Native life in East Africa

Africa! Africa! When, in past years, men told me that in Africa it is no use making plans of any sort beforehand, I always looked on this opinion as the quintessence of stupidity; but after my recent experiences I am quite in a position to appreciate its truth.

I must go back to the 11th of June. The two geographers and I had fixed our departure northward for the 20th; after getting together the necessary men and baggage we intended to take the steamer to Tanga, and the Usambara railway from Tanga to Mombo, so as to start from the Pangani Valley on our march across the Masai steppe to Kondoa-Irangi. Our preparations were going on in the most satisfactory manner; and I was one morning doing my best to hasten them in Traun, Stürken and Devers’ stores, by exercising that persistency in bargaining which can only be acquired by the director of an ethnographical museum. I had not been listening to the conversation going on beside me between one of the salesmen and a European officer of the Field Force; but suddenly the name Kondoa-Irangi fell on my ear, and I was all attention on the instant. “I suppose you are going home by the——to-morrow?” said one. “No such luck! we are marching to-morrow afternoon. Didn’t I just say there’s a rising in Iraku?” returned the other.

Kondoa-Irangi and Iraku concerned me closely enough to necessitate farther inquiry. Half instinctively, I flung myself out at the door and into the dazzling sunshine which flooded the street. At that moment Captain Merker’s mule-waggon rattled up, and his voice reached me over the woolly heads of the passers-by. “Stop, Dr. Weule, you can’t go to Kondoa-Irangi.”

Though not in general endowed with presence of mind in any extraordinary degree, I must in this instance have thought with lightning speed, for no sooner had I taken my place beside Merker, in order to proceed without loss of time to the Government offices and ask for fuller explanations, than I had already gone through in my mind the various possible alternatives, in case it turned out—as seemed probable—that I had to give up all thought of the Irangi expedition. In those—to me—critical days at Dar es Salam, there was no one acquainted with the circumstances but would have said, “Get out! the Iraku rising is no rising at all—it is a mere trifle, a quarrel about a couple of oxen, or something of the sort—in any case an affair that will soon be settled.” None the less I had to admit that the Acting Governor (Geheimrat Haber, of whose unfailing kindness I cannot say enough) was right when he pointed out that, while a geographer could traverse that district at his ease, regardless of the four columns of the native Field Force (Schutztruppe) marched into it, along roads converging from Moshi, Mpapwa, Kilimatinde and Tabora respectively, the case was totally different for an ethnographic expedition, which can only do its work in a perfectly undisturbed country. This condition would not be attainable up North for some time to come. Would it not be better to turn southward, to the hinterland of Lindi and Mikindani? True, a rising had taken place there not long ago, but it was now quite over, and the Wamwera, more especially, had got a very effectual thrashing, so that the tribes of that part would be unlikely to feel disposed for fresh aggression just at present. At the same time, a comparatively large force had marched into the South, both Field Force and police, and the most important strategic points were strongly garrisoned, so that I could be certain of getting a sufficient escort; while for the Manyara country I could only reckon on a couple of recruits at the outside.

My long-continued study of African races never rendered me a better service than now. It can easily be understood that I knew less about the new field of work suggested than about that which had been so rudely snatched from me; but I was aware that it contained a conglomeration of tribes similar to that found in the North; and I was also able to form a fairly definite notion of the way in which I should have to plan and carry out my new expedition, in order to bring it to a successful issue. I refrained, however, from thinking out the new plan in detail—indeed, I should have had no time to do so, for I had to be quick if I did not wish to lose several weeks. The permission of the Geographical Committee and of the Colonial Office was soon secured, my loads were packed; two boys and a cook had been engaged long before. The little Government steamer Rufiji was to start for the South on the 19th of June. I induced the Government to supply me on the spot with the only map of the southern district at that time procurable, and with equal promptitude the admirably-managed “Central-Magazin” had found me two dozen sturdy Wanyamwezi porters. Other absolutely indispensable arrangements were speedily disposed of, and before I had time to look round, I found myself on board and steaming out of Dar es Salam Harbour.

I had never for one moment cherished the illusion that a research expedition was a pleasure-trip, but the three days and a quarter spent on board the Rufiji will remain a vivid memory, even should my experience of the interior prove worse than I anticipate. My own want of foresight is partly to blame for this. Instead of having a good breakfast at the Dar es Salam Club before starting, I allowed the ship’s cook to set before me some coffee, which in combination with the clammy, ill-baked bread and rancid tinned butter would have proved an effectual emetic even on dry land, and soon brought about the inevitable catastrophe on board the little vessel madly rolling and pitching before a stiff south-west monsoon. The Rufiji and her sister ship the Rovuma are not, properly speaking, passenger steamers, but serve only to distribute the mails along the coast and carry small consignments of cargo. Consequently there is no accommodation for travellers, who have to climb the bridge when they come on board, and live, eat, drink, and sleep there till they reach their destination. This is all very well so long as the numbers are strictly limited: there is just room at night for two or three camp beds, an item which has to be brought with you in any case, as without it no travel is possible in East Africa. But the state of things when six or eight men, and perhaps even a lady, have to share this space, which is about equal to that of a moderate-sized room—the imagination dare not picture.

