it is quite bad enough; the wonder is that any one can live there. The
city lies very low, almost surrounded by a shallow lagoon, over which
the water flows at every tide, leaving a deposit of reeking filth. No
attempt at drainage has been made; sanitary reform is totally unknown;
and the smell of the beach caused Livingstone to suggest that the name
should be changed to Stinkibar. The year before the great hurricane
there was a cholera epidemic which is supposed to have killed ten
thousand people. Strangely enough, the Europeans, who mostly suffer
much from fevers, were totally exempt, and the natives got the notion
that the devil, who gave them the cholera, was afraid to attack the
redoubtable _Myungoo_; so they sometimes whitewashed a man who showed
symptoms of the disease, to cheat the devil, but the devil refused to
be cheated so easily. The physical is far superior, however, to the
moral condition of Zanzibar; in fact, the place is a Sodom where
morality is unknown.
To arrive at an idea of the religious condition of the peoples it is
necessary to consider each race separately, and try to understand their
habits and modes of thought. First let us take the negro—the most
numerous class. Even so we shall be generalizing for the different
tribes and nations of the interior, as distinct from each other and the
races of Europe.
The writer has had considerable opportunities of judging of the black
man, having served in a British man-of-war engaged in the suppression
of the slave-trade, and having for some time been in charge of an
establishment of liberated slaves—mostly boys. The negro character is a
strange series of contradictions, and it takes some time to understand
him. He is profoundly conscious of his inferiority. An English officer
adopted a little slave boy taken from a dhow, and we taught him a few
elements of religion, which he eagerly grasped. Amongst others he was
much struck by the idea of a future state. One day he was being
chaffed: “Ah! you nigger—thick lips—flat nose,” when he replied: “If
I’m a good nigger, after I die I shall get up again, not black then,
but white as you are.” It was a long time, though, before he could
believe that a negro could rise again, though it did not seem
unreasonable to him for an Arab or white man to rise.
Passing with this same boy, Mumbo, through a graveyard at Zanzibar, he
pointed to a grave. “Who’s there?” he said. “Arab man,” I answered,
recognizing it to be so from the concrete with which the grave was
covered. “He get up again?” “Yes,” I replied, after which the boy was
thoughtful and silent for a while. “Who’s buried there?” he repeated,
pointing to a grave marked by a wooden cross. “A Msungu” (white man), I
answered. “He get up again?” “Yes.” Another pause. “And who’s there?”
the boy again asked, pointing to a mean grave unmarked by cross or
stone. “A nigger man,” said I. “He get up again?” But on replying in
the affirmative he would not believe it, and continued obstinately
sceptical for some time.
Selfishness seems to be the most prominent feature of the negro
character. Civilized people mask the repulsive feeling, but not so the
black. Everything is for himself and his own present sensual
gratification. They have not a particle of gratitude, and if you show
them kindness or give them a present it is considered a sign of
weakness, and their contempt for their benefactor is apparent. There is
no word expressive of thanks in the Swahili language, though the
“Santa” of the Arab, accompanied by a bow, the right hand placed on the
heart, is most graceful and pleasing. On taking charge of the boys’
house, in the benevolence of my heart I invested in numbers of stalks
of bananas—a large one can be obtained for eight cents—and distributed
them. But no word of thanks was heard, and the boys began to consider
fruit as a right, and to grumble if it were not forthcoming; so I grew
rather disgusted and discontinued scattering largesse amidst such a
graceless set. Neither do they show much affection. This, perhaps, is
hardly to be wondered at, as the slave-traffic, which has existed from
time immemorial, must, by constantly separating families, have weakened
and almost destroyed all ties of kindred. A gentleman well acquainted
with the people told me that the only known affection amongst them was
that between a son and his mother. Several slave boys whom we had
liberated and kept on board the ship, on our leaving the coast were
wisely sent on shore to the mission, only the one of whom I have
previously spoken remaining. He wept piteously and sobbed himself to
sleep. We were touched, and fancied that, after all, we had formed too
low an estimate of the negro, till on waking he appeared to have
completely forgotten his friends, and never spoke of them again. It
then appeared that his grief had been purely selfish; for, as he
phrased it, he would have no one “to skylark with.” “What will you give
me?” is the view a negro takes of his neighbor, and in this the
Ki-Swahili, and even the Arab, very much resemble him. One’s ear soon
grows familiar with the cry of “Lata paca”—“Bring pice”—pice being
little Indian copper coins which form the currency at Zanzibar. This
question is asked you in the streets or country roads, not merely by
the poor, but even by well-to-do people. I was one day walking home
from a feast to which I had been invited by the proprietor of a sugar
plantation—a Swahili man. These people are mulattoes, partly Arab, but
mostly negro. They are Mahometans and call themselves Arabs. We had
been hospitably _fêted_, and I was accompanied by a brother of my host,
a nice-looking young fellow, upright as a dart—as they all are—and
dressed in the graceful long white linen robe which they always wear.
