Chapter XI (1)

COMPARATIVE ANTHROPOLOGY (ETHNOLOGY) OF ZANZIBAR—THE WASAWAHILI AND THE
SLAVE RACES.

‘Venti anni sono, il commercio di Zanzibar era nullo; ora il commercio li supera 50 milioni di franchi. Per alcuni articoli, per esempio, pel garofano, per la gomma copale, e per l’avorio, il mercato di Zanzibar è divenuto il principale del Mondo.’—P. 17, La grandezza Italiana, by the learned geographer Cavagliere Cristoforo Negri. Torino, 1864.

The Wasawahili, bounded north by the Somal and the Gallas, south by the so-called Kafir tribes, extend along the Indian Ocean from Makdishu to Mozambique, a coastal distance of some 1050 miles; they also occupy the Zangian Archipelago, and the islets that fringe the shore. They call themselves Wazumba, ignoring the term Jabarti or Ghiberti (Gibberti), still applied to them by the northern Moslems. It is given by El Makrizi to Zayla in Somaliland, and by other writers to the Abyssinian ‘Moors;’ vocatur quoque Jabarta, i. e. Regio Ardens. This insititious race might be called Hamito-Semitic if anywhere we could discern that the mythical Ham, or his progeny, ever became negroes. They are, as they confess themselves to be, mulattos, descended from Asiatic settlers and colonists, Arabs, and Persians of the Days of Ignorance, who intermarried with the Wakafiri or infidels. The author of the Natural History of Man is correct in asserting their African origin, but he under-estimates the amount of Asiatic innervation. The traveller still witnesses the process of breeding half-castes: Maskatis and Baloch still trade to the coast harbours, and settle as agriculturists in the maritime regions, whilst the African element is maintained in the Island by a steady importation of slave girls. The Wasawahili differ in one essential point from their congeners of mixed blood, Egyptian, Nubian, Abyssinian, Galla, Dankali, Somal, and the northern negroids; these have not, those like the Comoro men distinctly have, the negro effluvium, they are the ‘foumarts, not the civets,’ of the human race.

I am compelled by its high racial significance to offer a few words upon this unpleasant topic. The odour of the Wasawahili, like that of the negro, is a rank fœtor, _sui generis_, which faintly reminded me of the ammoniacal smell exhaled by low-caste Hindus, popularly called Pariahs. These, however, owe it to external applications, aided by the want of cleanliness. All agree that it is most offensive in the yellow-skinned, and the darkest negroids are therefore preferred for domestic slaves and concubines. It does not depend upon diet. In the Anglo-American States, where blacks live like whites, no diminution of it has been remarked; nor upon want of washing,—those who bathe are not less nauseous than those who do not. After hard bodily exercise, or during mental emotion, the epiderm exudes a fœtid perspiration, oily as that of orange peel: a negro’s feet will stain a mat, an oar must be scraped after he has handled it, and a woman has left upon a polished oaken gun-case a hemispherical mark that no scrubbing could remove. This ‘Catinga,’ as the Brazilians call it, taints the room, infects every part of the body with which it comes in contact, and exerts a curious effect on the white races. A missionary’s wife in Zanzibar owned to me that it caused her almost to faint. I have seen an Englishman turn pale when he felt that a crowded slave-craft was passing under his windows, and the late Sayyid could not eat or drink for hours after he had been exposed to the infliction.

The Wasawahili may be roughly estimated at half a million of souls. In 1850 Dr Krapf (Vocabulary of six East African Languages) proposed 350,000 to 400,000. In Zanzibar Island they are divided into two great families, a distinction hitherto disregarded by travellers. The Shirazi, or nobles, derive themselves from the Shangaya settlement, also called Shiraz, on the coast north of Lamu in about S. lat. 2°; thence they extended to Tungi, four days’ sail south of the Rufuma river. Asserting themselves to be Alawi Sayyids (descended from the Khalifah Ali) they take the title of Muigni, ‘lord,’ equivalent to the Arab ‘Sherif,’ whereas the other chiefs are addressed as B’ana—master. The last Msawahili Sultan in the days of the Arab conqueror, Ahmed bin Said, was Ahmed bin Sultan bin Hasan el Alawi. The actual head of the family is entitled Muigni Mku by his people; by the Europeans, ‘King of the Sawahili.’ His name is mentioned in the Khutbah or Friday Sermon; he collects the poll-tax, and receives a percentage, some say one half, others only $2000, when paying it into the Sayyid’s treasury. He was never, however, admitted to any equality by the Arab ruler. The Shirazi clan does not now contain more than a hundred families.

The Wasawahili race appears, from the ‘Kilwa Chronicle’ (Huma Chronica dos Reys de Quiloa) mentioned by De Barros (1st Decade of Asia, viii. 4, 5), to have been derived from the ‘Emozaydis’ (Amm Zayd) or followers of their Imam, Zayd bin Ali Zayn el Abidín bin Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet. He was proclaimed Khalifah at Kufa in A. H. 122 (A. D. 739), under the Khalifat of El Hesham bin Abd el Melek, the Ommiade, by whom he was conquered and slain. The pretender’s son, Yahya, fled to Khorasan, where the Abbasides were already making head against the Ommiades, and the tenets of his followers, the Zaydis, spread throughout Yemen, where they formed, and they still form, a numerous and influential class. Other ‘Shiah’ partisans took refuge from persecution in East Africa, fortified themselves upon the littoral about Shangaya, and, extending southwards, became lords of the land. Some generations afterwards an emigration of Sunni Arabs from El Hasa, in three ships, commanded by seven brothers flying from the tyranny of their chief, visited the coast, founded Makdishu and Brava, and extended to Sofala. The ‘Emozaydis,’ unwilling to accept orthodox rule, retired into the interior, intermingled with the Kafir race, and became the Bedawin of the country. The second Persian emigration took place early in our eleventh century. A certain Ali, son of a ‘Moorish’ Sultan Hasan, who governed Shiraz, by an Abyssinian slave, finding himself despised by his six brethren, fled with wife and family in two ships from Hormuz to East Africa. At Makdishu and Brava, finding Arabs of another faith (Sunnis), he went to Kilwa Island, bought land with cloth, took the title of Sultan, and fortified himself against the Kafirs and against the Moslems of Songo-Songo and Changa, whose dominion extended to Mompana (Mafiyeh). The latter, together with other islets, was conquered by his son, Sultan ‘Ali Bumale,’ and the dynasty lasted a grand total of 541 lunar years before the arrival of Cabral at Kilwa in July, A. D. 1500. These Shirazis originated the noble family of the Wasawahili, who do not claim descent from the older ‘Emozaydis.’[103]

