The country properly called the Mrima has no history beyond its name, whilst the towns immediately to the north and south of it,—Mombasah and Kilwa,—have filled many a long and stirring page. The Arab geographers preceding the Portuguese conquest mention only five settlements on the coast between Makdishu (Magadoxo) and Kilwa, namely, Lamu, Brava, Marka, Malindi (Melinda), and Mombasah. In Captain Owen’s charts, between Pangani and the parallel of Mafiyah (Monfia Island) not a name appears.
The fringe of Moslem Negroids inhabiting this part of the East African coast is called by the Arabs Ahl Maraim, and by themselves Wamrima, in opposition to the heathen of the interior. These are designated in mass the Washenzi—conquered or servile—properly the name of a Helot race in the hills of Usumbara, but extended by strangers to all the inner races. The Wasawahili, or people of the Sawahil, Mulattos originally African, but semiticised, like the Moplahs of Malabar, by Arab blood, are in these days confined to the lands lying northwards of Mombasah, to the island of Zanzibar, and to the regions about Kilwa.
The Mrima is peopled by two distantly connected families, the half-caste Arabs and the Coast-Clans. The former are generally of Bayazi or Khariji persuasion; the latter follow the school of el Shafei; both, though the most imperfect of Moslems, are fanatical enough to be dangerous. They own a nominal allegiance to the suzerain of Zanzibar, yet they are autonomous and free-spoken as Bedouins, when removed a few miles from the coast, and they have a rooted aversion to the officials of the local government, whom they consider their personal enemies. Between them and the pure Arabs of Oman, who often traverse, but who now never settle upon the Mrima, there is a repugnance increased by commercial jealousy; they resent the presence of these strangers as an intrusion, and they lose no opportunity of thwarting and discouraging them from travelling into the interior. Like their ancestors, they dislike Europeans personally, and especially fear the Beni Nar, or Sons of Fire,—the English—“hot as the Ingrez,” is in these lands a proverb. In their many Riwayat, Hadisi, and Ngoma—tales, traditions, and songs—they predict the eventual conquest of the country that has once felt the white man’s foot.
The half-caste Arab is degenerate in body and mind; the third generation becomes as truly negroid as the inner heathen. Even Creoles of pure blood, born upon the island and the coast of Zanzibar, lose the high nervous temperament that characterises their ancestors, and become, like Banyans, pulpy and lymphatic. These mestiços, appearing in the land of their grandsires, have incurred the risk of being sold as slaves. The peculiarity of their physiognomy is the fine Semitic development of the upper face, including the nose and nostrils, whilst the jaw is prognathous, the lips are tumid and everted, and the chin is weak and retreating. The cranium is somewhat rounded, and it wants the length of the Negroid’s skull. Idle and dissolute, though intelligent and cunning, the coast-Arab has little education. He is sent at the age of seven to school, where in two or three years he accomplishes the Khitmah, or perlection of the Koran, and he learns to write a note in an antiquated character, somewhat more imperfect than the Cufic. This he applies to the Kisawahili, and as nothing can be less fitted for the Semitic tongues than the Arabic syllabarium, so admirably adapted to its proper sphere, his compositions require the deciphering of an expert. A few prayers and hymns conclude the list of his acquirements. His mother-tongue knows no books except short treatises on Bao, or geomancy, and specimens of African proverbial wisdom. He then begins life by aiding his father in the shop or plantation, and by giving himself up to intoxication and intrigue. After suffering severely from his excesses—in this climate no constitution can bear up against over-indulgence long continued—at the age of seventeen or eighteen, he takes unto himself a wife. Estranged from the land of his forefathers, he rarely visits Zanzibar, where the restraints of semi-civilisation, the decencies of oriental society, and the low estimation in which the black skin is held, weary and irritate him. His point of honour seems to consist chiefly in wearing publicly, in token of his Arab descent, a turban and a long yellow shirt, called El Dishdasheh.
