Another man, a muscular fellow of middle height, seemed to be a popular all-round comedian. He first showed himself a skilled contortionist—in fact, he might have appeared without hesitation in any European circus. He next gave an equally masterly performance on the swinging trapeze, four strong men holding up a long pole which served as the axis of his evolutions. Finally, he distinguished himself as a clown. In accordance with the mental constitution of the race, however, the comic effect was produced, not so much by facial expression as by his attitudes and the movements of his legs, as will be seen by the cinematograph records I took of his performance. To complete the proof of his versatility, he appeared in the second part of the programme as the hero of a pantomime. This was a “problem play” of sorts,—the husband a blockhead, the wife (played as in the classic drama of antiquity, by a man) an artful coquette,—the lover, a Don Juan, approved in all the arts of seduction. The foundation of the drama, as will be seen, is so far cosmopolitan, but the naturalness and simplicity with which all the incidents of actual life took place on the stage was genuinely primitive and African, and equally African was the imperturbable gravity of the public, who obviously followed the progress of the action with the deepest interest. There was no silly laughter at the wrong time; no one made audible comments.

If anyone is still inclined to doubt that the original and uncontaminated culture of our primitive peoples is rapidly perishing, I would request him to consider the following.

Again it is a lively afternoon: dancing, singing, and games going on everywhere. I am fully occupied, as usual, but all at once, my attention is directed to a figure apparently pursuing an individual activity by itself. The arms move rhythmically up and down, holding two sticks about half-a-yard in length, united by a string of twisted bark. Suddenly the arms are abruptly thrown apart, the right being stretched upward, the left spread sideways, and like a bomb a still unrecognisable object descends out of the air, is cleverly caught on the string, and runs like a frightened weasel backwards and forwards between the ends of the sticks. Immediately afterwards it has again vanished in the air, but returns repentant to its owner, and the process continues. I feel that I have somewhere seen this before, and rack my brain for some time—at last I have it. This is no other than the game of diabolo, which as we read in the German papers, is pursued with such enthusiasm in England and other countries where games are the rage. When I left home, it was still unknown to my compatriots, who, in this as in other matters, limp slowly but steadily after the rest of the world; but I venture to prognosticate that it will begin to flourish among us when other nations have dropped it as an obsolete fashion. Now, too, I can recall a picture of the game seen in a shop-window at Leipzig, and if I compare my recollection of this with the action of the man before me, I must confess that this solution of the technical problem could not be bettered. The narrow wedge-shaped notch cut all round the convex surface of the wooden cylinder gives free play to the string without appreciably diminishing the weight of the whole.^[69]

Had I not been aware that the rain is the only cause for the daily falling off in the number of my visitors, I should here, too, have reason to consider myself a mighty magician; but, as it is, the people tell me frankly enough that it is now time to attend to their fields. To be candid, the leisure thus obtained is not at all unwelcome. I am, indeed, satisfied, more than satisfied, and have several times caught myself passing over with indifference the most interesting phenomena in the life of the people. There are limits to the receptive power of the human mind, and when overtaxed, as mine has recently been, it altogether refuses to take in further impressions.

Only Ningachi and his school never fail to excite my interest. Our baraza is the second house on the south side of the boma, beginning from the east. The first is the alleged abode of some Baharia; but in reality it seems to be a large harem, for women’s voices keep up an incessant giggling and chattering there. In the third house lives His Excellency the Secretary of State to the Viceroy, in other words the officially appointed clerk to the Wali. He is a Swahili from Dar es Salam, and an intimate friend of Moritz’s, but his relations with the pillar of my migratory household have not prevented my giving the rascal a good dressing down. For some time after my arrival, I was unable to get a proper night’s rest, on account of the perpetual crying of a baby, evidently in pain, which was audible from somewhere close at hand. Before long, I had traced it to its source and cited father, mother and son to appear in my consulting-room. Both parents, on examination, proved to be thoroughly healthy and as fat as butter; the child, about a year old, was likewise round as a ball, but covered from head to foot with sores in consequence of the most disgraceful neglect. And this man can read and write, and is, therefore, in the eyes of statisticians a fully accredited representative of civilization, and looks down with abysmal contempt on those who do not, like himself, lounge about in white shirt and embroidered cap.

