Chapter II: Part 2

The really appalling mortality of Europeans is a fact with which all who have any idea of casting in their lot with Africa should seriously reckon. None but those who have been on the spot, or have followed closely the inner history of African exploration and missionary work can appreciate the gravity of the situation. The malaria spares no man; the strong fall as the weak; no number of precautions can provide against it; no kind of care can do more than make the attacks less frequent; no prediction can be made beforehand as to which regions are haunted by it and which are safe. It is not the least ghastly feature of this invisible plague that the only known scientific test for it at present is a human life. That test has been applied in the Congo region already with a recklessness which the sober judgment can only characterize as criminal. It is a small matter that men should throw away their lives, in hundreds, if need be, for a holy cause; but it is not a small matter that man after man, in long and in fatal succession, should seek to overleap what is plainly a barrier of Nature. And science has a duty in pointing out that no devotion or enthusiasm can give any man a charmed life, and that those who work for the highest ends will best attain them in humble obedience to the common laws. Transcendentally, this may be denied; the warning finger may be despised as the hand of the coward and the profane. But the fact remains--the fact of an awful chain of English graves stretching across Africa. This is not spoken, nevertheless, to discourage missionary enterprise. It is only said to regulate it.

To the head of Lake Nyassa in a little steam yacht is quite a sea-voyage. What with heavy seas, and head-winds, and stopping to wood, and lying-to at nights, it takes longer time than going from England to America. The lake is begirt with mountains, and storms are so incessant and so furious that Livingstone actually christened Nyassa the "Lake of Storms." The motion on anchoring at night was generally so unpleasant that one preferred then to be set on shore. My men--for I had already begun to pick up my caravan whenever I could find a native willing to go--would kindle fires all round to keep off beasts of prey, and we slept in peace upon the soft lake sand.

Instead of being one hundred and fifty miles long, as first supposed, Lake Nyassa is now known to have a length of three hundred and fifty miles, and a breadth varying from sixteen to sixty miles. It occupies a gigantic trough of granite and gneiss, the profoundly deep water standing at a level of sixteen hundred feet above the sea, with the mountains rising all around it, and sometimes sheer above it, to a height of one, two, three, and four thousand feet. The mountains along the west coast form an almost unbroken chain, while the north-east and north are enclosed by the vast range of the Livingstone Mountains. The anchorages on the lake are neither so numerous nor so sheltered as might be wished, but the _Ilala_ has picked out some fair harbors on the west coast, and about half as many are already known on the east.

I only visited one native village on the lake, and I should hope there are none others like it--indeed it was quite exceptional for Africa. I tumbled into it early one morning, out of the _Ilala's_ dingy, and lost myself at once in an endless labyrinth of reeking huts. Its filth was indescribable, and I met stricken men, at the acute stage of smallpox, wandering about the place at every turn, as if infection were a thing unknown. The chief is the greatest slaver and the worst villain on the lake, and impaled upon poles all round his lodge, their ghastly faces shrivelling in the sun, I counted forty human heads.

This village was not African, however. It was Arab. The native villages on Nyassa are rarely so large, seldom so compact, and never so dirty. Everywhere they straggle along the shore and through the forest, and altogether there must be many hundreds of them scattered about the lake. On the western shore alone there are at least fifteen different tribes, speaking as many different languages, and each of them with dialects innumerable.

The bright spot on Lake Nyassa is Bandawé, the present headquarters of the Scotch Livingstonia Mission. The phrase "headquarters of a mission" suggests to the home Christian a street and a square, with its overshadowing church; a decent graveyard; and a reverent community in its Sunday clothes. But Bandawé is only a lodge or two in a vast wilderness, and the swarthy worshippers flock to the seatless chapel on M'lunga's day dressed mostly in bows and arrows. The said chapel, nevertheless, is as great an achievement in its way as Cologne Cathedral, and its worshippers are quite as much interested, and some of them at least to quite as much purpose. In reality no words can be a fit witness here to the impression made by Dr. Laws, Mrs. Laws, and their few helpers, upon this singular and apparently intractable material. A visit to Bandawé is a great moral lesson. And I cherish no more sacred memory of my life than that of a communion service in the little Bandawé chapel, when the sacramental cup was handed to me by the bare black arm of a native communicant--a communicant whose life, tested afterwards in many an hour of trial with me on the Tanganyika plateau, gave him perhaps a better right to be there than any of us.

III.

THE HEART OF AFRICA.

THE COUNTRY AND ITS PEOPLE.

We are now far enough into the interior to form some general idea of the aspect of the heart of Africa. I shall not attempt to picture any particular spot. The description about to be given applies generally to Shirwa, the Shiré Highlands, Nyassa, and the Nyassa-Tanganyika plateau--regions which together make up one of the great lobes of the heart of Africa.

