lagenaria supplies every utensil except those used for cooking; its many
and various adaptations render it a valuable production. The people
train it to grow in the most fantastic shapes, and ornament it by
tatooing with dark paint, and by patterns worked in brass tacks and
wires; where it splits, it is artistically sewn together. The larger
kinds serve as well-buckets, water-pots, travelling-canteens, churns,
and the sounding-boards of musical instruments: a hookah, or water-pipe,
is made by distorting the neck, and the smaller varieties are converted
into snuff-boxes, medicine-cases, and unguent-pots. The fruit of the
calabash-tree is also called buyu: split and dried it is used as ladles,
but it is too small to answer all the purposes of the gourd.
The East Africans excel in the manufacture of mtemba or
bori--pipe-heads. These are of two kinds. One is made from a soft stone,
probably steatite, found in Usonga, near Utumbara, and on the road to
Karagwah: it is, however, rare, and about ten times the price of the
clay bowls, because less liable to break. The other is made of a plastic
or pipe-clay, too brittle to serve for pots, and it invariably cracks at
the shank, unless bound with wire. Both are hand-made, and are burned in
the same rough way as the pottery. At Msene, where the clay pipe is
cheapest, the price of the bowl is a khete, or double string of white or
blue beads. The pipe of Unyamwezi is of graceful shape, a cone with the
apex downwards; this leaves but little of the hot, oily, and
high-smelling tobacco at the bottom, whereas in Europe the contrary
seems to be the rule. In Ujiji the bowl is small, rounded, and shallow;
it is, moreover, very brittle. The most artful “mtemba” is made by the
people of Uvira: black inside, like other pottery, its exterior is
coloured a greyish-white, and is adorned with red by means of the Indian
geru (Colcothar or Crocus Martis). Bhang is always, and tobacco is
sometimes, smoked in a water-pipe: the bowl is of huge size, capable of
containing at least half a pound, and its upper half is made to incline
towards the smoker’s face. The Lakist tribes have a graceful variety,
like the Indian “chillam,” very different from the awkward, unwieldy,
and distorted article now fashionable in Unyamwezi and the Eastern
countries. The usual pipe-stem is a tube of about 1·5 feet long,
generally a hollow twig of the dwarf melewele-tree. As it is rudely
bored with hot wire, it must be made air-tight by wax and a coating of
brass or copper wire; a strap of hairy skin prevents the pipe-shank
parting from the stick. Iron and brass tubes are rare and highly prized;
the fortunate possessor will sometimes ask for a single specimen two
shukkahs.
Basket-making and mat-weaving are favourite occupations in East Africa
for both sexes and all ages; even the Arabs may frequently be seen
absorbed in an employment which in Oman would be considered derogatory
to manliness. The sengo, or common basket, from the coast to the Lake,
is an open, shallow, and pan-shaped article, generally made of mwanzi,
or bamboo-bark, reddened in parts and stained black in others by the
root of the Mkuruti and other trees, and white where the outer coat has
been removed from the bamboo. The body, which resembles a popular
article in ancient Egypt, is neatly plaited, and the upper ends are
secured to a stout hoop of the same material. The kanda (in the plural
makanda) acts in the interior as matting for rooms, and is converted
into bags for covering bales of cloth, beads, and similar articles. It
is made from the myara (myala) or Chamærops humilis; the leaf is peeled,
sun-dried, and split with a bit of iron into five or six lengths, joined
at the base, which is trimmed for plaiting. The Karagwah, the only mat
made in the interior of Africa, is used as bedding and carpeting; on
journeys the porters bivouac under it; it swells with the wet, and soon
becomes impervious to rain or heavy dew. It is of two kinds: one of
rushes growing in the vicinity of water, the other of grass rolled up
into little bundles. A complicated stitch runs along the whole length in
double lines. The best description of mat is called mkeke. It is made
at Zanzibar and the coast, from the young fronds of the ukhindu or brab,
neatly stained with various dyes. Women of family pride themselves upon
their skill in making the mkeke, which still attains a price of four
dollars. Amongst the maritime races none but the chiefs have a right to
sit upon it; there are no such distinctions in the interior, where these
mats are carried for sale by the slaves. From the brab also are made
neat strainers to purify honey, pombe, and similar articles. They are
open-mouthed cylinders, from one to two feet long, and varying in
diameter from three to six inches. The bottom is narrowed by whipping
fibre round the loose ends of the leaves. The fishing-nets have been
described when treating of the Tanganyika. The luávo, or hand-net, is
made of calabash or other fibre, with coarse wide meshes; it is affixed
to two sticks firmly planted in the ground, and small animals are driven
into it by beaters.
