The natives of British Central Africa

								

of alluvial land is so level and devoid of natural features that, in
the rainy season, there is usually one navigable channel, if not more,
cutting it off into an island, by connecting the Shiré and Zambezi.
On the eastern bank we have left Mount Morambala behind—a massive
ridge, extending over several miles and reaching a height of 4000 feet.
Beyond the flats in the north-east you see the strangely shaped cone of
Chinga-Chinga Mountain against the sky, and later on other ranges come
into view; but just here the river valley is a marsh (some parts of it an
actual lake) in the wet season, and a dusty plain at the end of the dry.
The Portuguese territory on the eastern bank extends a little farther
north till it reaches a more tangible boundary in the river Ruo, which
rushes down from Matapwiri’s Mountain in the north-east, throwing itself
over a fall of 200 feet, and then, winding through the same sort of plain
as that already described, enters the Shiré through a sort of miniature
delta, by the reedy island of Malo and the ‘lip’ of land where now stands
the British township of Chiromo.
I have spoken all along of the Shiré River; and it is not now to be
expected that Europeans will ever call it anything else; but it is
perhaps unnecessary to say that no native, unless thoroughly accustomed
to Europeans and their ways, would ever know it by that name. To him it
is the Nyanja, or, if he happens to be a Yao, the Nyasa—a word which
means any large body of water, whether river or lake. To those living
near Lake Nyasa, it is the lake which is Nyanja or Nyasa, as the case may
be; it is only European usage which has stereotyped the Yao word on our
maps. Chiri, in the Mang’anja language, means ‘a steep bank,’ and was
misunderstood (by the Portuguese, probably, as it seems to have been in
use before Livingstone penetrated the country) as the name of the river;
since a native would say, ‘I am going to the bank,’ where we should
say, ‘I am going to the river.’ As Sir H. H. Johnston has remarked, the
Zambezi is the only one of the four great African rivers which bears a
name given by, or even known to, the people dwelling on it.
Roughly speaking, the British Protectorate, to which we have been
referring, comprises the basin of Lake Nyasa and its outlet, the Shiré.
This general statement, of course, requires some qualification. The north
end of the lake (the British boundary is the Songwe River, running out in
about 10° of S. latitude) and nearly half the eastern side are German;
south of that, i.e. from 11° 30´ S. to Fort Maguire, is Portuguese.
From Fort Maguire, the border-line runs south-east to the small lake
called Chiuta, then south, by the salt lake Chilwa and Mlanje Mountain to
the Ruo.
The western frontier of the Protectorate is an irregular line, following
more or less the watershed between the streams that flow into the lake
and those that flow into the Luangwa (a tributary of the Zambezi which,