Nothing could more wildly misrepresent the reality than the idea of one's school days that the heart of Africa is a desert. Africa rises from its three environing oceans in three great tiers, and the general physical geography of these has been already sketched--first, a coast-line, low and deadly; farther in, a plateau the height of the Scottish Grampians; farther in still, a higher plateau, covering the country for thousands of miles with mountain and valley. Now fill in this sketch, and you have Africa before you. Cover the coast belt with rank yellow grass, dot here and there a palm; scatter through it a few demoralized villages; and stock it with the leopard, the hyena, the crocodile, and the hippopotamus. Clothe the mountainous plateaux next--both of them--with endless forest,--not grand umbrageous forest like the forests of South America, nor matted jungle like the forests of India, but with thin, rather weak forest,--with forest of low trees, whose half-grown trunks and scanty leaves offer no shade from the tropical sun. Nor is there anything in these trees to the casual eye to remind you that you are in the tropics. Here and there one comes upon a borassus or fan-palm, a candelabra-like euphorbia, a mimosa aflame with color, or a sepulchral baobab. A close inspection also will discover curious creepers and climbers; and among the branches strange orchids hide their eccentric flowers. But the outward type of tree is the same as we have at home--trees resembling the ash, the beech, and the elm, only seldom so large, except by the streams, and never so beautiful.[1] Day after day you may wander through these forests with nothing except the climate to remind you where you are. The beasts, to be sure, are different, but unless you watch for them you will seldom see any; the birds are different, but you rarely hear them; and as for the rocks, they are our own familiar gneisses and granites, with honest basalt-dykes boring through them, and leopard-skin lichens staining their weathered sides. Thousands and thousands of miles, then, of vast thin forest, shadeless, trackless, voiceless--forest in mountain and forest in plain--this is East Central Africa.

[1] The more important of these trees are--_Napaca Kirkii_, _Brachystegia longifolia_, _Vitex umbrosa_, _Erythrina speciosa_, _Ficus sycamorus_, _Khaya senegalensis_, _Nuxia congesta_, _Parinarium mobola_, and _Erythrophlœum guineensis_.

The indiscriminate praise formerly lavished on tropical vegetation has received many shocks from recent travellers. In Kaffirland, South Africa, I have seen one or two forests fine enough to justify the enthusiasm of armchair word-painters of the tropics; but so far as the central plateau is concerned, the careful judgment of Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace respecting the equatorial belt in general--a judgment which has at once sobered all modern descriptions of tropical lands, and made imaginative people more content to stay at home--applies almost to this whole area. The fairy labyrinth of ferns and palms, the festoons of climbing plants blocking the paths and scenting the forests with their resplendent flowers, the gorgeous clouds of insects, the gaily-plumaged birds, the paroquets, the monkey swinging from his trapeze in the shaded bowers--these are unknown to Africa. Once a week you will see a palm; once in three months the monkey will cross your path; the flowers on the whole are few; the trees are poor; and, to be honest, though the endless forest-clad mountains have a sublimity of their own, and though there are tropical bits along some of the mountain-streams of exquisite beauty, nowhere is there anything in grace and sweetness and strength to compare with a Highland glen. For the most part of the year these forests are jaded and sun-stricken, carpeted with no moss or alchemylla or scented woodruff, the bare trunks frescoed with few lichens, their motionless and unrefreshed leaves drooping sullenly from their sapless boughs. Flowers there are, small and great, in endless variety; but there is no display of flowers, no gorgeous show of blossom in the mass, as when the blazing gorse and heather bloom at home. The dazzling glare of the sun in the torrid zone has perhaps something to do with this want of color-effect in tropical nature; for there is always about ten minutes just after sunset, when the whole tone of the landscape changes like magic, and a singular beauty steals over the scene. This is the sweetest moment of the African day, and night hides only too swiftly the homelike softness and repose so strangely grateful to the over-stimulated eye.

Hidden away in these endless forests, like birds' nests in a wood, in terror of one another, and of their common foe, the slaver, are small native villages; and here in his virgin simplicity dwells the primeval man, without clothes, without civilization, without learning, without religion--the genuine child of nature, thoughtless, careless, and contented. This man is apparently quite happy; he has practically no wants. One stick, pointed, makes him a spear; two sticks rubbed together make him a fire; fifty sticks tied together make him a house. The bark he peels from them makes his clothes; the fruits which hang on them form his food. It is perfectly astonishing when one thinks of it what nature can do for the animal-man, to see with what small capital after all a human being can get through the world. I once saw an African buried. According to the custom of his tribe, his entire earthly possessions--and he was an average commoner--were buried with him. Into the grave, after the body, was lowered the dead man's pipe, then a rough knife, then a mud bowl, and last his bow and arrows--the bow string cut through the middle, a touching symbol that its work was done. This was all. Four items, as an auctioneer would say, were the whole belongings for half a century of this human being. No man knows what a man is till he has seen what a man can be without, and be withal a man. That is to say, no man knows how great man is till he has seen how small he has been once.

The African is often blamed for being lazy, but it is a misuse of words. He does not need to work; with so bountiful a nature round him it would be gratuitous to work. And his indolence, therefore, as it is called, is just as much a part of himself as his flat nose, and as little blameworthy as slowness in a tortoise. The fact is, Africa is a nation of the unemployed.

