Kitabı oku: «Stanley in Africa», sayfa 32
So now, notwithstanding the claim of Portugal to her territory on both the African coasts, by right of discovery, England does not hesitate to enter the Nyassa and Shiré region, hoist her flag and claim the rights of sovereignty, on the ground that she is the first permanent occupant. The fact that she has tangible interests to protect – invested property, missions etc., serves to strengthen her attitude with other European powers. But aside from this she does not intend to let Portugal establish a permanent possession clear across Africa from the Atlantic, at Angola and Benguella, to the mouth of the Zambesi. Such a possession would simply cut the continent in two, and erect a barrier on the east coast to that union of the British African possessions which her foreign diplomacy designs. Moreover, it is fully settled in the mind of Great Britain that the Nile water-way and its extensions through Lakes Albert and Edward Nyanza, Tanganyika, Nyassa, and the Shiré and Zambesi rivers, are hers, even if force has to be applied to make them actually hers.
But it must be said on behalf of Portugal, that she is not resting her rights on the ancient fiction of discovery alone. Her occupancy of the Zambesi region has, of late, become quite distinct and her vested rights have assumed impressive proportions. The management of her affairs are in the hands of Major Alberto da Rocha Serpa Pinto, whose exertions have greatly strengthened the Portuguese claims. His achievements in the way of African exploration give him high rank as a traveler, explorer, scientist and organizer. He was born in 1845 and educated for the Portuguese military service. In 1869 he first went to Africa, where he took part in the campaign against the rebellious chief Bonga, in the region of the Zambesi. He acquitted himself with distinction on the field of battle, and acquired wide repute as an explorer, by ascending the river as far as the Victoria Falls, making many important discoveries on the way, and crossing the African continent from one side to the other.
Upon his return to Portugal, Serpa Pinto was received personally by the King, who was first to greet him when entering the harbor; Lisbon and Oporto were brilliantly illuminated in his honor, and he received many honors and marks of distinction from the sovereign and public bodies.
In November, 1877, Serpa Pinto was again sent to Africa by the Portuguese Government and the Lisbon Geographical Society in conjunction. He organized a force of fourteen soldiers and fifty-seven carriers, and, starting from Benguella, he penetrated to the interior, traversing the districts of Dombe, Guillenguez, and Caconda, reaching Bihé in March of the following year. He was finally laid low with fever and carried by his faithful followers to the coast. Two of his subordinates, Brito Capello and Ivens, who have since become eminent as explorers, left the expedition in the interior, journeying to the northward to explore the river Quanza, while Serpa Pinto went to the eastward. On his return to Lisbon he was received with evidences of great esteem by the King, and was the object of popular adulation in all quarters. He described the sources of four great rivers heretofore unknown. His discovery of the river Coando, navigable for 600 miles and flowing into the Zambesi, alone placed Major Pinto in the rank of the great African explorers. After remaining in Portugal a few years, Serpa Pinto again returned to Africa, where he has since remained. In 1884, he made another extended journey of exploration, the results of which fully entitled him to the title of the Portuguese Stanley.
Following his discoveries the Portuguese have built a short railroad inland from Delagoa, and have established a system of steam navigation on the Zambesi and Shiré rivers, and opened a large and prosperous trading establishment. The activity recently displayed by the British in southeast Africa has led them to push forward their advantages and seize everything they can lay their hands on while the opportunity offers.
Commenting on this situation the London Times calls it “Major Serpa Pinto’s gross outrage on humanity and intolerable affront to England,” to which an American paper very appropriately replies: —
“Nothing would suit the English better than to have some excuse for wrenching away from little Portugal her possessions on the Dark Continent. England has played the cuckoo so many times with impunity that now it is believed a quickened public conscience will call a halt.
