A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries

A herd of fine cattle showed that no tsetse existed in the district.  They had the Indian hump, and were very fat, and very tame.  The boys rode on both cows and bulls without fear, and the animals were so fat and lazy, that the old ones only made a feeble attempt to kick their young tormentors.  Muazi never milks the cows; he complained that, but for the Mazitu having formerly captured some, he should now have had very many.  They wander over the country at large, and certainly thrive.

After leaving Muazi’s, we passed over a flat country sparsely covered with the scraggy upland trees, but brightened with many fine flowers.  The grass was short, reaching no higher than the knee, and growing in tufts with bare spaces between, though the trees were draped with many various lichens, and showed a moist climate.  A high and very sharp wind blew over the flats; its piercing keenness was not caused by low temperature, for the thermometer stood at 80 degrees.

We were now on the sources of the Loangwa of the Maravi, which enters the Zambesi at Zumbo, and were struck by the great resemblance which the boggy and sedgy streams here presented to the sources of the Leeba, an affluent of the Zambesi formerly observed in Londa, and of the Kasai, which some believe to be the principal branch of the Congo or Zairé.

We had taken pains to ascertain from the travelled Babisa and Arabs as much as possible about the country in front, which, from the lessening time we had at our disposal, we feared we could scarcely reach, and had heard a good deal of a small lake called Bemba.  As we proceeded west, we passed over the sources not only of the Loangwa, but of another stream, called Moitawa or Moitala, which was represented to be the main feeder of Lake Bemba.  This would be of little importance, but for the fact that the considerable river Luapula, or Loapula is said to flow out of Bemba to the westward, and then to spread out into another and much larger lake, named Moero, or Moelo.  Flowing still further in the same direction, the Loapula forms Lake Mofué, or Mofu, and after this it is said to pass the town of Cazembé, bend to the north, and enter Lake Tanganyika.  Whither the water went after it entered the last lake, no one would venture an assertion.  But that the course indicated is the true watershed of that part of the country, we believe from the unvarying opinion of native travellers.  There could be no doubt that our informants had been in the country beyond Cazembé’s, for they knew and described chiefs whom we afterwards met about thirty-five or forty miles west of his town.  The Lualaba is said to flow into the Loapula—and when, for the sake of testing the accuracy of the travelled, it was asserted that all the water of the region round the town of Cazembé flowed into the Luambadzi, or Luambezi (Zambesi), they remarked with a smile, “He says, that the Loapula flows into the Zambesi—did you ever hear such nonsense?” or words to that effect.  We were forced to admit, that according to native accounts, our previous impression of the Zambesi’s draining the country about Cazembé’s had been a mistake.  Their geographical opinions are now only stated, without any further comment than that the itinerary given by the Arabs and others shows that the Loapula is twice crossed on the way to Cazembé’s; and we may add that we have never found any difficulty from the alleged incapacity of the negro to tell which way a river flows.

The boiling-point of water showed a descent, from the edge of the plateau to our furthest point west, of 170 feet; but this can only be considered as an approximation, and no dependence could have been placed on it, had we not had the courses of the streams to confirm this rather rough mode of ascertaining altitudes.  The slope, as shown by the watershed, was to the “Loangwa of the Maravi,” and towards the Moitala, or south-west, west, and north-west.  After we leave the feeders of Lake Nyassa, the water drains towards the centre of the continent.  The course of the Kasai, a river seen during Dr. Livingstone’s journey to the West Coast, and its feeders was to the north-east, or somewhat in the same direction.  Whether the water thus drained off finds its way out by the Congo, or by the Nile, has not yet been ascertained.  Some parts of the continent have been said to resemble an inverted dinner-plate.  This portion seems more of the shape, if shape it has, of a wide-awake hat, with the crown a little depressed.  The altitude of the brim in some parts is considerable; in others, as at Tette and the bottom of Murchison’s Cataracts, it is so small that it could be ascertained only by eliminating the daily variations of the barometer, by simultaneous observations on the Coast, and at points some two or three hundred miles inland.  So long as African rivers remain in what we may call the brim, they present no obstructions; but no sooner do they emerge from the higher lands than their utility is impaired by cataracts.  The low lying belt is very irregular.  At times sloping up in the manner of the rim of an inverted dinner-plate—while in other cases, a high ridge rises near the sea, to be succeeded by a lower district inland before we reach the central plateau.  The breadth of the low lands is sometimes as much as three hundred miles, and that breadth determines the limits of navigation from the seaward.

