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Instant Download Ebook PDF The Psychology of Criminal and Violent Behaviour PDF FREE
Instant Download Ebook PDF The Psychology of Criminal and Violent Behaviour PDF FREE
Instant Download Ebook PDF The Psychology of Criminal and Violent Behaviour PDF FREE
I had never for one moment cherished the illusion that a research
expedition was a pleasure-trip, but the three days and a quarter
spent on board the Rufiji will remain a vivid memory, even should
my experience of the interior prove worse than I anticipate. My own
want of foresight is partly to blame for this. Instead of having a good
breakfast at the Dar es Salam Club before starting, I allowed the
ship’s cook to set before me some coffee, which in combination with
the clammy, ill-baked bread and rancid tinned butter would have
proved an effectual emetic even on dry land, and soon brought about
the inevitable catastrophe on board the little vessel madly rolling and
pitching before a stiff south-west monsoon. The Rufiji and her sister
ship the Rovuma are not, properly speaking, passenger steamers, but
serve only to distribute the mails along the coast and carry small
consignments of cargo. Consequently there is no accommodation for
travellers, who have to climb the bridge when they come on board,
and live, eat, drink, and sleep there till they reach their destination.
This is all very well so long as the numbers are strictly limited: there
is just room at night for two or three camp beds, an item which has
to be brought with you in any case, as without it no travel is possible
in East Africa. But the state of things when six or eight men, and
perhaps even a lady, have to share this space, which is about equal to
that of a moderate-sized room—the imagination dare not picture.
My own woes scarcely permitted me to think about the welfare of
my men. Moritz and Kibwana, my two boys and my cook, Omari, are
travelled gentlemen who yielded themselves with stoic calm to the
motion of the Rufiji, but my Wanyamwezi porters very soon lost their
usual imperturbable cheerfulness. They all came on board in the
highest spirits, boasting to the kinsmen they left behind at Dar es
Salam of the way in which they were going to travel and see the
world. How the twenty-four managed to find room in the incredibly
close quarters of the after-deck, which they had, moreover, to share
with two or three horses, is still a puzzle to me; they were sitting and
lying literally on the top of one another. As they were sick the whole
time, it must, indeed, have been a delightful passage for all of them.
There is something strangely rigid, immovable and conservative
about this old continent. We were reminded of this by the Lion of
Cape Guardafui, and now we find it confirmed even by the official
regulations of steamer traffic. The ancients, as we know, only sailed
by day, and savages, who are not very well skilled in navigation,
always moor their sea-going craft off shore in the evening. We
Europeans, on the other hand, consider it one of our longest-
standing and highest achievements to be independent both of
weather and daylight in our voyages. To this rule the Rovuma and
Rufiji form one of the rare exceptions; they always seek some
sheltered anchorage shortly before sunset, and start again at
daybreak the next morning.
On the trip from Dar es Salam to Lindi and Mikindani—the South
Tour, as it is officially called—the first harbour for the night is Simba
Uranga, one of the numerous mouths of the great Rufiji river. The
entrance to this channel is not without charm. At a great distance the
eye can perceive a gap in the green wall of mangroves which
characterizes the extensive delta. Following the buoys which mark
the fairway, the little vessel makes for the gap, not swiftly but
steadily. As we approach it opens out—to right and left stretches the
white line of breakers, foaming over the coral reefs which skirt the
coast of Eastern Equatorial Africa—and, suddenly, one is conscious
of having escaped from the open sea and found refuge in a quiet
harbour. It is certainly spacious enough—the river flows, calm and
majestic, between the green walls of its banks, with a breadth of 600,
or even 800 metres, and stretches away into the interior farther than
the eye can follow it. The anchorage is about an hour’s steam up
river. On the right bank stands a saw-mill, closed some time ago: its
forsaken buildings and rusting machinery furnishing a melancholy
illustration of the fallacious hopes with which so many Colonial
enterprises were started. Just as the sun sinks below the horizon, the
screw ceases its work, the anchor-chain rattles through the hawse-
holes, and the Rufiji is made fast for the night. Her furnace, which
burns wood, is heated with mangrove logs, cut in the forests of the
Delta and stacked at this spot ready for transference on board. This
work is usually done under the superintendence of a forester, whom
I am sorry not to see, he being absent up country. His life may be
leisurely, but scarcely enviable; for we are speedily surrounded, even
out in mid-stream, by dense clouds of mosquitoes, which, I fancy,
will hardly be less abundant on land. The swabbing of the decks on
an ocean steamer, in the early morning, just at the time when sleep is
sweetest, is represented on the Rufiji by the wooding in the Simba
Uranga River, and the shipping of cargo in the open roadstead of
Kilwa. In the two nights passed on board, I got very little sleep,
between the incessant bumping of loads thrown down on deck, and
the equally incessant yelling of the crew. There was little
compensation for this, either in the magnificent sunset witnessed on
the Simba Uranga, or the wonderfully impressive spectacle we
enjoyed when steaming out in the early morning. Nothing could have
revived us but the fresh breeze of the monsoon on the open sea. No
sooner, however, were we outside than Neptune once more
demanded his tribute. I do not know whether a healthy nervous
system would have been affected by the Rufiji’s mode of stoking—
and if so, how—but to us three sea-sick passengers, who had to share
the amenities of the bridge as far as Kilwa, it was simply intolerable.
