People of Africa | Page 9

great chiefs were large and beautifully decorated with plaited reeds.
The chief food of the Baganda is plantains or bananas, which are peeled when unripe and wrapped in smoke-dried banana leaves. These packets are slowly cooked with very little water in earthenware cooking-pots. When the food is cooked it is pressed and beaten, and then the leaves are opened out and make a plate. Other things, such as beans and vegetables and fish, are cooked in the same way, wrapped in banana leaves and then eaten with the bananas.
Some of the Baganda fish in the lake, and when they go on journeys it is often quicker to travel by boat on the lake. Many Africans can only make boats out of rough tree-trunks with the inside scooped out, but the Baganda had learnt to build long, narrow boats with high carved wooden ends. These canoes shot through the water very swiftly, as twenty or thirty men paddled together in each boat. It is well they learnt to travel quickly, because the lake is very wide and distances are great. Often there are sudden, violent storms, which would overturn a clumsy boat. The carving on the boats and the beautiful reed-work on the chiefs' houses were different from the work of other African tribes. When people begin to try to make things beautiful as well as useful it is a sign that one day they will become wise and great.
3. Europeans Come to Uganda
In the old days the Baganda, like other African people, thought there were spirits in all the rivers and lakes and trees and everywhere, which could help or hurt men. The chief spirit they feared and to whom they offered sacrifice was the spirit of their lake, Victoria Nyanza. Their witch-doctors told the people when they thought this spirit was pleased or angry. These witch-doctors were often bad and cruel, and really cared more about getting all the power they could over the king and people than for anything else. Sometimes they said that people must be killed as a sacrifice to the Spirit of the Lake.
When Europeans first went to Uganda, a few went to trade, but most went to teach the Baganda about the Christians' God. Many boys went to their school near Mengo and were taught. But the witch-doctors grew frightened and persuaded the king to drive away all the Europeans, and to kill the Baganda who would not worship the Lake Spirit because they were Christians. Mutesa the king did this, killing the Christian Baganda boys very cruelly by burning them to death, and killing the European, Bishop Hannington, when he came. But in a few years there were more Christians than before, and now in Uganda the king and nearly all the chiefs and people are Christians, as well as many of the tribes living near them to whom the Baganda have sent teachers. All through the Christian African kingdom there are schools and hospitals. The Baganda were always strong, and now so many are Christians they have stopped fighting the other tribes and killing and making slaves, and instead they spend their time learning to make useful and beautiful things, which make their homes happier and more comfortable to live in. They quickly learn all they can from Europeans and Indians, and to-day, in Mengo and in the other large towns of Uganda, there are trains and motor-cars and stores, while steamers on the lake bring European and Indian things quickly from the coast towns. There are many Europeans and Indians living in Uganda, and this is a good thing, because when many people of different races meet, they learn from one another and so grow wiser.
4. Europeans help Africans
In this chapter we have read about one of the wisest tribes of the dark-skinned African people. The Arabs in the north came to Africa long ago from their own home in Asia, and the Europeans in the south came from their home in Europe. Both these races had learnt by themselves a great deal more than the African race has done. This is partly because their homes were not so hot, and so they had to think hard to get enough food and to keep warm. It is partly due, too, to the way in which for hundreds of years the people of Europe and Asia have been able to read and write, and have met and learnt from one another. The Africans never found out how to write, and so could only learn from each other by listening, never by reading. They were shut off from the rest of the world until one hundred years ago, and all they knew they had found out for themselves. But among the Africans some learnt more than others, and the Baganda are a tribe who