Tropical Africa

by Henry Drummond

This question I answer unhesitatingly in the affirmative. I have described Africa as a nation of the unemployed. But the sole reason for the current impression that the African is an incorrigible idler is that at present there is really nothing for him to do. But that he can work and will work when the opportunity and inducement offer has been proved by experiment. The coast native, as all must testify who have seen him in the harbor of Zanzibar, Mozambique, Delagoa Bay, Natal, or the other eastern ports, is, with all allowances, a splendid worker; and though the experiment has seldom been tried in the interior, it is well known that the capacity is there, and wherever encouraged yields results beyond all expectation. Probably the severest test to which the native of Central Africa has ever been put is the construction of the Stevenson road, between Lakes Nyassa and Tanganyika. Forty-six miles of that road—probably the only thing of the kind in Central Africa—have already been made entirely by native labor, and the work could not have been better done had it been executed by English navvies. I have watched by the day a party of seventy natives working at a cutting upon that road. Till three or four years ago none of them had ever looked upon a white man; nor, till a few months previously, had one of them seen a spade, a pickaxe, or a crowbar. Yet these savages handled their tools to such purpose that, with only a single European superintendent, they have made a road, full of difficult cuttings and gradients, which would not disgrace a railway contractor at home. The workmen keep regular hours—six in the morning till five at night, with a rest at mid-day—work steadily, continuously, willingly, and above all, merrily. This goes on, observe, in the heart of the tropics, almost under the equator itself, where the white man's energy evaporates, and leaves him so limp that he cannot even be an example to his men. This goes on too without any compulsion; the natives flock from far and near, sometimes from long distances, to try this new sensation of work. These men are not slaves, but volunteers; and though they are paid by the fortnight, many will remain at their post the whole season through. The only bribe for all this work is a yard or two of calico per week per man; so that it seems to me one of the greatest problems of the future of Africa is here solved. In capacity the African is fit to work, in inclination he is willing to work, and in actual experiment he has done it; so that with capital enlisted and wise heads to direct these energies, with considerate employers who will remember that these men are but children, this vast nation of the unemployed may yet be added to the slowly growing list of the world's producers.

Africa at this moment has an impossible access, a perilous climate, a penniless people, an undeveloped soil. So once had England. It may never be done; other laws may operate, unforeseen factors may interfere; but there is nothing in the soil, the products, the climate, or the people of Africa, to forbid its joining even at this late day in the great march of civilization.

IV.
THE HEART-DISEASE OF AFRICA.

ITS PATHOLOGY AND CURE.

The life of the native African is not all idyll. It is darkened by a tragedy whose terrors are unknown to any other people under heaven. Of its mild domestic slavery I do not speak, nor of its revolting witchcraft, nor of its endless quarrels and frequent tribal wars. These minor evils are lost in the shadow of a great and national wrong. Among these simple and unprotected tribes, Arabs—uninvited strangers of another race and nature—pour in from the North and East, with the deliberate purpose of making this paradise a hell. It seems the awful destiny of this homeless people to spend their lives in breaking up the homes of others. Wherever they go in Africa the followers of Islam are the destroyers of peace, the breakers up of the patriarchal life, the dissolvers of the family tie. Already they hold the whole Continent under one reign of terror. They have effected this in virtue of one thing—they possess firearms; and they do it for one object—ivory and slaves, for these two are one. The slaves are needed to buy ivory with; then more slaves have to be stolen to carry it. So living man himself has become the commercial currency of Africa. He is locomotive, he is easily acquired, he is immediately negotiable.

Arab encampments for carrying on a wholesale trade in this terrible commodity are now established all over the heart of Africa. They are usually connected with wealthy Arab traders at Zanzibar and other places on the coast, and communication is kept up by caravans which pass, at long intervals, from one to the other. Being always large and well supplied with the material of war, these caravans have at their mercy the feeble and divided native tribes through which they pass, and their trail across the Continent is darkened with every aggravation of tyranny and crime. They come upon the scene suddenly; they stay only long enough to secure their end, and disappear only to return when a new crop has arisen which is worth the reaping.

