FROM EAST AND WEST AFRICA.* THE reviewer of books is
often constrained to ask himself what makes the difference between an interesting book and a dull one, and that question is forced on us by the comparison of these two volumes, each written by a man who has obviously no vocation for literature as such, but who, possessing a mass of curious knowledge about a savage and little-known com- munity, and also a number of admirable pictures illustrating the unfamiliar life, is tempted by the ordinary rewards to make them accessible to the public. Admitting that the Masai of the East African Protectorate are more peculiar and more romantic than the Mendi and other tribes of the Sherbro' Hinterland, or of the West Coast in general, we still cannot account for the difference. In 1898, during the rebellion occasioned by the imposition of the Hut-tax, Mr. Alldridge went through an experience by far more exciting than any that befel Mr. Hinde among the Masai or among the lions of that beast-haunted country, yet his story of it is less moving by far than Mr. Hinde's account of the rinderpest and the prophecy of Batian. The difference lies in the men themselves. Mr. Hinde is the adventurer born, as indeed his previous record in the Congo State proves ; he has a natural affinity with the savage life, and their customs find in him a sympathetic interpreter. Mr. Alldridge, after twelve years' residence as Administrator in touch with raw natives, remains fundamentally the decent English bourgeois, just and kindly, we make no doubt, and probably an accurate recorder of what he saw and heard, but without the least glimpse of insight into what lies behind the grotesque jumble of customs and ceremonies, decent and indecent. He has never learnt, in Miss Kingsley's phrase, " to think black " for a moment, and consequently the chief use of , his volume will probably be to furnish data from which other inquirers can begin their investigation.
For instance, he gives a considerable number of details respecting the secret societies, which, as be says, "entirely ruled the natives " before British intervention—the Porrot, the Bundu, the Yassi—and he shows pictures of people in the characteristic dresses. But there is not a single hint of any underlying principle, of any intelligible object. It is inconceivable that these societies should have ruled the folk by means purely arbitrary and capricious they were instruments of human association, and if Miss Kingsley had been reporting on them, she would have endeavoured to show how the thing worked. Mr. Alldridge sets down his observations as if they were ultimate facts. And yet the whole contention of his book is that the natives have the common human faculty that enables them to appre- ciate justice and good government. Their order may not be so good an order as ours, but it is an order, and not a meaning- less chaos. One may be very sure that a community will not invoke the terrible " Tongo players " whom he describes unless there is a widespread idea that these medicine-men, who cote down to kill and burn, it may be, those who in. coked their coming, are not acting wantonly, but somehow or other tend to set right what is wrong. However the shape and detail of it may vary, there is a certain common element in human conceptions of justice, and you cannot be of any good to people unless you recognise this fact. The contempt for the native mind which ignores the existence of this ele- ment has much to answer for. On a view very commonly taken, an example is afforded by the transactions in which Mr. Alldridge was intimately concerned. When it was
• (1.) The Last of the 3faent. By Sidney Langford Hinde and Hildegarde Hinde. With Illustrations from Photographs and Drawings. London : R . Heinemann. [15s. 1—(2.) Tic Si::'hero and its Hinterland. By T. S. Alldridge. • The Great Deserts and Forests of North America. By Paul Fountain. London Macmillan and Co. [13s.] London : Longman and Co. [95. 6d. net.]
decided to transform the Hinterland of Sherbro' and the other districts about Sierra Leone from a "sphere of influence" into a protectorate, he was one of those charged with visiting the chiefs and forming friendly treaties. He says he explained these treaties, and he evidently explained that the traffic in slaves must stop. But did he explain to them that the treaty gave a right to the British to impose direct taxa- tion ? If he did, it is odd that he does not say so. The view that the imposition of the Hut-tax caused the war is represented as a vague popular belief. But surely that view was expressed in the Report of Sir David Chalmers, the Commissioner specially appointed to inquire into the matter. Mr. Alldridge should either have dealt seriously with the question, or abstained from reference to it. We are glad, however, to note and
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products, is both valuable and interesting. unhappily, it seems, a race doomed to extinction. As the Greek statesman said of the Spartans, so it may be said that the Masai cannot last, for the final cause of their polity is war. And if his report be true, their wars were carried on under the most chivalric conditions. Surprises and ambushes formed no part in their strategy ; when they went out to fight they sent a warning, and the fight when joined resolved itself into a series of duels. They spared the women of the vanquished, a trait unusual in any war. Shield and spear were their only weapons ; archery they condemned as unmanly, and left it to the servile race of the Dorrobo, who differed from the Helots in being refused the privilege of fighting beside their own lords. Nomad herdsmen, they have developed in the course of ages a strange intimacy with their cattle, and a child can control a great herd on the open plains. Lying and theft are contemned among them. Their marriage customs are strange to our minds, but not ignominious ; and though all drudgery is done by the old women, they are willing drudges. " They are almost invariably lively and good- tempered, and, incredible as it seems, appear to enjoy existence. They in no way resent being compelled to work, and since they are not actively ill-treated they go on con- tentedly to the end." The duties of child-bearing women are few and light; young girls are wholly exempt from menial work. As for the elders, whose period of service as fighters has closed, they are like Plato's in the Republic," turned free to pasture like the sacred cattle." Indeed, in many ways the Masai customs recall Plato's Utopia. Try to wean them from their traditional way of life and settle them as agriculturists, they become mere pariahs, like the American Indians. It is to be hoped that the latter portion of the prophecy which Batian spoke on Kilima N'jaro foretelling the de- vastation of his land by the small-pox and rinderpest, and the subsequent coming of the " God man with a fair and shining white face," under whose aegis his people should dwell safely, may find an honourable fulfilment, and not merely accomplish itself in the inglorious decay of a fine race. We have no space left to speak of Mr. Hinde's detailed chapters on the game of the greatest of all game countries. We have only to add that, whether the credit be due to him or the editor who signs "E. C. M.," his book is exceedingly well written and in every way creditable.
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