How I Found Livingstone | Page 6

Zanzibar, he has become a proverb for honesty, and strict
business integrity. He is enormously wealthy, owns several ships and
dhows, and is a prominent man in the councils of Seyd Burghash.
Tarya has many children, two or three of whom are grown-up sons,
whom he has reared up even as he is himself. But Tarya is but a
representative of an exceedingly small minority.
The Arabs, the Banyans, and the Mohammedan Hindis, represent the
higher and the middle classes. These classes own the estates, the ships,
and the trade. To these classes bow the half-caste and the negro.
The next most important people who go to make up the mixed
population of this island are the negroes. They consist of the aborigines,
Wasawahili, Somalis, Comorines, Wanyamwezi, and a host of tribal
representatives of Inner Africa.
To a white stranger about penetrating Africa, it is a most interesting
walk through the negro quarters of the Wanyamwezi and the
Wasawahili. For here he begins to learn the necessity of admitting that
negroes are men, like himself, though of a different colour; that they
have passions and prejudices, likes and dislikes, sympathies and
antipathies, tastes and feelings, in common with all human nature. The
sooner he perceives this fact, and adapts himself accordingly, the easier
will be his journey among the several races of the interior. The more
plastic his nature, the more prosperous will be his travels.

Though I had lived some time among the negroes of our Southern
States, my education was Northern, and I had met in the United States
black men whom I was proud to call friends. I was thus prepared to
admit any black man, possessing the attributes of true manhood or any
good qualities, to my friendship, even to a brotherhood with myself;
and to respect him for such, as much as if he were of my own colour
and race. Neither his colour, nor any peculiarities of physiognomy
should debar him with me from any rights he could fairly claim as a
man. "Have these men--these black savages from pagan Africa," I
asked myself, "the qualities which make man loveable among his
fellows? Can these men--these barbarians--appreciate kindness or feel
resentment like myself?" was my mental question as I travelled through
their quarters and observed their actions. Need I say, that I was much
comforted in observing that they were as ready to be influenced by
passions, by loves and hates, as I was myself; that the keenest
observation failed to detect any great difference between their nature
and my own?
The negroes of the island probably number two-thirds of the entire
population. They compose the working-class, whether enslaved or free.
Those enslaved perform the work required on the plantations, the
estates, and gardens of the landed proprietors, or perform the work of
carriers, whether in the country or in the city. Outside the city they may
be seen carrying huge loads on their heads, as happy as possible, not
because they are kindly treated or that their work is light, but because it
is their nature to be gay and light-hearted, because they, have conceived
neither joys nor hopes which may not be gratified at will, nor cherished
any ambition beyond their reach, and therefore have not been baffled in
their hopes nor known disappointment.
Within the city, negro carriers may be heard at all hours, in couples,
engaged in the transportation of clove-bags, boxes of merchandise, &c.,
from store to "godown" and from "go-down" to the beach, singing a
kind of monotone chant for the encouragement of each other, and for
the guiding of their pace as they shuffle through the streets with bare
feet. You may recognise these men readily, before long, as old
acquaintances, by the consistency with which they sing the tunes they
have adopted. Several times during a day have I heard the same couple
pass beneath the windows of the Consulate, delivering themselves of

the same invariable tune and words. Some might possibly deem the
songs foolish and silly, but they had a certain attraction for me, and I
considered that they were as useful as anything else for the purposes
they were intended.
The town of Zanzibar, situate on the south-western shore of the island,
contains a population of nearly one hundred thousand inhabitants; that
of the island altogether I would estimate at not more than two hundred
thousand inhabitants, including all races.
The greatest number of foreign vessels trading with this port are
American, principally from New York and Salem. After the American
come the German, then come the French and English. They arrive
loaded with American sheeting, brandy, gunpowder, muskets, beads,
English cottons, brass-wire, china-ware, and other notions, and depart
with ivory, gum-copal, cloves, hides, cowries, sesamum, pepper, and
cocoa-nut oil.
The value of the exports