But now as to the fourth house. On the first morning, I saw, without understanding the meaning of the sight, some six or eight half-grown boys assembled in front of it about half-past six. My first thought was that they were going to play, and, as I watched them, they arranged themselves in Indian file in the order of their height. They were then joined by a man in a white shirt, and, at a sign from him, vanished, one after another, in the same order, under the overhanging eaves. A sound reached my ear soon after, which, it is true, was in itself nothing extraordinary; a deep voice reciting words immediately taken up by a chorus of high trebles,—but something in the quality of the utterance induced me to approach within earshot without knowing what attracted me. Standing at a distance of a few feet from the house, I became aware that I was actually listening to German words. An elementary lesson in arithmetic was taking place. “Und das ist eins—and that is one,” began Ningachi, and the class echoed his words. Then followed, in like manner, “and that is two,” “and that is three,” and so on, up to thirty-one, which appeared to be the limit of the teacher’s arithmetical knowledge, as far as numeration is concerned, for he then proceeded to exercises in addition and subtraction. Having listened to these lessons on many successive mornings, I have reluctantly been forced to the conclusion that they are a mere mechanical drill. The pupils are at once embarrassed if asked to point out at random any figure in the series so neatly written out on the blackboard by their teacher, and in the sums they appear to be hopelessly at sea. “Two minus eight is six,” is a comparatively venial error. Ningachi himself does not feel very happy when going through this routine, but says that he was taught so in the Government School at Mikindani, and is bound to teach in the same way himself. It was no great consolation to the honest fellow to hear that there are cramming establishments elsewhere.

I finished my notes on the Makonde language in an astonishingly short space of time. Like a god from the machine, my pearl of assistants, Sefu, suddenly appeared from Newala, and in conjunction with him and Ningachi I have been able to convince myself, in the course of seven very strenuous days, that Makonde is most closely connected with the neighbouring idioms, and that it is probably only the absence of the “s” sound which has led other writers to describe it as very divergent from Swahili and Yao. The want of this sound, however, I feel certain, is intimately connected with the wearing of the pelele in the upper lip. I suppose all of us have, at one time or another, suffered from a badly swelled upper lip. Is it possible, under such circumstances, to articulate any sibilant whatever? This theory, indeed, supposes that the men originally wore the same lip-ornaments as the women. But why should this not have been the case? The Mavia men wear them even now, and the Mavia are said to be very closely related to the Makonde.

Only with the Wamwera I have had no luck. I have never lost sight of my intention to return and spend some time in the country of that tribe; but the Wali, Sefu, and other well-informed men tell me it is impossible. They say that the Wamwera, having been in rebellion against the Government, were unable to plant their fields last season, as they were in hiding in the bush.

“The Wamwera,” they say, “have been at war with the Germans, and so they were living in the bush, for the whole of the planting season, and could not sow their crops. They have long ago eaten up the little store they had hidden, and now they have nothing more; they are all suffering from hunger, and many of them have died.” My next suggestion was that we should provision ourselves here and make for the Rondo plateau, but my advisers were very much against this plan. They said the people in their despair would fall upon us and fight with us for our supplies of corn. Well, I thought, if the mountain will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet must go to the mountain, and a few days later, there appeared, summoned by special messengers, the two Wamwera alleged to be the most learned men in the tribe. They were two elderly men, emaciated to skeletons, without a trace of calves, or any other muscular development, while their sunken cheeks and hollow eyes bore eloquent testimony to the terrible sufferings they had undergone. We waited patiently while they were getting fed—they devoured such quantities of porridge that their stomachs protruded like large skittle-balls from their bodies. At last they were in a fit condition to be questioned.