This completeness, however, will be a sad drawback to development. Already it is found difficult to create new wants; and when labor is required, and you have already paid your man a yard of calico and a string of beads, you have nothing in your possession to bribe him to another hand's turn. Nothing almost that you have would be the slightest use to him. Among the presents which I took for chiefs, I was innocent enough to include a watch. I might as well have taken a grand piano. For months I never looked at my own watch in that land of sunshine. Besides, the mere idea of time has scarcely yet penetrated the African mind, and forms no element whatever in his calculations. I wanted on one occasion to catch the little steamer on the Shiré, and pleaded this as an excuse to a rather powerful chief, whom it would have been dangerous to quarrel with, and who would not let me leave his village. The man merely stared. The idea of any one being in a hurry was not only preposterous but inconceivable, and I might as well have urged as my reason for wishing away that the angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles.

This difference in ideas is the real obstacle to African travelling, and it raises all sorts of problems in one's mind as to the nature of ideas themselves. I often wished I could get inside an African for an afternoon, and just see how he looked at things; for I am sure our worlds are as different as the color of our skins.

Talking of skins, I may observe in passing that the highland African is not a negro, nor is his skin black. It is a deep full-toned brown, something like the color of a good cigar. The whole surface is diced with a delicate pattern, which gives it great richness and beauty, and I often thought how effective a row of books would be bound in native-morocco.

No one knows exactly who these people are. They belong, of course, to the great Bantu race; but their origin is obscure, their tribal boundaries are unmapped, even their names are unknown, and their languages---for they are many--are unintelligible. A fine-looking people, quiet and domestic, their life-history from the cradle to the grave is of the utmost simplicity. Too ill armed to hunt, they live all but exclusively on a vegetable diet. A small part of the year they depend, like the monkeys, upon wild fruits and herbs; but the staple food is a small tasteless millet-seed which they grow in gardens, crush in a mortar, and stir with water into a thick porridge. Twice a day, nearly all the year round, each man stuffs himself with this coarse and tasteless dough, shoveling it into his mouth in handfuls, and consuming at a sitting a pile the size of an ant-heap. His one occupation is to grow this millet, and his gardening is a curiosity. Selecting a spot in the forest, he climbs a tree, and with a small home-made axe lops off the branches one by one. He then wades through the litter to the next tree, and hacks it to pieces also, leaving the trunk standing erect. Upon all the trees within a circle of thirty or forty yards diameter his axe works similar havoc, till the ground stands breast-high in leaves and branches. Next, the whole is set on fire and burned to ashes. Then, when the first rains moisten the hard ground and wash the fertile chemical constituents of the ash into the soil, he attacks it with his hoe, drops in a few handfuls of millet, and the year's work is over. But a few weeks off and on are required for these operations, and he may then go to sleep till the rains are over, assured of a crop which never fails, which is never poor, and which will last him till the rains return again.

Between the acts he does nothing but lounge and sleep; his wife, or wives, are the millers and bakers; they work hard to prepare his food, and are rewarded by having to take their own meals apart, for no African would ever demean himself by eating with a woman. I have tried to think of something else that these people habitually do, but their vacuous life leaves nothing more to tell.

Apart from eating, their sole occupation is to talk, and this they do unceasingly, emphasizing their words with a marvellous wealth of gesticulation. Talking, indeed, is an art here--the art it must once have been in Europe before the newspaper drove it out of fashion. The native voices are sometimes highly musical, though in the strict sense the people have no notion whatever of singing; and the languages themselves are full of melody. Every word, like the Italian, ends in a vowel, and when well spoken they are exceedingly effective and full of character.

Notwithstanding their rudimentary estate, the people of Africa have the beginnings of all the more characteristic things that make up the life of civilized man. They have a national amusement, the dance; a national musical instrument, the drum; a national drink, _pombé_; a national religion, the fear of evil spirits. Their chamber of justice is a council of head-men or chiefs; their court of appeal, the _muavi_, or poison cup. No new thing is found here that is not in some form in modern civilization; no new thing in civilization but has its embryo and prophecy in the simpler life of these primitive tribes. To the ignorant these men are animals; but the eye of evolution looks on them with a kindlier and more instructed sense. They are what we were once; possibly they may become what we are now.

What, then, is to become of this strange people and their land? With the glowing figures of a very distinguished traveller in our minds, are we to expect that the Shiré and Congo routes have but to be connected with New York and Manchester to cause at once a revolution among the people of Africa and in the commerce of the world? We hear two criticisms upon that subject. One complains that while Mr. Stanley emphasizes in the most convincing way the thousands of miles of cloth the African is waiting to receive from Europe, he is all but silent as to what Europe is to get in return. A second remark is that Africa has nothing to give in return, and never will have.

The facts of the case briefly, as it seems to me, are these:--

First, The only thing of value the interior of Africa produces at present in any quantity is ivory. There is still, undoubtedly, a supply of this precious material in the country--a supply which may last yet for fifteen or twenty years. But it is well to frame future calculation on the certainty of this abnormal source of wealth ceasing, as it must do, in the immediate future.

