The marriages (Máowáno) of the Wasawahili are operose, as might be

expected amongst a race whose family festivals are, as in the far north

of Europe, their only public amusements. I may, perhaps, here remark

that in matching, as well as in despatching, even civilization has not

thrown off all traces of the old barbarism, and that the visit to M. le

Maire and the wedding breakfast, to mention no other troubles and

disagreeables, should make us uncommonly lenient to those less advanced

than ourselves. The relatives of the bridegroom, as soon as he reaches

the mature age of 15, having found for him a fit and proper mate, repair

to the parents; propose a Mahr, or settlement, varying according to

means from $15 to $25, and obtain the reply ancipital. The women then

visit one another; the answer emerges into distinctness, and all fall to

cooking. In due time Cœlebs receives, as a token of acceptance, a large

Siniyyah, a tray of rice, meat, and confectionery, a ‘treat’ for his

friends, forwarded by the future father-in-law. The feast concludes the

betrothal;[107] either of the twain most concerned is still at liberty

to jilt; but in such a case, as usual throughout the Moslem East, enmity

between the families inevitably results.

The wedding festivities outlast the month: there are great ‘affinities

of gossips;’ tympanum et tripudium; hard eating and harder wetting of

the driest clay with the longest draughts of Tembo K’hali (sour toddy),

of Pombe beer (the Kafir Chuala), and of the maddening Zerambo.

Processions of free women and slave girls, preceded by chattels

performing on various utensils of music, perambulate the streets,

singing and dancing in every court. At length the Kazi, or any other man

of letters, recites the Fatiheh, and the two become one, either at the

bridegroom’s or at the bride’s house. The women are present when the

happy man enters the nuptial chamber, and they always require to be

ejected by main force. Unlike the Arabs, they retain the Jewish practice

of inspection: if the process be satisfactory, the bridegroom presents

$10 to $50 to his new connections, while the exemplary young person is

blessed, congratulated, and petted with small gifts by papa and mamma.

She often owes, it is whispered, her blushing honours to the simple

process of cutting a pigeon’s throat. In case of a disappointment, there

is a violent scene of abuse and recrimination; but when lungs and wrath

are exhausted, the storm is lulled without blows or even divorce. The

first ‘Mfungato,’ i. e. seven (days) after consummation, is devoted to

the wildest revelry, the ‘Walímeh,’ or wedding feast, concluding only

with the materials for feasting.

The Msawahili is allowed to breathe his last upon a couch, and the

corpse, after being washed by an Alim or by some kinsman, is hastily

wrapped in a perfumed winding-sheet. Women of the highest rank sit at

home in solitary grief. The middle-classes stain their faces, assume

dark or dingy-coloured dresses, and repair to the sea-shore for the

purpose of washing the dead man’s clothes before dividing them amongst

his relations or distributing them to the poor. The slave girls shave

their heads like Hindus, bathe, and go about the streets singing Neniæ,

and mourning aloud. Meanwhile a collection, technically known as Sándá

(the winding-sheet), is made amongst the people, who are almost all

connected by a near or distant tie. One of the blood-kinsmen acts

Munádi, or crier. As each one appears with his quotum, he shouts ‘lo!

such a person (naming him) has bought such and such articles for his

brother’s funeral feast.’ This publicity tends of course to make men

liberal. The corpse is buried, as is customary amongst Moslems, on the

day, generally the evening, of decease, and there is a popular belief,

in which some Europeans join, that deaths take place mostly when the

tide ebbs, at the full and change of the moon. The custom of abusing the

corpse, accompanied with the greatest indecencies, is confined to the

least civilized settlements. After the funeral all apply themselves to

eating, drinking, and what we should call merriment; whilst music and

dancing are kept up as long as weak human nature permits. The object is

not that of the Yorkshire Arvills, to refresh those who attended from

afar—it is confessedly to ‘take the sorrow out of the heart.’ So the

Velorio of Yucatan is para divertise—to distract kin-grief. As in the

matter of marriage, however, so in funerals, we can hardly deride

barbarous races whilst we keep up our pomp and expense of ridiculous

trappings, taxing even the poor for mutes and carriages, for ‘gloves,

scarves, and hatbands.’

The Wasawahili have all the African passion for the dance and song: they

may be said to exist upon manioc and betel, palm-wine and spirits, music

and dancing. The Ngoma Khu, or huge drum, a hollowed cocoa-stem bound

with leather braces, and thumped with fists, palms, or large sticks,

plays an important and complex part in the business of life: it sounds

when a man falls sick, when he revives, or when he dies; at births and

at marriages; at funerals and at festivals; when a stranger arrives or

departs; when a fight begins or ends, and generally whenever there is

nothing else to do. It is accompanied by the ‘Siwa,’ a huge pipe of

black wood or ebony, and by the ‘Zurmári,’ a more handy variety of the

same instrument. On occasions which justify full orchestras, an ‘Upatu,’

or brass pan, is placed upon the ground in a wooden tray, and is tapped

with two bits of palm-frond. Some wealthy men possess gongs, from which

the cudgel draws lugubrious sounds. The other implements are ‘Tabl,’ or

tomtoms of gourd, provided with goatskin; the Tambire, or Arab Barbut, a

kind of lute; the Malagash ‘Zeze,’ a Calabash-banjo, whose single string

is scraped with a bow; and finally horns of the cow, of the Addax, and

the Oryx antelopes. These people are excellent timeists, but their

music, being all in the minor key, and the song being a mere recitative

without change of words, both are monotonous to the last degree. The

dancing resembles that of the Somal, and, as amongst the slaves, both

sexes prance together. The Diwans, or chiefs, caper with drawn swords,

whilst the women move in regular time, shaking skirts with the right

hand. The ‘figures’ are, unlike the music, complicated and difficult:

they seem to vary in almost every village. The only constant

characteristic appears to be that tremulous motion from the waist

downwards, and that lively pantomime of love which was so fiercely

satirized by the eminently moral Juvenal. It is, indeed, the groundwork

of all ‘Oriental’ dancing from Morocco to Japan.

The principal occupation of the Wasawahili is agriculture; they form the

farmer class of the Island, and everywhere in the interior we find their

little settlements of cajan-thatched huts of wattle and dab, with flying

roofs, acting chimney as well as ventilator—a right sensible

contrivance, worthy of imitation. The furniture consists of a few mats;

of low stools, mostly cut out of a single block; of chairs, a skin being

stretched on a wooden frame; and invariably of a Kitándá, or cartel of

coir and sticks; even the beggar will not sleep or sit upon the damp

face of his mother earth. The dwelling is divided into several rooms, or

rather closets, by partition walls the height of a man; as usual in

tropical lands, the interior is kept dark. Sometimes the hovel boasts

the convenience of a Cho’oni or Shironi (latrina), but in no case is

there a window. Gossips meet under the shade of huge Calabashes and

other trees.

Like the Somal, the Wasawahili are essentially a trading race, a

crumenimulga natio, and they do business with the characteristic

dishonesty of Africans. They defraud and even offer violence to Banyans,

and acting as trade-men to European merchants, they never allow a

purchase without deducting their percentage. At the same time their

plausibility, like that of the travelling Dragoman, so impresses upon

the civilized dupe, whom they hedge round with an entourage of their

own, and whom it is their life-business to cozen, that nothing can

convince him of their rascality. Some of them make considerable

fortunes: I heard of one who lately purchased an estate for $14,000.

They are also commercial travellers of no mean order. Upon the Zanzibar

coast they cut rafters and firewood; they dig for copal, and they act as

middlemen; they wander far into the interior, buying hides, slaves, and

ivory, and they have thus become familiar with the Lake Regions, which

are now attracting our attention. The poorest classes employ themselves

in fishing, and many may be seen by day plying about the harbour in

little ‘Monoxyles,’ which they manage with admirable dexterity. Others

have learned to make the rude hardwares with which the mainland is

supplied: there are also rough masons, boat-builders, and carpenters of

peculiar awkwardness.

Respectable Wasawahili dress like Arabs in ‘Kofíyya,’ here meaning red

caps, and the long Disdashah, or night-gown; the loins are girt with a

‘Kamarband’-shawl, and sandals protect the feet. Others are contented

with the Hammam-toilette, waist-cloth (Shukkah or Tanga) and shoulder-

sheets (Izár), always adorned with the favourite fringe (Tambúa or

Taraza). This is at once the simplest and one of the most ancient of

attires; the plate from Montfaucon’s Cosmas Indicopleustes (1706,

Topographia Christiana) reproduced by Vincent (Periplus, Appendix, part

I.) shows the kilt to have been the general dress of the ancient

Æthiopians, as the spear was their weapon. Before superiors they bare

the shaven poll, an un-Oriental custom probably learned from the

Portuguese. As amongst the Arab Bedawin, the Syrian Rayahs, and the

Persian Iliyat, the women mostly go abroad unveiled. The ‘Murungawánah,’

or freeborn, however, is distinguished out-of-doors by her rude

mantilla, and ‘ladies’ affect an Ukaya, or fillet of indigo-dyed cotton,

or muslin, somewhat like that of the Somal and the Syrians. The feminine

garb is a Kisitu, or length of stained cotton, blue and red being the

pet colours. It resembles the Kitambi of the Malagash, and it is the

nearest approach to the primitive African kilt of skin or tree bark.

Wrapped tightly round the unsupported bosom, and extending from the

armpits to the heels, this ungraceful garb depresses the breast, spoils

the figure, and conceals nothing of its deficiencies. The hair, like the

body, drips with unfragrant cocoa-nut oil; and though there is not much

material to work upon, it is worked in various fanciful styles. Many

shave clean; some wear a half-crop, like a skull-cap of Astracan wool;

others a full-grown bush covering the whole head. These part it down the

middle, with an asinine cross over the regions of veneration; those draw

longitudinal lines above the ears, making a threefold parting; there are

also garnishings and outworks of stunted pigtails, forming stiff and

savage accroche-cœurs. Two peculiar coiffures at once attract the

stranger’s eye. One makes the head look as if split into a pair of

peaks, the side hair being raised from sinciput to occiput in tall

double unpadded rolls, parted by a deep central hollow: this style is

nowhere so pronounced as near the Gaboon river, where the heads of the

Mpongwe girls appear short-horned. The other consists of frizzly twists

trained lengthwise from nape to brow, and the whitish etiolated scalp

showing itself between the lines as though the razor had been used: the

stripes suggest the sections of a musk-melon or the meridians of a map.

The favourite feminine necklace is a row of sharks’ teeth; some use

beads, others bits of copal, but the amber so highly valued in the

Somali country is here not prized. I have alluded before to the

artificial deformity of ear-lobes distended by means of the Mpogo, a

mixture of raw Copal (Chakazi) and Cinnabar. The left nostril is usually

honoured with some simple decoration—a stud or rose-shaped button of

wood or bone, of ivory or of precious metal, and at times its place is

taken by a clove or a pin of Cassava. The tattoo is not so common on the

Island as upon the Continent. These women are said to be prolific, but

apparently they have small families: the child is carried in a cloth

called Mbereko, and, curious to say, they do not bind up its head

immediately after birth. They are hard-worked; and, like the dames of

Harar, they buy and sell with men in the bazar. Their food is manioc,

holcus, rice, and sometimes fish; a fowl is the extent of luxury, flesh

being mostly beyond their means. Few smoke, but almost all chew tobacco

as lustily as their husbands, and their mouths are horrid chasms full of

‘Tambúl’—quids of betel-nut and areca leaf peppered with coarse shell-

lime.[108] This astringent, like the Kola-nut of the Guinea Regions,

acts preventive against the effect of damp heat, and it is a stomachic,

consequently a tonic. The habit of ‘chawing’ it becomes inveterate:

Hindostanis visiting Portugal, and unable to procure the favourite ‘Pán-

Supári,’ have imitated it with cuttings of cypress-apples and ivy

leaves. Ibn Batuta declares the betel to be highly aphrodisiac, and

hence partly the high esteem in which this masticatory is held.

