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 Praise for The Knowledge

“The Knowledge is a fascinating look at the basic principles of the most

important technologies undergirding modern society. . . . A fun read full of
optimism about human ingenuity.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“[Dartnell’s] plans may anticipate the destruction of our world, but embedded
in them is the hope that there might be a better way to live in the pre-
apocalyptic world we inhabit right now.”
—The Boston Globe
“The ultimate do-it-yourself guide to ‘rebooting’ human civilization. With
scientific nous, Dartnell depicts probable environmental scenarios on a stricken
Earth and offers putative survivors instruction in the technologies needed to
craft a culture from the ground up. Many will thrill to this reminder of our
species’ prodigious resilience.”
—Nature
“The Knowledge is kin to the ‘way things work’ books of the artist-writer
David Macauley, showing how complex the makings of civilization—the
engines, the infrastructure, all the things we take for granted—really are. . . .
[It] will prove a valuable owner’s guide for a difficult but not impossible
future.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Dartnell’s vision is a great start in understanding what it took to build our
world.”
—Booklist
“This book is an extraordinary achievement. With lucidity and brevity, Dartnell
explains the rudiments of a civilization. It is a great read even if civilization
does not collapse. If it does, it will be the sacred text of the new world—
Dartnell that world’s first great prophet.”
—The Times (London)
“The Knowledge is premised on an ingenious sleight of hand. Ostensibly a
manual on rebuilding our technological life-support system after a global
catastrophe, it is actually a glorious compendium of the knowledge we have
lost in the living; the origins of the material fabric of our actual, unapocalyptic
lives. . . . The most inspiring book I’ve read in a long time.”
—The Independent (London)

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“The Knowledge is a terrifically engrossing history of science and
technology. . . . A cunningly packaged yet entertainingly serious essay in the
history of practical ideas.”
—The Guardian (London)
“A whirlwind tour of the history of human endeavor in terms of scientific and
technological discovery. . . . Readers will certainly come away better informed,
more knowledgeable about, and hopefully more interested in the fundamental
science and technology necessary to rebuild a civilized society.”
—Times Higher Education (London)
“A hymn to human ingenuity, charting how we have taken control of the planet,
engineered solutions to the many problems that plagued us as we developed
modern societies, and learned to beat our microbial assailants to live ever
longer lives. Yet it is more than that. It is a manual for rebuilding society in the
face of collapse.”
—New Statesman (London)
“A crash course in the scientific fundamentals underpinning modern-day
living . . . The Knowledge impresses as a condensed history of scientific
progress and will pique curiosity among readers who regret daydreaming
throughout school chemistry lessons.”
—The Observer (London)
“A whistle-stop tour of the history of science and technology . . . full of those
‘oh!’ moments, when you think, ‘well, I never thought of that before.’ ”
—The Telegraph (UK)
“Dartnell’s guide to surviving the apocalypse is as breezy and engaging as it is
informative. I now know exactly what I’m going to do as soon as a mushroom
cloud appears on the horizon. Leap in my golf cart and go straight round to
Dartnell’s place.”
—Daily Mail (London)
“An eye-opener . . . The Knowledge is an amazing checklist of human
discovery.”
—GeekDad
“A marvelously astounding work: In one graceful swoop, Lewis Dartnell takes
our multilayered, interconnected modern world, shows how fragile its
scaffolding is, and then lays out a how-to guide for starting over from scratch.
Imagine Zombieland told by Neil deGrasse Tyson and you’ll get some sense of
what a delight The Knowledge is to read.”
—Seth Mnookin, New York Times bestselling author of The Panic Virus and
associate director of MIT’s graduate program in science writing
“For all those terrified by runaway climate change, supereruptions, planet-killer
asteroids, doomsday viruses, nuclear terrorism, and absolute domination by

2
superintelligent machines, Lewis Dartnell has written a long-overdue guide to
what you should do after the apocalypse: an illuminating and entertaining
vision of how to reboot life, civilization, and everything. Dartnell’s vision of
the survival of the smartest in a postapocalyptic world offers a remarkable and
panoramic view of how civilization actually works.”
—Roger Highfield, journalist, author, and Science Museum (London) executive
“This book is useful if civilization collapses, and entertaining if it doesn’t. After
the cometary impact it may save your life, and if it doesn’t at least you’ll know
why you perished.”
—S. M. Stirling, New York Times bestselling author of The Given Sacrifice
“Dartnell makes the technology and science of everyday life in our civilization
fascinating and understandable. This book may or may not save your life but
it’ll certainly make it more interesting. This is the book we all wish we’d been
given at school: The Knowledge that makes everything else make sense.”
—Ken MacLeod, author of Intrusion and Descent

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 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Lewis Dartnell is a UK Space Agency research fellow at the University

of Leicester and writes regularly for New Scientist, BBC Focus, BBC Sky at
Night, and Cosmos, as well as for newspapers including the (London)
Times, the Guardian, and the New York Times. He has won several awards,
including the Daily Telegraph Young Science Writer Award. He also makes
regular TV appearances and has been featured on BBC Horizon, Stargazing
Live, Sky at Night, and numerous times on the Discovery and Science
channels. His scientific research is in the field of astrobiology, focusing on
how microorganisms might survive on the surface of Mars and the best
ways to detect signs of ancient Martian life.

4
5
PENGUIN BOOKS
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New York, New York 10014
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First published in the United States of America by The Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2014
Published in Penguin Books 2015

Copyright © 2014 by Lewis Dartnell

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture.
Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or
distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish
books for every reader.

The Credits page constitutes an extension of this copyright page.

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

Dartnell, Lewis.
The knowledge : how to rebuild our world from scratch / Lewis Dartnell.
pages cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-698-15165-9 (e-book)
1. Technology—Popular works. 2. Discoveries in science—Popular works. 3. Survival—Popular works. 4. Knowledge, Theory of—
Popular works. I. Title.
T47.D37 2014
500—dc23 2013040820

The information contained in this book cannot replace sound judgment and good decision making, which can help reduce risk
exposure, nor does the scope of this book allow for disclosure of all the potential hazards and risks involved. The author and publisher
are not responsible for the instructions and information, as these are not intended for use except in the event of mass disasters, when
the customary ways of doing things are not possible.

Version_2

6
 To my wife, Vicky.
Thank you for saying yes.

7
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
T. S. ELIOT, THE WASTE LAND

8
 CONTENTS

PRAISE FOR The Knowledge

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION

EPIGRAPH

INTRODUCTION

1: THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT

2: THE GRACE PERIOD
3: AGRICULTURE

4: FOOD AND CLOTHING

5: SUBSTANCES
6: MATERIALS
7: MEDICINE

8: POWER TO THE PEOPLE

9: TRANSPORT
10: COMMUNICATION

11: ADVANCED CHEMISTRY

12: TIME AND PLACE
13: THE GREATEST INVENTION
FINALE

9
FURTHER READING AND REFERENCES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX

CREDITS

10
 INTRODUCTION

THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT HAS ENDED.

