THE KINGDOM OF UGANDA
The East Africa Protectorate is a country of the highest interest to
the colonist, the traveller, or the sportsman. But the Kingdom of
Uganda is a fairy tale. You climb up a railway instead of a beanstalk,
and at the end there is a wonderful new world. The scenery is
different, the vegetation is different, the climate is different, and,
most of all, the people are different from anything elsewhere to be
seen in the whole range of Africa. Instead of the breezy uplands we
enter a tropical garden. In the place of naked, painted savages,
clashing their spears and gibbering in chorus to their tribal chiefs,
a complete and elaborate polity is presented. Under a dynastic King,
with a Parliament, and a powerful feudal system, an amiable, clothed,
polite, and intelligent race dwell together in an organized monarchy
upon the rich domain between the Victoria and Albert Lakes. More
than two hundred thousand natives are able to read and write. More
than one hundred thousand have embraced the Christian faith. There is
a Court, there are Regents and Ministers and nobles, there is a
regular system of native law and tribunals; there is discipline, there
is industry, there is culture, there is peace. In fact, I ask myself
whether there is any other spot in the whole earth where the dreams
and hopes of the negrophile, so often mocked by results and stubborn
facts, have ever attained such a happy realization.
[Illustration: KISUMU.]
Three separate influences, each of them powerful and benevolent,
exercise control over the mass of the Baganda nation. First, the
Imperial authority, secular, scientific, disinterested, irresistible;
secondly, a native Government and feudal aristocracy, corrected of
their abuses, yet preserving their vitality; and thirdly, missionary
enterprise on an almost unequalled scale. Under the shelter of the
British Flag, safe from external menace or internal broil, the
child-King grows to a temperate and instructed maturity. Surrounded by
his officers of State, he presides at the meetings of his council and
Parliament, or worships in the huge thatched cathedral which has been
reared on Namirembe Hill. Fortified in their rights, but restrained
from tyrannical excess, and guided by an outside power, his
feudatories exercise their proper functions. The people, relieved from
the severities and confusions of times not long ago, are apt to learn
and willing to obey. And among them with patient energy toils a large
body of devoted Christian men of different nations, of different
Churches, but of a common charity, tending their spiritual needs,
enlarging their social and moral conceptions, and advancing their
education year by year.
An elegance of manners springing from a naÔve simplicity of character
pervades all classes. An elaborate ritual of friendly salutations
relieves the monotony of the wayfarer's journey. Submission without
servility or loss of self-respect is accorded to constituted
authority. The natives evince an eagerness to acquire knowledge and a
very high observant and imitative faculty. And then Uganda is from end
to end one beautiful garden, where the staple food of the people grows
almost without labour, and where almost everything else can be grown
better and easier than anywhere else. The planter from the best
islands in the West Indies is astonished at the richness of the soil.
Cotton grows everywhere. Rubber, fibre, hemp, cinnamon, cocoa, coffee,
tea, coca, vanilla, oranges, lemons, pineapples are natural or thrive
on introduction. As for our English garden products, brought in
contact with the surface of Uganda they simply give one wild bound of
efflorescence or fruition and break their hearts for joy. Does it not
sound a paradise on earth? Approach and consider it more closely.
The good ship _Clement Hill_, named after a well-known African
explorer, has carried us smoothly and prosperously across the northern
corner of the Victoria Nyanza, and reaches the pier of Entebbe as the
afternoon draws towards its close. The first impression that strikes
the eye of the visitor fresh from Kavirondo is the spectacle of
hundreds of natives all dressed in long clean white garments which
they wear with dignity and ease. At the landing-place a sort of
pavilion has been erected, and here come deputations from the Chamber
of Commerce--a limited body of Europeans--from the Goanese community,
and from the numerous Indian colony of merchants. A tonga drawn by
two mules takes me to Government House, and from a wide
mosquito-proof veranda I am able to survey a truly delightful
prospect. The most beautiful plants and trees grow in profusion on all
sides. Beyond a blaze of violet, purple, yellow, and crimson blossoms,
and an expanse of level green lawns, the great blue lake lies in all
its beauty. The hills and islands on the horizon are just beginning to
flush to the sunset. The air is soft and cool. Except that the picture
actually looks more English in its character, one would imagine it was
the Riviera. It must be too good to be true.