“The merits of this particular case will hardly exert much influence in determining the fate of Portugal in Africa. Left to themselves, England would dispossess Portugal in the twinkling of an eye, for if Turkey is the sick man of Eastern Europe, Portugal is the national personification of senility in the West. Four or five hundred years ago it was the foremost nation of Europe in point of commercial enterprise. The ships of Portugal were the most adventuresome of any that ploughed the ocean. As long ago as 1419 a bold Portuguese tar, Zarco, skirted along Western Africa, far below the Equator, and later, Vasco de Gama doubled the Cape of Good Hope. Like Columbus, he sought the most direct route to India, and what the Genoese missed he found. The country which England is now impatiently eager to steal from Portugal is a part of the reward of that enterprise which revolutionized Oriental trade, and was second in importance to the world only to the discovery of America. It was as if both sought a silver mine, and the one who failed to find what they were after came upon a gold mine. Portugal may not have made very much use of her discovery for herself and her people, but mankind has been immeasurably benefited, and England incalculably enriched. For the latter to now turn around and rob Portugal of her African possessions, in whole or in part, would be poetic injustice. It would be the old fable over again of the farmer who warmed a snake in his bosom only to be bitten by it.”
MISSIONARY WORK IN AFRICA
It is not alone as a commercial, scientific and political field that Africa attracts attention. No country presents stronger claims on the attention of Christian philanthropists. The Arabs entered Africa as propagandists of Islamism. The Portuguese advent was signalized by the founding of Catholic missions. When they arrived off the mouth of the Congo, in 1490, the native king, “seated on a chair of ivory, raised on a platform, dressed in glossy, highly colored skins and feathers, with a fine head-dress made of palm fibre, gave permission to the strangers to settle in his dominions, to build a church, and to propagate the Christian religion. The King himself and all his Chiefs were forthwith baptised, and the fullest scope was allowed to the Roman Catholic missionaries who accompanied the expedition to prosecute their appointed work.”
Thus runs an old chronicle. It is valuable as showing the antiquity of Christian interest in Africa, as well as showing the fine opportunity then presented for introducing the gospel into benighted lands. We say fine opportunity, because Portugal was then a power, able and willing to second every effort of the church, and the church itself was well equipped for missionary work. Its zeal was untiring. Its formula was calculated to impress the African mind. The regalia of its priesthood was captivating. Its music was pleasing and inspiring. But the sequel proved that something was wrong. The priesthood laboured arduously, establishing missions, baptizing the natives by the thousand, adapting their ceremonies and processions to heathen rites and superstitions. The process was not that of lifting pagan souls to a high Christian level, so much as a lowering of Christian principles to a heathen level. Then the church was too dependent on, too intimate with, the state. Even Portuguese historians admit that physical force was frequently employed to bring the natives more completely under the will of the priests. The accounts given of some of the floggings which took place, both of males and female, would be alternately shocking and ludicrous, but for the fact that they were associated with the propagation of religion. Also, both church and state countenanced the crime of slavery, and fattened on the infernal traffic. The ultimate result of such a system might have been easily foreseen. After a long career of so-called missionary success, during which hundreds of mission stations were founded on the entire western and on a great part of the eastern coast of Africa, and many even far inland, the priests fell under the jealousy of the chiefs, clashed with them respecting polygamy and various other customs, and were finally forced back with the receding wave of European influence, when the power of Portugal began to wane. Within one hundred years of the above described arrival of the Portuguese missionaries off the mouth of the Congo, no trace of the labors of Catholic missionaries could be found and no tradition among the natives that they had ever been there. The finest mission stations elsewhere had fallen into ruins, and only those remained which were near ports of entry and fortified commercial points.
It may be truthfully said that missionary work in Africa lay as if dead till the spirit of African discovery was revived in England by the formation of the British African Association, in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Even its first pioneers were not missionaries, but rather explorers in a commercial and scientific sense. They were, however, philanthropic Christian men, and the problem of evangelizing Africa was ever present in their minds. Among them were Leyard, Major Houghton, Mungo Park who met his death on the Upper Niger, Frederic Horeman, Mr. Nicholls, Prof. Roentgen, Mr. James Riley, Captain Tuckey who manned the first Congo expedition in 1816, Captain Gray and Major Laing, Richie and Lyon, Denham and Clapperton who pierced Bornou and visited Lake Tchad, Laing and Caillié whose glowing descriptions of Timbuctoo were read with delight.