The Wasawahili are not an honoured race; even the savage Somal call them

’Abíd, or serviles, and bitterly deride their peculiarities. The

unerring instinct of mankind has pointed them out for slaves, and they

have readily accepted the position. As Moslems they should be free, and

the Faith forbids them to trade in Moslems. Yet by local usage, as the

children become the property not of the parents, but of the mother’s

brother, the latter can sell any or all of his nephews and nieces;

indeed, he would be subject to popular contempt if, when poor, he did

not thus ‘raise the wind.’

The most interesting point connected with these coast negroids is their

language, the Kisawahili. It was anciently called Kingozi, from Ungozi

or the region lying about the Dana, or rather Zana, the river known to

its Galla accolœ as ‘Maro,’ and ‘Pokomoni’ from the heathen Pokomo who,

living near its course, form the southern boundary of Galla-land proper.

The dialect is still spoken with the greatest purity about Patta and the

other ancient settlements between Lamu and Mombasah. Oral tongues are

essentially fluctuating; having no standard, the roots of words soon

wither and die, whilst terms, idioms, and expressions once popular

speedily fall into oblivion, and are supplanted by neologisms. Thus the

origin of words must often be sought by collation with the wilder

kindred dialects of the coast tribes; for instance, the root of ‘Mbua’

(rain), which has died out of Kisawahili, still visits in Kinyika—ku

buá, to rain. In Zanzibar Island Kisawahili is most corrupted; the

vocabulary, varying with every generation, has become a mere

conglomerate which combines South African, Arabic, Persian, Hindi, and

even Portuguese, an epitome of local history. On the coast it greatly

varies, being constantly modified by the migration and mixture of

tribes. Like the Malay of the Indian Islands, it has become the Lingua

Franca, the Lingoa Geral of commerce from Ra’as Hafun to the Mozambique

and throughout Central Intertropical Africa. This Urdu Zaban, or

Hindostani of East Africa, is indispensable to the explorer, who

disdains mere ‘geography;’ almost every inland tribe has some vagrant

man who can speak it. My principle being never to travel where the

language is unknown to me, I was careful to study it at once on arriving

at Zanzibar; and though sometimes in the interior question and answer

had to pass through three and even four media, immense advantage has

derived from the modicum of direct intercourse.

The base of Kisawahili is distinctly African; and, totally unlike its

limitrophe the Galla, it grammatically ignores the Semitic element. It

is now time for writers to unlearn that, ‘all the languages over the

face of the earth, however remotely different and however widely spread,

appear to be all reducible to the one or the other of three radically

distinct tongues’ (Dr Beke, p. 352, Appendix to Jacob’s Flight. London,

Longmans, 1865).[109] It is only, I believe, the monogenist pure and

simple who in these days would assert ‘there exist three linguistic

types, as there are three physical types, the black, the yellow, and the

white’ (M. de Quatrefages, p. 31, Anthropological Review, No. xxviii.).

To the old and obsolete triad of Turanian, Semitic, and Aryan, or

Turanian, Semitic, and Iranian, we must now add at least another pair—

without noticing the Asianesian—namely, the American or Sentence

language, and the prefixitive South African family. These two great

tongues, one extending over half a world, the other through half a

continent, are, I believe with Lichtenstein and Marsden, unborrowed,

indigenous, and marked with all the peculiarities which distinguish

their inventors. Both are idioms which seem to indicate nice linguistic

perceptions and high intellectual development; history, however,

supplies many cases of civilization simplifying and curtailing the

complicated tongues of barbarians, thus making language the means, not

the end, of instruction.

The limits of the South African family may be roughly laid down as

extending from the Equator to the Cape of Good Hope. The Equatorial

Gaboon on the Western Coast[110] evidently belongs to it; and upon the

Congo river I found that whole sentences of Kisawahili were easily made

intelligible to the people.[111] Though the language is evidently one in

point of construction throughout this immense area, isolation and

hostilities between tribes have split it into a multitude of dialects.

Almost every people, at the distance of 30 to 50 miles, has its peculiar

speech, and in these regions it would not be difficult to collect

‘Specimens of a hundred African Languages.’ The older travellers

remarked that the Tower of Babel must have been near the Gulf of Guinea;

they would have found the same throughout the interior and Eastern

Coast.

My experience[112] of the tongues spoken to the west of the Zanzibar

coast proper is that their amount of difference greatly varies: some

average that of the English counties, others of the three great Neo-

Latin languages, whilst in some the degree amounts to that between

English, German, and Dutch. And generally, I may remark, the East-West

extremities of the lingual area are more closely connected than the

North-South: the language of Angola, for instance, is more like

Kisawahili than the Sichuana. I am at pain to understand why Dr Krapf

should have named this linguistic family, Orphno-(dark-brown) Hamitic,

Orphno-Cushite, Nilo-Hamitic, and Nilotic,[113] when it is far more

intimately connected with the Kafir regions, the Congo and the Zambeze

rivers, than with Æthiopia or the Nile Valley proper. Mr Cooley’s term

‘Zangian’ or ‘Zingian’ also unduly limits the area to that of a mere

sub-family.

The crux grammaticorum of the great South African language is its highly

artificial system of principiatives or preformatives.[114] In the three

recognized lingual types of the old world the work of inflexion, the

business of grammar, and the mechanism of speech disclose themselves at

the ends of vocables. In this prefixitive tongue the changes of mood,

tense, case, and number, are effected at the beginning of words by

prepositive modifying particles, which are evidently contractions of

significant terms, and whose apparatus supplies the total want of

inflexion. This development, arrested in other languages—the Coptic, for

instance—here obtains a significance which isolates it from all

linguistic society. The practised student at once discovers that he is

dealing with a completely new family by the unusual difficulty which

unvaried terminations and initial changes present to one accustomed only

to the terminal.

The minor characteristics of the Kisawahili are the peculiarities of the

negative system in substantives and adjectives, pronouns, adnouns, and

verbs; for instance, Asie, he or she who is not, Isie, it which is not.

Secondly, are the broad lines of distinction drawn between words

denoting the rational and the irrational, and in a minor degree the

rational-animate (as man), and the rational-inanimate (as ass). In most

cases the rational-animate affixes Wa as a plural sign: the irrational-

animate Ma. Umbu, a sister, properly makes Waumbu, sisters: the

ignorant, however, and the Islanders often say Maumbu (sisters) like

Map’hunda (asses). Thus personality supplies the place of gender, a

phenomenon that already dawns in the Persian and in other Indo-European

tongues. Next is the artful and intricated system of irregular plurals,

and last, not least, the characteristic alliteration, an assonance

apparently the debris of many ancient dialects based upon an euphonious

concord not always appreciable by us, and therefore not yet subjected by

our writers to rule. We understand, for instance, that an alliterative

speaker should say Mtu mema (a good man), and Watu wema (good men); but

why is the regularity altered to Máháli _p_ángo (my place), p’hunda

_z_ango (my donkey), and Mtu _wa_ Rashidi (Rashid’s man), instead of

mango, pango, and ma? These distinctions appear far too empirical,

arbitrary, and artificial for the wants of primitive speech.

The Kisawahili is an oral tongue—an illiterate language in the sense

assigned to the term by Professor Lepsius. The people, like the Somal

and the Gallas, never invented a syllabarium. This absence of alphabet

is a curious proof of deficient constructiveness in a race that

cultivates rude eloquence, and that speaks dialects which express even

delicate shades of meaning: it contrasts wonderfully with the Arabs and

Hindus, who adapt to each language some form of Phœnician or Dewanagari.

The coast races use the modern Arabic alphabet, which, admirable for its

proper purpose, represents African sounds imperfectly, as those of Sindi

and Turkish, and is condemned to emulate the anomalous orthography or

cacography of our English. The character is large, square, and old-

fashioned, resembling later Kufic even more than that of Harar, and he

must be a first-rate scholar who can read at sight all the letter of a

man to his friend. Literature is confined, to a few sheets upon the

subject of Báo or Uganga (Raml or geomancy), to proverbs and proverbial

sayings, mostly quatrains; to riddles and rabbit tales, which here

represent the hare legends of the Namaquas and the spider stories of the

Gold Coast; to Mashairi, or songs rhymeless, measureless, and unmusical,

and to ‘Utenzi,’ religious poems, and eulogies of the brave.

In Zanzibar Island Arabic is ever making inroads upon the African

tongue, and the student who knows the former will soon master the

latter. The first short vocabulary, by Mr Salt, was published in 1814,

and was presently followed by others, especially the ‘Soahili

vocabulary’ of the late Mr Samuel K. Masury, of Zanzibar (Memoirs of the

American Academy, Cambridge, May, 1845), and Mr J. Ross Browne’s

‘Specimen of the Sowhelian Language’ (Etchings of a Whaling Cruise. New

York, 1846).[115] Strange to say, the ‘Mombas Mission’ translated the

Gospels into the obscure local Kinyika, when only three chapters of

Genesis and a version of the English Prayer Book (Tubingen, 1850-54)

were published ‘in the one language, by the instrumentality of which the

missionary and the merchant can master in a short time all the dialects

spoken from the Line down to the Cape of Good Hope.’ Dr Krapf’s ‘Outline

of the Elements of the Kisauaheli Language’ (Tubingen, 1850) requires

great alterations and additions, especially in the alliterative and

other characteristic parts of the tongue. Messrs Rebmann and Erhardt,

who both were capable of writing a scholar-like book, or of perfecting

the ‘Outline,’ turned their attention to the languages of the Nyassa,

Usumbara, and the Wakwafi. In 1857 M. Guillain published, as an Appendix

to his third volume, a short grammar and vocabulary of the ‘langue

Souahhéli:’ they are mere bald sketches, and they convey but the

scantiest idea of what they attempt to illustrate. A good study of

Kisawahili would facilitate the acquisition of the whole sub-family. For

my own use I commenced a grammar intended to illustrate the intricate

and difficult combinations and the peculiar euphony which here seems to

be the first object of speech: unfortunately my transfer to West Africa

left it, like my vocabularies, in a state of MS. My friend Mr Trübner

has lately advertised a volume called ‘East African folk-lore, Swahili

Tales, as told by the natives of Zanzibar,’ with an English translation

by Edward Steere, L.L.D., Rector of Little Steeping, Lincolnshire, and

Chaplain to Bishop Tozer (London: Bell and Daldy, 1870);[116] and Dr

Krapf has proposed to publish the Juo ya Herkal (Book of Heraclius), ‘an

account of the wars of Mohammed with Askaf, Governor of Syria, to the

Greek Emperor Heraclius, in rhyme; a MS. in ancient Ki-Suahili written

in Arabic characters.’ Also ‘Juo ja Utenzi, Poems and Mottoes in rhyme,’

the dialect being that formerly spoken in the Islands of Patta and Lamu.

Both the ‘linguistic treasures’ were presented to the Oriental Society

of Halle. The last publications which I have seen are ‘Specimens of the

Swahili Language’ (Zanzibar, 1866); ‘Collections for a Handbook of the

Swahili Language, as spoken at Zanzibar,’ by Bishop Tozer and Rev. E.

Steere (Zanzibar, 1865), and the Rev. E. Steere’s ‘Collections for a

Handbook of the Shambala Language’ (Zanzibar, 1867), the ‘tongue spoken

in the country called in our maps Usumbara, which is a mountainous

district on the mainland of Africa, lying opposite to the Island of

Pemba, and visible in clear weather from the town of Zanzibar.’

Kisawahili is at once rich and poor. It may contain 20,000 words, of

which, perhaps, 3000 are generally used, and 10,000 have been published.