Of the two boats, the Rovuma, at any rate, has a digestion
sufficiently robust to grapple with the thirty-inch lengths of
mangrove-wood, thrown into her furnaces just as they are. The
Rufiji, however, has a more delicate constitution, and can only
assimilate food in small pieces. With the first glimmer of daybreak,
the heavy hammer, wielded by the strong right arm of a muscular
baharia, crashes down on the steel wedge held in position by another
native sailor on the first of the mangrove logs. Blow after blow shakes
the deck; the tough wood creaks and groans; at last the first morsel
has been chopped up for the ravenous boiler, and the fragments
describe a lofty parabola in their flight into the tiny engine-room.
Then comes another crash which makes the whole boat vibrate,—and
so on, hour after hour, throughout the whole day. Not till evening do
the men’s arms rest, and our sea-sick brains hail the cessation of
work with sincere thankfulness, for the continuous rhythm of the
hammer, which seems quite tolerable for the first hour, becomes, in
the eleven which follow it, the most atrocious torture.
My black followers behaved exactly as had been foretold to me by
those best acquainted with the race. At Dar es Salam each of the
twenty-seven had received his posho, i.e., the means of buying
rations for four days. At Simba Uranga, the mnyampara (headman)
came to me with a request that I should buy more provisions for
himself and his twenty-three subordinates, as they had already eaten
all they had. The complete lack of purchasable supplies in the forest
saved me the necessity of a refusal,—as it also did in the case of
Moritz, who, with his refined tastes, insisted on having some fish,
and whom, with a calm smile, I projected down the bridge ladder.
That is just like these improvident children of the Dark Continent;
they live in the present and take no thought for the future—not even
for to-morrow morning. Accordingly, I had to spend a few more
rupees at Kilwa, in order to quiet these fellows, the edge of whose
insatiable appetite had not been blunted by sea-sickness. Kilwa—
called Kilwa Kivinje, to distinguish it from Kilwa Kisiwani, the old
Portuguese settlement further south,—has sad memories for us,
connected with the Arab rising of 1888, when two employees of the
German East African Company met with a tragic death through the
failure of our fleet to interfere. The officers in command have been
severely blamed for this; but to-day, after examining for myself the
topography of the place, I find that the whole deplorable business
becomes perfectly intelligible. The shallowness of the water off shore
is such that European steamers have to anchor a long way out, and
the signals of distress shown by the two unfortunate men could not
have been seen.
Under normal circumstances three days is a pretty liberal
allowance for the run from Dar es Salam to Lindi by the Rufiji; but
we did not accomplish it in the time. South of Kilwa we lost the
shelter afforded us for the last two days by the island of Mafia and
the countless little coral reefs and islets, and consequently felt the
full force of the south wind. Being now the only passenger, I had
plenty of room, but was if possible more wretched than before, as the
supply of oranges—the only thing I felt the slightest inclination to eat
—was exhausted. Soon after midday the captain and mate began to
study the chart with anxious looks.
“When shall we get to Lindi?” I asked wearily, from the depths of
my long chair.
An evasive answer. The afternoon wore on, and the view to
starboard: a white, curling line of breakers, backed by the wall of
mangroves with their peculiar green, still remained the same. The
captain and mate were still bending over their chart when the sun
was nearing the horizon.
