Part 26

As might be expected among a sparse population leading a comparatively simple life, the vast variety of diseases which afflict more civilised races, who are collected in narrow spaces, are unknown in East Africa even by name. Its principal sporadic is fever, remittent and intermittent, with its multitudinous secondaries, concerning which notices have been scattered through the preceding pages. The most dangerous epidemic is its aborigen, the small-pox, which, propagated without contact or fomites, sweeps at times like a storm of death over the land. For years it has not left the Arab colony at Kazeh, and, shortly before the arrival of the Expedition, in a single month 52 slaves died out of a total of 800. The ravages of this disease amongst the half-starved and over-worked gangs of caravan porters have already been described; as many as a score of these wretches have been seen at a time in a single caravan; men staggering along blinded and almost insensible, jostling and stumbling against every one in their way; and mothers carrying babes, both parent and progeny in the virulent stage of the fell disease. The Arabs have partially introduced the practice of inoculating, anciently known in South Africa; the pus is introduced into an incision in the forehead between the eyebrows. The people have no remedy for small-pox: they trust entirely to the vis medicatrix. There is a milder form of the malady, called shúrúá, resembling the chicken-pox of Europe; it is cured by bathing in cold water and smearing the body with ochreish earth. The Arab merchants of Unyanyembe declare that, when they first visited Karagwah, the people were decimated by the táún, or plague. They describe correctly the bubo under the axillæ, the torturing thirst, and the rapid fatality of the disease. In the early part of 1859 a violent attack of cholera, which extended from Maskat along the eastern coast of Arabia and Africa, committed terrible ravages in the island of Zanzibar and throughout the maritime regions. Of course, no precautions of quarantine or cordon militaire were taken, yet the contagion did not extend into the interior.

Strangers in East Africa suffer from dysenteries and similar disorders consequent upon fever; and, as in Egypt, few are free from hæmorrhoids, which in Unyamwezi are accompanied by severe colics and umbilical pains. Rheumatism and rheumatic fever, severe catarrhs and influenzas, are caused by the cold winds, and, when crossing the higher altitudes, pneumonia and pleurisis abound in the caravan. On the coast many settlers, Indian and Arab, show upon the skin whitish leprous spots, which are treated with various unguents. In the interior, though well provided with fresh meat and vegetables, travellers are attacked by scurvy, even in the absence of its normal exciting causes, damp, cold, and poor diet. This phenomenon has often been observed upon the upper course of the Nile; Europeans have been prostrated by it even in the dry regions westward of the Red Sea, and the Portuguese officers who explored Usenda of the Kazembe suffered tortures from the complaint.

Common diseases among the natives are umbilical hernia and prolapsus: the latter is treated by the application of powdered bhang, dry or mixed with ghee. They are subject to kihindu-hindu--in Arabic, sara--the epilepsy, which they pretend to cure by the marrow of rhinoceros’ shank. Of the many fits and convulsions which affect them, the kichyoma-chyoma is the most dreaded. The word, which means the “little irons,” describes the painful sensations, the cramps and stitches, the spasms and lancinations, which torment the sufferer. Many die of this disease. It is not extraordinary that the fits, convulsions, and contortions which it suddenly induces should lead the people to consider it in the light of possession, and the magician to treat it with charms. Madness and idiocy are not uncommon: of the patient it is said, “Ana wazimo”--“he has fiends.” In most parts the people, after middle age, are tender-eyed from the effects of smoke within, glare without, exposure and debauchery. Not a few samples of acute ophthalmic disease were seen.

In the lower and more malarious spots, desquamations, tumours, and skin diseases are caused by suddenly suppressed perspiration. The terrible kidonda or helcoma of the maritime regions and the prurigo of Ujiji have already been alluded to. The “chokea” is a hordeolum or large boil, generally upon the upper eyelid. The “funza” is supposed to result from the bite of a large variety of fly. It begins with a small red and fiery swelling, which bursts after a time and produces a white entozoon about half an inch in length. “Kumri” are common blains, and “p’hambazi” malignant blind-boils, which leave a deep discoloured scar; when the parts affected are distant from the seat of circulation, the use of the limb is sometimes lost. For most of these sores tutiya or murtutu, blue-stone, is considered a specific.