Copious to cumbrousness in concrete, collective, and ideal words, it

abounds in names of sensuous objects; there is a term for every tree,

shrub, plant, grass, and bulb, and I have shown that the several ages of

the cocoa-nut are differently called. It wants compounds, abstract and

metaphysical expressions: these must be borrowed from the Arabic, fitted

with terminal and internal vowels, to suit the tongue, and modified

according to the organs of the people, harsh and guttural consonants

being exchanged for easy cognates. Even the numerals beyond twenty are

mere Semitic corruptions. All new ideas, that of servant, for instance,

must be expressed by a short description. In the more advanced South

African dialects, as in the Mpongwe of the Gaboon, a compound or a

derivative would be found to include all requirements. The sound would

be soft and harmonious were it not for the double initial consonants,

aspirated or not; for the perpetual reduplications (the Arabic

Radif),[117] a savage and childish contrivance to intensify the word,

and for the undue recurrence of the coarse letter K. Possibly the

fondness of the people for tautology may have tended to develop their

tautophony and euphony. Abounding in vowels and liquids, the language

admits of vast volubility of utterance; in anger or excitement the words

flow like a torrent, and each dovetails into its neighbour till the

whole speech becomes one vocable. Withal, every vowel has its distinct

and equal articulation. It wants the short and obscure sound of the

English and other European languages (e. g. a li_a_r, h_e_r, f_i_rst,

act_o_r, and h_u_rled) called by us the original vowel sound. Like the

Chinese and Maori languages, and the other South African tongues, it

confounds the so often convertible letters, the L and the R.[118] The

slaves, the Wasawahili, and the wild natives mostly prefer the former,

e. g. Mabeluki for Mabruki, and the Arabs and civilized speakers the

latter, although Mr Cooley (Geography of N’yassi, p. 20) asserts the

contrary. The metastasis, however, appears to me often arbitrary,

occasioning trouble, e. g. when ku ría (to eat) becomes ku lía (to

weep). Dr Livingstone, (chap. xxx. First Expedition) complains of

Loangoa, Luenya, and Bazizulu being transformed into Arroangoa, Ruanha,

and Morusurus, but he also similarly errs when he converts Karagwah into

Kalagwe, and when (p. 266) he uses indifferently Maroro and Maloli. The

R is often inserted pleonastically, to prevent hiatus, as Ku potéra for

Ku potéa, to lose; Ku pakíra for Ku pakía, to pack. Sometimes, again, it

is omitted, as U’ongo for Urongo, a lie. In pronouncing it the tongue

tip must (be more vibrated than in our language, which loves to slur

over the sound. Aspirated consonants are found, as in Sanskrit,

especially B’h, P’h, D’h, T’h, K’h, and G’h. Quiescent consonants are

rare in the middle of words; thus the Arabic Mismar (a nail) is changed

to Misumari, and treble are unknown. There are only five peculiar

sounds[119] which are generally mispronounced by the Arabs, and these

are mostly of little importance. The dialect is easily learned: many

foreigners who cannot speak understand, after a short residence, what is

spoken to them. It may be said to have no accent, but a sinking or

dropping of the voice at the terminal syllable—possibly the case with

Latin hexameters and pentameters—seems to place the ictus upon the

penultimate, as Wasawahíli for Wasawahĭli.[120] Hence when first writing

proper nouns I preferred Mtony and Pangany to Mto-ni and Pangani.

Similarly the W when placed between a consonant and a vowel is often so

slurred over as hardly to be detected. For instance, Bwáná, master,

becomes B’áná, and Unyamwezi might be both written Unyam’ezi were it not

liable to confuse the reader. There is also a Spanish ñ (Niña), as in

Ñika, the bush, and Ñendo, the P. N. of a district, which I express by

Ny, e. g. Nyika and Nyendo. Finally, being a lazy language, which well

suits the depressing climate, it takes as little trouble to articulate

as Italian: hence, even in the first generation, Arabs and Baloch

exchange for it their own guttural and laborious tongues, and their

offspring will learn nothing else. This is more curious than the

children of the Scandinavians abandoning the father-tongue for Norman

and Anglo-Scandinavian, vulgarly called Anglo-Saxon. In East Africa

adult settlers forget their mother-tongue,

And now of the slave races proper.

The treaty of 1845, which modified Capt. Moresby’s, of 1822, and Capt.

Cogan’s, of 1839, forbade exportation from the Zanzibarian ports north

of Lamu and its dependencies (S. lat. 1° 57′) and south of Kilwa (S.

lat. 9° 2′): thus the upper markets were cut off, and the traffic was

confined to the African dominions of the late Sayyid. The object of

these provisions was, of course, to avoid interference with the status

of domestic slavery, in the dominions of a foreign and friendly power.

It actually, however, led to what it was intended to prevent. The

vigilance and the summary measures of our Cape cruisers, especially when

commanded by men like Admiral Christopher Wyvill, inflicted severe

injuries upon, and in some places almost abolished, the contraband. I

have said that the diminution of export has materially benefited the

Island and its population. But at Zanzibar, as in the Guinea regions and

the African interior, prædial slavery appears still an evil necessity:

upon it hinges not only the prosperity but the very existence of the

present race. An abolition act passed in this Island would soon restore

it to the Iguana and the Turtle, its old inhabitants.

The slave, on the other hand, has lost by not being exported. It is the

same in the Oil rivers of West Africa, where in 1838 Sir T. Fowell

Buxton proposed to substitute for illegal and injurious, harmless and

profitable trade leading to ‘Christianity, which would call forth the

capabilities of the soul, and elevate the savage mind.’ It was expected

that at Benin, for instance, man would become too valuable as a labourer

to be sold as a chattel. Unhappily the reverse took place; man became so

cheap, that to work and to starve him to death paid better than to feed

him. A fresh gang could be purchased for a few shillings, and the price

of provisions was of far more importance than the value of life. The

Buxtonian idea was founded upon simple ignorance of Africa, and upon the

ill-judged assertion that slavery was caused by foreigners. The internal

wars, whose main object is capturing serviles, are the normal state of

Blackland society; they continued and they will continue, whether

slavers touch the coast or not. Briefly, the results to the captive are

now not sale, but slaughter or sacrifice in the interior, and death by

starvation upon the coast.

When I visited Zanzibar, in 1857, the English public, periodically

stimulated by the Liberal press, had split up, on the subject of the

African slave trade, into two sets of opinions, both honestly believed

in, both diametrically opposed to each other, and both somewhat in

extremes. The one sanguinely represented it as crushed, and

congratulated the nation upon having dealt its death-blow to a system

which was rotting the roots of prosperity and progress. The others

despondently declared that, although in some places the snake was

scotched, yet that it was nowhere killed; they proved that whilst

slavery had increased in horrors, the result of our interference, yet

the average quantity of the wretched merchandise had not been

diminished; they opined that nothing save the special interposition of

Providence could end that which had so long baffled many best efforts;

and being well acquainted with details, they maintained that the average

opinion was a mere pandering to popularity at the expense of truth. And,

when weary of the self-glorifying theme whose novelty had engrossed the

attention of their fathers, the public readily attributed selfish

motives to those who would enliven their zeal.

Fact, as usual, lay between the two assertions, but the inner working of

the slave-abolition measures was known only to few, and those few hardly

cared to speak out. England, ripe for free labour, had resolved to throw

off the African; she kicked away, to use a popular phrase, the ladder by

which she had risen, and she made slavery, for which she had shed her

best blood in the days of Queen Anne, the sum of all villanies in the

reign of King George. This was natural. The steps by which nations

attain to the summit of civilization appear, as they are beheld from

above, gradations of mere barbarism: to revert to them would be as

possible as to enjoy the nursery tales which enlivened our childhood.

Other European peoples were not in the condition of England to dispense

with slave labour, but the termination of a long continental war was

made the inducement to sign abolition treaties. All were so much waste-

paper, not being based upon public opinion. As long as Cuba and the

slave-importers of the Western world required (A.D. 1830-57) an annual

supply of 100,000 men, their demands were supplied. Neither the word

piracy, nor the prospect of hanging from the yard-arm—a remedy more

virulent than the disease—could deter adventurers from engaging in a

trade where a ‘pretty girl’ was to be ‘bought for a few rolls of

tobacco, fathoms of flannel, and pieces of calico,’ and whose profits

were estimated at 200 per cent. As long as sugar, tobacco, and dollars

increase, so long will the desire for more support the means by which

the supply may be increased. Of old one cargo run home out of three

paid: presently one in four was found sufficient. The losses, however,

added greatly to the misery of the slave; ships were built with 18

inches between decks, one pint of water ahead was served out per diem,

and five wretches were stowed away instead of two. With curious

contradiction and ‘wrong-headedness,’ these evils, caused by an

abolitionary squadron, were quoted against the slaver, as if the

diabolical malignity of the latter could be gratified only by destroying

his own property.

It was soon discovered that the slaves, being often condemned

criminals,[121] could not be returned under pain of death to their

homes. The natural result was to disembark them free upon English

ground, and thus certain British colonies were amply supplied with the

hands of which their government was depriving foreign powers. This

proceeding added jealousy to the ill-will with which our ‘meddling and

muddling’ philanthropy was regarded. But both those chiefly concerned—

the slaver and anti-slaver—gained; for the former the price of his wares

was kept up, whilst the latter made not a little political capital out

of his position. Slave exportation might at once have been crushed at

head-quarters: Madrid could have ended it in Cuba; Lisbon, and Rio de

Janeiro, in Africa and in the Brazil; it was, however, judged best to

let it die quietly, and to make as much use as possible of its dying

throes. Some five years ago, after defying for a generation the

squadrons of civilized Europe and the United States, it perished of

itself, and to-morrow it would revive if the old conditions of its

existence could be restored.

The Zanzibar slave-depôt is so situated that its market was limited only

by the extent of Western Asia. From Ra’as Hafun to the Kilima-ni river

was gathered the supply for the Red Sea, for the Persian Gulf, for the

Peninsula of Hindostan, and for the extensive regions to the East. A

spirited trade was carried on, and few obstacles were placed in its way.

The Anglo-India Government did not in this matter rival the zeal of the

Home Authorities. It lacked earnestness, judging slavery leniently, and

finding the practice conducive to the well-being of its subjects. A

squadron of at least four steamers was required: the work was left to a

sloop and a corvette stationed in the Persian Gulf, with orders, amongst

other things, to arrest slavers. The Cape squadron, whose beat extended

to the Equator, rarely visited these seas, and the French ships of war

were popularly said to do more harm than good. Even in after years, when

a considerable impulse was given to our cruisers, they could capture

only 6.6 per cent.: thus, from Zanzibar and Kilwa, in 1867-9 were taken

116 daus carrying 2645 slaves, leaving 37,000 to escape. There were

neither special agents nor approvers; steam-launches and crews

sufficiently numerous for arduous boat-service were wanting. An infinite

deal of nothing in the shape of bescribbled foolscap was collected, by

way of sop for the Court of Directors and for Exeter Hall; but the

counsels of such authorities as Lieut.-Colonel Hamerton and Capt. Felix

Jones, I. N., were passed over with the scant attention of a compliment.

The fact is, in British India, as to a certain extent in France, no

political capital could be made out of Abolition. Few men retain, after

long residence in the East, that lively horror of the institution which

distinguishes the home-bred Englishman, and which has arisen partly from

his crass ignorance of negro nature and from the misrepresentations of

very earnest but also deluded anti-slavers. The Anglo-Indian has seen

many a chattel happy and contented, enjoying an enviable lot compared

with the poor at home free to starve or to die in the workhouse:

possibly he has dined with some emancipated slave: certainly he has

heard of Mamluk Beys and purchased Pashas; and, whilst he owns in the

abstract that one man has no right to buy another, in practice he is

lenient to the ‘patriarchal system.’

The apathy of the Anglo-Indian Government gave the cue to its executive.

When it was proposed that the Cutch ‘Nakhodas’ (skippers) should be

compelled to keep crew-lists for inspection, some ‘collector’ objected

that such men cannot write—surely he must have known that every vessel

carries its own ‘Kirani,’ or accountant. That imperium in imperio the

Supreme Court, was enough to paralyze the energies of a fleet; the

captured slave-dau was carried to Bombay, whence, after a year’s

detention by the claws of the law, it was probably restored to its

owner. The officers of the Indian Navy would not exercise increased

vigilance, necessitating exposure of their men and neglect of other more

important duties, when their labours were so likely to be made futile.

And as very little prize money was followed by a very large amount of

correspondence, slaver-hunting appeared as undesirable to them as to the

officers of the French squadron on the West Coast of Africa.

