The market at Unyanyembe varies greatly according to the quantity of the rains. As usual in barbarous societies, a dry season, or a few unexpected caravans, will raise the prices, even to trebling; and the difference of value in grain before and after the harvest will be double or half of what it is at par. The price of provisions in Unyamwezi has increased inordinately since the Arabs have settled in the land. Formerly a slave-boy could be purchased for five fundo, or fifty strings of beads: the same article would now fetch three hundred. A fundo of cheap white porcelain-beads would procure a milch cow; and a goat, or ten hens its equivalent, was to be bought for one khete. In plentiful years Unyanyembe is, however, still the cheapest country in East Africa, and, as usual in cheap countries, it induces the merchant to spend more than in the dearest. Paddy of good quality, when not in demand, sells at twenty kayla (120lbs.) for one shukkah of American domestics; maize, at twenty-five; and sorghum, here the staff of life, when in large stock, at sixty. A fat bullock may be bought for four domestics, a cow costs from six to twelve, a sheep or a goat from one to two. A hen, or its equivalent, four or five eggs, is worth one khete of coral or pink porcelain beads. One fundo of the same will purchase a large bunch of plantains, with which máwá or plantain-wine, and siki or vinegar are made; and the Wanyamwezi will supply about a pint of milk every morning at the rate of one shukkah per mensem. A kind of mud-fish is caught by the slaves in the frequent pools which, during the cold season, dot the course of the Gombe Nullah, lying three miles north of Kazeh; and return-caravans often bring with them stores of the small fry, called Kashwá or Daga’a, from the Tanganyika Lake.
From Unyanyembe twenty marches, which are seldom accomplished under twenty-five days, conduct the traveller to Ujiji, upon the Tanganyika. Of these the fifth station is Msene, the great Bandari of Western Unyamwezi. It is usually reached in eight days; and the twelfth is the Malagarazi River, the western limit of the fourth region.
The traveller, by means of introductory letters to the Doyen of the Arab merchants at Kazeh, can always recruit his stock of country currency,—cloth, beads, and wire,—his requirements of powder and ball, and his supply of spices, comforts, and drugs, without which travel in these lands usually ends fatally. He will pay, it is true, about five times their market-value at Zanzibar: sugar, for instance, sells at its weight in ivory, or nearly one-third more than its weight in beads. But though the prices are exorbitant they preserve the buyer from greater evils, the expense of porterage, the risk of loss, and the trouble and annoyance of personally superintending large stores in a land where “vir” and “fur” are synonymous terms.
And now comfortably housed within a stone-throw of my new friend Shaykh Snay bin Amir, I bade adieu for a time to the march, the camp, and the bivouac. Perhaps the reader may not be unwilling to hear certain details concerning the “road and the inn” in Eastern Africa; he is familiar from infancy with the Arab Kafilah and its host of litters and camels, horses, mules, and asses, but the porter-journeys in Eastern Africa have as yet escaped the penman’s pen.