These were followed at a later period by Richard and John Lander who really solved the problem of the Niger, and by Laird and Oldfield and Coulthurst and Davidson. Now came a time, 1841, when broader sympathies were enlisted. An expedition was organized under the direction and at the expense of the British Government which was not merely to explore the interior of the vast Continent, promote the interests of art and science, but check the slave trade, introduce legitimate commerce, advance civilization and social improvement, and thus prepare the way for the introduction of Christianity. For this purpose, treaties were to be formed with native princes, agriculture was to be encouraged, and Christian missions were to be established. Two missionaries went along, Rev. Messrs. Muller and Schon. The expedition began the ascent of the river Niger, but was soon forced to return. Failure was written over the enterprise, and the cause was the deadly climate, which had been too little studied in advance. African enterprise in the north again fell back on pioneering exploits, and we have the splendid researches of Barth, Krapf and Rebman in 1849, and in 1857 those still more brilliant efforts of Burton and Speke, who entered the continent from Zanzibar, on the east, and brought to light the mystery of Victoria Nyanza and Tanganyika. Following these came Baker, and then the immortal Livingstone, who united the pioneer and the missionary.
Livingstone entered Africa in 1840, under the auspices of the London Missionary Society, and founded a missionary station at Kolobeng, South Africa, 200 miles north of the Moffat station at Kuruman. He married Rev. Robert Moffat’s daughter, and was thus doubly fortified for missionary work. He labored earnestly and faithfully in his field till driven by the hostility of the Boers to provide himself another mission further north and beyond the great Kalahari desert. After suffering untold hardships in his trip across the desert, he discovered Lake Ngami, decided that it would be a good base for further missionary work, and then returned for his wife. A third time he crossed the desert, which had been regarded as impassable, and this time with his family. It was the year 1851. He reached the river Chobe after a hard struggle, his animals having perished under the bites of the poisonous tsetse fly. Here he entered the kingdom of Sebituane, the renowned warrior, whose favor he had previously secured. But that chieftain had died, and his successor detained Livingstone for a time. When a permit was obtained to go where he pleased, he pushed on 130 miles to Sesheke, and thence to the Zambesi, in the center of the continent, in the country of the famed Macololos. But finding the country too unhealthy for a permanent mission, he returned to Cape Town, whence he planned and carried to success a journey back to the Zambezi, and westward, through the Macololos and other tribes, to Loanda in Angola, quite across the continent. This was in 1852. This journey came about because, when at Cape Town, he learned of the total destruction of his parent mission station at Kolobeng by the Boers. This left him without a pastoral charge, but it proved a turning point in his life. Henceforth the field of adventure and exploration was his, and he easily became the most noted of African travelers, till Stanley established for himself a greater fame. What the Church lost a whole world gained. His further travels, how he lost and buried his faithful wife on the banks of the Shiré, his own sad death in the swamps of Lake Bangweola, the return of his dead body to Zanzibar, borne by his faithful servants Chuma and Susi, have all been described elsewhere in this volume.
The recent advance of the Portuguese toward the head-waters of the Zambesi, and their reduction of the Macololo territory to a Portuguese possession, together with the complications with other ambitious nations of Europe, likely to grow out of it, bring that strange Central African people again into prominence. The region was made known, in olden times, by the Portuguese traveler, Silva Porto, who described it as fertile, and the people as of divided tribes. But Livingstone describes the section as the empire of the Macololos, and gives many glowing descriptions of the people, their rulers, products and possessions. He was well received by them, liked their country, and left a profound impression among them, for Major Serpa Pinto, in his visit many years afterwards, found Livingstone’s name mentioned everywhere among the then detached and demoralized tribes with respect.
