As for food, our supplies are close to being exhausted, and the people of this place have but little to give. What they have given, they have given freely however. Amoda had some work to do to persuade them that we could not take them with us, for they would fain have joined us if they could.
I will not forget their miserable faces as we left. For it is not certain that they will meet with another traveling party soon. All I could do for them was to lay a benediction on every head, and pray the Lord to keep them, and us too, as we moved away from this place of misery and hopelessness. My final prayer was that the Lord would, in His own time, turn the heart of every slaver, and of every man who holds the weak in the grip of Tyranny and Terror.
11
22 July 1873
Eleventh Entry from the Journal of Jacob Wainwright, written at Chawende; in which the Expedition overpowers a Village, Occasioning a Lamentable Loss of Life, and Wainwright reflects on the Unexpected Munificence of Providence.
After the miserable conditions of that last village, I am pleased to say that here in the stockaded village of Chawende, we are at last sheltered in some comfort. Though not quite the Palace Beautiful, Chawende has given us the greatest ease we have enjoyed since we left Chitambo.
It is, altogether, a most impressive place. Secure within high walls made of an ingenious combination of thatch, mud, and wooden poles is a great number of well-built huts, of both the round and square variety that we have seen elsewhere. Entrance can only come from one direction, through large wooden gates that we have secured with rope made from strong bark.
How we came to occupy this village is a tale most distressing, and indeed, it might be well if, when it comes to publication of this Journal, I should omit this section altogether in narrating our travails, as it would reflect no credit on any of the party. But as my own conduct is entirely blameless and can attract no reproach, it may well be that the record should stand as truthfully as it can, so that it may be known to what exigencies the party was driven.
After crossing the Luapula, we walked a great distance. First, we passed through the village of a man named Kawinga, whose reputation appeared to rest on his great height and his rumored possession of a gun, a rare instrument this deep into the interior. The height was indeed remarkable—we found him to be a strikingly tall man, of singularly light color—but the gun in question, which rested above his seat, was more a talisman than a weapon, for it was nothing but a rusted piece of metal. And if ever it had any bullets, Kawinga had never heard of them. The magic of the word “gun,” however, secured his power over his land.
We did not stop long with him, for we feared that seeing what a real gun not only looked like but, more important, was capable of, he might consider it necessary that he have more than one, and thus lay claim to those of our askari. All we asked from him was for directions to the next village, that of Nkossu, where we had heard report of their having many herds of cattle.
We found as we marched that we got hungrier as we talked of food, but on this occasion, we gave rein to our thoughts as we imagined the feast that awaited us at Nkossu. It was with a cheerful step that we moved on.
Alas, the report of Nkossu’s cattle was as exaggerated as rumors of Kawinga’s gun, for the animals were untamed and exceedingly wild, and seemed to roam where they pleased. The three best hunters of the expedition, Wadi Saféné, Munyasere, and Carus Farrar, loaded their guns and prepared to fire on the creatures. Their actions attracted a great deal of notice, and soon, a crowd of Nkossu’s people had gathered to watch the proceedings.
To the great excitement of the crowd, Munyasere felled one creature. Not to be outdone, Wadi Saféné fired in echo. This was when the accident happened. Wadi Saféné, firing wildly, hit one of the villagers. The man let out a great bellow of pain as the people around him scattered in fear. The bullet had struck him in his right thigh. Carus Farrar dropped his gun and rushed to attend to him.
It can only have been due to the Merciful Intervention of Him above that the man sustained no great injury. The bullet had gone right through the flesh, and would cause no lasting damage, Carus Farrar said. After treatment using some of the Doctor’s ointments, the man was soon hobbling about and showing his wounds with evident pride and delight.
Seeing that no real harm had been done, the Chief said a fine of three strings of blue beads would have to be paid to the wounded man’s father, and also demanded that we leave behind the beast we had slain as our fine.
From Nkossu we walked for many days, looking for a sheltered place at which to set camp. Our supplies were dangerously low. Bitterly did we regret the cow Nkossu had fined us. Not only were we passing through a barren landscape, we were doing so in the bone-dry month of July.
In the two months that we had been on the road, the skies had turned blue with no clouds. The streams that we passed were parched, the trees bore no fruit. Thus it was that the march from Nkossu saw us with an ever-diminishing supply of food, which we augmented with the few berries that came our way.
Quarrels were now a daily feature of our march. Petty disputes were threatening to break out into open warfare. Amoda and Susi almost came to blows over a small matter, and were stopped only by the intervention of Chuma. Two of the pagazi came to blows because one of them had looked at the other in the wrong way.
The Nassickers were getting even more fractious than the children, and there was great unpleasantness between Benjamin Rutton and John Wainwright, for the latter claimed that the former was carrying a trunk in such a manner as to unfairly tilt all the weight toward him. The women were no better, for whenever any of the children fought, their mothers picked up the quarrels, with Khadijah and Laede fighting over their children on more than one occasion.