He was proceeding to his home, a well-built stone house, but before
leaving me I was astonished at his asking in Swahili for a few pice!
Doubting my ears, I asked a boy who understood English what he had
said, and he told me that I had not mistaken his meaning; so I gave him
two or three coppers, and he went away well pleased.
Negroes are very improvident, like most savage races. They take no
thought for the morrow—not from faith, but from utter recklessness.
They are also fond of desertion for the mere sake of change. Slaves
sometimes leave their masters and hire themselves out for a year or two
to some one else, returning afterwards as if nothing had happened, and
receiving no punishment, the master fearing that he might revenge
himself on him or desert again, and also arguing that it is his nature
and that no better can be expected of him. I was once on a shooting
party in the Kingani River, and placing one of the boats in charge of a
quartermaster, left with him a Seedee boy, or black seaman, to clean
the jaws of a hippopotamus that I had shot on the previous day. I went
up the river in the other boat with the remaining seamen for a day’s
shooting, and on my return in the evening was informed that the black
had decamped, and we never saw any more of him. In the ship he was
receiving about four times as much pay as he could possibly earn
elsewhere, and, in addition to this, he left clothes and money behind.
Yet we afterwards learnt that before leaving the vessel he had told his
friends of his intention to run.
The negro is, in Africa as elsewhere, exceedingly indolent, and, nature
having provided him with abundance of the necessaries of life, he
indulges his laziness to the full when he possibly can—that is, in his
native country or at Zanzibar, if he can manage to possess a few slaves
to work for him.
He is also obstinate and headstrong. Going on shore on the beautiful
island of Pemba, north of Zanzibar, to trade for provisions, they were
uniformly refused us, whatever price we offered. Yet next day the
natives brought the things to the ship, some miles from the shore, and
offered them for sale. A little bit of a boy was so obstinate that he
would not obey orders unless he chose, even if thrashed with a
rhinoceros-hide whip; neither did he flinch nor utter a cry under
punishment. But when he left the ship, where he had been petted by the
sailors, being sent to the French Mission, he was so disgusted that the
first thing he did was to roll on the beach and completely destroy his
new clothes, and the missionaries were compelled to restore him his old
sailor costume. Still he sulked, and when I left they had not managed
to get him to speak.
Negroes are subject to sudden fits of fury almost amounting to madness,
and then they cry, shout, vociferate, and argue in the most ridiculous
manner. They love to eat and are very greedy, but are still more fond
of drinking, and in their own country begin the day by copious
potations of beer. However, at Zanzibar drunkenness would be punished
by imprisonment; and that is no trifle, the prisoners being placed in a
yard enclosed by four walls, and receiving no food, unless they have a
friend to bring them some. They are also exceedingly depraved, and,
when brought into contact with the semi-civilization of the coast, they
become, if anything, worse than before. A stranger is astonished at the
cool manner in which they enter a strange house, if they see the door
open. They place their spear in a corner, set themselves in the best
place, and talk till they are tired (they are especially fond of
hearing themselves talk), when they rise and leave. It is no good
trying to exclude them; their curiosity must be satisfied, and they
insist on seeing and learning about everything—examining and handling
your clothes and asking the value of each article.