We made three long marches beyond Muazi’s in a north-westerly direction; the people were civil enough, but refused to sell us any food.  We were travelling too fast, they said; in fact, they were startled, and before they recovered their surprise, we were obliged to depart.  We suspected that Muazi had sent them orders to refuse us food, that we might thus be prevented from going into the depopulated district; but this may have been mere suspicion, the result of our own uncharitable feelings.

We spent one night at Machambwé’s village, and another at Chimbuzi’s.  It is seldom that we can find the headman on first entering a village.  He gets out of the way till he has heard all about the strangers, or he is actually out in the fields looking after his farms.  We once thought that when the headman came in from a visit of inspection, with his spear, bow and arrows, they had been all taken up for the occasion, and that he had all the while been hidden in some hut slily watching till he heard that the strangers might be trusted; but on listening to the details given by these men of the appearances of the crops at different parts, and the astonishing minuteness of the speakers’ topography, we were persuaded that in some cases we were wrong, and felt rather humiliated.  Every knoll, hill, mountain, and every peak on a range has a name; and so has every watercourse, dell, and plain.  In fact, every feature and portion of the country is so minutely distinguished by appropriate names, that it would take a lifetime to decipher their meaning.  It is not the want, but the superabundance of names that misleads travellers, and the terms used are so multifarious that good scholars will at times scarcely know more than the subject of conversation.  Though it is a little apart from the topic of the attention which the headmen pay to agriculture, yet it may be here mentioned, while speaking of the fulness of the language, that we have heard about a score of words to indicate different varieties of gait—one walks leaning forward, or backward, swaying from side to side, loungingly, or smartly, swaggeringly, swinging the arms, or only one arm, head down or up, or otherwise; each of these modes of walking was expressed by a particular verb; and more words were used to designate the different varieties of fools than we ever tried to count.

Mr. Moffat has translated the whole Bible into the language of the Bechuana, and has diligently studied this tongue for the last forty-four-years; and, though knowing far more of the language than any of the natives who have been reared on the Mission-station of Kuruman, he does not pretend to have mastered it fully even yet.  However copious it may be in terms of which we do not feel the necessity, it is poor in others, as in abstract terms, and words used to describe mental operations.

Our third day’s march ended in the afternoon of the 27th September, 1863, at the village of Chinanga on the banks of a branch of the Loangwa.  A large, rounded mass of granite, a thousand feet high, called Ñombé rumé, stand on the plain a few miles off.  It is quite remarkable, because it has so little vegetation on it.  Several other granitic hills stand near it, ornamented with trees, like most heights of this country, and a heap of blue mountains appears away in the north.

The effect of the piercing winds upon the men had never been got rid of.  Several had been unable to carry a load ever since we ascended to the highlands; we had lost one, and another poor lad was so ill as to cause us great anxiety.  By waiting in this village, which was so old that it was full of vermin, all became worse.  Our European food was entirely expended, and native meal, though finely ground, has so many sharp angular particles in it, that it brought back dysentery, from which we had suffered so much in May.  We could scarcely obtain food for the men.  The headman of this village of Chinanga was off in a foray against some people further north to supply slaves to the traders expected along the slave route we had just left; and was said, after having expelled the inhabitants, to be living in their stockade, and devouring their corn.  The conquered tribe had purchased what was called a peace by presenting the conqueror with three women.