The Wamrima, or coast-clans, resemble even more than the half-caste Arabs their congeners the Washenzi. The pure Omani will not acknowledge them as kinsmen, declaring the breed to be Aajam, or gentiles. They are less educated than the higher race, and they are more debauched, apathetic, dilatory, and inert; their favourite life is one of sensual indolence. Like the Somal, they appear to be unfitted by nature for intellectual labour; of the former people there is but one learned man, the Shaykh Jami of Harar, and the Kazi Muhiyy-el-Din of Zanzibar is the only literato amongst the Wasawahili. Study, or indeed any tension of the mind, seems to make these weak-brained races semi-idiotic. They cannot answer Yes or No to the simplest question. If, for example, a man be asked the place of his tribe, he will point to a distance, though actually living amongst them; or if questioned concerning some particular of an event, he will detail everything but what is wanted. In the earlier days of exploration, I have repeatedly collected the diwans, and, after a careful investigation and comparison of statements, have registered the names and distances of the stages ahead. These men, though dwelling upon the threshold of the regions which they described, and being in the habit of traversing them every year, yet could hardly state a single fact correctly; sometimes they doubled, at other times they halved, the distance; they seldom gave the same names, and they almost always made a hysteron-proteron of the stations. The reader may gather from this sample some idea of the difficulties besetting those who would collect information concerning Africa from the Africans. It would not have happened had an Arab been consulted. I soon resolved to doubt for the future all Wasawahili, Wamrima, Washenzi, and slaves, and I found no reason for regretting the resolution.
The Wamrima are of darker complexion, and are more African in appearance, than the coast Arabs. The popular colour is a dull yellowish bronze. The dress is a fez, or a Surat-cap; a loin-cloth, which among the wealthy is generally an Arab check or an Indian print, with a similar sheet thrown over the shoulders. Men seldom appear in public without a spear, a sword, or a staff; and priding themselves upon the possession of umbrellas, they may be seen rolling barrels, or otherwise working upon the sands, under the luxurious shade. The women wear a tobe, or long cloth, wrapped tightly round the body, and extending from beneath the arms to the ankles; it is a garb ungraceful as was the European “sacque” of bygone days. It spoils the figure by depressing instead of supporting the bosom, and it conceals none of its deficiencies, especially the narrowness of the hips. The Murungwana, or free-woman, is distinguished from the slave-girl, when outside the house, by a cloth thrown over the head. Like the women of the Bedouins and of the Persian Iliyat, even the matrons of the Mrima go abroad unmasked. Their favourite necklace is a string of shark’s teeth. They distend the lobes of the ears to a prodigious size, and decorate them with a rolled-up strip of variously-dyed cocoa-leaf, a disk of wood, a plate of chakazi or raw gum-copal, or, those failing, with a betel-nut or with a few straws. The left wing of the nose is also pierced to admit a pin of silver, brass, lead, or even a bit of manioc-root. The hair, like the body, is copiously anointed with cocoa-nut or sesamum oil. Some shave the head wholly or partially across the brow and behind the ears; others grow their locks to half or full-length, which rarely exceeds a few inches. It is elaborately dressed, either in double-rolls rising like bear’s ears on both sides of the head, or divided into a number of frizzly curls which expose lines of scalp, and give to the head the appearance of a melon. They have also a propensity for savage “accroche-cœurs,” which stand out from the cheek bones, stiffly twisted like young porkers’ tails. In early youth, when the short, soft, and crisp hair resembles Astrachan wool, when the muscles of the face are smoothly rounded, and when the skin has that life and texture, and the countenance has that vivacity and amiability which belong only to the young, many of the girls have a pretty piquancy, a little minois chiffonné, a coquettishness, a natural grace, and a caressing look, which might become by habit exceedingly prepossessing. In later life, their charms assume that peculiar solidity which is said to characterise the beauties of Mullingar, and as a rule they are shockingly ugly. The Castilian proverb says that the English woman should be seen at the window, the French woman on the promenade, and the Spanish woman everywhere;—the African woman should be seen nowhere, or in the dark. The children mostly appear in the graceful costume of the Belvidere Apollo; not a few of them have, to the European eye, that amusing prettiness which we admire in pug-pups.
The mode of life in the Mrima is simple. Men rise early and repair to either the shop, the boat, or the plantation,—more commonly they waste the morning in passing from house to house “ku amkía,”—to salute neighbours. They ignore “manners”: they enter abruptly with or without the warning cry of “Hodi! Hodi!” place their spears in the corner, and without invitation squat and extend themselves upon the floor till wearied with conversation they take “French leave.” Life, to the European so real and earnest, is with them a continued scene of drumming, dancing, and drinking, of gossip, squabble, and intrigue. The favourite inebrients are tembu or cocoa toddy, and mvinyo, its distillation, pombe or millet-beer, opium, Bhang, and sometimes foreign stimulants purchased at Zanzibar. Their food is mostly ugali, the thick porridge of boiled millet or maize flour, which represents the “staff of life” in East Africa: they usually feed twice a day, in the morning and at night-fall. They employ the cocoa-nut extensively: like the Arabs of Zanzibar, they boil their rice in the thick juice of the rasped albumen kneaded with water, and they make cakes of the pulp mixed with the flour of various grains. This immoderate use of the fruit which, according to the people, is highly refrigerant, causes, it is said, rheumatic and other diseases. A respectable man seen eating a bit of raw or undressed cocoa-nut would be derided by his fellows. They chew tobacco with lime, like the Arabs, who, under the influence of Wahhabi tenets, look upon the pipe as impure, and they rarely smoke it like the Washenzi.