Negroes have the redeeming feature of being mostly good-tempered and
pleased by a very little. They delight in a joke, yet their wit is of
the most elementary character. They are exceedingly fond of music;
neither does its unvaried monotony pall on them. I once passed an old
man amusing himself by drumming with two sticks on a plank; returning
after some hours, I found him continuing the performance, which he had
evidently kept up all the time. You will see them on a moonlight night,
or even in the daytime, dancing and flinging their limbs about in the
most ridiculous and ungraceful manner to the tune of tomtoms and fifes;
yet they keep perfect time. A circle is formed, and a performer waltzes
rapidly around the inner space, looking up to the sky, till she becomes
giddy and falls into the arms of her friends. Whatever work they are
engaged in, these people always sing, and in the streets you constantly
hear the chant of porters, who carry tusks of ivory or bales of goods
slung between two of them on a pole which rests on their shoulders.
The East African negro has been completely debased by centuries of
oppression and slavery. “All the good qualities appear crushed out of
the African race,” said an experienced missionary at Zanzibar to me.
Their religion is the same as that of the natives of the west
coast—fetichism. I believe this word is derived from the Portuguese
_feitiço_, a doing—that is, of magic. Nature has colored the black
man’s thoughts, but not with the sublime and beautiful. He sees nothing
in nature but the terrible, vast, threatening, and hostile. The dense
jungle with huge trees, concealing poisonous snakes, fierce lions, and
spotted leopards; the fever-breeding swamp; the devastating
cyclone—these have produced a feeling of dread, helplessness, and
terror on his debased mind. He has but a very vague, unformed idea of a
Supreme Being, and does not at all conceive of the spiritual and
eternal side of man. To him death is destruction. Yet he believes that
the ghost of the departed person remains, and he always imagines it to
be harmful and hostile. In fact, he is for ever in terror of ghosts and
witchcraft, and his religion consists in the propitiation of natural
objects. The African’s creed may be reduced to two articles: the first
demonology, or the existence of spectres of the dead; the second
witchcraft, or black magic. Their native superstitions the slaves carry
with them to Zanzibar or wherever they are taken, and so deeply rooted
are these beliefs in their minds that I have often been surprised to
hear negroes who have been Protestant Christians for years, and daily
attending public Christian worship, speak of witchcraft in ordinary
conversation as much as a matter of course as they would of any
every-day occurrence. For instance, missing some pice from my drawers,
I asked my servant to find out who had taken them. He replied that he
could not do so, but that a man had been there years ago who “made
plenty witchcraft”; he would have told me, but now he was gone. Some
very good Christian boys, as I was walking with them one day, suddenly
dropped their voices and told me that it was a “plenty bad place.” I
imagined that fever or ague was intended, as it was low, marshy ground;
but no such thing. They had once witnessed some “witchcraft” or other
there.
There are _Mganga_—wizards and witches—who are partly impostors and
partly dupes of their own imagination. To these people the negroes have
recourse in any calamity or sickness. Their office is to transfer the
evil from which they suffer to some one else. Of course payment is the
preliminary—no pay, no work. And an African must have present payment;
he attaches no value to promises of future reward, though ever so near.
These Mganga endeavor to entice ghosts from possessed persons and
transfer them to some inanimate object, striving to effect it by music,
dancing, and drinking. Thus, they nail pieces of cloth to trees to coax
the devils into them. Epileptic fits are very common, and it is not
astonishing that they should regard them as the effect of seizure by
some external agent. On the mainland they attempt to discover the
workers of magic by most cruel ordeals.
There are also rain-makers. It does not require an exceptionally
weatherwise person to infer what the weather will be in a country of
regular monsoons and seasons; still, they sometimes make a mistake, and
then the false prophets have to escape as best they can.
The Arabs have the utmost contempt for the negroes, and, so far from
trying to convert them, purposely leave them to perdition; if they made
them Mahometans they would be their equals, and this they do not at all
desire.
Such is the character and religious belief of these unhappy people. We
will see later on what the church can do for them, but in this inquiry
one important subject must be considered—that is, the slave-trade.