In spite of their reputation for wisdom, there was not much to be got out of Machigo and Machunya; a few dozen clan names, a longer list of simple words—that was all. Every attempt to ascertain by their help the forms of verbs or any of the mysteries of syntax was an utter failure. Probably it was not intelligence so much as intellectual training that was wanting; anyone who should attempt to ascertain the structure of the German language with the assistance of a bullock-driver, would doubtless fare no better than I did.

I dismissed the old men after a short time without resentment—in fact, I loaded them with presents, and, cheered by the consciousness of their unexpected gains, they stepped out manfully on their road northward.

With the departure of the two gaunt professors of Kimwera, I have really got rid of my last scientific care, and that is just as well, for, as I have already remarked, my appetite is more than satiated. I have accomplished a respectable amount of work in the past few months. I have taken more than 1,200 photographs; but the non-photographer, who imagines the art to be a mere amusement, will scarcely place this to my credit; and only the expert can appreciate the amount of exertion and excitement represented by the above number of negatives in a country like this. I have already alluded to some difficulties; these have only increased with time, for the sun is every day higher in the heavens, and the intensity of the light between eight a.m. and five p.m. is quite incredible. I have always kept an exact record, in my register of negatives, of all details of weather and light, but nevertheless I have not escaped failure—so difficult is it to judge the intensity of light in the tropics. One night, one may have the satisfaction of finding, when developing the day’s work, that by good luck all the exposures have been right. Next day the weather is precisely the same—you take the same stop, and expose for the same length of time—and yet, when evening comes, you find that every plate is over or under exposed. This is not exhilarating. Then there is the perpetual worry about the background. Unfortunately, I have brought no isochromatic plates; but the want of them is partly supplied by a huge tarpaulin which I originally took with me to cover my baggage at night, but which never served this purpose. Even before leaving Masasi, we fastened it between two bamboo poles, and covered one side of it with one or two lengths of sanda. Since then I have always used it in photographing when the sun is high, to screen off a too-strongly illuminated background. And if nothing else will serve, the strongest of my men hold the screen over the object, when I find myself obliged to take an important photograph with the sun directly overhead.

Next come the phonograph cylinders. The extremely high temperature of the lowlands has deprived me of the opportunity of making some valuable records—a loss which must be borne with what philosophy I can summon to my aid. It is the easier to do so, that, in spite of the drawbacks referred to, I have only five left out of my five-dozen cylinders, and for these, too, I can find an excellent use; to-morrow they shall be covered with the finest Nyamwezi melodies. As to the cinematograph, I must remember that I am a pioneer, and as such must not only incur all the inconvenience involved in the imperfections of an industry as yet in its infancy, but take the risk of all the dangers which threaten gelatine films in the tropics. It certainly does not dispose one to cheerfulness, when Ernemann writes from Dresden that my last consignment of films has again proved a failure; but I have given over worrying over things of this sort, ever since my vexation at the fall of my 9 x 12 cm. camera let me in for the severe fever I went through at Chingulungulu. Besides, I know, by those I have developed myself, that about two-thirds of my thirty-eight cinematograph records must be fairly good, or at least good enough to use, and that is a pretty fair proportion for a beginner. Over twenty such imperishable documents of rapidly disappearing tribal life and customs—I am quite disposed to congratulate myself!

But my chief ground for pride is the quantity, and even more the quality of my ethnological and sociological notes, which surely will not be an entirely valueless contribution to our knowledge of the East African native. As a stranger in the country, I could not, of course, in the short time at my disposal, survey all the departments of native life, but I have made detailed studies of a great many. I must not forget my exceptional good fortune with regard to the unyago; the elucidation of these mysteries would alone have amply repaid the journey.

To conclude with my ethnographic collection. In the Congo basin, and in West Africa I should probably, in the same space of time, have been able, without any difficulty, to get together a small ship-load of objects, while here in the East a collection of under two thousand numbers represents the material culture of tribes covering a whole province. The number of individual specimens might, indeed, have been increased, but not that of categories, so thoroughly have I searched the native villages and rummaged their huts one by one. After all, the East African native is a poor man.

