that, in appearance, it had remained just as it was four hundred
years before. There is no decay, no ruins, no sign of disuse; it is,
on the contrary, clean and brilliantly beautiful in color, with
dancing blue waters all about it, and with enormous palms moving
above the towering white walls and red tiled roofs, but it is a city
of the dead. The open-work iron doors, with locks as large as
letter-boxes, are closed, the wooden window-shutters are barred, and
the wares in the shops are hidden from the sidewalk by heavy
curtains. There is a park filled with curious trees and with flowers
of gorgeous color, but the park is as deserted as a cemetery; along
the principal streets stretch mosaic pavements formed of great
blocks of white and black stone, they look like elongated
checker-boards, but no one walks upon them, and though there are
palaces painted blue, and government buildings in Pompeiian red, and
churches in chaste gray and white, there are no sentries to guard
the palaces, nor no black-robed priests enter or leave the
churches. They are like the palaces of a theatre, set on an empty
stage, and waiting for the actors. It will be a long time before the
actors come to Mozambique. It is, and will remain, a city of the
fifteenth century. It is now only a relic of a cruel and barbarous
period, when the Portuguese governors, the "gentlemen adventurers,"
and the Arab slave-dealers, under its blue skies, and hidden within
its barred and painted walls, led lives of magnificent debauchery,
when the tusks of ivory were piled high along its water-front, and
the dhows at anchor reeked with slaves, and when in the
market-place, where the natives now sit bargaining over a bunch of
bananas or a basket of dried fish, their forefathers were themselves
bought and sold.
In the five hundred years in which he has claimed the shore line of
East Africa from south of Lorenço Marquez to north of Mozambique,
and many hundreds of miles inland, the Portuguese has been the dog
in the manger among nations. In all that time he has done nothing to
help the land or the people whom he pretends to protect, and he
keeps those who would improve both from gaining any hold or
influence over either. It is doubtful if his occupation of the East
Coast can endure much longer. The English and the Germans now
surround him on every side. Even handicapped as they are by the lack
of the seaports which he enjoys, they have forced their way into the
country which lies beyond his and which bounds his on every side.
They have opened up this country with little railroads, with lonely
lengths of telegraph wires, and with their launches and gunboats
they have joined, by means of the Zambesi and Chinde Rivers, new
territories to the great Indian Ocean. His strip of land, which bars
them from the sea, is still unsettled and unsafe, its wealth
undeveloped, its people untamed. He sits at his café at the coast
and collects custom-dues and sells stamped paper. For fear of the
native he dares not march five miles beyond his sea-port town, and
the white men who venture inland for purposes of trade or to
cultivate plantations do so at their own risk, he can promise them
no protection.
The land back of Mozambique is divided into "holdings," and the rent
of each holding is based upon the number of native huts it
contains. The tax per hut is one pound a year, and these holdings
are leased to any Portuguese who promises to pay the combined taxes
of all the huts. He also engages to cut new roads, to keep those
already made in repair, and to furnish a sufficient number of police
to maintain order. The lessees of these holdings have given rise to
many and terrible scandals. In the majority of cases, the lessee,
once out of reach of all authority and of public opinion, and
wielding the power of life and death, becomes a tyrant and
task-master over his district, taxing the natives to five and ten
times the amount which each is supposed to furnish, and treating
them virtually as his bondsmen. Up along the Shire River, the
lessees punish the blacks by hanging them from a tree by their
ankles and beating their bare backs with rhinoceros hide, until, as
it has been described to me by a reputable English resident, the
blood runs in a stream over the negro's shoulders, and forms a pool
beneath his eyes.
[Illustration: The Ivory on the Right, Covered Only with Sacking,
Is Ready for Shipment to Boston, U.S.A.]
