The Mganga is also a predictor and a soothsayer. He foretels the success or failure of commercial undertakings, of wars, and of kidnapping-commandos; he foresees famine and pestilence, and he suggests the means of averting calamities. He fixes also, before the commencement of any serious affair, fortunate conjunctions, without which a good issue cannot be expected. He directs expiatory offerings. His word is ever powerful to expedite or to delay the march of a caravan; and in his quality of augur he considers the flight of birds and the cries of beasts, like his prototype of the same class in ancient Europe and in modern Asia.
The principal instrument of the Mganga’s craft is one of the dirty little buyu or gourds which he wears in a bunch round his waist; and the following is the usual programme when the oracle is to be consulted. The magician brings his implements in a bag of matting; his demeanour is serious as the occasion; he is carefully greased, and his head is adorned with the diminutive antelope-horns fastened by a thong of leather above the forehead. He sits like a sultan upon a dwarf stool in front of the querist, and begins by exhorting the highest possible offertory. No pay, no predict. Divination by the gourd has already been described; the Mganga has many other implements of his craft. Some prophesy by the motion of berries swimming in a cup full of water, which is placed upon a low stool surrounded by four tails of the zebra or the buffalo lashed to sticks planted upright in the ground. The Kasanda is a system of folding triangles not unlike those upon which plaything soldiers are mounted. Held in the right hand, it is thrown out, and the direction of the end points to the safe and auspicious route; this is probably the rudest appliance of prestidigitation. The shero is a bit of wood about the size of a man’s hand, and not unlike a pair of bellows, with a dwarf handle, a projection like a nozzle, and in the circular centre a little hollow. This is filled with water, and a grain or fragment of wood, placed to float, gives an evil omen if it tends towards the sides, and favourable if it veers towards the handle or the nozzle. The Mganga generally carries about with him to announce his approach a kind of rattle called “sánje.” This is a hollow gourd of pine-apple shape, pierced with various holes, prettily carved and half filled with maize, grains, and pebbles; the handle is a stick passed through its length and secured by cross-pins.
The Mganga has many minor duties. In elephant hunts he must throw the first spear and endure the blame if the beast escapes. He marks ivory with spots disposed in lines and other figures, and thus enables it to reach the coast without let or hindrance. He loads the kirangozi or guide with charms and periapts to defend him from the malice which is ever directed at a leading man, and sedulously forbids him to allow precedence even to the Mtongi, the commander and proprietor of the caravan. He aids his tribe by magical arts in wars, by catching a bee, reciting over it certain incantations, and loosing it in the direction of the foe, when the insect will instantly summon an army of its fellows and disperse a host, however numerous. This belief well illustrates the easy passage of the natural into the supernatural. The land being full of swarms, and man’s body being wholly exposed, many a caravan has been dispersed like chaff before the wind by a bevy of swarming bees. Similarly in South Africa the magician kicks an ant-hill and starts wasps which put the enemy to flight. And in the books of the Hebrews we read that the hornet sent before the children of Israel against the Amorite was more terrible than sword or bow. (Joshua, xxiv.)
The several tribes in East Africa present two forms of government, the despotic and the semi-monarchical.
In the despotic races, the Wakilima or mountaineers of Chhaga, for instance, the subjects are reduced to the lowest state of servility. All, except the magicians and the councillors, are “Wasoro”—soldiers and slaves to the sultan, mangi, or sovereign. The reader will bear in mind that the word “sultan” is the Arabic term applied generically by traders to all the reguli and roitelets, the chiefs and headmen, whose titles vary in every region. In Uzaramo the Sultan is called p’hazi; in Khutu, p’hazi or mundewa; in Usagara, mundewa; in Ugogo, mteme; in Unyamwezi, mwami; in Ujiji and Karagwah, mkama. “Wazir” is similarly used by the Arabs for the principal councillor or minister, whose African name in the several tribes is mwene goha, mbáhá, mzágírá, magáwe, mhángo, and muhinda. The elders are called throughout the country Wagosi and Wányáp’hárá; they form the council of the chief. All male children are taken from their mothers, are made to live together, and are trained to the royal service, to guarding the palace, to tilling the fields, and to keeping the watercourses in order. The despot is approached with fear and trembling; subjects of both sexes must stand at a distance, and repeatedly clap their palms together before venturing to address him. Women always bend the right knee to the earth, and the chief acknowledges the salutation with a nod. At times the elders and even the women inquire of the ruler what they can do to please him: he points to a plot of ground which he wishes to be cleared, and this corvée is the more carefully performed, as he fines them in a bullock if a weed be left unplucked. In war female captives are sold by the king, and the children are kept to swell the number of his slaves. None of the Wasoro may marry without express permission. The king has unlimited power of life and death, which he exercises without squeamishness, and a general right of sale over his subjects; in some tribes, as those of Karagwah, Uganda, and Unyoro, he is almost worshipped. It is a capital offence to assume the name of a Sultan; even a stranger so doing would be subjected to fines and other penalties. The only limit to the despot’s power is the Ada, or precedent, the unwritten law of ancient custom, which is here less mutable than the codes and pandects of Europe. The African, like the Asiatic, is by nature a conservative, at once the cause and the effect of his inability to rise higher in the social scale. The king lives in a manner of barbarous state. He has large villages crowded with his families and slaves. He never issues from his abode without an armed mob, and he disdains to visit even the wealthiest Arabs. The monarchical tribes are legitimists of the good old school, disdaining a novus homo; and the consciousness of power invests their princes with a certain dignity and majesty of demeanour. As has been mentioned, some of the Sultans whose rule has the greatest prestige, appear, from physical peculiarities, to be of a foreign and a nobler origin.
