The heart of Africa, Vol. 2 (of 2)

by Georg August Schweinfurth

The greatest service, however, that Seebehr afforded me was in providing me with boots and shoes of European make; no acquisition was to be appreciated higher than this; and in finding myself fresh and well-shod I felt myself renovated to start again upon my wanderings with redoubled vigour. None but those who have been in my condition can comprehend the pleasure with which I hailed the sight of the most trivial and ordinary articles. Once again I was in possession of a comb, some pipe-bowls, and lucifers. As I was not in the least inclined to forego my smoking while on the march, I had been obliged, in order to get a light for my tobacco, to make one of my people carry a blazing firebrand throughout the recent journey.

IBRAHIM EFFENDI.

No sooner was I installed in the huts allotted to me than I received a succession of visitors; some of them crossed my threshold from mere idle curiosity, whilst others came either with some vague hope of profit or from some innate love of intrigue. I was honoured by a call from the great Zelim, Ali Aboo Amoory’s chief controller, who came to express his hope that I had been satisfied with my reception in his Seriba, which I had visited during his absence. Then I made the acquaintance of some of the more important slave-traders, who had long been settled in the place and who came burning with curiosity to know the real object of my journey. But the most remarkable of all my visitors was a certain Ibrahim Effendi, who held the office of head clerk and accountant in the Egyptian camp. His life had been one unbroken series of criminal proceedings, and he had been guilty of frauds and swindling transactions to an extent that was absolutely incredible. Originally a subordinate in one of the departments of the Egyptian Ministry he had, during Said Pasha’s Government, forged the Viceregal seal and attached it to a document professing to appoint him to the command of a regiment that was to be formed in Upper Egypt, and to prescribe that the local government there should defray all the expenses of levying and equipping the troops. This document he had the audacity to present first with his own hands to the governor of the province, and then forthwith he proceeded to present himself in the Upper Egyptian town as the colonel of the new regiment. Only those who are acquainted with the disorder and despotism that prevailed in every branch of the Administration during the lifetime of that Viceroy could believe that such a deception would be practicable; but I am in a position positively to assert that the fraudulent artifice did really for a while succeed. Two months afterwards, the troops having meanwhile been embodied, the Viceroy happened to make an excursion up the Nile, and seeing a great many soldiers on its banks, inquired the number of their regiment and why they were there. His astonishment was unbounded when he was told of a regiment of whose existence he had never previously heard. Ibrahim was summoned at once. Throwing himself at the Viceroy’s feet, the culprit colonel confessed his guilt and begged for mercy. The good-natured Said, who never suffered himself to lose his temper, far less to go into a rage, merely sentenced him to a few years’ banishment and imprisonment in Khartoom. As soon as Effendi had completed his term of punishment and regained his liberty, he started afresh as clerk to some of the Soudan authorities; but his habits of fraud and embezzlement were as strong as ever, and he was caught in the act of decamping with the cash-box, and was this time banished to Fashoda, on the White Nile, as being the safest place for dangerous characters of his stamp. After he had been here for several years our friend managed to excite the compassion of Kurshook Ali, who was passing through the place, and was induced to give him his present post of head clerk to his division of the Government troops. This appointment brought Effendi to the district of the Gazelle.

Well versed as he was in the ways of the world, Effendi, by his wit and versatility, seemed to have the power of winning every heart. His position here in the Egyptian camp offered only too wide a scope for his love of intrigue. He had played an important part in the affair with Hellali, having doubtless been at the bottom of the stroke of policy that had reconciled Seebehr to the Turkish soldiers by bringing the hated Hellali to chains and to the yoke of the sheba. Probably he was again bidding for the command of come troops, and I am bound to confess that he seemed in a fair way of being able before long to gratify his old predilection for military organisation.

DAR FERTEET.

