I ought to say a few words as to how the expedition I have attempted to describe in the following pages came to be undertaken, and why the task of describing its wanderings has fallen upon me.
In the summer of 1907 I was contemplating a journey in the Sahara Desert, a country with which I had some previous acquaintance, when the trouble between France and Morocco led the French Government to decide that the state of affairs in the Sahara was too unsettled to admit of its allowing travellers to wander there unescorted, and, there being already sufficient to occupy all the troops in that region, it felt itself unable to offer me any soldiers to accompany me. I was accordingly obliged to abandon my expedition, for which most of my preparations had been made. I was determined to go somewhere, however, and Mr. T. A. Joyce, of the British Museum, suggested that I should visit the Congo, in the natives of which country he was keenly interested. He introduced me to Mr. Emil Torday, the Hungarian traveller, with whom he had collaborated in the writing of numerous papers about the Congo natives for the publications of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and Mr. Torday invited me to join him upon an expedition which he was about to undertake in the Kasai basin of the Congo Free State. I at once agreed to accompany him, delighted at the opportunity of visiting equatorial Africa, and of seeing something of the life of its primitive inhabitants. Mr. Torday had already studied the peoples who dwell in the south-western portion of the Congo State around the Kwilu River, and he desired to make an ethnographical survey of the natives of the Kasai and Sankuru basins, at the same time making extensive collections for the ethnographical department of the British Museum, and, if possible, of visiting the hitherto unexplored country between the Kasai and its tributary the Loange, which is inhabited by the Tukongo, a people so hostile to the white man that their tract of country had never been traversed by a European.
The Kasai is the largest of those mighty waterways which form the tributaries of the Congo. Rising not far from the sources of the Zambezi, it flows northward into Congo territory, turning almost at right angles to the west at the point where it receives the waters of the Sankuru, and falling into the Congo about 140 miles above Stanley Pool. The Kasai is navigable for river steamers up to Wissmann Falls, above its confluence with the Lulua, and these vessels ply upon the Sankuru to a point a little above Lusambo. Upon one or two of the lesser streams of the district, such as the Kwilu (itself a great river), the Inzia, and the Lubefu, small steamers are employed. The trade of this country was in the hands of the Kasai Company, which has established numerous factories on the banks of the principal rivers and in the interior. As no coinage had in 1907 been introduced in the Kasai district, Mr. Torday knew that we should require very large quantities of trade goods, such as cloth, salt, iron bars, knives, &c., which passes for money among the natives, and in order to avoid the waste of money which would result if we purchased these commodities in Europe and then found many of them unsaleable in Africa, he approached the Kasai Company with the request that we might buy such goods as we required at the factories from the stock kept by the Company for the purchase of ivory and rubber. In this way we should be sure of obtaining the goods the people of each locality we visited really required. The Kasai Company kindly agreed to this proposal, and also consented to allow our baggage and the collections we were to make to be conveyed in their steamers. The Government of the Congo, which had been requested by the authorities of the British Museum to further the interests of our expedition, and which is ever ready to help forward the efforts of the scientist or sportsman, agreed to give us special facilities for collecting natural history specimens, and to allow the cases we addressed to the Museum to come out of the Congo unopened by the customs’ officials. While Mr. Torday was busily engaged in making the arrangements necessary for our journey, Mr. Norman H. Hardy, a well-known painter of native life, offered to accompany us for the first six months of our journey, and as Mr. Torday was particularly anxious to secure reliable coloured pictures of the natives among whom he was to work, he gladly agreed to this suggestion, and Mr. Hardy became the third member of our party. While Mr. Torday was making his investigations in the field, Mr. T. A. Joyce had been engaged upon library work in Europe, and they have collaborated in publishing the scientific results of the journey, some of which are not yet fully worked up, although their monograph on the Bushongo tribe has recently been published.
During the whole journey I carefully kept a personal diary, in which I described the country we passed through and the various adventures which befel us in our wanderings. Upon our return home several people suggested to me that I should write some account of the expedition which might prove of interest to the general reader. Mr. Torday was anxious that I should do this, for his own time would be too fully occupied in working up his scientific notes to allow him sufficient leisure for the writing of a book of travel.
When I returned to Europe, however, I was in a very bad state of health, for I had broken a bone in my right hand some nine months previously, which I had not been able to have set, and which necessitated my carrying my arm in a sling for a couple of months on reaching England, and also the frequent fevers of the equatorial forest and the period of starvation through which we passed during the latter part of 1908 had told seriously upon my constitution. I was accordingly unable to undertake any work for a considerable time after my return from Africa. This must be my excuse for publishing now a book relating to a journey which came to an end in 1909. I would ask my readers to be so kind as to remember that I make no pretensions to literary merits. I have for some years led the life of a wanderer, and it has been my good fortune to witness many strange scenes, to come in contact with many remarkable peoples, and to visit districts many of which have never hitherto been described in the English language. I only regret that I do not possess the literary skill necessary to do justice to them. Had there been any other member of our party who stayed with the expedition during the whole of its sojourn in Africa, doubtless the task of narrating our adventures would have been very much better fulfilled; as it is, with Mr. Torday busily engaged in scientific work, and Mr. Hardy absent during the last part of our journey, I am the only person upon whom this task can devolve.