In the aristocratical or semi-monarchical tribes, as the Wanyamwezi, the power of the Sultan depends mainly upon his wealth, importance, and personal qualifications for the task of rule. A chief enabled to carry out a “fist-right” policy will raise himself to the rank of a despot, and will slay and sell his subjects without mercy. Though surrounded by a council varying from two to a score of chiefs and elders, who are often related or connected with him, and who, like the Arab shaykhs, presume as much as possible in ordering this and forbidding that, he can disregard and slight them. More often, however, his authority is circumscribed by a rude balance of power; the chiefs around him can probably bring as many warriors into the field as he can. When weak, the sultan has little more authority than the patell of an Indian village or the shaykh of a Bedouin tribe. Yet even when the chief cannot command in his own clan, he is an important personage to travelling merchants and strangers. He can cause a quarrel, an advance, or an assassination, and he can quiet brawls even when his people have been injured. He can open a road by providing porters, or bar a path by deterring a caravan from proceeding, or by stopping the sale of provisions. Thus it is easy to travel amongst races whose chiefs are well disposed to foreigners, and the utmost circumspection becomes necessary when the headmen are grasping and inhospitable. Upon the whole, the chiefs are wise enough to encourage the visits of traders.
A patriarchal or purely republican form of government is unknown in East Africa. The Wasagara, it is true, choose their chief like the Banyai of “Monomotapa,” but, once elected, he becomes a monarch. Loyalty—or, to reduce it to its elements, veneration for the divinity that hedges in a king—is a sentiment innate in the African mind. Man, however, in these regions is not a political animal; he has a certain instinctive regard for his chief and a respect for his elders. He ignores, however, the blessings of duly limited independence and the natural classification of humanity into superior and inferior, and honours—the cheap pay of nations—are unknown. He acknowledges no higher and lower social strata. His barbarism forbids the existence of a learned oligarchy, of an educated community, or of a church and state, showing the origin of the connection between the soul and body of society. Man being equal to man, force being the only law and self the sole consideration, mutual jealousy prevents united efforts and deadens all patriotic spirit. No one cares for the public good; the welfare of the general must yield to the most contemptible individual interests; civil order and security are therefore unknown, and foreign relations cannot exist.
In the lowest tribes the chieftain is a mere nonentity, “a Sultan,” as the Arabs say, “within his own walls.” His subjects will boast, like the Somal, that he is “tanquam unus ex nobis;” and they are so sensible of restraint that “girdles and garters would be to them bonds and shackles” metaphorically as well as literally. The position of these Sultans is about equal to that of the diwans of the Mrima; their dignity is confined to sitting upon a dwarf three-legged stool, to wearing more brass wire than beads, and to possessing clothes a little better than those of their subjects. The “regulus” must make a return present to strangers after receiving their offerings, and in some cases must begin with gifts. He must listen to the words of his councillors and elders, who, being without salary, claim a portion of the presents and treasure-trove, interfere on all occasions of blackmail, fines, and penalties, demand from all petitioners gifts and bribes to secure interest, and exert great influence over the populace.
Legitimacy is the rule throughout the land, and the son, usually the eldest, succeeds to the father, except amongst the Wasukuma of N. Unyamwezi, where the line of descent is by the sister’s son—the “surer side”—for the normal reason, to secure some of the blood royal for ruling. Even the widows of the deceased become the property of the successor. This truly African practice prevails also amongst the Bachwana, and presents another of those curious points of resemblance between the Hamite and Semite races which have induced modern ethnologists to derive the Arab from Africa. The curious custom amongst the Wanyamwezi of devising property to illegitimate children is not carried out in the succession to power. Where there are many sons, all, as might be expected, equally aspire to power; sometimes, however, of two brothers, one will consent to hold authority under the other. In several tribes, especially in Usukuma, the widow of a chief succeeds to his dignity in default of issue.
Punishments are simple in East Africa. The sar, vendetta or blood-feud, and its consequence, the diyat or weregeld, exist in germ, unreduced, as amongst the more civilised Arabs, to an artful and intricate system. But these customs are founded, unlike ours, upon barbarous human nature. Instinct prompts a man to slay the slayer of his kith and kin; the offence is against the individual, not the government or society. He must reason to persuade himself that the crime, being committed against the law, should be left to the law for notice; he wants revenge, and he cares nought for punishment or example for the prevention of crime. The Sultan encourages the payment of blood-money to the relatives of the deceased, or, if powerful enough, claims it himself, rather than that one murder should lead to another, and eventually to a chronic state of bloodshed and confusion. Thus, in some tribes the individual revenges himself, and in others he commits his cause to the chief. Here he takes an equivalent in cattle for the blood of a brother or the loss of a wife; there he visits the erring party with condign punishment. The result of such deficiency of standard is a want of graduation in severity; a thief is sometimes speared and beheaded, or sold into slavery after all his property has been extorted by the chief, the councillors, and the elders, whilst a murderer is perhaps only fined.