390 



TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTELT.— SUPPLEMENT. 



effects upon the country and people. " What 

 curse," he asks, " lies so heavily upon Africa? " 

 He answers : 



" It is the internal traffic in slaves. All idea 

 of commerce, improvement, and the advancement 

 of the African race, must be discarded until the 

 traffic in slaves shall have ceased to exist." 



In a curious paragraph the Reviewer appar- 

 ently apologizes for the slavers by involving the 

 native chiefs who sell slaves in equal if not greater 

 guilt, but in the very next sentence he recovers 

 his mental equilibrium and sense of justice, and 

 tells us of 



"crafty slave-dealers, who, under various pre- 

 texts, set chief against chief, knowing that which- 

 ever wins they will be the gainers, obtaining 

 thereby the numerous slaves they covet." 



There is nothing surprising in the fact that, 

 under such circumstances, Africans sell each oth- 

 er. Who was it that sold those Angles whom 

 Gregory saw in the slave-market at Rome ? Is 

 it not well known that Saxon husbands and par- 

 ents sold their wives and daughters ? Did not 

 slavery prevail in every country in Europe ? 



Now, suppose duriDg the days of European 

 ignorance and darkness, when the people sold 

 their own children, the large alien populations of 

 Asia had agreed to make constant incursions into 

 Europe and stimulate the traffic in slaves. Sup- 

 pose the result of the battle of Marathon had 

 been different, and Europe had become the vas- 

 sal of Asia, and Asiatic hordes had entered its 

 territory for the purposes for which both Euro- 

 peans and Asiatics have entered Africa, and had 

 continued their depredations to this period, what 

 would be the condition of Europe to-day ? 



It cannot have escaped the most superficial 

 reader of African history that the ravages intro- 

 duced by the slave-trade have had a distinctly 

 marked effect not only on the personal or tribal 

 character of the inhabitants, but on their social 

 organization — on the whole industrial and eco- 

 nomic life of the country. Their condition for 

 centuries has been one of restless anarchy and in- 

 security. 



Both Livingstone and Baker describe regions 

 free from the slave-trade, where the people were 

 superior, and had many of the elements of prog- 

 ress ; but they enjoy only a sort of insular im- 

 munity, with all the disadvantages of such a posi- 

 tion. Their dwelling-places are like islands in 

 piratical seas, kept as it were constantly under 

 martial law, with the means of defense always 

 carried about or accessible at a moment's notice 



— forever on the alert to hold their own against 

 the traders who menace them from every quarter. 

 These regions the cowardly marauders avoid. 

 Speaking of the warlike Baris, Sir Samuel Baker 

 says: 



" I discovered that these people had never had 

 any communication with the slave-traders, who 

 were afraid to molest so powerful a tribe." 



Mr. Stauley, in his address at Cape Town in 

 November last, when fresh from his great achieve- 

 ment of the discovery of the course of the Luala- 

 ba-Congo River, described certain inaccessible lo- 

 calities as follows : 



" I can assure you that on this map — and it will 

 probably be the last part of Africa to be explored 

 — there is a part close to Zanzibar which every ex- 

 pedition takes good care to avoid. It lies between 

 Mombassa and Lake Victoria, and there lives there 

 the ferocious tribe of the Wahomba. An expedi- 

 tion of a thousand men could go there and pene- 

 trate the country, but with an ordinary traveling- 

 expedition it would be impossible. Then there is 

 the Somab country — I should like to see what 

 travelers would make of that ; and there is another 

 district which would tax the skill of the best ex- 

 plorer. From the north end of Lake Tanganyika 

 to the south end of Lake Albert Nyanza there is a 

 pretty and very interesting district, but it is a 

 country where you will have to fight if you want to 

 explore it. Here is another little district close to 

 the West Coast, and yet in two hundred years the 

 Portuguese have been unable to explore it. Be- 

 tween St. Paul and a part called Ambriz, a dis- 

 tance of only sixty miles, there is no communica- 

 tion by land, and yet it is Portuguese territory. 

 There are martial as well as pacific tribes." 1 



Still, formidable as are the " martial " tribes, 

 the exigencies of their condition are a perpetual 

 bar to progress. 



" We can scarcely enter into the feelings " (says 

 Livingstone) " of those who are harried by maraud- 

 ers. Like Scotland in the twelfth and thirteenth 

 centuries, harassed by Highland Celts on one side 

 and English marchmen on the other, and thus 

 kept in the rearward of civilization, these people 

 have rest neither for many days nor for few." a 



The Reviewer, after getting the negro down 

 to the lowest possible point in the scale of being, 

 to which Sir Samuel Baker in his aggressive dog- 

 matism and satirical humor has reduced him, 

 suggests the uselessness of endeavoring to educate 

 him, in the, ordinary sense and by the ordinary 

 methods, we presume, of European education. 

 He says : 



1 Times, November 30, 1877. 



2 " Last Journals," vol. ii., p. 143. 