The Mahadimu, or serviles, a word derived from the Arabic Makhadim, the ‘Mohaydin’ of Europeans, compose the mass of the Wasawahili race. They are popularly derived from the slaves left upon the Island by the Portuguese. It must, however, be observed that most of the great families in Eastern and Southern Africa have congener clients, or rather outcastes, who are probably, like the Spartan Helots, remnants of subjugated rivals. Thus, to quote but a few, there are the Midgans amongst the Somal, the Walangúlo or Ariangulo and Dahalo amongst the Southern Gallas,[104] and the Wandurobo amongst the Wakwafi. The Wasumbara have their Washenzi; the Hottentots their Bushmen, and the Kafirs their Fingos. In a former volume I have shown that even the Arabs of Oman and Yemen are mixed with Khadims, a system of race within race, as contrary to the spirit of El Islam as of Christianity. These servile castes are distinguished by swarthier skins, weaker frames, and other signs of inferior development. The Mahadímu of Zanzibar are evidently the ancient lords of the Island, reduced to a manner of servitude by northern conquerors. Though now free, and often slave-owners, these Helots are subject, at the Prince’s order, to an occasional corvée, and to a poll-tax. The amount of the latter affords a rude census; the adult males range between 10,000 and 12,000, and the women, it is said, are proportionally more numerous.

The Wasawahili of the Island appear physically inferior to those of the seaboard: as in the days of Marco Polo, they are emphatically an ugly race. If the girls in early youth show traces of prettiness, it is a grotesque order of the beauté du diable. Some of the men have fine, large, strong, and muscular figures, without being able to use their strength, and as amongst uncivilized people generally, the reality falls short of the promise. The national peculiarity is the division of the face into two distinct types, and the contrast appears not a little singular. The upper, or intellectual part, though capped by woolly hair, is distinctly Semitic—with the suspicion of a caricature—as far as the nose-bridge, and the more ancient the family the more evident is the mixture. The lower, or animal half, especially the nostrils, lip, jaws, and chin is unmistakably African. There are a few Albinos with silk- cocoon-coloured hair, and tender-red eyes, their pinkish skins are cobwebbed by darker reticulations and rough from pellagrous disease. Leucosis, however, is rare; we saw only two cases, one on the Island, the other a youth near Tángá.

The Wasawahili are by no means a jet-black people, as Pritchard, misled by Dr Bird, has assumed; nor, indeed, is this the distinction of the Zanzibarian races generally. The skin is a chocolate-brown, varying in shades, as amongst ourselves, but usually not darker than the complexion of Southern Arabia. About Lamu and Patta the colour is yellow-brown; at Mombasah and Zanzibar dark-brown; and south of Kilwa, I am told, black- brown. Mostly the hair is jetty, unless sunburnt; crisp, and curling short; it splits after growing a few inches long, and often it is planted like the body pile, in distinct ‘pepper-corns.’ The barbule is a degeneracy from the Arab goatee, and the mustachios are short and scanty. The oval skull, too dolichocephalous to be purely Caucasian, is much flattened at the walls, and sometimes the upper, brow (the reflective region of Gall) is too highly developed for the lower. The eyes, with dark-brown pupils and cornea stained dirty bilious-yellow, are straight and well-opened, but the nose is flat and patulous, the mouth is coarse and ill-cut; the lips, often everted, project unduly; the teeth are obliquely set, and the jaw is prognathous. The figure is loose and pulpy, and even in early manhood the waist is seldom finely formed; in many men I have seen the nipples placed unusually low down, whilst the women have the flaccid pendulous breasts of negresses. Both sexes fail in point of hips, which are lank and angular, whereas those of the inner savages are finely rounded. The shanks are bowed forwards, the calf is high raised and bunchy, the heel is long, and the extremities are coarse and large. There is another proof of African blood which can hardly be quoted here: many overland travellers have remarked it amongst the boatmen of Egypt.[105]

Veritable half-castes, the Wasawahili have inherited the characters of both parents. From the Arab they derive shrewd thinking and practice in concealing thought: they will welcome a man with the determination to murder him; they have unusual confidence, self-esteem, and complacency; fondness for praise, honours, and distinctions; keenness together with short-sightedness in matters of business, and a nameless horror of responsibility and regular occupation. Africa has gifted them with comparative freedom from bigotry—they are not admodum dediti religionibus. Usually the Moslem combines commerce with proselytizing, opposed to our system, which divides by a wide gulf the merchant’s career from that of the Missionary, and which unites them only upon the subscription sheet. These people care little to make converts: their African languor upon doctrinal points prevents their becoming fanatics or proselytizers. African also is their eternal, restless suspicion, the wisdom of serf and slave compensating for their sluggish imagination and small powers of concentration. They excel in negro duplicity; they are infinitely great in the ‘Small wares and petty points of cunning,’ and they will boast of this vile eminence, saying, ‘Are we not Wasawahili?’ men who obtain their ends by foxship? Natum mendacio genus, truth is unknown to it; honesty and candour are ignored even by name. When they assert they probably lie, when they swear they certainly lie. The favourite oath is ‘Mi mi wad (or M’áná) harámí—I am a bastard if,’ &c., &c., and it is never respected. The language is very foul, and such expressions as Komanyoko are never out of the mouth. The Msawahili will not ask a thing openly: he waits, fidgeting withal, till the subject edge itself in, and then he will rather hint than speak out. At the same time he is an inveterate beggar, and the outstretching of hands seems to relieve his brain. When his mind is set upon an acquisition, he becomes a monomaniac, like that child-man the savage. His nonchalance, carelessness, and improvidence pass all bounds. He will light his pipe under a dozen leaky kegs of gunpowder; ‘he will set a house on fire, as it were, to roast his eggs;’ he will wreck his ship because anchoring her to the beach saves trouble in loading; he might make his coast a mine of wealth, but he will not work till hunger compels him, and his pure insouciance has allowed his valuable commerce to be wrested from him by Europeans, Hindus, and Arabs. His dislike of direct action exceeds that of the Bedawi, and yet he quotes a proverb touching procrastination, ‘Leo kabli yá kesho,’—to-day is before to-morrow—better than our ‘To-morrow never comes.’