A particularly virulent strain of avian flu finally breached the species
barrier and hopped successfully to human hosts, or was deliberately released
in an act of bioterrorism. The contagion spread devastatingly quickly in the
modern age of high-density cities and intercontinental air travel, and killed a
large proportion of the global population before any effective immunization
or even quarantine orders could be implemented.
Or tensions between India and Pakistan reached the breaking point and a
border dispute escalated beyond all rational limits, culminating in the use of
nuclear weapons. The warheads’ distinctive electromagnetic pulses were
detected by defense surveillance in China and triggered a round of preemptive
launches against the United States, which in turn spurred retaliatory strikes by
America and its allies in Europe and Israel. Major cities worldwide were
reduced to jagged plains of radioactive glass. The enormous volumes of dust
and ash injected into the atmosphere reduced the amount of sunlight reaching
the ground, causing a decades-long nuclear winter, the collapse of agriculture,
and global famine.
Or the event was entirely beyond human control. A rocky asteroid, only
around a mile across, slammed into the Earth and fatally changed atmospheric
conditions. People within a few hundred kilometers of ground zero were
dispatched in an instant by the blast wave of intense heat and pressure, and
from that point on most of the rest of humanity was living on borrowed time.
It didn’t really matter which nation was struck: the rock and dust hurled up
high into the atmosphere—as well as the smoke produced by widespread fires
ignited by the heat blast—dispersed on the winds to smother the entire planet.
As in a nuclear winter, global temperatures dropped enough to cause
worldwide crop failures and massive famine.
This is the stuff of so many novels and films featuring post-apocalyptic
worlds. The immediate aftermath is often—as in Mad Max or Cormac
McCarthy’s novel The Road—portrayed as barren and violent. Roving bands
of scavengers hoard the remaining food and prey ruthlessly on those less well
organized or armed. I suspect that, at least for a period after the initial shock

11
of collapse, this might not be too far from the truth. I’m an optimist, though: I
think morality and rationality would ultimately prevail, and settlement and
rebuilding begin.
The world as we know it has ended. The crucial question is: now what?
Once the survivors have come to terms with their predicament—the
collapse of the entire infrastructure that previously supported their lives—
what can they do to rise from the ashes to ensure they thrive in the long term?
What crucial knowledge would they need to recover as rapidly as possible?
This is a survivors’ guidebook. Not one just concerned with keeping
people alive in the weeks after the Fall—plenty of handbooks have been
written on survival skills—but one that teaches how to orchestrate the
rebuilding of a technologically advanced civilization. If you suddenly found
yourself without a working example, could you explain how to build an
internal combustion engine, or a clock, or a microscope? Or, even more basic,
how to successfully cultivate crops and make clothes? The apocalyptic
scenarios I’m presenting here are also the starting point for a thought
experiment: they are a vehicle for examining the fundamentals of science and
technology, which, as knowledge becomes ever more specialized, feel very
remote to most of us.
People living in developed nations have become disconnected from the
everyday processes of civilization that support them. Individually, we are
astoundingly ignorant of even the basics of the production of food, shelter,
clothes, medicine, materials, or vital substances. Our survival skills have
atrophied to the point that much of humanity would be incapable of sustaining
itself if the life-support system of modern civilization failed, if food no longer
magically appeared on store shelves, or clothes on hangers. Of course, there
was a time when everyone was a survivalist, with a far more intimate
connection to the land and methods of production, and to survive in a post-
apocalyptic world you’d need to turn back the clock and relearn these core
skills.*
What’s more, each piece of modern technology we take for granted
requires an enormous support network of other technologies. There’s much
more to making an iPhone than knowing the design and materials of each of
its components. The device sits as the capstone on the very tip of a vast
pyramid of enabling technologies: the mining and refining of the rare element
indium for the touch screen, high-precision photolithographic manufacturing
of microscopic circuitry in the computing processor chips, and the incredibly
miniaturized components in the microphone, not to mention the network of
cell phone towers and other infrastructure necessary to maintain
telecommunications and the functioning of the phone. The first generation
born after the Fall would find the internal mechanisms of a modern phone
absolutely inscrutable, the pathways of its microchip circuits invisibly small

12
to the human eye and their purpose utterly mysterious. The sci-fi author
Arthur C. Clarke said in 1961 that any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic. In the aftermath of the Fall, the rub is that this
miraculous technology would have belonged not to some star-faring alien
species, but to people just a generation in our own past.
Even quotidian artifacts of our civilization that aren’t particularly high-
tech still require a diversity of raw materials that must be mined or otherwise
gathered, processed in specialized plants, and assembled in a manufacturing
facility. And all of this in turn relies on electrical power stations and transport
over great distances. This point is made very eloquently in Leonard E. Read’s
1958 essay written from the perspective of one of our most basic tools, “I,
Pencil.” The astounding conclusion is that because the sourcing of raw
materials and the methods of production are so dispersed, there is not a single
person on the face of the Earth who knows how to make even this simplest of
implements.
A potent demonstration of the gulf that now separates our individual
capabilities and the production of even simple gizmos in our everyday life
was offered by Thomas Thwaites when, in 2008, he attempted to make a
toaster from scratch while studying for his MA at the Royal College of Art.
He reverse-engineered a cheap toaster down to its barest essentials—iron
frame, mica-mineral insulating sheets, nickel heating filaments, copper wires
and plug, and plastic casing—and then sourced all the raw materials himself,
digging them out of the ground in quarries and mines. He also looked up
simpler, historical metallurgical techniques, referring to a sixteenth-century
text to build a rudimentary iron-smelting furnace using a metal trash can,
barbecue coals, and a leaf blower for bellows. The finished model is
satisfyingly primitive but also grotesquely beautiful in its own right and
neatly underscores the core of our problem.
Of course, even in one of the extreme doomsday scenarios, groups of
survivors would not need to become self-sufficient immediately. If the great
majority of the population succumbed to an aggressive virus, there would still
be vast resources left behind. The supermarkets would remain stocked with
plentiful food, and you could pick up a fine new set of designer clothes from
the deserted department stores or liberate from the showroom the sports car
you’ve always dreamed about. Find an abandoned mansion, and with a little
foraging it wouldn’t be too hard to salvage some mobile diesel generators to
keep the lighting, heating, and appliances running. Underground lakes of fuel
remain beneath gas stations, sufficient to keep your new home and car
functioning for a significant period. In fact, small groups of survivors could
probably live pretty comfortably in the immediate aftermath of the Fall. For a
while, civilization could coast on its own momentum. The survivors would

13
find themselves surrounded by a wealth of resources there for the taking: a
bountiful Garden of Eden.
But the Garden is rotting.
Food, clothes, medicines, machinery, and other technology inexorably
decompose, decay, deteriorate, and degrade over time. The survivors are
provided with nothing more than a grace period. With the collapse of
civilization and the sudden arrest of key processes—gathering raw materials,
refining and manufacturing, transportation and distribution—the hourglass is
inverted and the sand steadily drains away. The remnants provide nothing
more than a safety buffer to ease the transition to the moment when
harvesting and manufacturing must begin anew.