At Zanzibar, where the French Consul, or in his absence the first

‘Drogman’ (like all consuls here, their office is rather political than

commercial), could fine and imprison an offender, and even ship off a

merchant skipper to the nearest port, the English functionary was a

magistrate absolutely without magisterial or criminal jurisdiction. He

could not deport an Indian convicted of slave-dealing. Whilst the Arab

Courts were not allowed jurisdiction over British subjects, the latter,

unless merchant seamen ashore, were not liable to be arrested for

felony. All this might easily have been remedied by extending eastward

the British Order in Council for the exercise of power and jurisdiction

by English functionaries (e.g. Consuls for the Levant), in the Ottoman

Dominions (June 19, 1844), and by adding power ashore to Article 124 of

Consular Instructions, making offences on the high seas cognizable by

the Consul.

Thus, despite Order upon Ordinance, Asia was supplied by the whole

slave-coast of Eastern Africa, without hardly the decency of

concealment. Boys and girls might be seen on board every native craft

freshly trapped in the inner wilds, unable to speak a word of any

language but the Zangian, and bearing upon their heads the trade-marks

of the Hindu Banyan. The commerce was openly carried on by aliens

sailing under British protection. Kidnapping was common and daring, as

about Lagos and Badagry. Scarcely a vessel manned by crews from Súr or

Ra’as el Khaymah, the greatest ruffians of these pirate seas, left

Zanzibar city or mainland without stealing a few negros or negrets. By

the temptations of a bottle of rum or of some decoy girl, they were

enticed into the house or on board, and they suddenly found themselves

safe under hatches: even Arabs, men and women, have been carried off in

mistake by these inveterate thieves. A child here worth from £1 5_s._ to

£3 would fetch in Persia £14 to £20; hence the practice. And the anti-

slave exportation treaties became exactly worth their weight in words,

because the sword was known to be sheathed.

The slaves on Zanzibar Island are roundly estimated, at two-thirds of

the population; some travellers increase the number to three-fourths.

The annual loss of males by death, export, and desertion, amounted, I

was told, to 30 per cent., thus within every fourth year the whole gang

upon a plantation required to be renewed. The actual supply necessary

for the Island is now estimated at a total varying from 1700 to 6000,

and leaving 12,000 to 16,000 for the export slave-market. As usual in

Moslem lands, they may be divided into two distinct classes: first, the

Muwallid or Mutawallid, the Mazáliyá of the Wasawahili, the famulus or

slave born in the family, or rather on the Island; secondly, the captive

or imported chattel.

The Muwallid belongs solely to his mother’s owner, who sells him or

gives him away at pleasure. Under no circumstances can he claim

manumission—one born a slave is a slave for ever, even in the next

world, amongst those nations which, like the Dahomans, have a next

world. If notoriously ill-treated, however, he may compel his proprietor

to dispose of him. Few Arabs behave cruelly to their ‘sons;’ they fear

desertion, which here is always easy, and the master, besides being

dependent for comfort upon his household, is also held responsible for

the misdeeds of his property. He is also probably living in concubinage

with the sisters of his slaves, and in this case the latter can take

great liberties—they are the most unruly of their kind. I need hardly

remark that the issue of a slave-girl by an Arab or by any other ‘Hurr’

(free-born man) has been legitimate in El Islam since the days of

Ishmael, inheriting like the son of a lawful wife, and that neither

mother nor child can be sold. It is to be regretted that in this matter

the Christian did not take example of the Mohammedan.

The domestic slave-girl rarely has issue. This results partly from the

malignant unchastity of the race, the women being so to speak in common;

and on the same principle we witness the decline and extinction of wild

tribes that come in contact with civilized nations. The chief social

cause is that the ‘captive’ has no interest in becoming a mother; she

will tell you so in the Brazil as in Zanzibar; her progeny by another

slave may be sold away from her at any moment, and she obviates the

pains and penalties of maternity by the easy process of procuring

abortion.

The wild slaves are brought over in daus which carry from 10 to 500

head. Most of those intended for the Island market are comparatively

young: the Portuguese settlements at Mozambique give higher prices for

able-bodied adults. Since the last treaty the value has more than

trebled; what then cost $10 has now risen to $30 to $35. A small boy

fresh from the mainland commands from $7 to $15; a girl under 7 or 8

years old, from $10 to $18. The live cargo pays duty to the Zanzibar and

Kilwa custom-houses, as at Zayla, Tajurrah, and the slave-exporting

harbours of the Red Sea: the sick and the refuse, however, enter free.

About 1835 the import duty varied from $0.50 to $4, according to the

port whence the ‘black ivory’ was shipped: some races had such an ill

fame that only excessive cheapness found purchasers. Presently $2 and at

last $1 were levied upon all, good or had. Of late years (1857) the

annual maximum collected was $23,000: this enables us to rate the import

at an average of 14,000 to 15,000 per annum, the extreme being 9000 or

18,000. In 1860-61 it rose to 19,000, in 1861-62 it fell to 14,000, and

in 1862-63 there was a further declension.[122]

The impudence and audacity of the wild slaves almost passes belief. Such

is their habit of walking into any open dwelling and carrying off

whatever is handy, that no questions are asked about a negro shot or cut

down in the act of simple trespass. At night they employ themselves in

robbing or smuggling, and at times in firing a house, when they join the

crowd and spread the flames for the purpose of plunder. They are armed

burglars, and not a few murders are laid at their door. In the

plantation they gratify their savage, quarrelsome, and ungovernable

tempers, by waging desultory servile wars with neighbouring gangs;

hundreds will turn out with knobsticks, stones, and a few muskets, and

blaze wildly in the direction of one another: at the first casualty all

will run. Some proprietors have had as many as 2000 blacks—not half the

number often owned in the Southern United States, and in the Brazil—but

at those times the negro was worth only from $3 to $10. They were

allowed two days out of the week to fish for themselves, and to work at

their own patches of ground.

Of late years the Zanzibar serviles have attempted to compete with the

honest and hardworking porters of Hazramaut; but they cannot keep their

hands from picking and stealing, and thus they have ruined several of

their ‘Akidahs,’ or headmen, who rendered themselves responsible to the

merchant. Being capable of considerable although desultory exertion,

they get a living by day-work on board European ships, and they prefer

this employment because they receive rations of rice and treacle, with

occasionally a bit of beef or pork. When there is no work upon the

plantation its slaves are jobbed at the rate of 8 to 10 pice per diem,

and of this sum they receive 2, about the wage of an Indian ‘biggaree.’

Of course they do their best to defraud their masters of the hire.

The following are the distant races of whom a few serviles find their

way to Zanzibar.

Circassians and white slave girls being exceedingly rare, are confined

to the harems of the rulers. They are brought from Persia, and are as

extravagant in tastes as they are expensive in prime cost. A ‘Járiyeh

bayza’ soon renders the house of a moderately rich man unendurable.

Abyssinians, or rather Africans from Gurague, Amhara, and the continent

north of the parallel of Cape Guardafui, are mostly imported from El

Hejaz. Boys and lads range from $50 to $100: girls, from $60 to $150.

The former are circumcised, and having a good reputation for honesty,

intelligence, and amiability, they are educated as stewards,

superintendents, and super-cargos. The latter, though exceedingly

addicted to intrigue, are favourites with men, and, it is said, with

Arab women.

Galla captives of many tribes, especially of the Arisha and a few of the

southern Somal, are shipped from Hafun, Brava, and Hanir or Makdishu.

They fetch low prices, and are little prized, being considered roguish

and treacherous. In appearance they are savage likenesses of the

Abyssinians.

The coast of Zanzibar, which before the days of the Periplus supplied

the eastern world with slaves, has of late years been exhausted by over-

driving. It may be divided into two sections: the northern country,

which exports from Mombasah and the little adjacent harbours as far

south as the Pangani river; and the southern regions between Pangani and

Kilwa. Details concerning all these servile races will be given when we

visit their respective ports.

-----

Footnote 103:

Further details will be given in Part II. chap. xi.

Footnote 104:

A highly interesting account is given of this almost unknown race by

the Rev. Thomas Wakefield in his ‘Footprints in Eastern Africa, or

Notes of a Visit to the Southern Gallas’ (London, Reed. 1866, pp. 76-

79). We are told that ‘the Gálas never stab a Mlangúlo, but removing

the blades of their spears, they thrash him to death with the shafts

or handles:’ moreover, that ‘the Walangúlo approach a Gála on their

knees, crying, “tiririsho! tiririsho! tiririsho!” until their greeting

is acknowledged by a grunt from their lord or by the latter spitting

out a little saliva!’

Footnote 105:

The curious reader will find it in the Travels of Marco Polo (chap.

xxxvii. note 1, p. 432, of Bohn’s Antiquarian Library).

Footnote 106:

Mr Cooley (Geog. 37) tells us that ‘Conda, in Congoese and also in

Sawahili, means hill.’ It certainly does not in Zanzibar, where Konda

is an adjective, lean or thin. Konde means the fist (in Arabic جِمع

and Khonde is applied to a Shamba or plantation.

Footnote 107:

M. Guillain (Part II. 108) calls the preliminary ceremony ‘Outoumba,’

and I cannot help thinking that he was grossly ‘sold’ by some

exceedingly impudent interpreter.

Footnote 108:

The areca-nut is called in Arabic Fofal, and in Kisawahili Popo: the

betel-nut, Tambul and Tambuli, and the lime Nurah and Choka.

Footnote 109:

This is repeated by my friend (p. 59, The Idol in Horeb: Evidence that

the golden image at Mount Sinai was a cone, and not a calf. London:

Tinsleys, 1871), who, however, informs us that in 1846 Major, now Sir

Henry, Rawlinson agreed with him in saying that, ‘the class of

languages to which the designation Semitic or Semitish is properly

applicable is that comprising the whole of the aboriginal languages of

Asia, Polynesia, and America.’ This latter continent, however, should

not have been included without proofs, and hitherto we have failed to

find them.

Footnote 110:

Grammar of the Baĕlele language, &c., by the Missionaries of the A. B.

C. F. M. Gaboon Station, Western Africa. New York: Pratt, 1854. Also

Grammar of the Mpongwe language, &c., by the same. New York: Snowdon

and Pratt, 1847.

Footnote 111:

A Vocabulary of the Malemba and Embomma Languages. (Appendix I.

Tuckey’s Expedition to the River Zaire. London: Murray, 1818.) Also

Fr. B. M. de Cannecatim’s Diccionario da Lingua Bunda. Lisboa, 1804.

Footnote 112:

When travelling in East Africa I took as a base the vocabulary of

Catherine of Russia, and filled it up with five dialects, viz., those

of the Sawahil, Uzaramo, Khutu, Usagara, and Unyamwezi.

Footnote 113:

In these days, however, we cannot say, with the Opener of Inner Africa

(p. 123), ‘The Nilotic family of languages nowhere extends into the

basin of the Nile.’

Footnote 114:

I have sketched the distinguishing points of the Hamitic tongues in my

Preface (p. xxii.) to ‘Wit and Wisdom from West Africa’ (London:

Tinsleys, 1865).

Footnote 115:

Mr Ross Browne has lately been engaged in writing a voluminous report

to the Government at Washington upon the mineral resources of the

Western States of the Union.

Footnote 116:

Messrs Monteiro and Gamitto (O Muata Cazembel, Appendix, 470) doubt

whether the Tete grammar can be reduced to an intelligible system of

verbs. I see no difficulty. Capt. Boteler, R. N. (Appendix, vol. i.

Voyage to Africa, Bentley, 1835) easily collected a ‘Delagoa

Vocabulary’ from George, his interpreter.

Footnote 117:

In Kisawahili reduplication sometimes seriously modifies the root

meaning, e. g. Mbhali means ‘far’ or ‘distant;’ Mbhali-Mbhali is

different or ‘several,’ meaning ‘distinct.’

Footnote 118:

The Tupys of the Brazil, according to the Portuguese, ignored both

sounds—I presume initiative.

