THE PEOPLE OF MOMBASAH. THE WANYIKA TRIBE.
Statio benefida carinis.—VIRGIL.
In 1844 Dr Krapf allowed the population of Mombasah town, without its
dependencies, to be 8000 to 10,000. In 1846 M. Guillain reduced it to
2500 or 3000 souls, not including a garrison of 250 men, but including
40 families of Arabs (220 to 230 souls), and 50 Banyans and Hindostani
Moslems. In 1857 I was assured that it contained 8000 to 9000 souls,
thus distributed: Arabs, about 350; 300 Baloch and other mercenaries, 50
Bhattias, 25 to 30 Indian Moslems, the rest being Wasawahili and the
slave races. The Wasawahili are distributed into two great groups. Older
and consequently nobler, though less numerous, are the Wamwita; they
derive their origin from a Shirazi Shaykh whose name is locally
forgotten. The other and far larger division is the Wakilindi-ni, who
trace their name from Kilindi, whence they emigrated to Shungaya alias
Shiraz, and eventually to Mombasah. Originally they occupied on the
western shore of the island a separate settlement, which they called
after their oldest homes; they built a tower of stone, surrounded it
with a wall, provided it with wells, and thus rendered themselves
independent of their patrons. Some remnants of eight other tribes, coast
Arabs who had suffered from the invader, also colonized Mwita. Under the
rule of the Portuguese an amalgamation took place, and the several races
all became Wasawahili. The city is now governed by three Shaykhs—of the
Arabs, of the Wamwita, and the Wakilindi-ni: they receive a small
salary, and they communicate direct with Zanzibar, visiting the Island
once a year. Justice is administered by three Kazis similarly chosen:
the troops are under a Jemadar, and a Banyan sent by the farmer-general
from head-quarters, manages the Custom House.
The Kisawahili spoken at Mombasah is purer than that of Zanzibar, the
result of being nearer the fountain-head. Here the people can hardly
articulate an initial ‘A:’ they must say, for instance Bdúlá, or as
often Mdúlá, not Abdullah, and they supply a terminal vowel, as Shkúlá
for School; the Hindostan man who shirks our double initial consonants
would change it to ishkúl. The explosive sound of the _B_ by forcibly
closing the lips is given to the _M_, which becomes a perfect consonant
having sound and continuance: before another consonant it creates in
strangers’ ears the suspicion of being preceded by the original
vowel-sound, and when following a vowel it is articulated as a final not
as an initial consonant—M’áná-_m_ke (a woman), for example, would be
pronounced M’áná_m_-ke. The initial _N_ also becomes before a consonant
hard and explosive, and it sounds to the tyro as if a rapidly pronounced
‘I’ or ‘E’ were prefixed: Europeans, for instance, write _N_jia,
‘Endia.’ At Mombasah I heard the Arab ‘Hamzeh,’ or compression and
contraction of the larynx, when a hiatus of two similar vowels occurs,
as in Mcho’o (rain) and Tá’á (a lamp): in the dialects less pure the gap
would be filled up by inserting the liquid R or L, as Mfuru for Mfu’u
(the name of a tree). The Arabs and the more civilized tribes, I have
remarked, prefer the R to the L, and say Rufu for Lufu, the Upper
Pangani river, and so forth. The _T_ also assumes the cerebral sound of
the Sanskrit and that which renders the English dentals so hard to
foreigners.
