Stanley in Africa

Though reduced by fever, the infatuation of travel was so strong in Livingstone, that he turned southerly along the lake and struck for the unknown regions, about its southern end. He crossed an important tributary, the Kalongosi, whose waters were literally alive with fish, from the lake, seeking places to spawn. South of this stream the people are the Limda, not friendly disposed, yet not hostile. They are of the true negro type, and are great fishermen and gatherers of salt on the lake. The forests are not of rank growth, and the wood is chiefly bark-cloth and gum-opal, the latter exuding its gum in large quantities, which enters the ground and is preserved in large cakes for the use of future generations.

The streams are now very frequent, and difficult to cross when swollen. After crossing the Limda he was in the Cassembe country, which is very rich and populous, growing the finest of palm-oil and ground-nuts. The capital village is in the centre of a plain, and is more a Mohammedan than a native town. As neither goats, sheep nor cattle thrive, the people depend on fish and vegetables for food. Every hut had a cassava garden about it, and honey and coffee were plenty, as were maize, beans and nuts.

The Cassembe, take their name from the chief or ruler, who is a Pharaoh, or general, called the “Cassembe,” the ninth generation of which was on the throne when Livingstone was there. He gave him a royal reception, differing in many respects from all others which he had received. Cassembe had a dwarf, captured from some of the northern tribes, who figured as clown of the occasion. Then his wife appeared as a conspicuous mistress of ceremonies, preceded by men brandishing battle axes, beating on hollow instruments, and yelling at the crowd to clear the way. She was a comely looking personage of light color and regular features. In her hand were two enormous pipes filled ready for smoking. This procession was followed by the Cassembe, whose smile of welcome would have been captivating but for the fact that he was accompanied by his executioner, bearing a broad Limda sword and a large pair of scissors for cropping the ears of offenders. The queen is a thorough agriculturist, and pays particular attention to her fields of cassava, sweet-potatoes, maize, sorghum, millet, ground-nuts and cotton. The people as a whole are rough mannered and positively brutal among themselves. Livingstone spent a month among them, before he could get an escort to take him through the swamps to the southern end of Moero, which he was anxious to explore further.

The Cassembe, like many other tribes on the head waters of the Congo, procure copper ore from Kantanga, on the west, and work it into bracelets, anklets and fine wire for baskets and traps. They have been visited time and again by the Portuguese. By and by Livingstone bade Cassembe farewell and pushed for the southern and western shores of the lake. He took views from many points on the Rua mountains and approached its shores at many points. At every shore approach there was a profusion of moisture and of tropical forests abounding in buffaloes and elephants, while the open spaces gave views of pasturing zebras. The latter had not yet become an object of chase as in the lands south of the Zambesi, where they give great sport to both native and foreign hunters and where so much of the larger game has been swept away by inconsiderate sportsmen. Lions and leopards were also plenty, and the camps had to be guarded nightly against them. The population about the lake is everywhere dense, and the fish supply limitless. Livingstone found the lake, at his various points of observation from the Rua heights, to be from 30 to 60 miles wide, and the natives claimed that it was larger than Tanganyika. They do not pretend to cross the lake in boats, deeming it too long and dangerous a journey, in a country where storms are frequent and the waters are apt to be lashed into fury by the winds.

The circuit of Lake Moero, the almost continuous wading of swamps and crossing of swollen streams, the arrival at Cassembe again and the expression of a determination to go still further south into the swampy regions, to discover Lake Bemba, or Bangweola, instead of back to Tanganyika, where rest and medicine could be had, caused the desertion of Livingstone’s entire traveling force except his always faithful Chuma and Susi. But having attained the consent of Cassembe to proceed, and having re-equipped himself as best he could, he started for Bangweola, keeping parallel with the Luapula, but a day’s march away from its swamps. Even then, the crossing of the frequent tributaries made his journey tedious and dangerous. It was through a region of hill and vale, forest and plain, of varied geological formation. At many points he came upon developments of iron ore, which the natives worked and he had no doubt that this valuable mineral existed in abundance in this region. It ought to be remembered that the Kantanga copper region, whence all the eastern coast draws a supply, lies but a few days’ journey west of the Luapula, and in this part of the Congo basin.

