THE MYSTERY OF AFRICA.
IT is impossible to read Mr. Stanley's reports of his • adventures, and especially the official one published - this week—a masterpiece of unpretentious lucidity, though obviously penned by a self-conscious man—without reflect- ing once more upon the great mystery of Africa. What is it that through all ages has rendered the mass of that grand continent, five times the size of Europe, full of extravagantly fertile regions and of mineral treasures, so useless-to mankind ? There they are, millions upon millions of rich acres, millions of pounds' worth of treasure, millions of people physically strong ; and except on a thin coast- line along the Mediterranean, and in a wonderfully narrow valley of the north-eastern corner, the progress of man- kind, till within the last fifty years, has been no better for them. Natural riches such as Europe does not possess. have served only to keep alive, for the most part in horrible misery, populations which never advance, never improve, build no city, develop no art, found no lasting society,—do nothing, in fact, but end lives of terror or rapine by deaths often of exceptional pain and horror. The Africans have not even developed creeds. The old-fashioned explanation, the solidity of the con- figuration of the continent, which has no internal sea and no deep fiords, is evidently imaginary. Africa is no more solid than Asia, and in some of the thickest and most remote corners of Asia, in Central China, in Samarcand, in -the depths of Arabia, in Central India, some of the greatest and most • independent civilisations have arisen. If Africa has. no sea, it has great lakes ; if it has no fiords, it. is penetrated to its very centre by mighty rivers, the Nile, the Niger, the Congo, the Orange, the Limpopo, the Zambesi, an several more, only one of which. has ever attracted a race capable of constructing stone buildings on its banks. So far from the desert and the forest being the obstacle, the deserts have been traversed on camels for ages ; half Africa is capable of cultivation, which itself implies capacity of travel ; in large sections of it the population is thick on the ground, and even on the lower grounds, or in the Doabs, where such awful forests as that of the Aruwhimi stretch, there are, as Mr. Drum- mond testifies, thousands of miles of footpath so inces- santly trodden that natives are never without a guiding line. Another explanation is, that the obstacle is the climate ; but that is almost as superficial as the first. Continents are populated by their peoples, not by wandering visitors from elsewhere ; and the climate of Africa, though in places deadly to the European, does not kill its own peoples, who are, for the most part, men of exceptional physical vigour and endurance. That is why the curse of the slave-trade has descended -on Africa, and also why her children, though transported to other regions, oppressed, beaten, and half-starved, multiply faster than either of the great colonising races, the Anglo-Saxon and the Spaniard. Ask the British soldier what the Zulu is like as a fighting man, or the British sailor what he thinks of the mere strength of the " nigger " cook, or any doctor in the Louisianian swamps, or those of • Mozambique, how he compares the capacity of Negro and White for resisting malaria. Besides, Africa is not a place, but a wilderness of places, and on its enormous plateaux the climate is often as good as that of Italy, and far better than that of Bengal, where the people swarm like flies. Sierra- Leone is in Africa, but so also is the Orange Free State, where ill-health may be said to be unknown, and the few people might be excused if, like the savages of Guiana, they held witchcraft to be the only origin of disease. Nor is the better theory of her separateness a full explanation of the uselessness of Africa. Men could hardly be more separate than the Assyrians, or the Chinese who reared the social order of -the earlier native Empire, or that strange people of Egypt who built Luxor and wrote the hieratic books, and who can have borrowed nothing, because they were earlier than all. No civilised man, it is said, not even the Roman, ever discovered the Quorm ; but did any such man discover the Nile ? There was, it is suggested, white blood in the first Egyptian, white blood, and therefore the transcendent gift of accumu- lating knowledge. Granted ; but was there white blood in the subjects of the Incas, who built, in a seclusion as perfect as that of a separate planet, great cities, smelted metals and worked in them, terraced the mountain-sides with watered gardens, invented the guipus, and organised a social polity so elaborate that the modern Socialists of the Continent, though they do not know it, are but imitators of the old Peruvian ideas ? And, finally, the great " Negro " theory, the incompetence said to be always found in the children of Ham, which is so constantly advanced, does not meet the facts. All Africans are not Negroes, or even black men. Brown races, no darker than the races of India, dwell or wander in a large portion of the continent. The Zulus and a host of such tribes are Asiatic in form, though burlier ; and Stanley relates, in the very Report which provokes us to this speculation, that he found "finely formed" tribes "light bronze" in colour, in the very recesses of the horrible forest of the Aruwhimi. Why has not some one clan amidst so many races mastered and civilised the Negro tribes, as similar clans mastered and civilised the original Australoids of the Asiatic deltas ? They were not impeded, we presume, by modern ideas about the righteousness of conquest, or by any hesitation in using discipline to enforce the needful education.
