“Bula Matali,” the Stone-breaker
“ BULA MATALI ”—THE STONE-BREAKER “ Father Nile presents his compliments... and begs leave to inform the world that at the suggestion of Dr Livingstone he has removed his headquarters to a delightful region, about eleven degrees south of the Equator, where for the present he is to be found by his friends. N.B.—You are heartily welcome to any refreshments which you may bring with you. Niggers about here don’t need to be shot! (Punch, 1869.) ^'“g~’^HE cruel scenes Livingstone had witnessed gave him a horror of the Arabs. He could hardly bear to have one near him; and what made it worse was the fact that the Manyema tribes evidently thought Livingstone himself a bosom friend of their Arab enemy. All the way back to Ujiji unseen Manyema hung upon the trail of his caravan. As the desperately sick man was carried through the dense vegetation or through the dark aisles of the forests, invisible hands cast spears, or laid ambushes to kill him. One of these spears grazed his neck, another missed him by a few inches. Big trees were sawed through and came crashing down upon him as he passed; he had many narrow escapes from death. It was only when he reached a clearing and met a great chief of the Manyema 222 “ BULA MATALI that he was able at last to convince them he was their friend.
At last he reached Ujiji, only to find that all his belongings had been stolen, and he was dependent upon savages for food and shelter.
The Manyema were a good-looking people, very vivacious and gay. But Livingstone soon discovered he had fallen into a nest of cannibals. They ate human flesh because they liked it, and spoke quite openly to Livingstone of their horrid feasts. A quarrel with his wife often ended in a Manyema husband killing her and eating her heart mixed up with a mess of goat’s flesh, or cooked with bananas. They were fond of their meat “ high,” and would bury a dead body for a day or two in forest leaves till it was in the state they liked best to find it. One man showed Livingstone a string of ten human jaw-bones, and described how he had killed and eaten their owners, laughing heartily when the white man showed his disgust. However, they were quite kind and courteous, and had honest and gentlemanly manners.
Livingstone saw numbers of hideous chimpanzees in the forests. These big apes, or sokos, as the Manyema called them, were painfully like human beings, but the people speared and ate them when they could trap or catch them in their nets. The sokos which Livingstone discovered may have been a new variety
THE STONE-BREAKER 223 of the chimpanzee family, or they may perhaps have been just a larger sort of common chimpanzee. They were certainly most interesting beasts. Sir H. H. Johnston thinks they* were probably the same kind of apes as those found by Emin Pacha in the country farther north. These sokos are pale yellow in colour, and walk upright like a man. They are most mischievous creatures, and as full of tricks and whimsies as little street gamins or any of the bander-log. When a Manyema woodsman is at his work in the forest he may suddenly have a grinning soko leaping out upon him in playful mood just to see if it can frighten him. Or a Manyema mother may raise her head from her work to see a soko making off with her baby, and a breathless sprint will take place to the nearest tree. Up the tree will go soko and toto, the unlucky baby, held perhaps upside down against the robber’s breast, the frantic mother screaming below. However, a bunch of bananas will generally tempt the thief to come down, and presently to drop the baby at its mother’s feet.
If, however, a soko is attacked he becomes anything but a joke to his foe. In an instant the big ape advances on the man, seizes his enemy’s wrist in a hairy hand—and bites off his fingers.
Livingstone mentions several other traits peculiar to sokos, amongst which, he says, are a most affectionate family feeling and (unluckily 224 “ BULA MATALI ”
for the traveller) a love of hearing their own voices. Sometimes they would hold a sort of concert round the boles of hollow trees, drumming on the tree trunks with their fists, and screaming at the top of their voices. He slyly adds that their “singing” rather reminded him of similar efforts on the part of the Manyema themselves.
While Livingstone lay sick he had a tame soko, which made herself a little nest beside him and slept in his hut. Her expressions were most human, and she would draw a covering over her when she went to bed, and wipe her skinny little hands with a leaf.
The sick man thought himself hopelessly cut off from home; but all this time his friends in England had been working hard for his rescue. Mr Young’s search expedition had failed to find him, but it brought back news that Livingstone was still alive, and every newspaper was full of the subject of Livingstone. Edward Young’s expedition had been carried out with extraordinary pluck and ability. In eight short months this faithful friend of Livingstone brought his search-party to Mponda’s, at the south end of Lake Nyassa, gained the news he came to seek and returned to England. With a steel boat, brought with them for the purpose, they sailed up the Zambesi in canoes; ascended the Shire to the cataracts; found some of Livingstone’s
A Perilous Journey
Unseen Manyema cast spears at the sick man, laid ambushes to kill him, and sawed trees so that they might fall and crush him as he
passed under them.
THE STONE BREAKER 225
Makololo friends to help them; put their collapsible boat together below the falls; rowed up the Upper Shire to Lake Nyassa, and finally found men at Mponda’s who had actually seen Livingstone deserted by his lying Johanna servants and who had news of his journeyings up-country. Where, however, in all the dark continent Livingstone might at that moment be found no one could possibly say. When the search-party returned early in 1868 and gave the news there was immense excitement, and every day new theories were offered as to Livingstone’s whereabouts. A long-belated letter from the Doctor himself to his friend Oswell described his discovery of Lake Bangweolo; but after the date when that letter was written there was a long pause of several years with no news whatever, and many people were quite convinced that Livingstone was lost for good and all.