We found unexpectedly at Mvíta—the ‘Mombas Mission’ having been kindly
received—a reception which could not be called friendly. Small
communities are rarely remarkable for amiability, and these citizens are
taxed by the rest of the coast-people with overweening pride, insolence
of manner, bigotry and evil speaking, turbulence and treachery. They
cannot forget their ancient glories, their hereditary chiefs who ruled
like kings with Wazirs, Shayhks of tribes and Amirs or chief captains
commanding hosts of savage warriors. Of course they regret the Mazara
whom they themselves were the first to betray—they would betray them
again and regret them again to-morrow. Like all ‘civilized’ Africans,
they are not only treacherous and turbulent, but also inveterate thieves
and pilferers: few travellers have failed to miss some valuable in the
boat that lands them. Lies were plentiful as pronouns. Whilst some for
their own purposes made very light of travel in the interior, others
studiously exaggerated the expense, the difficulty, and the danger; and
recounted the evils which had befallen Dr Krapf because he refused to
take their advice. As I determined to disregard both, so they combined
to regard us as rivals and enemies. They devoted all their energies to
the task of spoiling us; and failing in that matter, they tried
bullying: on one occasion I was obliged to administer, sword in hand,
the descent down-stairs. The Jemadar Tangai, a gaunt Mekrani some 60
years old, and measuring 6 ft 2 in., insisted courteously upon supplying
an escort, with the view of exchanging his worthless swords for our guns
and revolvers: he could neither read nor write, but he was renowned for
‘’Akl,’ intellect, here synonymous with rascality. His son Mustafa
brought a present of goats and fruit, for which he received the normal
return-gift; he expected a little cloth, gunpowder, and a gold
chronometer. We were visited by a certain Shafei Shaykh; by a Mombasah
merchant, Jabir bin Abdullah el Rijebi, who seemed to think that men
should speak in his presence with bated breath: he almost merited and he
narrowly escaped being led out of the room by his ears. The very Hindus
required a lesson of civility. We were on the best of terms with the
Wali or Governor, Khalfan bin Ali el Bu Saídí, a fine specimen of the
Arab gentlemen: he was on board when the Sayyid died, and he told us all
the particulars of that event. But the manifest animus of the public was
such as to make a residence at Mombasah by no means pleasant to us.
Considering the intense curiosity of civilized humanity to know
something of its fellow-men in the state so-called of nature, of the
savages which now represent our remote ancestors, I proceed to sketch
the typical tribe of this part of Africa. My principal authority is M.
Rebmann, who during nine years has made a conscientious study of the
race, and who imparted his knowledge with the greatest courtesy.
The name ‘Wanyika’ means People of the Nyika,[18] or wild land: it is
useless, with M. G. de Bunsen, to identify their land with the Νίχωνος
ὅρμος of the Periplus, as every wilderness is here called Nyika.
Moreover, the name is not anciently known upon the coast: we read of the
Wakilindi-ni and of the ‘Muzungulos,’ the plundering tribe which
occupied the terra firma of Mombasah, and thus we may suspect the
Wanyika to be a race which has emigrated from the interior since the
middle of the 17th century. Their own tradition is that they were
expelled by the Gallas from the lands lying N.N. West of Melinde. They
occupy the highlands between S. lat. 3° and 5°, and they are bounded
north by the Wataita, and south by the Wasumbara. Dr Krapf proposes for
them a census of 50,000 to 60,000 souls, which appears greatly
exaggerated. They are, as usual, divided into a multitude of clans,
concerning which we know little but the names. Mulattoes of an early
date, negroes mixed with Semitic blood and with a score of tribes, these
East African families appear to have cast off in the course of ages the
variety and irregularity of hybridism; moreover, if it be true that ‘the
Semite is the flower of the negro race,’ the produce would hardly be
properly called half-caste. Receiving for ages distinct impressions of
the physical media around them, they have settled down into several and
uniform national types: these, however, will not be detected by the
unpractised eye. Many considerations argue them to be a degeneracy from
civilized man rather than a people advancing towards cultivation. Their
language attaches them to the great South African race, and some have
believed in their ancient subjection to the Ethiopian or Kushite Empire.
The historian of these lands, however, has to grope through the glooms
of the past, guided only by the power to avail himself of the dimmest
present lights. I vehemently doubt, moreover, the antiquity of maritime
races in Tropical Africa—a subject which has been discussed in my sundry
studies of the Western Coast. A case in point is the latest move of the
pastoral Wamasai.
