it was. It may not be conducted under the old methods. There is no
longer that almost continuous procession of chained and tortured men
and women which all travellers who crossed the Hungry Country before
1902 describe. For the moment rubber has become almost as lucrative as
man. The traffic has been driven underground. There is now a feeling of
shame and risk about it, and the military authorities dare not openly
give it countenance as before. But I have never heard of any case in
which they openly interfered to stop it, and the thing still goes on.
It is, in fact, fast recovering from the shock of the rebellion of
1902, and is now increasing again every month.
It will go on and it will increase as long as the authorities and
traders habitually speak of the natives as “dogs,” and allow the men
under their command to misuse them at pleasure. To-day a negro soldier
in the white Portuguese uniform seized a little boy at the head of
my carriers, pounded his naked feet with the butt of his rifle, and
was beating him unmercifully with the barrel, when I sprang upon him
with two javelins which I happened to be carrying because my rifle was
jammed. At sight of me the emblem of Portuguese justice crawled on the
earth and swore he did not know it was a white man’s caravan. That was
sufficient excuse.
Three days ago word came to me on the march that one of my carriers had
been shot at and wounded. We were in a district where three Chibokwe
natives actually with shields and bows as well as guns had hung upon
our line as we went in. I had that morning warned the carriers for the
twentieth time that they must keep together, and had set an advanced
and rear guard, knowing that stray carriers were being shot down.
But natives are as incapable of organization as of seeing a straight
line, and my people were straggled out helplessly over a length of
five or six miles. Hurrying forward, I found that the bullet--a cube
of copper--had just missed my carrier’s head, had taken a chip out of
his hand, and gone through my box. The carrier behind had caught the
would-be murderer, and there he stood--a big Luvale man, with filed
teeth, and head shaved but for a little tuft or pad at the top. I
supposed he ought to be shot, but my rifle was jammed, and I am not a
born executioner. However, I cleared a half-circle and set the man in
the middle. A great terror came into his face as I went through the
loading motions. I had determined, having blindfolded him, to catch
him a full drive between the eyes. This would give him as great a
shock as death. He would think it was death, and yet would have time
to realize the horror of it afterwards, which in the case of death he
would not have. But when all was ready, my carriers, including the
wounded man, set up a great disturbance, and seized the muzzle of my
rifle and turned it aside. They kept shouting some reason which I did
not then understand. So I gave the punishment over to them, and they
took the man’s gun--a trade-gun or “Lazarino,” studded with brass
nails--stripped him of his powder-gourd, cloth, and all he had, beat
him with the backs of their axes, and drove him naked into the forest,
where he disappeared like a deer.
I found out afterwards that their reason for clemency was the fear of
Portuguese vengeance upon their villages, because the man was employed
by the fort at Mashiko, and therefore claimed the right of shooting any
other native at sight, even over a minute’s dispute about yielding the
foot-path.
Such small incidents are merely typical of the attitude which the
Portuguese take towards the natives and allow their own black soldiers
and slaves to take. As long as this attitude is maintained, the
immensely profitable slave-traffic which has filled with its horrors
this route for centuries past will continue to fill it with horrors, no
matter how secret or how legalized the traffic may become.
I have pitched my tent to-night on a hill-side not far from the fort of
Matota, where a black sergeant and a few men are posted to police the
middle of the Hungry Country. In front of me a deep stream is flowing
down to the Zambesi with strong but silent current in the middle of a
marsh. The air is full of the cricket’s call and the other quiet sounds
of night. Now and then a dove wakes to the brilliant moonlight, and
coos, and sleeps again. Sometimes an owl cries, but no leopards are
abroad, and it would be hard to imagine a scene of greater peace or of
more profound solitude. And yet, along this path, there is no solitude,
for the dead are here; neither is there any peace, but a cry.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Commander Cameron describes the town and its chief, Mona Peho, in
_Across Africa_, p. 426 (1876).
