It is unquestionably an advantage that the East African negro should develop a taste for civilized attire. In no more useful and innocent direction could his wants be multiplied and his desires excited, and it is by this process of assimilation that his life will gradually be made more complicated, more varied, less crudely animal, and himself raised to a higher level of economic utility. But it would surely be worth while to organize and guide this new motive force within graceful and appropriate limits. A Government runs risks when it intrudes upon the domain of fashion; but when a veritable abyss of knowledge and science separates the rulers from the ruled, when authority is dealing with a native race still plunged in its primary squalour, without religion, without clothes, without morals, but willing to emerge and capable of emerging, such risks may fairly be accepted; and the Government might well prescribe or present suitable robes for ceremonial occasions to the chiefs, and gradually encourage, and more gradually still enforce, their adoption throughout the population.
After the dance it had been arranged that I should go as far as the bank of the Tana River to see the view of Mount Kenya, and then return to the Thika camp before night. But when the whole splendid panorama of the trans-Tana country opened upon us, I could not bring myself to stop short of the promised land; and, casting away material cares of luncheon and baggage, I decided to ride through to Embo, twenty-eight miles from Fort Hall, and our most advanced post in this direction. We crossed the Tana by a ferry which travels along a rope under the impulsion of the current. The ponies swam the deep, strong, sixty-yard stream of turbulent red water. On the farther bank the country is really magnificent in quality and aspect. The centre of the picture is always Mount Kenya; but there never was a mountain which made so little of its height. It rises by long gentle slopes, more like a swelling of ground than a peak, from an immense upland plain, and so gradual is the acclivity that, but for the sudden outcrop of snow-clad rock which crowns the summit, no one would believe it over eighteen thousand feet high. It is its gradual rise that imparts so great a value to this noble mountain; for about its enormous base and upon its slopes, traversed by hundreds of streams of clear perennial water, there grows, or may grow, in successive, concentric belts, every kind of crop and forest known in the world, from the Equator to the Arctic Circle. The landscape is superb. In beauty, in fertility, in verdure, in the coolness of the air, in the abundance of running water, in its rich red soil, in the variety of its vegetation, the scenery about Kenya far surpasses anything I have ever seen in India or South Africa, and challenges comparison with the fairest countries of Europe. Indeed, looking at it with an eye fresh from Italy, I was most powerfully reminded of the upper valleys of the Po.
We rode on all day through this delicious country, along a well-kept native road, smooth enough for a bicycle, except where it crossed stream after stream on primitive bridges. On every side the soil was cultivated and covered with the crops of a large and industrious population. It is only a year since regular control was established beyond the Tana, not without some bloodshed, by a small military expedition. Yet so peaceful are the tribes—now that their intertribal fighting has been stopped—that white officers ride freely about among their villages without even carrying a pistol. All the natives met with on the road were armed with sword and spear, and all offered us their customary salutations, while many came up smiling and holding out long, moist, delicate-looking hands for me to shake, till I had quite enough of it. Indeed, the only dangers of the road appear to be from the buffaloes which infest the country, and after nightfall place the traveller in real peril. We were very glad for this reason, and also because we had eaten nothing but a banana each since early morning, to see at last on the top of the next hill the buildings of Embo just as the sun sank beneath the horizon.
Embo is a model station, only five months old—one small, three-roomed house for the District Commissioner, one for the military officer, an office, and a tiny jail, all in good dressed stone; two Indian shops in corrugated iron; and seven or eight long rows of beehive grass huts for a hundred and fifty soldiers and police. Two young white officers—a civilian and a soldier—preside from this centre of authority, far from the telegraph, over the peace and order of an area as large as an English county, and regulate the conduct and fortunes of some seventy-five thousand natives, who have never previously known or acknowledged any law but violence or terror. They were uncommonly surprised to see four horsemen come riding up the zigzag path to their dwelling; but their astonishment was no bar to their hospitality, and we were soon rewarded for our journey and our fasting in most excellent fashion.
I had just time before the darkness flooded the land and blotted out the mighty mountain and its wreaths of fire-tipped cloud to walk round this station. The jail consisted of a single room, barred and bolted. Inside not a prisoner was to be seen. I inquired where they were, and was shown two little groups seated round fires in the open. They were chained together by a light running chain, and after a hard day's miscellaneous work about the station they chatted peacefully as they cooked and ate their evening meal. The prison was only their shelter for the night—primitive arrangements, no doubt, but are they more barbarous than the hideous, long-drawn precision of an English convict establishment?
The African protectorates now administered by the Colonial Office afford rare scope for the abilities of earnest and intelligent youth. A man of twenty-five may easily find himself ruling a large tract of country and a numerous population. The Government is too newly established to have developed the highly centralized and closely knit—perhaps too closely knit—hierarchy and control of the Indian system. It is far too poor to afford a complete Administration. The District Commissioner must judge for himself, and be judged upon his actions. Very often—for tropical diseases make many gaps in the ranks, and men must often return to England to recruit their health—the officer is not a District Commissioner at all, but a junior acting in his stead or in some one's stead, sometimes for a year or more. To him there come day by day the natives of the district with all their troubles, disputes, and intrigues. Their growing appreciation of the impartial justice of the tribunal leads them increasingly to carry all sorts of cases to the District Commissioner's Court. When they are ill they come and ask for medicine. When they are wounded in their quarrels it is to the white man they go to have the injuries dressed. Disease and accident have to be combated without professional skill. Courts of justice and forms of legality must be maintained without lawyers. Taxes have to be collected by personal influence. Peace has to be kept with only a shadow of force.