This state of matters afforded us but a poor prospect of finding more provisions in that direction than we could with great difficulty and at enormous prices obtain here.  But neither want of food, dysentery, nor slave wars would have prevented our working our way round the Lake in some other direction, had we had time; but we had received orders from the Foreign Office to take the “Pioneer” down to the sea in the previous April.  The salaries of all the men in her were positively “in any case to cease by the 31st of December.”

We were said to be only ten days’ distant from Lake Bemba.  We might speculate on a late rise of the river.  A month or six weeks would secure a geographical feat, but the rains were near.  We had been warned by different people that the rains were close at hand, and that we should then be bogged and unable to travel.  The flood in the river might be an early one, or so small in volume as to give but one chance of the “Pioneer” descending to the ocean.  The Makololo too were becoming dispirited by sickness and want of food, and were naturally anxious to be back to their fields in time for sowing.  But in addition to all this and more, it was felt that it would not be dealing honestly with the Government, were we, for the sake of a little éclat, to risk the detention of the “Pioneer” up the river during another year; so we decided to return; and though we had afterwards the mortification to find that we were detained two full months at the ship waiting for the flood which we expected immediately after our arrival there, the chagrin was lessened by a consciousness of having acted in a fair, honest, above-board manner throughout.

On the night of the 29th of September a thief came to the sleeping-place of our men and stole a leg of a goat.  On complaining to the deputy headman, he said that the thief had fled, but would be caught.  He suggested a fine, and offered a fowl and her eggs; but wishing that the thief alone should be punished, it was advised that he should be found and fined.  The Makololo thought it best to take the fowl as a means of making the punishment certain.  After settling this matter on the last day of September, we commenced our return journey.  We had just the same time to go back to the ship, that we had spent in coming to this point, and there is not much to interest one in marching over the same ground a second time.

While on our journey north-west, a cheery old woman, who had once been beautiful, but whose white hair now contrasted strongly with her dark complexion, was working briskly in her garden as we passed.  She seemed to enjoy a hale, hearty old age.  She saluted us with what elsewhere would be called a good address; and, evidently conscious that she deserved the epithet, “dark but comely,” answered each of us with a frank “Yes, my child.”  Another motherly-looking woman, sitting by a well, began the conversation by “You are going to visit Muazi, and you have come from afar, have you not?”  But in general women never speak to strangers unless spoken to, so anything said by them attracts attention.  Muazi once presented us with a basket of corn.  On hinting that we had no wife to grind our corn, his buxom spouse struck in with roguish glee, and said, “I will grind it for you; and leave Muazi, to accompany and cook for you in the land of the setting sun.”  As a rule the women are modest and retiring in their demeanour, and, without being oppressed with toil, show a great deal of industry.  The crops need about eight months’ attention.  Then when the harvest is home, much labour is required to convert it into food as porridge, or beer.  The corn is pounded in a large wooden mortar, like the ancient Egyptian one, with a pestle six feet long and about four inches thick.  The pounding is performed by two or even three women at one mortar.  Each, before delivering a blow with her pestle, gives an upward jerk of the body, so as to put strength into the stroke, and they keep exact time, so that two pestles are never in the mortar at the same moment.  The measured thud, thud, thud, and the women standing at their vigorous work, are associations inseparable from a prosperous African village.  By the operation of pounding, with the aid of a little water, the hard outside scale or husk of the grain is removed, and the corn is made fit for the millstone.  The meal irritates the stomach unless cleared from the husk; without considerable energy in the operator, the husk sticks fast to the corn.  Solomon thought that still more vigour than is required to separate the hard husk or bran from wheat would fail to separate “a fool from his folly.”  “Though thou shouldst bray a fool in a mortar among wheat with a pestle, yet will not his foolishness depart from him.”  The rainbow, in some parts, is called the “pestle of the Barimo,” or gods.  Boys and girls, by constant practice with the pestle, are able to plant stakes in the ground by a somewhat similar action, in erecting a hut, so deftly that they never miss the first hole made.

Let any one try by repeatedly jobbing a pole with all his force to make a deep hole in the ground, and he will understand how difficult it is always to strike it into the same spot.