You hear of no legitimate enterprise fostered by these lessees, of
no development of natural resources, but, instead, you are told
tales of sickening cruelty, and you can read in the consular
reports others quite as true; records of heartless treatment of
natives, of neglect of great resources, and of hurried snatching at
the year's crop and a return to the Coast, with nothing to show of
sustained effort or steady development. The incompetence of Portugal
cannot endure. Now that England has taken the Transvaal from the
Boer, she will find the seaport of Lorenço Marquez too necessary to
her interests to much longer leave it in the itching palms of the
Portuguese officials. Beira she also needs to feed Rhodesia, and the
Zambesi and Chinde Rivers to supply the British Central African
Company. Farther north, the Germans will find that if they mean to
make German Central Africa pay, they must control the seaboard. It
seems inevitable that, between the two great empires, the little
kingdom of Portugal will be crowded out, and having failed to
benefit either herself or anyone else on the East Coast, she will
withdraw from it, in favor of those who are fitter to survive her.
There is no more interesting contrast along the coast of East
Africa than that presented by the colonies of England, Germany, and
Portugal. Of these three, the colonies of the Englishmen are, as one
expects to find them, the healthiest, the busiest, and the most
prosperous. They thrive under your very eyes; you feel that they
were established where they are, not by accident, not to gratify a
national vanity or a ruler's ambition, but with foresight and with
knowledge, and with the determination to make money; and that they
will increase and flourish because they are situated where the
natives and settlers have something to sell, and where the men can
bring, in return, something the natives and colonials wish to buy.
Port Elizabeth, Durban, East London, and Zanzibar belong to this
prosperous class, which gives good reason for the faith of those who
founded them.
On the other hand, as opposed to these, there are the settlements of
the Portuguese, rotten and corrupt, and the German settlements of
Dar Es Salaam and Tanga which have still to prove their right to
exist. Outwardly, to the eye, they are model settlements. Dar Es
Salaam, in particular, is a beautiful and perfectly appointed
colonial town. In the care in which it is laid out, in the
excellence of its sanitary arrangements, in its cleanliness, and in
the magnificence of its innumerable official residences, and in
their sensible adaptability to the needs of the climate, one might
be deceived into believing that Dar Es Salaam is the beautiful
gateway of a thriving and busy colony. But there are no ramparts of
merchandise along her wharves, no bulwarks of strangely scented
bales blocking her water-front; no lighters push hurriedly from the
shore to meet the ship, although she is a German ship, or to receive
her cargo of articles "made in Germany." On the contrary, her
freight is unloaded at the English ports, and taken on at English
ports. And the German traders who send their merchandise to Hamburg
in her hold come over the side at Zanzibar, at Durban, and at Aden,
where the English merchants find in them fierce competitors. There
is nothing which goes so far to prove the falsity of the saying that
"trade follows the flag" as do these model German colonies with
their barracks, governor's palace, officers' clubs, public pleasure
parks, and with no trade; and the English colonies, where the German
merchants remain, and where, under the English flag, they grow
steadily rich. The German Emperor, believing that colonies are a
source of strength to an empire, rather than the weakness that they
are, has raised the German flag in Central East Africa, but the
ships of the German East African Company, subsidized by him, carry
their merchandize to the English ports, and his German subjects
remain where they can make the most money. They do not move to those
ports where the flag of their country would wave over them.
Dar Es Salaam, although it lacks the one thing needful to make it a
model settlement, possesses all the other things which are needful,
and many which are pure luxuries. Its residences, as I have said,
have been built after the most approved scientific principles of
ventilation and sanitation. In no tropical country have I seen
buildings so admirably adapted to the heat and climatic changes and
at the same time more in keeping with the surrounding scenery. They
are handsome, cool-looking, white and clean, with broad verandas,
high walls, and false roofs under which currents of air are lured in
spite of themselves. The residences are set back along the high bank
which faces the bay. In front of them is a public promenade, newly
planted shade-trees arch over it, and royal palms reach up to it
from the very waters of the harbor. At one end of this semicircle
are the barracks of the Soudanese soldiers, and at the other is the
official palace of the governor. Everything in the settlement is
new, and everything is built on the scale of a city, and with the
idea of accommodating a great number of people. Hotels and cafés,
better than any one finds in the older settlements along the coast,
are arranged on the water-front, and there is a church capable of
seating the entire white population at one time. If the place is to
grow, it can do so only through trade, and when trade really comes
all these palaces and cafés and barracks which occupy the entire
water-front will have to be pushed back to make way for warehouses
and custom-house sheds. At present it is populated only by
officials, and, I believe, twelve white women.