Footnote 119:

These are

1. B—an emphatic and explosive perfect-mute, formed by compressing the

lips apparently to the observer’s eye.

2. D—which is half T, formed somewhat like the Arabic Ta (ط) by

touching the lower part of the central upper incisors with the

thickened tongue-tip. Strangers write indifferently Doruma and Toruma,

Taita and Daida.

3. G—harder and more guttural than ours, the tongue root being applied

thickened to the soft palate. An instance is _G_ombe, a large cow

(Gnombe), which Arabs and Europeans pronounce Gombe, meaning a shell.

Incrementation is also effected by simplifying the initial sound, as

Gu, a large foot, from Mgu; Dege, a large bird, from Kdege.

4. J—a semi-liquid: the J is expressed by applying the fore part of

the tongue to the palate, above the incisors closely followed by a

half-articulated Y. It is often confounded with D and Y, e. g. Unguja,

Unguya, and Ungudya, for Ungujya (not Ugúya, as Mr Cooley believes),

and Yambeho or Jambeho for Jyambeho. The sound is not ‘peculiarly

African;’ it exists in Sindi and other tongues, and a likeness to it

occurs at the junction of English words, as ‘pledge you’ Even the

Arabs distinguish it from their common Jim, and it is well worth the

conscientious student’s attention.

5. K—half G, a hardened sound whilst the mid tongue is still applied

to the palate. It might be taken for a corruption of the Arabic Kaf

(ق).

At Mombasah we shall remark other sounds mostly peculiar to the coast

Kisawahili. As a rule, however, the stranger will be understood even

before his tongue has mastered these minutiæ.

Footnote 120:

Nothing can be more erroneous than the following sentence: ‘But the

Mohammedan natives of the Eastern Coasts of Africa, who are

comprehended under the name of Sawáhili, do not pronounce the hard _h_

of the Arabs; the vowels, therefore, between which it stands in their

name, unite to form a diphthong, like the Italian _ai_ or the English

i in wile; and Sawáhili is pronounced Sawïli’ (Inner Africa Laid Open,

p. 88). The Wasawahil merely change the hard Arabic h (ح) into the

softer guttural (ه).

Footnote 121:

I regret to read such statements as the following in the Journal of

the Anthropological Society: ‘It may be asserted, without fear of

exaggeration, that it is to this demand for slaves that are to be

attributed the desultory and bloody wars which are waged in Central

Africa.’ (On the Negro Slaves in Turkey, No. 29, April, 1870.)

Footnote 122:

Concerning Kilwa further details will be found in Vol. II.

CHAPTER XII.

PREPARATIONS FOR DEPARTURE.

‘The port of Zanzibar has little or no trade; that to Bombay consists of

a little gum and ivory, brought from the mainland, with a few cloves,

the only produce of the island; and the import trade is chiefly dates,

and cloth from Muscat, to make turbans. These things are sent in small

country vessels, which make only one voyage a year. The trade is

consequently very trifling.’—CAPT. HART, Commanding H. M. S. Imogene,

1834.

The dry season—and uncommonly dry it had been—was judged by all old

hands unfit for travel, and I was strongly advised to defer exploration

of the interior till after learning something of the coast. The Rev. Mr

Erhardt’s Memoir on the Chart of Eastern and Central Africa, which threw

into a huge uninterrupted Caspian half-a-dozen central lakes, and called

it in the south Niandsha (Nyassa), in the north Ukerewe, and on the

coast Niasa and Bahari ya Uniamési, had proposed a choice of three

several routes. The first was through Dshaga (Chaga), and the lands of

the Wamasai. It numbered 59 days, over level land, though studded with

many isolated hills and mountains, and it traded to the Wanyamwezi, ‘of

the race of Wazambiro,’ probably the Wafioma of the Usambíro district,

near Karagwah. The middle caravan was reported to start ‘from Bagamoyo

and Mboamaji to Uniamési.’ The general features of the country, the

distances, and even the position of Ujiji, were remarkably well laid

down. The ‘Stadt Ujiji,’ inhabited partly by Arabians, partly by Wahas

(Wahhas), of course, did not exist: the saline stream of the Wapogo[123]

and the people, whose teeth became yellow by drinking of another water,

were evidently the creations of some lively negro’s fancy. The ‘third or

southern caravan line,’ set out from Kilwa, and after 200 miles struck

the ‘Niasa or Niandsha’ Lake. In this section the distances were

miscalculated, and except the Wafipa and the Wabembe, the tribes were

incorrectly named and placed.

In his plan for exploring the Great Lake, and laid before the Royal

Geographical Society in 1854, M. Erhardt proposed to land at Kilwa,

where he had touched with Dr Krapf; to collect a party of Wasawahili,

and with an outfit of $300 to march into the continent. This might have

been feasible in 1854; it was impossible in 1856. The sum mentioned was

inadequate; the missionaries had spent as much upon a fortnight’s march

from Pangani to Fuga. Slaves are the only porters of the land, and the

death of Sayyid Said had then made the coast Arabs and the Mrima people

about Kilwa almost independent of Zanzibar. My directions from home were

to follow, if possible, this line; Lieut. Christopher, I. N., however,

who visited the coast in 1843, more wisely advised explorers to avoid

the neighbourhood of Kilwa. Lieut.-Colonel Hamerton, moreover, strongly

objected to our landing anywhere but under the guns of Zanzibar, as it

were. He informed me that the Wangindo, a tribe settled behind Kilwa,

had lately murdered a native trader, at the instigation of those settled

on the coast; and that nothing less than a ship of war stationed at the

port would open the road to a ‘Muzungu’ (white man).

The Consul had also warned me that my inquiries into the country trade,

and the practice of writing down answers—without which, however, no

report could have been compiled—were exciting ill will. The short-

sighted traders dreaded, like Orientals, that competition might result

from our discoveries, and their brains were too dull to perceive that

the development of the resources of the interior would benefit all those

connected with the coast. Houses that had amassed in a few years large

fortunes by the Zanzibar trade, were exceedingly anxious to ‘let

sleeping dogs lie.’ As far as dinners and similar hospitality, the white

merchants resident on the Island received us with the usual African

profuseness. There were, of course, honourable exceptions: I have

especially mentioned Captain Mansfield, Mr Masury, and M. Bérard; but

not a few—exempla sunt odiosa—spread reports amongst the natives,

Banyans, Arabs, and Wasawahili, which were very likely to secure for us

the disastrous fate of M. Maizan. Captain Speke, who subsequently

ignored this fact, threatened to throw one of the ‘first houses’ out of

the window; and Lieut.-Colonel Hamerton declared that unless more

discretion in spreading evil reports were shown he would withdraw

British protection from another well-known firm. The son of a Hamburg

merchant had written to his father for leave to supply us with sums to

be recovered from the Royal Geographical Society. When informed of this

peculiar kindness I inquired the object, and the answer was that,

intending himself to visit India, he wished to prepare his father for

the expense of travel in the East. Certainly knowing all these

intrigues, I see no reason why they should not be published.

The Arabs were as much alarmed at the prospect of opening up the African

interior as were the foreign merchants; they knew that Europeans had

long coveted a settlement upon the sea-board, and they had no wish to

lose the monopoly of the copal coast and the ivory-lands. Nothing indeed

would be easier, I repeat, for a European power than to establish itself

upon the mainland; and if it followed the wise example of the early

Portuguese, who limited their possessions to the principal ports and to

the great centres of trade, it would soon monopolize an enriching

traffic. With respect to copal, and to the articles most in demand, our

commercial relations with Zanzibar might be altered for the benefit of

both contracting parties. It is at present an unnatural, exclusive

system, a monopoly claiming advantages of which it will not, or cannot,

avail itself. But all steps in these matters must be taken by the Home

Governments; the petty jealousies of rival powers here render all local

interference unadvisable.

At length the Kazi Muhiyy el Din, the ‘celestial doctor’ of the

Wasawahili, was detailed by the curious to investigate the subject, and

to represent the terrors of the public. He retired, satisfied that our

plans were not of conquest. The Arab chiefs pressed Lieut.-Colonel

Hamerton to swear upon the ‘Kalmat Ullah’ that the expedition was to be

conducted only by English officers, upon whose good-will they could

rely; that it was not a proselytizing movement of the Wanajuoni (sons of

the book, missionaries), and that it would not be accompanied by

‘Dutchmen,’ as certain gentleman from Germany were called by the

Zanzibaris.[124] Had the Consul hesitated to satisfy them, the course of

events is clear to all who know the Eastern man. The surface of Arab

civility would have run unruffled, but the undertow would have carried

us off our legs.

Persuaded at last by the earnestness of our energetic supporter, the

Sayyid Sulayman bin Hamid bin Said—a noble Omani never neglects the name

of his grandsire—came forward in our favour. This aged chief, a cousin

of the late Sayyid, rejoiced in the nickname of Bahari Maziwa (Sea of

Milk), the Ethiopic equivalent for ‘soft-sawder.’ He had governed

Zanzibar during the minority of Sayyid Khalid, who died in 1854, and his

influence was strong upon the sea-board. He gave us his good word in

sundry circulars, to which the Prince Majid added others, addressed to

Kimwere, Sultan of Usumbara; to the Diwans or Wasawahili head-men, and

to the Baloch Jemadars, commanding the several garrisons. On the other

hand, Ladha Damha of Mandavie, the Banyan Collector of Customs, provided

me with orders upon the Hindu coast-merchants, to raise the requisite

moneys, without which our reception would have been of the coolest. The

horizon now began to clear, and even to look bright, as it generally

will when the explorer has time and patience to await the change of

weather.

If we travellers in transit had reason to be proud of our countryman’s

influence at Zanzibar, the resident foreigners should have been truly

thankful for it. When Lieut-Colonel Hamerton first made this Island his

head-quarters (1841), he found that for nine years it had not been

visited by a British cruiser, and that interested reports had been

spread, representing us to be no longer masters of the Indian Seas.

Slavery was everywhere rampant. Bozals, green or wild slaves, here

called Baghams (بغم), were thrown overboard when sick, to avoid paying

duty; and the sea-beach of the city, which acts Marine Parade, as well

as the plantations, presented horrible spectacles of dogs and birds of

prey devouring swollen and spotted human carcases—the remnants of

‘slaves that never prayed.’[125] The Consul’s representations were

listened to by Sayyid Said, who, through virtue of certain dry floggings

and confiscations of property, à la Mohammed Ali, instilled into the

slave-owners some semblance of humanity.

Negro insolence was dealt with as summarily. The Arabs had persuaded the

Wasawahili, and even the Creoles, that a white man is a being below

contempt, and the ‘poor African’ eagerly carried out the theory. Only 17

years have elapsed (1857) since a certain trading-consul, Mr W—, in

consular hat and sword, was horsed upon a servile back, and was solemnly

‘bakur’d,’ in his own consular house, under his own consular flag. This

occurrence was afterwards denied by the best of all authorities, the

gentleman who told the tale: I have, however, every reason to believe

it. A Msawahili would at any time enter the merchant’s office, dispose

his sandaled or bare feet upon the table or the bureau, call for cognac,

and, if refused, draw his dagger. Impudent fishermen would anchor their

craft below the windows of the British Consulate, and, clinging to the

mast-top, enjoy with derision the spectacle of feeding Kafirs. The Arabs

jostled strangers in the streets, drove them from the centre, and

compelled them to pass by the wall. At night no one dared to carry a

lantern, which would inevitably have been knocked out of his hand; and a

promenade in the dark usually caused insults, sometimes a bastinado. To

such a pitch rose contempt for the ‘Faranj,’ that even the ‘mild

Hindus,’—our ‘fellow-subjects’ from Cutch and other parts of Western

India,—could not preserve with a European the semblance of civility.

Time was required to uproot an evil made inveterate, as in Japan, by

mercantile tameness, and by the precept quocunque modo rem. Patience,

the Sayyid’s increasing good-will, and at times a rough measure which

brought the negro man to a ‘sense of his duty,’ were at last successful,

and the result now is that the Englishman is better received here than

at any of our Presidencies. The change is wholly the work of Lieut.-

Colonel Hamerton, who, in the strenuous and unremitting discharge of his

duties, has lost youth, strength, and health. The iron constitution of

this valuable public servant—I have quoted merely one specimen of his

worth—has been undermined by the terrible fever, and at fifty his head

bears the ‘blossoms of the grave,’ as though it had seen its seventieth

summer.