Throughout Eastern Africa made roads, the first test of progress in a people, are unknown. The most frequented routes are foot-tracks like goat-walks, one to two spans broad, trodden down during the travelling season by man and beast, and during the rains the path in African parlance “dies,” that is to say, it is overgrown with vegetation. In open and desert places four or five lines often run parallel for short distances. In jungly countries they are mere tunnels in thorns and under branchy trees, which fatigue the porter by catching his load. Where fields and villages abound they are closed with rough hedges, horizontal tree-trunks, and even rude stockades, to prevent trespassing and pilferage. Where the land is open, an allowance of one-fifth must be made for winding: in closer countries this must be increased to two-fifths or to one-half, and the traveller must exercise his judgment in distributing the marches between these two extremes. In Uzaramo and K’hutu the tracks run through tall grasses, which are laid by their own weight after rains, and are burned down during the hot seasons: they often skirt cultivated lands, which they are not allowed to enter, miry swamps are spanned, rivers breast-deep, with muddy bottoms and steep slippery banks, are forded, whilst deep holes, the work of rodents and insects, render them perilous to ridden cattle. In Usagara the gradients are surmounted either by beds of mountain torrents or by breasting steep and stony hills, mere ladders of tree-root and loose stones: laden animals frequently cannot ascend or descend them. The worst paths in this region are those which run along the banks of the many streams and rivulets, and which traverse the broken and thorny ground at the base of the hills. The former are “thieves’ roads,” choked with long succulent grass springing from slushy mud; the latter are continued rises and falls, with a small but ragged and awkward watercourse at every bottom. From Usagara to Western Unyamwezi the roads lead through thick thorn-jungle, and thin forests of trees blazed or barked along the track, without hill, but interrupted during the rains by swamps and bogs. They are studded with sign-posts, broken pots and gourds, horns and skulls of game and cattle, imitations of bows and arrows pointing towards water, and heads of holcus. Sometimes a young tree is bent across the path and provided with a cross-bar; here is a rush gateway like the yoke of the ancients, or a platform of sleepers supported by upright trunks; there a small tree felled and replanted, is tipped with a crescent of grass twisted round with bark, and capped with huge snail shells, and whatever barbarous imagination may suggest. Where many roads meet, those to be avoided are barred with a twig or crossed by a line drawn with the foot. In Western Uvinza and near Ujiji, the paths are truly vile, combining all the disadvantages of bog and swamp, river and rivulet, thorn-bush and jungle, towering grasses, steep inclines, riddled surface, and broken ground. The fords on the whole line are temporary as to season, but permanent in place: they are rarely more than breast-deep; and they average in dry weather a cubit and a half, the fordable medium. There are but two streams, the Mgeta and the Ruguvu, which are bridged over by trees; both could be forded higher up the bed; and on the whole route there is but one river, the Malagarazi, which requires a ferry during the dry season. Cross roads abound in the populous regions. Where they exist not, the jungle is often impassable, except to the elephant and the rhinoceros: a company of pioneers would in some places require a week to cut their way for a single march through the network of thorns and the stockade of rough tree-trunks. The directions issued to travellers about drawing off their parties for safety at night to rising grounds, will not apply to Eastern Africa; it would be far easier to dig for themselves abodes under the surface.
It is commonly asserted in the island of Zanzibar that there are no caravans in these regions. The dictum is true if the term be limited to the hosts of camels and mules that traverse the deserts and the mountains of Arabia and Persia. It is erroneous if applied to a body of men travelling for commercial purposes. From time immemorial the Wanyamwezi have visited the road to the coast, and though wars and blood-feuds may have temporarily closed one line, another necessarily opened itself. Amongst a race so dependent for comfort and pleasure upon trade, commerce, like steam, cannot be compressed beyond a certain point. Until a few years ago, when the extension of traffic induced the country people to enlist as porters, all merchants traversed these regions with servile gangs hired on the coast or island of Zanzibar, a custom still prevailing on the northern and southern routes from the sea-board to the lakes of Nyanza and Nyassa. Porterage, on the long and toilsome journey, is now considered by the Wanyamwezi a test of manliness, as the Englishman deems a pursuit or a profession necessary to clear him from the charge of effeminacy. The children imbibe the desire with their milk, and at six or seven years old they carry a little tusk on their shoulders—instinctive porters, as pointer-pups are hereditary pointers. By premature toil their shinbones are sometimes bowed to the front like those of animals too early ridden. “He sits in hut egg-hatching,” is their proverbial phrase to express one more elegant—
“Home-keeping youth have ever homely wits.”