The people were the Banyamwezi, smart traders and given to lying like Greeks. They are populous, but having been raided by the Mazitu, many of their villages were deserted. Passing through their country, the land becomes flat and forest covered, and so continues all the way to Bangweola. The streams are all banked by the juicy sponge, before described, which make traveling so treacherous and tiresome. All the forests are infested with lions and leopards, necessitating the greatest care at night.

It was January 18th, 1868, when Livingstone first set eyes on Lake Bangweola. The country around the lake is all flat and free from trees, except the mosikisi, which is spared for its dense foliage and fatty oil. The people have canoes and are expert fishermen. They are numerous, especially on the large islands of the lake. The variety of fish is numerous and some are taken which measure four feet in length. The bottom of the lake is sandy, and the shores reedy. During windy weather the waters become quite rough and dangerous. The islanders have herds of goats and flocks of fowls, and are industrious and peaceable, not given to curiosity, but sitting unconcernedly and weaving their cotton or knitting their nets, as a stranger passes by. According to Livingstone’s estimate this splendid body of water is some 150 miles long by 80 broad. The Lokinga mountains, extending from the southeast to the southwest are visible, and this range joins the Mokone range, west of Kantanga, which range is the water-shed between the Zambesi and Congo basins.

The people are still the Banyamwezi. Besides being skilled in weaving cotton and in net-making, they are expert copper workers. In forging they use a cone-shaped hammer, without a handle. They use bellows, made of goat skin and wood. With these they smelt large ingots of copper in a pot, and pour it into moulds, which give a rough shape to the article they wish to forge.

Livingstone’s observations in this section taught him that there was no such thing as a rainy zone, to account for the periodical rise of rivers like the Nile and Congo. From May to October is a comparatively dry season, and from October to May almost every day gave a thunder shower, but there is no such continuous down pour as has been imagined by meteorologists in Europe. He accounts for the humidity of both the Congo and Zambesi watersheds, by the meeting of the easterly and westerly winds in that section, thus precipitating the evaporations of both oceans in mid-Africa. It is certain that the Congo does not get its yellow hue from its head waters, for all the streams run clear even when swollen. The sponges, or bogs, which are so frequent are accounted for by the fact that some six to eight feet beneath the surface is a formation of sand which cakes at the bottom, thus holding up the saturated soil above and preventing the escape of the water. The same is true of large sections on the Zambesi, and especially in the Kalahari Desert, though the vegetable mould is wanting on the top. In that desert wells must be dug only so deep. If water does not come, they must be dug in another place. To puncture the substratum of caked sand is to make an escape for the water, and create a dearth in an entire drainage system. A peculiarity of the sponge everywhere is that it absorbs so much water as to keep the streams from flooding till long after the shower. Then they assume what would be an unaccountable flow, but for knowledge of the fact that it has taken several hours for the rain-fall to penetrate them. When traveling on the Limda, Livingstone had great trouble with his ox teams, which became invariably bogged in the sponges, and when they saw the clear sand in the centre of the streams, they usually plunged headforemost for it, leaving nothing in sight but their tails.

Livingstone’s return from Bangweola to Cassembe gave him no opportunity for observation, owing to the fact that the tribes were at war with one another, instigated by the Arabs, who were gathering a rich crop of slaves. Yet this misfortune was compensated in part by a return of his deserters to his service, on his arrival at Cassembe, thereby enabling him to continue his northward journey more comfortably, and to run the gauntlet of the contending tribes with greater safety.

His journey to Tanganyika, arrival at Ujiji, sickness there, receipt of welcome stores from the coast, slow recovery, make a sad history, but does not add to our knowledge of the natural features and resources of the Congo region. However, our interest is again awakened in this heroic adventurer when we find him once more on his feet and resolved to visit the land of the Manyuema, off to the west and on the Lualaba, in the very heart of the Upper Congo valley, and the stamping ground of the now celebrated Tippoo Tib. The Manyuema country was then unknown, and Livingstone went in the trail of the first of those Arab hordes which ever visited it, but whose repeated visits in quest of ivory and slaves have carried murder, fire, theft and destruction to a once undisturbed, if not happy people.

