AROUND MOUNT KENYA
The town of Nairobi, the capital of the East Africa Protectorate,
stands on the base of wooded hills at the three hundred and
twenty-seventh mile of the railroad. Originally chosen as a convenient
place for assembling the extensive depots and shops necessary to the
construction and maintenance of the railway, it enjoys no advantages
as a residential site. The ground on which the town is built is low
and swampy. The supply of water is indifferent, and the situation
generally unhealthy. A mile farther on, however, upon the rising
ground a finer position could have been found, and this quarter is
already being occupied sparsely by Government buildings, hospitals,
and barracks. It is now too late to change, and thus lack of foresight
and of a comprehensive view leaves its permanent imprint upon the
countenance of a new country.
Our train traverses the Athi plains, more crowded perhaps with game
than any other part of the line, and approaches swiftly the long rows
of one-storeyed tin houses which constitute the town. Nairobi is a
typical South African township. It might be Pietermaritzburg or
Ladysmith of twenty years ago, before blue gum-trees and stone
buildings had waxed and multiplied. In its present stage perhaps it
resembles Buluwayo most. The population is also South African in its
character and proportions. There are five hundred and eighty whites,
three thousand one hundred Indians, and ten thousand five hundred and
fifty African natives. The shops and stores are, however, much more
considerable than these figures would appear to warrant, and are fully
capable of supplying the varied needs of settlers and planters over a
wide area. Nairobi is also the headquarters of a brigade of the King's
African Rifles, the central office and depot of the Uganda Railway,
and the seat of the Administration, with its numerous official
_personnel_. The dinner of the Colonists' Association, to which I was
invited, afforded the familiar, yet in Central Africa not
unimpressive, spectacle of long rows of gentlemen in evening dress;
while the ball given by the Governor to celebrate the King's birthday
revealed a company gay with uniforms, and ladies in pretty dresses,
assembled upon a spot where scarcely ten years before lions hunted
undisturbed.
[Illustration: GUARD OF HONOUR, KING'S AFRICAN RIFLES.]
Every white man in Nairobi is a politician; and most of them are
leaders of parties. One would scarcely believe it possible, that a
centre so new should be able to develop so many divergent and
conflicting interests, or that a community so small should be able to
give to each such vigorous and even vehement expression. There are
already in miniature all the elements of keen political and racial
discord, all the materials for hot and acrimonious debate. The white
man _versus_ the black; the Indian _versus_ both; the settler as
against the planter; the town contrasted with the country; the
official class against the unofficial; the coast and the highlands;
the railway administration and the Protectorate generally; the King's
African Rifles and the East Africa Protectorate Police; all these
different points of view, naturally arising, honestly adopted,
tenaciously held, and not yet reconciled into any harmonious general
conception, confront the visitor in perplexing disarray. Nor will he
be wise to choose his part with any hurry. It is better to see
something of the country, of its quality and extent, of its promises
and forfeits, of its realities and illusions, before endeavouring to
form even a provisional opinion.
The snow-clad peak of Mount Kenya, a hundred miles away, can on a
clear morning be easily seen from the slopes above Nairobi--a sharp,
serrated summit veined with gleaming white. A road--passable, albeit
unmetalled, for wagons and even a motor-car--runs thitherward by Fort
Hall and across the Tana River. On the way there is much to see. A
wild, ragged-looking, but fertile region, swelling into successive
undulations and intersected by numerous gorges whose streams are
shaded by fine trees, unfolds itself to the eye. Scattered about upon
spacious estates of many thousand acres are a score or two of
colonists, each gradually making himself a home and a living in his
own way. One raises stock; another plants coffee, which grows so
exuberantly in this generous soil as to threaten the speedy exhaustion
of the plant. Here are ostriches, sheep, and cattle standing
placidly together in one drove under the guardianship of a native
child of eleven. There is a complete dairy farm, admirably equipped.
One of the streams has been dammed effectively, and turbines are
already in position to light Nairobi with electricity. Upon the banks
of another there is talk of building an hotel.
[Illustration: BREAKDOWN ON THE WAY TO THIKA CAMP.]