A REBOOT MANUAL
The most profound problem facing survivors is that human knowledge is
collective, distributed across the population. No one individual knows enough
to keep the vital processes of society going. Even if a skilled technician from
a steel foundry survived, he would only know the details of his job, not the
subsets of knowledge possessed by other workers at the foundry that are vital
for keeping it running—let alone how to mine iron ore or provide electricity
to keep the plant operating. The most visible technology we use daily is just
the tip of a vast iceberg—not only in the sense that it’s based on a great
manufacturing and organizational network that supports production, but also
because it represents the heritage of a long history of advances and
developments. The iceberg extends unseen through both space and time.
So where would survivors turn? A great deal of information will certainly
remain in the books gathering dust on the shelves of the now-deserted
libraries, bookshops, and homes. The problem with this knowledge, however,
is that it isn’t presented in a way appropriate for helping a fledgling society—
or an individual without specialist training. What do you think you’d
understand if you just pulled a medical textbook off the shelf and flipped
through the pages of terminology and drug names? University medical
textbooks presuppose a huge amount of prior knowledge, and are designed to
work alongside teaching and practical demonstrations from established
experts. Even if there were doctors among the first generation of survivors,
they’d be severely limited in what they could accomplish without test results
or the cornucopia of modern drugs they were trained to use—drugs that
would be degrading on pharmacy shelves or in defunct hospital storage
refrigerators.
Much of this academic literature would itself be lost, perhaps to fires
ripping unchecked through empty cities. Even worse, much of the wealth of
new knowledge generated each year, including that which I and other

14
scientists produce and consume in our own research, is not recorded on any
durable medium at all. The cutting edge of human understanding exists
primarily as ephemeral bits of data: as specialist journals’ academic “papers”
stored on website servers.
And the books aimed at general readers wouldn’t be much more help. Can
you imagine a group of survivors who had access to only the selection of
books stocked in an average store? How far would a civilization get trying to
rebuild itself from the wisdom contained in the pages of self-help guides to
succeeding in business management, thinking yourself thin, or reading the
body language of the opposite sex? The most absurd nightmare would be a
post-apocalyptic society discovering a few yellowed and crumbly books and,
thinking them the scientific wisdom of the ancients, trying to apply
homeopathy to curb a plague or astrology to forecast harvests. Even the books
in the science section would offer little help. The latest pop-sci page-turner
may be engagingly written, make clever metaphorical use of everyday
observations, and leave the reader with a deeper understanding of some new
research, but it probably won’t yield much pragmatic knowledge. In short, the
vast majority of our collective wisdom would not be accessible—at least in a
usable form—to the survivors of a cataclysm. So how best to help the
survivors? What key information would a guidebook need to deliver, and how
might it be structured?
I’m not the first person to wrestle with this question. James Lovelock is a
scientist with a formidable track record for striking at the heart of an issue
long before his peers. He is most famous for his Gaia hypothesis, which
posits that the entire planet—a complex assemblage of rocky crust and oceans
and swirling atmosphere, along with the thin smear of life that has established
itself across the surface—can be understood as a single entity that acts to
damp down instabilities and self-regulate its environment over billions of
years. Lovelock is deeply concerned that one element of this system, Homo
sapiens, now has the capacity to disrupt these natural checks and balances
with devastating effect.
Lovelock draws on a biological analogy to explain how we might
safeguard our heritage: “Organisms that face desiccation often encapsulate
their genes in spores so that the information for their renewal is carried
through the drought.” The human equivalent envisaged by Lovelock is a book
for all seasons, “a primer on science, clearly written and unambiguous in its
meaning—a primer for anyone interested in the state of the Earth and how to
survive and live well on it.” What he proposes is a truly massive undertaking:
recording the complete assemblage of human knowledge in a huge textbook
—a document that you could, at least in principle, read from cover to cover,
and then walk away knowing the essentials of everything that is now known.

15
 In fact, the idea of a “total book” has a much longer history. In the past,
encyclopedia compilers appreciated far more acutely than we do today the
fragility of even great civilizations, and the exquisite value of the scientific
knowledge and practical skills held in the minds of the population that
evaporate once the society collapses. Denis Diderot explicitly regarded his
Encyclopédie, published between 1751 and 1772, as a safe repository of
human knowledge, preserving it for posterity in case of a cataclysm that
snuffs our civilization as the ancient cultures of the Egyptians, Greeks, and
Romans had all been lost, leaving behind only random surviving fragments of
their writing. In this way, the encyclopedia becomes a time capsule of
accumulated knowledge, all of it arranged logically and cross-referenced,
protected against the erosion of time in case of a widespread catastrophe.
Since the Enlightenment our understanding of the world has increased
exponentially, and the task of compiling a complete compendium of human
knowledge would be orders of magnitude harder today. The creation of such a
“total book” would represent a modern-era pyramid-building project,
consuming the full-time exertion of tens of thousands of people over many
years. The purpose of this toil would be to ensure not the safe passage of a
pharaoh to eternal bliss in the afterworld, but the immortality of our
civilization itself.
Such an all-consuming undertaking is not inconceivable if the will is
there. My parents’ generation worked hard to put the first man on the moon:
at its peak the Apollo program employed 400,000 people and consumed 4
percent of the total American federal budget. Indeed, you might think that the
perfect compendium of current human knowledge has already been created by
the phenomenal combined effort of the committed volunteers behind
Wikipedia. Clay Shirky, an expert on the sociology and economics of the
Internet, has estimated that Wikipedia currently represents around 100 million
man-hours of devoted effort in writing and editing. But even if you could
print Wikipedia in its entirety, its hyperlinks replaced by cross-referenced
page numbers, you’d still be a far cry from a manual enabling a community to
rebuild civilization from scratch. It was never intended for anything like this
purpose, and lacks practical details and the organization for guiding
progression from rudimentary science and technology to more advanced
applications. Moreover, a hard copy would be unfeasibly large—and how
could you ensure post-apocalyptic survivors would be able to get hold of a
copy?
In fact, I believe you can help society recover much better by taking a
slightly more elegant approach.
The solution can be found in a remark made by physicist Richard
Feynman. In hypothesizing about the potential destruction of all scientific
knowledge and what might be done about it, he allowed himself a single

16
statement, to be transmitted securely to whichever intelligent creatures
emerged after the cataclysm: What sentence holds the most information in the
fewest words? “I believe,” said Feynman, “it is the atomic hypothesis . . . that
all things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual
motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but
repelling upon being squeezed into one another.”
The more you consider the implications and testable hypotheses emerging
from this simple statement, the more it unfurls to release further revelations
about the nature of the world. The attraction of particles explains the surface
tension of water, and the mutual repulsion of atoms in close proximity
explains why I don’t fall straight through the café chair I’m sitting on. The
diversity of atoms, and the compounds produced by their combinations, is the
key principle of chemistry. This single, carefully crafted sentence
encapsulates a huge density of information, which unravels and expands as
you investigate it.
But what if your word count wasn’t quite so restricted? If allowed the
luxury of being more expansive while retaining the guiding principle of
providing key, condensed knowledge to accelerate rediscovery, rather than
attempting to write a complete encyclopedia of modern understanding, is it
feasible to write a single volume that would constitute a survivor’s quick-start
guide to rebooting technological society?
I think that Feynman’s single sentence can be improved upon in a
fundamentally important way. Possessing pure knowledge alone with no
means to exploit it is impotent. To help a fledgling society pull itself up by its
own bootstraps, you’ve also got to suggest how to utilize that knowledge, to
show its practical applications. For the survivors of a recent apocalypse, the
immediate practical applications are essential. Understanding the basic theory
of metallurgy is one thing, but using the principles to scavenge and reprocess
metals from the dead cities, for instance, is another. The exploitation of
knowledge and scientific principles is the essence of technology, and as we’ll
see in this book, the practices of scientific research and technological
development are inextricably intertwined.
Inspired by Feynman, I’d argue that the best way to help survivors of the
Fall is not to create a comprehensive record of all knowledge, but to provide a
guide to the basics, adapted to their likely circumstances, as well as a
blueprint of the techniques necessary to rediscover crucial understanding for
themselves—the powerful knowledge-generation machinery that is the
scientific method. The key to preserving civilization is to provide a condensed
seed that will readily unpack to yield the entire expansive tree of knowledge,
rather than attempting to document the colossal tree itself. Which fragments,
to paraphrase T. S. Eliot, are best shored against our ruins?

