CHAP. XVI THEIR REPUTATION 297 



great belt of Tropical Africa between the Sahara and the 

 Zambesi would have been impossible. The expeditions which 

 discovered the great lakes and tracked the rivers of the Equa- 

 torial regions have all had to rely upon the transport organised 

 by the slave -raiders and ivory -dealers of the Suahili coast. 

 Hardly a fact about the geography of the interior of the Con- 

 tinent has been discovered, except at the price of the lives of 

 these poor natives ; and our knowledge of the roads that lead 

 there is in direct proportion to the number of Zanzibari whose 

 bones bleach beside them. 



In spite of this, the services of the Zanzibari are not 

 regarded in Europe with the gratitude they deserve. Travellers 

 have given very different reports as to the behaviour of their 

 men ; but the best known accounts of them have been unfavour- 

 able. Burton, for example, describes his porters thus : — 



" The self-willed wretches demean themselves with the 

 coolest impudence ; reply imperiously, lord it over their leaders, 

 regulate the marches and the halts, and though they work 

 they never work without loud complaints and open discontent. 

 Rations are a perpetual source of heartburning ; stinted at 

 home to a daily mess of grain porridge, the porters on the line 

 of march devote, in places where they can presume, all their 

 ingenuity to extort as much food as possible from their 

 employers." ^ 



Cameron tells us ' that in his caravan " the majority of the 

 men were thieves, and pilfered unceasingly from their loads " ; 

 and he gives support to the view that the Zanzibari must be 

 handled sternly, for he tells us elsewhere ^ — " I found that we 

 had treated our men with too much consideration, and they in 

 consequence tried to impose on us, and were constantly 

 grumbling and growling." 



Mr. Joseph Thomson tells us that he had to select the men 

 for his " Masai Land Expedition " from " a flood of vagabond- 

 age . . . the blind and the lame, the very refuse of Zanzibar 

 rascaldom, beach-combers, thieves, murderers, runaway slaves, 

 most of them literally rotten with a life of debauchery " ; and 

 he accordingly had to start with " a villanous crew." ^ 



^ R. F. Burton, The Lake Regions of Central Africa, vol. i. (i860), pp. 342-343. 



^ V. L. Cameron, Across Africa (1877), vol. i. p. 11. 



^ Op. cit. vol. i. p. 107. 



"* J. Thomson, Through Masai Land {\?>^i), p. 23. 