My own woes scarcely permitted me to think about the welfare of my men. Moritz and Kibwana, my two boys and my cook, Omari, are travelled gentlemen who yielded themselves with stoic calm to the motion of the Rufiji, but my Wanyamwezi porters very soon lost their usual imperturbable cheerfulness. They all came on board in the highest spirits, boasting to the kinsmen they left behind at Dar es Salam of the way in which they were going to travel and see the world. How the twenty-four managed to find room in the incredibly close quarters of the after-deck, which they had, moreover, to share with two or three horses, is still a puzzle to me; they were sitting and lying literally on the top of one another. As they were sick the whole time, it must, indeed, have been a delightful passage for all of them.

There is something strangely rigid, immovable and conservative about this old continent. We were reminded of this by the Lion of Cape Guardafui, and now we find it confirmed even by the official regulations of steamer traffic. The ancients, as we know, only sailed by day, and savages, who are not very well skilled in navigation, always moor their sea-going craft off shore in the evening. We Europeans, on the other hand, consider it one of our longest-standing and highest achievements to be independent both of weather and daylight in our voyages. To this rule the Rovuma and Rufiji form one of the rare exceptions; they always seek some sheltered anchorage shortly before sunset, and start again at daybreak the next morning.

On the trip from Dar es Salam to Lindi and Mikindani—the South Tour, as it is officially called—the first harbour for the night is Simba Uranga, one of the numerous mouths of the great Rufiji river. The entrance to this channel is not without charm. At a great distance the eye can perceive a gap in the green wall of mangroves which characterizes the extensive delta. Following the buoys which mark the fairway, the little vessel makes for the gap, not swiftly but steadily. As we approach it opens out—to right and left stretches the white line of breakers, foaming over the coral reefs which skirt the coast of Eastern Equatorial Africa—and, suddenly, one is conscious of having escaped from the open sea and found refuge in a quiet harbour. It is certainly spacious enough—the river flows, calm and majestic, between the green walls of its banks, with a breadth of 600, or even 800 metres, and stretches away into the interior farther than the eye can follow it. The anchorage is about an hour’s steam up river. On the right bank stands a saw-mill, closed some time ago: its forsaken buildings and rusting machinery furnishing a melancholy illustration of the fallacious hopes with which so many Colonial enterprises were started. Just as the sun sinks below the horizon, the screw ceases its work, the anchor-chain rattles through the hawse-holes, and the Rufiji is made fast for the night. Her furnace, which burns wood, is heated with mangrove logs, cut in the forests of the Delta and stacked at this spot ready for transference on board. This work is usually done under the superintendence of a forester, whom I am sorry not to see, he being absent up country. His life may be leisurely, but scarcely enviable; for we are speedily surrounded, even out in mid-stream, by dense clouds of mosquitoes, which, I fancy, will hardly be less abundant on land. The swabbing of the decks on an ocean steamer, in the early morning, just at the time when sleep is sweetest, is represented on the Rufiji by the wooding in the Simba Uranga River, and the shipping of cargo in the open roadstead of Kilwa. In the two nights passed on board, I got very little sleep, between the incessant bumping of loads thrown down on deck, and the equally incessant yelling of the crew. There was little compensation for this, either in the magnificent sunset witnessed on the Simba Uranga, or the wonderfully impressive spectacle we enjoyed when steaming out in the early morning. Nothing could have revived us but the fresh breeze of the monsoon on the open sea. No sooner, however, were we outside than Neptune once more demanded his tribute. I do not know whether a healthy nervous system would have been affected by the Rufiji’s mode of stoking—and if so, how—but to us three sea-sick passengers, who had to share the amenities of the bridge as far as Kilwa, it was simply intolerable. Of the two boats, the Rovuma, at any rate, has a digestion sufficiently robust to grapple with the thirty-inch lengths of mangrove-wood, thrown into her furnaces just as they are. The Rufiji, however, has a more delicate constitution, and can only assimilate food in small pieces. With the first glimmer of daybreak, the heavy hammer, wielded by the strong right arm of a muscular baharia, crashes down on the steel wedge held in position by another native sailor on the first of the mangrove logs. Blow after blow shakes the deck; the tough wood creaks and groans; at last the first morsel has been chopped up for the ravenous boiler, and the fragments describe a lofty parabola in their flight into the tiny engine-room. Then comes another crash which makes the whole boat vibrate,—and so on, hour after hour, throughout the whole day. Not till evening do the men’s arms rest, and our sea-sick brains hail the cessation of work with sincere thankfulness, for the continuous rhythm of the hammer, which seems quite tolerable for the first hour, becomes, in the eleven which follow it, the most atrocious torture.