As might be expected amongst an ignorant and debauched race coming in direct contact with semi-civilisation, the lues has found its way from the island of Zanzibar to Ujiji and into the heart of Africa. It is universally believed both by the natives and by the Arabs, who support the assertion with a host of proofs, to be propagated without contact. Such, indeed, is the general opinion of the Eastern world, where perhaps its greater virulence may assimilate it to the type of the earlier attacks in Europe. The disease, however, dies out, and has not taken root in the people as amongst the devoted races of North America and the South Sea islands. Although a malignant form was found extending throughout the country, mutilation of the features and similar secondaries were not observed beyond the maritime region. Except blue-stone, mineral drugs are unknown, and the use of mercury and ptyalism have not yet exasperated the evil. The minor form of lues is little feared and yields readily to simples; the consequences, however, are strangury, cystitis, chronic nephritic disease, and rheumatism.

“Polypharmacy” is not the fault of the profession in East Africa, and the universal belief in possession tends greatly to simplify the methodus modendi. The usual cathartic is the bark of a tree called kalákalá, which is boiled in porridge. There is a great variety of emetics, some so violent that several Arabs who have been bold enough to swallow them, barely escaped with life. The actual cautery--usually a favourite counter-irritant amongst barbarous people--is rarely practised in East Africa; in its stead powder of blue-stone is applied to the sore or wound, which has been carefully scraped, and the patient howls with pain for twenty-four hours. They bleed frequently as Italians, who even after being startled resort to a mild phlebotomy, and they cut down straight upon the vein with a sharp knife. They prefer the cucurbitula cruenta, like the Arabs, who say,--

“Few that cup repent; Few that bleed, rejoice.”

A favourite place is the crown of the head. The practitioner, after scarifying the skin with a razor or a dagger, produces a vacuum by exhausting the air through a horn applied with wetted edges; at the point is a bit of wax, which he closes over the aperture with his tongue or teeth, as the hospital “singhi” in India uses a bit of leather. Cupping--called ku hu míká or kumíká--is made highly profitable by showing strange appearances in the blood. They cure by excision the bite of snakes, which, however, are not feared nor often fatal in these lands. They cannot reduce dislocations, and they never attempt to set or splint a broken bone.

The mganga or medicine-man, in his character of “doctor,” is a personage of importance. He enters the sick-room in the dignity of antelope-horn, grease, and shell-necklace, and he sits with importance upon his three-legged stool. As the devil saves him the trouble of diagnosis, he begins by a prescription, invariably ordering something edible for the purpose, and varying it, according to the patient’s means, from a measure of grain to a bullock. He asserts, for instance, that a pound of fat is required for medicine; a goat must be killed, and his perquisite is the head or breast--a preliminary to a more important fee. Then the price of prescription--a _sine quâ non_ to prescribing--is settled upon and paid in advance. After certain questions, invariably suggesting the presence of poison, the medical practitioner proceeds to the cure; this is generally a charm or periapt bound round the part affected. In common diseases, however, like fever, the mganga will condescend to such profane processes as adhibiting sternutatories and rubbing the head with vegetable powders. If the remedies prove too powerful or powerless, he at once decamps; under normal circumstances he incapacitates himself for performing his promise of calling the next day by expending his fee in liquor. The Africans have in one point progressed beyond Europeans: there are as many women physicians as men.

[Illustration: A Mnyamwezi.

A Mheha.]

CHAP. XIX.

THE CHARACTER AND RELIGION OF THE EAST AFRICANS; THEIR GOVERNMENT, AND SLAVERY.

The study of psychology in Eastern Africa is the study of man’s rudimental mind, when, subject to the agency of material nature, he neither progresses nor retrogrades. He would appear rather a degeneracy from the civilised man than a savage rising to the first step, were it not for his apparent incapacity for improvement. He has not the ring of the true metal; there is no rich nature, as in the New Zealander, for education to cultivate. He seems to belong to one of those childish races which, never rising to man’s estate, fall like worn-out links from the great chain of animated nature. He unites the incapacity of infancy with the unpliancy of age; the futility of childhood, and the credulity of youth, with the scepticism of the adult and the stubbornness and bigotry of the old. He has “beaten lands” and seas. For centuries he has been in direct intercourse with the more advanced people of the eastern coast, and though few have seen an European, there are not many who have not cast eyes upon an Arab. Still he has stopped short at the threshold of progress; he shows no signs of development; no higher and more varied orders of intellect are called into being. Even the simple truths of El Islam have failed to fix the thoughts of men who can think, but who, absorbed in providing for their bodily wants, hate the trouble of thinking. His mind, limited to the objects seen, heard, and felt, will not, and apparently cannot, escape from the circle of sense, nor will it occupy itself with aught but the present. Thus he is cut off from the pleasures of memory, and the world of fancy is altogether unknown to him. Perhaps the automaton which we call spiritual suffers from the inferiority of the mechanism by which it acts.

The East African is, like other barbarians, a strange mixture of good and evil: by the nature of barbarous society, however, the good element has not, whilst the evil has, been carefully cultured.

