The dawn has hardly broken when we emerge from our tents to give the order to the caravan headman “to take up loads”. These, during the night, have been stacked under the guard in front of the tents, and while you and I were rapidly dressing, the caravan askari, according to custom, have laid them out one by one in long rows on the ground. At the word there is a rush from all parts of camp; every porter seizes his own load, and he seems to have a dread lest it should be appropriated by another, however heavy and unwieldy it be, and carries it off to lash on to it his mat and his cooking-pot and his little all, and that done, to sit upon it and discuss the delicacy of a few roasted grains of mahindi (maize), or to gnaw the white bones of last night’s nyama (game). Still in the grey dawn, while the askari are striking the tents, and the servants and the porters who are to carry them are tying up your bed and bedding, etc., and the other men adjusting their loads, we sit down to discuss a chunk of meat and a cup of tea – generally in my own case the meal which is to last me till evening.
Just as the sun appears above the horizon I lead the way, followed by a few askari. Every porter shoulders his load, the Wanyamwezi strike up their strange but musical chant, and in two minutes the camp, but now a scene of animated life, is deserted, the smouldering fires die out with the rising sun, and the infinite but silent life of the forest replaces the chatter of the camp.
The Rise of our East African Empire F. D. Lugard.
Until the advent of the railway no expedition, great or small, could have left the coast for the perilous interior without the porters carrying loads on head or shoulders. Porters had their own code of conduct, techniques of porterage and pride in their achievements.
Though you might not ask a man to carry more than his sixty-five lb., there was nothing to prevent him from carrying more if he liked; and the stronger men did like, for a good reason. Three classes of porter were recognized; one-load, two-load and four-load men. The first was the ordinary porter; he carried his burden on his head all day, and when the safari halted to camp for the night upon him fell the task of cutting grass for the pack animals, collecting wood for the fires and bringing water; often troublesome and tedious jobs after six hours or more of marching under a load. The two-load man did none of this camp work, drew double pay and a double ration of food; the four-load man was free of all rules and ate as much as he liked; which was a good deal. I should perhaps explain that he did not carry all 240 lb. at once; he made two journeys: thus the camping places on the old safari route to Uganda were on the average twelve or thirteen miles apart; the four-load man shouldered his two loads at any hour in the morning, probably at four, carried them to the first camping place, and strolled back for two more. It will be admitted that a day’s journey of from thirty-six to forty miles, two-thirds of it under a weight of 120 or 130 lb., proves fine physique and staying power. The four-load man would thus do the 400-mile journey to Naivasha.
On the old ration of 1 ½ lb. of rice per day, forty men ate one load per diem, and the four-load man’s burden was eaten first; thus his load was reduced, first to three loads, then to two loads, then to one. To shepherd and protect every ten porters was an askari with a rifle; none might become an askari unless he had graduated as a two-load man, because it was his duty to see the loads safely into camp, and if accident disabled a man the askari had to make over his rifle to somebody else and take up the load or loads himself. Disabling accidents of the temporary sort were, and are, common; and it often happened that the askari had to turn porter for the nonce. Men, lamed by thorns, stones, or otherwise injured, were left to be brought in by the neapara, an official who funga safari – “closed the safari” – and brought the last man into camp. The neapara sometimes had hard work.
The Kavirondo are good porters; I have had them march for five hours with a single halt to rest, keeping up with mules which travel a good three miles an hour, often more; the going, I need hardly say, was good, neither deep sand, nor hills nor detaining bush to hinder; but even so, five hours going with a load of from sixty to seventy lb. was fine work. The trouble with Kavirondo is their clumsiness; when cutting grass they are sure to damage themselves somehow with the knives; I have had to doctor three men the same evening for the same mishap – each had cut his little finger nearly off. By way of compensation, be it said, these men are patients to delight a doctor, so easily do they heal. I used to dress the wounds with Stockholm tar and grease, bind them up and dismiss the man, safe in the knowledge that the worst cut would heal “by first intention” on these healthy fellows. Never go on safari without Stockholm tar; messy and disagreeable as it is to use, there is nothing like it for treating cuts and sores, whether on man or beast.
There are bad and indifferent porters: dawdlers who can’t or won’t keep up with the rest, stupid fellows who lose themselves on small provocation, poor-spirited fellows who give in when tired. I once had a man give in so completely that he asked me to shoot him; he was persuaded to struggle on till we camped, and was unmercifully chaffed by the others who had no sympathy with one who confessed his job too much for him.
It is a hard life the porter leads on safari. Up at daylight, five or six hours’ march under a sixty lb. load; reaching camp, down with the load, only to seek out wood, grass and water; dinner, 1 ½ lb. of rice – meat, only if the gods are good; sleep, in the open, with, it may be, thought of lions; up again at daylight to go through the same routine; and so for days together. Small wonder that the men become safari-stale; the marvel is that they continue for so long at a time the cheery, light-hearted fellows they are.
A Game Ranger on Safari A. B. Percival.
The ivory caravan.
