While waiting for supplies in Unyanyembe, Dr. Livingstone wrote a second letter to Mr. James Gordon Bennett, which was principally devoted to the slave trade of East Africa, to greatly aid in the abolition of which would be more gratifying to the explorer’s ambition than to discover all the sources of the Nile. This might well be supposed from what has already been quoted from Dr. Livingstone’s despatches to his government; but inasmuch as he here directly appeals to the American people, this volume would be incomplete without the remarkable and most thrillingly interesting statements of the letter in question. They were sent by cable telegram from London and appeared in the “Herald” newspaper of July 27, 1872:
“At present let me give a glimpse of the slave trade, to which the search and discovery of most of the Nile fountains have brought me face to face. The whole traffic, whether by land or ocean, is a gross outrage on the common law of mankind. It is carried on from age to age, and, in addition to the evils it inflicts, presents almost insurmountable obstacles to intercourse between different portions of the human family. This open sore in the world is partly owing to human cupidity, partly to the ignorance of the more civilized of mankind of the blight which lights chiefly on more degraded piracy on the high seas. (sic.) It was once as common as slave trading is now, but as it became thoroughly known the whole civilized world rose against it.
“In now trying to make Eastern African slave trade better known to Americans, I indulge the hope I am aiding on, though in a small degree, the good time coming yet when slavery as well as piracy will be chased from the world. Many have but a faint idea of the evils that trading in slaves inflicts on the victims and authors of its atrocities. Most people imagine that negroes, after being brutalized by a long course of servitude, with but few of the ameliorating influences that elevate the more favored races, are fair average specimens of the African man. Our ideas are derived from slaves of the west coast, who have for ages been subject to domestic bondage and all the depressing agencies of a most unhealthy climate. These have told most injuriously on their physical frames, while fraud and the rum trade have ruined their moral natures so as not to discriminate the difference of the monstrous injustice.
“The main body of the population is living free in the interior, under their own chiefs and laws, cultivating their own farms, catching fish in their own rivers, or fighting bravely with the grand old denizens of the forest, which, in more recent continents, can only be reached in rocky strata or under perennial ice. Winwood Reade hit the truth when he said the ancient Egyptian, with his large, round, black eyes, full, luscious lips, and somewhat depressed nose, is far nearer the typical negro than the west coast African, who has been debased by the unhealthy land he lives in. The slaves generally, and especially those on the west coast, at Zanzibar and elsewhere are extremely ugly. I have no prejudice against their color; indeed, any one who lives long among them forgets they are black and feels they are just fellow-men; but the low, retreating forehead, prognathous jaws, lark-heels and other physical peculiarities common among slaves and West African negroes, always awaken some feelings of aversion akin to those with which we view specimens of the Bill Sykes and ‘Bruiser’ class in England. I would not utter a syllable calculated to press down either class more deeply in the mire in which it is already sunk, but I wish to point out that these are not typical Africans any more than typical Englishmen, and that the natives on nearly all the high lands of the interior Continent are, as a rule, fair average specimens of humanity.
“I happened to be present when all the head men of the great Chief Msama—who lives west of the south end of Tanganyika—had come together to make peace with certain Arabs who had burned their chief town, and I am certain one could not see more finely formed, intellectual heads in any assembly in London or Paris, and the faces and forms corresponded finely with the well-shaped heads. Msama himself had been a sort of Napoleon for fighting and conquering in his younger days. He was exactly like the Ancient Assyrians sculptured on the Nineveh marbles, as Nimrod and others, and he showed himself to be one of ourselves by habitually indulging in copious potations of beer, called pombe, and had become what Nathaniel Hawthorne called ‘bulbous below the ribs.’ I do not know where the phrase ‘bloated aristocracy’ arose. It must be American, for I have had glimpses of a good many English noblemen, and Msama was the only specimen of a ‘bloated aristocrat’ on whom I ever set eyes.
“Many of the women are very pretty, and, like all ladies, would have been much prettier if they had only let themselves alone. Fortunately the dears could not change charming black eyes, beautiful foreheads, nicely rounded limbs, well shaped forms and small hands and feet, but must adorn themselves, and this they do by filing splendid teeth to points like cats’ teeth. It was distressing, for it made their smile like that of crocodile ornaments, scarce. They are not black, but of light, warm brown color, and so very sisterish, if I may use the word, it feels an injury done one’s self to see a bit of grass stuck through the cartilage of the nose so as to bulge out the alæ nasi, or wing of the nose of the anatomists.
“Cazembe’s Queen, Moaria Nyombe by name, would be esteemed a real beauty either in London Paris, or New York, and yet she had a small hole through the cartilage, near the tip of her fine, slightly aquiline nose. But she had only filed one side of two of the front of her superb snow-white teeth, and then, what a laugh she had! Let those who wish to know go see her. She was carried to her farm in a pony phæton, which is a sort of throne, fastened on two very long poles and carried by twelve stalwart citizens. If they take the Punch motto of Cazembe—‘Niggers don’t require to be shot here’—as their own, they may show themselves to be men; but whether they do or not Cazembe will show himself a man of sterling good sense.
“Now, these people, so like ourselves externally, have brave, genuine human souls. Rua, large sections of country northwest of Cazembe, but still in same inland region, is peopled with men very like those of Wsama and Cazembe. An Arab, Syed Ben Habib, was sent to trade in Rua two years ago, and, as Arabs usually do where natives have no guns, Syed Ben Habib’s elder brother carried matters with a high hand. The Rua men observed the elder brother slept in a white tent, and, pitching spears into it by night, killed him. As Moslems never forgive blood, the younger brother forthwith ‘ran a muck’ on all indiscriminately in a large district.
“Let it not be supposed any of these people are, like American Indians, insatiable, blood-thirsty savages, who will not be reclaimed or entertain terms of lasting friendship with fair-dealing strangers. Had the actual murderers been demanded, and a little time granted, I feel morally certain, from many other instances among tribes who, like the Ba Rua, have not been spoiled by Arab traders, they would all have been given up.
“The chiefs of the country would, first of all, have specified the crime of which the elder brother was guilty, and who had been led to avenge it. It is very likely they would have stipulated no other should be punished but the actual perpetrator, the domestic slave acting under his orders being considered free of blame.