APPENDIX 



I. THE KI-SWAHILI LANGUAGE 



The Ki-Swahili language, of the Bantu group, is not only 

 spoken by the Swahili coast people of British and German East 

 Africa, but has for hundreds of years been used by the Arab mer- 

 chants and slave traders on their safaris into the interior. There 

 is hardly a tribe of any size at all in the whole of British East 

 Africa, German East Africa, British Central Africa, Uganda, 

 and even the Congo, of which not a few people at least under- 

 stand enough of Ki-Swahili to be able to serve fairly well as 

 guides, gun-bearers and interpreters. 



The language generally spoken by these inland tribes is, of 

 course, a very corrupt form of Ki-Swahili. In this respect it 

 corresponds to the " pidgin-English " spoken by the Chinamen 

 in Hong Kong and other places in the East where many Eng- 

 lish-speaking people live. The ordinary illiterate caravan porter, 

 even when a Swahili, speaks almost exclusively this " pidgin- 

 Swahili," partly because he knows no better, but also because he 

 is aware that the average European, or the savage inlander, will 

 then more easily understand him. 



When I arrived the first time in Africa I had, by hard work, 

 during the last three weeks of the voyage, acquired a rude 

 knowledge of Ki-Swahili, enough to enable me to get along 

 very nicely with the porters without an interpreter. When ar- 

 riving the second and third time in Africa, I had learned to 

 speak the language more correctly and grammatically, but found 

 that I often had to speak in the pidgin dialect to be quicker un- 

 derstood by the porters of the different tribes in my caravan. 



