The natives of British Central Africa

								

Lions are common enough to be a plague. Thirteen years ago they were
looked on as a thing of the past at Blantyre, though even then they were
met with a few miles out on the Matope road, and I have heard, though
not seen, them in the Upper Shiré district. (The roaring we heard two or
three times, on stormy nights, came, we were assured, from the banks of
the Kapeni, six miles away.) But the mysterious disease among the wild
buffaloes, antelopes, and other game, which in 1894 spread westward to
the lakes and then southward, and when it attacked the cattle in South
Africa was known as rinderpest, deprived them of their food, and drove
them to invade the more settled districts. Twelve were shot within a few
weeks on one plantation, and a planter in the neighbourhood of Zomba,
who was riding a bicycle, was chased for some miles by a lion, but
ultimately escaped. In some parts, as, for instance, on the low ground
near the Shiré, below the Murchison Cataracts, the natives build their
huts on raised platforms so as to be safe from lions at night. Leopards
also are apt to be dangerous; they prowl about habitations by night,
usually in the hope of getting into the goat-kraal, or picking up some
stray dog unlucky enough to have been left outside, and are by no means
above carrying off the miserable fowls to be found in native villages,
one of which can scarcely be a mouthful. But they frequently attack human
beings; and at one village a leopard had made a habit of waiting in the
grass beside a certain path along which the women went to fetch water
from the river, and had killed several before he was shot. Wizards are
supposed to take this shape, among others.
Domestic animals are not numerous, but we shall come back to them in a
later chapter.
British Central Africa, says Sir H. H. Johnston, ‘is a country singularly
rich in bird life.’ On the Shiré we have a wonderful variety of
water-birds—flamingoes, herons, cranes, ducks, geese, plovers—and, to
mention no more (these two are among the first noticed by the new comer),
the handsome black-and-white fishing-eagle, and the tiny kingfisher,
‘like a flash of blue light.’ Among the hills we have strange forms,
like the hornbill, and gorgeous colouring, as in the plantain-eaters and
rollers and some of the fly-catchers, and familiar home birds, and their
near relations—swallows, thrushes, larks, woodpeckers (the native name
for the latter, gogompanda, is very expressive). As to singing-birds,
I may quote again from Sir Harry Johnston: ‘Both Mr. Whyte and myself
have remarked with emphasis at different times on the beauty of the
birds’ songs in the hilly regions of British Central Africa. The chorus
of singing-birds is quite as beautiful as anything one hears in Europe,
thus quite disposing of one of the numerous fictions circulated by early
travellers about the tropics, to the effect that the birds, though