24 
BRITISH CENTRAL AFRICA 
place, but a European official. In his heart of hearts, of course, he sees no 
harm in the slave trade. He is well aware that he is entertaining at one and 
the same time European officials of high standing and five or six powerful 
Arab slave dealers, and that his large, rambling metropolis of several square 
miles in area harbours simultaneously not only the Europeans and their porters, 
servants, and escort, but perhaps three hundred raw slaves from the Lualaba. 
But he is not going to give his compatriots away unless they make fools of 
themselves by any attempt to molest the Europeans, in which case, and in 
any case if it comes to a choice of sides, he will take the part of the European. 
In his dull way this unlettered man, who has read little else than the Koran 
and a few Arab books of obscenities, or of fortune-telling, has grasped the fact 
that from their own inherent faults and centuries of wrong-doing, Islam and 
Arab civilisation must yield the first place to the religion and influence of the 
European. He has no prejudice against Christianity—on the contrary, perhaps 
a greater belief in its supernatural character than some of the Englishmen he 
entertains from time to time—but if his inchoate thoughts could be interpreted 
in one sentence it would be “Not in our time, O Lord!” The change must 
come but may it come after his death. Meantime he hopes that you will not 
drive home too far the logic of your rule. When he is gone the Christian 
missionary may come and build there, but while he lasts he prefers to see 
nothing but the ramshackle mosques of his own faith and to have his half- 
caste children taught in the Arab fashion. He points out some to you who are 
sitting in the verandah of an opposite hut, under the shade of a knot of papaw 
trees ; a hideous old negroid Arab with a dark skin and pockmarked face is 
teaching them to read. Each child has a smooth wooden board with a long 
handle, something like a hand-mirror in shape. The surface of this board is 
whitened with a thin coating of porcelain clay ; and Arab letters, verses of the 
Koran and sentences for parsing are written on it by means of a reed pen 
dipped in ink or by a piece of charcoal. 
There is a certain pathos about this uneducated old coast Arab who has been 
a notable man in his day as conqueror and slave raider but who has had 
sufficient appreciation of the value of well-doing not to be always a slave raider, 
who has sought to inspire a certain amount of affection among the populations 
he enslaved. These in time have come to regard him as their natural 
sovereign, though the older generation can remember his first appearance in the 
country as an Arab adventurer at the head of a band of slavers. His soldiers, 
most of them now recruited from amongst his negro subjects, cheerfully raid the 
territories of other chiefs in the interior, but slave raiding within his own especial 
kingdom has long since ceased and a certain degree of order and security has 
been established. Let us set off against the crimes of his early manhood the 
good he has done subsequently by introducing from Zanzibar the cocoanut- 
palm, the lime tree, the orange, good white rice, onions, cucumbers and other 
useful products of the East; by sternly repressing cannibalism, abolishing 
witchcraft trials, improving the architecture, and teaching many simple arts and 
inducing the negroes to clothe their somewhat extravagant nudity in seemly, 
tasteful garments. 
He has known Livingstone and may even have secured a good word from 
that Apostle of Africa for hospitality and for relative humanity, as compared 
to other and wickeder Arabs. This casual mention of him in the book of the 
great “Dottori ” 1 will cause him a childish pleasure if you point it out. “Has 
1 The name by which Livingstone is almost universally known in Central Africa. 