The basts or barks and fibrous substances in East Africa are cheap and
abundant, but labour and conveyance being difficult and expensive, they
would require to be shipped from Zanzibar in the condition of
half-stuff. The best and most easily divisible into pliant and
knot-tying fibres are, upon the coast the pineapple, and in the interior
the plantain. The next in value are the integuments of the calabash and
the myombo tree. These fibres would produce a good article were it not
for the artlessness of African manipulation. The bark is pounded or
chewed, and, in lieu of spinning, is twisted between the hands; the
largest ropes are made in half an hour, and break after a few minutes of
hard work. A fine silky twine, used for fishing, is made from the
aloetic plants called by the Wasawahili mkonge, and by the Arabs bag,
masad and kideh: it is the hig or haskul of Somaliland, where it affects
the poorest ground, cannot be burnt down, and is impassable to naked
legs and cattle. The leaves are stripped of their coats, and the ends
being tightly bound between two pieces of wood, the mass of fibre is
drawn out like a sword from its sheath. Fatilah, or matchlock matches,
are made in Zanzibar of cotton, and in the interior of calabash fibre.
As might be expected among a sparse population leading a comparatively
simple life, the vast variety of diseases which afflict more civilised
races, who are collected in narrow spaces, are unknown in East Africa
even by name. Its principal sporadic is fever, remittent and
intermittent, with its multitudinous secondaries, concerning which
notices have been scattered through the preceding pages. The most
dangerous epidemic is its aborigen, the small-pox, which, propagated
without contact or fomites, sweeps at times like a storm of death over
the land. For years it has not left the Arab colony at Kazeh, and,
shortly before the arrival of the Expedition, in a single month 52
slaves died out of a total of 800. The ravages of this disease amongst
the half-starved and over-worked gangs of caravan porters have already
been described; as many as a score of these wretches have been seen at a
time in a single caravan; men staggering along blinded and almost
insensible, jostling and stumbling against every one in their way; and
mothers carrying babes, both parent and progeny in the virulent stage of
the fell disease. The Arabs have partially introduced the practice of
inoculating, anciently known in South Africa; the pus is introduced into
an incision in the forehead between the eyebrows. The people have no
remedy for small-pox: they trust entirely to the vis medicatrix. There
is a milder form of the malady, called shúrúá, resembling the
chicken-pox of Europe; it is cured by bathing in cold water and smearing
the body with ochreish earth. The Arab merchants of Unyanyembe declare
that, when they first visited Karagwah, the people were decimated by the
táún, or plague. They describe correctly the bubo under the axillæ, the
torturing thirst, and the rapid fatality of the disease. In the early
part of 1859 a violent attack of cholera, which extended from Maskat
along the eastern coast of Arabia and Africa, committed terrible ravages
in the island of Zanzibar and throughout the maritime regions. Of
course, no precautions of quarantine or cordon militaire were taken, yet
the contagion did not extend into the interior.
Strangers in East Africa suffer from dysenteries and similar disorders
consequent upon fever; and, as in Egypt, few are free from hæmorrhoids,
which in Unyamwezi are accompanied by severe colics and umbilical pains.
Rheumatism and rheumatic fever, severe catarrhs and influenzas, are
caused by the cold winds, and, when crossing the higher altitudes,
pneumonia and pleurisis abound in the caravan. On the coast many
settlers, Indian and Arab, show upon the skin whitish leprous spots,
which are treated with various unguents. In the interior, though well
provided with fresh meat and vegetables, travellers are attacked by
scurvy, even in the absence of its normal exciting causes, damp, cold,
and poor diet. This phenomenon has often been observed upon the upper
course of the Nile; Europeans have been prostrated by it even in the dry
regions westward of the Red Sea, and the Portuguese officers who
explored Usenda of the Kazembe suffered tortures from the complaint.
