We found unexpectedly at Mvíta—the ‘Mombas Mission’ having been kindly received—a reception which could not be called friendly. Small communities are rarely remarkable for amiability, and these citizens are taxed by the rest of the coast-people with overweening pride, insolence of manner, bigotry and evil speaking, turbulence and treachery. They cannot forget their ancient glories, their hereditary chiefs who ruled like kings with Wazirs, Shayhks of tribes and Amirs or chief captains commanding hosts of savage warriors. Of course they regret the Mazara whom they themselves were the first to betray—they would betray them again and regret them again to-morrow. Like all ‘civilized’ Africans, they are not only treacherous and turbulent, but also inveterate thieves and pilferers: few travellers have failed to miss some valuable in the boat that lands them. Lies were plentiful as pronouns. Whilst some for their own purposes made very light of travel in the interior, others studiously exaggerated the expense, the difficulty, and the danger; and recounted the evils which had befallen Dr Krapf because he refused to take their advice. As I determined to disregard both, so they combined to regard us as rivals and enemies. They devoted all their energies to the task of spoiling us; and failing in that matter, they tried bullying: on one occasion I was obliged to administer, sword in hand, the descent down-stairs. The Jemadar Tangai, a gaunt Mekrani some 60 years old, and measuring 6 ft 2 in., insisted courteously upon supplying an escort, with the view of exchanging his worthless swords for our guns and revolvers: he could neither read nor write, but he was renowned for ‘’Akl,’ intellect, here synonymous with rascality. His son Mustafa brought a present of goats and fruit, for which he received the normal return-gift; he expected a little cloth, gunpowder, and a gold chronometer. We were visited by a certain Shafei Shaykh; by a Mombasah merchant, Jabir bin Abdullah el Rijebi, who seemed to think that men should speak in his presence with bated breath: he almost merited and he narrowly escaped being led out of the room by his ears. The very Hindus required a lesson of civility. We were on the best of terms with the Wali or Governor, Khalfan bin Ali el Bu Saídí, a fine specimen of the Arab gentlemen: he was on board when the Sayyid died, and he told us all the particulars of that event. But the manifest animus of the public was such as to make a residence at Mombasah by no means pleasant to us.
Considering the intense curiosity of civilized humanity to know something of its fellow-men in the state so-called of nature, of the savages which now represent our remote ancestors, I proceed to sketch the typical tribe of this part of Africa. My principal authority is M. Rebmann, who during nine years has made a conscientious study of the race, and who imparted his knowledge with the greatest courtesy.
The name ‘Wanyika’ means People of the Nyika,[[18]] or wild land: it is useless, with M. G. de Bunsen, to identify their land with the Νίχωνος ὅρμος of the Periplus, as every wilderness is here called Nyika. Moreover, the name is not anciently known upon the coast: we read of the Wakilindi-ni and of the ‘Muzungulos,’ the plundering tribe which occupied the terra firma of Mombasah, and thus we may suspect the Wanyika to be a race which has emigrated from the interior since the middle of the 17th century. Their own tradition is that they were expelled by the Gallas from the lands lying N.N. West of Melinde. They occupy the highlands between S. lat. 3° and 5°, and they are bounded north by the Wataita, and south by the Wasumbara. Dr Krapf proposes for them a census of 50,000 to 60,000 souls, which appears greatly exaggerated. They are, as usual, divided into a multitude of clans, concerning which we know little but the names. Mulattoes of an early date, negroes mixed with Semitic blood and with a score of tribes, these East African families appear to have cast off in the course of ages the variety and irregularity of hybridism; moreover, if it be true that ‘the Semite is the flower of the negro race,’ the produce would hardly be properly called half-caste. Receiving for ages distinct impressions of the physical media around them, they have settled down into several and uniform national types: these, however, will not be detected by the unpractised eye. Many considerations argue them to be a degeneracy from civilized man rather than a people advancing towards cultivation. Their language attaches them to the great South African race, and some have believed in their ancient subjection to the Ethiopian or Kushite Empire. The historian of these lands, however, has to grope through the glooms of the past, guided only by the power to avail himself of the dimmest present lights. I vehemently doubt, moreover, the antiquity of maritime races in Tropical Africa—a subject which has been discussed in my sundry studies of the Western Coast. A case in point is the latest move of the pastoral Wamasai.
Physically the Wanyika race is not inferior to other negroids, nor degraded as is the Congo negro. Like the Galla and the Somal, the skull is pyramido-oval, flattened and depressed at the moral region of the phrenologist—a persistent form amongst savages and barbarians—and straight or ‘wall-sided’ above the ears, a shape common both to ‘Semite’ and negro. The features are ‘Hamitic’ only from the eyes downwards: the brow is moderately high, broad, and conical; the orbits are tolerably distant; the face is somewhat broad and plain, with well-developed zygomata; the nose is depressed with patulated nostrils, coarse and ill-turned; the lips are bordés, fleshy and swelling, and the jaw is distinctly prognathous. The beard is scant; the hair, which though wiry, yet grows comparatively long, is shaved off the forehead from ear to ear, and hangs down in the thinnest of corkscrews, stiffened with fat. The skin is soft, but the effluvium is distinctly African; the colour is chocolate-brown and rarely black, unless the mother be a slave from the South. The figure is, like the features, Semitic above and negrotic below. The head is well seated upon broad shoulders; the chest is ample, and the stomach, except in early boyhood or in old age, does not protrude or depend. But the bunchy calf is placed near the ham; the shin-bone bends forward, and the foot is large, flat, and lark-heeled. Nothing is more remarkable than the contrast between form and face in the woman-kind: upon the lower limbs, especially the haunches, of the Medicean Venus a hideous ape-like phiz meets the disappointed eye: above hangs a flaccid bosom, below
wand-like is
Her middle falling still,
And rising whereas women rise—
Imagine nothing ill!
There is not, as amongst the Hottentots, that exaggeration of the steatopyga which assimilates the South African man to his ovines: the subcutaneous fat overlying the gluteian muscles and their adjacents, forms in early life a cushion rather ornamental than otherwise. Young men often show a curious little crupper which gives a whimsical appearance to the posterior surface—I have observed this also amongst the Somal. The favourite standing position is cross-legged, a posture unknown to Europe; sometimes the sole of one foot is applied to the ankle or to the knee of the other leg: the gait—no two nations walk exactly alike—is half-stride, half-lounge. Eyes wild and staring, abrupt gestures, harsh, loud, and barking voices, still evidence the ignoble savage.
The Wanyika afford a curious study of rudimental mind. A nation of semi-naturals as regards moral and intellectual matters, their ideas are all in confusion. To the incapacity of childhood they unite the hard-headedness of age, and with the germs of thought that make a Bacon or a Shakespeare they combine an utter incapability of developing them. Their religion is of the ‘small’ category, the large being Brahmanism and Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and El Islam, the first active Reformation of its predecessor, and the triumph of Arianism over Athanasianism. The system is that of a ‘Gentile worshipping nothing,’ yet feeling instinctively that there is a Something above or beyond him. It is the vain terror of our childhood rudely systematized, the earliest dawn of faith, a creation of fear which ignores love. Thus they have not, in our sense of the words, God or devil,[[19]] heaven or hell, soul or spirit.