I am certain that the discord in the party was due to the hunger that was now pressing on all of us. The pagazi who had no women and children in the party were becoming fractious about sharing rations with the weaker members of the expedition. A small group of quat-chewing pagazi, led by Ali and Asmani, were threatening mutiny, for they had consumed most of their leaf and would not march without more. It took all of Amoda’s efforts to keep the group peaceable.
On the night before we reached Chawende, we made a meager repast of some fish caught by Susi, and a yellow fruit with sharp thorns that Halima assured us was a prickly cucumber. “It tastes particularly good if you eat it with lamb stewed with limes and cardamom spice,” she said, a statement that was of little use to us on that particular day. Indeed, if we could all have fed from Halima’s descriptions of the food that her mother cooked when she was in the Liwali’s kitchen, we might never have hungered.
We gathered as much of the fruit as we could. It would have kept us going, but we found when it came time to eat again that the powerful heat had wilted and rotted it.
“I am sure,” Ntaoéka said, “that this would not smell at all if we only had limes to dress it with. It would taste so good with limes.”
“Ah, if only we had limes,” added Laede. “The Liwali had so many limes.”
“Limes that would make even this rotten fruit the best feast ever eaten.”
At this, Halima flew at both women, and it took Amoda and Susi to separate them from each other. Chirango, meantime, was narrating to me all the food that he planned to buy for the party when he got his reward in Zanzibar.
While Halima dreamed of past feasts and Chirango of future ones, for my part, I could not help but wish that I had in me the power of Our Lord Jesus Christ to turn fish and bread into a meal to feed the party before me, just as he had once fed the five thousand on two loaves and five fishes. I soon put such blasphemous thoughts from my mind.
Instead, I said out loud the Reverend Bean’s prayer to Him Above to have compassion and give us seasonable weather for the fruits of the earth. I also prayed that the Lord from whom comes our Daily Bread relieve us from hunger. The answer to my prayer came in an unexpected way. It is indeed true that the Lord’s Purposes will Ripen Fast and U
nfold Every Hour, but this answer to my prayer came at great cost.
We were fortunate to meet a hunting party that told us of a village that lay directly north of our path. We pressed on to ask for admittance but met with the keenest disappointment when we were refused entry. No doubt the intelligence that we were carrying a body had reached this place, for it seems to have spread with the greatest rapidity in all directions: every hut and hamlet that we reached was shut against us.
Desperate for shelter and food, we marched on. By the time we approached Chawende’s town, we had exhausted all provisions, even the rotten fruit that those with stronger stomachs had been eating. We had also walked farther than we had on any day since leaving Chitambo.
Pressed on by hunger, we marched until we reached the approach to Chawende’s. It was most pleasing to see that Chawende’s promised to be more than a village; it seemed to be an impressively built and stockaded town protected by large wooden gates. Munyasere and Chowpereh went on in front to inform the Chief of our presence and to ask leave to enter his town. We waited for them. And waited. We waited an hour and they did not return. Two hours, no return.
By the third hour, we were all impatient for news. The children were wailing with hunger, the women petulant as they failed to comfort them. John Wainwright, who at first had been sighing and weeping silently, now picked up and then threw down his load, and in great hysterics said he was not moving anymore.
Then Mariko Chanda and Toufiki Ali, the two men whose turn it was to carry the Doctor’s body, laid it down on the ground and said they would not move any longer with this blasted corpse. Another man said the same, and another, and another, until all of the pagazi who marched between the body and the safire were threatening to revolt. It was clear to me that they had been dissatisfied for a while, but Amoda chose to lay their actions at the feet of John Wainwright. As he was still protesting furiously, Amoda walked up to him and hit him hard in the stomach. John doubled over with a howl of pain.
In the silence that followed, Amoda said: “If you do not shut yourself up this instant, I will whip you until your skin falls off. I am as hungry as you, and as tired as you, but weak as I am, I have the strength of all the men here and I will whip you all the way to Bagamoio.
“You see Chirango there?”
He indicated Chirango, who had been watching the scene as helplessly as anyone else.
“What happened to him is nothing compared to what will happen to you if you do not shut that mouth.”
Amoda was addressing himself to all the pagazi, but his eyes were on John Wainwright. “It is only the thought of the recovery that you will need afterward that prevents me from doing it now. So instead, your whipping will wait until we get to Bagamoio.”
John collapsed to sit on his load. He was silent now, but still he wept silently, but enough to produce tears and mucus that he wiped from his nose with his hand. It was a most unedifying sight. I was about to go to tell him to pull himself up, and that he was a Nassicker and a Christian and he was letting down the school with this disgraceful display, when Amoda declared that he would go himself to see what was happening.
He and Chuma set off after Munyasere and Chowpereh. Again we waited. No better success seemed to attend this second venture, so shouldering our burdens, we went forward as a body in the track of the four messengers.
We were almost at the gates of the stockaded town when we saw all four come in the opposite direction to meet us. They walked together with five men whose faces looked most unfriendly. They had sought to enter the town but found it a very large place and extremely well protected. There were two other villages of equal size close to it. Much pombe drinking was going on, and they had refused to entertain the request of our first two messengers.