As a rule, the civilised or highest type of man owns the sway of intellect, of reason; the semi-civilised--as are still the great nations of the East--are guided by sentiment and propensity in a degree incomprehensible to more advanced races; and the barbarian is the slave of impulse, passion, and instinct, faintly modified by sentiment, but ignorant of intellectual discipline. He appears, therefore, to the civilised man a paralogic being,--a mere mass of contradictions; his ways are not our ways, his reason is not our reason. He deduces effects from causes which we ignore; he compasses his ends by contrivances which we cannot comprehend; and his artifices and polity excite, by their shallowness and “inconsequence,” our surprise and contempt. Like that Hindu race that has puzzled the plain-witted Englishman for the century closing with the massacres of Delhi and Cawnpore, he is calculated to perplex those who make conscience an instinct which elevates man to the highest ground of human intelligence. He is at once very good-tempered and hard-hearted, combative and cautious; kind at one moment, cruel, pitiless, and violent at another; sociable and unaffectionate; superstitious and grossly irreverent; brave and cowardly, servile and oppressive; obstinate, yet fickle and fond of changes; with points of honour, but without a trace of honesty in word or deed; a lover of life, though addicted to suicide; covetous and parsimonious, yet thoughtless and improvident; somewhat conscious of inferiority, withal unimprovable. In fact, he appears an embryo of the two superior races. He is inferior to the active-minded and objective, the analytic and perceptive European, and to the ideal and subjective, the synthetic and reflective Asiatic. He partakes largely of the worst characteristics of the lower Oriental types--stagnation of mind, indolence of body, moral deficiency, superstition, and childish passion; hence the Egyptians aptly termed the Berbers and negroes the “perverse race of Kush.”

The main characteristic of this people is the selfishness which the civilised man strives to conceal, because publishing it would obstruct its gratification. The barbarian, on the other hand, displays his inordinate egotism openly and recklessly; his every action discloses those unworthy traits which in more polished races chiefly appear on public occasions, when each man thinks solely of self-gratification. Gratitude with him is not even a sense of prospective favours; he looks upon a benefit as the weakness of his benefactor and his own strength; consequently, he will not recognise even the hand that feeds him. He will, perhaps, lament for a night the death of a parent or a child, but the morrow will find him thoroughly comforted. The name of hospitality, except for interested motives, is unknown to him: “What will you give me?” is his first question. To a stranger entering a village the worst hut is assigned, and, if he complain, the answer is that he can find encamping ground outside. Instead of treating him like a guest, which the Arab Bedouin would hold to be a point of pride, of honour, his host compels him to pay and prepay every article, otherwise he might starve in the midst of plenty. Nothing, in fact, renders the stranger’s life safe in this land, except the timid shrinking of the natives from the “hot-mouthed weapon” and the necessity of trade, which induces the chiefs to restrain the atrocities of their subjects. To travellers the African is, of course, less civil than to merchants, from whom he expects to gain something. He will refuse a mouthful of water out of his abundance to a man dying of thirst; utterly unsympathising, he will not stretch out a hand to save another’s goods, though worth thousands of dollars. Of his own property, if a ragged cloth or a lame slave be lost, his violent excitement is ridiculous to behold. His egotism renders him parsimonious even in self-gratification; the wretched curs, which he loves as much as his children, seldom receive a mouthful of food, and the sight of an Arab’s ass feeding on grain elicits a prolonged “Hi! hi!” of extreme surprise. He is exceedingly improvident, taking no thought for the morrow--not from faith, but rather from carelessness as to what may betide him; yet so greedy of gain is he that he will refuse information about a country or the direction of a path without a present of beads. He also invariably demands prepayment: no one keeps a promise or adheres to an agreement, and, if credit be demanded for an hour, his answer would be, “There is nothing in my hand.” Yet even greed of gain cannot overcome the levity and laxity of his mind. Despite his best interests, he will indulge the mania for desertion caused by that mischievous love of change and whimsical desire for novelty that characterise the European sailor. Nor can even lucre prevail against the ingrained indolence of the race--an indolence the more hopeless as it is the growth of the climate. In these temperate and abundant lands Nature has cursed mankind with the abundance of her gifts; his wants still await creation, and he is contented with such necessaries as roots and herbs, game, and a few handfuls of grain--consequently improvement has no hold upon him.