The Wamrima as well as the Wasawahili are distinguished by two national peculiarities of character. The first is a cautiousness bordering upon cowardice, derived from their wild African blood; the second is an unusual development of cunning and deceitfulness, which partially results from the grafting of the semi-civilised Semite upon the Hamite. The Arabs, who are fond of fanciful etymology, facetiously derive the race-name “Msawahili” from “Sawwá hílah,”[3] he played a trick, and the people boast of it, saying, “are we not Wasawahili?” that is “artful dodgers.” Supersubtle and systematic liars, they deceive when duller men would tell the truth, the lie direct is no insult, and the offensive word “muongo!” (liar) enters largely into every dialogue. They lie like Africans, objectlessly, needlessly, when sure of speedy detection, when fact would be more profitable than falsehood; they have not discovered with the civilised knave, that “honesty is the best policy;” they lie till their fiction becomes subjectively fact. With them the lie is no mental exertion, no exercise of ingenuity, no concealment, nor mere perversion of the truth: it is apparently a local instinctive peculiarity in the complicated madness of poor human nature. The most solemn and religious oaths are with them empty words; they breathe an atmosphere of falsehood, manœuvre, and contrivance, wasting about the mere nothings of life—upon a pound of grain or a yard of cloth—ingenuity of iniquity enough to win and keep a crown. And they are treacherous as false; with them the salt has no signification, and gratitude is unknown even by name.
[3] Dr. Krapf, in the Preface to his “Outlines of the Kisuahelí Language,” deduces the national name from Síwá, ’a hílah, which would mean exactly the reverse of astute—“without guile.” He has made other curious linguistic errors: he translates, for instance, the “Quilimancy” River—the ancient name for the Ozi or Dana—“water from the mountain,” after a Germanic or Indo-European fashion, whereas, in the Zangian languages, the compound word would, if admissible, signify “a mountain of water.” It is curious that the learned and accurate Mr. Cooley, who has charged Dr. Krapf with “puerile etymologies,” should have fallen into precisely the same error. In the “Geography of N’yassi,” p. 19, “Mazingia” is rendered the “road or land along the water,” but Májí Njíá, if the elision of the possessive affix ya be allowed in prose as in poetry—Májí Njíá for Májí ya Njíá—would mean only the “water of the road.” As a specimen of Dr. Krapf’s discoveries in philology the following may suffice. In his vocabulary of the Engutuk Eloikob or Kikuafi dialect, he derives Olbitir, a pig, from the Arabic El Batrah, a young ass, or from El Basir, a sharp-seeing dog!
Though partially Arabised, the Wamrima, as well as the Wasawahili, retain many habits and customs derived from the most degraded of the Washenzi savagery. Like the Wazegura heathen of Eastern Africa, and the Bangala of the Kasanji (Cassange) Valley, in the West, the uncle sells his nephews and nieces by an indefeasible vested right, with which even the parents cannot interfere. The voice of society even justifies this abomination. “What!” exclaim the people, “is a man to want when his brothers and sisters have children?” He is thus encouraged in doing, on the slightest pretext, that of which the heathen rarely approve, except to save themselves from starvation. At the same time the Wamrima, holding the unchastity of woman as a tenet of belief, consider the sister’s son—the “surer side”—the heir, in preference to the son. They have many superstitions, and before all undertakings they consult a pagan Mganga or medicine-man. If the K’hunguru or crow caws from the house-top, a guest is coming; if a certain black bird cries “chee! chee!” in front of a caravan, the porters will turn back, saying that there is blood on the road, and they will remain four or five days till the “chika! chika!” of the partridge beats the “General.” An even number of wayfarers met in early morning is a good omen, but an odd number, or the bark of the Mbweha—the fox—before the march, portends misfortune. Strong minds of course take advantage of these and a thousand other follies of belief, and when there is not, as in civilised countries, a counteracting influence of scepticism, the mental organisation of the people becomes a mass of superstitious absurdities.