of the Swahili women as I see them here. Their skins are of a rich chocolate brown and shine as though oiled. They have woolly hair, but they comb it in a most extraordinary way, using a razor to shave out partings between the rows of plaited locks so that when the hair is properly dressed the woman seems to have on a hood of black wool. I took a snapshot of two girls who were undergoing the process of hairdressing yesterday, fearing the while that their calico gowns, which were fastened by a single twist under the armpits, might slip. A little farther on Jack took a photograph of another giddy maiden clad in two strips of bright-coloured calico and numerous earrings, while I gave her a few coppers to pose for the picture. At the same time on the opposite side of the street stood a black girl gorgeous with jewellery. In her nose she had a brass ring as big around as the bottom of a dinner bucket, and her ears had holes in their lobes so big that a hen’s egg could be put through them without trouble. Not only the lobes, but the rims also were punctured, each ear having around the edges five little holes of about the size of my little finger. These holes were filled with rolls of bright-coloured paper cut off so smoothly that they seemed almost a part of the ear. The paper was of red, green, and blue and looked very quaint.