Sometimes these Arab traders will actually settle for a year or two in the heart of some quiet community in the remote interior. They pretend perfect friendship; they molest no one; they barter honestly. They plant the seeds of their favorite vegetables and fruits—the Arab always carries seeds with him—as if they meant to stay for ever. Meantime they buy ivory, tusk after tusk, until great piles of it are buried beneath their huts and all their barter-goods are gone. Then one day, suddenly, the inevitable quarrel is picked. And then follows a wholesale massacre. Enough only are spared from the slaughter to carry the ivory to the coast; the grass-huts of the villages are set on fire; the Arabs strike camp; and the slave-march, worse than death, begins.

This last act in the drama, the slave-march, is the aspect of slavery which, in the past, has chiefly aroused the passions and the sympathy of the outside world, but the greater evil is the demoralization and disintegration of communities by which it is necessarily preceded. It is essential to the traffic that the region drained by the slaver should be kept in perpetual political ferment; that, in order to prevent combination, chief should be pitted against chief; and that the moment any tribe threatened to assume a dominating strength it should either be broken up by the instigation of rebellion among its dependencies, or made a tool of at their expense. The inter-relation of tribe with tribe is so intricate that it is impossible to exaggerate the effect of disturbing the equilibrium at even a single centre. But, like a river, a slave-caravan has to be fed by innumerable tributaries all along its course—at first in order to gather a sufficient volume of human bodies for the start, and afterwards to replace the frightful loss by desertion, disablement, and death.

Many at home imagine that the death-knell of slavery was struck with the events which followed the death of Livingstone. In the great explorer's time we heard much of slavery; we were often appealed to; the Government busied itself; something was really done. But the wail is already forgotten, and England hears little now of the open sore of the world. But the tragedy I have alluded to is repeated every year and every month—witness such recent atrocities as those of the Upper Congo, the Kassai and Sankaru region described by Wissmann, of the Welle-Inakua district referred to by Van Gele. It was but yesterday that an explorer, crossing from Lake Nyassa to Lake Tanganyika, saw the whole southern end of Tanganyika peopled with large and prosperous villages. The next to follow him found not a solitary human being—nothing but burned homes and bleaching skeletons. It was but yesterday—the close of 1887—that the Arabs at the north end of Lake Nyassa, after destroying fourteen villages with many of their inhabitants, pursued the population of one village into a patch of tall dry grass, set it on fire, surrounded it, and slew with the bullet and the spear those who crawled out from the more merciful flames. The Wa-Nkonde tribe, to which these people belonged, were, until this event, one of the most prosperous tribes in East Central Africa. They occupied a country of exceptional fertility and beauty. Three rivers, which never failed in the severest drought, run through their territory, and their crops were the richest and most varied in the country. They possessed herds of cattle and goats; they fished in the lake with nets; they wrought iron into many-patterned spearheads with exceptional ingenuity and skill; and that even artistic taste had begun to develop among them was evident from the ornamental work upon their huts, which were themselves unique in Africa for clever construction and beauty of design. This people, in short, by their own inherent ability and the natural resources of their country, were on the high road to civilization. Now, mark the swift stages in their decline and fall. Years ago an almost unnoticed rill from that great Arab stream, which with noiseless current and ever-changing bed has never ceased to flow through Africa, trickled into the country. At first the Arab was there on sufferance; he paid his way. Land was bought from the Wa-Nkonde chiefs, and their sovereignty acknowledged. The Arab force grew. In time it developed into a powerful incursion, and the Arabs began openly to assert themselves. One of their own number was elevated to the rulership, with the title of "Sultan of Nkonde." The tension became great, and finally too severe to last. After innumerable petty fights the final catastrophe was hurried on, and after an atrocious carnage the remnant of the Wa-Nkonde were driven from their fatherland. Such is the very last chapter in the history of Arab rule in Africa.