The Mahadimu, or serviles, a word derived from the Arabic Makhadim, the ‘Mohaydin’ of Europeans, compose the mass of the Wasawahili race. They are popularly derived from the slaves left upon the Island by the Portuguese. It must, however, be observed that most of the great families in Eastern and Southern Africa have congener clients, or rather outcastes, who are probably, like the Spartan Helots, remnants of subjugated rivals. Thus, to quote but a few, there are the Midgans amongst the Somal, the Walangúlo or Ariangulo and Dahalo amongst the Southern Gallas,[[104]] and the Wandurobo amongst the Wakwafi. The Wasumbara have their Washenzi; the Hottentots their Bushmen, and the Kafirs their Fingos. In a former volume I have shown that even the Arabs of Oman and Yemen are mixed with Khadims, a system of race within race, as contrary to the spirit of El Islam as of Christianity. These servile castes are distinguished by swarthier skins, weaker frames, and other signs of inferior development. The Mahadímu of Zanzibar are evidently the ancient lords of the Island, reduced to a manner of servitude by northern conquerors. Though now free, and often slave-owners, these Helots are subject, at the Prince’s order, to an occasional corvée, and to a poll-tax. The amount of the latter affords a rude census; the adult males range between 10,000 and 12,000, and the women, it is said, are proportionally more numerous.
The Wasawahili of the Island appear physically inferior to those of the seaboard: as in the days of Marco Polo, they are emphatically an ugly race. If the girls in early youth show traces of prettiness, it is a grotesque order of the beauté du diable. Some of the men have fine, large, strong, and muscular figures, without being able to use their strength, and as amongst uncivilized people generally, the reality falls short of the promise. The national peculiarity is the division of the face into two distinct types, and the contrast appears not a little singular. The upper, or intellectual part, though capped by woolly hair, is distinctly Semitic—with the suspicion of a caricature—as far as the nose-bridge, and the more ancient the family the more evident is the mixture. The lower, or animal half, especially the nostrils, lip, jaws, and chin is unmistakably African. There are a few Albinos with silk-cocoon-coloured hair, and tender-red eyes, their pinkish skins are cobwebbed by darker reticulations and rough from pellagrous disease. Leucosis, however, is rare; we saw only two cases, one on the Island, the other a youth near Tángá.
The Wasawahili are by no means a jet-black people, as Pritchard, misled by Dr Bird, has assumed; nor, indeed, is this the distinction of the Zanzibarian races generally. The skin is a chocolate-brown, varying in shades, as amongst ourselves, but usually not darker than the complexion of Southern Arabia. About Lamu and Patta the colour is yellow-brown; at Mombasah and Zanzibar dark-brown; and south of Kilwa, I am told, black-brown. Mostly the hair is jetty, unless sunburnt; crisp, and curling short; it splits after growing a few inches long, and often it is planted like the body pile, in distinct ‘pepper-corns.’ The barbule is a degeneracy from the Arab goatee, and the mustachios are short and scanty. The oval skull, too dolichocephalous to be purely Caucasian, is much flattened at the walls, and sometimes the upper, brow (the reflective region of Gall) is too highly developed for the lower. The eyes, with dark-brown pupils and cornea stained dirty bilious-yellow, are straight and well-opened, but the nose is flat and patulous, the mouth is coarse and ill-cut; the lips, often everted, project unduly; the teeth are obliquely set, and the jaw is prognathous. The figure is loose and pulpy, and even in early manhood the waist is seldom finely formed; in many men I have seen the nipples placed unusually low down, whilst the women have the flaccid pendulous breasts of negresses. Both sexes fail in point of hips, which are lank and angular, whereas those of the inner savages are finely rounded. The shanks are bowed forwards, the calf is high raised and bunchy, the heel is long, and the extremities are coarse and large. There is another proof of African blood which can hardly be quoted here: many overland travellers have remarked it amongst the boatmen of Egypt.[[105]]