Before we could set out a guide, a Mahmandar a Cafilah-báshí or

Kirangozi, was requisite, and this necessary was soon provided by the

‘Sea of Milk.’ Saíd bin Sálim el Lamki, the companion of our way for

many a weary league, must not depart this life unsketched. He is a half-

caste Arab, as is shown by the wiry, woolly hair, which he generally,

however, removes with care; by his dead yellow skin; by scanty

mustachios, and by a heard which no pulling will lengthen. Short, thin,

and delicate; a kind of man for the pocket; with weak and prominent

eyes, the long protruding beak of a young bird, loose lips, and regular

teeth dyed by betel to the crimson of chess-men, he owns to 40, and he

shows 45. Of noble family on the father’s side, the Benu Lamk of the

Hináwi, he was born when his progenitor governed Kilwa, hence his

African blood; and he has himself commanded at the little port Sa’adani.

Yet has not dignity invested him with the outer show of authority. He

says ‘Karrib,’—draw near!—to all, simple and gentle. He cannot beat his

naughty bondsmen, though he perpetually quotes Ali the Khalifeh—

‘Buy not the slave but with staff and sword;

Or the lord will slave, and the slave will lord.’

I have heard, him address, with ‘rotund mouth,’ his small boy Faraj, a

demon of impudence; yet he is mostly ashamed to scold. This results from

his extreme timidity and nervousness. He never appears abroad without

the longest of daggers and a two-handed blade fit for Richard of

England. He will sleep in an oven rather than open the door when a

leopard has been talked of: on board ship he groans like a colicky

patient at every ‘lop,’ and a shipped sea brings from his lips the

involuntary squeak of mortal agony. In the hour of perfect safety he has

a certain quietness of manner and mildly valorous talk which are

exceedingly likely to impose. He cannot bear hunger or thirst, fatigue

or want of sleep, and until Fate threw him in our way he probably never

walked a single consecutive mile. Though owner of a wife, and of three

quasi wives, he had been refused by Allah the gift of issue and

increase. Possibly the glad tidings that a slave girl was likely to make

him a father—he swore that, if a boy, Abdullah should be his name—

suddenly communicated to him on his return from our first cruise, caused

him to judge my companionship canny, and once more to link his destiny

with ours.

Saíd bin Sálim is a Bayázi of the Kháriji schism. He prays regularly;

fasts uncompromisingly; he chews but will not smoke tobacco; he never

casts away a date-stone; and he ‘sips water’ but ‘swills milk’ as the

Moslem saying directs. His mother tongue is the Kisawahili: he speaks,

however, the grotesque Arabic of Oman, and sometimes, to display his

mastery of the humanities, he mixes hashed Koran and terminating vowels

with Maskat ‘baragouinage,’ Paradise Lost and Thieves’ Latin. He has

read syntax; he writes a pretty hand; he is great at epistles, and he

loves to garnish discourse with saw and song. When in the ‘doldrums’ he

will exclaim—

‘The grave’s the gate all flesh must pass—

Ah! would I knew what lies behind.’

I have heard him crooning for long hours—

‘The knowledge of this nether world,

Say, friend, what is it?—false or true?

The false, what mortal cares to know?—

The true, what mortal ever knew?’

Sometimes he will break out into rather a ‘fast’ strain, e. g.—

‘At Meccah I saw a lass selling perfume,

She put forth a hand, and I cried, “O sweet!”

(Three sniffs, crescendo.)

She leant over me, casting a glance of love,

But from Meccah I sped, saying, “Farewell, sweet!”’

(Three Kafir clicks, diminuendo, signifying ‘No go.’)

The reader will ask what induced me to take a guide apparently so little

fit for rough and ready work? In the first place, the presence of Saíd

bin Sálim el Lamki, el Hináwi, was a pledge of our utter

‘respectability,’ and as a court spy, he could report that we were not

malignants. Moreover, he was well known upon the coast, and he had a

knowledge-box filled with local details, which he imparted without

churlishness. During the first trip I found him full of excellent gifts,

courteous, thoroughly good-tempered, and apparently truthful, honest,

and honourable—a bright exception to the rule of his unconscientious

race. When I offered him the task he replied, ‘Verily, whoso benefiteth

the beneficent becometh his lord; but the vile, when well treated, will

turn and rend thee.’ I almost hoped that he would not disappoint me in

the end; but the delays, the dangers, and the hardships of the second

journey proved too much for Saíd bin Sálim. The thin outer varnish

disappeared from the man, and the material below was not inviting. The

Maskat Arab, especially the half-caste, easily becomes the Bedáwi, the

Ishmael, the Orson. These people have rarely any ‘stay’ in them; they

are charming only as long as things run smooth, and after once showing

true colours, they care not to conceal them. Arabs, however, are not the

only handsome shoes that badly pinch. How often would fellow-travellers

have avoided one another like fire, had they been able to see a trifle

below the surface! Saíd bin Sálim, offended by certain remarks in my

Lake Regions of Central Africa (passim), and wishing to ‘prove his

character for honour and honesty,’ persuaded Capt. Speke to give him

another chance, and began by telling a gross falsehood, which Capt.

Speke at once believed. He accompanied the second East African

expedition: he played his usual slavish tricks, and he had to be

‘dropped,’ utterly useless, at Kazeh, with the Arabs.

I had engaged at Bombay two Portuguese boys, Valentino Rodrigues and

Caetano Andrade, who resolved that what Sahib Log could endure, that

same could they. Having described them once there is no object in saying

further of them, except that they were, despite all deficiencies, a

great comfort to us; and that they proved themselves, in the long run,

better men than the Arab. Taking no interest in ‘African exploration,’

and desirous of seeing only the end of the expedition, they must, poor

fellows, have yearned sadly for home, even Goa; and I am rejoiced to

think that they both reached it alive.

The outfit and expenses of an African journey are always interesting to

travellers. For the personnel, we expended in two months a total of $172

($50 to Said, and $20 per mens. to the two Goanese), including $32 for

ship hire, and the inevitable ‘Bakhshish’ which accompanies it. As

presents to the native chiefs who might entertain us, we took 20

Jamdanis, or sprigged muslin, for turbans ($15); a score of embroidered

Surat caps (Alfiyyah = $17.50); a broad-cloth coat and a Maskat Sabai,

or loin-cloth of silk, cotton, and gold thread ($20.50) for the Sultan

Kimwere; two gaudy cotton shawls, yellow and scarlet ($2.50), and 35

lbs. of small white-and-pink Venetian beads ($14). This item amounted to

$69.50. I made the mistake of ignorance by not laying in an ample store

of American domestics (Merkani), the silver of the country, and a

greater quantity of beads, which are the small change. About $250

represented the expenses of living and travelling ($94 in January, and

in February $84): this included the expenditure of the whole party. The

provisions were, rice (three bags), maize flour (one barrel), dates (one

bag), sugar and coffee (each 20 lbs.), salt, pepper, onions, and curry

stuff, oil and clarified butter, snuff and tobacco. Of course soap and

candles were not forgotten, and we had a small but necessary supply of

cords for baggage—these, however, soon followed the way of our knives.

The several items form a grand total of $480, equal to about £50 per

mensem. I must observe, however, that we travelled in humble guise,

hired poor vessels, walked the whole way, and otherwise practised a

somewhat rigid economy.

Ladha Damha, who had provided us with these necessaries, also hired for

the coasting cruise an old Arab Beden, or ‘Awaysiyeh’ (foyst) called the

Riámi. She was a fine specimen of her class; old and rotten, the boards

and timbers of the deck were breaking up; the tanks were represented by

a few Girbahs, or empty skins; the sails were in rags; the ropes and

cables broke every half-hour, and the awning leaked like a cheap

waterproof, despite bits of cotton rudely caulked in. Ants effected

lodgment in our instrument cases, cockroaches dropped upon us all day,

and the rats made marriage, as Saíd said, during the live-long night.

The crew was picked up out of the bazar: one was a tailor, a second

stuttered unintelligibly, a third was maimed and purblind, a fourth was

sick, and a fifth, the Chelebi (fop) of the party, was a malingerer, who

could do nothing but shave, pluck his eyebrows, and contemplate a flat

face in the glass. The only man on board was old Ráshid, a scion of that

Súrí race, the self-styled descendants of the Syrians, well-known for

beggary and niggardness, for kidnapping and safe piracy. They are the

most uncourteous of the Arabs; and while ever demanding Hishmah

(respect) for themselves, they forget their own proverb, ‘Politeness has

two heads,’ and they will on no occasion accord it to others. Ráshid,

however, proved a hero and a treasure, by the side of our Nakhoda Hamid,

a Saudawi or melancholist of the most approved type—never was brain of

goose or heart of hen-partridge hidden by brow so broad and

intellectual; never did liver of milk wear so Herculean a beard! He

squats upon the deck screaming and abusing his men; now silent and

surly, then answering every question with El ’ilm ’ind Allah (God

knows!), and in danger he weeps bitterly. With such fellows the only

system is to be as distant as possible: the least familiarity ends

badly; they will hate you more for one cross word than love you for a

thousand favours. The civility of a pipe or a glass of sherbet

infallibly spoils them: they respect only the man who tells them once a

day that they are unworthy to eat with a Walad Amir (gentleman). They

will call you proud; but that matters little, and if you pay them well

they will speak of you accordingly.

On the evening of Sunday, Jan. 4, 1857, we bade a temporary farewell to

our kind friend and host, Lieut.-Colonel Hamerton, and transferred

ourselves on board the Ríami, expecting to set out. Simple souls that we

were! There was neither wood nor water on board, and our gallant captain

lost no time in eclipsing himself. The north-east wind coursing through

the clear sky was dead against us, but he pretended that the sailors had

remained in the bazar. He came on board next morning, when we made sail

and ran down to Mto-ni, there filling our skins with bad saltish water.

Hamid again went ashore, promising to return in half an hour, and

leaving us to spend the day in vain expectation. Said bin Salim solaced

himself by wishing that the Shaytan might appear to Hamid on his death-

bed and say, ‘O friend of my soul, welcome home!’ But when the truant

came off, he was welcomed by the half-caste Arab with a cup of coffee

and a proverb importing that out of woe cometh weal; this considerably

diminished the effect of my flea in the ear and threat of the ‘bakur.’

Finally, after the loss of two nights and a day, we fished up our

ground-tackle and began our journey. I afterwards learned that in this

part of East Africa the traveller must ever be prepared for three

distinct departures—the little start, the big start, and _the_ start.

Amongst our belongings was a life-boat which we determined to tow, and

the trouble which it gave was endless. In consequence of a lecture

delivered at the United Service Institution (May 2, 1856), by Major, now

Sir Vincent, Eyre, of the Bengal Artillery, I wrote through him to Mr

Joseph Francis, of New York, whose application of iron had taken the

place of the old copper article in which Lieut. Lynch, of the United

States navy, descended the Jordan rapids. The total length, 20 feet, was

divided into seven sections, each weighing under 40 lbs. The pieces were

so numbered that experienced men could put the thing together in one

hour, and it was provided with rivets, bolts, nuts, and japanned

waterproof awning. A flat keel and a cork fender were proposed by Major

Eyre to the manufacturers, Messrs Marshall, Lefferts, and Co., and were

rejected: the former would have offered greater hindrance to the joints,

and the latter would have been only additional weight.