Second, Africa already produces in a wild state a number of vegetable and other products of considerable commercial value; and although the soil can only be said to be of average fertility, there is practically no limit to the extent to which these could be developed.

Wild indigo--the true _indigofera tinctoria_ is already growing on the hills of the interior. The Londolphia, an indiarubber-bearing creeper, is to be seen on most of the watercourses; and a variety of the _Ficus elastica_, the well-known rubber plant, abounds on Lake Nyassa. The orchilla weed is common. The castor-oil plant, ginger, and other spices, the tobacco-plant, the cotton-plant, and many fibre-yielding grasses, are also found; and oil-seeds of every variety and in endless quantity are grown by the natives for local use.

The fatal drawback, meantime, to the further development of these comparatively invaluable products is the transit, carriage to the coast from Nyassa or Tanganyika being almost prohibitive. Up till very recently only two native products have ever been exported from this region--indiarubber and beeswax, and these in but trifling quantity. But there is no reason why these products should not be largely developed, and freights must become lower and lower every year. In addition to the plants named, the soil of Central Africa is undoubtedly adapted for growing coffee; and the Cinchona would probably flourish well on the higher grounds of the Tanganyika plateau.

I must not omit to mention in this connection that an attempt is now being made, and so far with marked success, to form actual plantations in the interior of Africa; and the result of the experiment ought to be watched with exceptional interest. Mr. Moir, on behalf of the African Lakes Company, and the Brothers Buchanan on their own account, and also Mr. Scott, with remarkable industry and enterprise have each formed at Blantyre a coffee plantation of considerable size. The plants, when I saw them, were still young, but very healthy and promising, and already a first crop of fine coffee-berries hung from the trees, and has since been marketed. These same gentlemen have also grown heavy crops of wheat; and Mr. Buchanan has succeeded well with sugar-cane, potatoes and other English vegetables. The manual work here has been entirely done by natives; and an immense saving to resident Europeans will be effected when the interior is able to provide its own food supplies, for at present wheat, coffee, and sugar, have all to be imported from home.

With so satisfactory an account of the possibilities of the country, the only question that remains is this--Can the African native really be taught to work?

This question I answer unhesitatingly in the affirmative. I have described Africa as a nation of the unemployed. But the sole reason for the current impression that the African is an incorrigible idler is that at present there is really nothing for him to do. But that he can work and will work when the opportunity and inducement offer has been proved by experiment. The coast native, as all must testify who have seen him in the harbor of Zanzibar, Mozambique, Delagoa Bay, Natal, or the other eastern ports, is, with all allowances, a splendid worker; and though the experiment has seldom been tried in the interior, it is well known that the capacity is there, and wherever encouraged yields results beyond all expectation. Probably the severest test to which the native of Central Africa has ever been put is the construction of the Stevenson road, between Lakes Nyassa and Tanganyika. Forty-six miles of that road--probably the only thing of the kind in Central Africa--have already been made entirely by native labor, and the work could not have been better done had it been executed by English navvies. I have watched by the day a party of seventy natives working at a cutting upon that road. Till three or four years ago none of them had ever looked upon a white man; nor, till a few months previously, had one of them seen a spade, a pickaxe, or a crowbar. Yet these savages handled their tools to such purpose that, with only a single European superintendent, they have made a road, full of difficult cuttings and gradients, which would not disgrace a railway contractor at home. The workmen keep regular hours--six in the morning till five at night, with a rest at mid-day--work steadily, continuously, willingly, and above all, merrily. This goes on, observe, in the heart of the tropics, almost under the equator itself, where the white man's energy evaporates, and leaves him so limp that he cannot even be an example to his men. This goes on too without any compulsion; the natives flock from far and near, sometimes from long distances, to try this new sensation of work. These men are not slaves, but volunteers; and though they are paid by the fortnight, many will remain at their post the whole season through. The only bribe for all this work is a yard or two of calico per week per man; so that it seems to me one of the greatest problems of the future of Africa is here solved. In capacity the African is fit to work, in inclination he is willing to work, and in actual experiment he has done it; so that with capital enlisted and wise heads to direct these energies, with considerate employers who will remember that these men are but children, this vast nation of the unemployed may yet be added to the slowly growing list of the world's producers.

Africa at this moment has an impossible access, a perilous climate, a penniless people, an undeveloped soil. So once had England. It may never be done; other laws may operate, unforeseen factors may interfere; but there is nothing in the soil, the products, the climate, or the people of Africa, to forbid its joining even at this late day in the great march of civilization.

IV.

THE HEART-DISEASE OF AFRICA.

ITS PATHOLOGY AND CURE.