The journey lay from Kasenge, on the west coast of Tanganyika, near its middle, in a north-west direction to the great market town of Nyangwe, on the Lualaba, or Upper Congo. He found the route hilly but comparatively open. Villages were frequent and the natives friendly, till the Manyuema themselves were reached. There was an abundance of elephants and buffaloes, which kept them supplied with meat. Where forests grew, the trees were of gigantic proportions, and very dense, affording a complete escape for wild animals when exhausted or crippled in the chase. The native huts were of a superior kind, with sleeping apartments raised from the ground. The soil was fertile, and the cultivation of vegetables was general. On the route they came into the region of the oil-palm, which does not flourish eastward of this, but assumes a more gigantic growth as the western coast is approached.

A little more than midway between Tanganyika and Nyangwe, is Bambarre, a flourishing village, surrounded by gardens, which the men help to cultivate, though all the other duties of farm and house are imposed upon the women, who are actual “hewers of wood and drawers of water” for the tribe. They made willing carriers, and are of comely form. Here the soko is believed to be a charm for rain. One was caught for meteorological purposes, with the result that the captor had the ends of two fingers and toes bitten off. Livingstone saw the nest of a soko, or gorilla, and pronounced it a poor architectural contrivance. A young soko, however, he regarded as the most wonderful object in nature, so ugly as to excite astonishment, yet so quaint as to stimulate curiosity. Like the kangaroo, it leaves one in doubt whether repulsion or attraction is uppermost in the mind when viewing it. In the vicinity are hot springs, and earthquakes are common, passing from east to west. The tribes of Bambarre hold the Manyuema in great fear, regarding them as of man eating propensity.

Leaving Bambarre, Livingstone was soon in the extensive country of the famed Manyuema, a tribe, or rather an entire people, hardly surpassed for size and power by even the Zulus, Macololos, Ugandas or Niam-Niams, a tribe whose name is one of terror far below Stanley Falls and far above Nyangwe, and whose unamiable qualities have of late years been greatly increased by the hold which Tippoo Tib, the Arab imperator on Lualaba, has gotten upon them.

Livingstone’s journey toward their capital was through the most remarkable country he had seen in Central Africa. He had elephant and rhinoceros meat of his own shooting, and plenty to trade to the natives for other dainties. The land is a beautiful succession of hills and dales. The villages are frequent and perched on the slopes so as to secure quick drainage. The streets run east and west in order that the blazing sun may lick up the moisture. The dwellings are in perfect line, with low thatched roofs, and every here and there are larger establishments with grounds, which answer for public assemblages. The walls are of beaten clay, and the insides are cosy and clean. The clay walls are so compact as to stand for ages, and frequently men return, after a site has been deserted for generations, to repair and re-occupy their ancestral abodes. The people practice the rite of circumcision, after the manner of the Abyssinians or Hebrews. The women are good housekeepers, and preserve their food from the ants, which are in great numbers and of many varieties, by slinging it from the ceiling of their huts in earthen pots or neatly made baskets.

Palms crown the heights of all the mountains and hills, and the forests, usually of a width of five miles between the groups of villages, are indescribable for their luxuriance and beauty. Climbers fold themselves gracefully over the gigantic trees, wild fruit abounds, and monkeys and brilliant birds skip and flit from bough to bough, with continuous chatter and chirp. The soil is excessively rich and the people cultivate largely, even though they are much separated by feuds and dense forest reaches. Their maize bends its fruit stalk round like a hook. They insert poles in the ground for fences, and these soon sprout making substantial and impervious hedges. Climbing plants are trained from pole to pole, and to these are suspended the ears of corn to dry. This upright granary forms a wall around the entire village, and the women take down corn at their will and distribute it to the men. The women are very naked. They are thrifty, however, and may be seen on any market day carrying their produce to the villages on their heads, or slung in receptacles over their shoulders. No women could be fonder of beads and ornaments than they, and Livingstone found them easy to trade with, when at all friendly.

