Tropical Africa

Tropical Africa by Henry Drummond

Tropical Africa records Henry Drummond’s journey from London through Zanzibar, Quilimane, the Zambesi and Shiré rivers, the Shiré Highlands, Lake Shirwa, Lake Nyassa, and the plateau toward Tanganyika. He presents the Zambesi–Shiré–Nyassa route as a potentially safer and more useful approach to Central Africa than the caravan route from Zanzibar, though it is obstructed by the Murchison Cataracts and threatened throughout by malaria. Travelling by river, steamer, and caravan, he observes crocodiles, hippopotami, elephants, buffaloes, zebras, birds, forests, lakes, and villages. He visits Mrs. Livingstone’s grave, the grave of Bishop Mackenzie, Blantyre Mission, the deserted Livingstonia station, and Bandawé. He repeatedly praises missionaries and the African Lakes Company for settlement, education, medical care, roads, plantations, trade, and efforts to oppose slavery. He describes the Ilala, carried to the Upper Shiré in pieces and assembled there, as a symbol of missionary and commercial connection with Lake Nyassa. Drummond depicts Lake Shirwa as brackish, game-rich, thinly inhabited, and devastated by slave-raiding. There he discovers a major slave route and sees a slave encampment preparing to move toward the coast. He explains that African travel generally follows an extensive network of narrow village paths rather than trackless wilderness; caravans live by purchasing food from villages with cloth and beads. His later diary recounts deserting carriers, fever, a false alarm of war with the Angoni, chiefs and village refugees, hunting, camp life, a buffalo attack on a porter, and the loyalty and Christian conduct of Moolu. The work gives a broad account of the country as forested plateaux rather than desert: a malarious coast belt rises through lower highlands to a central plateau of mountains, valleys, thin forest, and scattered settlements. Drummond describes local farming based on millet, the social importance of chiefs, dancing, drums, pombé, spirits, and the muavi poison test. He argues that Africans can become productive workers if given inducement and direction, citing coffee, wheat, sugar-cane, vegetables, wild indigo, rubber, fibre plants, oil-seeds, and the native-built Stevenson road as evidence of commercial possibility. A central political argument condemns the ivory and slave trades. Drummond holds that ivory encourages violence, Arab trading expansion, slave-carrying, and the destruction of communities. He describes Arab encampments that trade peacefully until ivory has been accumulated, then provoke conflict, massacre inhabitants, burn villages, and force survivors to carry ivory. He recounts the devastation of the Wa-Nkonde and demands organized protection of native peoples, the suppression of Arab power, patrol steamers on the great lakes, and effective administration rather than nominal European claims. He argues that Britain has a special responsibility toward the Nyassa region because of Livingstone’s expedition, British missions, British capital, and the African Lakes Company. He rejects Portuguese claims to the Shiré Highlands and Lake Nyassa as unsupported by occupation or protection, criticizes German territorial expansion, and urges the definition of spheres of influence and international settlement of African boundaries. The book also advances natural-history and geological observations. Drummond argues that termites, rather than earthworms, are major tropical cultivators of soil: their tunnels, tree galleries, subterranean chambers, and great mounds transport subsoil upward, consume dead wood, and supply material later dispersed by wind and rain. He describes termite workers, soldiers, kings, queens, nests, and their role in denudation and soil renewal. In discussing insect life, he examines protective colouring and mimicry. Puff-adders resemble forest litter; zebra, leopard, crocodile, and other animals blend with their surroundings. He records insects mimicking dry grass, twigs, leaves, lichens, fungi, and bird-droppings, arguing that concealment allows vulnerable creatures to survive through stillness rather than flight or combat. His geological survey traces coral debris, sedimentary rocks, quartzite hills, granite, gneiss, basaltic dykes, volcanic cones, coal reports, and fossiliferous beds near Karonga containing shells, plant traces, fish scales, and fossil fish identified as paleoniscids. He considers Lake Shirwa and Lake Nyassa remnants of formerly larger waters, notes the silting of Lake Pomalombé, rejects evidence for Central African glaciation, and emphasizes the continuity of geological processes across tropical and temperate regions.

By Henry Drummond · First published 1888 · Genre: Travel Literature, Exploration Narrative, African Travelogue · 10 chapters · 48,074 words

First lines

THE ZAMBESI AND SHIRE.

Three distinct Africas are known to the modern world -- North Africa, where men go for health; South Africa, where they go for money; and Central Africa, where they go for adventure. The first, the old Africa of Augustine and Carthage, every one knows from history; the geography of the second, the Africa of the Zulu and the diamond, has been taught us by two Universal Educators -- War and the Stock-Exchange; but our knowledge of the third, the Africa of Livingstone and Stanley, is still fitly symbolized by the vacant look upon our maps which tells how long this mysterious land has kept its secret.

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Victorian travel writing · Central African exploration · Zambesi River · Shiré River · Lake Nyassa · Lake Shirwa · East African caravan travel · British missionary enterprise · Livingstone legacy · anti-slavery advocacy · ivory trade · Arab slave traders

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