orests, like birds' nests in a wood, in
terror of one another and of their common foe the slaver, are small
native villages; and here in his virgin simplicity dwells primeval
man, without clothes, without civilization, without learning, without
religion--the genuine child of nature, thoughtless, careless, and
contented. This man is apparently quite happy; he has practically no
wants. One stick, pointed, makes him a spear; two sticks rubbed
together make him a fire; fifty sticks tied together make him a
house. The bark he peels from them makes his clothes; the fruits which
hang on them form his food. It is perfectly astonishing, when one
thinks of it, what nature can do for the animal man, to see with what
small capital after all a human being can get through the world. I
once saw an African buried. According to the custom of his tribe, his
entire earthly possessions--and he was an average commoner--were
buried with him. Into the grave, after the body, was lowered the dead
man's pipe, then a rough knife, then a mud bowl, and last his bow and
arrows--the bowstring cut through the middle, a touching symbol that
its work was done. This was all. Four items, as an auctioneer would
say, were the whole belongings for half a century of this human being.
No man knows what a man is till he has seen what a man can be without,
and be withal a man. That is to say, no man knows how great man is
till he has seen how small he has been once.

The African is often blamed for being lazy, but it is a misuse of
words. He does not need to work; with so bountiful a Nature round him
it would be gratuitous to work. And his indolence, therefore, as it
is called, is just as much a part of himself as his flat nose, and as
little blameworthy as slowness in a tortoise. The fact is, Africa is
a nation of the unemployed.

THE EAST-AFRICAN LAKE COUNTRY

From 'Tropical Africa'

Somewhere in the Shire Highlands, in 1859, Livingstone saw a large
lake--Lake Shirwa--which is still almost unknown. It lies away to the
east, and is bounded by a range of mountains whose lofty summits are
visible from the hills round Blantyre. Thinking it might be a useful
initiation to African travel if I devoted a short time to its
exploration, I set off one morning, accompanied by two members of the
Blantyre staff and a small retinue of natives. Steering across country
in the direction in which it lay, we found, two days before seeing the
actual water, that we were