It would be no explanation to say, as we seem to remember that Sir R. Burton has somewhere said, that the native of Africa lacks the natural morale necessary to develop a civilisation. That only pushes back the research one step further, for why does he lack it any more than any other of mankind ? Moral strength surely is not depen- dent on geography ; and in Christian morality, or any sound morality, the Chinese is as lacking as the Negro. Besides, is the idea well founded ? It is not necessary to cumber ourselves with democratic nonsense about the equality of races, who are no more equal than individuals are, in order to ask whether the low moral nature of the African may not be exaggerated, whether, at all events, it is not high enough to allow of a coherent society. It seems to us, who are most doubtful of Negro capacity for unguided development, as if there were some evidence on the other side. To ask to be governed, to be grateful for political protection, is the very first of political steps upward, is the root, for example, of kingship and feudalism ; and Negroes have displayed these qualities. Mr. Stanley is certainly no "nigger worshipper," but a man who says out that Emin Pasha's failure was due to his hesitation in governing when needful by the bullet, and he tells one story strangely suggestive of a hope to be entertained for the Negro even when unguided :— " Our advance into U songora created great terror among the Waradura, and infused such courage in the minds of the Wakongu and the Wasongura, that our expedition became soon of such a formidable force that opposition was hopeless. We drove the Wanyoro from both these countries, and released the Salt Lakes of their presence, and in so doing performed such service to the natives of Ukonju, Usongora, Toro, Uhaiyana,
U nyampaka, and Ankori that our march through these countries was a triumph ; we were the recipients of many courtesies ; we were welcomed by old and young; king, chief, and peasant assisted to do us honour. Ankori especially is such a vast country and so very populous, that it alone might have seriously impeded our advance, and possibly rendered it impossible; yet in no district, country, or region in all my experience of Africa have I been so affected by the general joy and universal pleasure my presence seemed to create. The reason of this was the great relief all these nations and tribes felt at the removal of the obstructions placed by the Wanyoro around the valuable salt deposits at the Salt Lakes, near Lake Albert Edward. The general exodus of the W anyoro at once opened access to the salt deposits, and while we slowly marched through the land, flotillas of canoes were hastily despatched by the tribes around Albert Edward Nyanza to be freighted with valuable cargoes of salt—an article much needed by the pastoral people of the lake because of their immense herds of cattle. Even as far as Karagwe this relief from the presence of Wanyoro was felt, and we happily experienced its effects, for from the Albert Nyanza to the south-western frontier of Karagwe our expedition was supported with grain, .bananas, and cattle by
voluntary contributions of the 'Kings and peoples. Any readers of explorers' records will understand, what this means. An ex- pedition,--such as I led, . of eight hundred souls would, under • ordinary cirenmstances, have needed forty bales of cloth. and twenty sacks of beads as currency to purchase food. Not a bead or a yard of cloth was demanded from us. Such small gifts of cloth to-the chiefs as we gave were given of our own accord."
Negroes undoubtedly forget with the rapidity of children ; but can the tribes of whom Mr. Stanley writes this be incapable of understanding or obeying the firm but just government to which his own followers—Africans also—so completely yielded, that they became in all essentials a • little army of disciplined men, ready to face anything except the protracted hunger which, be it remembered, has often dissolved the discipline of British sailors, and would; we fear, dissolve also that of Pomeranian soldiers ? There must be possibilities of government among such a people, though it might not be government by philan- thropists who have forgotten-what savage human nature is like, as completely as they have forgotten the old-Biblical teaching about thosewho bear the sword of the Lord in • vain. And yet if-this ability-to be governed and protected exists, this thirst for a true political rule, how is it that in three thousand years it has never been gratified, when it has been gratified everywhere else where men have grown thick on the ground ? We know, and pretend to know, of no answer to the riddle, and can only say that if men owe, any obligation to each other, Europe is bound to • find, one, and to prevent.both at once and for all time such scenes as this, which in whole sections of Africa have now become normal :— " People in England have not the slightest idea what the present fashion of ivory-collecting, as adopted by the Arabs and Zanzibari half-castes west of the lake regions, means. Slave- trading becomes innocence when compared with ivory-raiding. The latter has become literally a most bloody business. Bands consisting of from 300 to 600 hfanyema, armed with Enfield carbines, and officered by Zanzibari Arabs and Swahili, range over that immense forest land east of the Upper Congo, destroying every district they discover, and driving such natives as escape the sudden fusillades into the deepest recesses of the forest. In the midst of a -vast circle described by several days' march in every direction, the ivory-raiders select a locality wherein plantains are abundant, prepare a few acres for rice, and, while the crop is growing, sally out by twenties or forties to destroy every village within the circle, and to hunt up the miser- able natives who have escaped their first secret and sudden onslaughts. They are aware that the forest, though it furnishes recesses of bush impervious to discovery, is a hungry wilderness outside the plantain-grove of the clearing, and that to sustain life the women must forage far and near for berries, wild fruit, and fungi. These scattered bands of ivory-hunters find these women and children an easy prey. The startling explosion of heavily loaded guns in the deep woods paralyses the timid creatures, and before they recover from their deathly fright they are rushed upon and secured. By the possession of these captives they impose upon the tribal communities the necessity of sur- rendering every article of value, ivory or goats, to gain the liberty of their relatives. Thus the land becomes thoroughly denuded of ivory ; but, unfortunately, also it becomes a wild waste. The six hundred ivory tusks that Ugarrowwa was bearing now to the coast had been acquired by just such bloody work, relentless destruction of human life, and condemnation of the un- happy survivors of the tribal communities to indescribable miseries. What Ugarrowwa had done within his elected circle, Kilonga-Longa has performed with no less skill, but certainly with a far greater disregard to the interests of humanity, within his reserve ; and the same cruel, murderous policy was being pur- sued within dozens of other circles into which the region as far south as Uregga, north to the Welle, east to longitude 29 deg. 30 sec., and west to the Congo, was parcelled out."
Alas! we who write so hopefully of" civilisation" know well that these devils incarnate are, as compared with the Negroes they murder, potentially highly civilised, are, in fact, of the race which wrote the "Arabian Nights," built Bagdad and Granada, and invented algebra. The secret of progress verily is hard to find.
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