The Martyrdom of Man, Winwood Reade [best book club books TXT] 📗

or tribe is precarious in the

extreme. They are like the wild animals, engaged from day to night in

seeking food, and ever watchful against the foes by whom they are

surrounded. The men who go out hunting, the girls who go with their

pitchers to the village brook, are never sure that they will return, for there

is always war with some neighbouring village, and their method of

making war is by ambuscade. But besides these real and ordinary

dangers, the savage believes himself to be encompassed by evil spirits

who may at any moment spring upon him in the guise of a leopard, or

cast down upon him the dead branch of a tree. In order to propitiate these

invisible beings, his life is entangled with intricate rites; it is turned this

way and that way as oracles are delivered or as omens appear. It is

impossible to describe, or even to imagine, the tremulous condition of the

savage mind, yet the traveller can see from their aspect and manners that

they dwell in a state of never-ceasing dread.

 

Let us now suppose that a hundred years have passed, and let us visit the

village again. The place itself and the whole country around have been

transformed. The forest has disappeared, and in its stead are fields

covered with the glossy blades of the young rice, with the tall red tufted

maize, with the millet and the Guinea corn, with the yellow flowers of the

tobacco plant growing in wide fields, and with large shrubberies of

cotton, the snowy wool peeping forth from the expanding leaves. Before

us stands a great town surrounded by walls of red clay flanked by towers,

and with heavy wooden gates. Day dawns, and the women come forth to

the brook decorously dressed in blue cotton robes passed over the hair as

a hood. Men ride forth on horseback, wearing white turbans and swords

suspended on their right shoulders by a crimson sash. They are the

unmixed descendants of the forest savage; their faces are those of pure

negroes, but the expression is not the same. Their manners are grave and

composed; they salute one another, saying in the Arabic “Peace be with

you.” The palaver-house or town-hall is also the mosque; the

parliamentary debates and the law trials which are there held have all the

dignity of a religious service; they are opened with prayer, and the name

of the creator is often solemnly invoked by the orator or advocate, while

all the elders touch their foreheads with their hands and murmur in

response, Amina! Amina! (Amen! Amen!). The town is pervaded by a

bovine smell, sweet to the nostrils of those who have travelled long in the

beefless lands of the people of the forest. Sounds of industry may also be

heard—not only the clinking of the blacksmith’s hammer, but also the

rattling of the loom, the thumping of the cloth-maker, and the song of the

cordwainer as he sits cross-legged making saddles or shoes. The women,

with bow and distaff and spindle, are turning the soft tree-wool into

thread; the work in the fields is done by slaves. The elders smoke or take

snuff in their verandahs, and sometimes study a page of the Koran. When

the evening draws on there is no sound of flute and drum. A bonfire of

brushwood is lighted in the market-place, and the boys of the town collect

around it with wooden boards in their hands, and bawl their lessons,

swaying their bodies to and fro, by which movement they imagine the

memory is assisted. Then rises a long, loud, harmonious cry, “Come to

prayers, come to prayers! Come to security! God is great! He liveth and

he dieth not! Come to prayers! O thou Bountiful!”

 

La ilah illa Allah: Mohammed Rasul Allah.

Allahu Akbaru. Allahu Akbar.

 

Such towns as these may be less interesting to the traveller than the pagan

villages—he finds them merely a second-hand copy of Eastern life. But

though they are not so picturesque, their inhabitants are happier and better

men. Violent and dishonest deeds are no longer arranged by pecuniary

compensation. Husbands can no longer set wife-traps for their friends;

adultery is treated as a criminal offence. Men can no longer squander

away their relations at the gaming table, and stake their own bodies on a

throw. Men can no longer be tempted to vice and crime under the

influence of palm wine. Women can no longer be married by a great

chief in herds, and treated like beasts of burden and like slaves. Each wife

has an equal part of her husband’s love by law; it is not permitted to

forsake and degrade the old wife for the sake of the young. Each wife has

her own house, and the husband may not enter until he has knocked at the

door and received the answer, Bismillah! (In the name of God!) Every

boy is taught to read and write in Arabic, which is the religious and

official language in the Sudan, as Latin was in Europe in the Middle

Ages; he also writes his own language with the Arabic character, as we

write ours with the Roman letter. In such countries the policy of isolation

is at an end; they are open to all the Moslems in the world, and are thus

connected with the lands of the East. Here there is a remarkable change,

and one that deserves a place in history. It is a movement the more

interesting since it is still actively going on. The Mohammedan religion

has already overspread a region of Negroland as large as Europe. It is

firmly established not only in the Africa of the Mediterranean and the

Nile and in the oases of the Sahara, but also throughout that part of the

continent which we have termed the platform of the Niger.