[Illustration: The Late Sultan of Zanzibar in His State Carriage.]
You feel that it is an experiment, that it has been sent out like a
box of children's building blocks, and set up carefully on this
beautiful harbor. All that Dar Es Salaam needs now is trade and
emigrants. At present it is a show place, and might be exhibited at
a world's fair as an example of a model village.
In writing of Zanzibar I am embarrassed by the knowledge that I am
not an unprejudiced witness. I fell in love with Zanzibar at first
sight, and the more I saw of it the more I wanted to take my luggage
out of the ship's hold and cable to my friends to try and have me
made Vice-Consul to Zanzibar through all succeeding administrations.
Zanzibar runs back abruptly from a white beach in a succession of
high white walls. It glistens and glares, and dazzles you; the sand
at your feet is white, the city itself is white, the robes of the
people are white. It has no public landing-pier. Your rowboat is run
ashore on a white shelving beach, and you face an impenetrable mass
of white walls. The blue waters are behind you, the lofty
fortress-like façade before you, and a strip of white sand is at
your feet.
And while you are wondering where this hidden city may be, a kind
resident takes you by the hand and pilots you through a narrow crack
in the rampart, along a twisting fissure between white-washed walls
where the sun cannot reach, past great black doorways of carved oak,
and out suddenly into the light and laughter and roar of Zanzibar.
In the narrow streets are all the colors of the Orient, gorgeous,
unshaded, and violent; cobalt blue, greens, and reds on framework,
windows, and doorways; red and yellow in the awnings and curtains of
the bazaars, and orange and black, red and white, yellow, dark blue,
and purple, in the long shawls of the women. It is the busiest, and
the brightest and richest in color of all the ports along the East
African coast. Were it not for its narrow streets and its towering
walls it would be a place of perpetual sunshine. Everybody is either
actively busy, or contentedly idle. It is all movement, noise, and
glitter, everyone is telling everyone else to make way before him;
the Indian merchants beseech you from the open bazaars; their
children, swathed in gorgeous silks and hung with jewels and
bangles, stumble under your feet, the Sultan's troops assail you
with fife and drum, and the black women, wrapped below their bare
shoulders in the colors of the butterfly, and with teeth and brows
dyed purple, crowd you to the wall. Outside the city there are long
and wonderful roads between groves of the bulky mango-tree of
richest darkest green and the bending palm, shading deserted palaces
of former Sultans, temples of the Indian worshippers, native huts,
and the white-walled country residences and curtained verandas of
the white exiles. It is absurd to write them down as exiles, for it
is a Mohammedan Paradise to which they have been exiled.
The exiles themselves will tell you that the reason you think
Zanzibar is a paradise, is because you have your steamer ticket in
your pocket. But that retort shows their lack of imagination, and a
vast ingratitude to those who have preceded them. For the charm of
Zanzibar lies in the fact that while the white men have made it
healthy and clean, have given it good roads, good laws, protection
for the slaves, quick punishment for the slave-dealers, and a firm
government under a benign and gentle Sultan, they have done all of
this without destroying one flash of its local color, or one throb
of its barbaric life, which is the showy, sunshiny, and sumptuous
life of the Far East. The good things of civilization are there, but
they are unobtrusive, and the evils of civilization appear not at
all, the native does not wear a derby hat with a kimona, as he does
in Japan, nor offer you souvenirs of Zanzibar manufactured in
Birmingham; Reuter's telegrams at the club and occasional steamers
alone connect his white masters with the outer world, and so
infrequent is the visiting stranger that the local phrase-book for
those who wish to converse in the native tongue is compiled chiefly
for the convenience of midshipmen when searching a slave-dhow.
[Illustration: H.S.H. Hamud bin Muhamad bin Said, the Late Sultan
of Zanzibar.]