In disposition the Msawahili is at once cowardly and destructive: his quarrelsome temper leads him into trouble, but he fights only by being brought to bay. Sensual and degraded, his self-indulgence is that of the brutes. He drinks, and always drinks to excess. He would stake and lose his mother at play. Chastity is unknown in this land of hot temperaments—the man places paradise in the pleasures of the sixth sense, and the woman yields herself to the first advances. Upon the coast, when an adulterer is openly detected, he is fined according to the ‘injured husband’s’ rank; mostly, however, such peccadillos are little noticed. Unnatural crimes are held conducive to health. * * *

The manners of ‘the perverse race of Kush’ are rough and free, especially compared with those of India, yet dashed with a queer African ceremoniousness. Their conversation turns wholly upon the subjects of women and money. With these optimists all that is is good, or, at least, it is not worth the trouble of a change for the better. They ‘make a stand upon the ancient way,’ and they hold that old custom, because it is old, must be fit for all time. This savage conservatism, combined with their traditional and now instinctive dread of the white face, and perhaps with a not unreasonable fear of present and future loss, has made them close the interior to Europeans. They have no especial dislike to, at the same time no fondness for, foreigners, who in mind as well as body are separated from them longo intervallo.

The characteristic good points of the coast race are careless merriment, an abundance of animal spirits; strong attachments and devoted family affection. There is amongst men an artificial fraternity which reminds us of the ‘fostering’ of Ireland and the ‘Lambmas brother and sister’ of the local Kermess, St Olla’s Fair: a similar brotherhood is found at Madagascar. Amongst the negro races generally each sucks or exchanges blood from an arm vein, and the two then swear relationship. The operation is called Ku chanjana and the oath Sare or Sogu,—the Arabs, by whose law it is forbidden, name it Mushátibeh. Girls, even though their parents be living, adopt a Kungwí or stead-mother, who may or who may not be of the family: the latter attends her ‘Mwari’ (adopted child) when the first ablution for puberty is performed, and at the wedding sits upon the couch till decency forbids. The connection reminds us of the Persian proverb, ‘The nurse is kinder than the mother.’ Like Orientals and certain peoples of Southern Europe, they make little distinction between near and distant relationship: a man’s son may come from the same city and his brother perhaps from the same province. So in West Africa ‘brother’ has an extensive signification.

The Wasawahili from Makdishu to Mozambique (Mussumbeg) are all Moslems and Shafei, as they were in the 14th century when Ibn Batuta reported them chaste and honest, peaceful and religious. Possibly under the orthodox denomination they may still preserve the heretical Zaydi tenets of their ancestors; but of this point I was not familiar enough with them to judge. If Persians, they must date from the days before the universal prevalence of Tashayyu (Shiitism), or they have abandoned their ancient faith. Feuds with the late Sayyid Said spread the school along the coast, and his Bayázi subjects became Sunnis in spite, even as Irishmen and Romans sometimes turn Protestants. El Islam, however, only fringes the Continent. With their savage irreverence for holy things, the Wasawahili calling themselves Moslems know little beyond the Kalmah, or profession of faith, rarely pray, and fast only by compulsion. Like Hindostanis, Persians, and Egyptians, nations professing El Islam at a distance from the fountainhead, amongst whom local usage has been largely incorporated with the pure practice of the Faith, they have retained a mass of superstitions and idolatries belonging to their pagan forefathers. They have a terror of the sorcerers, with whom Maskat is said to swarm, and they tell frightful stories of men transformed into hyænas, dogs, sheep, camels, and other animals. They defend themselves and their huts against evil spirits (Jánn) and bad men by Koranic versets, greegrees, and various talismans, mostly bought from the pagan Mganga or Medicine-man. They believe in alchemy and in Rimbwata, or love-philters, the latter, as usual in the East, containing various abominations. The slave girls from about Mangáo, a small port near Kilwa, are famous for concocting draughts which, after bringing on a possibly fatal sickness, subjugate for ever the affections of the patient. Similarly in India, Sind, Egypt, and Persia, no man will touch sherbet under the roof of his betrothed and prepared by her mother, unless his future father-in-law set him the example. Some of the Rimbwata or philters are peculiar: a few grains of Jowari are ‘forced’ in an exceptional way till they sprout; they are then pounded and mixed with the food. This harmless adhibition causes, say the people, either death by violent disease or intense affection. It is a superstition common to the Western East, and I have found it in India and Sind, in Peru and Egypt. Ghosts and larvæ haunt the houses in which men have died, a Fetish belief which does not properly belong to El Islam or to Christianity: the British Consulate has a had name on account of the terrible fate of its owner, the late Sayyid’s nephew. Descended from ‘devil-worshippers,’ the Wasawahili rather fear the ‘Shaytani’ than love Allah, and to the malignant powers of preternatural beings they attribute sickness and all the evils of human life. A Zanzibar negroid will not even fetch a leech from the marsh, for fear of offending him to whom the animal is ‘Ju-ju,’ or sacred.

Generally, the Msawahili Alim or literato, though capable of reading the Koran, cannot write a common Arabic letter. Some, however, attain high proficiency: I may quote as an instance the Kazi Muhiyy el Din. These negroids begin arithmetic early, a practice which, perhaps, they have learned from the Banyans. They excel in memory and in quickness of apprehension from early childhood to the age of puberty: the same has been remarked about the Arabs, and Anglo-Indians observe it in the natives of Hindostan. Whether at the virile epoch there is an arrest of development, or the brain suffers from exclusive, excessive obedience to the natural law, ‘increase and multiply’ and its consequent affections, is a question still to be settled. Boys are sent to school when aged seven, and finish their Khitmah (perlection of the Koran) in one to three years; after this they are usually removed to assist their fathers in the business of life.

