arguing, says the witty author, so deep a devotion to that art which hath power to soothe the savage breast. With time and tune well developed, but wholly wanting in initiative, the wild men easily learned music from the missionaries; yet they have always preferred their own meaningless declamation. Of course the Kinyika is an illiterate language.
The policy of the Wanyika is a rude and lawless liberty, equality, fraternity. None commands where none obeys: consequently there is no ‘temperamentum of chief,’ no combination, and no possible improvement. The headman plies his hoe, like the serf, in his little plot of maize or manioc; and the clans will not unite even to protect life. Causes are decided by a council of elders, according to the great African code—ancient custom. The chief of the five Shaykhs is he of Rabai Mku; but even he dare not arrogate to himself any authority. Pilfering is common, robbing is rare; and a man caught in the act of stealing is chastised by the proprietor with sword or bow. Adultery is punished by the fine of a cow and abundance of liquor. The murderer is more often mulcted than handed over for death to the family of the slain; and little is said concerning the slaughter of a slave. Divided into half-a-dozen sub-tribes, each barely sufficient to stock an English village, these savages find petty political jealousies and intrigues as necessary and as ready to hand as do the highly civilized.
The Wanyika readily attended the European schools as long as these were a novelty; presently, with the characteristic African levity and inconsequence, they grew weary of application, and they dubbed all who so exerted themselves Wazingu, or fools. Yet in one point they are an anomaly. They possess, in a high degree, the gift of many negro and negroid races, an unstudied eloquence which the civilized speaker might envy, and which, like poetry, seems to flourish most in the dawn of civilization. To see, says a Brazilian author, men so eloquent and so badly governed does not suggest that public speaking in the virility of civilization is a great ruling power. Their unpremeditated speech rolls like a torrent; every limb takes its part in the great work of persuasion, and the peculiar rhythm of their copious dialect, favourable to such displays of oratory, forms an effective combination. Few, however, can ‘follow the words,’ that is to say, answer in due order the heads of an opponent’s speech. Such power of memory and logical faculty is not in them. The abuse of the gift of language makes them boisterous in conversation, unable to keep silence—the negro race is ever loquacious—and addicted to ‘bending their tongues like their bows for lies.’ They cannot even, to use a Zanzibar German merchant’s phrase, ‘lie honestly.’ Their character may thus be briefly summed up: a futile race of barbarians, drunken and immoral; cowardly and destructive; boisterous and loquacious; indolent, greedy, and thriftless. Their redeeming points are, a tender love of family, which displays itself by the most violent ‘kin-grief,’ and a strong attachment to an uninviting home.
A certain critic, who had probably never transgressed the bounds of Europe, but who probably had read Macaulay (‘by judicious selection and previous exaggeration, the intellect and the disposition of any human being might be described as being made up of nothing but startling contrasts’), thus complained of my description of Somal inconsistency. ‘This affectionately-atrocious people,’ he declares, ‘is painted in strangely opposite colours.’ Can we not, then, conceive the high development of destructiveness and adhesiveness, to speak phrenologically, combining in the same individual? And are not the peasantry of Connaught a familiar instance of the phenomenon? Such is the negro’s innate destructiveness, that I have rarely seen him drop or break an article without a loud burst of laughter. During fires at Zanzibar he appears like a fiend, waving brands over his head, dancing with delight, and spreading the flames, as much from instinct as with the object of plunder. On the other hand, he will lose his senses with grief for the death of near relatives: I have known several men who remained in this state for years. But why enlarge upon what is apparent to the most superficial observer’s eye?
The male dress is a tanned skin or a cotton cloth tied round the waist, strips of hairy cowhide are bound like garters, or the ‘hibás’ of the Bedawin Arabs, below the knee, and ostrich and other feathers are stuck in the tufty poll. The ornaments are earrings of brass or iron wire, and small metal chains: around the neck and shoulders, arms and ankles, hang beads, leather talisman-cases, and ‘ghost-chairs’—the latter usually some article difficult to obtain, for instance, a leopard’s claw. Those near the seaboard have ceased to extract one or more of the lower incisors—a custom whose object was probably the facilitating of expectoration—and they now rarely tattoo, saying, ‘Why should we spoil our bodies?’ They have abandoned the decoration to women, who raise the cutis with a long sharp thorn, prick it with a knife-point, and wash the wounds with red ochre and water. Abroad the Mnyika carries his bow and long skin-quiver full of reed arrows, tipped with iron or hard wood, and poisoned by means of some bulbous root: his shield is a flat strip of cowhide doubled or trebled. He has also a spear, a knife at his waist for cutting cocoa-nuts, a Rungu or knobstick in his girdle behind, and a long sword, half sheathed, and sharpened near the point. He hangs round his neck a gourd sneeze-mull, containing powdered tobacco with fragrant herbs and dried plantain-flower. On journeys he holds a long thin staff surmounted by a little cross, which serves to churn his blood and milk, a common article of diet in East Africa—similarly, the Lapps bleed their reindeer. He also slings to his back a dwarf three-legged stool, cut out of a single block of hard wood. In the ‘Reise auf dem Weissen Nil’ (p. 32), extracted from the Vicar-General Knoblecher’s Journals, we read of the chief Nighila and his followers carrying stools of tree-stumps, ornamented with glass-ware. The other approximations of custom, character, and climate between the North Equatorial basin of the White River (Nile) and the coast of Eastern Intertropical Africa are exceedingly interesting.
