Among many other diseases, such as malarial, black-water and remittent fever, sleeping-sickness, guinea-worm, beriberi, and whatever other ills, great or small, mankind may suffer from in these otherwise favoured regions, leprosy is unfortunately endemic in our colony on the Indian Ocean. On the coast of the southern district, the Government is trying to prevent the further spread of this terrible disease, by establishing an isolation hospital on an island in the Lukuledi Estuary, where the patients, at present about forty in number, are treated by the medical staff at Lindi. Here in the interior, lepers are for the present entirely dependent on the care of their fellow-tribesmen. Among the Yaos this care is a mixture of human sympathy and the crudest barbarity. The patient is taken to a hut built specially for him in a remote part of the bush, where his friends or relations bring him food, till the end seems to be approaching. If the wise men of the tribe come to the conclusion that this diagnosis is correct, a last and very abundant meal is carried out to the hut, which is then fastened up from the outside, so strongly that, even had the patient the power and the will to make an effort, he could not free himself. He is thus, should he still have any vitality left by the time the last of the food and drink is consumed, condemned to perish of starvation.
VILLAGE OF THE NGONI CHIEF MAKACHU
GRAVE OF THE YAO CHIEF MALUCHIRO, AT MWITI
Another picture connected with death presents itself. We have already seen the mysterious, legend-haunted site of Hatia’s grave on Unguruwe mountain; those of other mortals are unpretending enough and quite prosaic in character. In the country round Chingulungulu I have found graves, both old and recent, at various places in the bush, none of them outwardly distinguishable from graves in our own country, except that the mounds over those of children are round or oval, instead of long like those of adults. So far I have seen nothing of the custom reported to me by several informants, of building a hut over the grave, and decorating it with calico. Only one grave at Masasi had such a hut, but I was told that it was an Arab grave, and there was no cloth.[[35]] The grave of Nakaam’s predecessor, Maluchiro, at Meviti, has unfortunately quite lost the traditional character. Here the traveller finds a large oval hut, and, stooping under the wide, overhanging eaves to enter, he sees, in the solemn twilight within, massive clay pillars at the head and foot of the grave, and a somewhat lower wall on either side of it. Such monuments are shown with pride by the natives to the passing European, but they are a proof how far Islamitic culture has penetrated the old African life.
European influence also has a share in the disappearance of old customs, though, in one point, at least, it is less far-reaching than I had supposed. I imagined that a box of matches would be found in every native hut, but I have seen nothing of the sort, and, moreover, have observed no other way of procuring fire. Yet no hut is ever without it. Here we have the startling solution of a question which has long occupied the attention of ethnographers. Not so many decades ago, inquirers of the standing of Tylor and Lubbock seriously believed in the existence of fireless tribes—even our brown fellow-subjects in the Marianne Islands being classed with such unfortunates. The contrary of this hypothesis has now been irrefutably demonstrated, and it is known that there is no tribe in the world ignorant of the use of fire, or even of the mode of producing it artificially. The problem has therefore assumed another aspect. Did men first use fire, and then learn to produce it? that is to say, did they begin by making use of its natural sources, such as volcanoes and lava currents, burning naphtha-beds, trees kindled by lightning, or heaps of vegetable matter ignited by spontaneous combustion?—or did they first learn to bring out the divine spark by boring, friction, or percussion, and then proceed to harness the kindly element to household tasks? Both sequences of events are a priori possible, though, of course, the first is much the more probable of the two. To-day we may say that it is the only one recognised. This knowledge we owe entirely to ethnography.
At a time when hundreds of students are continually busy investigating and describing the remotest and most forlorn of primitive tribes at present accessible—when the existing ethnographic museums are filled to overflowing with new collections, and new museums are opened every year, it is strange to think of the earlier and less favoured period which had to be content with mere arm-chair theories. Two branches of a tree rub together in a storm. As the wind grows stronger, the friction becomes more rapid, till the surfaces are heated; at last a tiny spark appears, it becomes a larger spark, and then a devouring flame which consumes the whole tree. Primitive man, standing under the tree, has been watching the process with amazement. “Oh!” says he, “is that how it’s done?” and thereupon takes a couple of sticks and does likewise.
KINDLING FIRE BY FRICTION