Slavery on the White Nile is admirably described by Sir Samuel Baker in
his _Nile Basin_, and it is much the same on the east coast. The petty
native chieftains are constantly at war with each other, the object
being plunder. They try to surprise a neighboring village at night,
fire it, and surround it with armed men. As the luckless inhabitants
rush out to escape from the flames, their enemies shoot down the men
and seize the women and children for slaves, carrying off the cattle.
Sometimes a thieving Arab slaving party joins one chief who has a
grudge against a neighboring village, assisting him to destroy it in
the manner just described and sharing the plunder. The Arabs then
manage to quarrel with their allies, and so obtain their goods also.
As long as this state of things exists mission work in the interior
will be impossible. The Protestant English mission, under Bishop
Mackenzie, some years ago established itself in the interior near the
Zambesi, and gathered together some hundreds of natives whose
improvement they hoped gradually to effect. But a powerful tribe
attacking the one amongst which they dwelt, they had to perform the
uncongenial task of driving off the invaders with their rifles. Their
friends were saved for the time, but many of the missionaries had died
from fever, and the small remainder was obliged to retire. Shortly
after this the tribe with which they had been was swept away and
destroyed. The slave-trade naturally prevents all progress and the
increase of population. It also weakens all family ties, parents
killing their offspring if they are in want. Great cruelties are
practised, not only in the capture of slaves, but in their transit to
the place of destination. The Arabs are very improvident, and
sometimes, having failed to provide sufficient food for their caravan,
they leave some of the slaves in the desert to starve, not even
removing the yokes by which they are fastened together. I was told of a
woman who was carrying a bale of cloth, and on the journey gave birth
to a child. She could not carry both the baby and the goods; the latter
were the more valuable, so the infant was brained against the nearest
tree and left on the ground.
About four years ago a treaty was signed between the Sultan of Zanzibar
and the British government, by which the importation of slaves was
prohibited, but the Arabs were permitted to retain the slaves they
already possessed. Strong pressure had to be brought to bear on the
Arabs to compel them to sign this treaty; but even now a considerable
traffic is carried on by the east coast with Arabia, Pemba, and
Madagascar. The negroes are crowded into the slave-dhows, and their
sufferings from hunger and filth must be extreme on a voyage. Many die
and are thrown overboard, and the remainder land in a miserably reduced
condition. But the household slaves are treated kindly and well fed;
this the owner finds politic, or the slave might desert. They are
addressed as “Ndugu-yango”—“My brother”—and considered part of the
family.
There are two sorts of slaves in the islands—the Muwallid, or domestic,
born in slavery, and the wild imported slave. The former class are much
better treated than the others. Even young captured slaves are not so
tractable as they, but the older ones are very obstinate and contrary
and given to thieving and disorder. Sometimes in revenge they attempt
the life of their master or try to get him into serious trouble, yet
they are seldom punished for it, any more than with us a vicious animal
would be. They are slaves, and it is their nature, and they themselves
give this as their excuse when convicted of the most abominable crimes.
But slaves often rise to a very important position; and as Abraham sent
his servant to Mesopotamia to negotiate his son’s marriage, so slaves
are entrusted by their masters with the command of trading caravans to
the interior, they preferring to remain comfortably at home. Free
negroes have been known to sell themselves for slaves, and, when asked
about it, to reply: “What can a dog do without a master?” Also, slaves
often own slaves of their own. The pilot of Zanzibar, an official of
some importance called Buckett, was a slave, and, when seen habited in
a naval officer’s old coat and a handsome turban on his head, he
appeared a person of much distinction.
It is difficult to see how slavery can be kept up at Zanzibar, now that
importation is forbidden; for the annual loss from death and desertion
is thirty per cent., and the average annual importation a few years ago
was estimated at thirteen thousand. Slavery, as it has been there, is
an abominable institution and a complete bar to improvement.