Veritable half-castes, the Wasawahili have inherited the characters of both parents. From the Arab they derive shrewd thinking and practice in concealing thought: they will welcome a man with the determination to murder him; they have unusual confidence, self-esteem, and complacency; fondness for praise, honours, and distinctions; keenness together with short-sightedness in matters of business, and a nameless horror of responsibility and regular occupation. Africa has gifted them with comparative freedom from bigotry—they are not admodum dediti religionibus. Usually the Moslem combines commerce with proselytizing, opposed to our system, which divides by a wide gulf the merchant’s career from that of the Missionary, and which unites them only upon the subscription sheet. These people care little to make converts: their African languor upon doctrinal points prevents their becoming fanatics or proselytizers. African also is their eternal, restless suspicion, the wisdom of serf and slave compensating for their sluggish imagination and small powers of concentration. They excel in negro duplicity; they are infinitely great in the ‘Small wares and petty points of cunning,’ and they will boast of this vile eminence, saying, ‘Are we not Wasawahili?’ men who obtain their ends by foxship? Natum mendacio genus, truth is unknown to it; honesty and candour are ignored even by name. When they assert they probably lie, when they swear they certainly lie. The favourite oath is ‘Mi mi wad (or M’áná) harámí—I am a bastard if,’ &c., &c., and it is never respected. The language is very foul, and such expressions as Komanyoko are never out of the mouth. The Msawahili will not ask a thing openly: he waits, fidgeting withal, till the subject edge itself in, and then he will rather hint than speak out. At the same time he is an inveterate beggar, and the outstretching of hands seems to relieve his brain. When his mind is set upon an acquisition, he becomes a monomaniac, like that child-man the savage. His nonchalance, carelessness, and improvidence pass all bounds. He will light his pipe under a dozen leaky kegs of gunpowder; ‘he will set a house on fire, as it were, to roast his eggs;’ he will wreck his ship because anchoring her to the beach saves trouble in loading; he might make his coast a mine of wealth, but he will not work till hunger compels him, and his pure insouciance has allowed his valuable commerce to be wrested from him by Europeans, Hindus, and Arabs. His dislike of direct action exceeds that of the Bedawi, and yet he quotes a proverb touching procrastination, ‘Leo kabli yá kesho,’—to-day is before to-morrow—better than our ‘To-morrow never comes.’
In disposition the Msawahili is at once cowardly and destructive: his quarrelsome temper leads him into trouble, but he fights only by being brought to bay. Sensual and degraded, his self-indulgence is that of the brutes. He drinks, and always drinks to excess. He would stake and lose his mother at play. Chastity is unknown in this land of hot temperaments—the man places paradise in the pleasures of the sixth sense, and the woman yields herself to the first advances. Upon the coast, when an adulterer is openly detected, he is fined according to the ‘injured husband’s’ rank; mostly, however, such peccadillos are little noticed. Unnatural crimes are held conducive to health. * * *
The manners of ‘the perverse race of Kush’ are rough and free, especially compared with those of India, yet dashed with a queer African ceremoniousness. Their conversation turns wholly upon the subjects of women and money. With these optimists all that is is good, or, at least, it is not worth the trouble of a change for the better. They ‘make a stand upon the ancient way,’ and they hold that old custom, because it is old, must be fit for all time. This savage conservatism, combined with their traditional and now instinctive dread of the white face, and perhaps with a not unreasonable fear of present and future loss, has made them close the interior to Europeans. They have no especial dislike to, at the same time no fondness for, foreigners, who in mind as well as body are separated from them longo intervallo.
The characteristic good points of the coast race are careless merriment, an abundance of animal spirits; strong attachments and devoted family affection. There is amongst men an artificial fraternity which reminds us of the ‘fostering’ of Ireland and the ‘Lambmas brother and sister’ of the local Kermess, St Olla’s Fair: a similar brotherhood is found at Madagascar. Amongst the negro races generally each sucks or exchanges blood from an arm vein, and the two then swear relationship. The operation is called Ku chanjana and the oath Sare or Sogu,—the Arabs, by whose law it is forbidden, name it Mushátibeh. Girls, even though their parents be living, adopt a Kungwí or stead-mother, who may or who may not be of the family: the latter attends her ‘Mwari’ (adopted child) when the first ablution for puberty is performed, and at the wedding sits upon the couch till decency forbids. The connection reminds us of the Persian proverb, ‘The nurse is kinder than the mother.’ Like Orientals and certain peoples of Southern Europe, they make little distinction between near and distant relationship: a man’s son may come from the same city and his brother perhaps from the same province. So in West Africa ‘brother’ has an extensive signification.