Upon the Island the Msawahili child receives some corrupted Moslem name, as Taufiki (Taufik) Muamádi (Mohammed), Tani (Usman), Shibu (Nasib), Muhina (Muhinna), Usy (Ali), or Hadi. Upon the coast the appellations are mostly heathen: I may quote the following from the Benu Kendi tribe— Bori, Chumi, Kambi, Kangaya, Kirwasha, Mareka, Mkame, Mkhokho, Mombe, or Mwambe, Mwere, Nungu, Shangora, Shenkambi, Zingaji. The wilder Wasawahili communities adopt very characteristic compounds: such are Machuzi wa Shimha (fish-soup), Mrima-khonde (mountain plantation),[106] Mkata-Moyyo (cutter-out of heart), Khiro-kota (treasure trove), Mchupio wa Keti (leaper upon a chair), Mshindo-Mamba (conqueror of crocodile), Khombe la Simba (lion’s claw), Mguru Mfupi (short-legs), Mui’ Mvua (Mister rain), Mkia ya Nyani (monkey’s tail), Masimbi (cowries), and Ugali (stirabout).

Girls take Arabic names, as Mamai Khamisi (Mother Thursday), Fatimah, and Arusi, or they borrow from the pagans Magonera, Zawádi and Apewai (a gift), Tímeh, Sítí, Baháti, Tínisí, and Machoyáo (their eyes). The ceremonial address to men is Bwana (pronounced B’áná) master, possibly a corruption of the Arabic ‘Abuna:’ it is prefixed to proper names, especially Arabic, as B’áná Muamádi. The diminutive Kib’áná is the Italian ‘Signorino.’ The feminine form Mwana (M’áná) has equal claims of descent from the Arabic Ummaná, our mother. It means, however, ‘child’ generically in the proverb M’áná uwwá Mze, Mze hawwá M’áná—child slays parent, parent slays not child—the equivalent of the Italian Amor descende non ascende, and the Arab’s ‘My heart is on my son, my son’s is on a stone.’ Amongst certain interior tribes it is still prefixed to the names of chiefs; hence probably the ‘Emperor’ Monomotapa (M’áná Mtápa) which J. de Barros writes Benomotapa: the latter may not be a misprint, but represent ‘B’áná Mtápa.’ Muigni, contracted to Mui’, is applied to Sayyids, Sherifs, and temporal rulers, and Shehe is the equivalent of Shaykh. Mkambi belongs to the sultan or chief, and the Anglo-Arab ‘Seedy’ (Sídi = my lord) is unknown.

The marriages (Máowáno) of the Wasawahili are operose, as might be expected amongst a race whose family festivals are, as in the far north of Europe, their only public amusements. I may, perhaps, here remark that in matching, as well as in despatching, even civilization has not thrown off all traces of the old barbarism, and that the visit to M. le Maire and the wedding breakfast, to mention no other troubles and disagreeables, should make us uncommonly lenient to those less advanced than ourselves. The relatives of the bridegroom, as soon as he reaches the mature age of 15, having found for him a fit and proper mate, repair to the parents; propose a Mahr, or settlement, varying according to means from $15 to $25, and obtain the reply ancipital. The women then visit one another; the answer emerges into distinctness, and all fall to cooking. In due time Cœlebs receives, as a token of acceptance, a large Siniyyah, a tray of rice, meat, and confectionery, a ‘treat’ for his friends, forwarded by the future father-in-law. The feast concludes the betrothal;[107] either of the twain most concerned is still at liberty to jilt; but in such a case, as usual throughout the Moslem East, enmity between the families inevitably results.

The wedding festivities outlast the month: there are great ‘affinities of gossips;’ tympanum et tripudium; hard eating and harder wetting of the driest clay with the longest draughts of Tembo K’hali (sour toddy), of Pombe beer (the Kafir Chuala), and of the maddening Zerambo. Processions of free women and slave girls, preceded by chattels performing on various utensils of music, perambulate the streets, singing and dancing in every court. At length the Kazi, or any other man of letters, recites the Fatiheh, and the two become one, either at the bridegroom’s or at the bride’s house. The women are present when the happy man enters the nuptial chamber, and they always require to be ejected by main force. Unlike the Arabs, they retain the Jewish practice of inspection: if the process be satisfactory, the bridegroom presents $10 to $50 to his new connections, while the exemplary young person is blessed, congratulated, and petted with small gifts by papa and mamma. She often owes, it is whispered, her blushing honours to the simple process of cutting a pigeon’s throat. In case of a disappointment, there is a violent scene of abuse and recrimination; but when lungs and wrath are exhausted, the storm is lulled without blows or even divorce. The first ‘Mfungato,’ i. e. seven (days) after consummation, is devoted to the wildest revelry, the ‘Walímeh,’ or wedding feast, concluding only with the materials for feasting.

The Msawahili is allowed to breathe his last upon a couch, and the corpse, after being washed by an Alim or by some kinsman, is hastily wrapped in a perfumed winding-sheet. Women of the highest rank sit at home in solitary grief. The middle-classes stain their faces, assume dark or dingy-coloured dresses, and repair to the sea-shore for the purpose of washing the dead man’s clothes before dividing them amongst his relations or distributing them to the poor. The slave girls shave their heads like Hindus, bathe, and go about the streets singing Neniæ, and mourning aloud. Meanwhile a collection, technically known as Sándá (the winding-sheet), is made amongst the people, who are almost all connected by a near or distant tie. One of the blood-kinsmen acts Munádi, or crier. As each one appears with his quotum, he shouts ‘lo! such a person (naming him) has bought such and such articles for his brother’s funeral feast.’ This publicity tends of course to make men liberal. The corpse is buried, as is customary amongst Moslems, on the day, generally the evening, of decease, and there is a popular belief, in which some Europeans join, that deaths take place mostly when the tide ebbs, at the full and change of the moon. The custom of abusing the corpse, accompanied with the greatest indecencies, is confined to the least civilized settlements. After the funeral all apply themselves to eating, drinking, and what we should call merriment; whilst music and dancing are kept up as long as weak human nature permits. The object is not that of the Yorkshire Arvills, to refresh those who attended from afar—it is confessedly to ‘take the sorrow out of the heart.’ So the Velorio of Yucatan is para divertise—to distract kin-grief. As in the matter of marriage, however, so in funerals, we can hardly deride barbarous races whilst we keep up our pomp and expense of ridiculous trappings, taxing even the poor for mutes and carriages, for ‘gloves, scarves, and hatbands.’