It _is_ too good to be true. One can hardly believe that such an
attractive spot can be cursed with malignant attributes. Yet what is
true of the East Africa Protectorate is even more true of Uganda. The
contrast between appearance and reality is more striking and more
harsh. Behind its glittering mask Entebbe wears a sinister aspect.
These smiling islands which adorn and diversify the scenery of the
lake supported a few years ago a large population. To-day they are
desolate. Every white man seems to feel a sense of undefinable
oppression. A cut will not heal; a scratch festers. In the third
year of residence even a small wound becomes a running sore. One day a
man feels perfectly well; the next, for no apparent cause, he is
prostrate with malaria, and with malaria of a peculiarly persistent
kind, turning often in the third or fourth attack to blackwater fever.
In the small European community at Entebbe there have been quite
recently two suicides. Whether, as I have suggested in East Africa, it
be the altitude, or the downward ray of the Equatorial sun, or the
insects, or some more subtle cause, there seems to be a solemn veto
placed upon the white man's permanent residence in these beautiful
abodes.
[Illustration: GOVERNMENT HOUSE, ENTEBBE.]
There are many who advocate the abandonment of Entebbe as the
administrative capital and the restoration of the seat of Government
to Kampala. But the expense of transferring public offices and
buildings lately erected to another site is altogether beyond the
slender resources and not among the most urgent needs of the Uganda
Protectorate. Great improvements have been effected recently in the
sanitation of Entebbe. The bush and trees, which added so greatly to
its picturesque appearance, have been ruthlessly cut down; and with
them, _mirabile dictu_, have vanished the mosquito and the
sleeping-sickness tsetse-fly. Half a mile away on either side of the
settlement are groves which it might easily be death to enter; but the
inhabited area is now quite clear.
Besides, the general unhealthiness of the country so far as the
European is concerned is not local to Entebbe. It is widely spread in
slightly different degrees throughout the whole of Uganda; and Kampala
is certainly not exempt. Finally, there is a reason of a different
character which ought to impose a final bar on any return of the
Imperial Government to the native city. Uganda is a native state. Much
of our success in dealing with its population arises from the fact
that we work through and by the native Government. And that Government
could not fail to lose much, if not all, of its separate and natural
identity if it were overwhelmed by the immediate proximity of the
supreme Administration.
[Illustration: UGANDA
Founded by permission of the War Office on the Map of Africa
No 1539.]
For a new station in an almost unknown land, Entebbe certainly
presents many remarkable evidences of progress. The slopes of the lake
shore are covered with pretty villas, each standing in its own
luxuriant garden. There is an excellent golf course, and a very
bright and pleasant society. Guardian over all this stands the Sikh.
There are two companies of these soldiers, one at Entebbe and the
other at Kampala, who, being entirely immune to local influences of
all kinds, constitute what Mr. Gladstone used to call the "motor
muscle" of Imperial authority. I have always admired the Sikh in
India, both in his cantonments and in the field. But somehow his
graceful military figure and grave countenance under the turban as he
stands erect beside his rifle on guard over British interests six
thousand miles from the Punjab, impresses the eye and the imagination
with an added force. He is a picked volunteer from all the Sikh
regiments, who delights in Uganda, thrives under its, to him, milder
sun, lives on nothing, saves his doubled pay, and returns to India
enriched and proud of his service across the sea. If at any time
considerations of expense, or the desire to obtain a complete
homogeneity in the military forces of the Protectorate, should lead to
the disbandment or withdrawal of these two companies, those who take
the decision will have incurred a responsibility which few would care
to share with them.
So far as human force is concerned, the British power in these regions
is at present beyond challenge. No man can withstand it. But a new
opponent has appeared and will not be denied. Uganda is defended by
its insects. It would even seem that the arrival of the white man and
the increased movement and activity which his presence has engendered
have awakened these formidable atoms to a realization of their powers
of evil. The dreaded _Spirillum_ tick has begun to infest the roads
like a tiny footpad, and scarcely any precautions avail with certainty
against him. This tick is a dirty, drab-coloured creature the size and
shape of a small squashed pea. When he bites an infected person he
does not contract the Spirillum fever himself, nor does he transmit it
directly to other persons. By a peculiarly malevolent provision of
Nature this power is exercised not by him but by his descendants, who
are numbered in hundreds. So the poison spreads in an incalculable
progression. Although this fever is not fatal, it is exceptionally
painful in its course and distressing in its consequences. There are
five or six separate and successive attacks of fever, in which the
temperature of the victim may rise even to 107 degrees; and
afterwards the eyes and hearing are temporarily affected by a kind of
facial paralysis. Road after road has been declared infected by this
scourge, and officer after officer struck down as he moves on duty
from place to place. The only sure preventive seems to be the
destruction of all old grass-huts and camping-grounds, and the
erection along the roads of a regular system of stone-built, properly
maintained and disinfected rest-houses, in which the traveller may
take refuge from the lurking peril. And this will have to be done.