17
 The value of such a book is potentially enormous. What might have
happened in our own history if the classical civilizations had left condensed
seeds of their accumulated knowledge? One of the major catalysts for the
Renaissance in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was the trickle of ancient
learning back into Western Europe. Much of this knowledge, lost with the fall
of the Roman Empire, was preserved and propagated by Arab scholars
carefully translating and copying texts; other manuscripts were rediscovered
by European scholars. But what if these treatises on philosophy, geometry,
and practical mechanisms had been preserved in a distributed network of time
capsules? And similarly, with the right book available, could a post-
apocalyptic Dark Ages be averted?*

ACCELERATED DEVELOPMENT
During a reboot, there’s no reason to retrace the original route to scientific
and technological sophistication. Our path through history has been long and
tortuous, stumbling in a largely haphazard manner, chasing red herrings and
overlooking crucial developments for long periods. But with 20/20 hindsight,
knowing what we know now, could we give directions straight to crucial
advances, taking shortcuts like an experienced navigator? How might we
chart an optimal route through the vastly interlinked network of scientific
principles and enabling technologies to accelerate progress as much as
possible?
Key breakthroughs in our history are often serendipitous—they were
stumbled upon by chance. Alexander Fleming’s discovery of the antibiotic
properties of Penicillium mold in 1928 was a chance occurrence. And indeed,
the observation that first hinted at the deep coupling between electricity and
magnetism—the twitching of compass needles left next to a wire carrying
current—was fortuitous, as was the discovery of X-rays. Many of these key
discoveries could just as easily have happened earlier, some of them
substantially so. Once new natural phenomena have been discovered,
progress is driven by systematic and methodical investigation to understand
their workings and quantify their effects, but the initial uncovering can be
targeted with a few choice hints to the recovering civilization on where to
look and which investigations to prioritize.
Likewise, many inventions seem obvious in retrospect, but sometimes the
time of emergence of a key advance or invention doesn’t appear to have
followed any particular scientific discovery or enabling technology. For the
prospects of a rebooting civilization, these cases are encouraging because
they mean the quick-start guide need only briefly describe a few central
design features for the survivors to figure out exactly how to re-create some
key technologies. The wheelbarrow, for instance, could have occurred

18
centuries before it actually did—if only someone had thought of it. This may
seem like a trivial example, combining the operating principles of the wheel
and the lever, but it represents an enormous labor saver, and it didn’t appear
in Europe until millennia after the wheel (the first depiction of a wheelbarrow
appears in an English manuscript written about 1250 AD).
Other innovations have such wide-ranging effects, aiding a great diversity
of other developments, that you would want to beeline directly toward them
to support many other elements of the post-apocalyptic recovery. The
movable-type printing press is one such gateway technology that accelerated
development and had incomparable social ramifications in our history. With a
little guidance, mass-produced books could reappear early in the rebuilding of
a new civilization, as we’ll see later.
And when developing new technologies, some steps in the progression
could be skipped altogether. The quick-start guide could aid a recovering
society by showing how to leapfrog straight over intermediate stages from our
history to more advanced, yet still achievable, systems. There are a number of
encouraging cases of this kind of technological leapfrogging in the
developing nations in Africa and Asia today. For example, many remote
communities unconnected to power grids are receiving solar-power
infrastructure, hopping over centuries of the Western progression dependent
on fossil fuels. Villagers living in mud huts in many rural parts of Africa are
leapfrogging straight to mobile phone communications, bypassing
intermediate technologies such as semaphore towers, telegraphs, or land-line
telephones.
But perhaps the most impressive feat of leapfrogging in history was
achieved by Japan in the nineteenth century. During the Tokugawa shogunate,
Japan isolated itself for two centuries from the rest of the world, forbidding its
citizens to leave or foreigners to enter, and permitting only minimal trade with
a select few nations. Contact was reestablished in the most persuasive manner
in 1853 when the US Navy arrived in the Bay of Edo (Tokyo) with
powerfully weaponized steam-powered warships, far superior to anything
possessed by the technologically stagnant Japanese civilization. The shock of
realization of this technological disparity triggered the Meiji Restoration.
Japan’s previously isolated, technologically backward feudal society was
transformed by a series of political, economic, and legal reforms, and foreign
experts in science, engineering, and education instructed the nation how to
build telegraph and railroad networks, textile mills and factories. Japan
industrialized in a matter of decades, and by the time of the Second World
War was able to take on the might of the US Navy that had forced this process
in the first place.
Could a preserved cache of appropriate knowledge allow a post-
apocalyptic society to similarly achieve a rapid developmental trajectory?

19
 Unfortunately, there are limits to how far ahead you can push a
civilization by skipping intermediate stages. Even if the post-apocalyptic
scientists fully understand the basis underlying an application and have
produced a design that would work in principle, it may still be impossible to
build a working prototype. I call this the Da Vinci effect. The great
Renaissance inventor generated endless designs for mechanisms and
contraptions, such as his fantastic flying machines, but few of them were ever
realized. The problem was largely that Da Vinci was too far ahead of his time.
Correct scientific understanding and ingenious designs aren’t sufficient: you
also need a matching level of sophistication in construction materials with the
necessary properties and available power sources.
So the trick for a quick-start guide must be to provide appropriate
technology for the post-apocalyptic world, in the same way that aid agencies
today supply suitable intermediate technologies to communities in the
developing world. These are solutions that offer a significant improvement on
the status quo—an advance from the existing, rudimentary technology—but
which are still able to be repaired and maintained by local workmen with the
practical skills, tools, and materials available. Thus the aim for an accelerated
reboot of civilization is to jump directly to a level that saves centuries of
incremental development, but that can still be achieved with rudimentary
materials and techniques—the sweet-spot intermediate technology.
It is these features of our own history—serendipitous discoveries,
inventions that were not waiting for any prerequisite knowledge, gateway
technologies that stimulated progress in many areas, and opportunities to
leapfrog over intermediate stages—that give us optimism that a well-designed
quick-start manual for civilization could give directions toward the most
fertile investigations and the crucial principles behind key technologies,
guiding an optimal route through the web of science and technology, and so
greatly accelerate rebuilding. Imagine science when you’re not fumbling
around in the dark, but your ancestors have equipped you with a flashlight
and a rough map of the landscape.
If a rebooting civilization is not required to follow our own idiosyncratic
path of progress, it will experience a completely different sequence of
advances. Indeed, rebooting along the same trajectory that our current
civilization followed may now be very difficult. The Industrial Revolution
was powered largely by fossil energy. Most of these easily accessible fossil
energy sources—deposits of coal, oil, and natural gas—have now been mined
toward depletion. Without access to such readily available energy, how could
a civilization following ours haul itself through a second industrial
revolution? The solution, as we’ll see, will lie in an early adoption of
renewable energy sources and careful recycling of assets—sustainable

20
development will likely be forced on the next civilization out of sheer
necessity: a green reboot.
In the process, unfamiliar combinations of technologies will emerge over
time. We will take a look at examples of where a recovering society is likely
to take a different trajectory in its development—the path not traveled—as
well as utilizing technological solutions that for us have fallen by the
wayside. To us, Civilization 2.0 might look like a mishmash of technologies
from different eras, not unlike the genre of fiction known as steampunk.
Steampunk narratives are set in an alternative history that has followed a
different pattern of development and is often characterized by a fusion of
Victorian technology with other applications. A post-apocalyptic reboot with
very different rates of progress in separate fields of science and technology is
likely to lead to such an anachronistic patchwork.