At one place I found a family of good people from Hightown,
Manchester, grappling courageously with an enormous tract of ten
thousand acres. Hard by, an old Boer, who has trekked the length of
Africa to avoid the British flag, sits smoking stolidly by his grass
house, reconciled to British rule at last by a few months' experience
of paternal government in a neighbouring Protectorate. He has few
cattle and less cash, but he holds decided views as to the whereabouts
of lions; there, moreover, stands the heavy tilted wagon of the Great
Trek--an ark of refuge when all else fails; and for the rest there is
plenty of game, few people, and the family grows from year to year. In
short, one sees a sparse, heterogeneous population engaged in varied
labours; but everywhere hard work, straitened resources, hopes
persisting through many disappointments, stout hospitable hearts, and
the beginnings, at any rate, of progress.
A camp has been prepared for me in a very beautiful spot at the
juncture of the Chania and Thika rivers. Tents are pitched and grass
shelters are erected in a smooth meadow. Southwards, a hundred yards
away, a fine waterfall plunges downwards over enormous boulders amid
tall, interlacing trees. The muffled roar of another rises from a deep
ravine an equal distance to the north; and the Philistine computes,
with a frown, four thousand horse-power expending itself upon the
picturesque.
Nothing causes the East African colonist more genuine concern than
that his guest should not have been provided with a lion. The
knowledge preys upon his mind until it becomes a veritable obsession.
He feels some deep reproach is laid upon his own hospitality and the
reputation of his adopted country. How to find, and, having found, to
kill, a lion is the unvarying theme of conversation; and every place
and every journey is judged by a simple standard--"lions or no lions."
At the Thika camp, then, several gentlemen, accomplished in this
important sport, have come together with ponies, rifles, Somalis,
and all the other accessories. Some zebras and kongoni have been
killed and left lying in likely-looking places to attract the lions;
and at 4 a.m., rain or shine, we are to go and look for them.
[Illustration: SHOOTING PARTY AT THIKA CAMP.
From left to right--Capt. Sadler, Major Riddell, Mr. Marsh,
Marquis Gandolfi-Hornyold, Hon. K. Dundas, Mr. Percival, Mr.
Churchill, Mr. D. J. Wilson.]
The young Englishman, be he officer or settler in the East African
Highlands, cuts a hardy figure. His clothes are few and far between: a
sun hat, a brown flannel shirt with sleeves cut above the elbow and
open to the chest, a pair of thin khaki knickerbockers cut short five
inches--_at least_--above the knee, boots, and a pair of putties
comprise the whole attire. Nothing else is worn. The skin, exposed to
sun, thorns, and insects, becomes almost as dark as that of the
natives, and so hardened that it is nothing to ride all day with bare
knees on the saddle; a truly Spartan discipline from which at least
the visitor may be excused.
This is the way in which they hunt lions. First find the lion, lured
to a kill, driven from a reed-bed, or kicked up incontinently by the
way. Once viewed he must never be lost sight of for a moment. Mounted
on ponies of more or less approved fidelity, three or four daring
Britons or Somalis gallop after him, as in India they ride the
pig--that is to say, neck or nothing--across rocks, holes, tussocks,
nullahs, through high grass, thorn scrub, undergrowth, turning him,
shepherding him, heading him this way and that until he is brought to
bay. For his part the lion is no seeker of quarrels; he is often
described in accents of contempt. His object throughout is to save his
skin. If, being unarmed, you meet six or seven lions unexpectedly, all
you need do--according to my information--is to speak to them sternly
and they will slink away, while you throw a few stones at them to
hurry them up. All the highest authorities recommend this.
But when pursued from place to place, chased hither and thither by the
wheeling horsemen, the naturally mild disposition of the lion becomes
embittered. First he begins to growl and roar at his enemies, in order
to terrify them, and make them leave him in peace. Then he darts
little short charges at them. Finally, when every attempt at peaceful
persuasion has failed, he pulls up abruptly and offers battle. Once he
has done this, he will run no more. He means to fight, and to fight
to the death. He means to charge home; and when a lion, maddened with
the agony of a bullet-wound, distressed by long and hard pursuit, or,
most of all, a lioness in defence of her cubs, is definitely committed
to the charge, death is the only possible conclusion. Broken limbs,
broken jaws, a body raked from end to end, lungs pierced through and
through, entrails torn and protruding--none of these count. It must be
death--instant and utter--for the lion, or down goes the man, mauled
by septic claws and fetid teeth, crushed and crunched, and poisoned
afterwards to make doubly sure. Such are the habits of this cowardly
and wicked animal.