This life-boat, after being set up with some difficulty at Zanzibar,

accompanied us on our trip northwards. The galvanized and corrugated

iron, in longitudial furrows, like the roofing of railway stations, but

only sixpence-thick, proved far superior to the softer copper formerly

used. The Arabs, who could not sufficiently admire her graceful form,

the facility with which she was handled, and above all things, her

speed, called her the Sharrádeh, or runaway (mare). The ‘Louisa’ was

indeed sadly given to breaking her halter and to bolting. We lost her

during a storm near Mombasah, but an article so remarkable and so

useless to any but ourselves was of course easily recovered. Compelled

by want of carriage on the coast to reduce my material, I left her most

unwillingly at Zanzibar. Buoyant as graceful, fireproof, wormproof, and

waterproof, incapable of becoming nail-sick or water-logged, she would

indeed have been a Godsend upon the Tanganyika lake, sparing us long

delay, great expense, and a host of difficulties and hardships.

-----

Footnote 123:

This salt stream might have been some confusion with the salt Lake

Naivasha or Balibali, in about S. lat. 1° 40′, first laid down by the

Rev. Thomas Wakefield, ‘Routes of Native Caravans from the Coast to

the Interior of Eastern Africa, chiefly from information given by Sádi

bin Ahédi, a native of a district near Gázi (Gási?), in Udigo, a

little north of Zanzibar’ (pp. 303-339, Journal of the Royal

Geographical Society, vol. xl. 1870). Of this very valuable paper I

shall have more to say in Vol. II.

Footnote 124:

I leave these words as they were written in 1857, a time when German

nationality did not exist, and when the name of German had perhaps

reached its lowest appreciation. Throughout the history of the

nineteenth century there is nothing more striking than the change

which the last decade has worked in Europe, than the rise of the

mighty power, which in a month crushed the armies of France, and which

tore from her side the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. By an

Englishman who loves his country, nothing can be more enthusiastically

welcomed than this accession to power of a kindred people, connected

with us by language, by religion, and by all the ties which bind

nation to nation. It proves that the North is still the fecund mother

of heroes, and it justifies us in hoping that our Anglo-Teutonic

blood, with its Scandinavian ‘baptism,’ will gain new strength by the

example, and will apply itself to rival our Continental cousins in the

course of progress, and in the mighty struggle for national life and

prosperity.

Footnote 125:

Dr Ruschenberger remarked the skeletons on the beach to the North and

to the East of the Island.

APPENDIX.

THE UKARA OR UKEREWE LAKE.

A DEDUCTION FROM THE REV. MR WAKEFIELD’S ‘ROUTES.’

The following paper was read out on December 11, 1871, before a meeting

of the Royal Geographical Society, Major-General Sir Henry Rawlinson,

President of the Society, being in the chair.

Much light had been lately thrown upon the dark points of Eastern

Africa, especially those which gather round the much-vexed Ethiopic

Olympus, Kilima-njaro, by the labours of the Rev. Thomas Wakefield. This

gentleman, we are informed (Preface by Mr Samuel S. Barton, General

Mission Secretary, to ‘Footprints in Eastern Africa.’ London: Reed,

1866), was one of four missionaries sent out to Mombasah in 1861 by the

United Methodist Free Churches under charge of Dr Krapf, who first

established the now world-renowned ‘Mombas Mission.’ After a residence

of five years he published the interesting series of ‘Notes on a Visit

to the Southern Gálas’ above alluded to; and in 1866-7, accompanied by

the Rev. C. New, he marched from Mombasah to Upokomo, on the Dana river.

He is therefore an African traveller of some experience; and as he has

evidently mastered the Kisawahili tongue, he is unusually well qualified

to supervise and to correct the ‘Routes of Native Caravans from the

Coast to the Interior of Eastern Africa, chiefly from information given

by Sádi bin Ahedi, a native of a district near Gázi (Gasi Bandar?) in

Udogo, a little north of Zanzibar.’ Especially advocated by my old and

tried friend Mr Alexander Findlay, F.R.G.S., this valuable paper was

published in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society (pp. 303-339,

No. xi. Vol. xl. of 1870), and I felt somewhat surprised that the extent

of its importance has not attracted more attention in England.

I will consider this addition to our scanty knowledge of one of the most

interesting regions in tropical Africa under two heads—the philological

and the geographical.

Firstly, Mr Wakefield, like Doctors Livingstone and Kirk, all being

practical linguists, invariably uses the system of Zangian

orthography, adopted by the ‘Mombas Mission,’ and by myself since

1859. He speaks, for instance, of Kilima-njaro and Unyamwezi, not the

Monomoezi of Mr Cooley or ‘the authentic word Mueni Muezi,’ translated

landlord, or petty chief country (p. 11, The Memoir on the Lake

Regions of East Africa reviewed, &c. &c., by W. D. Cooley. London:

Stanford, 1864). We find in Mr Wakefield’s Notes (p. 316) ‘_Líma_, a

term denoting extraordinary size—Mlíma being the general term for

mountain,’ whilst (p. 321) Ki-Mrima is justly applied to the dialect

spoken on the Mrima or mainland facing Zanzibar Island. We read also

(323) ‘Mtanganyíko,[126] Kisawáhílí, meaning the place of _mingling_

or _mixture_ (rendezvous).’ This is precisely the meaning attached by

me to the Lake’s name, yet I was assured in the Memoir above alluded

to (p. 7) that nothing can be ‘more ridiculous’ than my explanation of

Tanganyika. Even in philological details of the Kisawahili dialect Mr

Wakefield agrees with me. He writes, for instance, Udogo (Notes, p.

313), Ugala (Footprints, p. 67, 68), and Ulangulo (Ibid. p. 63). I was

assured in the Memoir (p. 9) that U is prefixed to the names of

countries only by Dr Krapf and Captain Burton—this, too, after I had

for years been talking of Europe as Uzungu, literally, Land of white

men. Mr Wakefield speaks of Wasămbá, of Wasawahili (or Wa-Sawahili),

and of Wanyamwezi, thus sanctioning the use of Wamrima, continental

men, and Wakilima, hill-men. He adopts Kisawahili, Kikwavi, Kimasai,

and so forth, prefixing an adjectival particle ‘Ki’ to the root, and

denoting chiefly dialect, yet I was assured by Mr Cooley (Memoir, p.

9) that ‘Ki’ has never an adjectival form. I may now invite the author

of Inner Africa Laid Open to revise the verdict (Memoir, p. 7) which

pronounces me ‘totally ignorant’ of the language of which I affect to

be master.

It may be deemed trivial to dwell upon these philological minutiæ, but,

firstly, nothing is unimportant when it affects the accuracy of a

traveller, especially of an explorer, in the smallest matters of detail.

Secondly, without an exact nomenclature all topographical literature

must be imperfect and of scant value. And, finally, as Mr Cooley and I

have been differing upon these points for the last ten years, it is well

that the portion of the public which takes an interest in the subject

should see who is right and who is not. I have no personal feeling in

the matter; and if the ‘Geographer of N’yassi’ will bring, as I have

done, independent testimony to bear upon the points in question, and not

evolve his learning out of the depths of his self-consciousness, I am at

all times ready and willing to own myself wrong.

Far more important and generally interesting, however, is the

geographical knowledge brought home or rather confirmed to us by Mr

Wakefield’s ‘Routes.’ We now know that the block whose apices are Mounts

Kilima-njaro and Kenia (alias Doenyo Ebor, Mont Blanc) to be a great

upland, bounded on the South by the Panga-ni river in S. lat. 5°, and on

the N. West by a lacustrine region in S. lat. 6°; whilst it may possibly

anastomose to the North, as was suggested by my friend Dr Beke, with the

Highlands of Harar and of Moslem Abyssinia, lying upon the same

meridian. The breadth between N. West and S. East will be included

between East long. (G.) 37° and 39°. Assuming, therefore, roughly the

bounding lines to measure 240 by 120 direct geographical miles—we obtain

a superficies of 28,800 square geographical miles, more than a fourth of

the area assigned to the British Islands. We can now safely believe,

with Dr Krapf and Mr Rebmann, the explorers, that the block is a high

volcanic country, separating the watershed of the Nilotic Basin from

that of the Indian Ocean; sending off, like the Highlands of Abyssinia,

its own tributary or tributaries to the White river, and corresponding

with the Camarones or Theōn Ochēma in West Africa (N. lat. 4°); that it

is a land of high plains and thickly forested hills, rising to summits

capped, not with delomite and quartz, but with glaciers and eternal

snows; and that it abounds in the lakes and swamps, sweet and salt,

necessary to feed the inland ‘smoke mountains’ or volcanoes,[127] whose

existence before appeared so problematical. And now the two mighty

summits, Kilima-njaro, explored by the late lamented Baron von der

Decken and Doenyo Ebor, reported to Dr Krapf under the alias Kenia or

Kirenia, and unexpectedly confirmed by fresh evidence, have obtained

local habitations as well as names.

But the interest of Mr Wakefield’s Routes culminates in the fact that

they show even to a certainty the existence of a lake before unknown,

and they lead to the conclusion that the area of 29,900 square

geographical miles, assigned to the so-called Victoria Nyanza, contains

at least four and probably a greater number of separate waters; that it

is, in fact, not a Lake, but a Lake Region.

Mr Keith Johnston observes (p. 333), ‘It is remarkable that not one

single name of a district, people, or place (with the exception of that

of the Wamasai, a general name for the people of the white region west

of the Lake)[128] given in these new routes has any such remote

resemblance to names reported by Speke and Burton as to warrant any

identification with any one of them.’ The reason will presently appear

in the fact that we are speaking of different waters. The annotator

further observes (p. 333) that ‘the arguments which Captain Burton used

in recommending a division of the Nyanza had not a sufficient basis of

proof to give them moment, as is shown by the acceptance of the Lake as

one sheet by the whole geographical world.’

The mapper will readily understand that it is much more sightly and

convenient to have a basin neatly outlined, and margined sky-blue, like

the Damascus swamps, than to split it into fragments as I did. A volume

published by the late Mr Macqueen and myself (The Nile Basin. London:

Tinsleys, 1864), offered a sketch of what was actually seen by the

second expedition, and the aspect of disjecta membra was not inviting.

Afterwards, however (p. 334), Mr Johnston remarks, ‘Captain Burton’s

recommendation would seem to receive some slight support from the new

information obtained by Mr Wakefield.’ To this I would add that his

language might have been less hesitating, as these ‘Routes,’ so

important to the geography of Eastern Africa, at once establish the

existence of two lakes wholly independent of the so-called Victoria

Nyanza.

The first is that which we named from hearsay Bahari ya Ngo, contracted

to Bahari Ngo, sea or water of Ngo(-land). In the atlas of Mercator

(Gerhard Kauffmann) we find it written Barcena for Barenca or Barenga.

Mr Wakefield prefers (324) Baringo, meaning a ‘canoe,’ and ‘possibly so

called from its form.’ I shall follow his example, at the same time

observing that African negroes rarely adopt such general and

comprehensive views of larger features or venture upon such comparisons

unless they can command a birds-eye glance at the prospect. Route No. 5,

from ‘Lake Nyanza’ to Lake Baringo, conclusively proves that the latter

is not ‘a sort-of backwater’ connected with the former ‘by a strait, at

the same distance from the East of Ripon Falls as the Katenga river is

to the West.’ Nor is it a ‘vast salt marsh’ without effluent: the saline

water has evidently been confused with the lately reported Lake

Naïrvasha or Balibali lying S. West of Doenyo Ebor. Native description

supplies the Baringo with the Northern Nyarus—the southern effluent of

the same name being clearly an influent. Nyarus thus corresponds with

the old Thumbiri, Tubirih, and Meri, afterwards called Achua, Usua, and

Asua, words probably corrupted from Nyarus.

The map of 1864, printed by Mr now Sir Samuel Baker in the Proceedings

of the Royal Geographical Society, affirms the Asua to have been a dry

channel 150 yards wide when he crossed it, in Jan. 9, 1864, but rolling

15 feet deep in the wet season. He can hardly be speaking of the drain

from the Baringo Lake, which must be large and perennial, and which

therefore must be sought farther north, unless it anastomoses with some

other stream. M. d’Arnaud, the French engineer sent in 1840-1841 by

Mohammed Ali Pasha to explore the Upper Nile, reported (Journal Royal

Geographical Society, vol. xviii. p. 73) that about 30 leagues south of

where the expedition was stopped by shallow water in N. lat. 4° 42′ 42″,

and therefore in N. lat. 3° 12′, the several branches unite, the chief

one flowing from the east.