When the second messengers had arrived, Amoda had made straight for the Chief. It would appear that Amoda had approached the Chief with his gun in hand. A man who it seems was Chawende’s son had become drunk and quarrelsome, and made this a cause of offense. Swaggering up to Amoda, he had, with great insolence, asked how he dared threaten the Chief with a gun.
This man had ordered our men’s expulsion from the compound and sent five of his own men to ensure that they left. When the four reached us, we made a show of walking in the direction opposite to the town, until the five returned from whence they came.
By this time, our whole party was footsore and heart-sore; the women fussed, the children cried. We were as close to starvation as we had been since we left Chitambo.
The following events might have been avoided, perhaps, had there not been hunger. But there was nothing to eat, and no likely looking place or materials to build shelters. The expedition leaders also later confessed that they were also actuated by another fear, that if we were to camp anywhere close to this town for the night, these drunken people who already had cause to be offended with us were likely to plunder the baggage.
It was resolved among us to make for the town and plead our case. We were flatly refused admittance, those inside telling us to go down to the river and camp on the bank. We replied that this was impossible: we were tired, it was late, and nothing could be found there to give shelter. We met only with derisive laughter.
It is said often enough that a hungry man is an angry man, and truly I saw the meaning of that statement that day. The men pushed in, to the surprise of those on the other side. Saféné got through, and Munyasere climbed over the top of the stockade, followed by Chuma. They opened the gate wide to let the rest of the party through.
I tried to call for peace, as did Amoda, but our voices were drowned in the general tumult. Those at the back of the column pushed with such force that most of our party was moved into the stockade. At that, a man inside drew a bow and fired an arrow at Munyasere, who managed to duck the arrow. It fell harmlessly to the ground. Amoda, seeking to restore some semblance of order, fired a gun into the air. The sound of the fearful weapon threw the townsfolk into a panic as they ran for the gate. There was pandemonium as the remnants of our party fought to get in while they fought to get out. Munyasere fired, as did Wadi Saféné. More arrows flew through the air.
Susi gathered Halima, Khadijah, and the children and led them to the shelter of a nearby hut before running to Chowpereh to take from him his musket. He and Chuma then followed Amoda as he commanded that Mariko and Ali put the body of the Doctor, along with all our goods and chattels, inside an empty hut. Mabruki was already in the thick of it, without once checking to see if Ntaoéka was safe.
“Come with me,” I said, and took her hand. It was soft in mine. As I held it, it appeared to me that my heart was beating faster and my blood was coursing at a rapid speed through my body. Laede then grabbed my other hand, and with both women screaming in my ears, and John Wainwright hard on my heels, I shepherded them to safety.
Now, I am no coward, and can, in a good cause, fight as well as any man. It brought me a little shame to see that John and I were the only men standing among the women, away from the fray before us, but I reassured myself that, unlike John Wainwright, I was not driven by lowly cowardice. No: I kept away because my true duty was to watch over the women and children, and to pray that our men would get safely through the affray. Though the men ribbed me afterward for not joining, I am certain that it was my prayers for the Lord’s Merciful Intervention, and my watching over the women, that allowed us to prevail.
From the granary in which we sheltered, I watched as the scene descended into the general mayhem of men fighting with fists, spears, and anything else they could find. Chirango aimed a blow at the man nearest to him. A hurled spear just avoided hitting Matthew Wellington in the back. On Munyasere’s order, our askari fired their guns. At this sound, there was a panic of running as Chawende’s men called a retreat. Their drums beat the assembly in all directions. But they were not in full retreat. The drums appeared to be a signal for reinforcements. Soon, an immense number of men swarmed toward the town with bows, arrows, and spears. Abandoned in the fight,
the Doctor’s body lay on the ground with the other packages. Things were becoming desperate.
At Munyasere’s signal, the askari charged out of the gates and fired with disastrous results. As bodies fell to the ground, the villagers ran, leaving behind their spears and shields. Having got rid of every last man, the askari bolted the gates to the town and gave a roar of triumph.
I am sorry to say that there was great joy as the men whooped and plundered the village of all the food they could find. The townsfolk had clearly been feasting, which meant there was a great deal of meat and pombe, which our men had no hesitation in drinking. The air that had rung with the noise of battle now rung with cheers and whooping celebrations, with the ululation of women and the squawking of chickens attempting to evade the pot.
Thanks to the mercy of God, our lives were spared, save that of two of the askari, Nchise and Ntaru. Nchise was shot with an arrow to the neck through the palisade and died on the spot, while Ntaru was shot in the bowels and sank soon afterward.
A few others who were hurt here and there had their injuries tended to by Carus Farrar and Farjallah Christie. I find myself thankful yet again for the Doctor’s medicine chest. I tried but could not succeed in urging the men to give a soberer reflection to the whole affair, for the victory, despite the deaths of Nchise and Ntaru, had gone to their heads and they were crowing with the sense of their own power.
It was as well however that Amoda insisted that a guard should be up to keep watch, for that night, a party approached from outside the stockade and threw small balls of fire within the compound. None landed on the thatch of the huts, however, and it was no time at all before the small fires were put out. A volley of gunfire soon scared off those outside.
Out of Darkness, Shining Light Page 16
