From the Cape to Cairo: The First Traverse of Africa from South to North

by Ewart Scott Grogan; Arthur H. Sharp

ALBERT LAKE AND UPPER NILE TO WADELAI.

An hour's walk into the valley of death brought us to a cluster of villages with a large population, which was in a state of utter destitution. The people, who were very nervous at first, eventually gathered round in numbers with the same tale of rapine and murder, and the chief gave me a guide to take me to the foot of the hills. Another hour brought us to Nsabe, which, though generally depicted on maps in large letters, consists of about five dirty little muck-heaps, only recognizable as human habitations by the filthy smell that emanated from them. All the inhabitants fled, leaving their spears, bows, and beer in their hurry, and no amount of shouting and yelling would induce them to return. Our guide promptly made a bundle of the spears and other movables, with a view to appropriation, which when complete I placed against a tree, accompanying the movement by a vigorous application of my boot to the toughest portion of his anatomy. Incorrigible, bullying, thieving curs, one is often tempted to think that the Boer method of treating natives is, after all, the only one they deserve. Their Mark Tapleyism is their sole redeeming feature, and that is attributable to the incapacity of their intellect to hold anything but the impression of the moment. Although of the same tribe and close neighbours, I expect he would have thoroughly enjoyed seeing me burn and loot the place; it is the same everywhere--a guide amongst his own people is a worse thief even than a Manyema porter. He then took us by a devious route to the shore of the lake, and seemed greatly astonished to find that the village he had mentioned did not exist; nor had it left any trace behind. I could see by the way he was behaving that he intended to bolt, and knowing that without a native of the country there was very little chance of inducing the people, in their frightened state, to remain in their villages, I kept a close eye on him. As I expected, when I sat down on the shore to wait for the boys to close up, he began edging off towards the jungle; but when he looked round to see if it was all clear, he found himself covered by my .303. I had him brought back, and explained to him that his chief had sent him to show the way to the foot of the hills, that he had led me into the wilderness and could now lead me out, the two alternatives being villages, another guide, and a present, or a race with a .303 bullet. He chose the former, and seeing that fooling was a glut in the market, promptly took us to a village of the Wakoba called Kahoma, and in Kahuma's country. Here all the people fled, but he followed, and persuaded them to bring food to trade. They, too, had been raided, and had lost two women and two children captured. They could not tell me how many white men or Askaris there were, as they had not waited to see. The majority of them are fine, well-made men, and intensely black. One in particular took my fancy. He was a tremendous swell, with anything from 15 to 20 lbs. of red clay on his head, an enormous ivory bracelet, and multitudes of iron rings. The Wakoba live all along the lake-shore and in the fringe of the hills, and, curiously enough, their villages are mixed indiscriminately with those of the Balegga, with whom they seem to be on the best of terms, although the two peoples are quite distinct, the Balegga being real out-and-out bestial little savages, while the Wakoba are much above the Central African average of intelligence, with quite a wide knowledge of local affairs. They are both in a state of parallel expansion, the Balegga working to the north into the Lendu country, and the Wakoba in the opposite direction encroaching on the Wanyabuga.

Two miles north of Kahoma the hills come down to the water's edge, leaving only a narrow shingly beach, and thenceforward our progress became painfully slow; at intervals the headlands jut out into the water, and the work of transporting the loads round these obstructions with only two or three small and very unstable canoes was one of considerable difficulty, even the latitude of Doctor Johnson's dictionary proving insufficient on occasions; scores of little streams come tumbling down into the lake, each one forming a small delta, on many of which there are Wakoba villages with a few banana palms, and signs of scratching on the hillside, where I presume something was intended to grow, but had turned dizzy and given up the attempt. After Kahanama's, which is in Kahuma's sphere, Mpigwa is the big man, and I passed through many of his villages, some of the largest being Kabora, Zingi (?), Bordo, Nsessi, and Kiboko. Most of the scenery is very fine, the little white cascades gleaming in the shadow of immense trees, many of which are covered with scarlet and yellow blossoms, and in the midst of luxuriant tangles of vegetation the great gaunt slabs of slimy rock deep-set in their snow-white bed of sand, over which the little waves come tumbling in, gurgling and splashing round their feet and moaning and sobbing into a thousand miniature caves; while great apes and little brown-eyed monkeys drop from branch to branch and sit leering and gibbering at us as we paddle past.

