it hardly a single native is to be seen. After leaving Benguela, till
you reach the district of Bihé, you will see only one native village,
and that is three miles from the road. Much of the country is fertile.
Villages have been plentiful in the past. The road passes through
their old fields and gardens. Sometimes the huts are still standing,
but all is silent and deserted now. Till this winter there was one
village left, close upon the road, about a day’s trek past Caconda.
But when I hoped to buy a few potatoes or peppers there, I found it
abandoned like the rest. Where the road runs, the natives will not
stay. Exposed continually to the greed, the violence, and lust of white
men and their slaves, they cannot live in peace. Their corn is eaten
up, their men are beaten, their women are ravished. If a Portuguese
fort is planted in the neighborhood, so much the worse. Time after time
I have heard native chiefs and others say that a fort was the cruelest
thing to endure of all. It is not only the exactions of the Chefe in
command himself, though a Chefe who comes for about eighteen months
at most, who depends entirely on interpreters, and is anxious to go
home much richer than he came, is not likely to be particular. But it
is the brutality of the handful of soldiers under his command. The
greater part of them are natives from distant tribes, and they exercise
themselves by plundering and maltreating any villagers within reach,
while the Chefe remains ignorant or indifferent. So it comes that where
a road or fort or any other sign of the white man’s presence appears
the natives quit their villages one by one, and steal away to build new
homes beyond the reach of the common enemy. This is, I suppose, that
“White Man’s Burden” of which we have heard so much. This is “The White
Man’s Burden,” and it is the black man who takes it up.
To the picturesque traveller who is provided with plenty of tinned
things to eat, the solitude of the road may add a charm. For it is far
more romantic to hear the voice of lions than the voice of man. But,
indeed, to every one the road is of interest from its great variety.
Here in a short space are to be seen the leading characteristics of all
the southern half of Africa--the hot and dry edging near the shore,
the mountain zone, and the great interior plateau of forest or veldt,
out of which, I suppose, the mountain zone has been gradually carved,
and is still being carved, by the wash and dripping from the central
marshes. The three zones have always been fairly distinct in every part
of Africa that I have known, from Mozambique round to the mouth of the
Congo, though in a few places the mountain zone comes down close to the
sea.
From Benguela I had to trek for six days, often taking advantage of the
moon to trek at night as well, before I saw a trace of water on the
surface of the rivers, and nine days before running water was found,
though I was trekking in the middle of the wet season. There are one
or two dirty wet places, nauseous with sulphur, but all drinking-water
for man or ox must be dug for in the beds of the sand rivers, and
sometimes you have to dig twelve feet down before the sand looks damp.
It is a beautiful land of bare and rugged hills, deeply scarred by
weather, and full of the wild and brilliant colors--the violet and
orange--that bare hills always give. But the oxen plod through it as
fast as possible, really almost hurrying in their eagerness for a
long, deep drink. Yet the district abounds in wild animals, not only
in elands and other antelopes, which can withdraw from their enemies
into deserts drier than teetotal States and can do without a drink for
days together. But there are other animals as well, such as lions and
zebras and buffaloes, which must drink every day or die. Somewhere,
not far away, there must be a “continuous water-supply,” as a London
County Councillor would say, and hunters think it may be the Capororo
or Korporal or San Francisco, only eight hours south of the road, where
there is always real water and abundance of game. A thirsty lion would
easily take his tea there in the afternoon and be back in plenty of
time to watch for his dinner along the road.
Lions are increasing in number throughout the district, and, I believe,
in all Angola, though they are still not so common as leopards.
Certainly they watch the road for dinner, and all the way from Benguela
to Bihé you have a good chance of hearing them purring about your wagon
any night. Sometimes, then, you may find a certain satisfaction in
reflecting that you are inside the wagon and that twenty oxen or more
are sleeping around you, tied to their yokes. An ox is a better meal
than a man, but to men as well as to oxen the lions are becoming more
dangerous as the wilder game grows scarcer. A native, from the wagon
which crossed the Cuando just after mine, was going down for water in
the evening, when a lion sprang on him and split the petroleum-can with
his claw. The boy had the sense to beat his cup hard against the tin,
and the monarch of the forest was so disgusted at the noise that he
withdrew; but few boys are so quick, and many are killed, especially in
the mountain zone, about one hundred miles from the coast.
I think it is ten years ago now that one of the Brothers of the Holy
Spirit was walking in the mission garden at Caconda in the cool of the
evening, meditating vespers or something else divine, when he looked
up and saw a great lion in the path. Instead of making for the nearest
tree, he had the good sense to fall on his knees, and so he went to
death with dignity. And on one of the nights when I was encamped near
the convent six lions were prowling round it. Vespers were over, but it
was a pleasure to me to reflect how much better prepared for death the
Brothers were than I.