According to Livingstone, the powerful Basuto tribe, south of the Zambesi, crossed to the north side under the lead of their chief, Chibitano, and reduced the numerous tribes who inhabited the vast stretches of country as far as the river Cuando. Chibitano gave to his army, formed of different elements, and to his conquered peoples, made up of a variety of origins, the name of Cololos, hence the word Macololos, so well known throughout Africa. This powerful warrior and legislator held his conquered tribes as brethren in one common interest till his death, when they began to set up independent empires. In this disintegration the Luinas, under King Lobossi, came to the front, and are yet the most powerful of the Macololos. Pinto says that the Macololo empire is now composed of a mongrel crew – Calabares, Luinas, Ganguellas, and Macalacas – all given to drunkenness and moral brutishness. They are polygamous and deep in the slave traffic. Their country – 200 miles long and over 50 wide – is full of villages and fine plantations. The Luina herds cover the plains of the upper Zambesi, and no finer cattle are to be found in Africa. Lakes abound, and while they contribute to malarial diseases, they give a rich variety of fish. The men do not take readily to farming, but the women are wonderful milkmaids and vegetable raisers. As a people, they are skillful iron-workers and wood-carvers, and expert at pottery work. They cultivate tobacco for snuff, but smoke only bangue. They dress fuller and better than most Central African people, and some of their garbs are quite fantastic.
Prof. Henry Drummond, of Glasgow, in a lecture on “The Heart of Africa,” gives a vivid description of the perils which beset missionary life in the Zambesi regions:
As his boat swept along the beautiful lake Nyassa, he noticed in the distance a few white objects on the shore. On closer inspection, they were found to be wattle and daub houses, built in English style and whitewashed. Heading his boat for the shore, he landed and began to examine what seemed to be the home of a little English colony. The first house he entered gave evidence of recent occupancy, everything being in excellent order; but no human form was to be seen or human voice to be heard. The stillness of death reigned. He entered the school-house. The benches and desks were there, as if school had been but recently dismissed; but neither teachers nor scholars were to be seen. In the blacksmith shop the anvil and hammer stood ready for service, and it seemed as if the fire had just gone out upon the hearth; but no blacksmith could be found. Pushing his investigations a little further, he came upon four or five graves. These little mounds told the whole story and explained the desolation he had seen. Within them reposed the precious dust of some of the missionaries of Livingstonia, who one by one had fallen at their post, victims of the terrible African fever. Livingstonia was Scotland’s answer in part to the challenge which Henry M. Stanley gave to the Christian world to send missionaries to eastern equatorial Africa. When that intrepid explorer, after untold hardship, had found David Livingstone, and during months of close companionship had felt the power of that consecrated life, he blew the trumpet with no uncertain sound to rouse the church to her privilege and responsibility in central Africa. But it was not till the death of the great missionary explorer, that the land which gave him birth resolved to send a little army of occupation to the region which he had opened to the Christian world. On the 18th of January, 1875, at a public meeting held in the city of Glasgow, the Free, the Reformed, and the United Presbyterian churches of Scotland founded a mission, to be called Livingstonia, and which was to be located in the region of Lake Nyassa, the most southern of the three great lakes of central Africa, with a coast of eight hundred miles. Although founded by the churches just named, it was understood that it was to be regarded as a Free Church mission, the others co-operating with men and means as opportunity offered or necessity required.
The choice of location was most appropriate, not only because Dr. Livingstone had discovered that beautiful sheet of water, but because he had requested the Free Church to plant a mission on its shores. The first company of missionaries, which included also representatives of the Established Church, who were to found a separate mission in the lake region, after immense toil and severe hardship, reached the lake, via the Zambesi and Shiré rivers, October 12th, 1875. They selected a site near Cape Maclear as their first settlement, and as soon as possible put into operation the various parts of the mission work they had been commissioned to prosecute – industrial, educational, medical and evangelistic. From the first the mission met with encouraging success, becoming not only a center of gospel light to that benighted region, but also a city of refuge to which the wretched natives fled to escape the inhuman cruelties of the slave traders. As the years rolled on, however, it was found necessary to remove the main work of the mission to a more healthful region on the lake – hence the desolation seen by Prof. Drummond – the work at Cape Maclear being now mainly evangelistic and carried on by native converts. The mission still lives and comprises four stations, one of which is situated on the Stevenson Road, a road constructed at a cost of $20,000 by an English philanthropist, and intended to promote communication between Lakes Nyassa and Tanganyika.