[Illustration: Nº 1 BURTON & SPEKE. _May 1858_]

[Illustration: Nº 2 SPEKE. 1859]

[Illustration: Nº 3 SPEKE & GRANT. 1863]

[Illustration: Nº 4 SIR S. W. BAKER. 1864]

The Baringo Palus must act reservoir to the whole N. Western declivities

of Doenyo Ebor, whose snows have given it a name. Ptolemy (iv. 8)

distinctly mentions the χίονας, or (melted) snows which feed the Nile;

and though he places them in S. lat. 12° 30′, he is correct as to the

existence of snowy feeders. Some years ago a Swiss traveller drew my

attention to the fact that glacier-water would explain the term White

river as opposed to Blue river. The quantity of melted snow or glacier-

water which finds its way to the true Nile may be comparatively

inconsiderable, but that little may perhaps modify the colourless

complexion of rain-water when its suspended matter has been deposited,

and distinguish it from the pure azure of a stream issuing from a Lake

Geneva. In 1857 Captain Speke, an experienced Himalayan, easily

detected, when drinking from the Pangar-ni or Rúfu river, the rough

flavour of snow water.

More important, however, than Baringo is the new Lake announced to us by

Mr Wakefield’s African Pandit, Sádi bin Ahedi. The latter ignoring

Nyanza, calls it Nyanja, possibly a dialectic variety, and therefore a

difference neither to be dwelt upon too much nor wholly to be neglected.

Of greater value is the name Bahari ya Pili, or Second Sea, not called

so, we are expressly informed, because inland of the First Sea—Indian

Ocean—but evidently because leading to a neighbouring water on the west.

Most suggestive of all, and therefore adopted by me, is the term ‘Bahari

ya Ukara,’ or Sea of Ukara, the latter being the region on the Eastern

shore. Here we detect the true origin of the ancient Garava, and of

Captain Speke’s Ukewere, which he applied to a peninsula projecting from

the Eastern shore, and which the Wanyamwezi, translating ‘island water,’

gave to the Oriental portion of the so-called Victoria Nyanza.

Respecting the length of the Ukara Lake, Sádi was informed that it could

be crossed by canoes in 6 full days, paddling from sunrise to sunset;

but if the men went on night and day, the voyage is to be accomplished

in three days. Now the native craft used upon these dangerous plateau-

waters never dare to cross them: the voyager may rush over the narrow

parts of the Tanganyika Lake, but of course he would not attempt the

physical impossibility of navigating without chart or compass beyond

sight of land. It is impossible to believe in a canoe-cruise of 6 days

across the lake: it is evident that a coasting-cruise is meant. The

total of hours, allowing the day to be 12, and without halts, would be

72. Upon the Tanganyika I estimated the rate at a little more than 2

knots an hour. Thus, in round numbers, we have 145 miles, which probably

require reduction: an estimate of the mean amount of error distributed

on the whole of Mr Wakefield’s ‘Routes’ gives, according to the

annotator, an exaggeration of 1.24 : 1.0; and of course, when estimating

the length of these distant and dangerous navigations, exaggeration

would be excessive. We may, therefore, fairly assume the semi-

circumference of the Ukara Lake at 120 miles, and the total

circumference at 240. Sádi, we are told (p. 309), made Bahari-ni on the

Eastern shore the terminus of his long journey from Tanga Bandar to the

‘Lake Nyanza’ (Nyanja?). Let us protract the full 145 miles as the

exceptional rate of 3 knots an hour upon Captain Speke’s last map,

without allowing anything for the sinuosities of the coast, and the end

would strike the entrance of ‘Jordan Nullah’ off the ‘Bengal

Archipelago,’ about half the width of the so-called ‘Victoria Nyanza.’

As regards the breadth of the Ukara Lake, we read (p. 310), ‘Standing on

the Eastern shore, Sádi said he could descry nothing of land in a

western direction, except the very faint outline of a mountain summit,

far, far away on the horizon.’ This passage is again suggestive. The

sandy and level Eastern shore of the Nyanja (i. e. water) or Ukara Lake

about Bahari-ni, whence Sádi sighted, it is probably in E. long. (G.)

35° 15′. The easternmost, that is, the nearest, point of the Karagwah,

or, as Captain Speke writes it, the Karague Highlands, is in E. long.

(G.) 32° 30′. Thus the minimum width is 165 miles, whilst man’s vision

under such circumstances would hardly cover a dozen. Here, again, we

have room for a First as well as for a Second Sea. Mr Johnston suggests

that the mountain-summit in question might be an island rising high in

the midst of the Lake; but, he adds, such a feature could not well have

been missed entirely by Captain Speke. Here I join issue with him for

reasons which can be deduced from these pages—my companion and second in

command never saw or heard of the Ukara Lake. But it is highly

improbable that those who could tell Sádi the number of days required to

cross or to coast along the Lake would not have known whether the summit

was that of a mountain on terra firma or of a lacustrine islet. The

latter feature is not unfamiliar to Mr Wakefield’s informant: he does

not fail to mention (p. 324) the small conical hill in the southern

waters of the Baringo Lake.

When Sádi declared that ‘he travelled 60 days (marches?) along the shore

without perceiving any signs of its termination,’ he evidently spoke

wildly, as Africans will. His assertion that the natives with whom he

conversed were unable to give him any information about its northern or

southern limit, simply means that in this part of the African interior

neither caravans nor individuals trust themselves in strange lands,

especially with the prospect of meeting such dangerous plunderers as the

Wasuku. Similarly a ‘two months’ journey’ and ‘going to Egypt,’ asserted

by ‘all authorities without exception, African and Arab,’ signify

nothing but the total ignorance of the informant concerning the country

a few leagues beyond his home. A lake 120 miles in length, that is to

say, even a little smaller than the Baringo is supposed to be, will

amply satisfy all requirements in this matter.

Finally, we have Sádi’s report that 8 or 9 years ago (before 1867?) the

Ukara Lake was navigated by Europeans. Certain very white men, we are

told, who bought only short ivories (Serivellos), refusing long tusks,

and who purchased large quantities of eggs—Africans have learnt by some

curious process to connect Europeans with oöphagy—came up in a large

vessel, carrying three masts and another in front (bowsprit?), with many

white cloths (sails). The event took place only a month and a half

before he reached the Lake, and it is described with an exactness of

detail which seems to vouch for its truth. If this be a fact, it is

clear that the Nyanja cannot be Captain Speke’s Nyanza, and that the

visitors could not have made it viâ his ‘White Nile,’ with its immense

and manifold obstructions. But it may be that of which he heard

(Journal, p. 333) from the ‘Kidi officers,’ who reported a high mountain

to rise behind the Asua (Nyarus?) river, and a lake navigated by the

Gallas in very large vessels. We now understand why the ‘King’ Mtesa

(Ibid. p. 294) offered to send the traveller home (to Zanzibar) in one

month by a frequented route, doubtless through the Wamasai and other

tribes living between the Nyanja and the Nyanza. Thus Irungu of Uganda

(Ibid. p. 187) expressed his surprise that Captain Speke had come all

the way round to that country, when he could have taken the short and

safe direct route up the mid-length of his own lake—viâ Umasai and

Usoga, by which an Arab caravan had travelled.

The Ukara Lake will be found laid down (A.D. 1712) in the Africa of John

Senex, F.R.S. (quoted by the late Mr John Hogg, F.R.S., ‘On some old

maps of Africa, in which the central equatorial lakes are laid down

nearly in their true positions’). It is evidently the Garava of Mercator

(A.D. 1623), whose atlas supplies it with a northern effluent draining

to the Nile. The ‘Couir’ of D’Anville’s folio atlas (A.D. 1749), and

placed where the Lake No and the Bahr el Ghazal actually exist, may be a

confusion with the equatorial Lake Kura Kawar, given by Ja’afar Mohammed

bin Musa el Khwarazmi (A.D. 833) in the Rasm el Arzi, published in

Lelawel’s Géographie du Moyen Age (Brussels, 1850), and, like Garava,

both may be derived from Ukara.

The third water is evidently the Nyanza of which I first heard at Kazah

of Unyamwezi, whence Captain Speke was despatched on a reconnoitre

between July 29 and August 25, 1858. After returning, he reported that

this lake being nearly flush with the surface of the level country to

the south, bears signs of overflowing for some 13 miles during the

rains. The second expedition found no traces of flood on the marshy

lands to the North and the N. West of the so-called ‘Victoria Nyanza.’

This fact, combined with a difference of level amounting to 400 feet in

the surface of the two waters, speaks for itself. We are justified in

suspecting a fourth lake, or broadening of a river along whose banks

Captain Speke and Grant travelled northward to Uganda, and there must be

more than one, if all his effluents be correctly laid down.

Briefly to resume: Mr Wakefield’s very valuable ‘Routes’ teach us these

novelties:

1. That the Baringo is a Lake distinct from the so-called Victoria

Nyanza; that it has a northern effluent, the Nyarus, and consequently

that its waters are sweet.

2. That the Nyanja, Ukara, Ukerewe, Garava or Bahari ya Pili, is a long

narrow formation like the Baringo, perhaps 20 miles broad, with 240 of

circumference, and possibly drained to the White River or true Nile by a

navigable channel.

And I have long ago come to the following conclusions:

1. That the 30,000 square miles representing upon our maps the area of

the so-called Victoria Nyanza represent not a lake, but a Lake Region.

2. That the Victoria Nyanza Proper is a water—possibly a swamp—distinct

from the two mentioned above, flooding the lands to the south, showing

no sign of depth and swelling during the hot season of the Nile, and

vice versâ.

3. That the Northern and N. Western portions of the so-called ‘Victoria

Nyanza’ must be divided into sundry independent broads or lakes, one of

them marshy, reed-margined, and probably shallow, in order to account

for three large effluents within a little more than 60 miles.

I cannot finish these lines without expressing my gratitude to Mr

Wakefield for the interesting information with which he supplied us. He

has returned to his labours at Mombasah, amongst the Wasawahili and the

Wanyika, and as he has, I am assured by my friend Captain George, R. N.,

qualified himself to take astronomical observations, we may rest assured

that with his aid the ‘Mombas Mission’ will lose nothing of its well-won

fame for linguistic study and African exploration.

END OF VOL. I.

---------------------

JOHN CHILDS AND SON, PRINTERS.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Transcriber’s Note

The word ‘seaboard’ appears both hyphenated and unhyphenated.

The word ‘Kipiní’ on p. 387 is likely to be an error for ‘Kipini’.

On page 397, the printed Arabic word محکمّه) does not match the

Romanization. A reading as محكّمه does.

My thanks to Olive and Manny for providing assistance with the rendering

of the Arabic words and phrases.

Errors deemed most likely to be the printer’s have been corrected, and

are noted here. The references are to the page and line in the original.

6.30 [‘]And see the twain Added.

45.15 the Gulf of Cambay.[’] Added.

58.6 a subscrip[t]ion for exploring Inserted.

63.25 (Map of the Lake Region of Eastern Africa[)] Added.

126.20 to the [‘]Roman Port’ Inserted.

127.13 ‘Shirazían[’] dynasty Added

(probably).

129.5 (S. lat. 10° 41′ 2”[)] Added.

129.25 [‘]men (des hommes):’ Added.

131.21 Zeramu, and Gogo.[’] Added.

131.35 with other words.[’] Added.

174.7 and in 1856 [i/o]n August 26. Replaced.

178.13 the inevitable ‘seasoning fever[’] Added.

197.21 (Viverra civetta, and V. genetta)[./,] one Replaced.

small,

248.26 and ran a[.] vein of silver Removed.

279.4 after touching at Makdish[ú/u] Replaced.

300.26 It began, ‘Yá Dayyus! yá Mal’ún[’], Added.

387.14 with leaden ‘Kipin[í/i’] (in the plural Replaced.

‘Vipini’)

393.27 for [t]he occasion Restored.

397.26 (محکمّه>) perhaps

محكّمه