 

In 1797 Mungo Park discovered the Niger in the heart of Africa, at a

point where it is as broad as the Thames at Westminster; in 1817 Rene

Caillie crossed it at a point considerably higher up; in 1822 Major Laing

attempted to reach it by striking inland from Sierra Leone, but was forced

by the natives to return when he was only fifty miles distant from the

river; and in 1869 I made the same attempt, was turned back at the same

place, but made a fresh expedition, and reached the river at a higher point

than Caillie and Park. But my success also was incomplete, for native

wars made it impossible for me to reach the source, though it was near at

hand; and that still remains a splendid prize for one who will walk in my

footsteps as I walked in those of Laing. The source of the Niger, as given

in the maps; was fixed by Laing from native information which I

ascertained to be correct. There is no doubt that this river rises in the

backwoods of Sierra Leone, at a distance of only two hundred miles from

the coast. It runs for some time as a foaming hill-torrent bearing obscure

and barbarous names, and at the point where I found it glides into the

broad, calm breast of the plateau, and receives its illustrious name of the

Joliba,or Great River.

 

It flows north-east, and enters the Sahara as if intending, like the Nile, to

pour its waters into the Mediterranean Sea. But suddenly it turns towards

the east, so that Herodotus, who heard of it when he was at Memphis,

supposed that it joined the Nile; and such was the prevailing opinion not

only among the Greeks but also among the Arabs in the Middle Ages.

They did not know that the eccentric river again wheels round, flows

towards the sea near which it rose, passes through the latitude of its birth,

and, having thus described three quarters of a circle, debouches by many

mouths into the Bight of Benin. So singular a course might well baffle

the speculations of geographers and the investigations of explorers. The

people who dwell on the banks of the river do not know where it ends. I

was told by some that it went to Mecca, by others that it went to

Jerusalem. Mungo Park’s own theory was ludicrously incorrect—he

believed that the Congo was its mouth. Others declared that it never

reached the sea at all. It was Lander who discovered the mouth of the

Niger, at one time as mysterious as the sources of the Nile, and so

established the hypothesis which Reichard had advanced and which

Mannert had declared to be “contrary to nature.”

 

The Niger platform or basin is flat, with here and there a line of rolling

hills containing gold. The vegetation consists of high, coarse grass and

trees of small stature, except on the banks of streams, where they grow to

a larger size. The palm-oil tree is not found on this plateau, but the shea-butter or tallow tree abounds in natural plantations which will some day

prove a source of enormous wealth. As the river flows on, these trees

disappear; the plains widen and are smoothed out, and the country

assumes the character of the Sahara.

 

The negroes who inhabited the platform of the Niger lived chiefly on the

banks of the river, subsisting on lotus root and fish. Like all savages,

they were jealous and distrustful; their intercourse was that of war. But

nature, by means of a curious contrivance, has rendered it impossible for

men to remain eternally apart. Common salt is one of the mineral

constituents of the human body, and savages, who live chiefly on

vegetable food, are dependent upon it for their life. In Africa children

may be seen sucking it like sugar. “Come and eat with us today,” says

the hospitable African; “we are going to have salt for dinner.” It is not in

all countries that this mineral food is to be found, but the saltless lands in

the Sudan contain gold dust, ivory, and slaves, and so a system of barter

is arranged, and isolated tribes are brought into contact with one another.

 

The two great magazines are the desert and the ocean. At the present day

the white, powdery English salt is carried on donkeys and slaves to the

upper waters of the Niger, and is driving back the crystalline salt of the

Sahara. In the ancient days the salt of the plateau came entirely from the

mines of Bilma and Toudeyni, in the desert, which were occupied and

worked by negro tribes. But at a period far remote, before the

foundations of Carthage were laid, a Berber nation, now called the

Tuaricks, overspread the desert and conquered the oases and the mines.

This terrible people are yet the scourge of the peaceful farmer and the

passing caravan. They camp in leather tents; they are armed with lance

and sword, and with shields on which is painted the image of a cross.

The Arabs call them “the muffled ones,” for their mouths and noses are

covered with a bandage, sometimes black, sometimes white, above which

sit in deep sockets, like antlions in their pits, a pair of dark, cruel,

sinister

looking eyes. They levy tolls on all travellers, and murder those who

have the reputation of unusual wealth—as they did Miss Tinne, whose

iron water-tanks they imagined to be filled with gold. When they poured

down on the Sahara they were soon attracted by the rich pastures and

alluvial plains of the black country. In course of time their raids were

converted into conquests, and they established a line of kingdoms from

the Niger to the Nile, in the borderland between the Sahara and the

parallel 10º N. Timbuktu, Haoussa, Bornu, Bagirmi, Waday, Darfur, and

Kordofan were the names of these kingdoms; in all of them Islam is now

the religion of the state; all of them belong to the Asiatic