VORTREKKERS IN BAROTSELAND
The three horsemen at the Great Kei River—Francois Coillard—Trekking northwards—In the clutches of Lobengula—In Khama's country—The Makari—kari Desert—The Upper Zambesi—King Lewanika of Barotseland—A canoe voyage—Adventure with the Balubale—The coming of the Iron Horse.
ON an autumn day in the year 1875 three horsemen rode out of King William's Town in the Cape Colony, and turned their faces to the north for the long journey to Basutoland, a distance of 300 miles, which lay before them. As they rode on side by side they talked earnestly about a movement, in which they were all deeply interested, for extending the influence of the French Protestant Mission in Basutoland into the vast region to the north between the Limpopo and Zambesi rivers-virgin soil in those days so far as Christian teaching was concerned. Of the three one was a soldier, Major Malan by name. He was a Swiss by birth, who had become an officer in the British Army, but had resigned his commission in order to devote himself to Christian work among the native races of Africa. The other two, M. Coillard and M. Mabille, were Frenchmen, agents of the celebrated Basutoland Mission carried on by Protestants from France. These two had already done their part in building LID a strong native Church among the valleys of that “Switzerland of South Africa," and now they were lifting up their eyes to wider horizons and thinking of the needs of the tribes to the far north.
When the trio reached the Great Kei River they plunged in and made the crossing. As they landed on the northern bank a common impulse seized them, and springing from their horses they knelt down under the shadow of a bush and devoted themselves before God to the new enterprise on which they had set their hearts. Then when they had remounted, Major Malan, as if he had been leading a cavalry charge, waved his hat, spurred his horse, and galloped up the hill with his two friends fast at his heels, shouting in his enthusiasm, "Three soldiers ready to conquer Africa." These men meant, what they said. That incident marked the origin of the Barotse Mission. And it is of one of the three, M. Coillard, and how he fulfilled the vow he took beneath that bush by the Kei River, that this chapter is to tell.
When the honor of leading an expedition to the north of the Limpopo was entrusted to M. Coillard by the Church of Basutoland, he was no tyro in the work of the pioneer. In fact he had been pioneering already for twenty years. For most of that time he and his wife, a brave Scotchwoman, had been content to live in a wagon, after the fashion of the South African "vortrekker," or at best in a poor hut. He had lately built himself a comfortable house and planted a garden round it; but of the fruit of that garden Madame Coillard and he were never to eat. The rest of their lives was to be spent in seeking to do for the tribes of the Zambesi what they had already done for the Basuto people.
Starting from Basutoland with four native catechists as well as with his wife and niece, a girl of eighteen, M. Coillard trekked with his ox caravan right through the territories of the Transvaal Republic, crossed the Limpopo, and plunged into a trackless wilderness where, like sailors on the ocean, they had nothing to guide them but their compass and the stars. Their first rude experience was at the hands of Masonda, a cowardly and treacherous Mashona chief. He received them with great protestations of friendship, but the very next day tried to decoy them to the edge of a frightful precipice, with the view of hurling them down. Being frustrated in his murderous plan, lie sought some compensation in robbing them of seventeen of their oxen before he would allow them to leave his country.
They had not long escaped from the clutches of this rascal when they fell into the hands of a savage still more dangerous because much more powerful—the redoubtable Lobengula, king of the Matabele. A band of Lobengula's men seized them and dragged them off to Bulawayo, at that time the capital of the Matabele, on the charge of having entered the king's territory without his permission. For three weeks they were hurried by forced marches across a very rough country, while every comfort was denied them. Even to wash in a wayside stream was a crime, respect for this black monarch requiring them to appear in his presence with all the dirt and sweat of the three weeks upon them as a proof that they had obeyed his summons with the utmost alacrity. When they came in sight of Bulawayo they were met by a witch doctor, who performed a ceremony of exorcism. Dipping a gnu's tail in a slimy green mixture, he applied this spiritual disinfectant liberally to every member of the company, back and front. For M. Coillard, as a rival sorcerer, he reserved a double dose of his medicine, dashing the liquid into his face and all over his clothes.
For nearly four months Lobengula kept the Coillards prisoners, but finally he contented himself with expelling them from his country, and forbidding them ever to return to Matabeleland. There seemed no alternative now but to retreat, and so with heavy hearts the little caravan made their way for hundreds of miles to the south-west till they reached Khama's country, where that well-known Christian chief, then quite a young man, received them with the utmost kindness. He warmly approved of their purpose to push northwards, and did all in his power to further their plans. And as a good deal of communication went on between his own country and that of Lewanika, king of the Barotse on the Upper Zambesi, he sent a body of envoys along with M. Coillard all the way to Barotseland, to urge upon Lewanika the advisability of welcoming the white teachers. It was largely through Khama's influence that the way was thus finally opened up for an advance to the very threshold of Central Africa.