And they are ever quoting the adage that men who travel not are void of understanding—the African equivalent of what was said by the European sage: “The world is a great book, of which those who never leave home read but a page.” Against this traditional tendency reasons of mere hire and rations, though apparently weighty, are found wanting. The porter will bargain over his engagement to the utmost bead, saying that all men are bound to make the best conditions for themselves: yet, after two or three months of hard labour, if he chance upon a caravan returning to his home, a word from a friend, acting upon his innate debility of purpose, will prevail upon him to sacrifice by desertion all the fruits of his toil. On these occasions the porters are carefully watched; open desertion would, it is true, be condemned by the general voice, yet no merchant can so win the affections of his men that some will not at times disappear. Until the gangs have left their homes far behind, their presence seems to hang by a thread; at the least pretext they pack up their goods and vanish in a mass. When approaching their settlements—at the frontier districts of Tura and Mfuto, for instance—their cloth and hire are taken from them, packed in the employer’s bales, and guarded by armed slaves, especially at night, and on the line of march. Yet these precautions frequently fail, and, once beyond the camp limits, it is vain to seek the fugitive. In the act of desertion they show intelligence: they seldom run away when caravans first meet, lest their employer should halt and recover them by main force, and, except where thieves and wild beasts are unknown, they will not fly by night. The porter, however, has one point of honour; he leaves his pack behind him. The slave, on the other hand, certainly robs his employer when he runs away, and this, together with his unwillingness to work and the trouble and annoyance which he causes to his owner, counterbalances his superior dexterity and intelligence.
Caravans, called in Kisawahili safári (from the Arab safar, a journey) and by the African rugendo or lugendo, “a going,” are rarely wanting on the main trunk-lines. The favourite seasons for the upward-bound are the months in which the greater and the lesser Masika or tropical rains conclude—in June and September, for instance, on the coast—when water and provisions are plentiful. Those who delay till the dry weather has set in must expect hardships on the march; the expense of rations will be doubled and trebled, and the porters will frequently desert. The down-caravans set out in all seasons except the rainy; it is difficult to persuade the people of Unyanyembe to leave their fields between the months of October and May. They will abandon cultivation to the women and children, and merrily take the footpath way if laden with their own ivory, but from the merchant they will demand exorbitant wages, and even then they will hesitate to engage themselves.
Porterage varies with every year and in every caravan. It knows but two limits: the interest of the employer to disburse as little as possible by taking every advantage of the necessities of his employé, and the desire of the employé to extract as much as he can by presuming upon the wants of his employer. In some years there is a glut of porters on the coast; when they are rare quarrels take place between the several settlements, each attempting a monopoly of enlistment to the detriment of its neighbours, and a little blood is sometimes let. When the Wanyamwezi began to carry, they demanded for a journey from the coast to their own country six to nine dollars’ worth of domestics, coloured cloths, brass-wires, and the pigeon’s-egg bead called sungomaji. The rate of porterage then declined; the increase of traffic, however, has of late years greatly increased it. In 1857 it was 10 dollars, and it afterwards rose to 12 dollars per porter. In this sum rations are not included; the value of these—which by ancient custom are fixed at 1 kubabah (about 1·5 lbs.) of grain per diem, or, that failing, of manioc, sweet potatoes, and similar articles, with the present of a bullock at the frontier—is subject to greater variations, and is even less reducible to an average than the porter’s pay. It is needless to say that the down-journey is less expensive than the up-march, as the carriers rely upon a fresh engagement on the coast. The usual hire from Unyanyembe would be nine cloths, payable on arrival at the sea-port, where each is worth 25 cents, or about 1 shilling. The Arabs roughly calculate—the errors balancing one another—that, rations included, the hire of a porter from the coast to the Tanganyika Lake and back amounts to a total of 20 dollars = 4l. 3s. From the coast, Wanyamwezi porters will not engage themselves for a journey westward of their own country; at Unyanyembe they break up, and a fresh gang must be enlisted for a march to the Tanganyika or to the Nyanza Lake. It is impossible to average the numbers of an East African caravan, which varies from half a dozen to 200 porters, under a single Mundewa or merchant. In dangerous places travellers halt till they form an imposing force; 500 is a frequent figure, and even bodies of 1000 men are not rare. The only limit to the gathering is the incapability of the country to fill more than a certain number of mouths. The larger caravans, however, are slow and cumbrous, and in places they exhaust the provision of water.