CONTENTS
A reboot manual would work best on two levels. First, you need a certain
amount of practical knowledge handed to you on a plate, so as to recover a
base level of capability and a comfortable lifestyle as quickly as possible, and
to halt further degeneration. But you also need to nurture the recovery of
scientific investigation and provide the most worthwhile kernels of
knowledge to begin exploring.*
We’ll start with the basics and see how you can provide the fundamental
elements of a comfortable life for yourself after the Fall: sufficient food and
clean water, clothes and building materials, energy and essential medicines.
There will be a number of immediate concerns for the survivors: cultivable
crops must be gathered from farmland and seed caches before they die and
are lost; diesel can be rendered from biofuel crops to keep engines running
until the machinery fails, and parts can be scavenged to reestablish a local
power grid. We’ll look at how best to cannibalize components and scavenge
materials from the detritus of the dead civilization: the post-apocalyptic world
will demand ingenuity in repurposing, tinkering, and jury-rigging.
Once the essentials are in place, I’ll explain how to reinstate agriculture
and safely preserve a stockpile of food, and how plant and animal fibers can
be turned into clothes. Materials such as paper, ceramic pottery, brick, glass,
and wrought iron are today so commonplace that they are considered prosaic
and boring—but how could you actually make them if you needed to? Trees
yield an enormous amount of remarkably useful stuff: from timber material
for construction to charcoal for purifying drinking water, as well as providing
a fiercely burning solid fuel. A whole range of crucial compounds can be
baked out of wood, and even ashes contain a substance (called potash) needed
for making essential items such as soap and glass, as well as producing one of

21
the ingredients of gunpowder. With basic know-how you can extract a great
deal of other critically useful substances from your natural surroundings—
soda, lime, ammonia, acids, and alcohol—and start a post-apocalyptic
chemical industry. And as your capabilities recover, the quick-start guide will
help the development of explosives suitable for mining and for demolishing
the carcasses of ancient buildings, as well as the production of artificial
fertilizer, and of the light-sensitive silver compounds used in photography.
In later chapters we’ll see how to relearn medicine, harness mechanical
power, master the generation and storage of electricity, and assemble a simple
radio set. And since The Knowledge contains information on how to make
paper, ink, and a printing press, the book itself contains the genetic
instructions for its own reproduction.
How much can one book invigorate our understanding of the world? I
obviously can’t begin to pretend this single volume represents a complete
documentation of the sum total of human knowledge of science and
technology. But I think it provides enough of a grounding in the fundamentals
to help survivors in the early years after a Fall, and broad directions for
tracing an optimal route through the web of science and technology for a
greatly accelerated recovery. And, following the principle of providing
condensed kernels of knowledge that unravel under investigation, a single
volume can encapsulate a vast treasure trove of information. By the time you
put down this manual, you’ll understand how to rebuild the infrastructure for
a civilized lifestyle. You’ll also, I hope, have a firmer grip on some of the
beautiful fundamentals of science itself. Science is not a collection of facts
and figures: it is the method you need to apply to confidently work out how
the world works.
The purpose of a quick-start guide is to ensure that the fire of curiosity, of
inquiry and exploration, continues to burn fiercely. The hope is that even in
the maw of a cataclysmic shock the thread of civilization is not broken and
the surviving community does not regress too far or stagnate; that the core of
our society can be preserved; and that these crucial kernels of knowledge,
nurtured in the post-apocalyptic world, will flourish once again.
This is the blueprint for a rebooting civilization—but also a primer on the
fundamentals of our own.

22
 CHAPTER 1

THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT

The most glorious moment for a work of this sort would be that which might come
immediately in the wake of some catastrophe so great as to suspend the progress of
science, interrupt the labors of craftsmen, and plunge a portion of our hemisphere
into darkness once again.
DENIS DIDEROT, Encyclopédie (1751–1772)

THE SEEMINGLY OBLIGATORY SCENE in any disaster movie is a panning shot

across a broad highway gridlocked with tightly packed vehicles attempting to
flee the city. Instances of extreme road rage flare as drivers grow increasingly
desperate, before abandoning their cars among the others already littering the
shoulders and lanes and joining the droves of people pushing onward on foot.
Even without an immediate hazard, any event that disrupts distribution
networks or the electrical grid will starve the cities’ voracious appetite for a
constant influx of resources and force their inhabitants out in a hungry
exodus: mass migrations of urbanite refugees swarming into the surrounding
countryside to scavenge for food.

TEARING UP THE SOCIAL CONTRACT

I don’t want to get stuck in the philosophical quagmire of debating whether
mankind is intrinsically evil or not, and whether a controlling authority is a
necessary construct to impose a set of laws and maintain order through the
threat of punishment. But it is clear that with the evaporation of centralized
governance and a civil police force, those with ill intentions will seize the
opportunity to subjugate or exploit those more peaceful or vulnerable. And
once the situation seems sufficiently dire, even previously law-abiding
citizens will resort to whatever action is necessary to provide for and protect
their own families. To ensure your own survival you may have to forage and
scavenge for what you need: a polite euphemism for looting.
Part of the glue that binds societies together is the expectation that the
pursuit of short-term gains through deception or violence is far outweighed by
the long-term consequences. You’ll be caught and socially stigmatized as an

23
untrustworthy partner or punished by the state: cheats don’t prosper. This tacit
agreement between the individuals in a society to cooperate and behave for
the collective good, sacrificing a certain amount of their own personal
freedom in exchange for benefits such as the mutual protection offered by the
state, is known as the social contract. It is the very foundation of all collective
endeavor, production, and economic activity of a civilization, but the structure
begins to strain and social cohesion loosens once individuals perceive greater
personal gains in cheating, or suspect that others will cheat them.
During a severe crisis the social contract can snap altogether, precipitating
a complete disintegration of law and order. We need look no further than the
most technologically advanced nation on the planet to see the effects of a
localized fracture in the social contract. New Orleans was physically
devastated by the rampage of Hurricane Katrina, but it was the desperate
realization by the city’s inhabitants that local governance had evaporated and
no help would be arriving anytime soon that precipitated the rapid
degeneration of normal social order and the outbreak of anarchy.
So after a cataclysmic event, we might expect organized gangs to emerge
to fill the power vacuum left behind after the evaporation of governance and
law enforcement, laying claim to their own personal fiefdoms. Those who
seize control of the remaining resources (food, fuel, and so on) will
administer the only items that have any inherent value in the new world order.
Cash and credit cards will be meaningless. Those appropriating the caches of
preserved food as their own “property” will become very wealthy and
powerful—the new kings—controlling the allocation of food to buy loyalty
and services in the same way that ancient Mesopotamian emperors did. In this
environment, people with special skills, such as doctors and nurses, might do
well to keep this to themselves, as they may be forced to serve the gangs as
highly specialized slaves.
Lethal force may be applied swiftly to deter looters and raids from rival
gangs, and as resources become depleted the competition will get only fiercer.
A common mantra of people who actively prepare for the apocalypse (called
Preppers) is: “It is better to have a gun and not need it than to need a gun and
not have it.”
One pattern likely to recur over the weeks and months after the Fall is that
small communities of people will gather together in a defensible location for
mutual support and protection of their own stash of consumables, looking for
safety in numbers. These small dominions will need to patrol and protect their
own borders in the way that whole nations do today. Ironically, the safest
place for a group to barricade themselves in and hunker down during the
turbulence would be one of the fortresses dotted across the country, but now
turned inside out in its purpose. Prisons are largely self-contained compounds
with high walls, sturdy gates, barbed wire, and watchtowers, originally