But what is the use of speculating as to what is attainable or unattainable? The sun is shining brightly, the woods are fresh and green after the shower, and some of the askari are lounging against the palisade in a picturesque if untidy group. The metamorphosis undergone by our native warrior in the course of the day is certainly surprising. Smart and active on the drill-ground—they look on their drill as a kind of game, and call it playing at soldiers—he is just the reverse, from our German point of view, in the afternoon and evening.

It must be acknowledged that he knows how to make himself comfortable when off duty. He has his boy to wait on him, even to take his gun from his hand the moment the word has been given to “dismiss”; and the respect commanded, in Africa as elsewhere, by anything in the shape of a uniform secures him the best of everything wherever he goes. He lounges through the hot hours on his host’s most commodious bedstead, and, when evening comes on, sallies forth in fatigue dress to captivate the girls of the place. They are less charming, it is true, than those of Lindi, but a man has to take what he can get. The slovenly figures in the photograph are those of Lumbwula and the Nubian Achmed Mohammed, taking their ease in this fashion.

My release from work and worry has worked miracles, physiologically speaking;—I sleep in my bed like a hibernating bear, wield a mighty knife and fork at table and increase in circumference almost perceptibly from day to day. Moreover, we have been living fairly well for the last few weeks. The first case of porter was followed by a second, and various other delights came up at the same time from Lindi—genuine unadulterated milk from the blessed land of Mecklenburg, fresh pumpernickel, new potatoes from British East Africa, tinned meats and fruits in abundance, and so forth. The lean weeks of Newala are forgotten, and our not much more luxurious sojourn at Chingulungulu recedes into the misty past. The evenings, too, are pleasant and leisurely. As decreed by a kindly destiny, I find that I have still some plates left, but no chemicals for developing and fixing, so that I can photograph as much as I like, while compelled to dispense with the trying work of developing the plates in the close tent. Omari has provided a spatchcocked fowl for our evening meal, which smells inviting and tastes delicious. He has here revived for our benefit the primitive process of roasting already known to prehistoric man, which consists of simply holding the meat over the fire till done. Only one innovation has been introduced: after splitting up the carcase of the fowl, Omari has rubbed salt and pepper into it. This, though historically incorrect, improves the flavour so much that it is quite a pardonable piece of vandalism.

Here come my carriers, issuing with clean clothes and radiant faces from their temporary lodgings in one of the thatched huts of the boma. They know that in the next few days we are going on safari again, the goal in view being this time the eagerly anticipated paradise of the coast. And they will be receiving uncounted sums of money at Lindi. Many a time have they grumbled at the Bwana Mkubwa, because he refused them an advance, when they wanted so very much to make a present to some pretty girl in a neighbouring village. They had even been directly asked for such presents, but the Bwana Pufesa made a point of saying to any man who wanted a trifle of a loan, “Nenda zako”—(“Be off with you”). He was very hard, was the Bwana Pufesa, but it was best so, after all; for now we shall get all the money paid down at once—it must be over forty rupees. What times we shall have at Lindi—not to mention Dar es Salam! And we will go to the Indian’s store and buy ourselves visibau finer even than the ones sported by those apes of Waswahili.

The crimson glow of the sunset is still lingering on the western horizon, while the full moon is rising in the east, behind the great spreading tree, under which my camera has been planted day after day for the last few weeks; and I am watching the spectacle, stretched comfortably in my long chair, and at the same time listening to the chant of the Wanyamwezi.

With the deep notes characteristic of the Wanyamwezi, the chant penetrates the ear of the European listener. My men have often sung it at Newala, at Majaliwa’s, and here at Mahuta, always accompanying the rhythm of the song with equally rhythmical movements. It is a hoeing-song. The Mnyamwezi going out into the fields with his hoe is provided with a whole repertoire of such songs; the body bends and rises in regular time as the broad blade crunches its way through the soil, and the chant of labour sounds softly and harmoniously over the wide plain. At this moment, when the men are squatting round me in picturesque groups, they snap their fingers in time with great spirit and energy, instead of going through the motions of hoeing.

