10th July, 1872.—No great difficulty would be encountered in establishing a Christian Mission a hundred miles or so from the East Coast. The permission of the Sultan of Zanzibar would be necessary, because all the tribes of any intelligence claim relationship, or have relations with him; the Banyamwezi even call themselves his subjects, and so do others. His permission would be readily granted, if respectfully applied for through the English Consul. The Suaheli, with their present apathy on religious matters, would be no obstacle. Care to speak politely, and to show kindness to them, would not be lost labour in the general effect of the Mission on the country, but all discussion on the belief of the Moslems should be avoided; they know little about it. Emigrants from Muscat, Persia, and India, who at present possess neither influence nor wealth, would eagerly seize any formal or offensive denial of the authority of their Prophet to fan their own bigotry, and arouse that of the Suaheli. A few now assume an air of superiority in matters of worship, and would fain take the place of Mullams or doctors of the law, by giving authoritative dicta as to the times of prayer; positions to be observed; lucky and unlucky days; using cabalistic signs; telling fortunes; finding from the Koran when an attack may be made on any enemy, &c.; but this is done only in the field with trading parties. At Zanzibar, the regular Mullams supersede them.
No objection would be made to teaching the natives of the country to read their own languages in the Roman character. No Arab has ever attempted to teach them the Arabic-Koran, they are called guma, hard, or difficult as to religion. This is not wonderful, since the Koran is never translated, and a very extraordinary desire for knowledge would be required to sustain a man in committing to memory pages and chapters of, to him, unmeaning gibberish. One only of all the native chiefs, Monyumgo, has sent his children to Zanzibar to be taught to read and write the Koran; and he is said to possess an unusual admiration of such civilization as he has seen among the Arabs. To the natives, the chief attention of the Mission should be directed. It would not be desirable, or advisable, to refuse explanation to others; but I have avoided giving offence to intelligent Arabs, who have pressed me, asking if I believed in Mohamad by saying, "No I do not: I am a child of Jesus bin Miriam," avoiding anything offensive in my tone, and often adding that Mohamad found their forefathers bowing down to trees and stones, and did good to them by forbidding idolatry, and teaching the worship of the only One God. This, they all know, and it pleases them to have it recognised.
It might be good policy to hire a respectable Arab to engage free porters, and conduct the Mission to the country chosen, and obtain permission from the chief to build temporary houses. If this Arab were well paid, it might pave the way for employing others to bring supplies of goods and stores not produced in the country, as tea, coffee, sugar. The first porters had better all go back, save a couple or so, who have behaved especially well. Trust to the people among whom you live for general services, as bringing wood, water, cultivation, reaping, smith's work, carpenter's work, pottery, baskets, &c. Educated free blacks from a distance are to be avoided: they are expensive, and are too much of gentlemen for your work. You may in a few months raise natives who will teach reading to others better than they can, and teach you also much that the liberated never know. A cloth and some beads occasionally will satisfy them, while neither the food, the wages, nor the work will please those who, being brought from a distance, naturally consider themselves missionaries. Slaves also have undergone a process which has spoiled them for life; though liberated young, everything of childhood and opening life possesses an indescribable charm. It is so with our own offspring, and nothing effaces the fairy scenes then printed on the memory. Some of my liberados eagerly bought green calabashes and tasteless squash, with fine fat beef, because this trash was their early food; and an ounce of meat never entered their mouths. It seems indispensable that each Mission should raise its own native agency. A couple of Europeans beginning, and carrying on a Mission without a staff of foreign attendants, implies coarse country fare, it is true, but this would be nothing to those who, at home amuse themselves with fastings, vigils, &c. A great deal of power is thus lost in the Church. Fastings and vigils, without a special object in view, are time run to waste. They are made to minister to a sort of self-gratification, instead of being turned to account for the good of others. They are like groaning in sickness. Some people amuse themselves when ill with continuous moaning. The forty days of Lent might be annually spent in visiting adjacent tribes, and bearing unavoidable hunger and thirst with a good grace. Considering the greatness of the object to be attained, men might go without sugar, coffee, tea, &c. I went from September 1866 to December 1868 without either. A trader, at Casembe's, gave me a dish cooked with honey, and it nauseated from its horrible sweetness, but at 100 miles inland, supplies could be easily obtained.