Common diseases among the natives are umbilical hernia and prolapsus:
the latter is treated by the application of powdered bhang, dry or mixed
with ghee. They are subject to kihindu-hindu--in Arabic, sara--the
epilepsy, which they pretend to cure by the marrow of rhinoceros’ shank.
Of the many fits and convulsions which affect them, the kichyoma-chyoma
is the most dreaded. The word, which means the “little irons,” describes
the painful sensations, the cramps and stitches, the spasms and
lancinations, which torment the sufferer. Many die of this disease. It
is not extraordinary that the fits, convulsions, and contortions which
it suddenly induces should lead the people to consider it in the light
of possession, and the magician to treat it with charms. Madness and
idiocy are not uncommon: of the patient it is said, “Ana wazimo”--“he
has fiends.” In most parts the people, after middle age, are tender-eyed
from the effects of smoke within, glare without, exposure and
debauchery. Not a few samples of acute ophthalmic disease were seen.
In the lower and more malarious spots, desquamations, tumours, and skin
diseases are caused by suddenly suppressed perspiration. The terrible
kidonda or helcoma of the maritime regions and the prurigo of Ujiji have
already been alluded to. The “chokea” is a hordeolum or large boil,
generally upon the upper eyelid. The “funza” is supposed to result from
the bite of a large variety of fly. It begins with a small red and fiery
swelling, which bursts after a time and produces a white entozoon about
half an inch in length. “Kumri” are common blains, and “p’hambazi”
malignant blind-boils, which leave a deep discoloured scar; when the
parts affected are distant from the seat of circulation, the use of the
limb is sometimes lost. For most of these sores tutiya or murtutu,
blue-stone, is considered a specific.
As might be expected amongst an ignorant and debauched race coming in
direct contact with semi-civilisation, the lues has found its way from
the island of Zanzibar to Ujiji and into the heart of Africa. It is
universally believed both by the natives and by the Arabs, who support
the assertion with a host of proofs, to be propagated without contact.
Such, indeed, is the general opinion of the Eastern world, where perhaps
its greater virulence may assimilate it to the type of the earlier
attacks in Europe. The disease, however, dies out, and has not taken
root in the people as amongst the devoted races of North America and the
South Sea islands. Although a malignant form was found extending
throughout the country, mutilation of the features and similar
secondaries were not observed beyond the maritime region. Except
blue-stone, mineral drugs are unknown, and the use of mercury and
ptyalism have not yet exasperated the evil. The minor form of lues is
little feared and yields readily to simples; the consequences, however,
are strangury, cystitis, chronic nephritic disease, and rheumatism.
“Polypharmacy” is not the fault of the profession in East Africa, and
the universal belief in possession tends greatly to simplify the
methodus modendi. The usual cathartic is the bark of a tree called
kalákalá, which is boiled in porridge. There is a great variety of
emetics, some so violent that several Arabs who have been bold enough to
swallow them, barely escaped with life. The actual cautery--usually a
favourite counter-irritant amongst barbarous people--is rarely practised
in East Africa; in its stead powder of blue-stone is applied to the sore
or wound, which has been carefully scraped, and the patient howls with
pain for twenty-four hours. They bleed frequently as Italians, who even
after being startled resort to a mild phlebotomy, and they cut down
straight upon the vein with a sharp knife. They prefer the cucurbitula
cruenta, like the Arabs, who say,--
“Few that cup repent;
Few that bleed, rejoice.”
A favourite place is the crown of the head. The practitioner, after
scarifying the skin with a razor or a dagger, produces a vacuum by
exhausting the air through a horn applied with wetted edges; at the
point is a bit of wax, which he closes over the aperture with his tongue
or teeth, as the hospital “singhi” in India uses a bit of leather.