After this diversion, forced upon the reader by reason of Livingstone’s dual missionary and pioneering work, we turn again to the north of Africa, and to historic Egypt. Comparatively little has been done in this land by Christendom for the evangelization of its degraded population. Wesleyan missionaries were stationed at Alexandria in the early part of the century, but the field proved unpropitious and they were removed to a more promising sphere of labor. Even the Church of England, now most in favor there, has not achieved much in the way of Christianizing the people. Perhaps the American United Presbyterians have been most successful in this uninviting field. They have several missionaries there, numerous lay agents, over a score of stations and schools, and quite a following of converts and pupils. The Khedive has granted them toleration and valuable concessions. The Church of Scotland sustains one mission and several prosperous schools at Cairo, in Egypt.
In Nubia, the Mohammedan religion is so firmly fixed, that missionary effort has been almost entirely discouraged.
The Abyssinians boast of their relationship to King Solomon, resulting from the visit of the Queen of Sheba to Jerusalem. They also claim to have received their Christianity from its fountain head in Judæa, on the return of the Ethiopian eunuch to the Court of Queen Candace, after his conversion to the faith of the Gospel by Philip, the Evangelist. Whatever truth there may be in these traditions, it is a fact that the religion of the country is a species of Christianity, combined with certain Judaic observances, as circumcision, abstinence from meat, keeping of Saturday as the Sabbath, and also with many Catholic forms, as reverence for the Virgin, the calendar of saints, etc. As a missionary field the Catholics were the first to enter Abyssinia in 1620, and they succeeded in persuading the king to declare Catholicism to be the religion of the State. This bold step, however, occasioned civil wars which ended in their expulsion from the country. Jesuit missionaries from France came later, but they were also banished.
The Church of England Missionary Society in 1829 sent out two missionaries. Others followed, but little was accomplished. The well known German missionary, Herr Flad, has accomplished quite a work in recent times. The defeat and murder of the Abyssinian king was one of the sad events of 1888. It followed successful invasions of the country and the slaughter and enslavement of large numbers of Abyssinians in 1885 and 1886 by the Mahdists, and their defeat by King John in 1887. Herr Flad transmitted a letter to the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society from Christian Abyssinians, which is a most earnest and pathetic appeal for help from their fellow Christians and such help as will prevent their enslavement and the entire desolation of their country. Very pertinently these people, whose liberties and lives are in such imminent danger, inquire of Christians in other lands, after depicting the desolation of their own, the selling of thousands of people into slavery, and the cruel butchery of other thousands, “Why should fanatic and brutal Moslems be allowed to turn a Christian land like Abyssinia into a desert, and to extirpate Christianity from Ethiopia?” They close with this earnest plea: “For Christ’s sake make known our sad lot to our brethren and sisters in Christian lands, who fear God and love the brethren.” While Abyssinian Christianity may not be without spot, Abyssinians are God’s men and women.
Later missionary letters to the London Anti-Slavery Society say that the Mahdists have made Western Abyssinia a desert. Whole flocks and herds have been destroyed, thousands of Christians have been thrown into slavery, thousands of others have been butchered, and hundreds of the noblest inhabitants have been taken to Mecca as slaves in violation of treaties.
The English gunboat Osprey recently captured three cargoes of slaves off the island of Perim, which guards the Aden entrance to the Red Sea. When brought to the Admiralty Court at Aden they proved to be about 217 in number, chiefly Abyssinian boys and girls from 10 to 20 years of age, captured by the fierce Mohammedan Gallas, and run across to Mocha to be sold to the Mohammedans. The Foreign Missionary Committee in Scotland appeal for a special Rescued Slaves’ Fund for the support and Bible education of these captives.
