“We people of Nchichira call ourselves Wangoni, but we call the people from Songea Mafiti. They came from a far country long ago, but we do not know what country they came from. Our fathers always lived on the Lukimwa, and if it were not that the evil Mafiti had raided us so often, we should be living there still. We are no kin to the Wamatambwe, but we are good friends with the Wayao; our fathers always took refuge with them in time of war.”
A detailed study of the Wangoni at Nchichira thus shows that, as already stated, they are a conglomerate of all possible elements, who during the long Mafiti troubles fled to this remote corner and became amalgamated into a sort of tribal unit of their own. How much they resemble—or try to resemble—the Yaos, nothing shows more clearly than the fact that almost all the women wear the kipini or nose-stud; the pelele is quite a rarity among them. Though disappointed of the new and strange traits I had hoped to meet with, had the Wangoni proved to be true Zulus, I cannot help feeling a certain pride in correcting the old mistaken view of these people which is even now current on the coast: yet I cannot deny that the discovery made me less unwilling to leave Nchichira than I should otherwise have been.
Knudsen has been spending the whole time which I have devoted to my inquiries among the Wangoni elders, hunting in the alluvial valley of the Rovuma, with its rich variety of high, dense forest, tangled scrub, and open, meadow-like glades. I often thought I could hear his gun, so close under the boma of Nchichira do these hunting-grounds lie, and, more than once, standing on the plateau, I have fancied my eye could follow his stooping figure as he advanced quickly and yet cautiously along the bottom of the valley.
The one evening walk possible at Nchichira is very short, but reveals almost an excess of beauty. The sun has just set behind the distant Nyasa, and, quite exhausted, I lay aside pencil and note-book, light a fresh cigar (we have had in a supply by this time, not derived from the Indian’s store at Lindi, but genuine Leipzig ones), beckon my camera-bearers to follow, and leave the boma at a good round pace. We walk along the palisade till it comes to an end, and then we have reached the goal; the Rovuma Valley in all its glory is lying immediately at my feet. It is no easy task to depict a sunset in words, and here, where to the peculiar character of the country, with its remarkable contrasts between the highest degree of erosion and the greatest amount of alluvial accumulation is added an indescribable richness of colour in the evening sky, the pen fails—if only because in the presence of such beauty it is impossible for a person of any feeling to put his impressions on paper. If I could photograph in colours what a picture I should have! But as I am confined to the use of common, or at most orthochromatic plates, I shall have to do the best I can with my note-book, after reaching home, to give some idea of the glory I have been witnessing.
FOREST RUINED BY NATIVES NEAR NCHICHIRA, ROVUMA VALLEY
The plateau, here, at the centre of its southern edge, is much lower than at Newala; it may be estimated at from 1,300 to 1,500 feet. And yet the valley of the Rovuma, with a breadth of from six to nine miles and a height above sea-level, at its lowest point, of barely 200 feet, makes the impression of a vast eroded ravine. Its two edges are absolutely similar, and it must be clear to any child that the Mavia plateau on the other side and the Makonde highlands on this are of the same age and have the same origin. The Rovuma, working downward like a saw, has gradually excavated this cañon across the old tableland. Now at the end of the dry season, the river looks more poverty-stricken than ever—a scanty thread of water trickling along a bed over half-a-mile wide, filled with enormous banks of gravel and sand. The river in flood must be a grand sight, but to-day the prevailing note of the scenery is gentle and cheerful. A whole series of terraces marking different flood-levels are visible to the naked eye below us, while similar ones can be made out with a field-glass on the Portuguese side of the river. The grey strip with the shining silver thread in it looks near enough to be touched by the hand, yet Knudsen says it is a good two hours’ walk to the river-bank—so deceptive is the wonderfully clear air. It is true that here, too, there are clouds of smoke rising to the sky—they are at times particularly dense and frequent on the other side of the valley, between the river and the Nangadi Lake. I am almost tempted to think that the Mavia want to smoke out the unlucky Portuguese who is probably meditating in his boma—easily distinguishable with the glass—on the reason why he has been condemned to pass his life here: so numerous are the concentric zones of fire which seem to surround his lonely abode. To our right the grey bed of the river with its green margins stretches away westward till it is lost in the distance. The Lidede Lake is by no means near, yet it, too, by an effect of perspective, seems to lie at our feet, so far can I look beyond it into the interior of the continent. And over all this the western and southern horizon glows in a thousand brilliant tints. It almost seems as if the sun, for love of so much beauty, were departing less quickly than he usually does between the tropics; the sunset hues pale and fade away only very gradually. It was with difficulty that I could tear myself away from this picture in order to take one or two photographs of it with my smallest stop, while my dark friends stood behind me in silence, evidently as much impressed as their master. At first the darkness came on by slow degrees, but after a while the shadows, growing deeper and deeper, descended more quickly over Lidede and Nangadi; then the first sombre tones touched the meadows and the green forest, and only the light grey of the river bed showed up for a while amid the gathering darkness. I am a very prosaic person, on the whole; but I am quite willing to admit that a single sunset like this would have amply repaid me for the march to Nchichira, even had I found no Wangoni living there.
In this valley, then, Nils Knudsen has been pursuing the pleasures of the chase. At any time, the first chance native who comes to him with the remark, “Master, there are elephants down there,” is enough to send him off in ten minutes at the best pace of which his rolling seaman’s gait will permit. He is sensible enough, however, to trust no longer to his ancient blunderbusses, but has asked me for the loan of one of my rifles.
One afternoon, I am sitting as usual with my native tutors. Our Kingoni studies are not progressing very satisfactorily. If I direct the intelligent Saidi to translate, “Your father is dead,” I infallibly get a sentence which, when afterwards checked, turns out to mean, “My father is dead.” If I want him to tell me the Kingoni for “My father is dead,” he translates (quite correctly from his point of view), “Your father,” etc., etc. I am now so far used to these little jokes that they no longer excite me, but a worse difficulty lies in ascertaining the forms of the personal pronouns: “I, thou,” etc. They caused me no end of trouble even at Newala, where my teachers were by no means stupid. Here, whatever I do, I cannot succeed in getting the third person singular and plural. I have arrived at the first and second, of course, by the rule of contraries; for, if I say “I,” involuntarily pointing to myself, I am sure to get the word for “you,” and vice versa. Resigning myself to disappointment, I am just about to light a cigar to soothe my nerves, when I become aware of a perceptible excitement all round me. At a rate compared with which Pheidippides must have come from Marathon at a snail’s pace, one of Knudsen’s boys arrives, spluttering out something which I cannot understand. My men are all assembled in no time, and from them and the inhabitants of the boma I hear the news of Knudsen’s success in bringing down a large elephant. Its tusks are “so big”—the fellows stretch out their, long, gibbon-like arms to show their girth—and as for meat...! I could see how their mouths were watering at the thought.
That day and the next were entirely dominated by the slain elephant. The men kept bringing in veritable mountains of meat, and the whole countryside smelt anything but agreeably of African cooking. Then arrived the four feet, then the tusks, and last of all the successful hunter himself. His triumph, however, was somewhat damped by the fact that the tusks were small in proportion to the size of the animal, weighing, by our reckoning, certainly not over forty pounds. To make up for this, he brought me another piece of news, to my mind much more welcome; the people in the valley had houses of a style totally different from anything to be seen up here—in fact, constructions of several stories. Nils was obliged to asseverate this in the most solemn way before I would believe him; but once convinced of his bona fides, I could not stay another day on the plateau. Early the very next morning, we were clambering like monkeys down its bordering cliffs into the river-valley.