As my readers will observe, this book has no political motive; it is intended merely to be a record of our journey, and they will find in the following pages nothing about the atrocities which we hear have been perpetrated in many parts of the Congo. The reason for this is that we came across no brutality on the part of white men towards natives during our journey in the Kasai district. When I returned from Africa I made this statement to a representative of the Press, with the result that I aroused such indignation on the part of certain persons that I almost feel I ought to apologise for my misfortune in having no atrocities to describe. As my narrative will show, we lived for practically two years in close contact with the natives, and we were fortunate enough to win the confidence of nearly all the peoples with whom we dwelt, but I was able to obtain no tales of atrocities from them. What goes on in parts of the Congo which I have never visited I am not in a position to state; I shall only deal with districts which I personally know.
Nor is it my intention to attempt to instruct the Belgians how to govern their new colony—it would take a far wiser head than mine to face the many problems by which they are confronted in the Congo—but I would like to say one word of warning. Let no one imagine that “any sort of man” will do to administer the black man’s country, and that the negro regards every European as a great and wonderful personage. Far from it. The negro judges every white man on his merits, and no one can more quickly distinguish a gentleman from a scapegrace, or a strong man from a weak, than the primitive inhabitants of Central Africa. Let the Belgians, bearing this in mind, do their utmost to induce men of the best class to enter the Congo service, and the success of their colonial enterprise should be assured.
As my readers may very possibly wonder how we obtained a great deal of the information relating to tribal customs, &c., to which I shall allude, I may here give some idea of how Mr. Torday carried on his investigations. In the first place he never accepted an item of information concerning the natives imparted to him by a white man, but only recorded what was told to him by members of the tribe concerned. Secondly, he used always to select as his informants from among the natives men who had been as little as possible in contact with the European, and who were, therefore, still in a primitive state of culture themselves; very often he obtained his data from chiefs. Thirdly, a working knowledge of eight native languages enabled him almost always to dispense with the services of that very unsatisfactory person an interpreter, and also allowed him to pick up from the natives a lot of information and some legends which he was able to overhear when they were being related by the people among themselves, and not directly addressed to him. An acquaintance with Chikongo and Chituba, two bastard languages (both very easy to learn) which serve as a medium for trade between the various tribes, will perfectly well enable one to travel in the Kasai district unaccompanied by an interpreter speaking English or French, but a knowledge of the real languages of the tribes is essential to any one desiring to undertake serious ethnological researches, and this knowledge Mr. Torday possesses. A long study of the negro, a great liking for the primitive savage, and a keen insight into his character have endowed him with a way of gaining the confidence of the negroes, and of becoming popular with them, which enabled him to visit in safety places where a less experienced man might easily have been murdered, and to which must be attributed the success which Mr. Torday obtained in extracting much valuable information from the natives—information they would never have imparted to a man they did not both trust and like. As regards the results of our journey, I gather from the remarks made by scientists at the conclusion of Mr. Torday’s lecture before the Royal Geographical Society in March, 1910, that they are considered satisfactory, while the collections made for the British Museum are very extensive. Unfortunately lack of space prevents the exhibition there of many of the articles collected, but any of my readers who care to look in the Ethnographical Gallery may find some good specimens (a small part of the collection) of Bushongo wood-carving and embroidery to which I shall allude in my narrative.
I feel that I ought to say something about the photographs which illustrate my pages. With the exception of the picture of the statue facing page 209 (for which I am indebted to Mr. Joyce) and that of the buffalo head on page 248, they are all reproduced from our own negatives. Some of them, I know, lack clearness; but if my readers will remember that the films were used in a terribly damp climate, that near to the Equator the rainy season continues practically the whole year round, and that for twenty consecutive months we lived under canvas and, accordingly, lacked favourable opportunities for developing our photographs, some allowance may be made for the shortcomings of certain of my illustrations. We took a large number of photographs, but unfortunately many of the most important of them (particularly of those taken in the forest) were ruined by the heat and damp of that most trying climate.
In bringing my introductory remarks to a close, I wish to thank the Directors of the Kasai Company for the facilities they gave us, to which allusion has been made, and also the many employees of that Company who showed us kindness during our journey; the Belgian Government and those of its officials who speeded us on our way; the Royal Geographical Society for permission to reproduce the map which illustrated Mr. Torday’s lecture in the Geographical Journal for July 1910; and all those natives who received us well, and to whom we owe the information we collected, particularly Kwete Peshanga Kena, the king of the Bushongo, and Okitu, a Batetela chief. I would like, also, to offer my heartiest thanks to Mr. T. A. Joyce for being the cause of my joining the expedition, and to Mr. Hardy for the care he has taken to produce coloured pictures for this book. Lastly, let me express my gratitude to Mr. Torday for allowing me to accompany him, for the assistance he has given me in compiling my manuscript, and for his pleasant companionship during two eventful years, in the whole course of which we never had the semblance of a dispute.
M. W. HILTON-SIMPSON.