Physically the Wanyika race is not inferior to other negroids, nor
degraded as is the Congo negro. Like the Galla and the Somal, the skull
is pyramido-oval, flattened and depressed at the moral region of the
phrenologist—a persistent form amongst savages and barbarians—and
straight or ‘wall-sided’ above the ears, a shape common both to ‘Semite’
and negro. The features are ‘Hamitic’ only from the eyes downwards: the
brow is moderately high, broad, and conical; the orbits are tolerably
distant; the face is somewhat broad and plain, with well-developed
zygomata; the nose is depressed with patulated nostrils, coarse and
ill-turned; the lips are bordés, fleshy and swelling, and the jaw is
distinctly prognathous. The beard is scant; the hair, which though wiry,
yet grows comparatively long, is shaved off the forehead from ear to
ear, and hangs down in the thinnest of corkscrews, stiffened with fat.
The skin is soft, but the effluvium is distinctly African; the colour is
chocolate-brown and rarely black, unless the mother be a slave from the
South. The figure is, like the features, Semitic above and negrotic
below. The head is well seated upon broad shoulders; the chest is ample,
and the stomach, except in early boyhood or in old age, does not
protrude or depend. But the bunchy calf is placed near the ham; the
shin-bone bends forward, and the foot is large, flat, and lark-heeled.
Nothing is more remarkable than the contrast between form and face in
the woman-kind: upon the lower limbs, especially the haunches, of the
Medicean Venus a hideous ape-like phiz meets the disappointed eye: above
hangs a flaccid bosom, below
wand-like is
Her middle falling still,
And rising whereas women rise—
Imagine nothing ill!
There is not, as amongst the Hottentots, that exaggeration of the
steatopyga which assimilates the South African man to his ovines: the
subcutaneous fat overlying the gluteian muscles and their adjacents,
forms in early life a cushion rather ornamental than otherwise. Young
men often show a curious little crupper which gives a whimsical
appearance to the posterior surface—I have observed this also amongst
the Somal. The favourite standing position is cross-legged, a posture
unknown to Europe; sometimes the sole of one foot is applied to the
ankle or to the knee of the other leg: the gait—no two nations walk
exactly alike—is half-stride, half-lounge. Eyes wild and staring, abrupt
gestures, harsh, loud, and barking voices, still evidence the ignoble
savage.
The Wanyika afford a curious study of rudimental mind. A nation of
semi-naturals as regards moral and intellectual matters, their ideas are
all in confusion. To the incapacity of childhood they unite the
hard-headedness of age, and with the germs of thought that make a Bacon
or a Shakespeare they combine an utter incapability of developing them.
Their religion is of the ‘small’ category, the large being Brahmanism
and Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and El Islam, the first active
Reformation of its predecessor, and the triumph of Arianism over
Athanasianism. The system is that of a ‘Gentile worshipping nothing,’
yet feeling instinctively that there is a Something above or beyond him.
It is the vain terror of our childhood rudely systematized, the earliest
dawn of faith, a creation of fear which ignores love. Thus they have
not, in our sense of the words, God or devil,[19] heaven or hell, soul
or spirit.
‘Mulungu’ is the Mnyika’s synonym of the Kafir Umdali, Uhlanga, and
Unkulumkulu, the Morungo of Tete, the Unghorray of Madagascar, and the
Omakuru of the Damaras. Amongst the most advanced tribes it denotes a
vague kind of God: here it means any good or evil ghost, especially of a
Pagan. The haunting Moslem is distinguished as P’hepo, the plural of
Upepo (a whirlwind, or ‘devil,’ generally called Chamchera). As amongst
all Fetish worshippers, the evestrum which they call Koma—pronounced
like Goma—meaning etymologically ‘one departed,’ is a subject of horror;
but of the dead they say Yuzi sira—he is ended. They cannot comprehend a
future state, yet they place sheep and goats, poultry and palm wine,
upon the tombs of their dead. It is a modern European error (Rev. Mr J.