In the meantime an expedition under Lieutenant Dawson, R.N., set out to find Livingstone. With the lieutenant were two other naval officers, young Oswell Livingstone, and the Reverend Charles New (the first man who climbed Mount Kilimanjaro to the snowline). The Royal Geographical Society and the Government contributed towards this expedition; but it was not fated that a British search-party should have the honour of finding Livingstone.
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There was living in America an enterprising young journalist named Henry Morton Stanley. He was British by birth, and had the name of being a particularly daring war correspondent. The son of the proprietor of The New York Herald knew that if he could be the first to discover Livingstone it would mean a most tremendous “ boom ” for his paper. Making up his mind with characteristic Yankee quickness, he sent for Stanley, told him to spend what he liked, and to set out immediately for Central Africa via Turkey, Palestine, Egypt, India and Zanzibar. He evidently hoped to kill several birds with one stone, and gain much “ copy ” for The New York Herald.
Stanley had never been in Africa before; but he was a most indomitable man, an extraordinary mixture of excitability and dogged tenacity and pluck. His object was to find Livingstone and to be first in the field; and so he threw a maze of mystery about his journey in order to put other seekers off the scent. He had as fine an expedition fitted out as dollars can buy, and drove refractory porters before him in a way that soon convinced them that he “ meant business.” The natives had an unbounded admiration for Stanley. To them he was a very great chief indeed; and the extraordinary way in which he scorned all danger and fatigue, and yet insisted on his personal comforts, impressed them enormously.
THE STONE-BREAKER 227 All along that awful route through unknown Africa Stanley had his special bath-tub carried for him; his smart travelling outfit; his silver forks and spoons. He himself wore a sort of braided uniform, with a peaked hat, pierced with holes, like an exaggerated soldier’s cap. He was a wonderful man and a leader to be followed through anything—his men called him “ Bula Matali ”—the Stone-breaker.
With unerring instinct this astonishing man fixed on Ujiji from the very first. But when he got about half-way he found himself mixed up in a native war at Unyanyembe. He took the side of the Arabs, and made a mistake; for they were beaten by the great chief of the Nyamwezi, and Stanley found his way blocked. Round he went in a wide circle through the tangled forests, forcing his way through with unconquerable courage, and then facing his small army of porters towards Ujiji once again. At last, after unheard-of exertions, Stanley reached Lake Tanganyika on 28th October 1871.
As Stanley crossed the last ridge of the mountains and saw the little port by Ujiji below him embowered in palm-trees, he gave his excited men the signal, and volley after volley from nearly fifty guns broke the silence of the lake. Three hundred yards farther and they met natives streaming out in hundreds to look at them, and Stanley heard a voice say:
“ Good-morning, sir.”
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“ Who the mischief are you? ”
“ I am Susi, the servant of Doctor Livingstone.”
“ And you? ”
“ I am Chumah, sir.”
Stanley pushed through the crowd and saw a semicircle of Arabs, in front of whom was a white man with a grey beard. He was pale, and looked old and wearied, and had on a consul’s cap with a bit of faded gold lace round it, and a red-sleeved waistcoat and grey tweed trousers.
“ Doctor Livingstone, I presume? ”
“ Yes,” said he, with a smile, lifting his cap slightly; and next moment Livingstone and Stanley grasped hands.
How much Stanley had to tell the great explorer, whom he had come so far to find, as they sat on the mud platform under the broad eaves of his Arab house. He told him about all the anxiety at home, and about his journey. He told him how the Kaiser of that day had humbled Denmark and annexed Schleswig- Holstein; how the German hosts were round Paris, and the Emperor of the French was a fugitive. Imagine what it would be to a Britisher now to be told in the depths of Africa, for the first time, how the Kaiser had forced the war of 1914 upon Europe, and that Britain, France, Russia, Belgium, Italy and Serbia were fighting the German invaders to the
THE STONE-BREAKER 229 death, in the greatest war the world has ever known. As Stanley went on Livingstone kept saying: “You have brought me new life.”
As the days passed by at Ujiji Stanley saw a marked improvement in the health and spirits of the worn and exhausted man. Once more he began to make eager plans for the exploration of the sources of the Nile. Stanley tried his very best to persuade Livingstone to come home with him; and, had the Doctor done so, no doubt he would have been completely restored to health, and might even have lived to enjoy a vigorous old age, as his friend Oswell did in his beautiful English home. But nothing could persuade Livingstone to leave Africa while his work remained unfinished. He told Stanley he would either complete his discoveries or die in the attempt. So the two travellers set out together to explore the north end of Lake Tanganyika, and the Rusizi River, which flows into the lake.
Then Baba Daud and Bula Matali set off in long canoes for Unjanyembe. The native rowers were mad with excitement at the thought of going home, and sent the canoes along at a spinning pace to the sound of a song of triumph “ We have given the Waha the slip! ha, ha!
The Wavinza will trouble us no more! oh, oh! Mionvu can get no more cloth from us! hy, hy! And Kiala will see us no more—never more! he, he! ”
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There followed long miles of marching through African forest and broad parkland, where both white men had plenty of exciting opportunities for sport among elephants, giraffes, buffaloes and antelopes.
At Unjanyembe a packet of newspapers was waiting for Stanley, and they read with horror of the awful war scenes in Paris and throughout France. “ Oh, France,” exclaimed Stanley, “ such things are unknown even in the heart of barbarous Central Africa 1 ” What would he have said if he had lived to see to-day the ravaged towns of northern France or Belgium?
That was why Livingstone, instead of going home to ease and honours, preferred remaining in Darkest Africa. He must open a way for Christianity into the great continent. Without that, he thought, as he spurned the European newspaper with his foot, what good would “ civilisation ” be to the poor African!