The Wasawahili have all the African passion for the dance and song: they may be said to exist upon manioc and betel, palm-wine and spirits, music and dancing. The Ngoma Khu, or huge drum, a hollowed cocoa-stem bound with leather braces, and thumped with fists, palms, or large sticks, plays an important and complex part in the business of life: it sounds when a man falls sick, when he revives, or when he dies; at births and at marriages; at funerals and at festivals; when a stranger arrives or departs; when a fight begins or ends, and generally whenever there is nothing else to do. It is accompanied by the ‘Siwa,’ a huge pipe of black wood or ebony, and by the ‘Zurmári,’ a more handy variety of the same instrument. On occasions which justify full orchestras, an ‘Upatu,’ or brass pan, is placed upon the ground in a wooden tray, and is tapped with two bits of palm-frond. Some wealthy men possess gongs, from which the cudgel draws lugubrious sounds. The other implements are ‘Tabl,’ or tomtoms of gourd, provided with goatskin; the Tambire, or Arab Barbut, a kind of lute; the Malagash ‘Zeze,’ a Calabash-banjo, whose single string is scraped with a bow; and finally horns of the cow, of the Addax, and the Oryx antelopes. These people are excellent timeists, but their music, being all in the minor key, and the song being a mere recitative without change of words, both are monotonous to the last degree. The dancing resembles that of the Somal, and, as amongst the slaves, both sexes prance together. The Diwans, or chiefs, caper with drawn swords, whilst the women move in regular time, shaking skirts with the right hand. The ‘figures’ are, unlike the music, complicated and difficult: they seem to vary in almost every village. The only constant characteristic appears to be that tremulous motion from the waist downwards, and that lively pantomime of love which was so fiercely satirized by the eminently moral Juvenal. It is, indeed, the groundwork of all ‘Oriental’ dancing from Morocco to Japan.

The principal occupation of the Wasawahili is agriculture; they form the farmer class of the Island, and everywhere in the interior we find their little settlements of cajan-thatched huts of wattle and dab, with flying roofs, acting chimney as well as ventilator—a right sensible contrivance, worthy of imitation. The furniture consists of a few mats; of low stools, mostly cut out of a single block; of chairs, a skin being stretched on a wooden frame; and invariably of a Kitándá, or cartel of coir and sticks; even the beggar will not sleep or sit upon the damp face of his mother earth. The dwelling is divided into several rooms, or rather closets, by partition walls the height of a man; as usual in tropical lands, the interior is kept dark. Sometimes the hovel boasts the convenience of a Cho’oni or Shironi (latrina), but in no case is there a window. Gossips meet under the shade of huge Calabashes and other trees.

Like the Somal, the Wasawahili are essentially a trading race, a crumenimulga natio, and they do business with the characteristic dishonesty of Africans. They defraud and even offer violence to Banyans, and acting as trade-men to European merchants, they never allow a purchase without deducting their percentage. At the same time their plausibility, like that of the travelling Dragoman, so impresses upon the civilized dupe, whom they hedge round with an entourage of their own, and whom it is their life-business to cozen, that nothing can convince him of their rascality. Some of them make considerable fortunes: I heard of one who lately purchased an estate for $14,000. They are also commercial travellers of no mean order. Upon the Zanzibar coast they cut rafters and firewood; they dig for copal, and they act as middlemen; they wander far into the interior, buying hides, slaves, and ivory, and they have thus become familiar with the Lake Regions, which are now attracting our attention. The poorest classes employ themselves in fishing, and many may be seen by day plying about the harbour in little ‘Monoxyles,’ which they manage with admirable dexterity. Others have learned to make the rude hardwares with which the mainland is supplied: there are also rough masons, boat-builders, and carpenters of peculiar awkwardness.

Respectable Wasawahili dress like Arabs in ‘Kofíyya,’ here meaning red caps, and the long Disdashah, or night-gown; the loins are girt with a ‘Kamarband’-shawl, and sandals protect the feet. Others are contented with the Hammam-toilette, waist-cloth (Shukkah or Tanga) and shoulder- sheets (Izár), always adorned with the favourite fringe (Tambúa or Taraza). This is at once the simplest and one of the most ancient of attires; the plate from Montfaucon’s Cosmas Indicopleustes (1706, Topographia Christiana) reproduced by Vincent (Periplus, Appendix, part I.) shows the kilt to have been the general dress of the ancient Æthiopians, as the spear was their weapon. Before superiors they bare the shaven poll, an un-Oriental custom probably learned from the Portuguese. As amongst the Arab Bedawin, the Syrian Rayahs, and the Persian Iliyat, the women mostly go abroad unveiled. The ‘Murungawánah,’ or freeborn, however, is distinguished out-of-doors by her rude mantilla, and ‘ladies’ affect an Ukaya, or fillet of indigo-dyed cotton, or muslin, somewhat like that of the Somal and the Syrians. The feminine garb is a Kisitu, or length of stained cotton, blue and red being the pet colours. It resembles the Kitambi of the Malagash, and it is the nearest approach to the primitive African kilt of skin or tree bark. Wrapped tightly round the unsupported bosom, and extending from the armpits to the heels, this ungraceful garb depresses the breast, spoils the figure, and conceals nothing of its deficiencies. The hair, like the body, drips with unfragrant cocoa-nut oil; and though there is not much material to work upon, it is worked in various fanciful styles. Many shave clean; some wear a half-crop, like a skull-cap of Astracan wool; others a full-grown bush covering the whole head. These part it down the middle, with an asinine cross over the regions of veneration; those draw longitudinal lines above the ears, making a threefold parting; there are also garnishings and outworks of stunted pigtails, forming stiff and savage accroche-cœurs. Two peculiar coiffures at once attract the stranger’s eye. One makes the head look as if split into a pair of peaks, the side hair being raised from sinciput to occiput in tall double unpadded rolls, parted by a deep central hollow: this style is nowhere so pronounced as near the Gaboon river, where the heads of the Mpongwe girls appear short-horned. The other consists of frizzly twists trained lengthwise from nape to brow, and the whitish etiolated scalp showing itself between the lines as though the razor had been used: the stripes suggest the sections of a musk-melon or the meridians of a map.