The life of the native African is not all idyll. It is darkened by a tragedy whose terrors are unknown to any other people under heaven. Of its mild domestic slavery I do not speak, nor of its revolting witchcraft, nor of its endless quarrels and frequent tribal wars. These minor evils are lost in the shadow of a great and national wrong. Among these simple and unprotected tribes, Arabs--uninvited strangers of another race and nature--pour in from the North and East, with the deliberate purpose of making this paradise a hell. It seems the awful destiny of this homeless people to spend their lives in breaking up the homes of others. Wherever they go in Africa the followers of Islam are the destroyers of peace, the breakers up of the patriarchal life, the dissolvers of the family tie. Already they hold the whole Continent under one reign of terror. They have effected this in virtue of one thing--they possess firearms; and they do it for one object--ivory and slaves, for these two are one. The slaves are needed to buy ivory with; then more slaves have to be stolen to carry it. So living man himself has become the commercial currency of Africa. He is locomotive, he is easily acquired, he is immediately negotiable.

Arab encampments for carrying on a wholesale trade in this terrible commodity are now established all over the heart of Africa. They are usually connected with wealthy Arab traders at Zanzibar and other places on the coast, and communication is kept up by caravans which pass, at long intervals, from one to the other. Being always large and well supplied with the material of war, these caravans have at their mercy the feeble and divided native tribes through which they pass, and their trail across the Continent is darkened with every aggravation of tyranny and crime. They come upon the scene suddenly; they stay only long enough to secure their end, and disappear only to return when a new crop has arisen which is worth the reaping.

Sometimes these Arab traders will actually settle for a year or two in the heart of some quiet community in the remote interior. They pretend perfect friendship; they molest no one; they barter honestly. They plant the seeds of their favorite vegetables and fruits--the Arab always carries seeds with him--as if they meant to stay for ever. Meantime they buy ivory, tusk after tusk, until great piles of it are buried beneath their huts and all their barter-goods are gone. Then one day, suddenly, the inevitable quarrel is picked. And then follows a wholesale massacre. Enough only are spared from the slaughter to carry the ivory to the coast; the grass-huts of the villages are set on fire; the Arabs strike camp; and the slave-march, worse than death, begins.

This last act in the drama, the slave-march, is the aspect of slavery which, in the past, has chiefly aroused the passions and the sympathy of the outside world, but the greater evil is the demoralization and disintegration of communities by which it is necessarily preceded. It is essential to the traffic that the region drained by the slaver should be kept in perpetual political ferment; that, in order to prevent combination, chief should be pitted against chief; and that the moment any tribe threatened to assume a dominating strength it should either be broken up by the instigation of rebellion among its dependencies, or made a tool of at their expense. The inter-relation of tribe with tribe is so intricate that it is impossible to exaggerate the effect of disturbing the equilibrium at even a single centre. But, like a river, a slave-caravan has to be fed by innumerable tributaries all along its course--at first in order to gather a sufficient volume of human bodies for the start, and afterwards to replace the frightful loss by desertion, disablement, and death.

Many at home imagine that the death-knell of slavery was struck with the events which followed the death of Livingstone. In the great explorer's time we heard much of slavery; we were often appealed to; the Government busied itself; something was really done. But the wail is already forgotten, and England hears little now of the open sore of the world. But the tragedy I have alluded to is repeated every year and every month--witness such recent atrocities as those of the Upper Congo, the Kassai and Sankaru region described by Wissmann, of the Welle-Inakua district referred to by Van Gele. It was but yesterday that an explorer, crossing from Lake Nyassa to Lake Tanganyika, saw the whole southern end of Tanganyika peopled with large and prosperous villages. The next to follow him found not a solitary human being--nothing but burned homes and bleaching skeletons. It was but yesterday--the close of 1887--that the Arabs at the north end of Lake Nyassa, after destroying fourteen villages with many of their inhabitants, pursued the population of one village into a patch of tall dry grass, set it on fire, surrounded it, and slew with the bullet and the spear those who crawled out from the more merciful flames. The Wa-Nkonde tribe, to which these people belonged, were, until this event, one of the most prosperous tribes in East Central Africa. They occupied a country of exceptional fertility and beauty. Three rivers, which never failed in the severest drought, run through their territory, and their crops were the richest and most varied in the country. They possessed herds of cattle and goats; they fished in the lake with nets; they wrought iron into many-patterned spearheads with exceptional ingenuity and skill; and that even artistic taste had begun to develop among them was evident from the ornamental work upon their huts, which were themselves unique in Africa for clever construction and beauty of design. This people, in short, by their own inherent ability and the natural resources of their country, were on the high road to civilization. Now, mark the swift stages in their decline and fall. Years ago an almost unnoticed rill from that great Arab stream, which with noiseless current and ever-changing bed has never ceased to flow through Africa, trickled into the country. At first the Arab was there on sufferance; he paid his way. Land was bought from the Wa-Nkonde chiefs, and their sovereignty acknowledged. The Arab force grew. In time it developed into a powerful incursion, and the Arabs began openly to assert themselves. One of their own number was elevated to the rulership, with the title of "Sultan of Nkonde." The tension became great, and finally too severe to last. After innumerable petty fights the final catastrophe was hurried on, and after an atrocious carnage the remnant of the Wa-Nkonde were driven from their fatherland. Such is the very last chapter in the history of Arab rule in Africa.