The expenses need not be large. Intelligent Arabs inform me that, in going from Zanzibar to Casembe's, only 3000 dollars' worth are required by a trader, say between 600l. or 700l., and he may be away three or more years; paying his way, giving presents to the chiefs, and filling 200 or 300 mouths. He has paid for, say fifty muskets, ammunition, flints, and may return with 4000 lbs. of ivory, and a number of slaves for sale; all at an outlay of 600l. or 700l. With the experience I have gained now, I could do all I shall do in this expedition for a like sum, or at least for 1000l. less than it will actually cost me.
12th July, 1872.—Two men come from Syde bin Habib report fighting as going on at discreet distances against Mirambo.
Sheikh But, son of Mohamad bin Saleh, is found guilty of stealing a tusk of 2-1/2 frasilahs from the Lewalé. He has gone in disgrace to fight Mirambo: his father is disconsolate, naturally. Lewalé has been merciful.
When endeavouring to give some account of the slave-trade of East Africa, it was necessary to keep far within the truth, in order not to be thought guilty of exaggeration; but in sober seriousness the subject does not admit of exaggeration. To overdraw its evils is a simple impossibility. The sights I have seen, though common incidents of the traffic, are so nauseous that I always strive to drive them from memory. In the case of most disagreeable recollections I can succeed, in time, in consigning them to oblivion, but the slaving scenes come back unbidden, and make me start up at dead of night horrified by their vividness. To some this may appear weak and unphilosophical, since it is alleged that the whole human race has passed through the process of development. We may compare cannibalism to the stone age, and the times of slavery to the iron and bronze epochs—slavery is as natural a step in human development as from bronze to iron.
Whilst speaking of the stone age I may add that in Africa I have never been fortunate enough to find one flint arrowhead or any other flint implement, though I had my eyes about me as diligently as any of my neighbours. No roads are made; no lands levelled; no drains digged; no quarries worked, nor any of the changes made on the earth's surface that might reveal fragments of the primitive manufacture of stone. Yet but little could be inferred from the negative evidence, were it not accompanied by the fact that flint does not exist in any part south of the equator. Quartz might have been used, but no remains exist, except the half-worn millstones, and stones about the size of oranges, used for chipping and making rough the nether millstone. Glazed pipes and earthenware used in smelting iron, show that iron was smelted in the remotest ages in Africa. These earthenware vessels, and fragments of others of a finer texture, were found in the delta of the Zambesi and in other parts in close association with fossil bones, which, on being touched by the tongue, showed as complete an absence of animal matter as the most ancient fossils known in Europe. They were the bones of animals, as hippopotami, water hogs, antelopes, crocodiles, identical with those now living in the country. These were the primitive fauna of Africa, and if vitrified iron from the prodigious number of broken smelting furnaces all over the country was known from the remotest times, the Africans seem to have had a start in the race, at a time when our progenitors were grubbing up flints to save a miserable existence by the game they might kill. Slave-trading seems to have been coeval with the knowledge of iron. The monuments of Egypt show that this curse has venerable antiquity. Some people say, "If so ancient, why try to stop an old established usage now?" Well, some believe that the affliction that befel the most ancient of all the patriarchs, Job, was small-pox. Why then stop the ravages of this venerable disease in London and New York by vaccination?
But no one expects any benevolent efforts from those who cavil and carp at efforts made by governments and peoples to heal the enormous open sore of the world. Some profess that they would rather give "their mite" for the degraded of our own countrymen than to "niggers"! Verily it is "a mite," and they most often forget, and make a gift of it to themselves. It is almost an axiom that those who do most for the heathen abroad are most liberal for the heathen at home. It is to this class we turn with hope. With others arguments are useless, and the only answer I care to give is the remark of an English sailor, who, on seeing slave-traders actually at their occupation, said to his companion, "Shiver my timbers, mate, if the devil don't catch these fellows, we might as well have no devil at all."
In conversing with a prince at Johanna, one of the Comoro islands lying off the north end of Madagascar, he took occasion to extol the wisdom of the Arabs in keeping strict watch over their wives. On suggesting that their extreme jealousy made them more like jailers than friends of their wives, or, indeed, that they thus reduced themselves to the level of the inferior animals, and each was like the bull of a herd and not like a reasonable man—"fuguswa"—and that they gave themselves a vast deal of trouble for very small profit; he asserted that the jealousy was reasonable because all women were bad, they could not avoid going astray. And on remarking that this might be the case with Arab women, but certainly did not apply to English women, for though a number were untrustworthy, the majority deserved all the confidence their husbands could place in them, he reiterated that women were universally bad. He did not believe that women ever would be good; and the English allowing their wives to gad about with faces uncovered, only showed their weakness, ignorance, and unwisdom.