Native life in East Africa

by Karl Weule

ASKARI IN FATIGUE DRESS

I finished my notes on the Makonde language in an astonishingly short space of time. Like a god from the machine, my pearl of assistants, Sefu, suddenly appeared from Newala, and in conjunction with him and Ningachi I have been able to convince myself, in the course of seven very strenuous days, that Makonde is most closely connected with the neighbouring idioms, and that it is probably only the absence of the “s” sound which has led other writers to describe it as very divergent from Swahili and Yao. The want of this sound, however, I feel certain, is intimately connected with the wearing of the pelele in the upper lip. I suppose all of us have, at one time or another, suffered from a badly swelled upper lip. Is it possible, under such circumstances, to articulate any sibilant whatever? This theory, indeed, supposes that the men originally wore the same lip-ornaments as the women. But why should this not have been the case? The Mavia men wear them even now, and the Mavia are said to be very closely related to the Makonde.

Only with the Wamwera I have had no luck. I have never lost sight of my intention to return and spend some time in the country of that tribe; but the Wali, Sefu, and other well-informed men tell me it is impossible. They say that the Wamwera, having been in rebellion against the Government, were unable to plant their fields last season, as they were in hiding in the bush.

“The Wamwera,” they say, “have been at war with the Germans, and so they were living in the bush, for the whole of the planting season, and could not sow their crops. They have long ago eaten up the little store they had hidden, and now they have nothing more; they are all suffering from hunger, and many of them have died.” My next suggestion was that we should provision ourselves here and make for the Rondo plateau, but my advisers were very much against this plan. They said the people in their despair would fall upon us and fight with us for our supplies of corn. Well, I thought, if the mountain will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet must go to the mountain, and a few days later, there appeared, summoned by special messengers, the two Wamwera alleged to be the most learned men in the tribe. They were two elderly men, emaciated to skeletons, without a trace of calves, or any other muscular development, while their sunken cheeks and hollow eyes bore eloquent testimony to the terrible sufferings they had undergone. We waited patiently while they were getting fed—they devoured such quantities of porridge that their stomachs protruded like large skittle-balls from their bodies. At last they were in a fit condition to be questioned.

In spite of their reputation for wisdom, there was not much to be got out of Machigo and Machunya; a few dozen clan names, a longer list of simple words—that was all. Every attempt to ascertain by their help the forms of verbs or any of the mysteries of syntax was an utter failure. Probably it was not intelligence so much as intellectual training that was wanting; anyone who should attempt to ascertain the structure of the German language with the assistance of a bullock-driver, would doubtless fare no better than I did.

I dismissed the old men after a short time without resentment—in fact, I loaded them with presents, and, cheered by the consciousness of their unexpected gains, they stepped out manfully on their road northward.

With the departure of the two gaunt professors of Kimwera, I have really got rid of my last scientific care, and that is just as well, for, as I have already remarked, my appetite is more than satiated. I have accomplished a respectable amount of work in the past few months. I have taken more than 1,200 photographs; but the non-photographer, who imagines the art to be a mere amusement, will scarcely place this to my credit; and only the expert can appreciate the amount of exertion and excitement represented by the above number of negatives in a country like this. I have already alluded to some difficulties; these have only increased with time, for the sun is every day higher in the heavens, and the intensity of the light between eight a.m. and five p.m. is quite incredible. I have always kept an exact record, in my register of negatives, of all details of weather and light, but nevertheless I have not escaped failure—so difficult is it to judge the intensity of light in the tropics. One night, one may have the satisfaction of finding, when developing the day’s work, that by good luck all the exposures have been right. Next day the weather is precisely the same—you take the same stop, and expose for the same length of time—and yet, when evening comes, you find that every plate is over or under exposed. This is not exhilarating. Then there is the perpetual worry about the background. Unfortunately, I have brought no isochromatic plates; but the want of them is partly supplied by a huge tarpaulin which I originally took with me to cover my baggage at night, but which never served this purpose. Even before leaving Masasi, we fastened it between two bamboo poles, and covered one side of it with one or two lengths of sanda. Since then I have always used it in photographing when the sun is high, to screen off a too-strongly illuminated background. And if nothing else will serve, the strongest of my men hold the screen over the object, when I find myself obliged to take an important photograph with the sun directly overhead.

Next come the phonograph cylinders. The extremely high temperature of the lowlands has deprived me of the opportunity of making some valuable records—a loss which must be borne with what philosophy I can summon to my aid. It is the easier to do so, that, in spite of the drawbacks referred to, I have only five left out of my five-dozen cylinders, and for these, too, I can find an excellent use; to-morrow they shall be covered with the finest Nyamwezi melodies. As to the cinematograph, I must remember that I am a pioneer, and as such must not only incur all the inconvenience involved in the imperfections of an industry as yet in its infancy, but take the risk of all the dangers which threaten gelatine films in the tropics. It certainly does not dispose one to cheerfulness, when Ernemann writes from Dresden that my last consignment of films has again proved a failure; but I have given over worrying over things of this sort, ever since my vexation at the fall of my 9 x 12 cm. camera let me in for the severe fever I went through at Chingulungulu. Besides, I know, by those I have developed myself, that about two-thirds of my thirty-eight cinematograph records must be fairly good, or at least good enough to use, and that is a pretty fair proportion for a beginner. Over twenty such imperishable documents of rapidly disappearing tribal life and customs—I am quite disposed to congratulate myself!

But my chief ground for pride is the quantity, and even more the quality of my ethnological and sociological notes, which surely will not be an entirely valueless contribution to our knowledge of the East African native. As a stranger in the country, I could not, of course, in the short time at my disposal, survey all the departments of native life, but I have made detailed studies of a great many. I must not forget my exceptional good fortune with regard to the unyago; the elucidation of these mysteries would alone have amply repaid the journey.

To conclude with my ethnographic collection. In the Congo basin, and in West Africa I should probably, in the same space of time, have been able, without any difficulty, to get together a small ship-load of objects, while here in the East a collection of under two thousand numbers represents the material culture of tribes covering a whole province. The number of individual specimens might, indeed, have been increased, but not that of categories, so thoroughly have I searched the native villages and rummaged their huts one by one. After all, the East African native is a poor man.