The Congo and Coasts of Africa Part 8

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Late Sultan of Zanzibar in His State Carriage.]

You feel that it is an experiment, that it has been sent out like a box of children's building blocks, and set up carefully on this beautiful harbor. All that Dar Es Salaam needs now is trade and emigrants. At present it is a show place, and might be exhibited at a world's fair as an example of a model village.

In writing of Zanzibar I am embarra.s.sed by the knowledge that I am not an unprejudiced witness. I fell in love with Zanzibar at first sight, and the more I saw of it the more I wanted to take my luggage out of the ship's hold and cable to my friends to try and have me made Vice-Consul to Zanzibar through all succeeding administrations.

Zanzibar runs back abruptly from a white beach in a succession of high white walls. It glistens and glares, and dazzles you; the sand at your feet is white, the city itself is white, the robes of the people are white. It has no public landing-pier. Your rowboat is run ash.o.r.e on a white shelving beach, and you face an impenetrable ma.s.s of white walls. The blue waters are behind you, the lofty fortress-like facade before you, and a strip of white sand is at your feet.

And while you are wondering where this hidden city may be, a kind resident takes you by the hand and pilots you through a narrow crack in the rampart, along a twisting fissure between white-washed walls where the sun cannot reach, past great black doorways of carved oak, and out suddenly into the light and laughter and roar of Zanzibar.

In the narrow streets are all the colors of the Orient, gorgeous, unshaded, and violent; cobalt blue, greens, and reds on framework, windows, and doorways; red and yellow in the awnings and curtains of the bazaars, and orange and black, red and white, yellow, dark blue, and purple, in the long shawls of the women. It is the busiest, and the brightest and richest in color of all the ports along the East African coast. Were it not for its narrow streets and its towering walls it would be a place of perpetual sunshine. Everybody is either actively busy, or contentedly idle. It is all movement, noise, and glitter, everyone is telling everyone else to make way before him; the Indian merchants beseech you from the open bazaars; their children, swathed in gorgeous silks and hung with jewels and bangles, stumble under your feet, the Sultan's troops a.s.sail you with fife and drum, and the black women, wrapped below their bare shoulders in the colors of the b.u.t.terfly, and with teeth and brows dyed purple, crowd you to the wall. Outside the city there are long and wonderful roads between groves of the bulky mango-tree of richest darkest green and the bending palm, shading deserted palaces of former Sultans, temples of the Indian worshippers, native huts, and the white-walled country residences and curtained verandas of the white exiles. It is absurd to write them down as exiles, for it is a Mohammedan Paradise to which they have been exiled.

The exiles themselves will tell you that the reason you think Zanzibar is a paradise, is because you have your steamer ticket in your pocket. But that retort shows their lack of imagination, and a vast ingrat.i.tude to those who have preceded them. For the charm of Zanzibar lies in the fact that while the white men have made it healthy and clean, have given it good roads, good laws, protection for the slaves, quick punishment for the slave-dealers, and a firm government under a benign and gentle Sultan, they have done all of this without destroying one flash of its local color, or one throb of its barbaric life, which is the showy, sunshiny, and sumptuous life of the Far East. The good things of civilization are there, but they are un.o.btrusive, and the evils of civilization appear not at all, the native does not wear a derby hat with a kimona, as he does in j.a.pan, nor offer you souvenirs of Zanzibar manufactured in Birmingham; Reuter's telegrams at the club and occasional steamers alone connect his white masters with the outer world, and so infrequent is the visiting stranger that the local phrase-book for those who wish to converse in the native tongue is compiled chiefly for the convenience of midshipmen when searching a slave-dhow.

[Ill.u.s.tration: H.S.H. Hamud bin Muhamad bin Said, the Late Sultan of Zanzibar.]

Zanzibar is an "Arabian Nights" city, a comic-opera capital, a most difficult city to take seriously. There is not a street, or any house in any street, that does not suggest in its architecture and decoration the untrammelled fancy of the scenic artist. You feel sure that the latticed balconies are canvas, that the white adobe walls are supported from behind by braces, that the sunshine is a carbon light, that the chorus of boatmen who hail you on landing will reappear immediately costumed as the Sultan's body-guard, that the women bearing water-jars on their shoulders will come on in the next scene as slaves of the harem, and that the national anthem will prove to be Sousa's Typical Tune of Zanzibar.

Several hundred years ago the Sultans of Zanzibar grew powerful and wealthy through exporting slaves and ivory from the mainland. These were not two separate industries, but one was developed by the other and was dependent upon it. The procedure was brutally simple. A slave-trader, having first paid his tribute to the Sultan, crossed to the mainland, and marching into the interior made his bargain with one of the local chiefs for so much ivory, and for so many men to carry it down to the coast. Without some such means of transport there could have been no bargain, so the chief who was anxious to sell would select a village which had not paid him the taxes due him, and bid the trader help himself to what men he found there.

Then would follow a hideous night attack, a ma.s.sacre of women and children, and the taking prisoners of all able-bodied males. These men, chained together in long lines, and each bearing a heavy tooth of ivory upon his shoulder, would be whipped down to the coast. It was only when they had carried the ivory there, and their work was finished, that the idea presented itself of selling them as well as the ivory. Later, these bearers became of equal value with the ivory, and the raiding of native villages and the capture of men and women to be sold into slavery developed into a great industry. The industry continues fitfully to-day, but it is carried on under great difficulties, and at a risk of heavy punishments. What is called "domestic slavery" is recognized on the island of Zanzibar, the vast clove plantations which lie back of the port employing many hundreds of these domestic slaves. It is not to free these from their slight bondage that the efforts of those who are trying to suppress the slave-trade is to-day directed, but to prevent others from being added to their number. What slave-trading there is at present is by Arabs and Indians. They convey the slaves in dhows from the mainland to Madagascar, Arabia, or southern Persia, and to the Island of Pemba, which lies north of Zanzibar, and only fifteen miles from the mainland. If a slave can be brought this short distance in safety he can be sold for five hundred dollars; on the mainland he is not worth more than fifteen dollars. The channels, and the mouths of rivers, and the little bays opening from the Island of Pemba are patrolled more or less regularly by British gunboats, and junior officers in charge of a cutter and a crew of half a dozen men, are detached from these for a few months at a time on "boat service." It seems to be an unprofitable pursuit, for one officer told me that during his month of boat service he had boarded and searched three hundred dhows, which is an average of ten a day, and found slaves on only one of them. But as, on this occasion, he rescued four slaves, and the slavers, moreover, showed fight, and wounded him and two of his boat's crew, he was more than satisfied.