Having returned to the south and also made a voyage to Europe for the furtherance of his new plans, M. Coillard was at length in a position to trek to the north again. This time he was accompanied not only by Basuto helpers, but by a young Swiss clergyman, M. Jeanmairet, and by two white artisans, one English and the other Scotch, whose services proved absolutely invaluable to the enterprise. In the interval Barotseland had been visited by Mr. F. S. Arnot, of whom something will be said in another chapter. He had spent a considerable time in Lewanika's capital, facing endless privations and trials, but had at length been compelled by illness to leave the unhealthy Zambesi basin and start on that long march to Benguela which led him eventually to the Garenganze country. It was to take up and carry on the work which Arnot had tried to begin that M. Coillard now turned his face towards the Upper Zambesi.
Having once more reached Khama's country, the caravan next crossed the Makari-kari Desert, with its swamps and sands, its almost impenetrable jungles of thorn, its dreary death-like solitudes. Here dwell the Bushmen, the Masaroa, as they are called by the tribes of the Zambesi basin. These people would have proved troublesome but for the fact that Khama, whose strong arm was respected over all that region, had once more sent a party of his men to accompany the travelers all the way to their destination. After the desert came vast virgin forests. Through these the cumbrous wagons with their long teams of oxen, so suitable for movement on the open veldt, could only be forced with heart-breaking toil and to the destruction of nearly everything that was breakable. Constant zigzags were indispensable, but in spite of all care in trying to get round the trees an unexpected branch would every now and then make a clean sweep of a wagon, so that portmanteaus, trunks, tool-boxes, books, and haberdashery lay in wild confusion on the ground.
At length to their intense delight they came in sight of the great river just where the Upper Zambesi joins its waters with those of the Chobe. But their difficulties were far from over. The cruelties of Lewanika had brought about a revolution in Barotseland; the king had been driven into exile, and the whole country was in a state of anarchy. It was impossible in the meantime to proceed up the river to the capital, and for months the expedition could do little but wait on the turn of events. At length there came a counter-revolution. Lewanika was restored to the throne, and signalized his triumph by a massacre of the rebel chiefs, their children also being put to death without exception, while their wives were divided among the conquerors. After all this had taken place, Lewanika gave permission to M. Coillard to advance into the heart of Barotseland and to begin work not far from Lealuyi, as the capital was called.
Seldom has pioneer work been carried on in the face of more crushing difficulties and bitter disappointments than those which were encountered for several years by this heroic Frenchman and his colleagues. It soon turned out that Lewanika cared nothing for the introduction of Christianity among his people; all that he wanted was to reap material advantages from the presence of the white men in his country. Whatever was theirs he considered to be his, and when he found them less pliable than his own cringing subjects, he treated them to threats and studied insults, or tried to starve them out by a system of boycott in which all the markets were closed against them. Meanwhile they had to witness day by day the worst horrors of African barbarism—the inhumanities of the slave trade, the fruits of a universal belief in witchcraft, the open practice of murder. Slave children were offered to the Coillards whom they could not buy, and yet they knew that to refuse might be to sign the death-warrant of a child. It was impossible to walk a few steps from their door without striking their feet against a skull or a collection of half-charred human bones, marking the spot where men and women had been burned alive. Whoever gave the slightest offence to Lewanika was at once ordered off to execution. But most painful of all were the witchcraft ordeals which constantly went on. If misfortune came to any one he had only to accuse a neighbor of having used sorcery against him, and the accused must submit to trial by ordeal. The method in Barotseland was by boiling water. A pot of water was set on a large fire. As soon as the water boiled, the poor wretch had to plunge his hands into it, and if the skin peeled off', as of course it almost invariably did, he was at once dragged away to a cruel death. From this fate no one was safe, man or woman, young or old, chief or slave.
