Chapter 49To KilimanjaroNACH DEM KILIMANDSCHARO
📖 This chapter with the German alongside →
But at Tanga I fled my ship. I sent only my luggage onward to Mombasa. I myself, though, travelled on the only just opened1 Usambara Railway to Moshi, toward Kilimanjaro.
Like a student on holiday I seemed to myself in this new escapade. Kilimanjaro, after all, was not in my programme. The railway took two days. At Buiko one had to pass the night — in a pioneer tavern. An obliging German Fräulein received the guests. My room next to the dining-hall promised nothing good, but the Fräulein strolled with me along the Pangani. On the far side the branches of the sky-high trees hung down deep into the water.
“Beyond that lies the Masai steppe,” she said. So the beautiful, warlike, ah, sadly now likewise dying-out Masai, of whom I had heard so much, dwelt there.
“Here comes one,” she said, and spoke most amiably with him in his own language, patting him tenderly, too, on chest and back.
The sun sank glowing red behind the Masai steppe. We turned back, “because otherwise we shall tread on snakes,” said Fräulein Else M., the daughter of a Saxon colonel, as she told me. But we came back by another path and turned in at a dark kraal, in which a young Masai warrior, squatting on the ground, was striking fire. Again Fräulein Else cooed and patted with him so long that I declared indignantly that if she did not come along now I would go alone. That brought her back to her senses.
Next day in Moshi I heard at the “boma,” the court, that she was shortly to be deported2, for perverse inclination toward natives. I still hear her triumphant voice: “I shall never, never go away from here again.” What a night-side, poor Else, you revealed to me.
In Moshi, the upper one (below, a modern metropolis is now being begun, and four big hotels are building at once), I liked it beyond all measure. We are here at a third of the height of “Kibo,” as the natives call Kilimanjaro, and purer, glorious airs are blowing! And how the stars shine at night! I was quartered at the model shamba of Dr. Förster and was daily a guest of Herr and Frau Freitag (of the boma). How much I learned there about the Wadschagga Negroes, who up here in the third zone of Kilimanjaro, in the dense banana belt, inhabit their leaf-hidden kraals. Their chieftain is Salema, the son of the prince hanged in his day before the boma3. But those are old, long-forgotten stories — — —
Little by little a resolve ripened in me. I no longer wanted to go back on the Usambara Railway, to travel from Tanga by ship to Mombasa and from there on the Uganda Railway via Nairobi to the Victoria Nyanza. That was very time-consuming, and besides, anyone could do that.
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑only just opened — Moshi got its rails on 26 September 1911 and its first through traffic on 4 October — she is riding a line about two months old. The Usambarabahn, begun at Tanga in 1893, crept inland for nearly twenty years: the rails reached Moshi on 26 September 1911, traffic over the whole line began on 4 October, and the official inauguration followed only in February 1912. So she is on a train that has been running for weeks, in a railhead town still being laid out — her “modern metropolis begun below, and four big hotels building at once” — some three months out from the Tempio farewell of September 1911. Chapter 52, which keeps Christmas at Mombasa, closes the calculation.
- ↑deported — Colonial sexual policing: a white woman's intimacy with African men was treated as an expellable scandal. German East Africa never criminalized such contact outright, but administrative deportation did the work — white women who crossed the line were shipped home as morally “impossible,” while white men's concubinage with African women was quietly tolerated throughout the colony. Else's “never, never” against the boma's file, and Hermione's own split reaction — indignation on the evening path, pity at the writing desk — hold the whole double standard in a single anecdote.
- ↑the prince hanged in his day before the boma — Mangi Meli of Moshi, hanged by the Germans on 2 March 1900. Meli, son of the great Chagga chief Rindi, had defeated a German force in 1892; in 1900 he was accused of conspiracy and hanged with his headmen before the boma of Old Moshi — nineteen leaders died there in those days. His skull was taken to Germany and his descendants have sought it ever since. Twelve years later she drinks coffee above the town and is told these are “old, long-forgotten stories” — her triple dash suggests she doubted it.