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Updated: June 19, 2025
Swahili porters are considered the best, but there are not enough to go round, so we had to take Swahilis, Bagandas, Kikuyus, Kavirondos, Lumbwas, Minyamwezis, and a lot more of assorted races. Each porter carries sixty pounds on his head, and when the whole outfit is on the trail it looks like a procession of much importance. The Norfolk Hotel is the chief rendezvous of Nairobi.
He would be butchered like a calf butchered and eaten by these repulsive wretches. Such would be his end. Now, however, to make the best of the situation! But little can he make of their tongue. Then he tries them in Swahili. Ah! several of them have a smattering of that. They have come to his aid at a critical moment, he puts it he is willing therefore to call them friends.
The force is made up of Swahili and negroid Arabs, and a strong contingent of Wangoni a Zulu-speaking tribe, turbulent, warlike, and to whom such a maraud as this comes as the most congenial occupation in the world. The last-named savages are still looking through the reed huts in search of food, arms, anything portable.
A very neatly uniformed Swahili bearing on his stomach a highly-polished brass label as big as a door plate "Harbour Police" threw duck fists over what he called overloading the boat. He knew very little about boats, but threw very competent duck fists. As we did know something about boats, we braved unknown consequences by disregarding him utterly.
Memba Sasa and the Swahili dropped flat on their faces while F. and I crawled slowly and cautiously through the mud until we had gained the cover of a shallow ravine that ran in the beast's general direction. Noting carefully a certain small thicket as landmark, we stooped and moved as fast as we could down to that point of vantage. There we cautiously parted the grasses and looked.
Other voices joined the leader's; a minor refrain swept up and down the line; and abruptly the climax swelled out in a diapason descending far into the bass. So that every one could sing, the improvisor had phrased his thoughts in Swahili, the inter-tribal language of Africa. He sang of the Bibi from afar, her skin like a bowl of milk, who was traveling as a bride to Fort Pero d'Anhaya.
Deeming parley better than fight, under the circumstances, Laurence began quickly upon them in a mixture of Swahili and Zulu, declaring that he could be no enemy to them or to their race. But a loud mocking laugh drowned his words; and, seeing that the savages had suddenly half crouched behind their shields for a charge, his quick, resourceful brain grasped the situation at once.
Do you blame gentle Sister Mabel that she would never speak to any Hun in German, using only Swahili and precious little of that? Far worse the story told by the broken Indian soldiers, prisoners since the fight at Jassin, left abandoned, half dead with dysentery and fever, by the Germans on their retreat to Mahenge.
From 'Swahili Tales, by Edward Steere, LL.D. THERE was once a little farmer and his wife living near Coolgarrow. They had three children, and my story happened while the youngest was a baby.
Foaker, the District Officer at the Ravine, very kindly procured us a reliable man a young Uashin Gishu Masai named Uliagurma. But as he could not speak a word of Swahili, we had also to engage an interpreter, an excellent, cheery fellow of the same tribe named Landaalu; and he in his turn possessed a kinsman who insisted on coming too, although he was no earthly use to us.
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