Edith A. How

“ Long ago most African peoples were shut off from the other people of the world by the sea and the great sandy desert. Only the people of Egypt could meet and learn from the people of Europe and Asia. So while the Egyptians grew wise and clever, all the other Africans, south of the desert, knew nothing except what they had learnt by themselves. Then Arabs began to cross the desert to get gold and slaves from the dark-skinned Africans. These Arabs taught them a little. But, later still, Europeans began to come in great ships over the sea. ”

“ Often slaves were happy if they had good masters, but it is a bad custom to take away a person's freedom and treat him as if he had no soul. During the last few years many Europeans have been helping the Egyptians to improve their country, and one of the changes has been to do away gradually with slavery. No one is now allowed to buy a slave, and anyone born in slavery can become free if he wishes to do so. Instead of slaves, people now have servants who receive wages for their work. ”

“ In Egypt, the land of the great River Nile, the people can grow rich and prosperous. They have time to learn, but, except the Copts, many of whom are goldsmiths, they seem to have quite forgotten how to make the beautiful things the old Egyptians made. In the desert, the Sahara, there is little water, and life is very hard. All day people must work to get enough for food and clothes. It is a land without a king and without laws, where each must fight for himself. Yet these people, on their long journeys through the waterless waste, have learned to be very brave and fearless and strong. ”

“ Many of the people of the Congo are not cannibals, but there is always war and fighting between the different tribes, and it is dangerous to travel because so many are always watching to rob and kill strangers. The lions and other wild beasts are dangerous, but the bands of fighting men are still more to be feared. Everything is wild and unsafe, and there is no law outside the village, so each one has to protect himself. Among the dark-skinned Central African people each village has a chief who keeps order within it, and often a group of villages of one tribe has a great chief. ”

“ When Europeans go to live in another country, they take all their own customs with them, and so in South Africa there are cities and houses exactly like those in their old homes in Europe. In the towns many people live together, drawn there by their work. Some work on mines or railways, some have shops, some have to keep the town clean and healthy. In all European towns there are shops, because in Europe and in India and China no one can make everything he needs for himself. Each man learns to make one thing well, and spends all the day making one kind of thing. ”

“ These little red and black Pigmy peoples do not have villages at all. They are all hunters, and each man wanders with his wife and children wherever he chooses. Then, near the village of some chief of another tribe, he collects grass and sticks, and builds a little house which is too small for an ordinary man to stand upright inside. The Pigmy people are not so dark-skinned as the other races of Central Africa, and they are very small, not so high as an ordinary man's shoulder. ”

“ But on our journey we should have met many different kinds of people, and have seen many different customs. In some places there would be rivers, in some mountains, in some deserts, with no trees or grass to be seen. In these, people must make their homes in many ways, and have many kinds of food and clothes. Because we live in Africa, we want to know about Africa and the people in it. They are men and women and children like ourselves, though the colour of their skins may be lighter or darker than ours, and their languages quite different. ”

“ The women weave camels' hair into clothes and blankets, and goats' hair into tent-covers. The Bedouin men are always ready to fight with their guns and lances; sometimes they are robbers, but most of them travel from place to place, only fighting if others attack them. There is always a chief in each tribe of Bedouin, and in each village of the Berbers, but away in the desert there are many bands of robbers who will not obey any law, and everyone has to fight for himself against these people. The Bedouin love their animals, especially their camels and their horses. ”

“ Sometimes when the harvest has been bad and food is dear and scarce, the people get deeply into debt. There is a great deal of illness and disease, but there are very few doctors and nurses to help people to get well. So the life of an Egyptian peasant is a hard one—a great deal of work and very little time to rest, or play, or learn. But everyone has something to make him happy, and, unless there is famine or pestilence, these people have their wives and children and home, just as people have in England and other countries. ”

“ Now a farm is a large stretch of land which belongs to one man, who uses it either to grow food in the ground, or else to raise large herds of cattle, or horses, or sheep. In a civilized country people cannot grow their own food, because they are busy all day with some other trade. So some people make it their work to grow large quantities of food, and sell all they do not need themselves. Cattle are kept for their milk, which all Europeans drink. The flesh of cattle and sheep is used for food. ”

“ But the town-people love their children very much, and Egyptian children are taught always to love, honour, and obey their father and mother. An Egyptian man may have four wives, but generally he has only one.
Until a few years ago, all Egyptians who had enough money used to buy slaves to do their work. Slaves could be bought or sold, or married or given away, as if they were things instead of people. Masters could illtreat or even kill their slaves and not be punished, because it was only as if they had broken their water-jar in a temper, and that was no one else's business. ”

“ High wages are paid for hard work, but everything is strange and different, and each one longs for his home. So everyone is glad when at last his work is done and his wages paid, and he is free to go back to his own village and the people he loves. We must remember that South Africa is a very large country with a great many Africans in it. Large numbers do go to work on the mines for a time, as we have been reading, but we must not forget that all these men have their homes in villages scattered all over that great country. ”

“ The camels can live for a few days without water, though they get very weak. For this reason, everyone who makes long journeys in the Sahara has to ride on a camel. A horse can travel more quickly, but he, like a man, must have water every day. So the camel is sometimes called the "Ship of the Desert," because he, best of all, can carry men across the waterless sand. When traders travel across the desert with their merchandise, they are very much afraid of the desert robbers, who steal what they can from travellers. ”