But a far more terrible shadow darkens the Uganda Protectorate. In
July, 1901, a doctor of the Church Missionary Society Hospital at
Kampala noticed eight cases of a mysterious disease. Six months later
he reported that over two hundred natives had died of it in the Island
of Buvuma, and that thousands appeared to be infected. The pestilence
swiftly spread through all the districts of the lake shore, and the
mortality was appalling. No one could tell where it had come from or
what it was caused by. It resisted every kind of treatment and
appeared to be universally fatal. Scientific inquiries of various
kinds were immediately set on foot, but for a long time no results
were obtained, and meanwhile the disease ran along the coasts and
islands of the great lake like fire in a high wind. By the middle of
1902 the reported deaths from _Trypanosomiasis_, or "sleeping
sickness," as it has come to be called, numbered over thirty thousand.
It was still spreading rapidly upon all sides, and no clue whatever to
its treatment or prevention had been obtained. It seemed certain that
the entire population of the districts affected was doomed.
On April 28th, 1903, Colonel Bruce, whose services had been obtained
for the investigation of "sleeping sickness" through the
instrumentality of the Royal Society, announced that he considered the
disease to be due to a kind of trypanosome, conveyed from one person
to another by the bite of a species of tsetse-fly called _Glossina
palpalis_. His theory was strongly supported by the fact that the
disease appeared to be confined to the localities infested by the fly.
The fly-belt also could be defined with precision, and was rarely
found to extend more than a mile or two from water. The news that
Europeans could no longer consider themselves immune from the
infection caused, as might be imagined, much consternation in the
white community. Nearly everybody had been bitten by tsetses at one
time or another, but whether by this particular species when actually
infected, remained in suspense. Moreover, tsetse-flies abounded in
such numbers on all parts of the lake shore that their wholesale
destruction seemed quite impossible. What then?
For a time Colonel Bruce's discovery almost paralyzed all preventive
and restrictive measures. The scourge fell unchecked. By the end of
1903 the reported deaths numbered over ninety thousand, and the lake
shores were becoming fast depopulated. Whole villages were completely
exterminated, and great tracts in Usoga, which had formerly been famed
for their high state of cultivation, relapsed into forests. The
weakness of the victims and the terror or apathy of the survivors
permitted a sudden increase in the number of leopards, and these
fierce animals preyed with daring and impunity upon the living, the
dying, and the dead.
Further investigations, which were anxiously pushed on in many
directions, revealed the existence of the tsetse-fly over widespread
areas. In the interior of Usoga, on the banks of many rivers, in
swamps on the shores of the Albert Lake and Lake Albert Edward, these
swarming emissaries of death were found to be awaiting their message.
All that was needed to arm them with their fatal power was the arrival
of some person infected with the microbe. The Albert shores and
several parts of the Upper Nile soon became new centres of pestilence.
Thousands of deaths occurred in Unyoro. By the end of 1905
considerably more than two hundred thousand persons had perished in
the plague-stricken regions, _out of a population_ in those regions
_which could not have exceeded three hundred thousand_.
Any decrease in the mortality in any district up to the present time
is due, not to any diminution in the virulence of the disease, but
simply to the reduction of possible victims, owing to the
extermination of the inhabitants. Buvuma, a few years ago one of the
most prosperous of all the islands, contains fewer than fourteen
thousand out of thirty thousand. Some of the islands in the Sesse
group have lost every soul, while in others a few moribund natives,
crawling about in the last stages of the disease, are all that are
left to represent a once teeming population.