The receptions Livingstone met with in the various villages, as he neared the Lualaba, were as various as the humors of the people. Some received him gladly, others with suspicion, and still others with rudeness, saying, “If you have food at home, why come you so far and spend your beads to buy it here?” On the Luamo, a tributary of the Lualaba, two hundred yards broad and very deep, the chiefs proved so hostile as to refuse to lend their canoes to the party to cross over. The women were particularly outspoken, and claimed that the party were identical with the cruel strangers (Arabs) who had lately robbed them. At length the warriors of the place surrounded the party, with their spears and huge wooden shields, and marched them bodily out of the district.

Wherever the wood has been cleared in this section, the soil immediately brings a crop of gigantic grasses. These are burned annually. Livingstone’s way now deflected to the north, through kindlier villages, separated by damp forests. The rainy season was on and the streams were all swollen. Evidences of large game were all around him. He passed an elephant trap, which was made of a log of heavy wood twenty feet long, with a hole at one end through which a vine passed to suspend it. At the other end a lance of wood, four feet long, is inserted. A latch string runs to the ground, which, when touched by the animal’s foot, causes the log to fall, and its great weight drives the lance into the animal’s body.

The people here were more friendly and very curious as they never had seen a white man before. They have a terrible dread of the Arabs, and strange to say the Arabs feared them as much, for nothing could convince an Arab that the Manyuema are not cannibals. It must be remembered that Livingstone wrote some years ago and before the Arabs acquired supremacy over these natives. It is a peculiarity of African tribes that nothing can exceed the terror inspired by a reputation in another tribe for cannibalism. It was a common thing on the Shiré and Zambesi, for Livingstone to hear the natives there speak of tribes far away to the north – like diseases, they are always far away – who eat human bodies, and on every occasion the fact was related with the utmost horror and disgust. Livingstone never took stock in these stories, nor in the wilder ones of the Arabs, and he mentions no authenticated case of cannibalism in all his volumes. It is more than likely that African cannibalism exists only in the imagination of persons who prefer sensation to fact.

Livingstone seems to have become bewildered on this northward journey, and crossed his track with the intention of making more directly for the Lualaba. Though he found the people kind and the country indescribably rich in vegetation, the way was difficult owing to the softness of the ground and the swollen streams. He however succeeded, with much hardship, in getting back to the route direct from Bambarre to the river. On this route the villages were almost continuous, as many as nine being passed in a single day. The people were kindly disposed and very curious. They brought food willingly, traded eagerly, preferring bracelets to beads, and in one village he was received by a band, composed of calabashes. Goat and sheep herds were plenty, tended mostly by children, who lived among and loved their charges as if they were human beings.

A grass burning resulted in the capture of four sokos by the natives, besides other animals. The full grown soko would do well to stand for a picture of the devil. One of them, it appears, was a young one which gave Livingstone an opportunity for study. His light-yellow face showed off his ugly whiskers and faint apology for a beard. The forehead, villainously low, with high ears, was well in the back-ground of a great dog mouth. The teeth were slightly human but the canines showed the beast by their large development. The hands, or rather fingers, were like those of the natives. The flesh of the feet was yellow. The eagerness with which the Manyuema devoured it left the impression that eating sokos was a good way to get up a reputation for cannibalism.

The soko sometimes kills the leopard by seizing both paws and biting them, but often gets disemboweled in the attempt. Lions kill sokos with a bound, tear them to pieces, but seldom eat them. They live in communities of about ten, each male having a single wife. Interference with a wife is visited by the resentment of all the other males, who catch and cuff the offender till he screams for mercy.

Livingstone was now sorely detained by sickness and the desertion of his carriers. The delay gave him opportunity to note the characteristics of the Manyuema country with more particularity. It is not a healthy country, not so much from fever as from debility of the whole system induced by damp, cold and indigestion. This general weakness is ascribed by some to the free use of maize as food, which produces weakness of the bowels and choleraic purging. Rheumatism is common and cuts the natives off. The Arabs fear this disease, and when attacked come to a stand-still till it is cured. Tape worm is frequent, and the natives know no remedy for it.