It is very rarely that you have the luck to see a lion, even where they
abound. They are easily hidden. Especially in a country like this,
covered with the tawny mounds and pyramids of the white ant, you may
easily pass within a few yards of a whole domestic circle of lions
without knowing it. Nor will they touch an armed white man unless
pinched with hunger. Yet, in spite of all travellers’ libels, the lion
is really the king of beasts, next to man. You have only to look at
his eye and his forearm to know it. I need not repeat stories of his
strength, but one peculiarity of his was new to me, though perhaps
familiar to most people. A great hunter told me that when, with one
blow of his paw, a lion has killed an ox, he will fasten on the back of
the neck and cling there in a kind of ecstasy for a few seconds, with
closed eyes. During that brief interval you can go quite close to him
unobserved and shoot him through the brain with impunity.
I found the most frequent spoor of lions in a sand river among the
mountains, about a week out from Benguela. The country there is very
rich in wild beasts--Cape buffalo, many antelopes, and quagga (or
Burchell’s zebra, as I believe they ought to be called, but the hunters
call them quagga).
I was most pleased, however, to find upon the surface of the sand river
the spoor of a large herd of elephants which had passed up it the night
before. It was difficult to make out their numbers, for they had thrust
their trunks deep into the sand for water, and having found it, they
evidently celebrated the occasion with a fairy revel, pouring the water
over their backs and tripping it together upon the yellow sands. But
when they passed on, it was clear that the cows and calves were on
the right, while the big males kept the left, and probably forced the
passages through the thickest bush. A big bull elephant’s spoor on sand
is more like an embossed map of the moon with her mountains and valleys
and seas than anything else I can think of. A cow’s footprint is the
map of a simpler planet. And the calf’s is plain, like the impression
of a paving-hammer, only slightly oval.
There was no nasty concealment about that family. The path they had
made through the forest was like the passage of a storm or the course
of a battle. They had broken branches, torn up trees, trampled the
grass, and snapped off all the sugary pink flowers of the tall aloes,
which they love as much as buns in the Zoo. So to the east they
had passed away, open in their goings because they had nothing to
fear--nothing but man, and unfortunately they have not yet taken much
account of him. The hunters say that they move in a kind of zone or
rough circle--from the Upper Zambesi across the Cuando into Angola and
the district where they passed me, and so across the Cuanza northward
and eastward into the Congo, and round towards Katanga and the sources
of the Zambesi again. The hunters are not exactly sure that the same
elephants go walking round and round the circle. They do not know. But
a prince might very profitably spend ten years in following an elephant
family round from point to point of its range--profitably, I mean,
compared to his ordinary round of royal occupations.
I must not stay to tell of the birds--the flamingoes that pass down the
coast, so high that they look no more than geese; the eagles, vultures,
and hawks of many kinds; the parrots, few but brilliant; the metallic
starling, of two species at least, both among the most gorgeous of
birds; the black-headed crane and the dancing crane whose crest is
like Cinderella’s fan, full-spread and touched with crimson; the many
kinds of hornbill, including the bird who booms all night with joy at
approaching rain; the great bustard, which the Boers in their usual
slipshod way called the pau or peacock, simply because it is big, just
as they call the leopard a tiger and the hyena a wolf. Nor must I tell
of the guinea-fowl and francolins, or of the various doves, one of
which begins with three soft notes and then runs down a scale of seven
minor tones, fit to break a mourner’s heart; nor of the aureoles and
the familiar bird that pleases his wives by growing his tail so long he
can hardly hover over the marshes; nor even of our childhood’s friend,
the honey-guide, whose cheery twitter may lead to the wild bees’ nest,
but leads just as cheerily to a python or a lion asleep. I cannot speak
of these, though I feel there is the making of a horrible tract in that
honey-guide.
When you have climbed the mountains--in one place the wagon crawls
over a pass or summit of close upon five thousand feet--you gradually
leave the big game (except the lions) and the most brilliant of the
birds behind. But the deer become even more plentiful in places. The
road is driving them away, as it has driven the natives, and for
the same reason. But within a few hours of the road you may find
them still--the beautiful roan antelope, the still more beautiful
koodoo, the bluebock, the lechwe, the hartebeest (and, I believe, the
wildebeest, or gnu, as well), the stinking water-buck, the reedbuck,
the oribi, and the little duiker, or “diver,” called from its way of
leaping through the high grass and disappearing after each bound. It is
fine to see any deer run, but there can be few things more delightful
than to watch the easy grace of a duiker disappearing in the distance
after you have missed him.