As we were sleeping one night outside a hut, but near enough to hear what was going on within, an anxious mother began to grind her corn about two o’clock in the morning.  “Ma,” inquired a little girl, “why grind in the dark?”  Mamma advised sleep, and administered material for a sweet dream to her darling, by saying, “I grind meal to buy a cloth from the strangers, which will make you look a little lady.”  An observer of these primitive races is struck continually with such little trivial touches of genuine human nature.

The mill consists of a block of granite, syenite, or even mica schist, fifteen or eighteen inches square and five or six thick, with a piece of quartz or other hard rock about the size of a half brick, one side of which has a convex surface, and fits into a concave hollow in the larger and stationary stone.  The workwoman kneeling, grasps this upper millstone with both hands, and works it backwards and forwards in the hollow of the lower millstone, in the same way that a baker works his dough, when pressing it and pushing from him.  The weight of the person is brought to bear on the movable stone, and while it is pressed and pushed forwards and backwards, one hand supplies every now and then a little grain to be thus at first bruised and then ground on the lower stone, which is placed on the slope so that the meal when ground falls on to a skin or mat spread for the purpose.  This is perhaps the most primitive form of mill, and anterior to that in oriental countries, where two women grind at one mill, and may have been that used by Sarah of old when she entertained the Angels.

On 2nd October we applied to Muazi for guides to take us straight down to Chinsamba’s at Mosapo, and thus cut off an angle, which we should otherwise make, by going back to Kota-kota Bay.  He replied that his people knew the short way to Chinsamba’s that we desired to go, but that they all were afraid to venture there, on account of the Zulus, or Mazitu.  We therefore started back on our old route, and, after three hours’ march, found some Babisa in a village who promised to lead us to Chinsamba.

We meet with these keen traders everywhere.  They are easily known by a line of horizontal cicatrices, each half an inch long, down the middle of the forehead and chin.  They often wear the hair collected in a mass on the upper and back part of the head, while it is all shaven off the forehead and temples.  The Babisa and Waiau or Ajawa heads have more of the round bullet-shape than those of the Manganja, indicating a marked difference in character; the former people being great traders and travellers, the latter being attached to home and agriculture.  The Manganja usually intrust their ivory to the Babisa to be sold at the Coast, and complain that the returns made never come up to the high prices which they hear so much about before it is sent.  In fact, by the time the Babisa return, the expenses of the journey, in which they often spend a month or two at a place where food abounds, usually eat up all the profits.

Our new companions were trading in tobacco, and had collected quantities of the round balls, about the size of nine pounder shot, into which it is formed.  One of them owned a woman, whose child had been sold that morning for tobacco.  The mother followed him, weeping silently, for hours along the way we went; she seemed to be well known, for at several hamlets, the women spoke to her with evident sympathy; we could do nothing to alleviate her sorrow—the child would be kept until some slave-trader passed, and then sold for calico.  The different cases of slave-trading observed by us are mentioned, in order to give a fair idea of its details.

We spent the first night, after leaving the slave route, at the village of Nkoma, among a section of Manganja, called Machewa, or Macheba, whose district extends to the Bua.

The next village at which we slept was also that of a Manganja smith.  It was a beautiful spot, shaded with tall euphorbia-trees.  The people at first fled, but after a short time returned, and ordered us off to a stockade of Babisa, about a mile distant.  We preferred to remain in the smooth shady spot outside the hamlet, to being pent up in a treeless stockade.  Twenty or thirty men came dropping in, all fully armed with bows and arrows, some of them were at least six feet four in height, yet these giants were not ashamed to say, “We thought that you were Mazitu, and, being afraid, ran away.”  Their orders to us were evidently inspired by terror, and so must the refusal of the headman to receive a cloth, or lend us a hut have been; but as we never had the opportunity of realizing what feelings a successful invasion would produce, we did not know whether to blame them or not.  The headman, a tall old smith, with an enormous, well-made knife of his own workmanship, came quietly round, and, inspecting the shelter, which, from there being abundance of long grass and bushes near, our men put up for us in half an hour, gradually changed his tactics, and, in the evening, presented us with a huge pot of porridge and a deliciously well-cooked fowl, and made an apology for having been so rude to strangers, and a lamentation that he had been so foolish as to refuse the fine cloth we had offered.  Another cloth was of course presented, and we had the pleasure of parting good friends next day.