"It might have been expected," writes Sir H. Hesketh Bell, the
Governor of Uganda, to whom I am indebted for much valuable
information on this subject, "that, even though the negroes showed
inability to grasp the theory of the transmission of disease by the
agency of insects, the undeniable deadliness of the countries
bordering on the lake shore would have induced them to flee from the
stricken land and to have sought in the healthier districts inland a
refuge from the pestilence that was slaying them by thousands. An
extraordinary fatalism, however, seems to have paralyzed the natives,
and, while deploring the sadness of their fate, they appear to have
accepted death almost with apathy."
The police of science, although arrived late on the scene of the
tragedy, were now following many converging clues. Therapeutic
investigation into the treatment and origin of the disease,
entomological examination of the resorts, habits, dangers, and
life-history of the fly, and thirdly administrative measures of
drastic authority are now being driven sternly forward. Knowledge has
accumulated. Fighting the sleeping sickness is like laying a vampire.
To make the spell work, five separate conditions must be
present--water, bushes, trees, the tsetse-fly (_Glossina palpalis_),
and one infected person. Remove any one of these and the curse is
lifted. But let them all be conjoined, and the sure destruction of
every human being in the district is only a matter of time.
The Government of Uganda is now pursuing a policy based on the
appreciation of these facts. Wherever it is necessary to come to the
lake shores, as at Entebbe, Munyonyo, Ripon Falls, Fajao, etc., the
tsetse-fly is banished or eliminated by cutting down the trees,
clearing away the bush, and planting in its place the vigorous,
rapid-growing _citronella_ grass, which, once firmly established,
holds its own against invading vegetation. Wherever it is not possible
to clear the shores of tsetse-flies, they must be cleared of
inhabitants. And the extraordinary operation of moving entire
populations from their old homes to new places--often against their
will--has been actually accomplished within the last year by a
combined dead-lift effort of these three tremendous forces of
Government which regulate from such different points of view the
lives and liberties of the Baganda.
It does not follow that the lake shores will have to be abandoned for
ever. In a very short time--some say two days, some eleven hours--the
infected tsetse is free from poison and can no longer communicate it;
and once the disease has been eradicated from the population, healthy
people might return and be bitten with impunity. Nor, on the other
hand, can we hope, unless some cure capable of being applied on a
large scale can be perfected, that the mortality in the immediate
future will sensibly diminish. For there are many thousands of persons
still affected, and for these segregation, nursing, and compassion
comprise the present resources of civilization.
One thing is, however, above all things important. There must be no
losing heart. At any moment the researches which are being conducted
in so many laboratories, and in which Professor Koch has taken a
leading part, may produce an absolute therapeutic remedy. By the
administrative measures now vigorously enforced it is believed that
the fatal contact between infected persons and uninfected flies,
between infected flies and uninfected persons, will have been
effectively broken. We cannot fail to learn more of the tsetse. The
humble black horse-fly, indistinguishable to the casual observer from
harmless types, except that his wings are folded neatly like a pair of
shut scissors, instead of splaying out on either side of his back, is
now under a bright, searching, and pitiless eye. Who are his enemies?
What are his dangers? What conditions are essential to his existence?
What conditions are fatal or inimical? International Commissions
discuss him round green tables, grave men peer patiently at him
through microscopes, active officers scour Central Africa to plot him
out on charts. A fine-spun net is being woven remorselessly around
him. And may not man find allies in this strange implacable warfare?
There are fishes which destroy mosquitoes, there are birds which prey
upon flies, there are plants whose scent or presence is abhorrent or
injurious to particular forms of insect life. In what places and for
how long will the tsetse continue to fly, as he is wont, over the
smooth, gleaming water, just above the reeds and bushes, just below
the branches of the overhanging trees? _Glossina palpalis contra
mundum!_
[Illustration: THE GOVERNOR WITH BAGANDA GROUP.]
I have not sought to conceal the perils in describing the riches and
the beauties of Uganda. The harsh contrasts of the land, its noble
potentialities, its hideous diseases, its fecundity alike of life and
death, are capable of being illustrated by many more facts and
examples than I can here set down. But what an obligation, what a
sacred duty is imposed upon Great Britain to enter the lists in person
and to shield this trustful, docile, intelligent Baganda race from
dangers which, whatever their cause, have synchronized with our
arrival in their midst! And, meanwhile, let us be sure that order and
science will conquer, and that in the end John Bull will be really
master in his curious garden of sunshine and deadly nightshade.