P. Schön and Rev. Mr Sam. Crowther) to suppose that drops of liquor
spilt, as by the Brass men, in honour of the old people (ancestors),
food-offerings at graves, and fires lighted there on cold wet nights,
evidence the European’s, the East African’s,[20] or the American’s
belief in futurity: as the act proves it is a belief in presentity, and
after a few years the ceremony showing ‘a continuation of relationship
between the living and the dead’, is always disused. Savages cannot
separate the idea of an immortal soul from a mortal body: can we wonder
at this when the wisest of the civilized have not yet agreed upon the
subject? The characteristic of the venerative faculty amongst savages
and barbarians is ever irreverence: they cannot raise themselves to the
idea of a Deity, and they blaspheme as if speaking of a man and an
enemy. The Wanyika horrify the Moslems by their free language concerning
Allah. So King Radáma I. of Madagascar, a comparatively civilized man,
who attempted to regulate his forces upon a European pattern, was in the
habit of firing guns during storms; he declared that the two deities
were answering one another—the God above speaking by thunder and
lightning, the god below by cannon and powder. Yet he could anticipate
the Bon Général Janvier by General Tazo, the swamp-fever, who he
declared was his best aid against the French invader. Something of this
irreverence is remarkable in the character of Richard Cœur de Lion.
The Wanyika thus hold, with our philosophers, that the Koma is a
subjective, not an objective, existence; and yet ghost-craft is still
the only article of their creed. All their diseases arise from
possession, and no man dies what we should term a natural death. Their
rites are intended either to avert evils from themselves or to cast them
upon others, and the primum mobile of their sacrifices is the interest
of the Mganga, or Medicine-man. When the critical moment has arrived,
the ghost, being adjured to come forth from the possessed one, names
some article, technically called a Kehi, or chair, in which, if worn
round the neck or limbs, it will reside without annoying the wearer.
This idea lies at the bottom of many superstitious practices: this negro
approach to a ‘sympathetic cure’ is the object of the leopard’s claw, of
the strings of white, black, and blue beads, called Mdugu ga Mulungu
(ghost-beads), worn over the shoulder, and of the rags taken from the
sick man’s body, and hung or fastened to what Europeans call the
‘Devil’s Tree.’ The ‘Kehi’ is preferred by the demon-ghost to the
patient’s person, and thus by mutual agreement both are happy. Some,
especially women, have a dozen haunters, each with its peculiar charm:
one of them is called, ridiculously enough, ‘Barakat,’ in Arabic ‘a
blessing,’ and the P.N. of the Æthiopian slave inherited by Mohammed.
It has not suited the Moslem’s purpose to proselytize the Wanyika, who
doubtless, like their kinsmen the Wasawahili, would have adopted the
Saving Faith. As it is, the Doruma tribe has been partly converted, and
many of the heathen keep the Ramazan fast, feeling themselves raised in
the scale of creation by doing something more than their pagan brethren.
The ceremonies are the simplest contrivances of savage priestcraft.
Births are not celebrated, and the weakly or deformed infant is at once
strangled: it is a failure, and as such it is put away. Children become
the property of the mother, or rather of her brother, to be disposed of
as he pleases: the only one who has no voice in the matter is the
putative father. Circumcision, an old African custom extending from
Egypt to the Cape, and adopted from the negroid by the Hebrews, is a
semi-religious act performed once every five or six years upon the
youths en masse, and accompanied by the usual eating and drinking,
drumming and dancing. A man may marry any number of wives; the genial
rite, however, is no tie to these fickle souls: it is celebrated by
jollifications, and it is broken as merrily.
The principal festivities, if they can be so called, are funerals: the
object is to ‘break the fear’ (Ussa kiwewe) of death, an event which,
savage-like, they regard with a nameless dread, an inexpressible horror.
For a whole week the relations of the deceased must abstain from
business, however urgent, and ruin themselves by killing cattle and
broaching palm-wine for the whole community. At these times there is a
laxity of morals, which recalls to mind the orgies of the classical
Adonia, and refusal to lavish wealth upon the obsequies of relations is
visited with tauntings and heavy fines.