Zanzibar is an "Arabian Nights" city, a comic-opera capital, a most
difficult city to take seriously. There is not a street, or any
house in any street, that does not suggest in its architecture and
decoration the untrammelled fancy of the scenic artist. You feel
sure that the latticed balconies are canvas, that the white adobe
walls are supported from behind by braces, that the sunshine is a
carbon light, that the chorus of boatmen who hail you on landing
will reappear immediately costumed as the Sultan's body-guard, that
the women bearing water-jars on their shoulders will come on in the
next scene as slaves of the harem, and that the national anthem will
prove to be Sousa's Typical Tune of Zanzibar.
Several hundred years ago the Sultans of Zanzibar grew powerful and
wealthy through exporting slaves and ivory from the mainland. These
were not two separate industries, but one was developed by the other
and was dependent upon it. The procedure was brutally simple. A
slave-trader, having first paid his tribute to the Sultan, crossed
to the mainland, and marching into the interior made his bargain
with one of the local chiefs for so much ivory, and for so many men
to carry it down to the coast. Without some such means of transport
there could have been no bargain, so the chief who was anxious to
sell would select a village which had not paid him the taxes due
him, and bid the trader help himself to what men he found there.
Then would follow a hideous night attack, a massacre of women and
children, and the taking prisoners of all able-bodied males. These
men, chained together in long lines, and each bearing a heavy tooth
of ivory upon his shoulder, would be whipped down to the coast. It
was only when they had carried the ivory there, and their work was
finished, that the idea presented itself of selling them as well as
the ivory. Later, these bearers became of equal value with the
ivory, and the raiding of native villages and the capture of men and
women to be sold into slavery developed into a great industry. The
industry continues fitfully to-day, but it is carried on under great
difficulties, and at a risk of heavy punishments. What is called
"domestic slavery" is recognized on the island of Zanzibar, the vast
clove plantations which lie back of the port employing many hundreds
of these domestic slaves. It is not to free these from their slight
bondage that the efforts of those who are trying to suppress the
slave-trade is to-day directed, but to prevent others from being
added to their number. What slave-trading there is at present is by
Arabs and Indians. They convey the slaves in dhows from the mainland
to Madagascar, Arabia, or southern Persia, and to the Island of
Pemba, which lies north of Zanzibar, and only fifteen miles from the
mainland. If a slave can be brought this short distance in safety he
can be sold for five hundred dollars; on the mainland he is not
worth more than fifteen dollars. The channels, and the mouths of
rivers, and the little bays opening from the Island of Pemba are
patrolled more or less regularly by British gunboats, and junior
officers in charge of a cutter and a crew of half a dozen men, are
detached from these for a few months at a time on "boat service." It
seems to be an unprofitable pursuit, for one officer told me that
during his month of boat service he had boarded and searched three
hundred dhows, which is an average of ten a day, and found slaves on
only one of them. But as, on this occasion, he rescued four slaves,
and the slavers, moreover, showed fight, and wounded him and two of
his boat's crew, he was more than satisfied.
The trade in ivory, which has none of these restrictions upon it,
still flourishes, and the cool, dark warerooms of Zanzibar are
stored high with it. In a corner of one little cellar they showed
us twenty-five thousand dollars worth of these tusks piled up as
carelessly as though they were logs in a wood-shed. One of the most
curious sights in Zanzibar is a line of Zanzibari boys, each
balancing a great tusk on his shoulder, worth from five hundred to
two thousand dollars, and which is unprotected except for a piece of
coarse sacking.
[Illustration: A German "Factory" at Tanga, the Store Below, the
Living Apartments Above.]
