Blantyre

“ If I can trust my recollection of the Anyanja, they were many of them not quite so dark as this; but in the Blantyre district they are intermixed with the Yaos, who are described by the same writer as ‘probably the lightest-tinted tribe’ in the region under review. The soles of the feet and palms of the hands are always much lighter, and give a curious impression, as if the colour had been washed out. ”

“ All this mountainous mass seems habitable, and, in fact, is inhabited to its very summits; and its temperate climate, healthful breezes, and freedom from malaria and mosquitoes, have led to its being chosen as the site of the Church of Scotland mission to the Nyassa country—their station, Blantyre, being named after the Scottish village where Livingstone first saw the light. ”

“ About half-way across the heath there had been a wide dike recently cut, and the earth from the cutting was cast up roughly on the other side. Surely this would stop them! But no; with scarcely a pause Lizzie took the leap, stumbled among the rough clods, and fell. Blantyre groaned, "Now, Auster, do your best!" He gave me a steady rein. I gathered myself well together, and with one determined leap cleared both dike and bank.
Motionless among the heather, with her face to the earth, lay my poor young mistress. Blantyre kneeled down and called her name ”

“ East of Blantyre rises the lofty Mount Choro, the abode of a powerful spirit venerated far and wide. On all occasions of public danger or disaster he is con- sulted in the name of the people by his bride, chosen from amongst the most beautiful young women of the district. ”

“ Even in such favorable situations as Blantyre, a lofty region south of Lake Nyassa, children can not be reared beyond a certain age, but must be sent home to England; otherwise they will degenerate physically and morally. ”

“ The neighborhood is quite a populous one, and 4,000 people have asked the missionaries to become their protectors. The Arabs carry on their nefarious trade between Blantyre and Zomba, and frequently kidnap people from the latter place to fill out their gangs. Refugees are almost constantly coming in at Blantyre, but none are received at Zomba. A school has been opened at Zomba, and it has forty scholars. The people are very attentive to the preacher, and sit a long time unwearied. ”

“ Fortunately she turned up safe and sound, along with some other women who had been hiding in the bush. A woman who lived about twelve miles from Blantyre, hearing that her son, a boarder at the Mission, was ill, walked in and carried him home on her back—a big lad of thirteen or fourteen. ‘The boy is the light of the mother’s eye. When he goes off on a journey she awaits his return anxiously ”

“ Nyassaland, a region in Central Africa under British protection, lying round the shores of Lake Nyassa, the chief town of which is Blantyre; it is known also as the British Central Africa Protectorate, the administration being in the hands of a commissioner acting under the Foreign Office; the Europeans number some 300, and the natives 850,000, while the forces defending it consist of 200 Sikhs and 300 negroes; there are plantations of sugar, coffee, tobacco, &c., and almost the entire trade is with Britain. ”

“ The same abundant energy and the same lack of restraint are noticeable wherever these Central African natives take to any European game, and they take to European games of the rougher sort very readily indeed. I have seen them at Blantyre clubbing one another on the head, under pretence of playing hockey, just as they rend one another to pieces at Kota Kota under pretence of playing football. It is, however, only fair to add that they show great activity, enthusiasm, and pluck ”

“ Though now clothed with forest, the whole district has obviously been under water at a comparatively recent period, and the shores of Lake Shirwa probably reached at one time to within a few miles of Blantyre itself. On reaching the lake a [Pg 4901] very aged female chief came to see us, and told us how, long, long ago, a white man came to her village and gave her a present of cloth. Of the white man, who must have been Livingstone, she spoke very kindly; and indeed, wherever David Livingstone's footsteps are crossed in Africa, the fragrance of his memory seems to remain. ”

“ It is the small and much more insignificant workers who do the damage in houses, eating wood-work and plastering walls with their galleries; but [192] they do not excite the same antipathy. The native, however, regards the inswa in a very different light; in fact, one of the Blantyre catechists has been known to use them with great effect in a sermon, as a simile for the delights of this world! Sometimes a large ant-heap is found close to or actually among the huts of a village ”