All these great opportunities of high service, and many others, are often and daily placed within the reach of men in their twenties—on the whole with admirable results. It was most pleasant to hear with what comprehension and sympathy the officers of the East Africa Protectorate speak about their work; and how they regard themselves as the guardians of native interests and native rights against those who only care about exploiting the country and its people. No one can travel even for a little while among the Kikuyu tribes without acquiring a liking for these light-hearted, tractable, if brutish children, or without feeling that they are capable of being instructed and raised from their present degradation. There are more than four million aboriginals in East Africa alone. Their care imposes a grave, and I think an inalienable, responsibility upon the British Government. It will be an ill day for these native races when their fortunes are removed from the impartial and august administration of the Crown and abandoned to the fierce self-interest of a small white population. Such an event is no doubt very remote. Yet the speculator, the planter, and the settler are knocking at the door. There are many things which ought to be done—good, wise, scientific, and justly profitable. If the Government cannot find the money to develop the natural economic strength of the country, to make its communications, to start its industries, can it with any reason bar the field to private enterprise? Can it prevent the ingress of a white population? Ought it to do so, and for how long? What is to happen when there are thirty thousand white people in East Africa, instead of the three thousand or so who make so much stir at the present time? Perhaps the course of these chapters will lead us back again to these questions. I am very doubtful whether it will supply their answers.
We have a discussion in the evening on a much more manageable subject. The District Commissioner at Embo has been ordered by the High Court of the Protectorate to retry a criminal case which he had settled some months before, on account of an informality in the report of the proceedings, which had excited the attention of the revising authority. It is pointed out that neither the accused nor his fellow-natives understand, or can ever be made to understand, the meaning of this repetition of a trial; that they are bewildered; that their confidence in their personal ruler may be weakened; that endless practical difficulties—for instance, the collection of witnesses scattered about in distant villages, and the disquietude caused to them by a second summons from the strange, mysterious power called "Government"—arise out of an error which only a lawyer could detect, and which only appears upon a piece of paper. "Some one," quaintly says a young civil officer, who has ridden over with us, "forgot to say 'Bo!' in the right place." I ask the nature of the "Bo!" It is certainly substantial. No mention was made in the report of the trial that the accused was given the opportunity of cross-examining the hostile witnesses. Therefore, although this was in fact done, the trial is held to be no trial, and ordered anew.
Now, here is again a balancing of disadvantages; but without here examining whether a simple release would not have been better than a retrial, I find myself plainly on the side of the "Bo!" There is scarcely anything more important in the government of men than the exact—I will even say the pedantic—observance of the regular forms by which the guilt or innocence of accused persons is determined. Those forms are designed to protect the prisoner, not merely from the consequences of honest forgetfulness in his judges, but from systematic carelessness and possible oppression. Once they are allowed to be loosely construed the whole system of civilized jurisprudence begins to crumble, and in its place there is gradually erected a rough-and-ready practice dependent entirely for its efficiency and fairness upon the character and intelligence of the individual responsible. Necessary as it is to trust to personal authority in the control of native races of the lowest standard, it is not less necessary to assign well-marked limits to that authority, and, above all, to place the simple primary rights of accused persons to what we at home are accustomed to call a "fair trial" outside its scope. Nor does the administrator really suffer in native eyes from the apparition into his domain of superior authority. The tribesmen see that their ruler—to them all-powerful, the man of soldiers and police, of punishment and reward—is himself obedient to some remote external force, and they wonder what that mysterious force can be and marvel dimly at its greatness. Authority is enhanced and not impaired by the suggestion of immense reserves behind and above the immediate ruler—strong though he be. But upon this, as upon other matters, it is not necessary for every one to be of the same opinion; and even lawyers are not always wise.
On our homeward ride in the early morning we passed a Swahili village. These Mohammedans have penetrated deeply and established themselves widely in the Eastern parts of Africa. Armed with a superior religion and strengthened with Arab blood, they maintain themselves without difficulty at a far higher level than the pagan aboriginals among whom they live. Their language has become a sort of lingua franca over all this part of the world. As traders they are welcomed, as fighting men they are respected, and as sorcerers they are feared by all the tribes. Their Khan had supplied us with bananas on the previous day with many expressions of apology that, as we were unexpected, he had no "European food." To-day all this was repaired. The men of the village, to the number of perhaps fifty, walked sedately out to meet us, their long white smocks in striking contrast to the naked, painted barbarians who surrounded them. The Khan led up a white Arab stallion, of vicious temper and tripling gait, to replace my wearied pony; and then produced tea and a familiar tin of mixed biscuits, which he had over-night sent runners to procure, that his hospitality might incur no reproach.