Native life in East Africa

by Karl Weule

Masasi, July 25, 1906.

I have been here at Masasi quite a week. My abode is a hut in the purest Yao style, built by the natives under the orders of the Imperial District Commissioner, expressly for the benefit of passing European travellers. This hut—or, I suppose I ought to say, this house, for it is a sizeable building of some forty feet by twenty—lies outside the boma which shelters the local police force. It is an oval structure whose roof is exactly like an overturned boat. The material of the walls is, as everywhere in this country, bamboo, and wood, plastered inside and out with dark grey clay. My palace is superior to the abodes of the natives in the matter of windows, though they are not glazed. At night, before I creep under my mosquito-net into the camp bed, the openings are closed with shutters constructed of strong pieces of bamboo. The floor, as in all native huts, is of beaten earth, which can in general be kept quite clean, but is not calculated for the sharp edges of European boot-heels, which soon play havoc with its surface. The interior forms an undivided whole, only interrupted by the two posts standing as it were in the foci of the ellipse, and supporting the heavy thatched roof. This projects outward and downward far beyond the wall of the house, its outer edge being carried by a further ellipse of shorter posts, and so makes a broad shady passage round the whole house, such as, under the name of baraza is an essential part of every East African residence.

The natives give the name of Masasi to a whole district alike interesting from the point of view of geography, geology, botany or geography.

Almost immediately after passing Nyangao, as one comes from the coast, begins the “open bush and grass steppe” already mentioned, while at the same time the edges of the Makonde plateau on the south and of the high ground to the north of the Lukuledi retreat further and further. As one walks on, day after day, across a perfectly horizontal plain covered with the same monotonous vegetation, the journey is by no means exciting. Then, suddenly, at a turn of the path, we see a huge cliff of glittering grey. We draw a long breath and forget all our fatigue in presence of this new charm in the landscape. Even the heavy-laden carriers step more lightly. Suddenly the bush, which has become fresher and greener as we approach the rock, ceases, and instead of the one cliff we now see a whole long range of rocky peaks, which seem to stand as a barrier right across our path. This, however, is not the case, for close to the foot of the first mountain the road turns sharply to S.S.E., running parallel and close to the range. When the range ends, the road ends too, for there, embosomed in a circle of “hill-children,”—as the native would say in his own language, i.e., low hills of a few thousand feet or under,—lies the military station of Masasi.

The dome-shaped gneiss peaks of Masasi are celebrated in geological literature: they are, in fact, unique, not in their petrographic constituents, but in the regularity of their serried ranks. Orographically this whole region of East Africa which I am now traversing is characterized by insular mountains (Inselberge), as they are called by the geologist Bornhardt. The name is very appropriate, for, if the land were to sink some three hundred feet, or the Indian Ocean to rise in the same degree, the valleys of the Lukuledi, Umbekuru and Rovuma, as well as, in all probability, several rivers in Portuguese East Africa, and also the whole vast plain west of the Mwera and Makonde plateaus would form one great lake. Here in the west, only these lumpy, heavy gneiss peaks would rise as tiny islands above the waters, while towards the coast the plateaus just mentioned would so to speak represent the continents of this piece of the earth’s surface.

THE INSULAR MOUNTAIN OF MASASI

In general these peaks are scattered irregularly over the whole wide area of the country. If I climb one of the smaller hills immediately behind my house, I can overlook an almost illimitable number of these remarkable formations to north, west and south. They are mostly single or in small clusters, but several days’ journey further west a large number are gathered into a close cluster in the Majeje country. The Masasi range in our immediate neighbourhood is the other exception. Corresponding to their irregular distribution is a great variety in height. Many are only small hillocks, while others rise to a sheer height of 1,600 feet and over from the plain, which here at Masasi is fully 1,300 feet above sea-level. The highest of these hills thus attain about the middle height among our German mountains.

As to the origin of these strange mountain shapes, not being a geologist, I am in no position to form an opinion. According to Bornhardt, who in his magnificent work on the earth-sculpture and geology of German East Africa[^[11]] has described the geological features of this landscape with admirable vividness, all these insular peaks testify to a primeval and never interrupted struggle between the constructive activity of the sea and the denuding, eroding, digging and levelling action of flowing water and of atmospheric influences. He sees this tract in primordial times as an immense unbroken plain of primitive gneiss. In this, in course of time, streams and rivers excavated their valleys, all more or less in the same direction. At the end of this long-continued process, long hill ridges were left standing between the different valleys. Then came another epoch, when stratification took the place of destruction. Whereas formerly, rain, springs, brooks and rivers carried the comminuted and disintegrated rock down to the sea, now, the sea itself overflowed the land, filled the valleys, and probably covered the whole former scene of action with its sediment. This sediment, again, in the course of further ages became hardened into rock. Once more the scene changed; again the land was left dry; and wind, rain and running water could once more begin their work of destruction. But this time their activity took a different direction. They had formerly carried the detritus north or south, but now they swept it eastward, at right angles to their former course, and so gradually ground and filed away the whole of the later deposit, and also eroded the long ridges which had survived from the first period of destruction. Finally, when even this primitive rock had been worn away down to the bottom level of the first valleys, nothing remained of the old sheet of gneiss except in the angles formed by the crossing of the two lines of abrasion and erosion. The superincumbent strata being swept away, the hard gneiss cores of these angles of ground form the very insular peaks I have been describing. Bornhardt’s theory is a bold one and assumes quite immeasurable periods of time, but it has been generally accepted as the most plausible of all attempts to explain the facts. In any case it is a brilliant proof of the capacity for inductive reasoning possessed by German scholars.

These mighty masses of rock, springing with an unusually steep slope, direct from the plain, dominate their surroundings wherever one comes across them, but where they appear in such a wonderfully regular series as they do here—Mkwera, Masasi, Mtandi, Chironji, Kitututu, Mkomahindo, and the rest of the lesser and greater elevations within my horizon,—they present an incomparable and quite unforgettable spectacle. When once the projected railway across the Umbekuru basin is completed, the tourist agencies will have no more popular excursion than that to the Masasi Range.