“ The customs of each tribe depend partly on which district of this large country they live in. Those who live near the salt sea eat sea-fish, and get salt by boiling the sea-water in their cooking-pots until the pot is quite dry, and then the salt is left behind after the water has gone. It was clever of those people to find out they could get salt that way. Others, who live near the great rivers, make canoes out of the tree-trunks with the inside hollowed out. ”

“ So that in this great land of Africa we have people living very different kinds of life, in the deserts, in the forests of the Congo, in Uganda and on the Nile, in the mines of South Africa, and on the great farms on the veld and in the great towns. The country itself is different in different parts: the sand in the north; Central Africa, with its hot sun and its lakes and rivers and mountains and forests; South Africa, with its great grassy plains, and the mines and towns joined by the railways which make it easy to get quickly to places far away. ”

“ Egypt is the only part of Africa that could be reached easily by people in Europe and Asia, because in Egypt is the only place where men could walk from Asia and Europe into Africa. Even if they did not want to walk, the sea was not too wide to cross in small boats. In the Bible we read how Abraham, who lived in Asia, walked to Egypt, and later how Moses led the Children of Israel back to Asia. Since that time Europeans have cut a waterway for ships through this narrow neck of land, which is called the Suez Canal. ”

“ The Pigmy man respects the chief whose village he settles in, but he does not fight for him or serve him as the other people do in his village. When he chooses, he leaves that village and goes somewhere else. If the Pigmies want fruit or anything the villagers have, they shoot an arrow into it. Then, later, when they come to fetch it, they leave a packet of meat in payment, for these little people never steal. Although they live peaceably with the other races, they speak their own language, and never have anything to do with other villagers, and they only marry among their own people. ”

“ It is surprising to find that there are a great many people living in this desert region of North Africa. There are three kinds of people there. Firstly, there are the Berbers, who live always in a little town or village on a big oasis, and grow their own food. Secondly, there are the Bedouin, who live in large wandering tribes. These keep sheep and goats and camels, and stay on a small oasis until their herds have eaten all the grass on it, and then move on to another place. ”

“ If the workman has a wife he is given a house in a mine village, called a "location." A location or a compound is like a village with a great number of houses placed close together along straight roads. The houses are sometimes built of stones or bricks, but more often of corrugated iron.
In each location there are hundreds of people who have come to work at the mines for a few months from different parts of South Africa. They are all strangers to each other and speak many different languages. Most of them try to copy the dress of Europeans ”

“ The third kind of people who are found in the Sahara are the traders. These, like the Bedouin, are Arabs, but often their homes are in some town, either on the edge of the desert or in Egypt. They travel from the great North African towns and from Egypt, across the desert to the rich countries south of it, where the dark-skinned people live. There, south of the Sahara, they buy ivory and dyed goat-skins and other things in exchange for cloth and beads, and return with their merchandise to the northern towns again. ”

“ All round the outside of the towns are brick walls with gates that are shut at night for fear of robbers.
These people live very much like the town-people in Egypt, only they are much poorer. They can buy things from the traders in the caravans which stop at their village for the night, but as they cannot grow or make many things to give in exchange, most people have to be content with the earthenware cooking-pots and the cloth they can make themselves. The women draw water and prepare the food and look after the children. ”

“ But in a few years there were more Christians than before, and now in Uganda the king and nearly all the chiefs and people are Christians, as well as many of the tribes living near them to whom the Baganda have sent teachers. All through the Christian African kingdom there are schools and hospitals. The Baganda were always strong, and now so many are Christians they have stopped fighting the other tribes and killing and making slaves, and instead they spend their time learning to make useful and beautiful things, which make their homes happier and more comfortable to live in. ”

“ Each tribe has its own way of making a house, but no one builds very big houses or large villages. None of the houses last more than three or four years; but these people do not want their houses to stand for many years, because they are not like the Baganda who chose a country and stay there always. The Congo tribes move their villages after a few years and live somewhere else. So villages are always shifting, and nothing they make is wanted to last long. Some weave mats and baskets out of palm-leaves or reeds ”

“ So there are often many people living together in one great farmhouse. Each man and woman will have their own room to sleep in, and everyone will eat together in a big room, not used for sleeping. In the evening they all sit together to talk about what has been done during the day. Outside, not far away, there are huts for the Africans who work on the farm, and sheds for the cattle and horses and the carts and ploughs. The Africans who work on the farms are not like those who work on the mines for a while and then go home. ”

“ Near the Congo and the Zambezi towards Central Africa the sun is very hot, but as we journey southwards it gets cooler. When we reach the colder lands of the south we find that the grass and maize do not grow so tall, and that there are no great forests. For long distances the land stretches as far as we can see, covered with short grass, but there are no trees. This kind of country is called "veld" in South Africa. There are some waterless deserts here, too, but none so large as the Sahara in North Africa. ”

“ When people first made mines, a great many died because of the bad air and because of fires, but now they have machines which blow good air down into the ground, and electric and other lamps which do not set fire to things easily, and so there are not many people killed in the mines now. Nevertheless, it is very hard and tiring work, and men are often ill because of the dust which fills the air they breathe. So the Europeans to whom the mines belong pay for doctors and hospitals where the sick can be cared for until they are well. ”