NA TURE 



241 



THURSDAY, JULY 11, i{ 



AFRICAN RIVER LIFE. 

 A Visit to Stanley s Rear Guard at Major Barttelofs 

 Camp on the Aruhwiini ; with an Account of River Life 

 on the Congo. By J. R. Werner. (Edinburgh and 

 London : Blackwood and Sons, 1889.) 



THAT, with our present knowledge of its geography 

 and resources, Africa should be considered the 

 special field for travellers en grand, is not surprising. 

 Nor is it strange that merchants and moneyed men 

 should be attracted to a land so rich in the means and 

 materials of commerce. Immense progress has of late 

 years been made in filling up the blanks for which its 

 maps were notorious up to a very recent generation of 

 school-boys ; but the impulse in this dii^ection is not yet 

 expended, and Europe awaits eagerly much-needed en- 

 lightenment on the Sahara and Western Soudan, besides 

 those countries of which more is heard, and remains to 

 be heard, in the development of our existing foreign or 

 colonial relations. To the north, Algiers and Egypt ; to 

 the south, the Cape of Good Hope and neighbouring 

 territories ; and east and west, the coast lines, and out- 

 lying islands generally, of the main land, have long since 

 become familiar localities to students of travel and current 

 events. It is only, however, within the last ten or fifteen 

 years that equatorial Africa has been fairly opened out. 

 Across the huge continent Europeans have now placed 

 a broad and continuous girdle, reaching from the 

 mouth of the Congo at Banana to the dominions 

 of the Sultan of Zanzibar. Looked at from weSt to 

 east, the component parts of this girdle are the 

 French Congo, won to France by M. De Brazza and 

 Belgian concession ; the Portuguese Congo, allowed to 

 Portugal in deference to a long-asserted claim, the fre- 

 quent rejection of which by the English Foreign Office 

 seemed to demand a change of treatment ; the Free State 

 of the Congo, founded and acquired by Stanley and a host 

 of explorers and emissaries serving the King of the 

 Belgians, first among promoters of Central African ex- 

 ploration ; the wide-spreading German lands obtained 

 from the chiefs of Usagara, Nguru, Useguha, and 

 Ukanio, by three skilful and enterprising negotiators, 

 whose work — like that of the Society of German Coloniza- 

 tion — was almost immediately taken under the protection 

 of the Imperial a.'gis on the signatures being affixed to 

 the Treaty of Berlin ; and now the girdle has become 

 deepened by the important addition of the tracts ceded 

 to the chartered Imperial British East African Com- 

 pany. What may be done by the Cohipany dealing 

 with the African Lakes is a problem the solution of which 

 should belong to the combined or separate action of both 

 philanthropists and commercial speculators. 



If the progress of mapping out Africa has been mar- 

 vellously rapid in the second half of the present century, 

 the educational gain to the civilized world from the process 

 is due not only to the labours of practical exploration, 

 but also to the literary skill and ability with which those 

 labours have been recorded. Travellers such as Burton, 

 Speke, Grant, Livingstone, Baker, Johnson, Thomson, 

 and Stanley, have been enabled, by the possession of 

 natural qualifications, to give to the world their personal 

 Vol. XL.— No. 1028. 



impressions and experiences with more or less of artistic 

 power, and the advantage to a reading and appreciative 

 public has been consequently great. But a second class 

 of writers must not be ignored, who, without laying claim 

 to the rank of chief explorers or the merit of original 

 discovery, have shown themselves fully capable of 

 strengthening the revelations of the princes of African 

 travel, by chronicling the results of their own lesser, yet 

 always intelligent, nomadism. Of this class Mr. Werner 

 is a good representative. His well-written narrative 

 might well have won attention as a mere description 

 of African river life, without the use of an ad captandum 

 title in reference to " Rear Guards." 



The author, accepting service as an engineer under the 

 Congo State, embarked from Antwerp in April 1886, 

 arrived at Banana late in May, passed up the river to 

 Boma and Matddi (which has taken the place of V^ivi on the 

 left bank), and left the latter station for Stanley Pool, by 

 land, on June 10. After many days of roughing and 

 sickness, he reached the Pool station at LeopoldviIle,was 

 detained there until the middle of July, and on August 1 

 came to a halt at Bangala, his prescribed head-quarters. 

 This is one of the more northerly posts of the Free State, 

 and is situated about a third of the way between the 

 Equator and Stanley Falls stations. Here he was seldom 

 allowed to rest for many weeks together ; for the little 

 steamer to which he was attached was in constant requisi- 

 tion. In fact, his river expeditions — at one time of a 

 punitive or political, at another of a searching or scientific 

 character — extending, in advance, to Stanley Falls, and, 

 in rear, to Leopoldville, or limited to places within either 

 distance — form the substance of his book. 



Mr. Werner's official residence may be described in his 

 own words : — 



" Bangala Station stands on the north bank of the 

 Congo, in the town of Iboko, which forms the centre of 

 a ten-mile line of towns and villages inhabited by the 

 Ba-Ngala tribe. This settlement is surrounded on three 

 sides by swamp, and on the fourth the River Congo cuts 

 off" all communication except by boat. According to 

 native accounts it is possible in the dry season to go 

 some two days' journey inland ; and I should think it 

 quite practicable to penetrate as far as the Oubangi, but 

 as the tribes on the bank of that river are hostile to the 

 Ba-Ngala, I had no means of ascertaining the fact, and 

 I have never been more than six or seven hours' journey 

 in that direction myself. I found the country gently 

 undulating — the rising ground for the most part cleared 

 and cultivated, and the hollows filled with a dense scrub, 

 which, in the wet season, grew out of three or four feet of 

 water, sometimes more. After some three hours' journey 

 inland, all cultivation ceases, and the path runs through 

 one continuous jungle of scrub, there being very few 

 large trees." 



Vivid pictures of scenery are not wanting in these 

 pages, and a chapter headed " Exploration of the 

 Ngala," gives an account of a nine days' endeavour 

 to test the navigability and uses of a feeder of the Congo 

 which empties itself into the larger river about forty or 

 fifty miles above Iboko, This expedition was, however, 

 brought abruptly to an end by hostilities on the part 

 of angry and warlike tribesmen. Mention is also 

 made of a large lake supposed to exist in the regions 

 between the Lower Lomami and the head of the Congo, 

 and to be distant only one day's canoe journey from the 

 former. Its appearance in the map accompanying Mr. 



M 



