Native life in East Africa

by Karl Weule

In geography my boy Moritz headed the class till recently. I heard him giving his friends, and anyone else who cared to listen, long lectures on Ulaya and America. He spoke of Berlin, Hamburg and Leipzig and explained to an interested audience with inexhaustible patience what was the end and aim of his master’s being in distant Ulaya. I was the Bwana mkubwa, so he said, of a great—a very great house—in which were the mats and stools and pots and spoons and cocoa-nut graters of all the tribes in the world; and I had come into this country to get more of such things and take them to Ulaya. It must be acknowledged that Moritz gave a pretty fair interpretation of the end I had in view; but his fame was soon eclipsed when, a day or two before we left Masasi, Ali, the far-travelled, came up from Lindi, to enter Knudsen’s service once more. Moritz’s squeaky voice was now silenced, for Ali was able to relate what he had seen with his own eyes at Berlin and Hamburg, having once visited Germany with a former master. His only regret was that he did not know Leipzig.

Nakaam’s topographical knowledge was, like Moritz’s, of a purely theoretic nature, and it only went as far as Berlin. But what an intense interest this man took in every possible detail of a European town! He wanted to know the length of the streets, the height of the houses, and how one could ascend such towers as they seemed to be, and how many people lived in one house, where they cooked their food, and a hundred other things. For me, with my scanty Swahili vocabulary, it was, of course, quite impossible to satisfy this thirst for information to its fullest extent, and I was the more grateful to Knudsen for his help.

Next day we marched to a God-forsaken hole called Mkululu, not as yet marked on any map. The miserable huts here were a complete contrast to Nakaam’s house, and the village square and baraza were dirty and neglected. Both had to be thoroughly cleaned before we could have our tents pitched close to the rest-house. Yet we were compelled to be grateful to the fate which had instinctively as it were directed our steps to the shelter of its thatched roof. The gale which had spoilt our evenings at Mwiti arose here likewise, soon after sunset. It would have been absolutely impossible to remain out of doors with such a quantity of dust, leaves, grass and twigs whirling through the air. Even under the baraza it was unendurable, so there was nothing for it but to make for our tents and get into our warm beds. Alas! this adjective did not apply, and all efforts to get warm, even with the help of a second camel’s hair blanket, were vain. I shivered with cold and my teeth chattered so that at intervals they were audible above the roaring of the gale. This roaring became louder and more formidable every quarter of an hour, and, thinking that the chill I felt was merely due to the usual fall of temperature in the evening, I got up to make the tent a little more weather-tight. Though I did not even get outside, I was sincerely thankful to return to its shelter. The world outside was given up to a veritable witches’ sabbath. Howling, shrieking and whistling, the storm, carrying with it dense clouds of dust and rubbish, raged round my tent; and the moment I attempted to set foot out of doors the whirlwind seized me in its embrace. At the same time an incessant crashing of falling trees and breaking branches, some of them, to judge by the sound, of considerable size, went on all round us. I never closed an eye during this night: the cold fit soon yielded to a violent perspiration, and only the inexorable necessity of marching on got me out of bed in the early morning.

I should prefer to say nothing about the forced march from Mkululu to Chingulungulu, as I must have played but a sorry part that day in the eyes of our followers. Knudsen, too, was suffering from fever. In the early morning, while the air was still cool and the bush fresh and green, it was not so bad, though riding was out of the question. Our way now ran close under the western edge of the Makonde plateau, through an area of deep sedimentary deposits, and at the same time of numerous springs. Consequently, every few hundred yards, the caravan found itself on the edge of a deep ravine with almost vertical sides, excavated by a stream in the loose soil. With unsteady feet one stumbles down the steep declivity, and only succeeds in scrambling up the other side by straining every muscle and nerve in the fever-weakened body. After this has happened more than a dozen times, the guide turns off the path to the right and disappears in the bush. This now becomes more and more open the farther we leave the escarpment of the plateau behind us, and at last it is the typical “open tree and grass steppe:” every tree exactly like every other; fresh foliage only at intervals; underwood also rare, but thorny where it occurs; grass in most places already burnt off. Where this is the case, an impenetrable cloud of ashes, stirred up by local whirlwinds, and still more by the steps of our party, circles round us in the glowing heat of noon, covering everything with a thick layer of black dust. I have long ago dropped the reins on the mule’s neck, and he has twice, in his innate apathy and determination to keep a straight course, run into a thornbush, so that I had to let myself fall off him backwards, whether I liked it or not. At last the Yao chief Zuza’s stately house came into view, and a few minutes later we and our men lay panting in its shade.

GROUND PLAN OF HUT

The strength of will of a civilized man is after all something to be proud of. In spite of our wretched condition, Knudsen and I could scarcely hold out five minutes on our camp stools, before we entered Zuza’s house and began to ask questions, sketch and collect. It proved a very good opportunity, for Zuza seems not only to be personally quite a unique representative of his race, but his house is arranged in a way one would never expect from a native. He himself, with his long black beard and intelligent face, is well and cleanly dressed in white calico, and his house is high, with an unusually neat and clean plastering of clay, light and airy. The hearth is really, in its way, a small work of art; the usual three stones rest on a raised clay platform about a yard wide, close to the wall and occupying the whole width of the kitchen. All round the fire itself is a series of very curious clay stands, by their shape evidently intended for supports to the round-bottomed pots. In Zuza’s own sleeping apartment we see—not indeed a European sofa, such as every Kamerun native has in his hut (I am thankful to see that the East Africans have not yet advanced so far)—but the prototype of all couches: a clay platform, about a foot high and something over a yard wide, with bevelled edges, and an inclined plane at the upper end, to rest the head and shoulders on, the whole being covered with beautifully-made clean mats.

ZUZA’S COUCH AND FIREPLACE

Yet even a man like Zuza cannot change his skin. After inspecting every part of the interior, we walked round the house; and I noticed an object hanging from a stick fixed under the eaves, strongly resembling a large sausage. It was the fruit of the Kigelia, which is called by Europeans the “German sausage tree,” though its resemblance to a sausage ends with its appearance. Zuza, after some hesitation, explained that this fruit was dawa—a medicine or a charm, or whatever is the proper name for such a preservative. Its task was no easy one, and consisted in protecting the house against the whirlwinds which habitually blow here with such violence that it is said they frequently carry away the roofs of huts. What association of ideas led these people to attribute to this inoffensive fruit the power of vanquishing Nature in her strongest manifestations, Zuza could not or would not inform me.