CHAPTER XVIII 



THE NATIONAL MOVEMENTS AND FUTURE PROSPECTS 

 OF BRITISH EAST AFRICA 



" Usunye kautsuka hiraka " 

 (Slavery is not quickly eradicated). 



Ki-nyika Proverb (W. E. Taylor). 



" Slavery is not so easy to be abolished ; it will long continue, in spite of acts of 

 parliament. My friends, I have come to the sad conclusion that slavery, whether 

 established by law, or by law abrogated, exists very extensively in this world ; and, 

 in fact, that you cannot abolish slavery by act of parliament, but can only abolish the 

 name of it, which is very little." — Carlyle. 



As we have seen in the introduction to the seventeenth chapter, 

 the people of East Africa are essentially a race of nomads. 

 Individuals may be stationary ; settlements may be made and 

 held for generations ; but slowly, irregularly, and unconsciously, 

 the tribes themselves are on the move. The predominant 

 migration is a flow from north to south. The ancestors of the 

 Masai worked their way along the Nile valley,^ and entered 

 what is now British East Africa from the north and north- 

 west. The Somali have spread over the " Horn of Africa," 

 and are encroaching from the north-east, parallel to the Indian 

 Ocean shore. This statement of direction, however, is only 

 true in a very general sense. Taken in detail the movement 

 has been spasmodic and erratic, and has travelled in waves 

 rather than in a direct and constant stream. Here, the back- 

 wash of a broken wave has enabled a tribe to advance in 

 the direction opposite to that of the main current ; there, an 

 eddy has thrown another at right angles to it. Occasionally 



^ C. W. Wilson, " The Tribes of the Nile Valley," Journ. Anthrop. Instit. vol. xvii. 

 (1888), pp. 3-25. 