Caconda is, in every sense, the turning-point of the journey; first,
because the road, after running deviously southeast, here turns almost
at right angles northeast on its way to Bihé; secondly, because Caconda
marks the entire change in the character of the scenery from mountains
to the great plateau of forest and marshy glades. And besides, Caconda
is almost the one chance you have of seeing human habitations along the
whole course of the journey of some four hundred and fifty miles. The
large native town has long since disappeared, though you can trace its
ruins; but about five miles south of the road is a rather important
Portuguese station of half a dozen trading-houses, a church--only in
its second year, but already dilapidated--and a fort, with a rampart,
ditch, a toy cannon, and a commandant who tries with real gravity to
rise above the level of a toy. Certainly his situation is grave. The
Cunyami, who ate up the Portuguese force on the Cunene in September of
1904, have sent him a letter saying they mean next to burn him and his
fort and the trading-houses too. He has under his command about thirty
black soldiers and a white sergeant; and he might just as well have
thirty black ninepins and a white feather. He impressed me as about the
steadiest Portuguese I had yet seen, but no wonder he looked grave.
He is responsible, further, for the safety of the Catholic mission,
which stands close beside the wagon track itself, overlooking a wide
prospect of woodland and grass which reminds one of the view over the
Weald of Kent from Limpsfield Common or Crockham Hill. The mission
has a tin-roofed church, a gate-house, cells for the four Fathers and
five Brothers, dormitories for a kind of boarding-school they keep,
excellent workshops, a forge, and a large garden, where the variety
of plants and fruits shows what the natives might do but for their
unalterable belief that every new plant which comes to maturity costs
the life of some one in the village.
[Illustration: CATHOLIC MISSION AT CACONDA]
Though under Portuguese allegiance and drawing money from the state,
all the Fathers and Brothers were French or Alsatian. The superior
was a blithe and energetic Norman, who probably could tell more about
Angola and its wildest tribes than any one living. But to me, caution
made him only polite. The Fathers are said to maintain that acrid
old distinction between Catholic and Protestant--not, one would have
thought, a matter of great importance--and in the past they have shown
much hostility to all other means of enlightening the natives except
their own. But things are quieter just now, and over the whole mission
itself broods that sense of beauty and calm which seems almost peculiar
to Catholicism. One felt it in the gateway with its bell, in the rooms,
whitewashed and unadorned, in the banana-walk through the garden, in
the workshops, and even under that hideous tin roof, when some eighty
native men and women knelt on the bare, earthen floor during the Mass
at dawn.
It is said, but I do not know with what truth, that the Fathers buy
from the slave-traders all the “boys” whom they bring up in the
mission. The Fathers themselves steadily avoided the subject in
conversing with me, but I think it is very probable. About half a mile
off is a Sisters’ mission, where a number of girls are trained in
the same way. When the boys and girls intermarry, as they generally
do, they are settled out in villages within sight of the mission.
I counted five or six such villages, and this seems to show, though
it does not prove, that most of the boys and girls came originally
from a distance, or have no homes to return to. On the whole, I am
inclined to believe that but for slavery the mission’s work must have
taken a different form. But why the Fathers should be so cautious
about confessing it I do not know, unless they are afraid of being
called supporters of the slave-trade because they buy off a few of its
victims, and so might be counted among its customers.
From Caconda it took me only three weeks with the wagon to reach the
Bihé district, which, I believe, was a record for the wet season.
There are five rivers to cross, all of them difficult, and the first
and last--the Cuando and the Kukema--dangerous as well. The track also
skirts round the marshy source of other great watercourses, and it was
with delight that I found myself at the morass which begins the great
river Cunene, and, better still, at a little “fairy glen” of ferns and
reeds where the Okavango drips into a tiny basin, and dribbles down
till it becomes the great river which fills Lake Ngami--Livingstone’s
Lake Ngami, so far away, on the edge of Khama’s country!
The wagon had, besides, to struggle across many of those high, upland
bogs which are the terror of the transport-rider in summer-time. The
worst and biggest of these is a wide expanse something like an Irish
bog or a wet Salisbury Plain, which the Portuguese call Bourru-Bourru,
from the native Vulu-Vulu. It is over five thousand feet above the
sea, and so bare and dreary that when the natives see a white man with
a great bald head they call it his Vulu-Vulu. It was almost exactly
midsummer there when I crossed it, and I threw no shadow at noon,
but at night I was glad to cower over a fire, with all the coats and
blankets I had got, while the mosquitoes howled round me as if for
warmth.
Two points of history I must mention as connected with this part of my
journey. The day after I crossed the Calei I came, while hunting, to a
rocky hill with a splendid view over the valley, only about a mile from
the track. On the top of the hill I found the remains of ancient stone
walls and fortifications--a big circuit wall of piled stones, an inner
circle, or keep, at the highest point, and many cross-walls for streets
or houses. The whole was just like the remains of some rude mediæval
fortress, and it may possibly have been very early Portuguese. More
likely, it was a native chief’s kraal, though they build nothing of
the kind now. Among the natives themselves there is a vague tradition
of a splendid ancient city in this region, which they remember as “The
Mountain of Money.” Possibly this was the site, and it is strange that
no Boers or other transport-riders I met had ever seen the place.