It is at the stage when the lion has been determinedly "bayed" that
the sportsman from London is usually introduced upon the scene. He
has, we may imagine, followed the riders as fast as the inequalities
of the ground, his own want of training, and the burden of a heavy
rifle will allow him. He arrives at the spot where the lion is
cornered in much the same manner as the matador enters the arena, the
others standing aside deferentially, ready to aid him or divert the
lion. If his bullet kills, he is, no doubt, justly proud. If it only
wounds, the lion charges the nearest horseman. For forty yards the
charge of a lion is swifter than the gallop of a racehorse. The
riders, therefore, usually avoid waiting within that distance. But
sometimes they do not; or sometimes the lion sees the man who has shot
him; or sometimes all sorts of things happen which make good
stories--afterwards.
After this general description no particular example is required, and
the reader need not be disappointed to learn that our lion escaped
what, no doubt, would have been his certain destruction by the
breaking of a single link in the regular chain of circumstances. He
was not found upon the kill. His place was taken by a filthy hyena,
and it was not until we had beaten thoroughly for two hours more than
three miles of reed-bed that we saw him--a splendid great yellow cat,
looking as big as a bullock--bounding away up the opposite hill. Off
started our riders like falcons; but alas!--if "alas!" is the proper
word--a deep and impassable nullah intervened, necessitating large
circuits and long delays; so that the lion got clean away out of sight
of all men, and we were reduced to the slow and tedious process of
tracking him footprint by footprint through waving grass, breast-high,
hour after hour, always expecting to tread on his tail, and
always--disappointed!
[Illustration: THE BANDA AT THIKA CAMP.]
[Illustration: COLONEL WILSON'S LION.]
In the afternoon I had to ride to Fort Hall, where there was to be a
great gathering of Kikuyu chiefs and thousands of their warriors and
women. The country is much the same as that traversed on the previous
day, but greener, smoother, and more pleasant-looking. Fort Hall is
not a fort in any military sense, but the Commissioner's house with a
ditch round it, a jail, a few houses, and an Indian bazaar. The
station is hardly well selected, being perched up on a hill out of the
reach of any railway--and unhealthy nevertheless. The whole place was
crowded with natives in their most highly ornamented and elaborate
nudity, waiting for the war-dance.
This ceremony was performed the next morning. Long before daylight the
beating of drums, the blowing of horns, and the rhythm of loud, yet
not altogether unmelodious chanting awakened the weariest sleeper; and
when, at eight o'clock the _indaba_ began, the whole space in front of
the fort was densely packed with naked, painted, plumed, and gyrating
humanity, which seethed continually to and fro, and divided from time
to time as particular chiefs advanced with their followers, or as
gifts of struggling sheep and bulls were brought forward. In his war
dress the Kikuyu, and, still more, the Masai warrior, is a striking,
if not impressive, figure. His hair and body are smeared with the red
earth of his native land, compounded into a pigment by mixture with
the slimy juice of the castor-oil plant, which abounds. Fantastic
headdresses, some of ostrich feathers, others of metal or leather;
armlets and leglets of twisted wire; stripes of white clay rubbed
across the red pigment; here and there an old pot-hat or some European
garment, incongruously contrasted with leopard-skins and bulls' horns;
broad, painted cow-hide shields, and spears with soft iron blades
nearly four feet long, complete a grotesque and indecorous picture.
Still, there is a sleek grace about these active forms--bronze statues
but for their frippery--which defeats all their own efforts to make
themselves hideous. The chiefs, however, succeed in reducing
themselves to regular guys. Any old, cast-off khaki jacket or tattered
pair of trousers; any fragment of weather-stained uniform, a
battered sun-helmet with a feather stuck lamely into the top of it, a
ragged umbrella, is sufficient to induce them to abandon the ostrich
plume and the leopard-skin kaross. Among their warriors in ancient
gear they look ridiculous and insignificant--more like the commonest
kind of native sweeper than the hereditary rulers of some powerful and
numerous tribe.
[Illustration: "DURBAR" AT KIAMBU.]