The Germans, the Belgians, the English, and the Portuguese, are crying out at present for territory in Central Africa. Meantime humanity is crying out for some one to administer the country; for some one to claim it, not by delimiting a frontier-line upon a map with colored crayons, but by seeing justice done upon the spot; for some one with a strong arm and a pitiful heart to break the Arab yoke and keep these unprotected children free. It has been reserved for a small company of English gentlemen to arrest the hand of the raider in the episode I have just described. While Germany covets Nyassa-land, while Portugal claims it, while England has sent a consul there, without protection, to safeguard British missionary and trading interests, two agents of the African Lakes Company, two missionaries, the British Consul at Mozambique, with two companions who happened to be in Nyassa-land on scientific work, have, at the risk of their lives, averted further war, and with their own rifles avenged the crime.

But this fortuitous concourse of English rifles cannot be reckoned upon every day; nor is it the part of the missionary and the trader to play the game of war. The one thing needed for Africa at present is some system of organized protection to the native, and the decisive breaking of the Arab influence throughout the whole interior. These events at Lake Nyassa have brought this subject once more before the civilized world, and I may briefly state the situation as it at present stands.

Five years ago the British cruisers which had been for years engaged in suppressing the slave-trade were tempted to relax their efforts. They had done splendid service. The very sight of the great hull of the _London_, as she rocked in the harbor of Zanzibar, had a pacific influence; and as the caravans from the interior came and went at intervals of years and found the cruiser's cannon still pointing to their sultan's palace, they carried the fear of England over the length and breadth of Africa. The slave-trade was seriously discouraged, and, so far as the coast traffic was concerned, it was all but completely arrested. What work, up to this point, was done, was well done; but, after all, only half the task had ever been attempted. It was not enough to stop the sewer at its mouth; its sources in the heart of Africa should have been sought out and purified. But now that even the menace at Zanzibar no longer threatened the slavers, their work was resumed with redoubled energy. The withdrawal of the _London_ was interpreted to mean either that England conceived her work to be done or that she had grown apathetic and would interfere no more.

The consequences were almost immediately disastrous. A new license to devastate, to murder, and to enslave, was telegraphed all over Africa, and speedily found expression, in widely separated parts of the country, in horrors the details of which can never be known to the civilized world. The disturbances on Lake Nyassa undoubtedly belong, though indirectly, to this new category of crime. Already the Arabs have learned that there is no one now to take them to task. In one district after another they have played their game and won; and with ample power, with absolute immunity from retribution, and with the sudden creation of a new demand for slaves in a quarter of which I dare not speak further here, their offenses can only increase in number and audacity. It is remarkable in the Wa-Nkonde episode that, for the first time probably in Central Africa, the Mohammedan defiance to the Christian power was open and undisguised. Hitherto the Arab worked in secret. The mere presence of a white man in the country was sufficient to stay his hand. On this occasion the Arab not only did not conceal his doings from the Europeans, nor flee when he was remonstrated with, but turned and attacked his monitors. The political significance of this is plain. It is part of a policy. It is a challenge to Europe from the whole Mohammedan power. Europe in Africa is divided; Mohammedanism is one. No isolated band of Arabs would have ventured upon such a line of action unless they were perfectly sure of their ground. Nor is there any reason why they should not be sure of their ground. Europe is talking much about Africa; it is doing nothing. This the Arab has discerned. It is one of the most astounding facts in morals that England should have kept the Arab at bay so long. But the time of probation is over. And the plain issue is now before the world--Is the Arab or the European henceforth to reign in Africa?

How the European could reign in Africa is a simple problem. The real difficulty is as to who in Europe will do it. Africa is claimed by everybody, and it belongs to nobody. So far as the Nyassa region is concerned, while the Portuguese assert their right to the south and west, scarcely one of them has ever set foot in it: and while the Germans claim the north and east, their pretension is based neither upon right of discovery, right of treaty, right of purchase, right of conquest, nor right of possession, but on the cool audacity of some chartographer in Berlin, who, in delineating a tract of country recognized as German by the London Convention of 1886, allowed his paint-brush to color some tens of thousands of square miles beyond the latitude assigned. To England it is a small matter politically who gets Africa. But it is of moment that those who secure the glory of annexation should not evade the duty of administration. The present condition of Africa is too critical to permit so wholesale a system of absentee landlordism; and it is the duty of England, so far at least as the Nyassa region is concerned, to insist on the various claimants either being true to their assumed responsibilities or abandoning a nominal sovereignty.