The kilangozi (head porter) generally carried the largest tusk, and was also leader in the singing. Immediately behind him came all those carrying large single tusks, then those carrying large bundles of cow-tusks, or two small bundles attached to each end of a strong five-foot long shoulder stick, known as an abdalla. Anything extra heavy was slung on a pole, and was carried by two men; it was known as a zega-zega. Owing to their carrying everything on their shoulders, the Wanyamwezi are (or were) remarkable for the conspicuously large and highly developed muscle on the top of each shoulder.
It was, however, the transfer of the load from one shoulder to the other that was the most spectacular “stunt” – personally, I have seen sixty to eighty men do it – as every load, at a given verbal signal at the end of a chorus of a song (of triumph, self-glorification, or flattery of their Bwana), was simultaneously changed from left to right, or vice versa, by simply ducking the head downwards, and then with a sideways swoop, upwards.
One of the self-imposed duties of the kilangozi was to encourage his tired comrades. I have seen one who was carrying a tusk of 115 lb. at the end of a twenty-two miles’ march, return on his tracks, and dance back over a mile, in order to put heart into the men, and to pass the word along that camp was near.
When we returned from Uganda, our kilangozi, a splendid fellow named Mganga, danced up and down the main street of Mombasa while the caravan was closing up, and according to custom he collected quite a considerable sum from the onlookers. It was also a recognized custom to issue all the leading porters who carried big tusks, an extra allowance of posho (food).
Early Days in East Africa Frederick Jackson.
1 Burton (Camoens, iv, p. 241) suggests that this picture of the Holy Ghost may have been a figure of Kapot-eshwar, the Hindu pigeon-god and goddess, an incarnation of Shiva and his wife, the third person of the Hindu Triad.
2 Trigo tremez, corn that ripens in three months. This, according to a note furnished by Sir John Kirk, would be sorghum.
3 “He hath shewed his people the power of his works, that he may give them the heritage of the heathen.”
4 All the time of my residence in Jagga it rained in torrents almost every night, on which account the sun is welcome to the inhabitants, and is their god; – Eruwa = sun, heaven, god.
PART II
Travel<
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AFTER THE DEPARTURE of the Portuguese, various Arab factions ruled the coastal settlements theoretically in the name of the Sultan of Oman who, between 1832 and 1840, transferred his capital from Muscat to Zanzibar. His successor, Barghash ibn Said, after long negotiations centred on the abolition of the slave trade, leased to the British Government for £11,000 a year a coastal strip about ten miles wide. Meanwhile an energetic Glaswegian ship-owner, William Mackinnon, in 1888 formed the Imperial British East Africa Company to open up to “legitimate commerce” the country between the coast and the kingdom of Buganda, raising for the purpose £250,000. The task proved beyond the Company’s means and in 1895 it was taken over by the British Government. The first duty of a government saddled with a chunk of Africa larger than France, thinly populated by tribes constantly at war with each other and dominated by the dreaded Maasai, was to establish the Pax Britannica and a framework of administration. The decision was made to build a railway. The railway opened the doors of eastern Africa to the rest of the world, and changed forever the country’s destiny and way of life of its peoples.
THE UGANDA RAILWAY
What it will cost no words can express;
What is its object no brain can suppose;
Where it will start from no one can guess;
Where it is going to nobody knows.
What is the use of it none can conjecture;
What it will carry there’s none can define;
And in spite of George Curzon’s superior lecture
It clearly is naught but a lunatic line.
Quoted in The Lunatic Express Charles Miller.
Even the Commissioner of the newly-created British East Africa Protectorate appeared to agree.
It is a curious confession, but I do not know why the Uganda Railway was built, and I think many people in East Africa share my ignorance. It is a little hard to believe that the only motive was purely philanthropic – namely, the suppression of the slave trade – nor are the strategic advantages of the line very obvious, for though it certainly might be used as an alternative route for sending troops to the Sudan, no attempt has been made to open up communication on the higher waters of the Nile, and the journey would in any case be long. It is most remarkable that at the time when the construction was decided on, there appears to have been no idea of the value, or even of the existence, of the high temperate region to the east of Lake Victoria. On the other hand, there was probably an exaggerated idea of the riches and fertility of Uganda, a country of great interest, with a large and exceptionally intelligent native population, but in most parts at any rate not suited for European settlement, and not as yet proved to yield any produce which would approximately repay the cost of the line. Yet, looking at the completed railway today, I think even hostile critics will admit that it justifies its existence. The slave trade has disappeared so entirely that one is apt to forget that only a few years ago it was a real horror and scandal which called for energetic suppression. The line is found to pass through a healthy and fertile district which ought to soon become a considerable European colony with good commercial prospects. Above all, the completion of this route has had the most remarkable effects in opening up the countries of Central Equatorial Africa, and dissipating the cloud of ignorance by which they were concealed. What may be the whole consequences in the future of this sudden illumination of the Dark Continent, no one can predict, but one remarkable result is our control of the sources of the Nile, and the grandiose plans now set forth for regulating the water supply of Upper Egypt.