It is unquestionably an advantage that the East African negro should
develop a taste for civilized attire. In no more useful and innocent
direction could his wants be multiplied and his desires excited, and
it is by this process of assimilation that his life will gradually be
made more complicated, more varied, less crudely animal, and himself
raised to a higher level of economic utility. But it would surely be
worth while to organize and guide this new motive force within
graceful and appropriate limits. A Government runs risks when it
intrudes upon the domain of fashion; but when a veritable abyss of
knowledge and science separates the rulers from the ruled, when
authority is dealing with a native race still plunged in its primary
squalour, without religion, without clothes, without morals, but
willing to emerge and capable of emerging, such risks may fairly be
accepted; and the Government might well prescribe or present suitable
robes for ceremonial occasions to the chiefs, and gradually encourage,
and more gradually still enforce, their adoption throughout the
population.
After the dance it had been arranged that I should go as far as the
bank of the Tana River to see the view of Mount Kenya, and then return
to the Thika camp before night. But when the whole splendid panorama
of the trans-Tana country opened upon us, I could not bring myself to
stop short of the promised land; and, casting away material cares of
luncheon and baggage, I decided to ride through to Embo, twenty-eight
miles from Fort Hall, and our most advanced post in this direction. We
crossed the Tana by a ferry which travels along a rope under the
impulsion of the current. The ponies swam the deep, strong, sixty-yard
stream of turbulent red water. On the farther bank the country is
really magnificent in quality and aspect. The centre of the picture is
always Mount Kenya; but there never was a mountain which made so
little of its height. It rises by long gentle slopes, more like a
swelling of ground than a peak, from an immense upland plain, and so
gradual is the acclivity that, but for the sudden outcrop of snow-clad
rock which crowns the summit, no one would believe it over eighteen
thousand feet high. It is its gradual rise that imparts so great a
value to this noble mountain; for about its enormous base and upon its
slopes, traversed by hundreds of streams of clear perennial water,
there grows, or may grow, in successive, concentric belts, every kind
of crop and forest known in the world, from the Equator to the Arctic
Circle. The landscape is superb. In beauty, in fertility, in verdure,
in the coolness of the air, in the abundance of running water, in its
rich red soil, in the variety of its vegetation, the scenery about
Kenya far surpasses anything I have ever seen in India or South
Africa, and challenges comparison with the fairest countries of
Europe. Indeed, looking at it with an eye fresh from Italy, I was most
powerfully reminded of the upper valleys of the Po.
We rode on all day through this delicious country, along a well-kept
native road, smooth enough for a bicycle, except where it crossed
stream after stream on primitive bridges. On every side the soil was
cultivated and covered with the crops of a large and industrious
population. It is only a year since regular control was established
beyond the Tana, not without some bloodshed, by a small military
expedition. Yet so peaceful are the tribes--now that their intertribal
fighting has been stopped--that white officers ride freely about among
their villages without even carrying a pistol. All the natives met
with on the road were armed with sword and spear, and all offered us
their customary salutations, while many came up smiling and holding
out long, moist, delicate-looking hands for me to shake, till I had
quite enough of it. Indeed, the only dangers of the road appear to be
from the buffaloes which infest the country, and after nightfall place
the traveller in real peril. We were very glad for this reason, and
also because we had eaten nothing but a banana each since early
morning, to see at last on the top of the next hill the buildings of
Embo just as the sun sank beneath the horizon.
Embo is a model station, only five months old--one small, three-roomed
house for the District Commissioner, one for the military officer, an
office, and a tiny jail, all in good dressed stone; two Indian shops
in corrugated iron; and seven or eight long rows of beehive grass huts
for a hundred and fifty soldiers and police. Two young white
officers--a civilian and a soldier--preside from this centre of
authority, far from the telegraph, over the peace and order of an area
as large as an English county, and regulate the conduct and fortunes
of some seventy-five thousand natives, who have never previously known
or acknowledged any law but violence or terror. They were uncommonly
surprised to see four horsemen come riding up the zigzag path to their
dwelling; but their astonishment was no bar to their hospitality, and
we were soon rewarded for our journey and our fasting in most
excellent fashion.
I had just time before the darkness flooded the land and blotted out
the mighty mountain and its wreaths of fire-tipped cloud to walk round
this station. The jail consisted of a single room, barred and bolted.