Cupping--called ku hu míká or kumíká--is made highly profitable by
showing strange appearances in the blood. They cure by excision the bite
of snakes, which, however, are not feared nor often fatal in these
lands. They cannot reduce dislocations, and they never attempt to set or
splint a broken bone.
The mganga or medicine-man, in his character of “doctor,” is a personage
of importance. He enters the sick-room in the dignity of antelope-horn,
grease, and shell-necklace, and he sits with importance upon his
three-legged stool. As the devil saves him the trouble of diagnosis, he
begins by a prescription, invariably ordering something edible for the
purpose, and varying it, according to the patient’s means, from a
measure of grain to a bullock. He asserts, for instance, that a pound of
fat is required for medicine; a goat must be killed, and his perquisite
is the head or breast--a preliminary to a more important fee. Then the
price of prescription--a _sine quâ non_ to prescribing--is settled upon
and paid in advance. After certain questions, invariably suggesting the
presence of poison, the medical practitioner proceeds to the cure; this
is generally a charm or periapt bound round the part affected. In common
diseases, however, like fever, the mganga will condescend to such
profane processes as adhibiting sternutatories and rubbing the head with
vegetable powders. If the remedies prove too powerful or powerless, he
at once decamps; under normal circumstances he incapacitates himself for
performing his promise of calling the next day by expending his fee in
liquor. The Africans have in one point progressed beyond Europeans:
there are as many women physicians as men.
[Illustration: A Mnyamwezi.
A Mheha.]
CHAP. XIX.
THE CHARACTER AND RELIGION OF THE EAST AFRICANS; THEIR GOVERNMENT, AND
SLAVERY.
The study of psychology in Eastern Africa is the study of man’s
rudimental mind, when, subject to the agency of material nature, he
neither progresses nor retrogrades. He would appear rather a degeneracy
from the civilised man than a savage rising to the first step, were it
not for his apparent incapacity for improvement. He has not the ring of
the true metal; there is no rich nature, as in the New Zealander, for
education to cultivate. He seems to belong to one of those childish
races which, never rising to man’s estate, fall like worn-out links from
the great chain of animated nature. He unites the incapacity of infancy
with the unpliancy of age; the futility of childhood, and the credulity
of youth, with the scepticism of the adult and the stubbornness and
bigotry of the old. He has “beaten lands” and seas. For centuries he has
been in direct intercourse with the more advanced people of the eastern
coast, and though few have seen an European, there are not many who have
not cast eyes upon an Arab. Still he has stopped short at the threshold
of progress; he shows no signs of development; no higher and more varied
orders of intellect are called into being. Even the simple truths of El
Islam have failed to fix the thoughts of men who can think, but who,
absorbed in providing for their bodily wants, hate the trouble of
thinking. His mind, limited to the objects seen, heard, and felt, will
not, and apparently cannot, escape from the circle of sense, nor will it
occupy itself with aught but the present. Thus he is cut off from the
pleasures of memory, and the world of fancy is altogether unknown to
him. Perhaps the automaton which we call spiritual suffers from the
inferiority of the mechanism by which it acts.
The East African is, like other barbarians, a strange mixture of good
and evil: by the nature of barbarous society, however, the good element
has not, whilst the evil has, been carefully cultured.
As a rule, the civilised or highest type of man owns the sway of
intellect, of reason; the semi-civilised--as are still the great nations
of the East--are guided by sentiment and propensity in a degree
incomprehensible to more advanced races; and the barbarian is the slave
of impulse, passion, and instinct, faintly modified by sentiment, but
ignorant of intellectual discipline. He appears, therefore, to the
civilised man a paralogic being,--a mere mass of contradictions; his
ways are not our ways, his reason is not our reason. He deduces effects
from causes which we ignore; he compasses his ends by contrivances
which we cannot comprehend; and his artifices and polity excite, by
their shallowness and “inconsequence,” our surprise and contempt. Like
that Hindu race that has puzzled the plain-witted Englishman for the
century closing with the massacres of Delhi and Cawnpore, he is
calculated to perplex those who make conscience an instinct which
elevates man to the highest ground of human intelligence. He is at once
very good-tempered and hard-hearted, combative and cautious; kind at one
moment, cruel, pitiless, and violent at another; sociable and
unaffectionate; superstitious and grossly irreverent; brave and
cowardly, servile and oppressive; obstinate, yet fickle and fond of
changes; with points of honour, but without a trace of honesty in word
or deed; a lover of life, though addicted to suicide; covetous and
parsimonious, yet thoughtless and improvident; somewhat conscious of
inferiority, withal unimprovable. In fact, he appears an embryo of the
two superior races. He is inferior to the active-minded and objective,
the analytic and perceptive European, and to the ideal and subjective,
the synthetic and reflective Asiatic. He partakes largely of the worst
characteristics of the lower Oriental types--stagnation of mind,
indolence of body, moral deficiency, superstition, and childish passion;
hence the Egyptians aptly termed the Berbers and negroes the “perverse
race of Kush.”