My black followers behaved exactly as had been foretold to me by those best acquainted with the race. At Dar es Salam each of the twenty-seven had received his posho, i.e., the means of buying rations for four days. At Simba Uranga, the mnyampara (headman) came to me with a request that I should buy more provisions for himself and his twenty-three subordinates, as they had already eaten all they had. The complete lack of purchasable supplies in the forest saved me the necessity of a refusal,—as it also did in the case of Moritz, who, with his refined tastes, insisted on having some fish, and whom, with a calm smile, I projected down the bridge ladder. That is just like these improvident children of the Dark Continent; they live in the present and take no thought for the future—not even for to-morrow morning. Accordingly, I had to spend a few more rupees at Kilwa, in order to quiet these fellows, the edge of whose insatiable appetite had not been blunted by sea-sickness. Kilwa—called Kilwa Kivinje, to distinguish it from Kilwa Kisiwani, the old Portuguese settlement further south,—has sad memories for us, connected with the Arab rising of 1888, when two employees of the German East African Company met with a tragic death through the failure of our fleet to interfere. The officers in command have been severely blamed for this; but to-day, after examining for myself the topography of the place, I find that the whole deplorable business becomes perfectly intelligible. The shallowness of the water off shore is such that European steamers have to anchor a long way out, and the signals of distress shown by the two unfortunate men could not have been seen.

Under normal circumstances three days is a pretty liberal allowance for the run from Dar es Salam to Lindi by the Rufiji; but we did not accomplish it in the time. South of Kilwa we lost the shelter afforded us for the last two days by the island of Mafia and the countless little coral reefs and islets, and consequently felt the full force of the south wind. Being now the only passenger, I had plenty of room, but was if possible more wretched than before, as the supply of oranges—the only thing I felt the slightest inclination to eat—was exhausted. Soon after midday the captain and mate began to study the chart with anxious looks.

“When shall we get to Lindi?” I asked wearily, from the depths of my long chair.

An evasive answer. The afternoon wore on, and the view to starboard: a white, curling line of breakers, backed by the wall of mangroves with their peculiar green, still remained the same. The captain and mate were still bending over their chart when the sun was nearing the horizon.

“Is that headland Cape Banura?” I asked, thinking that we were on the point of entering Lindi Bay, which once seen can never be mistaken.

Another evasive answer made it quite clear to me that our two navigators could not be very familiar with this part of the coast. In fact the captain was quite a new-comer, and the mate was acting temporarily in the place of a man on leave. As the sun was now fast setting, we ran into the first convenient inlet, passed a quiet night there, and did the last three or four hours to Lindi on the fourth day, without further incident. Our harbour of refuge was Mchinga Bay, which was unknown to the two seamen and to me—though not, as afterwards appeared, to the two engineers. Unluckily it happened—as it always does when our countrymen are cooped up together in a small space for any length of time—that there was an implacable feud between the after-deck and the engine-room, and the latter had not thought fit to enlighten the former as to the ship’s position.

There is something solemn and awe-inspiring about the entrance to Lindi Bay. As the vessel rounds Cape Banura, a mighty basin, perhaps nine miles by three, spreads itself out before us. The green hills surrounding it are not high, but yet by no means insignificant, and they fall away in steep declivities to the sea, especially on the south side. The Rufiji looks a black speck on this glittering silvery expanse. The little town of Lindi lies picturesquely enough among groves of coco-palms and Casuarina, on a tongue of land formed by the shore at the back of the rectangular bay and the left bank of a seemingly vast river, which we can see penetrating into the country behind Lindi. The geographer knows, however, that this mighty channel—from 800 to 1,200 yards broad—represents the estuary of the tiny Lukuledi, which at the present day could not possibly fill such a bed. What we look upon as its mouth is really the whole valley of a much older Lukuledi, now sunk beneath the level of the Indian Ocean. All our harbours on this coast have originated in the same way:—Dar es Salam, Kilwa Kisiwani, Lindi and Mikindani are all flooded river-valleys. Africa with its unwieldy mass looks dull enough, I admit, on the map; but examined at close quarters the continent is interesting in all its parts, as we find even before we have landed on its shores.