It is well known,--it is certain,--that neither Portugal nor Germany will ever administer this region. If they would, the problem would be solved, and England would gladly welcome the release; the release, for, although England has never aided this country with a force of arms, she has for some time known that in some way, direct or indirect, she ought to do it. This country is, in a special sense, the _protégé_ of England. Since Livingstone's death the burden of it has never really left her conscience. The past relation of England to Nyassa-land, and her duty now, will be apparent from the following simple facts:--

Lake Nyassa was discovered by David Livingstone. At that time he was acting as Her Majesty's Consul, and was sent to Africa with a Government Expedition, which was equipped not to perform an exceptional and romantic piece of work, but in accordance with a settled policy on the part of England. "The main object of the Zambesi Expedition," says Livingstone, "as our instructions from Her Majesty's Government explicitly stated, was to extend the knowledge already attained of the geography, and mineral and agricultural resources, of Eastern and Central Africa; to improve our acquaintance with the inhabitants, and to endeavor to engage them to apply themselves to industrial pursuits, and to the cultivation of their lands, with a view to the production of raw material to be exported to England in return for British manufactures; and it was hoped that, by encouraging the natives to occupy themselves in the development of the resources of the country, a considerable advance might be made towards the extinction of the slave-trade, as they would not be long in discovering that the former would eventually be a more certain source of profit than the latter. The Expedition was sent _in accordance with the settled policy of the English Government_; and the Earl of Clarendon being then at the head of the Foreign Office, the Mission was organized under his immediate care. When a change of Government ensued we experienced the same generous countenance and sympathy from the Earl of Malmesbury as we had previously received from Lord Clarendon; and on the accession of Earl Russell to the high office he has so long filled we were always favored with equally ready attention and the same prompt assistance. Thus _the conviction was produced that our work embodied the principles not of any one party, but of the hearts of the statesmen and of the people of England generally._"

Encouraged by this national interest in Africa, the churches of England and Scotland attempted to follow up the work of Livingstone in one at least of its aspects, by sending missionaries into the country. These have already succeeded in establishing themselves in one district after another, and are daily extending in numbers and influence.

In order to perpetuate a scarcely less important branch of the movement initiated by Livingstone,--a department specially sanctioned, as the above extract shows, by the English Government--the African Lakes Company was formed in 1878. Its object was to open up and develop the regions of East Central Africa from the Zambesi to Tanganyika; to make employments for the native peoples, to trade with them honestly, to keep out rum, and, so far as possible, gunpowder and firearms, and to co-operate and strengthen the hands of the missionary. It has already established twelve trading stations, manned by a staff of twenty-five Europeans and many native agents. The _Ilala_ on Lake Nyassa belongs to it; and it has just placed a new steamer to supersede the _Lady Nyassa_ on the river Shiré. It has succeeded in starting a flourishing coffee plantation in the interior, and new sources of wealth are being gradually introduced. For the first time, on the large scale, it has taught the natives the meaning and the blessings of work. It has acted, to some extent, as a check upon the slave-trade; it has prevented inter-tribal strife, and helped to protect the missionaries in time of war. The African Lakes Company, in short, modest as is the scale on which it works, and, necessarily limited as are its opportunities, has been for years the sole administering hand in this part of Africa. This Company does not exist for gain;--or exists for gain only in the sense that commercial soundness is the only solid basis on which to build up an institution which can permanently benefit others. A large amount of private capital has been expended by this Company; yet, during all the years it has carried on its noble enterprise, it has re-invested in Africa all that it has taken from it.

All this British capital, all the capital of the Missions, all these various and not inconsiderable agencies, have been tempted into Africa largely in the hope that the old policy of England would not only be continued but extended. England has never in theory departed from the position she assumed in the days of the Zambesi Expedition. On the contrary, she has distinctly recognized the relation between her Government and Africa. She has continued to send out British Consuls to be the successors of Livingstone in the Nyassa region. When the first of these, Captain Foote, R.N., died in the Shiré Highlands in 1884, the English Government immediately sent another to take his place. But this is the last thing that has been done. The Consul is there as a protest that England has still her eye on Africa. But Africa needs more than an eye. And when, as happened the other day, one of Her Majesty's representatives was under Arab fire for five days and nights on the shores of Lake Nyassa, this was brought home to us in such practical fashion as to lead to the hope that some practical measures will now be taken.

I do not presume to bring forward a formal proposal; but two things occur to one as feasible, and I shall simply name them. The first is for England, or Germany, or France, or some one with power and earnestness, to take a firm and uncompromising stand at Zanzibar. Zanzibar, as the Arab capital, is one of the keys of the situation, and any lesson taught here would be learned presently by the whole Mohammedan following in the country.

The other key to the situation is the vast and splendid water-way in the heart of Africa--the Upper Shiré, Lake Nyassa, Lake Tanganyika, and the Great Lakes generally. As a base for military or patrol operations nothing better could be desired than these great inland seas. A small steamer upon each of them--or, to begin with, upon Nyassa and Tanganyika--with an associated depôt or two of armed men on the higher and healthier plateaux which surround them, would keep the whole country quiet. Only a trifling force of well-drilled men would be needed for this purpose. They might be whites, or blacks and whites; they might be Sikhs or Pathans from India; and the expense is not to be named considering the magnitude of the results--the pacification of the entire equatorial region--that would be achieved. That expense could be borne by the Missions, but it is not their province to employ the use of force; it could be borne by the Lakes Company, only they deserve protection from others rather than that this should be added to the large debt civilization already owes them; it could be done by the Free Congo State,--and if no one else is shamed into doing it, this further labor of love may fall into its hands. But whether alone, or in co-operation with the few and overburdened capitalists of the country, or in conjunction with foreign powers, England will be looked to to take the initiative with this or a similar scheme.