The uninhabited wilderness stretching to the west of the Pongo, a district long known to the inhabitants of Darfoor and Kordofan under the name of Dar Ferteet,[73] represents one of the oldest domains of the slave-trade, and at the present day, as far as regards its aboriginal population, presents to the eye of a traveller the aspect of what may be described as “a sold-out land.” Only within the last fifteen years have the Khartoom trading-companies penetrated into the district watered by the Gazelle, but long before that numbers of slave-dealers had already formed settlements in Dar Ferteet, then as now streaming into the country from Darfoor and Kordofan accompanied by hundreds of armed men, and coming, year after year, in the winter months so as to accomplish their business and get back to their homes before the rainy season again set in. Some of them, however, did not return, but remained permanently in the land, and, under the sanction of the more influential chieftains, founded large establishments (Dehms) to serve as marts or depôts for their black merchandise. As soon as the ivory-traders, with their enormous armed bands, made their appearance in the country, the Gellahbas received them with open arms; and the Nubians, in order to provide for the storing of their ivory and ammunition, forthwith combined their Seribas with the Dehms already established, so that in the course of time these places assumed the appearance of the market towns of the Soudan. The Gellahbas by remaining in their old quarters reaped a twofold advantage: in the first place, the large contingents of armed men that were now introduced into the country relieved them from the necessity of maintaining troops of their own; and, secondly, they were exonerated from the heavy imposts that they had been compelled to pay to the native Kredy chieftains, as these were very speedily reduced by the Nubians to the subordinate position of mere sheikhs or local overseers of the natives. In the course of my tour through Dar Ferteet I became acquainted with five of these towns, which represented so many centres of the slave-trade in this part of the country.

But although the various Khartoom companies who had thus taken up their quarters in the Dehms sent out expeditions every year to the remotest of the Kredy tribes in the west, and even penetrated beyond them to the Niam-niam in the south-west, it did not take them very long to discover that the annual produce of ivory was altogether inadequate to defray the expenses of equipping and maintaining their armed force. Finding, however, that the region offered every facility for the sale of slaves, they began gradually to introduce this unrighteous traffic into their commercial dealings, until at length it became, if not absolutely the prime, certainly one of the leading objects of their expeditions; thus the people whom the professional Gellahbas had at first hailed as friends grew up, ere long, to be their most formidable rivals. For example, Seebehr Rahama himself, who had to maintain a fighting force of a thousand men on his territories, had, as the result of his ivory expedition in the previous year, gained no more than 300 loads or 120 cwt., a quantity which realised but little over 2300l. at Khartoom; but at the same time he sent probably as many as 1800 slaves direct to Kordofan, there to be disposed of on his own account.

Ethnographically considered, Dar Ferteet presented a wondrous medley. Perhaps nowhere else, in an area so limited, could there be found such a conglomeration of the representatives of different races as upon the cultivated tracts in the environs of the Dehms: they were evidently the miserable remnants of an unceasing work of destruction. As we have already observed, the neighbours of the Bongo upon the west were the Golo and the Sehre, who combine together and have their homes in common. Beyond them, still farther to the west, are the Kredy. These Kredy do not seem to be limited to any particular district, but like blades of any one particular species of grass, crop up every now and then, quite at haphazard, as it were, amongst the other species in detached groups. The tribes which predominate, or at any rate those which I had the most frequent opportunities of observing, were the Nduggo, who were settled around Seebehr’s Dehm; the Bia, who were settled all about Dehm Gudyoo; and the Yongbongo, who occupied the region between the two.

THE KREDY.

Of all the people of the Bahr-el-Ghazal district with whom I made acquaintance, the Kredy, I think, were the ugliest; and whether it was in consequence of their longer period of subjection, or that they were depressed by their straitened circumstances, I cannot say, but certainly they were, to my mind, very inferior in intelligence to the Golo, the Sehre, and the Bongo. In form the Kredy are thick and unwieldy, and entirely wanting in that symmetry of limb which we admire in the slim figures of those who inhabit the swampy depressions of the Gazelle; but although their limbs are strong and compact, they must not be supposed to be like the muscular and well-developed limbs of Europeans. They are like the true Niam-niam in being below an average height, and resemble them more particularly in the broad brachycephalic form of their skulls; there is, however, a very marked difference between the two races in the growth of the hair and in the shape of the eyes. Their lips are thicker and more protruding and their mouths wider than those of any other negroes that I saw throughout the whole of my travels. Their upper incisor teeth were either filed to a point or cut away, so as to leave intervening gaps between tooth and tooth; in the lower jaw there is no mutilation, and the teeth being left intact may perhaps account for their language being more articulate than any other in this part of Africa, although, at the same time, it bears but the slightest resemblance to any of them. Their complexion is coppery-red, the same hue that is to be noticed among the fairer individuals of the Bongo; but, like the majority of the Niam-niam, they are generally coated with such encrusted layers of dirt that they appear several shades darker than they really are: as a rule I should say that they are decidedly fairer than either the Bongo or the Niam-niam.