But the power of truth, backed by such patience and heroism as were shown by the Coillards, gradually began to tell. Lewanika grew ashamed of his cruelties, and came to have a larger sense of his responsibilities as the master of a vast territory stretching from the Kalahari Desert on the south to the watershed between the Congo and the Zambesi systems on the north. He was naturally a most intelligent man, possessed of a mechanical skill exceedingly rare in an African prince. He had a workshop of his own in which he spent his leisure hours, and could turn out almost anything he wanted, from a canoe to a harmonica or a delicately carved ivory bracelet. Canoe-building was a specialty of the Barotse, for like all the Zambesians they are essentially a river people. But the state-barge of the king's own designing, sixty feet long and manned by fifty rowers, was a structure of which the whole nation was proud. Though his heart was difficult to reach, his intelligence and ambition could be appealed to, and by and by he grew eager to see education, industry, and civilization develop among his people. As the representatives of all these good things he came to trust M. Coillard and his colleagues, and to favor the progress of Christianity among his subjects.
When he had at length secured a firm footing in the capital, Coillard began to think of the various tribes on the higher reaches of the Zambesi, which were more or less under Lewanika's sway, and one of the most interesting chapters of his striking book, On the Threshold of Central Africa, is that which tells of a voyage of exploration far up towards the sources of the river. He was accompanied by forty men in a flotilla of ten canoes, and, in order that canoeing might be easy, the expedition was made at a time shortly after the height of the annual floods, when the Zambesi Valley was all under water. The plain at this season "is a floating prairie, enameled with flowers; rosette water-lilies, with their delicate tints of blue, pink, and white; and a kind of convolvulus which proudly erects her great magenta trumpets, only dipping them reluctantly as our canoes go by. But it is also diversified by tall grass and reeds, through which we have to force our way.”
Far up the river they met a venerable man, nearly blind, who had seen Livingstone, and who pointed out a spot where the great traveler had camped and which was still known by his name. When Coillard spoke of Jesus he listened attentively and said, “It is just what Nyaka (i.e. The Doctor') used to say." In one place where the Mission party held a meeting with the people and sang a hymn, they were astonished to find that all present could join in it heartily. "Who taught it to you?" they asked; and the people shouted, "Bangueta." Then M. Coillard saw how the seed he had been sowing had silently spread like "bread cast upon the waters," for Bangueta had been a pupil in his own school at Lealuyi.
At length they reached a district so far up the river that Lewanika's name was no longer the protection it had hitherto been. They were now in the country of the Balubale, whose chief was called Kakenge. A mob of young men armed with guns met them, who demanded to know what the white man meant by coming into Kakenge's country with a band of Barotse, and without having obtained his permission. They also sought to exact the homage or tax which Kakenge imposed upon all traders coming to that land. Coillard told them that he was not a merchant or even a traveler, but a Moruti, i.e. a teacher, and that he had come among them to teach the things of God. They took him into the presence of the king, who was throned on a stool, clothed in a colored blanket, and shaded by an enormous blue cotton umbrella held by a slave. All Coillard's explanations were treated by Kakenge as lies, and after breaking into a passionate speech, he suddenly turned his back on the missionary and disappeared into his harem.
Things were looking bad, especially as the expedition had been refused all food since coming to Kakenge's country, and by this time they were nearly starving. But the situation grew still more serious when two of M. Coillard's men, who had contracted blood-brotherhood with some of the Balubale, obtained secret information that out of pure hatred for the Barotse Kakenge had sworn to destroy the whole party, and had already given orders for their massacre.
That night not one of the company slept. All of them, heathen and Christian alike, were praying to God. And next day a wonderful change had come over Kakenge's mind, for he sent them a plentiful supply of millet and fowls and sweet potatoes, and when they went in a body to the court to thank him for his kindness, told them that he had come to believe in their good intentions, and asked them to forget his ill-temper of the past days.
This was the farthest point reached by M. Coillard in his advance from the south towards the heart of Africa; and at this point our account of the labors and wanderings of this brave and devoted Frenchman must stop. Those who wish to know more about him and his work will find the story fully told in his own book.
There have been wonderful changes on the Upper Zambesi in recent years. The Barotse kingdom now forms a part of that vast stretch of British African territory which is known as Rhodesia. King Lewanika himself has paid a visit to England and been presented at King Edward's Court. A mighty bridge now spans the Victoria Falls. Through the regions where Coillard once toiled slowly with his laboring teams the Cape to Cairo railway now carries its passengers in swift and luxurious ease. But nothing can dim the honor of the heroic Christian "Vortrekker" who left his home in the fair Basuto valleys more than a generation ago, and turned the poles of his ox-wagons towards the land beyond the Limpopo.
The material for the above chapter is drawn from M. Coillard's On the Threshold of Central Africa (Hodder and Stoughton).