A characteristic of Wanyika customs is the division of both sexes into
distinct bodies, with initiatory rites resembling masonic degrees. The
orders are three, not four as in India, Persia, and ancient Greece; and
traces of such organization, founded as it is upon the ages of man, may
be found in many communities of negroes and negroids. The Kru Republic,
for instance, a pure democracy, flourishing close to the despotisms of
Ashanti and Dahome, makes a triple division of its citizens: the Kedibo,
or juveniles; the Sedebo, or soldiers (adults); and the Gnekbadi, elders
and censors. The southern Gallas appear to be divided into ‘Toibs,’ or
officers; the ‘Ghaba,’ adult warriors, who wear four Gútu or pigtails,
projecting at right angles from the poll; and the ‘Ari,’ cadets or
aspirants, who have a right to only two. The Wakwafi have the El Moran,
warriors, young men who live with their fathers; the Ekieko, married
men; and the Elkijaro or Elkimirisho, elders. The Wanyika split into the
Nyere, or young; the Khambi, or middle-aged; and the Mfaya, or old. Each
degree has its different initiation and ceremonies, with an ‘elaborate
system of social and legal observances,’ the junior order always buying
promotion from the senior. Once about every twenty years comes the great
festival ‘Unyaro,’ at which the middle-aged degree is conferred. This
(1857) is Unyaro-year; but the Wamasai hindered the rite. Candidates
retire to the woods for a fortnight, and clay themselves for the first
half with white, and during the second with red earth; a slave is
sacrificed, and the slaughter is accompanied by sundry mysteries, of
which my informants could learn nothing. When all the Khambi have been
raised to the highest rank, the Mfaya, these, formerly the elders,
return, socially, to a second childhood; they are once more Nyere, or
(old) boys, and there is no future promotion for them. After the
clay-coatings and the bloody sacrifice, the chief distinctions of the
orders are their religious utensils. Tor instance, the Muansa (plural
Miansa) drum, a goat-skin stretched upon a hollowed tree-trunk, six feet
long, whose booming, drawn-out sounds, heard at night amongst the wild
forested hills, resembles the most melancholy moaning, is peculiar to
the third degree or elders of both sexes. It is brought during the dark
hours to the Kaya, and the junior orders may not look upon it.
Similarly, the women have earthenware drums, which are concealed from
the men. El Idrisi (1st climate, 2nd section) had heard that the people
of El Banes, 150 Arab miles by sea from Manisa or Mombasah, adored a
drum called Esrahim. It was covered with skin only at one end, and was
suspended by a cord to be beaten; the result was a frightful sound,
heard at the distance of a league.
Languor and apathy are here at once the gifts of the media or climate,
and the heritage of the race: moreover, man in these lands, wanting
little, works less. Two great classes, indeed, seem everywhere to make
of life one long holiday—the civilized rich, who have all things, and
the savage, who possesses almost nothing. Yet is the Mnyika, and indeed
mostly the wild man, greedy of gain—alieni appetens, sui
pro-fusus—perfectly dishonest in quest of lucre, and not to be bound by
honour or oath, as he is reckless, wasteful, and improvident. Like their
neighbour-nations in this part of Africa, these people are instinctively
and essentially thieves. They never go to war; agriculture, commerce,
and a settled life have enervated them into pusillanimity without
supplying superior knowledge for offence or even for defence. They
scratch the ground with their little hoes; they wander about after their
few cows and goats; they sit dozing or chatting in the sun or before a
fire; and they spend hours squatting round an old pit till water
collects, rather than sink it a few feet. Thus they idle away three
days, and they rest from non-labour on the fourth, called Juna, from
Jum’a the Moslem ‘sabbath.’ This, as amongst the Dahomans and other
African tribes, is their week. Spare time is passed mostly in
drunkenness, induced by Tembo or palm-wine, and with stronger liquors,
when they can get them. They begin the potations early in the morning,
and after midday they are seldom sober, except for want of material. The
tom-tom is hardly ever silent: as amongst the Somal and the Wasawahili,
it sounds at all times, seasons, and occasions: and they dance,
accompanying themselves with loud cries, even to expel the bad ghost
from the body of a bewitched friend. They have also the Dahoman rattle,
an empty gourd or cocoa-nut, filled with pebbles and provided with a
handle: this is the celebrated ‘Tamaraka’ idol worshipped by the
Tupy-Guarani tribes, between the Gulf of Mexico and the Rio de la Plata.