[2] The King of Italy’s award on the disputed frontier between British
Barotzeland and Portuguese Angola was not published, in fact, till
July, 1905. Great Britain received only part of her claim, and the
Hungry Country, together with the whole of the slave route, remains
under Portuguese misgovernment.
[3] Properly speaking, vapeka is the plural of upeka, a slave, but in
Bihé apeka is used.
VII
SAVAGES AND MISSIONS
The Chibokwe do not sell their slaves; they kill them; and this
distinction between them and the Bihéans is characteristic. The Bihéans
are carriers and traders. They always have an eye fixed on the margin
of profit. They will sell anything, including their own children,
and it is waste to kill a man who may be sold to advantage. But the
Chibokwe are savages of a wilder race, and no Bihéan would dare buy a
Chibokwe slave, even if they had the chance. They know that the next
Bihéan caravan would be cut to pieces on its way.
It is impossible to fix the limits of the Chibokwe country. The people
are always on the move. It is partly the poverty of the land that
drives them about, partly their habit of burning the village whenever
the chief dies; and as villages go by the chief’s name, they are the
despair of geographers. But in entering the interior you may begin
to be on your guard against the Chibokwe two days after crossing
the Cuanza. They have a way of cutting off stray carriers, and, as
I mentioned in my last letter, my own little caravan was dogged by
three of them with shields and spears, who might have been troublesome
had they known that the Winchester with which I covered the rear was
only useful as a club. It was in the Chibokwe country, too, that the
one attempt was made to rob my tent at night, and again I only beat
off the thieves by making a great display with a jammed rifle. On one
side their villages are mixed up with the Luimbi, on the other with
the Luena people and the Luvale, who are scattered over the great, wet
flats between Mashiko and Nanakandundu. But they are a distinct people
in themselves, and they appear to be increasing and slowly spreading
south. If the King of Italy’s arbitration gives the Zambesi tributaries
to England, the Chibokwe will form the chief part of our new
fellow-subjects, and will share the legal advantages of Whitehall.[4]
They file or break their teeth into sharp points, whereas the Bihéans
compromise by only making a blunt angle between the two in front. It
used to be said that pointed teeth were the mark of cannibalism, but I
think it more likely that these tribes at one time had the crocodile or
some sharp-toothed fish as their totem, and certainly when they laugh
their resemblance to pikes, sharks, or crocodiles is very remarkable.
Anyhow, the Chibokwe are not cannibals now, except for medicine, or
in the hope of acquiring the moral qualities of the deceased. But I
believe they eat the bodies of people killed by lightning or other
sudden death, and the Bihéans do the same.
Though not so desert as the Hungry Country, the soil of their whole
district is poor, and the people live in great simplicity. Hardly
any maize is grown, and the chief food is the black bean, a meal
pounded from yellow millet, and a beetle about four inches long. In
all villages there are professional hunters and fishers, but game is
scarce, and the fish in such rivers as the Mushi-Moshi (Simoï) are not
allowed to grow much above the size of whitebait. Honey is to be found
in plenty, but for salt, which is their chief desire, they have to put
up with the ashes of a burned grass, unless they can buy real salt from
the Bihéans in exchange for millet or rubber. Just at present rubber
is their wealth, and they are doing rather a large trade in it. All
over the forests they are grubbing up the plant by the roots, and in
the villages you may hear the women pounding and tearing at it all the
afternoon. But rubber thus extirpated gives a brief prosperity, and in
two years, or five at the most, the rubber will be exhausted and the
Chibokwe thrown back on their natural poverty.
In the arts they far surpass all their neighbors on the west side.
They are so artistic that the women wear little else but ornament.
Their houses are square or oblong, with clean angles and straight
sides, and the roofs, instead of being conical, are oblong too, having
a straight beam along the top, like an English cottage. The tribe
is specially famous for its javelins, spears, knives, hatchets, and
other iron-work, which they forge in the open spaces round the village
club-house, working up their little furnaces with wooden tubes and
bellows of goat-skin, like loose drum-heads, pulled up and down with
bits of stick to make a draught. A simple pattern is hammered on some
of the axes, and on the side of one hut I saw an attempt at fresco--a
white figure on a red ground under a white moon--the figure being quite
sufficiently like an ox.