In this stage of society truth is no virtue. The “mixture of a lie” may “add to pleasure” amongst Europeans; in Africa it enters where neither pleasure nor profit can arise from the deception. If a Mnyamwezi guide informs the traveller that the stage is short, he may make up his mind for a long and weary march, and _vice versâ_. Of course, falsehood is used as a defence by the weak and oppressed; but beyond that, the African desires to be lied to, and one of his proverbs is, “’Tis better to be deceived than to be undeceived.” The European thus qualifies the assertion,

“For sure the pleasure is as great In being cheated as to cheat.”

Like the generality of barbarous races, the East Africans are wilful, headstrong, and undisciplinable: in point of stubbornness and restiveness they resemble the lower animals. If they cannot obtain the very article of barter upon which they have set their mind, they will carry home things useless to them; any attempt at bargaining is settled by the seller turning his back, and they ask according to their wants and wishes, without regard to the value of goods. Grumbling and dissatisfied, they never do business without a grievance. Revenge is a ruling passion, as the many rancorous fratricidal wars that have prevailed between kindred clans, even for a generation, prove. Retaliation and vengeance are, in fact, their great agents of moral control. Judged by the test of death, the East African is a hardhearted man, who seems to ignore all the charities of father, son, and brother. A tear is rarely shed, except by the women, for departed parent, relative, or friend, and the voice of the mourner is seldom heard in their abodes. It is most painful to witness the complete inhumanity with which a porter seized with small-pox is allowed by his friends, comrades, and brethren to fall behind in the jungle, with several days’ life in him. No inducement--even beads--can persuade a soul to attend him. Every village will drive him from its doors; no one will risk taking, at any price, death into his bosom. If strong enough, the sufferer builds a little bough-hut away from the camp, and, provided with his rations--a pound of grain and a gourdful of water--he quietly expects his doom, to feed the hyæna and the raven of the wild. The people are remarkable for the readiness with which they yield to fits of sudden fury; on these occasions they will, like children, vent their rage upon any object, animate or inanimate, that presents itself. Their temper is characterised by a nervous, futile impatience; under delay or disappointment they become madmen. In their own country, where such displays are safe, they are remarkable for a presumptuousness and a violence of manner which elsewhere disappears. As the Arabs say, there they are lions, here they become curs. Their squabbling and clamour pass description: they are never happy except when in dispute. After a rapid plunge into excitement, the brawlers alternately advance and recede, pointing the finger of threat, howling and screaming, cursing and using terms of insult which an inferior ingenuity--not want of will--causes to fall short of the Asiatic’s model vituperation. After abusing each other to their full, both “parties” usually burst into a loud laugh or a burst of sobs. Their tears lie high; they weep like Goanese. After a cuff, a man will cover his face with his hands and cry as if his heart would break. More furious shrews than the women are nowhere met with. Here it is a great truth that “the tongues of women cannot be governed.” They work off excitement by scolding, and they weep little compared with the men. Both sexes delight in “argument,” which here, as elsewhere, means two fools talking foolishly. They will weary out of patience the most loquacious of the Arabs. This development is characteristic of the East African race, and “maneno marefu!”--long words!--will occur as a useless reproof half a dozen times in the course of a single conversation. When drunk, the East African is easily irritated; with the screams and excited gestures of a maniac he strides about, frantically flourishing his spear and agitating his bow, probably with notched arrow; the spear-point and the arrow-head are often brought perilously near, but rarely allowed to draw blood. The real combat is by pushing, pulling hair, and slapping with a will, and a pair thus engaged require to be torn asunder by half a dozen friends. The settled tribes are, for the most part, feeble and unwarlike barbarians; even the bravest East African, though, like all men, a combative entity, has a valour tempered by discretion and cooled by a high development of cautiousness. His tactics are of the Fabian order: he loves surprises and safe ambuscades; and in common frays and forays the loss of one per cent. justifies a _sauve qui peut_. This people, childlike, is ever in extremes. A man will hang himself from a rafter in his tent, and kick away from under him the large wooden mortar upon which he has stood at the beginning of the operation with as much sang-froid as an Anglo-Saxon in the gloomy month of November; yet he regards annihilation, as all savages do, with loathing and ineffable horror. “He fears death,” to quote Bacon, “as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other.” The African mind must change radically before it can “think upon death, and find it the least of all evils.” All the thoughts of these negroids are connected with this life. “Ah!” they exclaim, “it is bad to die! to leave off eating and drinking! never to wear a fine cloth!” As in the negro race generally, their destructiveness is prominent; a slave never breaks a thing without an instinctive laugh of pleasure; and however careful he may be of his own life, he does not value that of another, even of a relative, at the price of a goat. During fires in the town of Zanzibar, the blacks have been seen adding fuel, and singing and dancing, wild with delight. On such occasions they are shot down by the Arabs like dogs.