24
Another random document with
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 DANCE ON STILTS AT THE GIRLS’ UNYAGO, NIUCHI

Newala, too, suffers from the distance of its water-supply—at least

the Newala of to-day does; there was once another Newala in a lovely
valley at the foot of the plateau. I visited it and found scarcely a trace
of houses, only a Christian cemetery, with the graves of several
missionaries and their converts, remaining as a monument of its
former glories. But the surroundings are wonderfully beautiful. A
thick grove of splendid mango-trees closes in the weather-worn
crosses and headstones; behind them, combining the useful and the
agreeable, is a whole plantation of lemon-trees covered with ripe
fruit; not the small African kind, but a much larger and also juicier
imported variety, which drops into the hands of the passing traveller,
without calling for any exertion on his part. Old Newala is now under
the jurisdiction of the native pastor, Daudi, at Chingulungulu, who,
as I am on very friendly terms with him, allows me, as a matter of
course, the use of this lemon-grove during my stay at Newala.
 FEET MUTILATED BY THE RAVAGES OF THE “JIGGER”
(Sarcopsylla penetrans)

The water-supply of New Newala is in the bottom of the valley,

some 1,600 feet lower down. The way is not only long and fatiguing,
but the water, when we get it, is thoroughly bad. We are suffering not
only from this, but from the fact that the arrangements at Newala are
nothing short of luxurious. We have a separate kitchen—a hut built
against the boma palisade on the right of the baraza, the interior of
which is not visible from our usual position. Our two cooks were not
long in finding this out, and they consequently do—or rather neglect
to do—what they please. In any case they do not seem to be very
particular about the boiling of our drinking-water—at least I can
attribute to no other cause certain attacks of a dysenteric nature,
from which both Knudsen and I have suffered for some time. If a
man like Omari has to be left unwatched for a moment, he is capable
of anything. Besides this complaint, we are inconvenienced by the
state of our nails, which have become as hard as glass, and crack on
the slightest provocation, and I have the additional infliction of
pimples all over me. As if all this were not enough, we have also, for
the last week been waging war against the jigger, who has found his
Eldorado in the hot sand of the Makonde plateau. Our men are seen
all day long—whenever their chronic colds and the dysentery likewise
raging among them permit—occupied in removing this scourge of
Africa from their feet and trying to prevent the disastrous
consequences of its presence. It is quite common to see natives of
this place with one or two toes missing; many have lost all their toes,
or even the whole front part of the foot, so that a well-formed leg
ends in a shapeless stump. These ravages are caused by the female of
Sarcopsylla penetrans, which bores its way under the skin and there
develops an egg-sac the size of a pea. In all books on the subject, it is
stated that one’s attention is called to the presence of this parasite by
an intolerable itching. This agrees very well with my experience, so
far as the softer parts of the sole, the spaces between and under the
toes, and the side of the foot are concerned, but if the creature
penetrates through the harder parts of the heel or ball of the foot, it
may escape even the most careful search till it has reached maturity.
Then there is no time to be lost, if the horrible ulceration, of which
we see cases by the dozen every day, is to be prevented. It is much
easier, by the way, to discover the insect on the white skin of a
European than on that of a native, on which the dark speck scarcely
shows. The four or five jiggers which, in spite of the fact that I
constantly wore high laced boots, chose my feet to settle in, were
taken out for me by the all-accomplished Knudsen, after which I
thought it advisable to wash out the cavities with corrosive
sublimate. The natives have a different sort of disinfectant—they fill
the hole with scraped roots. In a tiny Makua village on the slope of
the plateau south of Newala, we saw an old woman who had filled all
the spaces under her toe-nails with powdered roots by way of
prophylactic treatment. What will be the result, if any, who can say?
The rest of the many trifling ills which trouble our existence are
really more comic than serious. In the absence of anything else to
smoke, Knudsen and I at last opened a box of cigars procured from
the Indian store-keeper at Lindi, and tried them, with the most
distressing results. Whether they contain opium or some other
narcotic, neither of us can say, but after the tenth puff we were both
“off,” three-quarters stupefied and unspeakably wretched. Slowly we
recovered—and what happened next? Half-an-hour later we were
once more smoking these poisonous concoctions—so insatiable is the
craving for tobacco in the tropics.
Even my present attacks of fever scarcely deserve to be taken
seriously. I have had no less than three here at Newala, all of which
have run their course in an incredibly short time. In the early
afternoon, I am busy with my old natives, asking questions and
making notes. The strong midday coffee has stimulated my spirits to
an extraordinary degree, the brain is active and vigorous, and work
progresses rapidly, while a pleasant warmth pervades the whole
body. Suddenly this gives place to a violent chill, forcing me to put on
my overcoat, though it is only half-past three and the afternoon sun
is at its hottest. Now the brain no longer works with such acuteness
and logical precision; more especially does it fail me in trying to
establish the syntax of the difficult Makua language on which I have
ventured, as if I had not enough to do without it. Under the
circumstances it seems advisable to take my temperature, and I do
so, to save trouble, without leaving my seat, and while going on with
my work. On examination, I find it to be 101·48°. My tutors are
abruptly dismissed and my bed set up in the baraza; a few minutes
later I am in it and treating myself internally with hot water and
lemon-juice.
Three hours later, the thermometer marks nearly 104°, and I make
them carry me back into the tent, bed and all, as I am now perspiring
heavily, and exposure to the cold wind just beginning to blow might
mean a fatal chill. I lie still for a little while, and then find, to my
great relief, that the temperature is not rising, but rather falling. This
is about 7.30 p.m. At 8 p.m. I find, to my unbounded astonishment,
that it has fallen below 98·6°, and I feel perfectly well. I read for an
hour or two, and could very well enjoy a smoke, if I had the
wherewithal—Indian cigars being out of the question.
Having no medical training, I am at a loss to account for this state
of things. It is impossible that these transitory attacks of high fever
should be malarial; it seems more probable that they are due to a
kind of sunstroke. On consulting my note-book, I become more and
more inclined to think this is the case, for these attacks regularly
follow extreme fatigue and long exposure to strong sunshine. They at
least have the advantage of being only short interruptions to my
work, as on the following morning I am always quite fresh and fit.
My treasure of a cook is suffering from an enormous hydrocele which
makes it difficult for him to get up, and Moritz is obliged to keep in
the dark on account of his inflamed eyes. Knudsen’s cook, a raw boy
from somewhere in the bush, knows still less of cooking than Omari;
consequently Nils Knudsen himself has been promoted to the vacant
post. Finding that we had come to the end of our supplies, he began
by sending to Chingulungulu for the four sucking-pigs which we had
bought from Matola and temporarily left in his charge; and when
they came up, neatly packed in a large crate, he callously slaughtered
the biggest of them. The first joint we were thoughtless enough to
entrust for roasting to Knudsen’s mshenzi cook, and it was
consequently uneatable; but we made the rest of the animal into a
jelly which we ate with great relish after weeks of underfeeding,
consuming incredible helpings of it at both midday and evening
meals. The only drawback is a certain want of variety in the tinned
vegetables. Dr. Jäger, to whom the Geographical Commission
entrusted the provisioning of the expeditions—mine as well as his
own—because he had more time on his hands than the rest of us,
seems to have laid in a huge stock of Teltow turnips,[46] an article of
food which is all very well for occasional use, but which quickly palls
when set before one every day; and we seem to have no other tins
left. There is no help for it—we must put up with the turnips; but I
am certain that, once I am home again, I shall not touch them for ten
years to come.
Amid all these minor evils, which, after all, go to make up the
genuine flavour of Africa, there is at least one cheering touch:
Knudsen has, with the dexterity of a skilled mechanic, repaired my 9
× 12 cm. camera, at least so far that I can use it with a little care.
How, in the absence of finger-nails, he was able to accomplish such a
ticklish piece of work, having no tool but a clumsy screw-driver for
taking to pieces and putting together again the complicated
mechanism of the instantaneous shutter, is still a mystery to me; but
he did it successfully. The loss of his finger-nails shows him in a light
contrasting curiously enough with the intelligence evinced by the
above operation; though, after all, it is scarcely surprising after his
ten years’ residence in the bush. One day, at Lindi, he had occasion
to wash a dog, which must have been in need of very thorough
cleansing, for the bottle handed to our friend for the purpose had an
extremely strong smell. Having performed his task in the most
conscientious manner, he perceived with some surprise that the dog
did not appear much the better for it, and was further surprised by
finding his own nails ulcerating away in the course of the next few
days. “How was I to know that carbolic acid has to be diluted?” he
mutters indignantly, from time to time, with a troubled gaze at his
mutilated finger-tips.
 Since we came to Newala we have been making excursions in all
directions through the surrounding country, in accordance with old
habit, and also because the akida Sefu did not get together the tribal
elders from whom I wanted information so speedily as he had
promised. There is, however, no harm done, as, even if seen only
from the outside, the country and people are interesting enough.
The Makonde plateau is like a large rectangular table rounded off
at the corners. Measured from the Indian Ocean to Newala, it is
about seventy-five miles long, and between the Rovuma and the
Lukuledi it averages fifty miles in breadth, so that its superficial area
is about two-thirds of that of the kingdom of Saxony. The surface,
however, is not level, but uniformly inclined from its south-western
edge to the ocean. From the upper edge, on which Newala lies, the
eye ranges for many miles east and north-east, without encountering
any obstacle, over the Makonde bush. It is a green sea, from which
here and there thick clouds of smoke rise, to show that it, too, is
inhabited by men who carry on their tillage like so many other
primitive peoples, by cutting down and burning the bush, and
manuring with the ashes. Even in the radiant light of a tropical day
such a fire is a grand sight.
Much less effective is the impression produced just now by the
great western plain as seen from the edge of the plateau. As often as
time permits, I stroll along this edge, sometimes in one direction,
sometimes in another, in the hope of finding the air clear enough to
let me enjoy the view; but I have always been disappointed.
Wherever one looks, clouds of smoke rise from the burning bush,
and the air is full of smoke and vapour. It is a pity, for under more
favourable circumstances the panorama of the whole country up to
the distant Majeje hills must be truly magnificent. It is of little use
taking photographs now, and an outline sketch gives a very poor idea
of the scenery. In one of these excursions I went out of my way to
make a personal attempt on the Makonde bush. The present edge of
the plateau is the result of a far-reaching process of destruction
through erosion and denudation. The Makonde strata are
everywhere cut into by ravines, which, though short, are hundreds of
yards in depth. In consequence of the loose stratification of these
beds, not only are the walls of these ravines nearly vertical, but their
upper end is closed by an equally steep escarpment, so that the
western edge of the Makonde plateau is hemmed in by a series of
deep, basin-like valleys. In order to get from one side of such a ravine
to the other, I cut my way through the bush with a dozen of my men.
It was a very open part, with more grass than scrub, but even so the
short stretch of less than two hundred yards was very hard work; at
the end of it the men’s calicoes were in rags and they themselves
bleeding from hundreds of scratches, while even our strong khaki
suits had not escaped scatheless.