Inside not a prisoner was to be seen. I inquired where they were, and
was shown two little groups seated round fires in the open. They were
chained together by a light running chain, and after a hard day's
miscellaneous work about the station they chatted peacefully as they
cooked and ate their evening meal. The prison was only their shelter
for the night--primitive arrangements, no doubt, but are they more
barbarous than the hideous, long-drawn precision of an English convict
establishment?
The African protectorates now administered by the Colonial Office
afford rare scope for the abilities of earnest and intelligent youth.
A man of twenty-five may easily find himself ruling a large tract of
country and a numerous population. The Government is too newly
established to have developed the highly centralized and closely
knit--perhaps too closely knit--hierarchy and control of the Indian
system. It is far too poor to afford a complete Administration. The
District Commissioner must judge for himself, and be judged upon his
actions. Very often--for tropical diseases make many gaps in the
ranks, and men must often return to England to recruit their
health--the officer is not a District Commissioner at all, but a
junior acting in his stead or in some one's stead, sometimes for a
year or more. To him there come day by day the natives of the
district with all their troubles, disputes, and intrigues. Their
growing appreciation of the impartial justice of the tribunal leads
them increasingly to carry all sorts of cases to the District
Commissioner's Court. When they are ill they come and ask for
medicine. When they are wounded in their quarrels it is to the white
man they go to have the injuries dressed. Disease and accident have to
be combated without professional skill. Courts of justice and forms of
legality must be maintained without lawyers. Taxes have to be
collected by personal influence. Peace has to be kept with only a
shadow of force.
All these great opportunities of high service, and many others, are
often and daily placed within the reach of men in their twenties--on
the whole with admirable results. It was most pleasant to hear with
what comprehension and sympathy the officers of the East Africa
Protectorate speak about their work; and how they regard themselves as
the guardians of native interests and native rights against those who
only care about exploiting the country and its people. No one can
travel even for a little while among the Kikuyu tribes without
acquiring a liking for these light-hearted, tractable, if brutish
children, or without feeling that they are capable of being instructed
and raised from their present degradation. There are more than four
million aboriginals in East Africa alone. Their care imposes a grave,
and I think an inalienable, responsibility upon the British
Government. It will be an ill day for these native races when their
fortunes are removed from the impartial and august administration of
the Crown and abandoned to the fierce self-interest of a small white
population. Such an event is no doubt very remote. Yet the speculator,
the planter, and the settler are knocking at the door. There are many
things which ought to be done--good, wise, scientific, and justly
profitable. If the Government cannot find the money to develop the
natural economic strength of the country, to make its communications,
to start its industries, can it with any reason bar the field to
private enterprise? Can it prevent the ingress of a white population?
Ought it to do so, and for how long? What is to happen when there are
thirty thousand white people in East Africa, instead of the three
thousand or so who make so much stir at the present time? Perhaps the
course of these chapters will lead us back again to these questions.
I am very doubtful whether it will supply their answers.
We have a discussion in the evening on a much more manageable subject.
The District Commissioner at Embo has been ordered by the High Court
of the Protectorate to retry a criminal case which he had settled some
months before, on account of an informality in the report of the
proceedings, which had excited the attention of the revising
authority. It is pointed out that neither the accused nor his
fellow-natives understand, or can ever be made to understand, the
meaning of this repetition of a trial; that they are bewildered; that
their confidence in their personal ruler may be weakened; that endless
practical difficulties--for instance, the collection of witnesses
scattered about in distant villages, and the disquietude caused to
them by a second summons from the strange, mysterious power called
"Government"--arise out of an error which only a lawyer could detect,
and which only appears upon a piece of paper. "Some one," quaintly
says a young civil officer, who has ridden over with us, "forgot to
say 'Bo!' in the right place." I ask the nature of the "Bo!" It is
certainly substantial. No mention was made in the report of the trial
that the accused was given the opportunity of cross-examining the
hostile witnesses. Therefore, although this was in fact done, the
trial is held to be no trial, and ordered anew.
Now, here is again a balancing of disadvantages; but without here
examining whether a simple release would not have been better than a
retrial, I find myself plainly on the side of the "Bo!" There is
scarcely anything more important in the government of men than the
exact--I will even say the pedantic--observance of the regular forms
by which the guilt or innocence of accused persons is determined.