In Barca, Tripoli, Fezzan, Tunis, Algiers, and Morocco, known as the Barbary States, owing to the exclusive character of the Moslem faith, all missionary effort for the evangelization of the general population has been precluded until recently. A note from Edward H. Slenny, secretary of the North Africa Mission, says Jan. 26, 1889: “I have just returned from visiting most of the missionaries connected within the North Africa Mission in Morocco, Algeria and Tunis. The prospect among the Mohammedans is encouraging and we are hoping to send out more laborers. There are now forty-one on our staff, and two more leave us in a week. We are now proposing to take up work among the Europeans as well as the Mohammedans, and also establish a station in Tripoli, which is quite without the Gospel.”
Algeria was occupied in some measure in 1881, Morocco in 1884, Tunis in 1885 and in 1889. Mr. Michell, who has been working in Tunis, accompanied by Mr. Harding, who left England February 1, landed in Tripoli the 27th. Thus far they are getting on well. They find the people more bigoted than in Tunis. Besides the work they may be able to do in the city and neighborhood, they will be able to send some Scriptures by the caravans leaving for the Soudan which, with the blessing of God, will spread the light around Lake Tchad.
A correspondent of The Christian, (London) writing from Gibraltar, says: “We have had very cheering news from Morocco. A wonderful work has sprung up among the Spanish and Jewish people of Tangier. Meetings, commenced two or three months ago, have been held in Spanish, addressed through an interpreter by some brethren of the North African Mission, and there has been an intense eagerness to hear the truth. The Holy Spirit has carried home the Gospel message with conviction to many hearts, and a few days ago the brethren informed me that seventeen Jewish and Spanish converts were baptized, and others were waiting for baptism. The meetings have been crowded night after night, so much so that the friends in Tangier contemplate hiring a music-hall, at present used for midnight revelry and sin. This revival has aroused the enmity of both rabbi and priest, consequently bitter persecution has followed. Several Jewish inquirers have been beaten in the synagogue, converts have been dismissed from their employment, and the priests have offered bribes and made threats to the Spanish converts to induce them to cease attending the meetings, but so far the converts are holding firm.”
E. F. Baldwin is meeting with great success in Morocco. He writes from Tangier:
“We have had great encouragement in the work here. For some two months we have had nightly meetings for inquirers and young converts, attended by from ten to twenty. Many have received Christ as their personal Saviour and have been at once baptized. For some weeks most of my time was occupied from morning until night talking with interested ones who visited me, and daily there would be natives in my room much of the time. At times conversions occurred daily. All of them are brought out of Mohammedan darkness. They all renounce that false religion formally at their baptism. Almost all are young men, some of good position, but most of them from among the poor. There is not one who has not prayed and spoken in our meetings from the day of his conversion.
“Two of the earliest converts are in the mountains traveling on foot without purse, scrip or pay, preaching in both Arabic and Shillah. They have been away now several weeks. Others, whose faces we have never seen, have been converted in distant places through one from here, and write us of many others believing through their word. We have reason to believe the Gospel has taken root in several places in Southern Morocco within these few weeks. Two others of our number are arranging to start at once to preach in another direction. Mr. Martain and I are also leaving as soon as we can get away, and will travel also as Christ commanded, on foot and without purse or scrip.”
Later he writes from Mogador: “For upwards of a year new accessions have been constant, and every one baptized has renounced Mohammedanism. For a time the work was seemingly much hindered by severe persecution, imprisonment, beating, disowning, banishment – these are all too familiar to the converts here in Southern Morocco. But when it was impossible to work longer here in Mogador we travelled and preached, going literally on the methods laid down in Matthew X, which we hold with, we find, increasing numbers of God’s children, to be of perpetual obligation. We have found them to contain the deep and matchless wisdom of God for missionary effort. Several others besides myself, including recently converted natives, are so travelling. The natives knowing no other methods, have gone gladly forth, without purse or scrip, on foot, taking nothing, and marvellous blessing in the way of conversion has followed the step of their simple faith. They go with no thought of pay or salary. The Father makes their simple needs His care. My own position as an unattached missionary, dependent only on God for temporal supplies (which, blessed be His name, He ceaselessly supplies), enables one to consistently instruct these native Christians in the principles and methods of Mathew x, and encourage them to go forth upon them.
