NATIVE SUFFERING FROM THE UBUBA DISEASE
The only really tall man is old Makachu, the headman of the neighbouring village, and at the same time the chief of one of the two clans into which the Wangoni living here are divided. I measured Makachu and found his height to be a fraction under six feet. If this stature makes him look like Saul among his people, it is obvious how very poorly developed the rest of them must be. Indeed the old men of the tribe, as they drag themselves up to the baraza to talk to me, seem quite emaciated with chronic underfeeding; and the rising generation does not promise much better. “No—these are no Zulus,” I said to myself on first seeing them; and I have since found this conclusion confirmed by all sorts of proofs.
MAJALIWA, SAIDI AND MAKACHU
In the first place, there is not a single South African touch in the arrangement and construction of their huts. The widely-scattered villages, through which we have marched for the last few hours of the road from Mahuta, are exactly like the villages in the plains west of the plateau. The only difference is that the fields here appear to be better kept, and to have been better cleared and broken up, to begin with. But then it is one thing to clear ground in a large timber forest, and another to burn off the sort of bush that grows up in these parts. The details of hut-construction, too, are exactly the same, and the interiors just as wildly untidy, and furnished with the same sort of grain-stores, pots and bark boxes, the same bedsteads and the same smouldering log on the hearth as at Mchauru or Akundonde’s; while the outer walls are daubed over with the same sort of childish paintings found elsewhere in the country.
But let us consider the language and history of this group of people. Among my carriers we have in the person of Mambo sasa a genuine Zulu, a Mngoni from Runsewe. These Wangoni are the descendants of that wave of Zulus which penetrated furthest north. While the main body of the warriors who, three quarters of a century ago, crossed the Zambezi,[[67]] settled on both shores of Nyasa, and founded kingdoms there, amid sanguinary struggles, these Wangoni kept on northward along the eastern shore of Tanganyika, till their advance, too, was checked in north-western Unyamwezi. Under the name of Watuta, the descendants of these first conquerors continued their predatory career for some decades, till Captain Langheld, in the nineties, settled them in the bush at Runsewe where they now live. “Now, Mambo sasa, you can go ahead and interpret!” I remarked to my merry friend, when the Wangoni made their appearance. I have already more than once mentioned Mambo; he is jester-in-ordinary to the whole company; his voice, though not melodious, is powerful and untiring, and his improvised ditties never cease during the day, whether on the march or in camp. With the Wangoni of Nchichira confronting the Mngoni from Runsewe, I prepared to take notes in my usual way. Mambo, when I had made sure that he understood my first question, repeated it in his mother tongue—but there was no answer; the men simply stared at him in bewilderment. Repeated experiments led to the same result; it was abundantly clear that the alleged fellow-tribesmen could not understand one another’s speech. Subsequently I questioned both parties separately, and noted down as much of their respective languages as the incredible and equal stupidity of the good Mambo sasa and the Nchichira elders would allow. So far as I have been able to get a connected view of the result, my supposition is confirmed; the Wangoni of this district have nothing beyond the name in common with those in the hill country near Songea. They are just such a congeries of broken tribes as we find elsewhere in the south of our colony.
A clear proof that I am right in the above opinion was afforded me when talking over the history of the tribe. After the giant Makachu, my principal informant is old Majaliwa, within the area of whose village the boma is built, and whose guests, in a manner of speaking, we therefore are. He is also the chief of the second clan previously mentioned. The younger and more “educated” element is represented by Saidi, the teacher at Nkundi, who arrived to act as interpreter in response to my urgent appeal for his help. The people here are, after all, too primitive for anything. Half-a-dozen other men, mostly elderly, who seem more concerned with expectorating all over my baraza than with adding to my knowledge of their tribal history, serve to fill up the background behind the above three worthies.
In the first place Majaliwa and Makachu enlighten me as to their respective families. The former belongs to the lukohu (= lukosyo) of the Makale, the latter to that of the Wakwama. Makachu, the effect of whose fine stature is somewhat spoilt by very high shoulders, between which his head appears quite sunk, then, uninvited, begins to relate how he was born near the Lukimwa River, but his people were driven thence to the Mluhezi when he was a boy. Quite mechanically, at the word boy, the old man, as he sits on the ground, raises his arm to a horizontal position, and as mechanically his hand rises so as to make a right angle with his arm. It was the Wangoni, he goes on, who drove them away.
“The Wangoni?” I ask in astonishment, “but you are a Mngoni yourself!”