The favourite feminine necklace is a row of sharks’ teeth; some use beads, others bits of copal, but the amber so highly valued in the Somali country is here not prized. I have alluded before to the artificial deformity of ear-lobes distended by means of the Mpogo, a mixture of raw Copal (Chakazi) and Cinnabar. The left nostril is usually honoured with some simple decoration—a stud or rose-shaped button of wood or bone, of ivory or of precious metal, and at times its place is taken by a clove or a pin of Cassava. The tattoo is not so common on the Island as upon the Continent. These women are said to be prolific, but apparently they have small families: the child is carried in a cloth called Mbereko, and, curious to say, they do not bind up its head immediately after birth. They are hard-worked; and, like the dames of Harar, they buy and sell with men in the bazar. Their food is manioc, holcus, rice, and sometimes fish; a fowl is the extent of luxury, flesh being mostly beyond their means. Few smoke, but almost all chew tobacco as lustily as their husbands, and their mouths are horrid chasms full of ‘Tambúl’—quids of betel-nut and areca leaf peppered with coarse shell- lime.[108] This astringent, like the Kola-nut of the Guinea Regions, acts preventive against the effect of damp heat, and it is a stomachic, consequently a tonic. The habit of ‘chawing’ it becomes inveterate: Hindostanis visiting Portugal, and unable to procure the favourite ‘Pán- Supári,’ have imitated it with cuttings of cypress-apples and ivy leaves. Ibn Batuta declares the betel to be highly aphrodisiac, and hence partly the high esteem in which this masticatory is held.

The Wasawahili are not an honoured race; even the savage Somal call them ’Abíd, or serviles, and bitterly deride their peculiarities. The unerring instinct of mankind has pointed them out for slaves, and they have readily accepted the position. As Moslems they should be free, and the Faith forbids them to trade in Moslems. Yet by local usage, as the children become the property not of the parents, but of the mother’s brother, the latter can sell any or all of his nephews and nieces; indeed, he would be subject to popular contempt if, when poor, he did not thus ‘raise the wind.’

The most interesting point connected with these coast negroids is their language, the Kisawahili. It was anciently called Kingozi, from Ungozi or the region lying about the Dana, or rather Zana, the river known to its Galla accolœ as ‘Maro,’ and ‘Pokomoni’ from the heathen Pokomo who, living near its course, form the southern boundary of Galla-land proper. The dialect is still spoken with the greatest purity about Patta and the other ancient settlements between Lamu and Mombasah. Oral tongues are essentially fluctuating; having no standard, the roots of words soon wither and die, whilst terms, idioms, and expressions once popular speedily fall into oblivion, and are supplanted by neologisms. Thus the origin of words must often be sought by collation with the wilder kindred dialects of the coast tribes; for instance, the root of ‘Mbua’ (rain), which has died out of Kisawahili, still visits in Kinyika—ku buá, to rain. In Zanzibar Island Kisawahili is most corrupted; the vocabulary, varying with every generation, has become a mere conglomerate which combines South African, Arabic, Persian, Hindi, and even Portuguese, an epitome of local history. On the coast it greatly varies, being constantly modified by the migration and mixture of tribes. Like the Malay of the Indian Islands, it has become the Lingua Franca, the Lingoa Geral of commerce from Ra’as Hafun to the Mozambique and throughout Central Intertropical Africa. This Urdu Zaban, or Hindostani of East Africa, is indispensable to the explorer, who disdains mere ‘geography;’ almost every inland tribe has some vagrant man who can speak it. My principle being never to travel where the language is unknown to me, I was careful to study it at once on arriving at Zanzibar; and though sometimes in the interior question and answer had to pass through three and even four media, immense advantage has derived from the modicum of direct intercourse.

The base of Kisawahili is distinctly African; and, totally unlike its limitrophe the Galla, it grammatically ignores the Semitic element. It is now time for writers to unlearn that, ‘all the languages over the face of the earth, however remotely different and however widely spread, appear to be all reducible to the one or the other of three radically distinct tongues’ (Dr Beke, p. 352, Appendix to Jacob’s Flight. London, Longmans, 1865).[109] It is only, I believe, the monogenist pure and simple who in these days would assert ‘there exist three linguistic types, as there are three physical types, the black, the yellow, and the white’ (M. de Quatrefages, p. 31, Anthropological Review, No. xxviii.). To the old and obsolete triad of Turanian, Semitic, and Aryan, or Turanian, Semitic, and Iranian, we must now add at least another pair— without noticing the Asianesian—namely, the American or Sentence language, and the prefixitive South African family. These two great tongues, one extending over half a world, the other through half a continent, are, I believe with Lichtenstein and Marsden, unborrowed, indigenous, and marked with all the peculiarities which distinguish their inventors. Both are idioms which seem to indicate nice linguistic perceptions and high intellectual development; history, however, supplies many cases of civilization simplifying and curtailing the complicated tongues of barbarians, thus making language the means, not the end, of instruction.

The limits of the South African family may be roughly laid down as extending from the Equator to the Cape of Good Hope. The Equatorial Gaboon on the Western Coast[110] evidently belongs to it; and upon the Congo river I found that whole sentences of Kisawahili were easily made intelligible to the people.[111] Though the language is evidently one in point of construction throughout this immense area, isolation and hostilities between tribes have split it into a multitude of dialects. Almost every people, at the distance of 30 to 50 miles, has its peculiar speech, and in these regions it would not be difficult to collect ‘Specimens of a hundred African Languages.’ The older travellers remarked that the Tower of Babel must have been near the Gulf of Guinea; they would have found the same throughout the interior and Eastern Coast.