LINDI ROADSTEAD
My stay at Lindi has passed off less peacefully and agreeably than I
had hoped. A day or two after landing here, I had to witness the
execution of a rebel. Such a function can never be a pleasure to the
chief performer, however callous; but if, after the reading of the long
sentence in German and then in Swahili, the proceedings are
lengthened by such bungling in the arrangements as was here the
case, it can be nothing less than torture even to the most apathetic
black. It is true that, as a precautionary measure, a second rope had
been attached to the strong horizontal branch of the great tree which
serves as a gallows at Lindi; but when the condemned man had
reached the platform it appeared that neither of the two was long
enough to reach his neck. The stoical calm with which the poor
wretch awaited the dragging up of a ladder and the lengthening of
one of the ropes was extremely significant as an illustration of native
character, and the slight value these people set on their own lives.
Lindi forms a contrast to many other Coast towns, in that its
interior keeps the promise of the first view from outside. It is true
that the long winding street in which the Indians have their shops is
just as ugly—though not without picturesque touches here and there
—as the corresponding quarters in Mombasa, Tanga and Dar es
Salam; but in the other parts of the straggling little town, the native
huts are all embowered in the freshest of green. Two elements
predominate in the life of the streets—the askari and the chain-gang
—both being closely connected with the rising which is just over. The
greater part of Company No. 3 of the Field Force is, it is true, just
now stationed at strategic points in the interior—at Luagala on the
Makonde Plateau, and at Ruangwa, the former seat of Sultan
Seliman Mamba, far back in the Wamwera country. In spite of this,
however, there is enough khaki left to keep up the numbers of the
garrison. This colour is most conspicuous in the streets in connection
with the numerous chain-gangs, each guarded by a soldier in front
and another in the rear, which are to be met with everywhere in the
neighbourhood of the old police Boma and the new barracks of the
Field Force. I realize now what nonsense has been talked in the
Reichstag about the barbarity of this method of punishment, and
how superficial was the knowledge of the negro’s psychology and his
sense of justice shown by the majority of the speakers. Though
competent writers—men who, through a long residence in the
country, have become thoroughly familiar with the people and their
character—have again and again pointed out that mere
imprisonment is no punishment for the black, but rather a direct
recognition of the importance of his offence, their words have fallen
on deaf ears. We Germans cannot get away from our stereotyped
conceptions, and persist in meting out the same treatment to races so
different in character and habit as black and white. Of course I do
not mean to imply that a man can under any circumstances be
comfortable when chained to a dozen fellow-sufferers (even though
the chain, running through a large ring on one side of the neck,
allows each one a certain freedom of movement), if only on account
of the difficulties involved in the satisfaction of natural necessities.
But then people are not sent to the chain-gang in order to be
comfortable.
However, men guilty of particularly heinous crimes and those of
prominent social position enjoy the distinction of solitary
confinement. In the conversation of the few Europeans just now
resident at Lindi, the name of Seliman Mamba is of frequent
occurrence. This man was the leader of the rising in the coast region,
but was ultimately captured, and is now awaiting in the Lindi
hospital the execution of the sentence recently pronounced on him.
As he has a number of human lives, including those of several
Europeans on his conscience, he no doubt
deserves his fate. As a historical personage
who will probably long survive in the annals of
our Colony, I considered Seliman Mamba
worthy of having his features handed down to
posterity, and therefore photographed him
one day in the hospital compound. The man
was obviously ill, and could only carry his
heavy chain with the greatest difficulty. His
execution, when it takes place, as it shortly
must, will be a release in every sense of the
word.
By far more agreeable than these “echoes of
rebellion” are the results of my scientific
inquiries among my own men and the
Swahilis. My Wanyamwezi seem quite unable
to endure inaction, and ever since our second
day at Lindi, they have been besieging me
from early morning till late at night with mute
or even vocal entreaties to give them
something to do. This request I granted with
SELIMAN MAMBA the greatest pleasure,—I made them draw to
their heart’s content, and allowed them to sing
into the phonograph as often as opportunity offered. I have already
discovered one satisfactory result from our adventurous and—in one
sense calamitous—voyage in the Rufiji. My men have wrought their
sufferings, and their consequent treatment at the hands of the crew
into a song which they now delight in singing with much energy and
a really pleasing delivery. Here it is:—[4]