NATIVE PATH THROUGH THE MAKONDE BUSH, NEAR

MAHUTA

I see increasing reason to believe that the view formed some time
back as to the origin of the Makonde bush is the correct one. I have
no doubt that it is not a natural product, but the result of human
occupation. Those parts of the high country where man—as a very
slight amount of practice enables the eye to perceive at once—has not
yet penetrated with axe and hoe, are still occupied by a splendid
timber forest quite able to sustain a comparison with our mixed
forests in Germany. But wherever man has once built his hut or tilled
his field, this horrible bush springs up. Every phase of this process
may be seen in the course of a couple of hours’ walk along the main
road. From the bush to right or left, one hears the sound of the axe—
not from one spot only, but from several directions at once. A few
steps further on, we can see what is taking place. The brush has been
cut down and piled up in heaps to the height of a yard or more,
between which the trunks of the large trees stand up like the last
pillars of a magnificent ruined building. These, too, present a
melancholy spectacle: the destructive Makonde have ringed them—
cut a broad strip of bark all round to ensure their dying off—and also
piled up pyramids of brush round them. Father and son, mother and
son-in-law, are chopping away perseveringly in the background—too
busy, almost, to look round at the white stranger, who usually excites
so much interest. If you pass by the same place a week later, the piles
of brushwood have disappeared and a thick layer of ashes has taken
the place of the green forest. The large trees stretch their
smouldering trunks and branches in dumb accusation to heaven—if
they have not already fallen and been more or less reduced to ashes,
perhaps only showing as a white stripe on the dark ground.
This work of destruction is carried out by the Makonde alike on the
virgin forest and on the bush which has sprung up on sites already
cultivated and deserted. In the second case they are saved the trouble
of burning the large trees, these being entirely absent in the
secondary bush.
After burning this piece of forest ground and loosening it with the
hoe, the native sows his corn and plants his vegetables. All over the
country, he goes in for bed-culture, which requires, and, in fact,
receives, the most careful attention. Weeds are nowhere tolerated in
the south of German East Africa. The crops may fail on the plains,
where droughts are frequent, but never on the plateau with its
abundant rains and heavy dews. Its fortunate inhabitants even have
the satisfaction of seeing the proud Wayao and Wamakua working
for them as labourers, driven by hunger to serve where they were
accustomed to rule.
But the light, sandy soil is soon exhausted, and would yield no
harvest the second year if cultivated twice running. This fact has
been familiar to the native for ages; consequently he provides in
time, and, while his crop is growing, prepares the next plot with axe
and firebrand. Next year he plants this with his various crops and
lets the first piece lie fallow. For a short time it remains waste and
desolate; then nature steps in to repair the destruction wrought by
man; a thousand new growths spring out of the exhausted soil, and
even the old stumps put forth fresh shoots. Next year the new growth
is up to one’s knees, and in a few years more it is that terrible,
impenetrable bush, which maintains its position till the black
occupier of the land has made the round of all the available sites and
come back to his starting point.
The Makonde are, body and soul, so to speak, one with this bush.
According to my Yao informants, indeed, their name means nothing
else but “bush people.” Their own tradition says that they have been
settled up here for a very long time, but to my surprise they laid great
stress on an original immigration. Their old homes were in the
south-east, near Mikindani and the mouth of the Rovuma, whence
their peaceful forefathers were driven by the continual raids of the
Sakalavas from Madagascar and the warlike Shirazis[47] of the coast,
to take refuge on the almost inaccessible plateau. I have studied
African ethnology for twenty years, but the fact that changes of
population in this apparently quiet and peaceable corner of the earth
could have been occasioned by outside enterprises taking place on
the high seas, was completely new to me. It is, no doubt, however,
correct.
The charming tribal legend of the Makonde—besides informing us
of other interesting matters—explains why they have to live in the
thickest of the bush and a long way from the edge of the plateau,
instead of making their permanent homes beside the purling brooks
and springs of the low country.
“The place where the tribe originated is Mahuta, on the southern
side of the plateau towards the Rovuma, where of old time there was
nothing but thick bush. Out of this bush came a man who never
washed himself or shaved his head, and who ate and drank but little.
He went out and made a human figure from the wood of a tree
growing in the open country, which he took home to his abode in the
bush and there set it upright. In the night this image came to life and
was a woman. The man and woman went down together to the
Rovuma to wash themselves. Here the woman gave birth to a still-
born child. They left that place and passed over the high land into the
valley of the Mbemkuru, where the woman had another child, which
was also born dead. Then they returned to the high bush country of
Mahuta, where the third child was born, which lived and grew up. In
course of time, the couple had many more children, and called
themselves Wamatanda. These were the ancestral stock of the
Makonde, also called Wamakonde,[48] i.e., aborigines. Their
forefather, the man from the bush, gave his children the command to
bury their dead upright, in memory of the mother of their race who
was cut out of wood and awoke to life when standing upright. He also
warned them against settling in the valleys and near large streams,
for sickness and death dwelt there. They were to make it a rule to
have their huts at least an hour’s walk from the nearest watering-
place; then their children would thrive and escape illness.”
The explanation of the name Makonde given by my informants is
somewhat different from that contained in the above legend, which I
extract from a little book (small, but packed with information), by
Pater Adams, entitled Lindi und sein Hinterland. Otherwise, my
results agree exactly with the statements of the legend. Washing?
Hapana—there is no such thing. Why should they do so? As it is, the
supply of water scarcely suffices for cooking and drinking; other
people do not wash, so why should the Makonde distinguish himself
by such needless eccentricity? As for shaving the head, the short,