The other point comes a little farther on--about three days after
one crosses the Cunughamba. It is the place by the roadside where,
three years ago, the natives burned a Portuguese trader alive and
made fetich-medicine of his remains. It happened during the so-called
“Bailundu war” of 1902, to which I have referred before. On the spot
I still found enough of the poor fellow’s bones to make any amount
of magic. But if bones were all, I could have gathered far more in
the deserted village of Candombo close by. Here a great chief had his
kraal, surrounded by ancient trees, and clustered round one of the
mightiest natural fortresses I have ever seen. It rises above the trees
in great masses and spires of rock, three or four hundred feet high,
and in the caves and crevasses of those rocks, now silent and deserted,
I found the pitiful skeletons of the men, women, and children of all
the little tribe, massacred in the white man’s vengeance. Whether the
vengeance was just or unjust I cannot now say. I only know that it was
exacted to the full.
V
THE AGENTS OF THE SLAVE-TRADE
The few English people who have ever heard of Bihé at all probably
imagine it to themselves as a largish town in Angola famous for its
slave-market. Nothing could be less like the reality. There is no town,
and there is no slave-market. Bihé is a wide district of forest and
marsh, part of the high plateau of interior Africa. It has no mountains
and no big rivers, except the Cuanza, which separates it from the land
of the Chibokwe on the east. So that the general character of the
country is rather indistinctive, and you might as well be in one part
of it as another. In whatever place you are, you will see nothing but
the broad upland, covered with rather insignificant trees, and worn
into quiet slopes by the action of the water, which gathers in morasses
of long grass, hidden in the midst of which runs a deep-set stream.
Except that it is well watered, fairly cool, and fairly healthy, there
is no great attraction in the region. There are a good many leopards
and a few wandering lions in the north. Hippos come up the larger
streams to breed, and occasionally you may see a buck or two. But
it is a poor country for beasts and game, and poor for produce too,
though the orange orchards and strawberry-beds at the mission stations
show it is capable of better things. On the whole, the impression of
the country is a certain want of character. Often while I have been
plodding through woods looking over a grassy valley I could have
imagined myself in Essex, except that here there are no white roads and
no ancient villages. The whole scene is so unlike the popular idea of
tropical Africa that it is startling to meet a naked savage carrying a
javelin, and almost shocking to meet a lady with only nine inches of
dress.
There is no town and no public slave-market. The Portuguese fort
at Belmonte, once the home of that remarkable man and redoubtable
slave-trader, Silva Porto, and the scene of his rather splendid suicide
in 1890, may be taken as the centre of the district. But there are
only two or three Portuguese stores gathered round it, and scattered
over the whole country there are only a very limited number of other
trading-houses, the largest being the headquarters of the Commercial
Company of Angola, established at Caiala, one day’s journey from the
fort. The trading-houses are, I think, without exception, worked
by slave labor, as are the few plantations of sweet-potato for the
manufacture of rum, which, next to cotton cloth, is the chief
coinage in all dealings with the natives. The exchange from the native
side consists chiefly of rubber, oxen, and slaves, a load of rubber
(say fifty to sixty pounds), an ox, and a young slave counting as about
equal in the recognized currency. In English money we might put the
value at £9.
[Illustration: CARRIERS ON THE MARCH]
It is through these trading-houses that the slave-trade has hitherto
been chiefly conducted, and if you want slaves you can buy them readily
from any of the larger houses still. But the Bihéans have themselves
partly to blame for the ill repute of their country. They are born
traders, and will trade in anything. For generations past, probably
long before the Portuguese established their present feeble hold upon
the country, the Ovimbundu, as they are called, have been sending their
caravans of traders far into the interior--far among the tributaries
of the Congo, and even up to Tanganyika and the great lakes. Like all
traders in Central Africa, they tramp in single file along the narrow
and winding foot-paths which are the roads and trade routes of the
country. They carry their goods on their heads or shoulders, clamped
with shreds of bark between two long sticks, which act as levers. The
regulation load is about sixty pounds, but for his own interest a man
will sometimes carry double as much. As a rule, they march five or six
hours a day, and it takes them about two months to reach the villages
of Nanakandundu, which may be taken as the centre of African trade,
as it is the central point of the long and marshy watershed which
divides the Zambesi from the Congo. For merchandise, they carry with
them cotton cloth, beads, and salt, and at present they are bringing
out rubber for the most part and a little beeswax. As to slaves, guns,
gunpowder, and cartridges are the best exchange for them, owing to
the demand for such things among the “Révoltés”--the cannibal and
slave-dealing tribes who are holding out against the Belgians among the
rivers west of the Katanga district. But the conditions of this caravan
slave-trade have been a good deal changed in the last three years, and
I shall be able to say more about it after my farther journey into the
interior.