The ‘cloud-light’ was that of our English climate: the scenery around us reminded my companion of Almorah, me of the Blue Mountains in Southern India. There were the same rounded cones, fertilized by rainy winds, tapestried with velvety grass, and ribbon’d with paths of red clay; the same ‘Sholas,’ black forest patches clothing the slopes; the same emerald swamps through which transparent runnels continually trickled, and little torrents and rocky linns. Here, however, we find a contrast of aspects: the Northern and Eastern slopes are bluff and barren, whilst the Southern and Western teem with luxuriant vegetation. The reeking and well-irrigated plains to the West are well wooded, and we were shown the water of Masindi, a long narrow tank, upon whose banks elephants, they say, abound. N. Westward the mountains are apparently higher and steeper, and about 10 miles farther West the giant flanks of Makumbara, whose head was capped with cloud-heaps, bound our prospect. We now stood about 4000 feet above sea level; 37 direct miles from the coast, and 74 to 75 along the winding river.
After another three-mile walk along the flanks of domed hills, and crossing a shallow burn which seemed to freeze our parched feet, we turned a corner and suddenly sighted, upon the summit of a grassy cone opposite, an unfenced heap of haycock huts, a cluster of bee-hives with concentric rings—Fuga. As we drew near, our Baloch formed up and fired a volley, which brought out of the settlement the hind and his wife, and his whole meine. This being one of the cities forbidden to strangers, we were led by Wazira through timid crowds, that shrank back as we approached, to four tattered huts, standing about 300 feet below the settlement, and assigned by superstition as a traveller’s bungalow. Even the son and heir of great Kimwere must here abide till the lucky hour admits him to the royal city and presence. The cold rain and the sharp rarified air, which would have been a tonic in a well-appointed sanitarium, rendered any shelter acceptable: we cleared the hovels of sheep and goats, housed our valuables, and sent Sidi Bombay to the Sultan, requesting the honour of an interview.
Before dark appeared three bare-headed Mdoe or Ministers, who declared in a long palaver that council must squat upon two knotty points. Primò, why and wherefore had we entered the king’s country viâ the hostile Wazegura? Secundò, when would his Majesty’s Mganga or Magician priest find an hour propitious for the ceremony? Sharp-witted Hamdan, at once and unprompted, declared us to be also Waganga, men whose powers extended to measuring the moon and stars, and to controlling the wind and rain. Away ran the ministers to report the wonder, and whilst they are absent I will briefly explain what in these regions a Mganga is.
The Mganga in Angola Nganga, called by the Arabs Bassár (seer) and Tabíb (physician), and by us priest, magician, rain-doctor, and medicine-man, combines, as these translations show, medical with supernatural powers: he may be considered the embryo of a sacerdotal order amongst the embryo civilizations of man. Thus Siberia has Shamans, and Greenland Angekoks; North America Medicine-men, and South America Pagés: the Galla believes in his Kalishah, the Kru Republic in her Deyabos, the Congo in Fetish-men, and the Cape Kafirs in witch doctors, who, with certain of the missionaries, have ever been the chief originators of our colonial troubles. In Eastern Africa, from the Somali country southwards, the rains, so wearisome to the traveller, are a boon to the savage, who, especially in the sub-tropical regions and those beyond the path of the sun, sees during droughts his children and cattle dying of hunger and thirst. Rain-charming is the popular belief of Africa, where the new comer’s reception will generally depend upon the state of the weather. The demand produces a supply of intellectuals, who, for the consideration of a lazy monastic kind of life, abundant respect from an ignorant laity, and the great political influence which they command, boldly assert an empire over the meteors. The folly is not confined, be it said, to these barbarous lands: in Ireland the owner of a four-leaved shamrock can or could cause or stop showers, and the Fins on board our ships still deal with the clerk of the weather for fair winds. The Hindu Jogi, the Bayragi, and the Sita-Rami have similar powers: at Porebunder I heard of a man who, when torrents of rain injured the crops, was threatened by the Raja with a ‘cotton coat,’ that is to say, with a padded dressing-gown, well oiled and greased, girt tightly round him, and set on fire. In civilization the last remnant of the barbarous belief is the practice of public prayer for rain, a process far less troublesome and not nearly so efficacious as planting trees and preserving the land from being disforested. During the last threatened drought in Syria the people of Bayrut assembled in the main square, all separated into groups according to their faiths, of which there are a couple of dozen. One party was of children, who, when the seniors failed, thus addressed heaven: ‘O Lord, if Thou disregard the petitions of our parents, they being sinners, and so forth, at least listen to us, being still in our virginal innocence!’ But the rain did not come, and the innocents went away unwhipped. Had the late Fuad Pasha been there he would, before sanctioning the assemblage, have consulted a meteorologist.