Those forms are designed to protect the prisoner, not merely from the
consequences of honest forgetfulness in his judges, but from
systematic carelessness and possible oppression. Once they are allowed
to be loosely construed the whole system of civilized jurisprudence
begins to crumble, and in its place there is gradually erected a
rough-and-ready practice dependent entirely for its efficiency and
fairness upon the character and intelligence of the individual
responsible. Necessary as it is to trust to personal authority in the
control of native races of the lowest standard, it is not less
necessary to assign well-marked limits to that authority, and, above
all, to place the simple primary rights of accused persons to what we
at home are accustomed to call a "fair trial" outside its scope. Nor
does the administrator really suffer in native eyes from the
apparition into his domain of superior authority. The tribesmen see
that their ruler--to them all-powerful, the man of soldiers and
police, of punishment and reward--is himself obedient to some remote
external force, and they wonder what that mysterious force can be and
marvel dimly at its greatness. Authority is enhanced and not impaired
by the suggestion of immense reserves behind and above the immediate
ruler--strong though he be. But upon this, as upon other matters, it
is not necessary for every one to be of the same opinion; and even
lawyers are not always wise.
On our homeward ride in the early morning we passed a Swahili village.
These Mohammedans have penetrated deeply and established themselves
widely in the Eastern parts of Africa. Armed with a superior religion
and strengthened with Arab blood, they maintain themselves without
difficulty at a far higher level than the pagan aboriginals among
whom they live. Their language has become a sort of _lingua franca_
over all this part of the world. As traders they are welcomed, as
fighting men they are respected, and as sorcerers they are feared by
all the tribes. Their Khan had supplied us with bananas on the
previous day with many expressions of apology that, as we were
unexpected, he had no "European food." To-day all this was repaired.
The men of the village, to the number of perhaps fifty, walked
sedately out to meet us, their long white smocks in striking contrast
to the naked, painted barbarians who surrounded them. The Khan led up
a white Arab stallion, of vicious temper and tripling gait, to replace
my wearied pony; and then produced tea and a familiar tin of mixed
biscuits, which he had over-night sent runners to procure, that his
hospitality might incur no reproach.
While we were eating and parleying with the Khan there arrived on the
scene a mounted Kikuyu chief, with chair, umbrella, khaki helmet, and
other insignia, and attended by about a hundred warriors in full
feather. In order to show their respect they began at once their
war-dance, and we left them a quarter of an hour later still circling
and hopping to and fro with quivering spears and nodding plumes to
their monotonous chorus, while the white-robed Swahilis stood gravely
by and bade us farewell in the dignified manners of the East. I
reflected upon the interval that separates these two races from each
other, and on the centuries of struggle that the advance had cost, and
I wondered whether that interval was wider and deeper than that which
divides the modern European from them both; but without arriving at
any sure conclusion.
Our journey to Embo had been so delightful that I was not inclined to
hanker after rejected alternatives. But when we drove in to the Thika
camp as the sun was setting, tired out by fifty miles of road, the
first spectacle which saluted my eyes was a lion's skin spread out
upon the ground and Colonel Wilson engaged in sprinkling it with
arsenical powder. Then we were told the tale, which in brief was that
they were driving a long reed-bed, when the lion sprang out and ran
obliquely across the line of beaters. Wilson fired and the lion
bounded back into the reeds, whence stones, fires, shoutings, shots,
and all other disturbances failed to move him. Whereupon, after two
hours, being impatient and venturesome, they had marched in upon him
shoulder to shoulder, to find him, fortunately, quite dead.
My friends endeavoured to console me by the news that lions had now
been heard of in two other places, and that we should be sure to find
one in the morning; and next day, after we had driven three miles of
reeds, it seemed that their hopes were well founded, for a large
animal of some kind could be seen moving swiftly to and fro under
cover, and every one declared this must be the lion. At last only one
more patch of reeds remained to beat, and we took up our positions,
finger on trigger, about sixty yards from the farther edge of it,
while the beaters, raising an astonishing tumult with yells and the
beating of tin cans, plunged boldly in. _Parturiunt montes_--out
rushed two enormous wart-hogs. Let no one reproach the courage of the
pig. These great fierce boars, driven from their last shelter, charged
out in gallant style--tusks gleaming, tails perpendicular--and met a
fate prepared for a king. With these and another which we galloped
down and pistolled on the way home I had to be content, and can now,
so far as I am concerned, sadly write, in the expressive words of
Reuter, "No lions were 'bagged.'"