“ The predatory man-eating bands at whose head they invaded the agricultural districts towards the sea coast, included elements of all kinds, not unlike the bands of the “Zulu” of our own time; and hence, one of the names by which they became known in Angola was Bangala.417 I have already stated that I do not think that these military leaders, or Jaga, have anything to do with the tribe of the Ayaka to the east of Kongo. ”

“ This is the coast which extends from the mouths of the river Ganges, at the beginning of the large kingdom of Bengal, as far as the cape of Comorin; it is inhabited by Malabars, a people very shrewd and intelligent, and fond of work, and so crafty that when it is worth their while they deceive [even] the Chinese, who excel in the ability to cheat. The Malabar and Bengal people are unsurpassed in the art of spinning and weaving cotton cloth ”

“ Bangala, a Station of the Independent Congo state. to have constituted in the Upper Congo regions a new empire, some hundred thousand square miles in extent, but without official recognition, because depending for the movement of exchanges on the Sultanate of Zanzibar. Without a seaport on the Indian Ocean the Arabs could' not possibly maintain their footing in the country, were their ivory trade with Bombay permanently interrupted. ”

“ After leaving these places, about six leagues along the coast southwards is a river, upon which is a town of Moors and Gentiles called Banda, in which there are many merchants who trade on the continent with the merchants whom the Malabars bring thither. And many ships come there from many parts on account of its being a good harbour, and there is a great exportation of goods and provisions from the interior of the country. Many ships fill here with rice, coarse millet, and other vegetables that are profitable to them ”

“ A range of hills, commencing opposite Senna, comes to within two or three miles of Mboma village, and then runs in a north-westerly direction; the principal hill is named Malawé; a number of villages stand on its tree-covered sides, and coal is found cropping out in the rocks. The country improves as we ascend, the rich valley becoming less swampy, and adorned with a number of trees.
Both banks are dotted with hippopotamus traps, over every track which these animals have made in going up out of the water to graze. ”

“ Balambángan is exactly analogous, in every respect, to Pinang; it does not admit of territorial extension, and must exist, if at all, by commerce solely. Malúdu, on the other hand, is a dependency on the island of Borneo, which admits of any degree of territorial extension, may always subsist any number of inhabitants by its own produce, and is said to communicate, by a land carriage of little more than forty miles, with the central lakes in the vicinity of the gold countries. ”

“ The view from the reservoir is famous. The Malabar hill is a promontory jutting southward into the sea, and occupied largely with villa residences. Westward from its summit you look over the open ocean, dotted with white sails; eastward, or south-eastward, across a narrow bay, is seen the long spit of flat land on which modern mercantile Bombay stands, with its handsome public buildings and long line of esplanade already at that hour beginning to twinkle with lamps. ”

“ The Congo River native is perhaps the shrewdest in [Pg 197] all Central Africa. He is a born trader, and he can convert the conventional shoe-string into something worth while. One reason why the Bangalas take positions as firemen and woodboys on the river boats is that it enables them to go into business. The price of food at the small settlements up river is much less than at Kinshassa, where navigation from Stanleyville southward ends. ”

“ The Cape Colony contains nearly three-quarters of a million of people, and is the only portion of South Africa which has what may be called a large white population; but that population,{56} though comparatively large,—something over a quarter of a million,—is less in number than the inhabitants of the single city of Melbourne. One colonial town in Australia, and that a town not more than a quarter of a century old, gives a home to more white people than the whole of the Cape Colony, which was colonized with white people two hundred years before Melbourne was founded. ”