Though the negro is so ignorant, superstitious, and debased, yet it has
been abundantly shown that he is capable of improvement. I once visited
the well-ordered estate of Kokotoni, in the north of Zanzibar Island,
the property of Capt. Fraser. I found it in charge of an intelligent
Scotchman, who said that they had about five hundred laborers resident
on the plantation—half men and half women. They required them all to
marry, gave them cottages, provision, grounds, and two dollars and a
half each per month, and they were an orderly and well-conducted
people. The overseer had taught them different trades—as that of
wheelwright, necessary for the work of the estate—and, though they
sometimes deserted in true negro fashion, yet the truants were sure to
return again.
At Zanzibar and Bagomoyo, twenty-five miles off on the mainland, at the
mouth of the Kingani River, the Société du Saint-Esprit, the parent
house of which is in Paris, have most flourishing establishments. The
town house is in the centre of Zanzibar, its corrugated iron roof,
towering above the neighboring buildings, being a conspicuous object.
On entering you will be greeted in good French by very civil negro boys
dressed in blue blouse and trowsers and wearing a black glazed hat.
They will conduct you to a spacious sitting-room decorated with
pictures of religious subjects, and before long the superior, Père
Etienne, appears. He is a tall, slight man, and has not lost the
cavalry swagger which he acquired as captain in a Lancers regiment, and
which forms a strange contrast to his black soutane. He is a most
affable and agreeable priest, and conducts one round the interesting
establishment. There is a beautiful little chapel on the first floor,
and when I was last in it the walls were being stencilled. In the
workshops trades are taught to the boys by the lay brethren, such as
working in metals, carpentering, and boat-building. The pupils belong
to the mission, they having been either handed over to it by the
British consul from captured slave-dhows, or purchased by the mission
in the slave-market in the old times before slavery was abolished. At
Bagomoyo there is a still larger establishment under the care of Père
Horner, where about ten clergy and the same number of sisters have
charge of an agricultural colony on which are several hundred Christian
negroes. At first the mission did not mean to Christianize the natives,
thinking that they were so degraded that it would take several
generations to raise them to that point; but they found them capable of
more than was originally expected. The mission establishment is half a
mile from the town of Bagomoyo, which contains about five thousand
people, but it has the appearance of a small town itself. The grounds
are laid out in a most orderly manner; it is a pleasure to walk along
the straight, well-kept paths between fields of maize, millet, and
sweet potatoes.
The captain of the ship in which I served was one day up the Kingani
River in his boat, accompanied by a young Alsatian lay brother from the
mission. Shooting a hippopotamus cow, the calf, only a week or two old,
would not leave the mother’s carcase, and the captain, who had to
return to his ship, giving money to the brother, advised him to obtain
assistance and catch the little animal, which he presented to the
mission. A few months after, as we were visiting the good fathers, the
lay brother took us to a large tank surrounded with a fence, which they
had formed for the accommodation of the hippopotamus. Standing at the
gate, the brother called the animal by name, and it came snorting out
of the water, ran up to its master, looking up into his face, and
followed us about the garden and into the house like a dog. Here he was
fed from a bottle with flour and milk. He was taken to the Zoölogical
Gardens at Berlin shortly afterwards, and must have sold for at least
six thousand dollars. Hippopotami are inimical to the crops of rice
which grow near the rivers, as they come on shore in the night and
devour enormous quantities of the young tender shoots, so that the
fields have to be carefully watched. But more dangerous animals are
found on the coast, and Père Horner told us a story of a huge lion
which had carried off several of their cattle. They constructed a trap
of a deserted hut, into which they enticed the animal, which, finding
himself imprisoned, aroused all the establishment from their midnight
slumbers by his roarings. He was shot by one of the brethren.
The fathers give their guests a good dinner of many courses in true
French style, but one should not conclude, as does Stanley in his _How
I Found Livingstone_, that champagne is their ordinary beverage. On the
contrary, when I was there they could offer us nothing but a little
white rum which had been sent them from our ship, and the champagne
with which they welcomed Mr. Stanley was some of a small present which
they had received.
Their mode of work is undoubtedly the true one: to get a certain number
of negroes, isolate them as much as possible from the licentious
society of their heathen brethren, and hope of them to form the nucleus
of a future Christian population.