3o6 THE ZANZIBARI 



firewood and fetching his water, is the work of the Askari, 

 There is always one of these to every ten porters. They do 

 not carry loads unless a porter is taken ill on the march, and 

 then the Askari is at liberty, before taking up the man's burden, 

 to give him ten blows with a stick as a safeguard against 

 malingering. This is a recognised right, though the Askari 

 do not as a rule insist upon it, unless in an obvious case of • 

 imposition. I never saw it enforced. On the contrary, in 

 cases of illness the men were always ready to help one another, 

 and several times I saw an Askari insist upon taking a load 

 from a sick man pluckily struggling to bear up under it. 

 The Askari are responsible to the " munipara " or headman, who 

 holds an extremely important position, and upon whom to a 

 large extent depends the peaceful working of a caravan. He 

 distributes the loads and food, and must see that all loads are 

 brought into camp. Hence he generally marches last, and 

 must not leave this post without the permission of the European 

 leader, who then generally takes his place. It is the absolute 

 rule of the road that no man is to be left behind alone. If a 

 porter is too ill to proceed, the headman stays with him, sending 

 on a message by one of the Askari for a fatigue party to be 

 sent back to carry the invalid. The porter has his rules to 

 obey ; e.g. he must not upon any account leave the track with- 

 out leaving his load there, or giving some other sign to the 

 headman. The only man I lost was sacrificed through his own 

 neglect of this rule ; he was tired, stole from the path, and went 

 to sleep under a tree ; when later on he tried to follow us he 

 lost the way ; our search for him was vain, and he, no doubt, 

 was either starved to death or killed by exposure to the cold, 

 unless the lions mercifully put an end to his sufferings. As a 

 rule the men obey their unwritten code implicitly ; it is, indeed, 

 a matter of habit with them, and an Ethiopian will sooner 

 change his skin than his habits ; indeed that is not so difficult 

 as one might imagine, for in cutting our way through the thorn 

 jungle of the Sabaki or Lake Losuguta, the men changed their 

 skin for sticking plaster at an appalling rate. 



The whole ethic of a porter's religion is concerned with his 

 load. His creed is very simple, consisting of two articles — (i) 

 Thou shalt not drop or abandon thy load ; (2) Thou shalt not 

 steal from it. Stanley tells a good story which well illustrates 



