My African Journey

by Winston Churchill

I have written of Europeans and Asiatics. What of the African? About four millions of these dark folk are comprised within the districts of the East Africa Protectorate which are actually or partially administered. Many more lie beyond those wide and advancing boundaries. What is to be their part in shaping the future of their country? It is, after all, their Africa. What are they going to do for it, and what is it going to do for them? "The natives," says the planter, "evince a great reluctance to work, especially to work regularly." "They must be made to work," say others. "Made to work for whom?" we innocently ask. "For us, of course," is the ready answer; "what did you think we meant?" And here we run into another herd of rhinoceros questions—awkward, thick-skinned, and horned, with a short sight, an evil temper, and a tendency to rush blindly up wind upon any alarm. Is the native idle? Does he not keep himself and pay his taxes? Or does he loll at his ease while his three or four wives till the soil, bear the burden, and earn his living? And if idle, has he a right to remain idle—a naked and unconscious philosopher, living "the simple life," without cares or wants,—a gentleman of leisure in a panting world? Is that to be the last word? Is civilization to say definitely that when the African native has kept himself, or made his women keep him, she has no further claim upon him? The white man shall do the rest. He shall preserve the peace, that the tribes may prosper and multiply. His watchful and foreseeing eye, strained and weary with the effort, shall still make provision against famine; his science, though he himself goes down in the struggle, shall grapple with pestilence and cure disease. Far from his home or from his family he shall hew the trees and dig the wells, shall dam the streams and build the roads, with anxious heart and "in the sweat of his brow," according to the curse laid upon the child of many wants, while the child of few wants watches him from the shade and thinks him mad.

And to compare the life and lot of the African aboriginal—secure in his abyss of contented degradation, rich in that he lacks everything and wants nothing—with the long nightmare of worry and privation, of dirt and gloom and squalour, lit only by gleams of torturing knowledge and tantalizing hope, which constitutes the lives of so many poor people in England and Scotland, is to feel the ground tremble under foot. "It would never do to have a lot of 'mean whites' in this country," I heard one day a gentleman say. "It would destroy the respect of the native for the white man, if he saw what miserable people we have got at home." So here, at any rate, the boot is on the other leg, and Civilization is ashamed of her arrangements in the presence of a savage, embarrassed lest he should see what lies behind the gold and purple robe of State, and begin to suspect that the all-powerful white man is a fraud. But this is an irrelevancy!

I am clearly of opinion that no man has a right to be idle, whoever he be or wherever he lives. He is bound to go forward and take an honest share in the general work of the world. And I do not except the African native. To a very much larger extent than is often recognized by some who discuss these questions, the natives are industrious, willing to learn, and capable of being led forward. Live for a few weeks, as I have done, in close association with the disciplined soldiers of the King's African Rifles, or with the smart sailors of the Uganda Marine, and it seems wonderful to contrast them with the population from which they have emerged. How strong, how good-natured, how clever they are! How proud their white officers are of them! What pains they take to please the travellers whom they escort; how frankly they are delighted by a word of praise or thanks! Just and honourable discipline, careful education, sympathetic comprehension, are all that is needed to bring a very large proportion of the native tribes of East Africa to a far higher social level than that at which they now stand. And why should men only be taught to be soldiers? Is war always to have the best of everything? Cannot peaceful industry be made as attractive, be as highly organized, as carefully studied as the combined use of deadly weapons? "Why," as Ruskin asks, "cannot men take pride in building villages instead of only carrying them?"

I wonder why my pen slips off into these labyrinths, when all I set out to do was to give some general idea of politics at Nairobi? But in truth the problems of East Africa are the problems of the world. We see the social, racial, and economic stresses which rack modern society already at work here, but in miniature; and if we choose to study the model when the whole engine is at hand, it is because on the smaller scale we can see more clearly, and because in East Africa and Uganda the future is still uncompromised. The British Government has it in its hands to shape the development and destiny of these new countries and their varied peoples with an authority and from an elevation far superior to that with which Cabinets can cope with the giant tangles at home. And the fact stirs the mind. But by this time the reader will have had as much of East African politics as I had when, after three days of deputations and disputations, the train steamed out of Nairobi to take us to the Great Lake and beyond.

CHAPTER IV
THE GREAT LAKE

We are off again on the Uganda Railway. Interesting and beautiful as is the country through which the line passes from Mombasa to Nairobi, it is surpassed by the magnificent scenery of the journey to the Lake. First in order and in rank is the Great Rift. This curious fault in the earth's surface, which geologists trace across the four thousand miles of land and sea which separate us from Palestine, and onward still to the southern end of Lake Tanganyika, is traversed by the Uganda Railway at one of its most remarkable stages. For sixty miles the Highland plateau has been rising steadily by a succession of wooded undulations to a level of over six thousand feet. Now it falls abruptly, almost precipitously, more than two thousand feet. This frowning wall of rock and forest, which extends straight as a ruler farther than eye can see, is the Kikuyu Escarpment. As the train claws its way downwards by slant and zigzag along its face, a majestic panorama breaks upon the view. Far below, bathed in sunshine, stretching away to misty purple horizons, lie the broad expanses of the Rift Valley. Its level surface is broken by strangely moulded volcanic hills and shattered craters. The opposite mountain wall looms up in the far distance, brown and blue. We gaze down upon the plain as from a balloon, mistaking forests for patches of green grass, and mighty trees for thorn-scrub.

The Rift Valley from the Kikuyu Escarpment.

Another hour or so and Lake Naivasha comes into view. This sheet of water is about ten miles square, and the rim of a submerged crater makes an odd, crescent-shaped island in its midst. Its brackish waters repel the inhabitants, but afford shelter to numberless wild-fowl and many hippopotami. At Naivasha there is the Government stock farm. One may see in their various flocks the native sheep, the half-bred English, the three-quarter-bred, etc. The improvement is amazing. The native sheep is a hairy animal, looking to the unpractised eye more like a goat than a sheep. Crossed with Sussex or Australian blood, his descendant is transformed into a woolled beast of familiar aspect. At the next cross the progeny is almost indistinguishable from the pure-bred English in appearance, but better adapted to the African sun and climate. It is the same with cattle. In the first generation the hump of the African ox vanishes. In the second he emerges a respectable British Shorthorn. The object of this farm is twofold: first, to find the type best adapted to local conditions; secondly, to supply the settlers and the natives with a steadily broadening fountain of good blood by which their flocks and herds may be trebled and quadrupled in value. The enthusiasm and zeal of those in charge of this work were refreshing. At present, however, their operations are restricted by insufficient funds and by the precautions which must be taken against East Coast fever. The first of these impediments may be removed; the second is less tractable.