The music is simple, and they are contented to recitative for the
live-long night such merum nectar as—
‘Kitosí múlálání ká-uká.’
‘The bird from the palm starts not.’
This reminds us of the Histoire d’un bouton and the magical Teutonic
refrain—
‘Trink Bier, liebe, liebe Lieschen,’
arguing, says the witty author, so deep a devotion to that art which
hath power to soothe the savage breast. With time and tune well
developed, but wholly wanting in initiative, the wild men easily learned
music from the missionaries; yet they have always preferred their own
meaningless declamation. Of course the Kinyika is an illiterate
language.
The policy of the Wanyika is a rude and lawless liberty, equality,
fraternity. None commands where none obeys: consequently there is no
‘temperamentum of chief,’ no combination, and no possible improvement.
The headman plies his hoe, like the serf, in his little plot of maize or
manioc; and the clans will not unite even to protect life. Causes are
decided by a council of elders, according to the great African
code—ancient custom. The chief of the five Shaykhs is he of Rabai Mku;
but even he dare not arrogate to himself any authority. Pilfering is
common, robbing is rare; and a man caught in the act of stealing is
chastised by the proprietor with sword or bow. Adultery is punished by
the fine of a cow and abundance of liquor. The murderer is more often
mulcted than handed over for death to the family of the slain; and
little is said concerning the slaughter of a slave. Divided into
half-a-dozen sub-tribes, each barely sufficient to stock an English
village, these savages find petty political jealousies and intrigues as
necessary and as ready to hand as do the highly civilized.
The Wanyika readily attended the European schools as long as these were
a novelty; presently, with the characteristic African levity and
inconsequence, they grew weary of application, and they dubbed all who
so exerted themselves Wazingu, or fools. Yet in one point they are an
anomaly. They possess, in a high degree, the gift of many negro and
negroid races, an unstudied eloquence which the civilized speaker might
envy, and which, like poetry, seems to flourish most in the dawn of
civilization. To see, says a Brazilian author, men so eloquent and so
badly governed does not suggest that public speaking in the virility of
civilization is a great ruling power. Their unpremeditated speech rolls
like a torrent; every limb takes its part in the great work of
persuasion, and the peculiar rhythm of their copious dialect, favourable
to such displays of oratory, forms an effective combination. Few,
however, can ‘follow the words,’ that is to say, answer in due order the
heads of an opponent’s speech. Such power of memory and logical faculty
is not in them. The abuse of the gift of language makes them boisterous
in conversation, unable to keep silence—the negro race is ever
loquacious—and addicted to ‘bending their tongues like their bows for
lies.’ They cannot even, to use a Zanzibar German merchant’s phrase,
‘lie honestly.’ Their character may thus be briefly summed up: a futile
race of barbarians, drunken and immoral; cowardly and destructive;
boisterous and loquacious; indolent, greedy, and thriftless. Their
redeeming points are, a tender love of family, which displays itself by
the most violent ‘kin-grief,’ and a strong attachment to an uninviting
home.
A certain critic, who had probably never transgressed the bounds of
Europe, but who probably had read Macaulay (‘by judicious selection and
previous exaggeration, the intellect and the disposition of any human
being might be described as being made up of nothing but startling
contrasts’), thus complained of my description of Somal inconsistency.