The costume of the Domus Aurea and Rosa Mystica is as simple: a skin or a cloth round the loins, another veiling the bosom, and in some cases a Marinda or broad lappet of woven beads, like the Coëoo of Guiana, falling in front, with a second of wider dimensions behind. A flat ruff of thick brass wire encircles the throat, making the head appear as in a barber’s dish; white and red beads, or the scarlet beans of the Abrus tree, form the earrings and necklace, bracelets and anklets, whilst a polished coil of brass wire, wound round a few inches of the leg below the knee, sets off the magnificent proportions of the limb. Young girls wear long hair, and the bold bairn takes his bow and arrows before thinking of a waist-cloth.
The Wanyika are a slave importing tribe: they prefer the darker women of the South to, and they treat them better than, their own wives. Children are sold, as in India, only if famine compels, and all have the usual hatred of slave merchants, the ‘sellers of men.’ When a certain Ali bin Nasir was Governor of Mombasah he took advantage of a scarcity to feed the starving Wanyika with grain from the public depôts. He was careful, however, to secure, as pledges of repayment, the wives and children of his debtors, and these becoming insolvent, he sold off the whole deposit. Such a transaction was little suspected by our acute countrymen, when, to honour enlightened beneficence, they welcomed with all the plaudits of Exeter Hall, ‘that enlightened Arab statesman, His Excellency Ali bin Nasir, Envoy Extraordinary of H.M. the Imam of Muscat, to the Court of H. B. Majesty;’ presented him with costly specimens of geology, and gold chronometers; entertained him at the public expense, and sent him from Aden to Zanzibar in the Hon. East India Company’s brig of war, Tigris. This Oriental votary of free trade came to a merited bad end. He was one of the prisoners taken by the doughty B’ana Mtakha of Sewi, where the late Sayyid’s ill-starved and worse-managed force was destroyed by the Bajuni spear. Recognized by the vengeful savages, he saw his sons expire in torments; he was terribly mutilated, and at last he was put to death with all the refinements of cruelty. And he deserved his fate.
The Wanyika consider service, like slavery, a dishonour: they have also some food prejudices which render them troublesome to Europeans, and those who live amongst them are obliged to engage Moslem menials. As regards the success of the ‘Mombas Mission,’ which was established in 1846, and upon which a large sum of money has been expended, the less said the better. Dr Krapf had started with the magnificent but visionary scheme of an ‘Apostle’s Street,’ a chain of mission posts stretching across Africa from sea to sea: he never, however, made converts enough to stock a single house. Those unacquainted with savage life would think it an easy task to overthrow the loose fabric of wild superstitions, and to raise upon its ruins a structure, rude, but still of higher type. Practically, the reverse is the case. The Wanyika, for instance, are so bound and chained by Adá, or custom, that inevitable public opinion, whose tyranny will not permit a man to sow his lands when he pleases; so daunted and cowed by the horrors of their faith; so thoroughly conservative in the worst sense of the word, and so enmeshed by tribal practices, of which not the least important is their triple initiation, that the slave of rule and precedent lacks power to set himself free. We may easily understand this. Religion is the mental expression of a race, and it cannot advance in purity without a correspondent intellectual improvement on the part of its votaries. On the other hand, not a few nations, especially in the dawn of civilization, have risen despite their follies of faith: but these are peoples who have within them the germs of progress. Judaism did not make the Falasha of East Africa, nor the remote colonists of Southern Arabia, an intellectual people: the Jews of Aden, to this day, show no traces of mental superiority over their neighbours. Christianity has done nothing for Abyssinia or Egypt: these lands are inhabited by peoples which have remained as nearly stationary as it is possible for human nature. Nowhere, indeed, has ‘the Church’ proved herself in the long course of ages a more complete and hopeless failure than in her own birthplace, and in her peculiar ethnic centre, Syria. Here the Marronites are in no ways superior, and in many points, such as courage and personal dignity, inferior to their neighbours, the Metawali, who have a debased religion, and the Druzes, who have none. El Islam, also, has not much to boast of on the coasts of Guinea and of Zanzibar, except that it has abolished certain abominations such as witch-killing, twin-murder, and poison ordeals, of which many have been practised in semi-civilized Europe and Asia. When, therefore, we tell the world that the Bible made England or the Koran Stambul, we merely assist in propagating a fallacy.
CHAPTER V.
FROM MOMBASAH TO THE PANGANI RIVER.
The sweeping sword of Time