Nothing could more wildly misrepresent the reality than the idea of
one's school days that the heart of Africa is a desert. Africa rises
from its three environing oceans in three great tiers, and the general
physical geography of these has been already sketched:--first, a coast
line, low and deadly; farther in, a plateau the height of the Scottish
Grampians; farther in still, a higher plateau, covering the country
for thousands of miles with mountain and valley. Now fill in this
sketch, and you have Africa before you. Cover the coast belt with rank
yellow grass; dot here and there a palm; scatter through it a few
demoralized villages; and stock it with the leopard, the hyena, the
crocodile, and the hippopotamus. Clothe the mountainous plateaux next,
both of them, with endless forests; not grand umbrageous forest like
the forests of South America, nor matted jungle like the forests of
India, but with thin, rather weak forest,--with forest of low trees,
whose half-grown trunks and scanty leaves offer no shade from the
tropical sun. Nor is there anything in these trees to the casual eye
to remind you that you are in the tropics. Here and there one comes
upon a borassus or fan-palm, a candelabra-like euphorbia, a mimosa
aflame with color, or a sepulchral baobab. A close inspection also
will discover curious creepers and climbers; and among the branches
strange orchids hide their eccentric flowers. But the outward type of
tree is the same as we have at home--trees resembling the ash, the
beech, and the elm, only seldom so large except by the streams, and
never so beautiful. Day after day you may wander through these
forests, with nothing except the climate to remind you where you are.
The beasts to be sure are different, but unless you watch for them you
will seldom see any; the birds are different, but you rarely hear
them; and as for the rocks, they are our own familiar gneisses and
granites, with honest basalt dikes boring through them, and
leopard-skin lichens staining their weathered sides. Thousands and
thousands of miles, then, of vast thin forest, shadeless, trackless,
voiceless,--forest in mountain and forest in plain,--this is East
Central Africa.
The indiscriminate praise, formerly lavished on tropical vegetation,
has received many shocks from recent travelers. In Kaffir-land, South
Africa, I have seen one or two forests fine enough to justify the
enthusiasm of arm-chair word-painters of the tropics; but so far as
the central plateau is concerned, the careful judgment of Mr. Alfred
Russell Wallace respecting the equatorial belt in general (a judgment
which has at once sobered all modern descriptions of tropical lands
and made imaginative people more content to stay at home) applies
almost to this whole area. The fairy labyrinth of ferns and palms,
the festoons of climbing plants blocking the paths and scenting the
forests with their resplendent flowers, the gorgeous clouds of
insects, the gayly plumaged birds, the paroquets, the monkey swinging
from his trapeze in the shaded bowers--these are unknown to Africa.
Once a week you will see a palm; once in three months the monkey will
cross your path; the flowers on the whole are few; the trees are poor;
and to be honest, though the endless forest-clad mountains have a
sublimity of their own, and though there are tropical bits along some
of the mountain streams of exquisite beauty, nowhere is there anything
in grace and sweetness and strength to compare with a Highland glen.
For the most part of the year these forests are jaded and
sun-stricken, carpeted with no moss or alchemylla or scented woodruff,
the bare trunks frescoed with few lichens, their motionless and
unrefreshed leaves drooping sullenly from their sapless boughs.
Flowers there are, small and great, in endless variety; but there is
no display of flowers, no gorgeous show of blossom in the mass, as
when the blazing gorse and heather bloom at home. The dazzling glare
of the sun in the torrid zone has perhaps something to do with this
want of color effect in tropical nature; for there is always about ten
minutes just after sunset when the whole tone of the landscape changes
like magic, and a singular beauty steals over the scene. This is the
sweetest moment of the African day, and night hides only too swiftly
the homelike softness and repose so strangely grateful to the
over-stimulated eye.
Hidden away in these endless forests, like birds' nests in a wood, in
terror of one another and of their common foe the slaver, are small
native villages; and here in his virgin simplicity dwells primeval
man, without clothes, without civilization, without learning, without
religion--the genuine child of nature, thoughtless, careless, and
contented. This man is apparently quite happy; he has practically no
wants. One stick, pointed, makes him a spear; two sticks rubbed
together make him a fire; fifty sticks tied together make him a
house. The bark he peels from them makes his clothes; the fruits which
hang on them form his food. It is perfectly astonishing, when one
thinks of it, what nature can do for the animal man, to see with what
small capital after all a human being can get through the world. I
once saw an African buried. According to the custom of his tribe, his
entire earthly possessions--and he was an average commoner--were
buried with him. Into the grave, after the body, was lowered the dead
man's pipe, then a rough knife, then a mud bowl, and last his bow and
arrows--the bowstring cut through the middle, a touching symbol that
its work was done. This was all. Four items, as an auctioneer would
say, were the whole belongings for half a century of this human being.
No man knows what a man is till he has seen what a man can be without,
and be withal a man. That is to say, no man knows how great man is
till he has seen how small he has been once.
The African is often blamed for being lazy, but it is a misuse of
words. He does not need to work; with so bountiful a Nature round him
it would be gratuitous to work. And his indolence, therefore, as it
is called, is just as much a part of himself as his flat nose, and as
little blameworthy as slowness in a tortoise. The fact is, Africa is
a nation of the unemployed.