The continual wetting and rock-climbing had the most disastrous effect on my already attenuated wardrobe, and for two or three days I was compelled to disport myself clad in a simple shirt, which, thanks to a classical education and consequent ignorance of the art of washing, had contracted to the modest and insufficient dimensions of a chest-preserver, while assuming the durable but inappropriate consistency of a piece of oil-cloth. The roseate hues of early dawn "weren't in it" with my nether limbs after the first day's exposure to a pitiless sun, and I became a sort of perambulating three-tiered Neapolitan ice, coffee, vanilla and raspberry, a phenomenon that greatly astonished a savage who surprised me in my bath, and who immediately fetched all his kith and kin to see; on the second day, however, the alarming desertion of a third of my epidermis so pained me mentally and physically, that after a great effort I produced a double-barrelled garment that in the absence of Poole-bred critics served its turn.

Of the various arts and crafts that one is called upon to undertake in Africa, such as cooking, shoe-mending, washer-womaning, doctoring, butchering, taxiderming, armoury work, carpentering, etc., ad infinitum, I think perhaps tailoring is the most trying; the cotton will not go into the eye of the needle, and the needle will go into one's fingers, and then when you think it is all over, you find you have sewn the back of your shirt to the front, or accomplished something equally unexpected and equally difficult to undo.

At Nsessi, two miles south of Kiboko, there is a superb waterfall; it has a drop of about 500 ft., and is divided into three stages, all at a different angle to one another, falling 100 ft., then swirling round at an angle, plunging into the next pool, and then a last long slide to the level of the lake. Stupendous silver-trunked trees, with foliage the colour of the ilex and brilliant splashes of scarlet bloom, crowd round on either side of the gorge wherever the wild rocks afford a footing; above towers a pointed peak showing bright above the dense gloom of the gorge, and a white stripe of sand fringes the little village, nestling in its banana grove, at the base.

These natives lead a curious existence, shut in between precipitous hills and the lake, their sole means of communication with one another being their leaky little 10 ft. dug-outs. They are wonderfully clever at handling them, and perform the extraordinary feat of crossing the lake, dodging in and out between the waves in the most marvellous manner. As a means of transport they are not to be recommended; the shape of a cross-section being that of an egg with its top off, one slides in with comparative ease like a pickle into a pickle-jar: once in, as with the pickle, extrication is a matter of time and patience. It needs one of Lear's Jumblies to feel thoroughly at home, as they leak like a sieve, and only perpetual bailing will keep them afloat.

The first day, in the sweet innocence of youth, I set off to round a headland with my guns and a tin box containing my indispensables on board, fearing to trust them to a native. All went smoothly at first, till I had arrived well off the rocks with a slight swell on and no landing-place near, and then she began slowly to heel over, while water seemed to be rushing in through the wood itself. After prodigious efforts I succeeded in running into the rocks, the water being then within an inch of the gunwale. I saved my guns and box, but smashed the canoe, and after that turned passenger. It looks so easy when they come dancing along, each with a native kneeling in the stern and plying a huge curved-bladed paddle; but it is a very different thing when one is wedged in oneself; physically incapable of squatting in a kneeling posture, as a native does, one finds bailing out an impossibility; the whole of the bottom of the canoe seems to be covered with boots, and the incurved edges catch the wooden bailing-dish and jerk the contents into one's lap.

Although the lake teems with fish, many of large size, the Wakoba make no attempt to catch them, trusting to the occasional chance of purchasing from the natives on the other shore or from Kasenyi.

One day I shot a baboon at the natives' request, a performance, by the way, that I shall not repeat, nor would I recommend it to any one but the most hardened villain. A frantic scramble took place for the flesh, and when I asked them what it tasted like, they "smole a smile." Amongst the countless troops of monkeys that are for ever coughing and dancing amongst the rocks and trees, I saw a small family of very beautiful little fellows with bright fox-red fringes down their sides, but I could not bring myself to shoot at them after seeing that unfortunate baboon, although I have never seen them described, or elsewhere in Africa.