The natives have wonderful stores of ivory which the Arabs are eager for. They cultivate the ground with the hoe, but their hoeing is little better than scraping the ground, and cutting through the roots of the grasses. This careless husbandry leaves the roots of maize, ground-nuts, sweet-potatoes and sorghum to find their way into the rich, soft soil, which they succeed in doing. The ground-nuts and cassava hold their own against the grasses for years. Bananas grow vigorously on the cleared spaces.

The great want of the Manyuema is national life. Of this they have none. Each head man is independent of each other. Of industry they have no lack and the villagers are orderly toward each other, but they go no further. If a man of another district ventures among them, he is not regarded with more favor as a Manyuema than one of a herd of buffaloes is by the rest, and on the slightest provocation he is likely to be killed. They buy their wives from one another. A pretty girl brings ten goats. The new wife is led to the new home by the husband, where five days are spent, then she is led back to her home for five days, after which she comes to her new home permanently. Many of the women are handsome, having perfect forms and limbs. The conviction of Livingstone, after his experience with these people, was that if a man goes with a good-natured and civil tongue, he may pass through the worst people in Africa unharmed. He also draws a fine line between the unmixed and mixed African races, by a narrative of experience on the Shiré river. One of a mixed race stepped into the water to swim off to a boat, and was seized by a crocodile. The poor fellow held up his hands and screamed for help. Not a man went to his help, but allowed him to perish. When at Senna, in the Makololo country, a woman was seized by a crocodile. Instantly four natives rushed unbidden and rescued her, though they knew nothing about her. These incidents are typical of the two races. Those of mixed blood possess the vices of both races and the virtues of neither.

The fact that there is no supreme chief among the Manyuema, makes it difficult to punish murder except by war, and the feud is made worse, being transmitted from generation to generation. This state of affairs, when it came to be understood by such a crafty statesman as Tippoo Tib, contributed to his victory over the people, and that peculiar sovereignty which he exercises.

Livingstone got away from this place of confinement, and crossed the Mamohela, on his journey to Nyangwe. The country was a fine grassy plain watered by numerous rills, and skirted by mountains on either side, on which perched the neat villages of the natives. Then forests intervene of even more luxuriant growth than before, to be again succeeded by plains. The people seem to grow more stately and shapely, the women being singularly perfect in hands, feet and limbs, and of light brown color, but all with the orifices of their noses enlarged by excessive snuff taking. The humor of the villagers depended on how lately they had been raided by the Arabs. They seemed also to grow more clever in art, for now many forges were seen in active operation where iron was being shaped into spears and utensils.

At length the Lualaba is reached at Nyangwe, the capital of the Manyuema country, and the greatest market town in Central Africa. Long before Livingstone reached it he met upon the route hundreds of women wending their way thither with their marketing in baskets on their heads or slung in receptacles on their shoulders. As they trudged cheerfully along full of thought as to what they would receive in exchange or what they would buy, he could not help contrasting their condition with that of the women bent on a like errand in his own country, where the labor might be the same, but where there was happy exemption from such scenes of bloodshed as he was forced to witness while there. But as these have been already narrated the reader is here spared their horrible review.

The Manyuema prefer to do all their business in open market. If one says, “Come, sell me that fowl, or cloth,” the reply is, “Come to the market place.” The values there are more satisfactory and the transaction is open. The people had a fear of Livingstone, because they could not disassociate him from the Arab half-castes who had brought upon them untold misery.

He found the Lualaba at Nyangwe to be twenty feet deep in mid stream and subject to annual overflow just like the Nile – a mighty river, he says, three thousand yards wide, with steep banks and full of islands. The current runs at the rate of two miles an hour. His greatest trouble was to get a canoe to take him across the river. The natives thought his request for a large canoe, with which he intended to explore the river, meant war upon them, so they sent only small ones, capable of carrying two or three men, and which were entirely unfit for his purposes. The Manyuema on the left bank of the Lualaba, opposite Nyangwe, are called Bagenya. There are salt springs in their district, and they manufacture the salt for the Nyangwe market, by boiling the brine.