[Illustration: A CHIBOKWE FORGE WHERE NATIVE SPEARS ARE MADE]
In dancing, the Chibokwe excel, like the Luvale people, who are their
neighbors on the eastern side, farther in the interior, and their
dances are much the same. It is curious that their favorite form is
almost exactly like the well-known Albanian dance of the Greeks.
Standing in a broken circle, they move round and round to a repeated
song, while the leader sets the pace, and now and again springs out
into the centre to display his steps. The Chibokwe introduce a few
varieties, the man in the centre beckoning with his hand to any one in
the ring to perform the next solo, and he in turn calling on another.
There is also much more movement of the body than in the Albanian
dance, the chief object of the art being to work the shoulders up and
down, and wriggle the backbone as much like a snake as possible. But
the general idea of the dance is the same, and neither the movement nor
the singing nor the beat of the drum alters much throughout a moonlit
night.
It is natural that the Chibokwe should have retained much of the
religious feeling and rites which the commercial spirit has destroyed
in the Bihéans. They are far more alive to the spiritual side of
nature, and the fetich shrines are more frequent in all their villages.
The gate of every village, and, indeed, of almost every house, has its
little cluster of sticks, with antelope skulls stuck on the tops, or
old rags fluttering, or a tiny thatched roof covering a patch of strewn
meal. The people have a way of painting the sticks in red and black
stripes, and so the fisher paints the rough model of a canoe that he
hangs by his door to please the fishing spirit. Or sometimes he hangs
a little net, and the hunter, besides his cluster of horned skulls,
almost always hangs up a miniature turtle three or four inches long. I
cannot say for what reason, but all these charms are not to avert evil
so much as to win the favor of a benign spirit who loves to fish or
hunt. So far the rites are above the usual African religion of terror
or devil-worship. But when a woman with child carves a wooden bird to
hang over her door, and gives it meal every evening and sprinkles meal
in front of her door, I think her object is to ward off the spirits of
evil from herself and her unborn baby.
In a Chibokwe village, one burning afternoon, I found a native woman
being treated for sickness in the usual way. She was stretched on her
back in the dust and dirt of the public place, where she had lain for
four days. The sun beat upon her; the flies were thick upon her body.
Over her bent the village doctor, assiduous in his care. He knew, of
course, that the girl was suffering from witchcraft. Some enemy had
put an evil spirit upon her, for in Africa natural death is unknown,
and but for witchcraft and spirits man would be immortal. But still
the doctor was trying the best human means he knew of as well. He had
plastered the girl’s body over with a compound of leaves, which he had
first chewed into a pulp. He had then painted her forehead with red
ochre, and was now spitting some white preparation of meal into her
nose and mouth. The girl was in high fever--some sort of bilious fever.
You could watch the beating of her heart. The half-closed eyes showed
deep yellow, and the skin was yellow too. Evidently she was suffering
the greatest misery, and would probably die next day.
It happened that two Americans were with me, for I had just reached
the pioneer mission station at Chinjamba, beyond Mashiko. One of them
was a doctor, with ten years’ experience in a great American city, and
after commending the exertions of the native physician, he asked to be
allowed to assist in the case himself. The native agreed at once, for
the white man’s fame as an exorcist had spread far through the country.
Four or five days later I saw the same girl, no longer stretched on hot
dust, no longer smeared with spittle, leaves, and paint, but smiling
cheerfully at me as she pounded her meal among the other women.
The incident was typical of those two missionaries and their way of
associating with the natives. It is typical of most young missionaries
now. They no longer go about denouncing “idols” and threatening hell.