My experience[112] of the tongues spoken to the west of the Zanzibar coast proper is that their amount of difference greatly varies: some average that of the English counties, others of the three great Neo- Latin languages, whilst in some the degree amounts to that between English, German, and Dutch. And generally, I may remark, the East-West extremities of the lingual area are more closely connected than the North-South: the language of Angola, for instance, is more like Kisawahili than the Sichuana. I am at pain to understand why Dr Krapf should have named this linguistic family, Orphno-(dark-brown) Hamitic, Orphno-Cushite, Nilo-Hamitic, and Nilotic,[113] when it is far more intimately connected with the Kafir regions, the Congo and the Zambeze rivers, than with Æthiopia or the Nile Valley proper. Mr Cooley’s term ‘Zangian’ or ‘Zingian’ also unduly limits the area to that of a mere sub-family.

The crux grammaticorum of the great South African language is its highly artificial system of principiatives or preformatives.[114] In the three recognized lingual types of the old world the work of inflexion, the business of grammar, and the mechanism of speech disclose themselves at the ends of vocables. In this prefixitive tongue the changes of mood, tense, case, and number, are effected at the beginning of words by prepositive modifying particles, which are evidently contractions of significant terms, and whose apparatus supplies the total want of inflexion. This development, arrested in other languages—the Coptic, for instance—here obtains a significance which isolates it from all linguistic society. The practised student at once discovers that he is dealing with a completely new family by the unusual difficulty which unvaried terminations and initial changes present to one accustomed only to the terminal.

The minor characteristics of the Kisawahili are the peculiarities of the negative system in substantives and adjectives, pronouns, adnouns, and verbs; for instance, Asie, he or she who is not, Isie, it which is not. Secondly, are the broad lines of distinction drawn between words denoting the rational and the irrational, and in a minor degree the rational-animate (as man), and the rational-inanimate (as ass). In most cases the rational-animate affixes Wa as a plural sign: the irrational- animate Ma. Umbu, a sister, properly makes Waumbu, sisters: the ignorant, however, and the Islanders often say Maumbu (sisters) like Map’hunda (asses). Thus personality supplies the place of gender, a phenomenon that already dawns in the Persian and in other Indo-European tongues. Next is the artful and intricated system of irregular plurals, and last, not least, the characteristic alliteration, an assonance apparently the debris of many ancient dialects based upon an euphonious concord not always appreciable by us, and therefore not yet subjected by our writers to rule. We understand, for instance, that an alliterative speaker should say Mtu mema (a good man), and Watu wema (good men); but why is the regularity altered to Máháli _p_ángo (my place), p’hunda _z_ango (my donkey), and Mtu _wa_ Rashidi (Rashid’s man), instead of mango, pango, and ma? These distinctions appear far too empirical, arbitrary, and artificial for the wants of primitive speech.

The Kisawahili is an oral tongue—an illiterate language in the sense assigned to the term by Professor Lepsius. The people, like the Somal and the Gallas, never invented a syllabarium. This absence of alphabet is a curious proof of deficient constructiveness in a race that cultivates rude eloquence, and that speaks dialects which express even delicate shades of meaning: it contrasts wonderfully with the Arabs and Hindus, who adapt to each language some form of Phœnician or Dewanagari. The coast races use the modern Arabic alphabet, which, admirable for its proper purpose, represents African sounds imperfectly, as those of Sindi and Turkish, and is condemned to emulate the anomalous orthography or cacography of our English. The character is large, square, and old- fashioned, resembling later Kufic even more than that of Harar, and he must be a first-rate scholar who can read at sight all the letter of a man to his friend. Literature is confined, to a few sheets upon the subject of Báo or Uganga (Raml or geomancy), to proverbs and proverbial sayings, mostly quatrains; to riddles and rabbit tales, which here represent the hare legends of the Namaquas and the spider stories of the Gold Coast; to Mashairi, or songs rhymeless, measureless, and unmusical, and to ‘Utenzi,’ religious poems, and eulogies of the brave.

In Zanzibar Island Arabic is ever making inroads upon the African tongue, and the student who knows the former will soon master the latter. The first short vocabulary, by Mr Salt, was published in 1814, and was presently followed by others, especially the ‘Soahili vocabulary’ of the late Mr Samuel K. Masury, of Zanzibar (Memoirs of the American Academy, Cambridge, May, 1845), and Mr J. Ross Browne’s ‘Specimen of the Sowhelian Language’ (Etchings of a Whaling Cruise. New York, 1846).[115] Strange to say, the ‘Mombas Mission’ translated the Gospels into the obscure local Kinyika, when only three chapters of Genesis and a version of the English Prayer Book (Tubingen, 1850-54) were published ‘in the one language, by the instrumentality of which the missionary and the merchant can master in a short time all the dialects spoken from the Line down to the Cape of Good Hope.’ Dr Krapf’s ‘Outline of the Elements of the Kisauaheli Language’ (Tubingen, 1850) requires great alterations and additions, especially in the alliterative and other characteristic parts of the tongue. Messrs Rebmann and Erhardt, who both were capable of writing a scholar-like book, or of perfecting the ‘Outline,’ turned their attention to the languages of the Nyassa, Usumbara, and the Wakwafi. In 1857 M. Guillain published, as an Appendix to his third volume, a short grammar and vocabulary of the ‘langue Souahhéli:’ they are mere bald sketches, and they convey but the scantiest idea of what they attempt to illustrate. A good study of Kisawahili would facilitate the acquisition of the whole sub-family. For my own use I commenced a grammar intended to illustrate the intricate and difficult combinations and the peculiar euphony which here seems to be the first object of speech: unfortunately my transfer to West Africa left it, like my vocabularies, in a state of MS. My friend Mr Trübner has lately advertised a volume called ‘East African folk-lore, Swahili Tales, as told by the natives of Zanzibar,’ with an English translation by Edward Steere, L.L.D., Rector of Little Steeping, Lincolnshire, and Chaplain to Bishop Tozer (London: Bell and Daldy, 1870);[116] and Dr Krapf has proposed to publish the Juo ya Herkal (Book of Heraclius), ‘an account of the wars of Mohammed with Askaf, Governor of Syria, to the Greek Emperor Heraclius, in rhyme; a MS. in ancient Ki-Suahili written in Arabic characters.’ Also ‘Juo ja Utenzi, Poems and Mottoes in rhyme,’ the dialect being that formerly spoken in the Islands of Patta and Lamu. Both the ‘linguistic treasures’ were presented to the Oriental Society of Halle. The last publications which I have seen are ‘Specimens of the Swahili Language’ (Zanzibar, 1866); ‘Collections for a Handbook of the Swahili Language, as spoken at Zanzibar,’ by Bishop Tozer and Rev. E. Steere (Zanzibar, 1865), and the Rev. E. Steere’s ‘Collections for a Handbook of the Shambala Language’ (Zanzibar, 1867), the ‘tongue spoken in the country called in our maps Usumbara, which is a mountainous district on the mainland of Africa, lying opposite to the Island of Pemba, and visible in clear weather from the town of Zanzibar.’

