Tropical Africa

by Henry Drummond

THE ZAMBESI AND SHIRE.

Three distinct Africas are known to the modern world—North Africa, where men go for health; South Africa, where they go for money; and Central Africa, where they go for adventure. The first, the old Africa of Augustine and Carthage, every one knows from history; the geography of the second, the Africa of the Zulu and the diamond, has been taught us by two Universal Educators—War and the Stock-Exchange; but our knowledge of the third, the Africa of Livingstone and Stanley, is still fitly symbolized by the vacant look upon our maps which tells how long this mysterious land has kept its secret.

Into the heart of this mysterious Africa I wish to take you with me now. And let me magnify my subject by saying at once that it is a wonderful thing to see. It is a wonderful thing to start from the civilization of Europe, pass up these mighty rivers, and work your way into that unknown land—work your way alone, and on foot, mile after mile, month after month, among strange birds and beasts and plants and insects, meeting tribes which have no name, speaking tongues which no man can interpret, till you have reached its secret heart, and stood where white man has never trod before. It is a wonderful thing to look at this weird world of human beings—half animal half children, wholly savage and wholly heathen; and to turn and come back again to civilization before the impressions have had time to fade, and while the myriad problems of so strange a spectacle are still seething in the mind. It is an education to see this sight—an education in the meaning and history of man. To have been here is to have lived before Menes. It is to have watched the dawn of evolution. It is to have the great moral and social problems of life, of anthropology, of ethnology, and even of theology, brought home to the imagination in the most new and startling light.

On the longest day of a recent summer—midwinter therefore in the tropics—I left London. A long railway run across France, Switzerland, and Italy brings one in a day or two to the Mediterranean. Crossing to Alexandria, the traveller strikes across Egypt over the Nile, through the battlefield of Tel-el-Kebir, to the Red Sea, steams down its sweltering length to Aden, tranships, and, after three lifetimes of deplorable humiliation in the south-west Monsoons, terminates his sufferings at Zanzibar.

Zanzibar is the focus of all East African exploration. No matter where you are going in the interior, you must begin at Zanzibar. Oriental in its appearance, Mohammedan in its religion, Arabian in its morals, this cesspool of wickedness is a fit capital for the Dark Continent. But Zanzibar is Zanzibar simply because it is the only apology for a town on the whole coast. An immense outfit is required to penetrate this shopless and foodless land, and here only can the traveller make up his caravan. The ivory and slave trades have made caravaning a profession, and everything the explorer wants is to be had in these bazaars, from a tin of sardines to a repeating rifle. Here these black villains, the porters, the necessity and the despair of travellers, the scum of old slave gangs, and the fugitives from justice from every tribe, congregate for hire. And if there is one thing on which African travellers are for once agreed, it is that for laziness, ugliness, stupidness, and wickedness, these men are not to be matched on any continent in the world. Their one strong point is that they will engage themselves for the Victoria Nyanza or for the Grand Tour of the Tanganyika with as little ado as a Chamounix guide volunteers for the Jardin; but this singular avidity is mainly due to the fact that each man cherishes the hope of running away at the earliest opportunity. Were it only to avoid requiring to employ these gentlemen, having them for one's sole company month after month, seeing them transgress every commandment in turn before your eyes—you yourself being powerless to check them except by a wholesale breach of the sixth—it would be worth while to seek another route into the heart of Africa.

But there is a much graver objection to the Zanzibar route to the interior. Stanley started by this route on his search for Livingstone, two white men with him; he came back without them. Cameron set out by the same path to cross Africa with two companions; before he got to Tanganyika he was alone. The Geographical Society's late expedition, under Mr. Keith Johnstone, started from Zanzibar with two Europeans; the hardy and accomplished leader fell within a couple of months. These expeditions have all gone into the interior by this one fatal way, and probably every second man, by fever or by accident, has left his bones to bleach along the road. Hitherto there has been no help for it. The great malarious coast-belt must be crossed, and one had simply to take his life in his hands and go through with it.

But now there is an alternative. There is a rival route into the interior, which, though it is not without its dark places too, will probably yet become the great highway from the East to Central Africa. Let me briefly sketch it:

Africa, speaking generally, is a vast, ill-formed triangle. It has no peninsulas; it has almost no islands or bays or fjords. But three great inlets, three mighty rivers piercing it to the very heart, have been allocated by a kind Nature, one to each of its solid sides. On the north is the river of the past, flowing through Egypt, as Leigh Hunt says, "like some grave, mighty thought threading a dream"; on the west, the river of the future, the not less mysterious Congo; and on the east the little known Zambesi.

The physical features of this great continent are easily grasped. From the coast a low scorched plain, reeking with malaria, extends inland in unbroken monotony for two or three hundred miles. This is succeeded by mountains slowly rising into a plateau some 2000 or 3000 feet high; and this, at some hundreds of miles distance, forms the pedestal for a second plateau, as high again. This last plateau, 4000 to 5000 feet high, may be said to occupy the whole of Central Africa. It is only on the large scale, however, that these are to be reckoned plateaux at all. When one is upon them he sees nothing but mountains and valleys and plains of the ordinary type, covered for the most part with forest.

I have said that Nature has supplied each side of Africa with one great river. By going some hundreds of miles southward along the coast from Zanzibar the traveller reaches the mouth of the Zambesi. Livingstone sailed up this river once, and about a hundred miles from its mouth discovered another river twisting away northwards among the mountains. The great explorer was not the man to lose such a chance of penetrating the interior. He followed this river up, and after many wanderings found himself on the shores of a mighty lake. The river is named the Shiré, and the lake—the existence of which was quite unknown before, is Lake Nyassa. Lake Nyassa is 350 miles long; so that, with the Zambesi, the Shiré, and this great lake, we have the one thing required to open up East Central Africa—a water-route to the interior. But this is not all. Two hundred and fifty miles from the end of Lake Nyassa another lake of still nobler proportions takes up the thread of communication. Lake Tanganyika is 450 miles in length. Between the lakes stands a lofty plateau, cool, healthy, accessible, and without any physical barrier to interrupt the explorer's march. By this route the Victoria Nyanza and the Albert Nyanza may be approached with less fatigue, less risk, and not less speed, than by the overland trail from Zanzibar. At one point also, along this line, one is within a short march of that other great route which must ever be regarded as the trunk-line of the African continent. The watershed of the Congo lies on this Nyassa-Tanganyika plateau. This is the stupendous natural highway on which so much of the future of East Central Africa must yet depend.