The Wasawahili from Makdishu to Mozambique (Mussumbeg) are all Moslems and Shafei, as they were in the 14th century when Ibn Batuta reported them chaste and honest, peaceful and religious. Possibly under the orthodox denomination they may still preserve the heretical Zaydi tenets of their ancestors; but of this point I was not familiar enough with them to judge. If Persians, they must date from the days before the universal prevalence of Tashayyu (Shiitism), or they have abandoned their ancient faith. Feuds with the late Sayyid Said spread the school along the coast, and his Bayázi subjects became Sunnis in spite, even as Irishmen and Romans sometimes turn Protestants. El Islam, however, only fringes the Continent. With their savage irreverence for holy things, the Wasawahili calling themselves Moslems know little beyond the Kalmah, or profession of faith, rarely pray, and fast only by compulsion. Like Hindostanis, Persians, and Egyptians, nations professing El Islam at a distance from the fountainhead, amongst whom local usage has been largely incorporated with the pure practice of the Faith, they have retained a mass of superstitions and idolatries belonging to their pagan forefathers. They have a terror of the sorcerers, with whom Maskat is said to swarm, and they tell frightful stories of men transformed into hyænas, dogs, sheep, camels, and other animals. They defend themselves and their huts against evil spirits (Jánn) and bad men by Koranic versets, greegrees, and various talismans, mostly bought from the pagan Mganga or Medicine-man. They believe in alchemy and in Rimbwata, or love-philters, the latter, as usual in the East, containing various abominations. The slave girls from about Mangáo, a small port near Kilwa, are famous for concocting draughts which, after bringing on a possibly fatal sickness, subjugate for ever the affections of the patient. Similarly in India, Sind, Egypt, and Persia, no man will touch sherbet under the roof of his betrothed and prepared by her mother, unless his future father-in-law set him the example. Some of the Rimbwata or philters are peculiar: a few grains of Jowari are ‘forced’ in an exceptional way till they sprout; they are then pounded and mixed with the food. This harmless adhibition causes, say the people, either death by violent disease or intense affection. It is a superstition common to the Western East, and I have found it in India and Sind, in Peru and Egypt. Ghosts and larvæ haunt the houses in which men have died, a Fetish belief which does not properly belong to El Islam or to Christianity: the British Consulate has a had name on account of the terrible fate of its owner, the late Sayyid’s nephew. Descended from ‘devil-worshippers,’ the Wasawahili rather fear the ‘Shaytani’ than love Allah, and to the malignant powers of preternatural beings they attribute sickness and all the evils of human life. A Zanzibar negroid will not even fetch a leech from the marsh, for fear of offending him to whom the animal is ‘Ju-ju,’ or sacred.
Generally, the Msawahili Alim or literato, though capable of reading the Koran, cannot write a common Arabic letter. Some, however, attain high proficiency: I may quote as an instance the Kazi Muhiyy el Din. These negroids begin arithmetic early, a practice which, perhaps, they have learned from the Banyans. They excel in memory and in quickness of apprehension from early childhood to the age of puberty: the same has been remarked about the Arabs, and Anglo-Indians observe it in the natives of Hindostan. Whether at the virile epoch there is an arrest of development, or the brain suffers from exclusive, excessive obedience to the natural law, ‘increase and multiply’ and its consequent affections, is a question still to be settled. Boys are sent to school when aged seven, and finish their Khitmah (perlection of the Koran) in one to three years; after this they are usually removed to assist their fathers in the business of life.
Upon the Island the Msawahili child receives some corrupted Moslem name, as Taufiki (Taufik) Muamádi (Mohammed), Tani (Usman), Shibu (Nasib), Muhina (Muhinna), Usy (Ali), or Hadi. Upon the coast the appellations are mostly heathen: I may quote the following from the Benu Kendi tribe—Bori, Chumi, Kambi, Kangaya, Kirwasha, Mareka, Mkame, Mkhokho, Mombe, or Mwambe, Mwere, Nungu, Shangora, Shenkambi, Zingaji. The wilder Wasawahili communities adopt very characteristic compounds: such are Machuzi wa Shimha (fish-soup), Mrima-khonde (mountain plantation),[[106]] Mkata-Moyyo (cutter-out of heart), Khiro-kota (treasure trove), Mchupio wa Keti (leaper upon a chair), Mshindo-Mamba (conqueror of crocodile), Khombe la Simba (lion’s claw), Mguru Mfupi (short-legs), Mui’ Mvua (Mister rain), Mkia ya Nyani (monkey’s tail), Masimbi (cowries), and Ugali (stirabout).