The trade in ivory, which has none of these restrictions upon it, still flourishes, and the cool, dark warerooms of Zanzibar are stored high with it. In a corner of one little cellar they showed us twenty-five thousand dollars worth of these tusks piled up as carelessly as though they were logs in a wood-shed. One of the most curious sights in Zanzibar is a line of Zanzibari boys, each balancing a great tusk on his shoulder, worth from five hundred to two thousand dollars, and which is unprotected except for a piece of coa.r.s.e sacking.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A German "Factory" at Tanga, the Store Below, the Living Apartments Above.]

The largest exporters of ivory in the world are at Zanzibar, and though probably few people know it, the firm which carries on this business belongs to New York City, and has been in the ivory trade with India and Africa from as far back as the fifties. In their house at Zanzibar they have entertained every distinguished African explorer, and the stories its walls have heard of native wars, pirate dhows, slave-dealers, the English occupation, and terrible marches through the jungles of the Congo, would make valuable and picturesque history. The firm has always held a semi-official position, for the reason that the United States Consul at Zanzibar, who should speak at least Swahili and Portuguese, is invariably chosen for the post from a drug-store in Yankton, Dakota, or a post-office in Canton, Ohio. Consequently, on arriving at Zanzibar he becomes homesick, and his first official act is to cable his resignation, and the State Department instructs whoever happens to be general manager of the ivory house to perform the duties of acting-consul. So, the ivory house has nearly always held the eagle of the consulate over its doorway. The manager of the ivory house, who at the time of our visit was also consul, is Harris Robbins Childs. Mr. Childs is well known in New York City, is a member of many clubs there, and speaks at least five languages. He understands the native tongue of Zanzibar so well that when the Prime Minister of the Sultan took us to the palace to pay our respects, Childs talked the language so much better than did the Sultan's own Prime Minister that there was in consequence much joking and laughing. The Sultan then was a most dignified, intelligent, and charming old gentleman. He was popular both with his own people, who loved him with a religious fervor, and with the English, who un.o.btrusively conducted his affairs.

There have been sultans who have acted less wisely than does Hamud bin Muhamad bin Said. A few years ago one of these, Said Khaled, defied the British Empire as represented by several gunboats, and dared them to fire on his ship of war, a tramp steamer which he had converted into a royal yacht. The gunboats were anch.o.r.ed about two hundred yards from the palace, which stands at the water's edge, and at the time agreed upon, they sank the Sultan's ship of war in the short s.p.a.ce of three minutes, and in a brief bombardment destroyed the greater part of his palace. The ship of war still rests where she sank, and her topmasts peer above the water only three hundred yards distant from the windows of the new palace. They serve as a constant warning to all future sultans.

The new palace is of somewhat too modern architecture, and is not nearly as dignified as are the ma.s.sive white walls of the native houses which surround it. But within it is a fairy palace, hung with silk draperies, tapestries, and hand-painted curtains; the floors are covered with magnificent rugs from Persia and India, and the reception-room is crowded with treasures of ebony, ivory, lacquer work, and gold and silver. There were two thrones made of silver dragons, with many scales, and studded with jewels. The Sultan did not seem to mind our openly admiring his treasures, and his attendants, who stood about him in gorgeous-colored silks heavy with gold embroideries, were evidently pleased with the deep impression they made upon the visitors. The Sultan was very gentle and courteous and human, especially in the pleasure he took over his son and heir, who then was at school in England, and who, on the death of his father, succeeded him. He seemed very much gratified when we suggested that there was no better training-place for a boy than an English public school; as Americans, he thought our opinion must be unprejudiced. Before he sent us away, he gave Childs, and each of us, a photograph of himself, one of which is reproduced in this book.

Our next port was the German settlement of Tanga. We arrived there just as a blood-red sun was setting behind great and gloomy mountains. The place itself was bathed in damp hot vapors, and surrounded even to the water's edge by a steaming jungle. It was more like what we expected Africa to be than was any other place we had visited, and the proper touch of local color was supplied by a trader, who gave as his reason for leaving us so early in the evening that he needed sleep, as on the night before at his camp three lions had kept him awake until morning.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Soudanese Soldiers Under a German Officer Outside of Tanga.]

The bubonic plague prevented our landing at other ports. We saw them only through field-gla.s.ses from the ship's side, so that there is, in consequence, much that I cannot write of the East Coast of Africa. But the trip, which allows one merely to nibble at the Coast, is worth taking again when the bubonic plague has pa.s.sed away. It was certainly worth taking once. If I have failed to make that apparent, the fault lies with the writer. It is certainly not the fault of the East Coast, not the fault of the Indian Ocean, that "sets and smiles, so soft, so bright, so blooming blue," or of the exiles and "remittance men," or of the engineers who are building the railroad from Cape Town to Cairo, or of any lack of interest which the East Coast presents in its problem of trade, of conquest, and of, among nations, the survival of the fittest.