Native life in East Africa

by Karl Weule

NATIVE DANCE AT DAR ES SALAM

Mombasa and Zanzibar interested me more from a historical than from a political point of view. How little do our educated and even learned circles know of the exploration and development, the varied political fortunes of this corner of the earth on the western shore of the Indian Ocean! Only specialists, indeed, can be expected to know that this year is the jubilee of the French Admiral Guillain’s epoch-making work, Documents sur l’Histoire, la Géographie, et le Commerce de l’Afrique Orientale, but it is extremely distressing to find that our countryman, Justus Strandes’ Die Portugiesenzeit in Deutsch- und Englisch-Ostafrika (1899) is not better known. Most of us think that Eastern Equatorial Africa, considered as a field for colonization, is as much virgin soil as Togo, Kamerun and German South-West Africa, or the greater part of our possessions in the South Seas. How few of us realise that, before us and before the English, the Arabs had, a thousand years ago, shown the most brilliant capacity for gaining and keeping colonies, and that after them the Portuguese, in connection with and as a consequence of Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India round the Cape of Good Hope in 1498, occupied an extensive strip of the long coast, and maintained their hold on it for centuries? And yet these events—these struggles for East Africa form one of the most interesting chapters in the history of modern colonization. Here for the first time the young European culture-element meets with an Eastern opponent worthy of its steel. In fact that struggle for the north-western shores of the Indian Ocean stands for nothing less than the beginning of that far more serious struggle which the white race has waged for the supremacy over the earth in general, and in which they already seemed to be victorious, when, a few years ago, the unexpected rise of Japan showed the fallacious nature of the belief so long entertained, and perhaps also the opening of a new era.

STREET IN THE NATIVE QUARTER, DAR ES SALAM

Anyone who does not travel merely for the sake of present impressions, but is accustomed to see the past behind the phenomena of the moment, and, like myself, leaves the area of European culture with the express object of using his results to help in solving the great problem of man’s intellectual evolution in all its details, will find in the voyage to German East Africa a better opportunity for survey and retrospect than in many other great routes of modern travel.

This is the case as soon as one has crossed the Alps. It is true that even the very moderate speed of the Italian express gives one no chance for anthropological studies. In order to observe the unmistakable Teutonic strain in the population of Northern Italy, it would be necessary to traverse the plain of Lombardy at one’s leisure. But already in the Adige Valley, and still more as one advances through Northern and Central Italy, the stratification of successive races seems to me to be symbolized by the three strata of culture visible in the fields: corn below, fruit-trees planted between it, and vines covering them above. Just so the Lombards, Goths and other nations, superimposed themselves on the ancient Italian and Etruscan stocks. On the long journey from Modena to Naples, it is borne in upon one that the Apennines are really the determining feature of the whole Italian peninsula, and that the Romans were originally started on their career of conquest by want of space in their own country. The only place which, in May, 1906, produced an impression of spaciousness was the Bay of Naples, of which we never had a clear view during our four or five days’ stay. A faint haze, caused by the volcanic dust remaining in the air from the eruption of the previous month, veiled all the distances, while the streets and houses, covered with a layer of ashes, appeared grey on a grey background—a depressing and incongruous spectacle. The careless indolence of the Neapolitans, which as a rule strikes the industrious denizens of Central Europe as rather comical than offensive, requires the clear sky and bright sunshine, celebrated by all travellers (but of which we could see little or nothing), to set it off.

From our school-days we have been familiar with the fact that the countries bordering the Mediterranean—the seats of ancient civilisation—are now practically denuded of forests. Yet the landscape of Southern Italy and Sicily seems to the traveller still more unfamiliar than that of the northern and central districts; it is even more treeless, and therefore sharper in contour than the Etruscan and Roman Apennines and the Abruzzi. But the most striking feature to us inhabitants of the North-German plain are the river-valleys opening into the Strait of Messina, leading up by steep gradients into the interior of the country. At this season they seem either to be quite dry or to contain very little water, so that they are calculated to produce the impression of broad highways. But how terrible must be the force with which the mass of water collecting in the torrent-bed after heavy rains, with no forest-soil to keep it back, rushes down these channels to the sea! To the right and left of Reggio, opposite Messina, numbers of sinuous ravines slope down to the coast, all piled high with débris and crossed by bridges whose arches have the height and span of the loftiest railway viaducts.

It is scarcely necessary to say anything about Port Said and the Suez Canal. Entering the Red Sea, I entered at the same time a familiar region—I might almost say, one which I have made peculiarly my own—it having fallen to my share to write the monographs on the three oceans included in Helmolt’s Weltgeschichte.[^[3]] Of these monographs, that dealing with the Atlantic seems, in the opinion of the general reader, to be the most successful; but that on the Indian Ocean is undoubtedly more interesting from the point of view of human history. In the first place, this sea has this advantage over its eastern and western neighbours, that its action on the races and peoples adjacent to it was continued through a long period. The Pacific has historic peoples (historic, that is to say, in the somewhat restricted and one-sided sense in which we have hitherto used that term) on its north-western margin, in eastern Asia; but the rest of its huge circumference has remained dead and empty, historically speaking, almost up to the present day. The Atlantic exactly reverses these conditions: its historical density is limited to the north-eastern region, the west coast of Africa, and the east coast of the Americas being (with the exception of the United States) of the utmost insignificance from a historical point of view.

Now the Indian Ocean formed the connecting link between these two centres—the Mediterranean culture-circle in the west, and that of India and Eastern Asia in the east,—at a time when both Atlantic and Pacific were still empty and untraversed wastes of water. This, however, is true, not of the whole Indian Ocean, but only as regards its northern part, and in particular the two indentations running far inland in a north-westerly direction, which we call the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. To-day, when we carry our railways across whole continents, and even mountain ranges present no insuperable obstacles to our canals, we imagine that masses of land as wide as the Isthmus of Suez or the much greater extent of the “Syrian Porte”—the route between the Persian Gulf and the Eastern Mediterranean—must have been absolute deterrents to the sea-traffic of the ancients. In a sense, indeed, this was the case; otherwise so many ancient rulers would not have attempted to anticipate us in the construction of the Suez Canal. But where technical skill is insufficient to overcome such impediments, and where at the same time the demand for the treasures of the East is so enormous as it was in classical and mediæval times, people adapt themselves to existing conditions and make use of navigable water wherever it is to be found. Only thus can be explained the uninterrupted navigation of the Red Sea during a period of several thousand years, in spite of its dangerous reefs and the prevailing winds, which are anything but favourable to sailing vessels.