Our guide, who belonged to the stockade near to which we had slept, declined to risk himself further than his home.  While waiting to hire another, Masiko attempted to purchase a goat, and had nearly concluded the bargain, when the wife of the would-be seller came forward, and said to her husband, “You appear as if you were unmarried; selling a goat without consulting your wife; what an insult to a woman!  What sort of man are you?”  Masiko urged the man, saying, “Let us conclude the bargain, and never mind her;” but he being better instructed, replied, “No, I have raised a host against myself already,” and refused.

We now pushed on to the east, so as to get down to the shores of the Lake, and into the parts where we were known.  The country was beautiful, well wooded, and undulating, but the villages were all deserted; and the flight of the people seemed to have been quite recent, for the grain was standing in the corn-safes untouched.  The tobacco, though ripe, remained uncut in the gardens, and the whole country was painfully quiet: the oppressive stillness quite unbroken by the singing of birds, or the shrill calls of women watching their corn.

On passing a beautiful village, called Bangwé, surrounded by shady trees, and placed in a valley among mountains, we were admiring the beauty of the situation, when some of the much dreaded Mazitu, with their shields, ran out of the hamlet, from which we were a mile distant.  They began to scream to their companions to give us chase.  Without quickening our pace we walked on, and soon were in a wood, through which the footpath we were following led.  The first intimation we had of the approaching Mazitu was given by the Johanna man, Zachariah, who always lagged behind, running up, screaming as if for his life.  The bundles were all put in one place to be defended; and Masiko and Dr. Livingstone walked a few paces back to meet the coming foe.  Masiko knelt down anxious to fire, but was ordered not to do so.  For a second or two dusky forms appeared among the trees, and the Mazitu were asked, in their own tongue, “What do you want?” Masiko adding, “What do you say?”  No answer was given, but the dark shade in the forest vanished.  They had evidently taken us for natives, and the sight of a white man was sufficient to put them to flight.  Had we been nearer the Coast, where the people are accustomed to the slave-trade, we should have found this affair a more difficult one to deal with; but, as a rule, the people of the interior are much more mild in character than those on the confines of civilization.

The above very small adventure was all the danger we were aware of in this journey; but a report was spread from the Portuguese villages on the Zambesi, similar to several rumours that had been raised before, that Dr. Livingstone had been murdered by the Makololo; and very unfortunately the report reached England before it could be contradicted.

One benefit arose from the Mazitu adventure.  Zachariah, and others who had too often to be reproved for lagging behind, now took their places in the front rank; and we had no difficulty in making very long marches for several days, for all believed that the Mazitu would follow our footsteps, and attack us while we slept.

A party of Babisa tobacco-traders came from the N.W. to Molamba, while we were there; and one of them asserted several times that the Loapula, after emerging from Moelo, received the Lulua, and then flowed into Lake Mofu, and thence into Tanganyika; and from the last-named Lake into the sea.  This is the native idea of the geography of the interior; and, to test the general knowledge of our informant, we asked him about our acquaintances in Londa; as Moené, Katema, Shindé or Shinté, who live south-west of the rivers mentioned, and found that our friends there were perfectly well-known to him and to others of these travelled natives.  In the evening two of the Babisa came in, and reported that the Mazitu had followed us to the village called Chigaragara, at which we slept at the bottom of the descent.  The whole party of traders set off at once, though the sun had set.  We ourselves had given rise to the report, for the women of Chigaragara, supposing us in the distance to be Mazitu, fled, with all their household utensils on their heads, and had no opportunity afterwards of finding out their mistake.  We spent the night where we were, and next morning, declining Nkomo’s entreaty to go and kill elephants, took our course along the shores of the Lake southwards.