The largest exporters of ivory in the world are at Zanzibar, and
though probably few people know it, the firm which carries on this
business belongs to New York City, and has been in the ivory trade
with India and Africa from as far back as the fifties. In their
house at Zanzibar they have entertained every distinguished African
explorer, and the stories its walls have heard of native wars,
pirate dhows, slave-dealers, the English occupation, and terrible
marches through the jungles of the Congo, would make valuable and
picturesque history. The firm has always held a semi-official
position, for the reason that the United States Consul at Zanzibar,
who should speak at least Swahili and Portuguese, is invariably
chosen for the post from a drug-store in Yankton, Dakota, or a
post-office in Canton, Ohio. Consequently, on arriving at Zanzibar
he becomes homesick, and his first official act is to cable his
resignation, and the State Department instructs whoever happens to
be general manager of the ivory house to perform the duties of
acting-consul. So, the ivory house has nearly always held the eagle
of the consulate over its doorway. The manager of the ivory house,
who at the time of our visit was also consul, is Harris Robbins
Childs. Mr. Childs is well known in New York City, is a member of
many clubs there, and speaks at least five languages. He understands
the native tongue of Zanzibar so well that when the Prime Minister
of the Sultan took us to the palace to pay our respects, Childs
talked the language so much better than did the Sultan's own Prime
Minister that there was in consequence much joking and laughing. The
Sultan then was a most dignified, intelligent, and charming old
gentleman. He was popular both with his own people, who loved him
with a religious fervor, and with the English, who unobtrusively
conducted his affairs.
There have been sultans who have acted less wisely than does Hamud
bin Muhamad bin Said. A few years ago one of these, Said Khaled,
defied the British Empire as represented by several gunboats, and
dared them to fire on his ship of war, a tramp steamer which he had
converted into a royal yacht. The gunboats were anchored about two
hundred yards from the palace, which stands at the water's edge, and
at the time agreed upon, they sank the Sultan's ship of war in the
short space of three minutes, and in a brief bombardment destroyed
the greater part of his palace. The ship of war still rests where
she sank, and her topmasts peer above the water only three hundred
yards distant from the windows of the new palace. They serve as a
constant warning to all future sultans.
The new palace is of somewhat too modern architecture, and is not
nearly as dignified as are the massive white walls of the native
houses which surround it. But within it is a fairy palace, hung with
silk draperies, tapestries, and hand-painted curtains; the floors
are covered with magnificent rugs from Persia and India, and the
reception-room is crowded with treasures of ebony, ivory, lacquer
work, and gold and silver. There were two thrones made of silver
dragons, with many scales, and studded with jewels. The Sultan did
not seem to mind our openly admiring his treasures, and his
attendants, who stood about him in gorgeous-colored silks heavy with
gold embroideries, were evidently pleased with the deep impression
they made upon the visitors. The Sultan was very gentle and
courteous and human, especially in the pleasure he took over his son
and heir, who then was at school in England, and who, on the death
of his father, succeeded him. He seemed very much gratified when we
suggested that there was no better training-place for a boy than an
English public school; as Americans, he thought our opinion must be
unprejudiced. Before he sent us away, he gave Childs, and each of
us, a photograph of himself, one of which is reproduced in this
book.
Our next port was the German settlement of Tanga. We arrived there
just as a blood-red sun was setting behind great and gloomy
mountains. The place itself was bathed in damp hot vapors, and
surrounded even to the water's edge by a steaming jungle. It was
more like what we expected Africa to be than was any other place we
had visited, and the proper touch of local color was supplied by a
trader, who gave as his reason for leaving us so early in the
evening that he needed sleep, as on the night before at his camp
three lions had kept him awake until morning.
[Illustration: Soudanese Soldiers Under a German Officer Outside of
Tanga.]
The bubonic plague prevented our landing at other ports. We saw them
only through field-glasses from the ship's side, so that there is,
in consequence, much that I cannot write of the East Coast of
Africa. But the trip, which allows one merely to nibble at the
Coast, is worth taking again when the bubonic plague has passed
away. It was certainly worth taking once. If I have failed to make
that apparent, the fault lies with the writer. It is certainly not
the fault of the East Coast, not the fault of the Indian Ocean, that
"sets and smiles, so soft, so bright, so blooming blue," or of the
exiles and "remittance men," or of the engineers who are building
the railroad from Cape Town to Cairo, or of any lack of interest
which the East Coast presents in its problem of trade, of conquest,
and of, among nations, the survival of the fittest.