The main characteristic of this people is the selfishness which the
civilised man strives to conceal, because publishing it would obstruct
its gratification. The barbarian, on the other hand, displays his
inordinate egotism openly and recklessly; his every action discloses
those unworthy traits which in more polished races chiefly appear on
public occasions, when each man thinks solely of self-gratification.
Gratitude with him is not even a sense of prospective favours; he looks
upon a benefit as the weakness of his benefactor and his own strength;
consequently, he will not recognise even the hand that feeds him. He
will, perhaps, lament for a night the death of a parent or a child, but
the morrow will find him thoroughly comforted. The name of hospitality,
except for interested motives, is unknown to him: “What will you give
me?” is his first question. To a stranger entering a village the worst
hut is assigned, and, if he complain, the answer is that he can find
encamping ground outside. Instead of treating him like a guest, which
the Arab Bedouin would hold to be a point of pride, of honour, his host
compels him to pay and prepay every article, otherwise he might starve
in the midst of plenty. Nothing, in fact, renders the stranger’s life
safe in this land, except the timid shrinking of the natives from the
“hot-mouthed weapon” and the necessity of trade, which induces the
chiefs to restrain the atrocities of their subjects. To travellers the
African is, of course, less civil than to merchants, from whom he
expects to gain something. He will refuse a mouthful of water out of his
abundance to a man dying of thirst; utterly unsympathising, he will not
stretch out a hand to save another’s goods, though worth thousands of
dollars. Of his own property, if a ragged cloth or a lame slave be lost,
his violent excitement is ridiculous to behold. His egotism renders him
parsimonious even in self-gratification; the wretched curs, which he
loves as much as his children, seldom receive a mouthful of food, and
the sight of an Arab’s ass feeding on grain elicits a prolonged “Hi!
hi!” of extreme surprise. He is exceedingly improvident, taking no
thought for the morrow--not from faith, but rather from carelessness as
to what may betide him; yet so greedy of gain is he that he will refuse
information about a country or the direction of a path without a present
of beads. He also invariably demands prepayment: no one keeps a promise
or adheres to an agreement, and, if credit be demanded for an hour, his
answer would be, “There is nothing in my hand.” Yet even greed of gain
cannot overcome the levity and laxity of his mind. Despite his best
interests, he will indulge the mania for desertion caused by that
mischievous love of change and whimsical desire for novelty that
characterise the European sailor. Nor can even lucre prevail against the
ingrained indolence of the race--an indolence the more hopeless as it is
the growth of the climate. In these temperate and abundant lands Nature
has cursed mankind with the abundance of her gifts; his wants still
await creation, and he is contented with such necessaries as roots and
herbs, game, and a few handfuls of grain--consequently improvement has
no hold upon him.
In this stage of society truth is no virtue. The “mixture of a lie” may
“add to pleasure” amongst Europeans; in Africa it enters where neither
pleasure nor profit can arise from the deception. If a Mnyamwezi guide
informs the traveller that the stage is short, he may make up his mind
for a long and weary march, and _vice versâ_. Of course, falsehood is
used as a defence by the weak and oppressed; but beyond that, the
African desires to be lied to, and one of his proverbs is, “’Tis better
to be deceived than to be undeceived.” The European thus qualifies the
assertion,
“For sure the pleasure is as great
In being cheated as to cheat.”