Near the Line it is easy to predict rain, and with thermometer and hygrometer—the latter far better than a barometer—man should never make a mistake. The Mganga delays his incantations till mists gather upon the mountain-tops and the Fetish is finished, as the cooling air can no longer support the superabundant moisture. Success brings both solid pudding and empty praise: failure, the trifling inconvenience of changing residence. Amongst the fiercer races, however, the wizard not unfrequently falls a victim to hope deferred, and there are parts of Africa where, as the venerable Mr Moffat says, he seldom, if ever, dies upon his mat.
The Mganga of Usumbara has manifold duties. He must as often be a rain-stopper as a rain-healer. He sprinkles the stranger with the blood of sheep and other medicines, the aspersory being a cow’s tail: upon the departing guest he gently spits, bidding him go in peace and do the people no harm. He marks ivory with magic signs, to ensure the tusk safely reaching the coast. During sickness he lays the ghost or haunting fiend, and applies the rude simples which here act ‘second causes.’ He presides at the savage ordeals. If the Sultan lose health or a villager die, he finds out the guilty one that bewitched the sufferer, and hands him over to the ‘secular arm’ for burning, cutting to pieces, or other such well-merited doom. Here, unless well fee’d, he thrusts into the accused’s mouth a red-hot hatchet, which has no power to burn the innocent or the strong-nerved guilty: in other parts he makes him or her swallow a cup of poison, which is duly tempered for the wealthy. In Usumbara the instrument of his craft is a bundle of small sticks: these form, when thrown upon the ground, certain figures: hence the Arabs translate Báo, or Uganga—the Mganga’s art—by Raml or Geomancy, whose last and ignoblest form is the ‘Book of Fate,’ attributed to Napoleon I. Similarly in Kafir land, sorcerers use sticks or bones, which are supposed to have the power of motion.
The Waganga are mostly open to the persuasions of cloth and beads. One saw the spirit of a pale-face occupying a chair which was brought as a present to King Kimwere, and broadly insinuated that none but the wise deserved such seat. But let not the reader suppose that these men are pure impostors. It would be, indeed, a subtle task to trace how far those who deal in the various mysteries called supernaturalisms are deceived or are deceivers, impostors or believers. Fools and knaves there are, of course, in abundance; but there is a residue, a tertium quid, which is neither one nor the other, and yet which custom and education condemn to act like both. Mental reservation and pious frauds are certainly not monopolized by civilization, nor by any stage of society. There is no folly conceivable by the mind of man in which man has not honestly, firmly, and piously placed his trust. And when man lays down his life, or gives up everything which makes life worth living for, in testimony to his belief, he proves conclusively, not the truth of his tenets, but that he believed them to be true: he compels us to wonder at the obstinacy, rather than to admire the fortitude, of the martyr.
The word Bassár, a seer, forms, I may here remark, a connecting link between the mental sight of the Arabs, the second-sight of Scotland, and, to mention no others, the clairvoyance of modern mesmerism. It alludes to that abnormal exertion of the will, sometimes verging upon the ecstatic state, which enables the brain to behold before it, and without external sight, a panorama of the past, the present and the future; whilst a thousand instances have shown that such scenic exhibitions of things absolutely unknown to the seer have actually come to pass. Almost invariably also the Mganga has, or induces, the ‘disease which precedes the power to divine’; and he attributes it to ancestral ghosts, which would now be called spirits.
At 6 P. M. the ‘Ministers’ ran back, and summoned us, breathless, to the ‘Palace.’ They led the way, through wind, and rain, and gathering gloom, to a clump of the usual huts, half hidden by trees, and spreading over a little eminence opposite to and below Fuga. We were allowed but three Baloch as escort. Their matchlocks were taken away, and a demand was put in for our swords, which of course we insisted upon retaining. The natural suspiciousness of the negro is always exaggerated by being in the neighbourhood of a more advanced race. Here even Hamdan became a Rustam.
Sultan Kimwere half rose from his couch as we entered, and motioned us to sit upon low stools in front of him. The Simba wa Muigni—Lion of the Lord[[41]]—was an old, old man (un vieux vieux), with emaciated frame, a beardless, wrinkled face like a grandam’s, a shaven head, disfurnished jaws, and hands and feet stained with leprous spots. We saw nothing of the ‘lion-like royal personage,’ the ‘tall and corpulent form with engaging features,’ and the ‘large eyes, red and penetrating, which cast a powerful look’ upon Dr Krapf in September, 1848, when the ‘king’ visited him, with a Highland tail and heralds singing out, ‘O Lion!’ His subjects declare him to be a centagenarian, and he is certainly dying of age and decay—the worst of diseases. The royal dress was a Surat cap much the worse for wear, and a loin-wrap as tattered. He was covered, as he lay upon his Jágá, or cot of bamboo and cowskin, with the doubled cotton cloth called in India a ‘do-pattá,’ and he rested upon a Persian rug apparently coeval with his person.