‘This affectionately-atrocious people,’ he declares, ‘is painted in
strangely opposite colours.’ Can we not, then, conceive the high
development of destructiveness and adhesiveness, to speak
phrenologically, combining in the same individual? And are not the
peasantry of Connaught a familiar instance of the phenomenon? Such is
the negro’s innate destructiveness, that I have rarely seen him drop or
break an article without a loud burst of laughter. During fires at
Zanzibar he appears like a fiend, waving brands over his head, dancing
with delight, and spreading the flames, as much from instinct as with
the object of plunder. On the other hand, he will lose his senses with
grief for the death of near relatives: I have known several men who
remained in this state for years. But why enlarge upon what is apparent
to the most superficial observer’s eye?
The male dress is a tanned skin or a cotton cloth tied round the waist,
strips of hairy cowhide are bound like garters, or the ‘hibás’ of the
Bedawin Arabs, below the knee, and ostrich and other feathers are stuck
in the tufty poll. The ornaments are earrings of brass or iron wire, and
small metal chains: around the neck and shoulders, arms and ankles, hang
beads, leather talisman-cases, and ‘ghost-chairs’—the latter usually
some article difficult to obtain, for instance, a leopard’s claw. Those
near the seaboard have ceased to extract one or more of the lower
incisors—a custom whose object was probably the facilitating of
expectoration—and they now rarely tattoo, saying, ‘Why should we spoil
our bodies?’ They have abandoned the decoration to women, who raise the
cutis with a long sharp thorn, prick it with a knife-point, and wash the
wounds with red ochre and water. Abroad the Mnyika carries his bow and
long skin-quiver full of reed arrows, tipped with iron or hard wood, and
poisoned by means of some bulbous root: his shield is a flat strip of
cowhide doubled or trebled. He has also a spear, a knife at his waist
for cutting cocoa-nuts, a Rungu or knobstick in his girdle behind, and a
long sword, half sheathed, and sharpened near the point. He hangs round
his neck a gourd sneeze-mull, containing powdered tobacco with fragrant
herbs and dried plantain-flower. On journeys he holds a long thin staff
surmounted by a little cross, which serves to churn his blood and milk,
a common article of diet in East Africa—similarly, the Lapps bleed their
reindeer. He also slings to his back a dwarf three-legged stool, cut out
of a single block of hard wood. In the ‘Reise auf dem Weissen Nil’ (p.
32), extracted from the Vicar-General Knoblecher’s Journals, we read of
the chief Nighila and his followers carrying stools of tree-stumps,
ornamented with glass-ware. The other approximations of custom,
character, and climate between the North Equatorial basin of the White
River (Nile) and the coast of Eastern Intertropical Africa are
exceedingly interesting.
The costume of the Domus Aurea and Rosa Mystica is as simple: a skin or
a cloth round the loins, another veiling the bosom, and in some cases a
Marinda or broad lappet of woven beads, like the Coëoo of Guiana,
falling in front, with a second of wider dimensions behind. A flat ruff
of thick brass wire encircles the throat, making the head appear as in a
barber’s dish; white and red beads, or the scarlet beans of the Abrus
tree, form the earrings and necklace, bracelets and anklets, whilst a
polished coil of brass wire, wound round a few inches of the leg below
the knee, sets off the magnificent proportions of the limb. Young girls
wear long hair, and the bold bairn takes his bow and arrows before
thinking of a waist-cloth.