They recognize that native worship is also a form of symbolism--a
phase in the course of human ideas upon spiritual things. They do
not condemn, but they say, “We think we know of better things than
these,” and the native is always willing to listen. In this case, for
instance, after the girl had been put into a shady hut and doctored,
the two missionaries sat down on six-inch native stools outside the
club-house and began to sing. They were pioneers; they had only three
hymns in the Chibokwe language, and they themselves understood hardly
half the words. No matter; they took the meaning on trust. By continued
repetition, by feeling no shame in singing a hymn twenty or thirty
times over at one sitting, they had got the words fixed in the native
minds, and when it came to the chorus the whole village shouted
together like black stars. The missionaries understood the doctrine,
the people understood the words; it was not a bad combination, and I
thought those swinging choruses would never stop. The preaching was
perhaps less exhilarating to the audience, but so it has sometimes been
to other congregations, and the preacher’s knowledge of the language he
spoke was only five months old.
[Illustration: A CHIBOKWE WOMAN AND HER FETICHES]
At the mission it was the same thing. The pioneers had set up a log
hut in the forest, admitting the air freely through the floor and
sides. They were living in hard poverty, but when they shared with me
their beans and unleavened slabs of millet, it was pleasant to know
that each of the two doors on either side of the hut was crammed with
savage faces, eagerly watching the antics of civilization at meals.
One felt like a lantern-slide, combining instruction with amusement.
The audience consisted chiefly of patients who had built a camp of
forty or fifty huts close outside the cabin, and came every morning to
be cured--cured of broken limbs, bad insides, wounds, but especially
of the terrible sores and ulcers which rot the shins and thighs,
tormenting all this part of Africa. Among the patients were three
kings, who had come far from the east. The greatest of them had brought
a few wives--eight, I think--and some children, including a singularly
fascinating princess with the largest smile I ever saw. Every morning
the king came to my tent, showed me his goitre, asked for tobacco, and
sat with me an hour in silent esteem. As I was not then accustomed to
royalty, I was uncertain how three kings would behave themselves in
hospital life; but in spite of their rank and station, they were quite
good, and even smiled upon the religious services, feeling, no doubt,
as all the rich feel, that such things were beneficial for the lower
orders.
On certain evenings the missionaries went out into the hospital camp to
sing and pray. They sat beside a log fire, which threw its light upon
the black or copper figures crowding round in a thick half-circle--big,
bony men, women shining with castor-oil, and swarms of children, hardly
visible but for a sudden gleam of eyes and teeth. The three invariable
hymns were duly sung--the chorus of the favorite being repeated
seventeen times without a pause, as I once counted, and even then
the people showed no sign of weariness. The woman next to me on that
occasion sang with conspicuous enthusiasm. She was young and beautiful.
Her mop of hair, its tufts solid with red mud, hung over her brow and
round her neck, dripping odors, dripping oil. Her bare, brown arms
jingled with copper bracelets, and at her throat she wore the section
of round white shell which is counted the most precious ornament of
all--“worth an ox,” they say. Her little cloth was dark blue with a
white pattern, and, squatted upon her heels, she held her baby between
her thighs, stuffing a long, pointed breast into his mouth whenever
he threatened to interrupt the music. For her whole soul was given to
the singing, and with wide-open mouth she poured out to the stars and
darkened forests the amazing words of the chorus:
“Haleluyah! mwa aku kula,
Jesu vene mwa aku sanga:”
There were two other lines, which I do not remember. The first line no
one could interpret to me. The second means, “Jesus really loves me.”
The other two said, “His blood will wash my black heart white.”
To people brought up from childhood in close familiarity with words
like these there may be nothing astonishing about them. They have
unhappily become the commonplaces of Christianity, and excite no more
wonder than the sunrise. But I would give a library of theology to know
what kind of meaning that brown Chibokwe woman found in them as she sat
beside the camp-fire in the forest beyond the Hungry Country, and sang
them seventeen times over to her baby and the stars.
