Native life in East Africa

by Karl Weule

The words of his song run as follows:—

“I went to Masasi; I went again to Masasi. In the evening I heard screams; I turned round and saw the itondosha. ‘My cousin Cheluka!’ (I cried), ‘Give me a gun and caps and a bullet.’ ‘Load it yourself,’ (said my cousin). ‘Come and let us pursue the itondosha; it went through a hole in the side wall of the house.’ My brother (cousin) turned round and said: ‘It has its legs stretched out straight before it, like a beard on the chin.’ It was seated, and we tried to tame the itondosha, the girl of Ilulu. Elo (Yes), that is so.”

A less uncanny subject was broached by an old Makonde by means of a little gift which he brought me. We had been talking about the method of reckoning time among these tribes, and had arrived at the fact that they were as backward, and at the same time as practical, in this respect as in their way of marking the hours of the day.

The recording of events by means of knots on a string is a contrivance adopted by mankind at different times and in different places. The famous quipu of the Peruvians is one example. Others have been discovered in the Pacific, and also in West Africa. Here on the Makonde Plateau it is still in daily use, for the number of children learning to read and write in the German Government Schools at Lindi and Mikindani is as yet but small.

KNOTTED STRING SERVING AS CALENDAR

With a courteous gesture the Makonde handed me a piece of bark string about a foot long, with eleven knots at regular intervals, proceeding to explain, with Sefu’s help, that the string was intended to serve as a kind of calendar. Supposing he were going on an eleven days’ journey, he would say to his wife, “This knot” (touching the first) “is to-day, when I am starting; to-morrow” (touching the second knot) “I shall be on the road, and I shall be walking the whole of the second and third day, but here” (seizing the fifth knot) “I shall reach the end of the journey. I shall stay there the sixth day, and start for home on the seventh. Do not forget, wife, to undo a knot every day, and on the tenth you will have to cook food for me; for, see, this is the eleventh day when I shall come back.”

Here, again, then, we have a survival, something which reminds us of a stage of culture passed through long ago by our ancestors. After all, have we left it so very far behind? Do we not, to this day, make a knot in our handkerchief, when we have something we want to remember? Mankind is poor in ideas, not only in the sense that inventions in all parts of the world can be reduced to the same simple fundamental principle, but with all our technical and intellectual progress the most advanced members of the race are in some points extremely conservative. So much the knot in the handkerchief is sufficient to prove.

The Makonde system of knot-records does not seem to be always quite so simple as we might think from the above example. Another Makonde has just brought me a whole bundle of knotted strings, saying that they belong to such and such a headman, who cannot remember which of his villagers have paid their hut-tax and which have not, but can manage in this way to keep count of them quite successfully.

In the light of my experiences in this country I am more and more confirmed in the conviction, formed on the ground of previous study at home, that our conventional estimate of the difference between “savage” and “civilized” mankind is to a great extent misleading. It is true that Amerinds and Eskimo, Hyperboreans and negroes, Oceanians and Australians alike, along with many peoples of southern and south-eastern Asia, live in more intimate connection with surrounding nature than we, who think that our environment is entirely artificial. But has not in reality each one of these despised groups of mankind a culture of its own? Is not—to take those who most nearly concern us just now—the material and mental life of these Rovuma Valley natives made up of a thousand details, not less differentiated from each other than the activities of our own lives? It is true that the native cannot attain by means of his hoe-culture and his simple arts and crafts to that standard of comfort and well-being demanded by every white man who is even moderately well off. But surely in many parts of Germany our rural population are no better, perhaps even worse off, than these barbarians who lie under the terrible reproach of being unable to write their names. I am, indeed, very far from seeing these so-called primitive peoples through rose-coloured spectacles; but when I consider that, in despite of the high opinion we entertain of ourselves, the enormous advance consequent upon the invention of printing, the discovery of the New World and the Reformation has after all affected in the fullest sense only a very small fraction of the white race—we might say, only a thin upper stratum, and that not continuous,—I cannot but come back again and again to my conviction that culture is not a thing of which we have the monopoly.