340 APPENDIX I.

afford the Europeans of Zanzibar an easy means of retreat to the healthy uplands of Usugara during the more trying parts of the year. Its terminus, moreover, would form an advantageous point de depart for the traveller, the trader, and the missionary ; the long delays in the deadly coast region, which has proved so fatal to many a traveller, being thus obviated.

The experience also which would be gained by a modest enterprise such as this would be invaluable when the time came for extending the line, and penetrating into the remoter regions of the interior.

If such a line were laid down, trading depots should be formed at intervals of twenty or thirty miles, or even less in thickly populated districts, where two or more Europeans should reside for the purpose of encouraging trade with the natives. For it must never be forgotten that, if a line is ever to pay, trade must be made. The average African negro has hardly a want now which he cannot himself satisfy ; his land produces grain enough to supply him and his family with food, or his bow and arrows or spear kills a sufficiency of wild animals to furnish him with meat. He manufactures his own weapons, and his hoes, axes, and knives, from iron obtained from native ores ; he moulds and bakes his own cooking-pots and tobacco-pipes, while the bottle-gourd, which he trains over his hut, supplies him with all else he needs in the way of domestic utensils. Tobacco (his sole luxury) he either grows himself, or, as in the case of the Wagogo, obtains it by barter from neighbouring tribes. He either discards clothing altogether, walking about in primitive nakedness, or the jungle grasses or the skins of wild animals furnish him with a scanty kilt. Should he, however, have made such an advance towards civilisation as to require cloth, he can obtain a sufficiency, in exchange for grain, from passing caravans, or for the tusks of the elephants he has killed for food.

That it is possible to create wants, and thus stimulate trade, may be seen in the case of th<5 Waganda, who have had a variety of wants created through contact with Arabs, Egyptians, and Europeans, and with whom, consequently, a considerable trade (as such things are reckoned in Africa) is carried on by the Arabs and half-breed traders from Zanzibar.