When at last the singing stopped, one of the missionaries began to
read. He chose the first chapter of St. John, and in that savage tongue
we listened to the familiar sentences, “In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Again I looked
round upon that firelit group of naked barbarians. I remembered the
controversies of ages, the thinkers in Greek, the seraphic doctors,
the Byzantine councillors, the saints and sinners of the intellect,
Augustine in the growing Church, Faust in his study--all the great
and subtle spirits who had broken their thought in vain upon that
first chapter of St. John, and again I was filled with wonder. “For
Heaven’s sake, stop!” I felt inclined to cry. “What are these people
to understand by ‘the beginning’? What are we to understand by ‘the
Word’?” But when I looked again I recognized on all faces the mood of
stolid acquiescence with which congregations at home allow the same
words to pass over their heads year after year till they die as good
Christians. So that I supposed it did not matter.
There seems to be a fascination to missionaries in St. John’s Gospel,
and, of course, that is no wonder. It is generally the first and
sometimes the only part of the New Testament translated, and I have
seen an old chief, who was diligently learning to read among a class
of boys, spelling out with his black fingers such words as, “I am
in the Father, and the Father in me.” No doubt it may be said that
religion has no necessary connection with the understanding, but I
have sometimes thought it might be better to begin with something more
comprehensible, both to savages and ourselves.
On points of this kind, of course, the missionaries may very well be
right, but in one thing they are wrong. Most of them still keep up the
old habit of teaching the early parts of the Old Testament as literal
facts of history. But if there is anything certain in human knowledge,
the Old Testament stories have no connection with the facts of history
at all. No one believes they have. No scholar, no man of science,
no theologian, no sane man would now think of accepting the Book of
Genesis as a literal account of what actually happened when the world
and mankind began to exist. Yet the missionaries continue to teach
it all to the natives as a series of facts. I have heard one of the
most experienced and influential of all the missionaries discussing
with his highest class of native teachers whether all Persons of the
Trinity were present at Eve’s temptation; and when one of them asked
what would have happened if Adam had refused to eat the apple, the
class was driven to suppose that in that case men would have remained
perfect, while women became as wicked as we see them now. It was a
doctrine very acceptable to the native mind, but to hear those rather
beautiful old stories still taught as the actual history of the world
makes one’s brain whirl. One feels helpless and confused and adrift
from reason, as when another missionary, whose name is justly famous,
told me that there were references to Moscow in Ezekiel, and Daniel had
exactly foretold the course of the Russo-Japanese war. The native has
enough to puzzle his brain as it is. On one side he has the Christian
ideal of peace and good-will, of temperance and poverty and honor and
self-sacrifice, and of a God who is love. And on the other side he
has somehow to understand the Christian’s contumely, the Christian’s
incalculable injustice, his cruelty and deceit, his insatiable greed
for money, his traffic in human beings whom the Christian calls God’s
children. When the native’s mind is hampered and entangled in questions
like these, no one has a right to increase his difficulties by telling
him to believe primitive stories which, as historical facts, are no
truer than the native’s own myths.
But, happily, matters of intellectual belief have very little to do
with personality, and many good men have held unscientific views on
Noah’s Ark. Contrary to nearly all travellers and traders in Africa,
I have nothing but good to say of the missionaries and their work. I
have already mentioned the order of the Holy Spirit and their great
mission at Caconda. The same order has two other stations in South
Angola and a smaller station among the mountains of Bailundu, about two
hours distant from the fort and the American mission there. Its work
is marked by the same dignity and quiet devotion as marks the work of
all the orders wherever I have come across their outposts and places of
danger through the world. It is constantly objected that the Portuguese
have possessed this country for over four centuries, and have done
nothing for the improvement or conversion of the natives, and I bear in
mind those bishops of Loanda who sat on marble thrones upon the quay
christening the slaves in batches as they were packed off by thousands
to their misery in Cuba and Brazil. Both things are perfectly true.
The Portuguese are not a missionary people. I have not met any but
French, Alsatians, and Germans in the missions of the order out here.
But that need not in the least diminish our admiration of the missions
as they now are. Nor should we be too careful to remember the errors
and cruelties of any people or Church in the past, especially when we
reflect that England, which till quite lately was regarded as the great
foe of slavery all over the world, was also the originator of the slave
export, and that the supreme head of the Anglican Church was one of the
greatest slave-traders ever known.