It is perhaps not superfluous to repeat that the Uganda Railway is not in Uganda at all, but entirely in the East Africa Protectorate, the whole breadth of which from the sea to Lake Victoria it traverses. It is as if the line from Charing Cross to Dover were called the French Railway. In some of the earlier reports it was described as the Mombasa-Victoria Railway, a far more correct name, which has, however, been entirely dropped in favour of the shorter title….
The most serious criticism passed on the Uganda Railway is that it was unduly costly. Elaborate defences have been made to prove the contrary, but I think that every one who has an adequate knowledge both of the country and of the history of the construction is agreed that the line ought really to have cost about four millions sterling, whereas “the total expenditure out of Parliamentary grants up to the date the Committee ceased to control the outlay” (which is not quite the whole expenditure) “was £5,317,000.” The expenditure on accessories was, no doubt, very ample; on housing the officials and the subordinate staff, on building whole towns, on the medical and police departments. I do not find fault with the expenditure, but Africa would be a very different place from what it is if everything were done on this scale, and I think it would have been more natural and more advantageous to have enlarged the corresponding departments of the Protectorate administration instead of creating duplicate departments….
But, no doubt, the chief assignable cause of the excess in expenditure was the enormous amount of temporary work on the line. A German official, who travelled over the railway shortly before its completion, said, on returning, “I am ashamed of my country. We have not built one railway to the Lake yet, and the English have built two.” For a large part of the line this was hardly an exaggeration. Even now the traveller sees everywhere traces of temporary bridges and temporary lines, and sometimes two of the latter, making three lines in all, before the final route was laid.
The East Africa Protectorate Sir Charles Eliot.
Labour to build the railway was brought from India; the men were called coolies. As the line approached Tsavo at Mile 121 its notorious man-eating lions emerged to halt construction altogether for three weeks in December 1898. Lt.-Col. J. H. Patterson of the Indian Army tells the story.
At first they [the lions] were not always successful in their efforts to carry off a victim, but as time went on they stopped at nothing and indeed braved any danger in order to obtain their favourite food. Their methods then became so uncanny, and their man-stalking so well-timed and so certain of success, that the workmen firmly believed that they were not real animals at all, but devils in lions’ shape. Many a time the coolies solemnly assured me that it was absolutely useless to attempt to shoot them. They were quite convinced that the angry spirits of two departed native chiefs had taken this form in order to protest against a railway being made through their country, and by stopping its progress to avenge the insult thus shown to them.
I had only been a few days at Tsavo when I first heard that these brutes had been seen in the neighbourhood. Shortly afterwards one or two coolies mysteriously disappeared, and I was told that they had been carried off by night from their tents and devoured by lions. At the time I did not credit this story, and was more inclined to believe that the unfortunate men had been the victims of foul play at the hands of some of their comrades…. This suspicion, however, was very soon dispelled. About three weeks after my arrival, I was roused one morning about daybreak and told that one of my jemadars, a fine powerful Sikh named Ungan Singh, had been seized in his tent during the night, and dragged off and eaten.
Naturally I lost no time in making an examination of the place, and was soon convinced that the man had indeed been carried off by a lion, as its “pug” marks were plainly visible in the sand, while the furrows made by the heels of the victim showed the direction in which he had been dragged away. Moreover, the jemadar shared his tent with half a dozen other workmen, and one of his bedfellows had actually witnessed the occurrence. He graphically described how, at about midnight, the lion suddenly put its head in at the open tent door and seized Ungan Singh – who happened to be nearest the opening – by the throat. The unfortunate fellow cried out “Choro” (“Let go”), and threw his arms up round the lion’s neck. The next moment he was gone, and his panic-stricken companions lay helpless, forced to listen to the terrible struggle which took place outside. Poor Ungan Singh must have died hard; but what chance had he? As a coolie gravely remar
ked, “Was he not fighting with a lion?” …
We found it an easy matter to follow the route taken by the lion, as he appeared to have stopped several times before beginning his meal. Pools of blood marked these halting-places, where he doubtless indulged in the man-eater’s habit of licking the skin off so as to get at the fresh blood. (I have been led to believe that this is their custom from the appearance of two half-eaten bodies which I subsequently rescued: the skin was gone in places, and the flesh looked dry, as if it had been sucked.) On reaching the spot where the body had been devoured, a dreadful spectacle presented itself. The ground all round was covered with blood and morsels of flesh and bones, but the unfortunate jemadar’s head had been left intact, save for the holes made by the lion’s tusks on seizing him, and lay a short distance away from the other remains, the eyes staring wide open with a startled, horrified look in them. The place was considerably cut up, and on closer examination we found that two lions had been there and had probably struggled for possession of the body. It was the most gruesome sight I had ever seen.
There followed a long duel between the man-eaters and the Colonel. Night after night, Patterson sat up in a tree to which a goat or donkey had been tethered as bait, only to hear screams from a distant camp which told him that his enemies had again eluded him. The lions grew bolder and bolder, forcing their way through the thickest thorn fences erected round the camps; the men more and more demoralized, demanding to be sent back to India and retreating at night into holes dug in the floors of their huts.
Nine Faces Of Kenya Page 8