The Wanyika are a slave importing tribe: they prefer the darker women of
the South to, and they treat them better than, their own wives. Children
are sold, as in India, only if famine compels, and all have the usual
hatred of slave merchants, the ‘sellers of men.’ When a certain Ali bin
Nasir was Governor of Mombasah he took advantage of a scarcity to feed
the starving Wanyika with grain from the public depôts. He was careful,
however, to secure, as pledges of repayment, the wives and children of
his debtors, and these becoming insolvent, he sold off the whole
deposit. Such a transaction was little suspected by our acute
countrymen, when, to honour enlightened beneficence, they welcomed with
all the plaudits of Exeter Hall, ‘that enlightened Arab statesman, His
Excellency Ali bin Nasir, Envoy Extraordinary of H.M. the Imam of
Muscat, to the Court of H. B. Majesty;’ presented him with costly
specimens of geology, and gold chronometers; entertained him at the
public expense, and sent him from Aden to Zanzibar in the Hon. East
India Company’s brig of war, Tigris. This Oriental votary of free trade
came to a merited bad end. He was one of the prisoners taken by the
doughty B’ana Mtakha of Sewi, where the late Sayyid’s ill-starved and
worse-managed force was destroyed by the Bajuni spear. Recognized by the
vengeful savages, he saw his sons expire in torments; he was terribly
mutilated, and at last he was put to death with all the refinements of
cruelty. And he deserved his fate.
The Wanyika consider service, like slavery, a dishonour: they have also
some food prejudices which render them troublesome to Europeans, and
those who live amongst them are obliged to engage Moslem menials. As
regards the success of the ‘Mombas Mission,’ which was established in
1846, and upon which a large sum of money has been expended, the less
said the better. Dr Krapf had started with the magnificent but visionary
scheme of an ‘Apostle’s Street,’ a chain of mission posts stretching
across Africa from sea to sea: he never, however, made converts enough
to stock a single house. Those unacquainted with savage life would think
it an easy task to overthrow the loose fabric of wild superstitions, and
to raise upon its ruins a structure, rude, but still of higher type.
Practically, the reverse is the case. The Wanyika, for instance, are so
bound and chained by Adá, or custom, that inevitable public opinion,
whose tyranny will not permit a man to sow his lands when he pleases; so
daunted and cowed by the horrors of their faith; so thoroughly
conservative in the worst sense of the word, and so enmeshed by tribal
practices, of which not the least important is their triple initiation,
that the slave of rule and precedent lacks power to set himself free. We
may easily understand this. Religion is the mental expression of a race,
and it cannot advance in purity without a correspondent intellectual
improvement on the part of its votaries. On the other hand, not a few
nations, especially in the dawn of civilization, have risen despite
their follies of faith: but these are peoples who have within them the
germs of progress. Judaism did not make the Falasha of East Africa, nor
the remote colonists of Southern Arabia, an intellectual people: the
Jews of Aden, to this day, show no traces of mental superiority over
their neighbours. Christianity has done nothing for Abyssinia or Egypt:
these lands are inhabited by peoples which have remained as nearly
stationary as it is possible for human nature. Nowhere, indeed, has ‘the
Church’ proved herself in the long course of ages a more complete and
hopeless failure than in her own birthplace, and in her peculiar ethnic
centre, Syria. Here the Marronites are in no ways superior, and in many
points, such as courage and personal dignity, inferior to their
neighbours, the Metawali, who have a debased religion, and the Druzes,
who have none. El Islam, also, has not much to boast of on the coasts of
Guinea and of Zanzibar, except that it has abolished certain
abominations such as witch-killing, twin-murder, and poison ordeals, of
which many have been practised in semi-civilized Europe and Asia. When,
therefore, we tell the world that the Bible made England or the Koran
Stambul, we merely assist in propagating a fallacy.
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Footnote 18:
From Nyika, the wild land, comes Mnyika, the wild lander; Wanyika, the
wild land folk; and Kinyika, the wild land tongue.
Footnote 19:
The Moslem Wasawahili adapts the modified Arabic form, ‘Shaytani.’
Footnote 20:
I say East African because the western regions, especially Fanti-land
and Dahome, believe in a Hades, or world of shades, which is
apparently derived from Egypt. Of this I have spoken in my Mission to
Dahome. Vitruvius exactly explains what my meaning is in the
celebrated passage, Virgo civis Corinthia, jam matrem nuptiis,
implicito morbo decessit; post sepulturam ejus quibus ea viva poculis
delectabatur, nutrix collecta et composita in calatho pertulit ad
monumentum, et in summo collocavit.