The barriers in the way of Government action are only two, and neither is insurmountable. The one is Portugal, which owns the approaches to the country; the other is Germany, which has inland interests of her own. Whether England could proceed in the face of these two powers would simply depend on how it was done. As a mere political move such an occupation of the interior might at once excite alarm and jealousy. But wearing the aspect of a serious mission for the good of Africa, instigated not by the Foreign Office but by the people of England, it is impossible to believe that the step could either be misunderstood or opposed. It is time the nations looked upon Africa as something more than a chess-board. And even if it were but a chess-board, the players on every hand are wise enough to know that whatever is honestly done to relieve this suffering continent will react in a hundred ways upon the interests of all who hold territorial rights within it.

A beginning once made, one might not be unduly sanguine in anticipating that the meshes of a pacific and civilizing influence would rapidly spread throughout the country. Already the missionaries are pioneering everywhere, prepared to slay and do their part; and asking no more from the rest of the world than a reasonable guarantee that they should be allowed to live. Already the trading companies are there, from every nationality, and in every direction ready to open up the country, but unable to go on with any confidence or enthusiasm till their isolated interests are linked together and secured in the presence of a common foe. The territories of the various colonies are slowly converging upon the heart of Africa, and to unite them in an informal defensive alliance would not be impossible. With Emin Pasha occupying the field in the north; with the African Lakes Company, the British East African Association, and the German Association, in the east; with the Congo Free State in the west, and British Bechuanaland in the south, a cordon is already thrown around the Great Lakes region, which requires only to have its several parts connected with one another and with central forces on the Lakes, to secure the peace of Africa.

V.

WANDERINGS ON THE NYASSA-TANGANYIKA PLATEAU.

A TRAVELLER'S DIARY.

With a glade in the forest for a study, a bale of calico for a table, and the sun vertical and something under a billion centigrade, diary-writing in the tropics is more picturesque than inspiring. To keep a journal, however, next to keeping his scalp, is the one thing for which the consistent traveller will go through fire and water; and the dusky native who carries the faded note-books on the march is taught to regard the sacredness of his office more than if he drove the car of Juggernaut. The contents of these mysterious note-books, nevertheless, however precious to those who write them, are, like the photographs of one's relations, of pallid interest to others, and I have therefore conscientiously denied myself the joy of exhibiting such offspring of the wilderness as I possess to my confiding reader.

But as the diary form has advantages of its own, I make no apology at this stage for transcribing and editing a few rough pages. Better, perhaps, than by a more ordered narrative, they may help others to enter into the traveller's life, and to illustrate what the African traveller sees and hears and does. I shall disregard names, and consecutive dates, and routes. My object is simply to convey some impression of how the world wags in a land unstirred by civilization, and all but untouched by time.

_29th September_.--Left Karongas, at the north end of Lake Nyassa, at 10.30, with a mongrel retinue of seven Mandalla natives, twelve Bandawé Atongas, six Chingus, and my three faithfuls--Jingo, Moolu, and Seyid. Total twenty-eight. Not one of my men could speak a word of English. They belonged to three different tribes and spoke as many languages; the majority, however, knew something of Chinanja, the lake language, of which I had also learned a little, so we soon understood one another. It is always a wise arrangement to have different tribes in a caravan, for in the event of a strike, and there are always strikes, there is less chance of concerted action. Each man carried on his head a portion of my purse--which in this region consists solely of cloth and beads; while one or two of the more dependable were honored with the transportation of the tent, collecting-boxes, provisions, and guns.

The road struck into a banana grove, then through a flat country fairly well wooded with a variety of trees, including many palms and a few baobabs. The native huts dotted over this rich flat are the best I have seen in Africa. The roofs are trimly thatched, and a rude carving adorns door-post and lintel. After seven miles the Rukuru is crossed--a fine stream rippling over the sand, with large flakes of mica tumbling about in the current, and sampling the rocks of the distant hills. The men laid down their loads, and sprawled about like crocodiles in the water as I waded across. A few yards off is a village, where a fire was quickly lit, and the entire population turned out to watch the white man nibble his lunch. The consumption at this meal being somewhat slight, and the menu strange to my audience, I saw that they regarded the white man's effort at nutrition with feelings of contempt. "The M'sungu eats nothing," whispered one, "he must die." The head man presently came asking beads; but, as I had none unpacked, two stray trinkets and a spoonful of salt more than satisfied him. On getting the salt he deftly twisted a leaf into a little bag, and after pouring all the salt into it, graciously held out his hand to a troop of small boys who crowded round, and received one lick each of his empty palm. Salt is perhaps the greatest luxury and the greatest rarity the north-end African can have, and the avidity with which these young rascals received their homœopathic allowance proved the instinctiveness of the want. I have often offered native boys the choice between a pinch of salt and a knot of sugar, and they never failed to choose the first. For return-present the chief made over to me two large gourds filled with curds, of which, of course, I pretended to drink deeply before passing it on to the men.