Kisawahili is at once rich and poor. It may contain 20,000 words, of which, perhaps, 3000 are generally used, and 10,000 have been published. Copious to cumbrousness in concrete, collective, and ideal words, it abounds in names of sensuous objects; there is a term for every tree, shrub, plant, grass, and bulb, and I have shown that the several ages of the cocoa-nut are differently called. It wants compounds, abstract and metaphysical expressions: these must be borrowed from the Arabic, fitted with terminal and internal vowels, to suit the tongue, and modified according to the organs of the people, harsh and guttural consonants being exchanged for easy cognates. Even the numerals beyond twenty are mere Semitic corruptions. All new ideas, that of servant, for instance, must be expressed by a short description. In the more advanced South African dialects, as in the Mpongwe of the Gaboon, a compound or a derivative would be found to include all requirements. The sound would be soft and harmonious were it not for the double initial consonants, aspirated or not; for the perpetual reduplications (the Arabic Radif),[117] a savage and childish contrivance to intensify the word, and for the undue recurrence of the coarse letter K. Possibly the fondness of the people for tautology may have tended to develop their tautophony and euphony. Abounding in vowels and liquids, the language admits of vast volubility of utterance; in anger or excitement the words flow like a torrent, and each dovetails into its neighbour till the whole speech becomes one vocable. Withal, every vowel has its distinct and equal articulation. It wants the short and obscure sound of the English and other European languages (e. g. a li_a_r, h_e_r, f_i_rst, act_o_r, and h_u_rled) called by us the original vowel sound. Like the Chinese and Maori languages, and the other South African tongues, it confounds the so often convertible letters, the L and the R.[118] The slaves, the Wasawahili, and the wild natives mostly prefer the former, e. g. Mabeluki for Mabruki, and the Arabs and civilized speakers the latter, although Mr Cooley (Geography of N’yassi, p. 20) asserts the contrary. The metastasis, however, appears to me often arbitrary, occasioning trouble, e. g. when ku ría (to eat) becomes ku lía (to weep). Dr Livingstone, (chap. xxx. First Expedition) complains of Loangoa, Luenya, and Bazizulu being transformed into Arroangoa, Ruanha, and Morusurus, but he also similarly errs when he converts Karagwah into Kalagwe, and when (p. 266) he uses indifferently Maroro and Maloli. The R is often inserted pleonastically, to prevent hiatus, as Ku potéra for Ku potéa, to lose; Ku pakíra for Ku pakía, to pack. Sometimes, again, it is omitted, as U’ongo for Urongo, a lie. In pronouncing it the tongue tip must (be more vibrated than in our language, which loves to slur over the sound. Aspirated consonants are found, as in Sanskrit, especially B’h, P’h, D’h, T’h, K’h, and G’h. Quiescent consonants are rare in the middle of words; thus the Arabic Mismar (a nail) is changed to Misumari, and treble are unknown. There are only five peculiar sounds[119] which are generally mispronounced by the Arabs, and these are mostly of little importance. The dialect is easily learned: many foreigners who cannot speak understand, after a short residence, what is spoken to them. It may be said to have no accent, but a sinking or dropping of the voice at the terminal syllable—possibly the case with Latin hexameters and pentameters—seems to place the ictus upon the penultimate, as Wasawahíli for Wasawahĭli.[120] Hence when first writing proper nouns I preferred Mtony and Pangany to Mto-ni and Pangani. Similarly the W when placed between a consonant and a vowel is often so slurred over as hardly to be detected. For instance, Bwáná, master, becomes B’áná, and Unyamwezi might be both written Unyam’ezi were it not liable to confuse the reader. There is also a Spanish ñ (Niña), as in Ñika, the bush, and Ñendo, the P. N. of a district, which I express by Ny, e. g. Nyika and Nyendo. Finally, being a lazy language, which well suits the depressing climate, it takes as little trouble to articulate as Italian: hence, even in the first generation, Arabs and Baloch exchange for it their own guttural and laborious tongues, and their offspring will learn nothing else. This is more curious than the children of the Scandinavians abandoning the father-tongue for Norman and Anglo-Scandinavian, vulgarly called Anglo-Saxon. In East Africa adult settlers forget their mother-tongue,

And now of the slave races proper.

The treaty of 1845, which modified Capt. Moresby’s, of 1822, and Capt. Cogan’s, of 1839, forbade exportation from the Zanzibarian ports north of Lamu and its dependencies (S. lat. 1° 57′) and south of Kilwa (S. lat. 9° 2′): thus the upper markets were cut off, and the traffic was confined to the African dominions of the late Sayyid. The object of these provisions was, of course, to avoid interference with the status of domestic slavery, in the dominions of a foreign and friendly power. It actually, however, led to what it was intended to prevent. The vigilance and the summary measures of our Cape cruisers, especially when commanded by men like Admiral Christopher Wyvill, inflicted severe injuries upon, and in some places almost abolished, the contraband. I have said that the diminution of export has materially benefited the Island and its population. But at Zanzibar, as in the Guinea regions and the African interior, prædial slavery appears still an evil necessity: upon it hinges not only the prosperity but the very existence of the present race. An abolition act passed in this Island would soon restore it to the Iguana and the Turtle, its old inhabitants.