“ Ballarat lies 100 miles to the north-east of Melbourne, or at least it is that distance by rail, viâ Geelong, but a direct line will soon reduce it to a distance of seventy miles. An upland plateau, with a fringe of hills all around, some of these now denuded of their timber, and glittering white, cold, and bare in the sun, the earth pitted with holes and gullies, scarified as if by some gigantic rooster, 'mullock'-heaps, 'poppet-heads,' and engine-stacks everywhere. This is one's first impression of Ballarat. Gold-fields are very much like each other all over the world. ”

“ In these kingdoms of Malabar, besides the races of the kings and gentiles and natives of the country, there are other foreign people who are merchants and traders in this country, in which they possess houses and estates; and they live like natives of the country, and observe their own sect and customs, which are the following. ”

“ Badjee Rao departed for Hindostan, and Malcolm remained to organise the administration of his kingdom. Before the peishwah had started a mutiny broke out among his Arab followers, which needed prompt suppression. Malcolm established cantonments at Mhow, and began the task of the reclamation of Malwah. His design was to reduce into order those provinces of the late prince of Poonah which had been for two generations a prey to anarchy, and then, unless meantime appointed governor of Bombay, to sail for England at the end of 1819. ”

“ By Malabar we now understand the little tract bounded on the north by Canara, to the south by the province of Cochin, having Coorg and Mysore to the east, and washed by the waves of the Indian Ocean on the west. Marco Polo (thirteenth century) [73] speaks of it as a “great kingdom,” and Linschoten (sixteenth century) describes it as extending from Comorin to Goa. The natives assert that the old Kerula Rajya was divided into sixty-four grama or districts, of which only eight are included in the present province of Malabar. ”

“ It is certainly within the mark to say that at least thirty thousand natives are annually carried away as slaves from the east coast of Africa.
Sir Bartle Frere, in addressing a meeting of the chief native inhabitants of Bombay in April 1873, said,—“Let me assure you, in conclusion, that what you have heard of the horrors of the slave-trade is in no way exaggerated. We have seen so much of the horrors which were going on that we can have no doubt that what you read in books, which are so often spoken of as containing exaggerations, is exaggerated in no respect. ”

“ Bombay, already primed, instantly said, "Oh, Bana, being a great man in his own country, and not thirsting for gain in ivory or slaves, would only accept such things as a spear, shield, or drum, which he could take to his own country as a specimen of the manufactures of Uganda, and a pleasing recollection of his visit to the king." ”

“ The kingdom of Malee is an ancient and flourishing country, and comprises two other provinces: one is Banbara, which contains rivers, woods, sands, a gold mine, and is occupied by the Soodan, who are still infidels, and possess great power ”

“ The Malays are not the Aborigines of this singular spit of land, and, they are its colonists rather than its conquerors. Their histories, which are chiefly traditional, state that the extremity of the Peninsula was peopled by a Malay emigration from Sumatra about the middle of the twelfth century, and that the descendants of these colonists settled Malacca and other places on the coast about a century later. Tradition refers the peopling of the interior States to another and later migration from Sumatra, with a chief at its head, who, with all his followers, married Aboriginal wives ”

“ The Bangala may be said to be the Ashantees of the Livingstone River, though their country has comparatively but a small populated river front. Their villages cover—at intervals of a mile or half a mile—a line of ten miles. They trade with Ikengo and Irebu down the river all the ivory they have purchased from Upoto, Gunji, Mpisa, Ukeré, Rubunga, Urangi, Mpakiwana, and Marunja. I observed soon after the fight began that many canoes emerged out of a river coming from a northerly direction. For a long period the river of Bangala has appeared on West African maps as the Bancaro River. ”

“ The rest of the population was composed of a heterogeneous mass of natives mingled with a number of Chinese, a few Arabs, and a large fluctuating population of traders from Borneo, Celebes, New Guinea, Siam, and the other innumerable isles of the archipelago. These were more or less connected with praus laden with the rich and varied merchandise of the eastern seas. As each man in the town had been permitted to build his house according to his own fancy, picturesque irregularity was the agreeable result. ”