The air is pleasing enough and insensibly steals into the consciousness of the listening European, carrying him away from the harsh, raw nature of Africa to the ancient civilisation of his native land, which the busy days now left behind have left him little leisure to recall. As Pesa mbili’s clear baritone alternates with the deep-toned chorus I recall the blacksmith at the forge, seeking the rhythm in his strokes which keeps his arm from tiring so soon in wielding the heavy hammer. It takes me back, too, to my boyhood, when few if any small farmers owned a threshing machine, and I used to hear from our neighbour’s barn the triple and quadruple time of the flails. The same sort of rhythm, too, is heard in our streets, above the bustle and noise of traffic, when the paviours are ramming down the stones,—ping, ping, ping, ping, ping, ping,—each note louder or softer according to the degree of force employed, but all in the strictest time. This rhythm is the outcome of a need inherent in human nature: it precedes, indeed it is indispensable to, any sustained bodily exertion. This is felt even by civilized people, as we see when the striking-up of the band puts new life and vigour into the tired legs of a marching regiment, or when a number of men are engaged in moving a heavy load; and it is true in a much greater degree of the African. I am convinced that he cannot accomplish the easiest task unless he accompanies it with a rapidly improvised chant; even the heavily-ironed convicts in the chain-gangs, push or pull their barrows to a continuous antiphonal chant. Thus, too, when a number of people are hoeing a field together, the work becomes a game in which the body spontaneously falls into the rhythmic motions of the dance; but no dance is without its song.

The song comes to an end with a long-drawn kweli (“it is true”). The Wanyamwezi are famed for their endurance, both in marching and singing, and the above performance has lasted for a considerable time. But after a short pause the indefatigable Pesa mbili begins again,—this time with my favourite melody, Kulya mapunda.

The singing has exercised its usual fascination on the European auditor, he is sitting upright and vigorously joining in, to the delight of the performers. This hasimpo, as it is usually called for brevity’s sake, is sung to accompany a dance. In the hoeing-song the tune and the words, so far as I have been able to translate the latter, show some degree of congruity with each other, but I cannot as yet make head or tail of what Pesa mbili has to-day dictated to me as the gist of this hasimpo song. For the sake of completeness I will first give my attempt at the translation of the hilala.

“Work, work. The headman will weep for his son. They love the white ombasha, he is strong. Thanks, the son has prophesied. Oh! blockhead that I am! my mother is going away, the children are crying. Do not cry, do not cry, do not cry.”

As will be seen, it is confused enough, but at least some parts appear to have a connected sense, and the sililo “do not weep,” thrice repeated, sounds rather touching. It is less easy to fit the ombasha—the corporal—into the framework of the song; but who shall fathom the profundities of the African mind? especially when it is the mind of a poet.

The dancing song is as follows:—

“The Wairamba are eating vegetables—they are eating vegetables, I say, at the well. When you get home, salute my mother, and tell her I am coming. So I said and the police seized the devil. We set down our loads of cloth and beads and yet again beads. The sun is going down, the time for dancing is at an end.”

Here again the reference to the mother is a pathetic touch, but the police and the nature of their association with the Prince of Darkness must remain a mystery.

Now comes the song of the Standard:—

It is the chant of the Long Trail—the glorification of travel for its own sake,—the element as necessary to the Mnyamwezi as his ugali:—“O journey! O journey with the great master, O (delightful) journey! He will give cloth to the young men—O journey, O beautiful journey!”

The deep bass notes have died away slowly, almost mournfully, and the men are visibly growing sleepy; in fact, it is nearly ten, by which hour they are usually rolled up in their mats and dreaming of home. A questioning glance from Pesa mbili induces me to give the signal; the whole band vanishes almost without a sound, and I am left alone. Really alone, for Knudsen has been away for some days, hunting in the valley. The people there sent him word that numbers of elephants had been seen, and after that there was no keeping him back. He hurried off at such a pace that his cook, Latu, and his boy, Wanduwandu, a splendid big Yao, could scarcely follow him. He was to have returned at noon to-day. I wonder what has detained him.