woolly crop scarcely needs it,[49] so the second ancestral precept is
likewise easy enough to follow. Beyond this, however, there is
nothing ridiculous in the ancestor’s advice. I have obtained from
various local artists a fairly large number of figures carved in wood,
ranging from fifteen to twenty-three inches in height, and
representing women belonging to the great group of the Mavia,
Makonde, and Matambwe tribes. The carving is remarkably well
done and renders the female type with great accuracy, especially the
keloid ornamentation, to be described later on. As to the object and
meaning of their works the sculptors either could or (more probably)
would tell me nothing, and I was forced to content myself with the
scanty information vouchsafed by one man, who said that the figures
were merely intended to represent the nembo—the artificial
deformations of pelele, ear-discs, and keloids. The legend recorded
by Pater Adams places these figures in a new light. They must surely
be more than mere dolls; and we may even venture to assume that
they are—though the majority of present-day Makonde are probably
unaware of the fact—representations of the tribal ancestress.
 The references in the legend to the descent from Mahuta to the
Rovuma, and to a journey across the highlands into the Mbekuru
valley, undoubtedly indicate the previous history of the tribe, the
travels of the ancestral pair typifying the migrations of their
descendants. The descent to the neighbouring Rovuma valley, with
its extraordinary fertility and great abundance of game, is intelligible
at a glance—but the crossing of the Lukuledi depression, the ascent
to the Rondo Plateau and the descent to the Mbemkuru, also lie
within the bounds of probability, for all these districts have exactly
the same character as the extreme south. Now, however, comes a
point of especial interest for our bacteriological age. The primitive
Makonde did not enjoy their lives in the marshy river-valleys.
Disease raged among them, and many died. It was only after they
had returned to their original home near Mahuta, that the health
conditions of these people improved. We are very apt to think of the
African as a stupid person whose ignorance of nature is only equalled
by his fear of it, and who looks on all mishaps as caused by evil
spirits and malignant natural powers. It is much more correct to
assume in this case that the people very early learnt to distinguish
districts infested with malaria from those where it is absent.
This knowledge is crystallized in the
ancestral warning against settling in the
valleys and near the great waters, the
dwelling-places of disease and death. At the
same time, for security against the hostile
Mavia south of the Rovuma, it was enacted
that every settlement must be not less than a
certain distance from the southern edge of the
plateau. Such in fact is their mode of life at the
present day. It is not such a bad one, and
certainly they are both safer and more
comfortable than the Makua, the recent
intruders from the south, who have made USUAL METHOD OF
good their footing on the western edge of the CLOSING HUT-DOOR
plateau, extending over a fairly wide belt of
country. Neither Makua nor Makonde show in their dwellings
anything of the size and comeliness of the Yao houses in the plain,
especially at Masasi, Chingulungulu and Zuza’s. Jumbe Chauro, a
Makonde hamlet not far from Newala, on the road to Mahuta, is the
most important settlement of the tribe I have yet seen, and has fairly
spacious huts. But how slovenly is their construction compared with
the palatial residences of the elephant-hunters living in the plain.
The roofs are still more untidy than in the general run of huts during
the dry season, the walls show here and there the scanty beginnings
or the lamentable remains of the mud plastering, and the interior is a
veritable dog-kennel; dirt, dust and disorder everywhere. A few huts
only show any attempt at division into rooms, and this consists
merely of very roughly-made bamboo partitions. In one point alone
have I noticed any indication of progress—in the method of fastening
the door. Houses all over the south are secured in a simple but
ingenious manner. The door consists of a set of stout pieces of wood
or bamboo, tied with bark-string to two cross-pieces, and moving in
two grooves round one of the door-posts, so as to open inwards. If
the owner wishes to leave home, he takes two logs as thick as a man’s
upper arm and about a yard long. One of these is placed obliquely
against the middle of the door from the inside, so as to form an angle
of from 60° to 75° with the ground. He then places the second piece
horizontally across the first, pressing it downward with all his might.
It is kept in place by two strong posts planted in the ground a few
inches inside the door. This fastening is absolutely safe, but of course
cannot be applied to both doors at once, otherwise how could the
owner leave or enter his house? I have not yet succeeded in finding
out how the back door is fastened.

MAKONDE LOCK AND KEY AT JUMBE CHAURO

 This is the general way of closing a house. The Makonde at Jumbe
Chauro, however, have a much more complicated, solid and original
one. Here, too, the door is as already described, except that there is
only one post on the inside, standing by itself about six inches from
one side of the doorway. Opposite this post is a hole in the wall just
large enough to admit a man’s arm. The door is closed inside by a
large wooden bolt passing through a hole in this post and pressing
with its free end against the door. The other end has three holes into
which fit three pegs running in vertical grooves inside the post. The
door is opened with a wooden key about a foot long, somewhat
curved and sloped off at the butt; the other end has three pegs
corresponding to the holes, in the bolt, so that, when it is thrust
through the hole in the wall and inserted into the rectangular
opening in the post, the pegs can be lifted and the bolt drawn out.[50]

MODE OF INSERTING THE KEY

With no small pride first one householder and then a second

showed me on the spot the action of this greatest invention of the
Makonde Highlands. To both with an admiring exclamation of
“Vizuri sana!” (“Very fine!”). I expressed the wish to take back these
marvels with me to Ulaya, to show the Wazungu what clever fellows
the Makonde are. Scarcely five minutes after my return to camp at
Newala, the two men came up sweating under the weight of two
heavy logs which they laid down at my feet, handing over at the same
time the keys of the fallen fortress. Arguing, logically enough, that if
the key was wanted, the lock would be wanted with it, they had taken
their axes and chopped down the posts—as it never occurred to them
to dig them out of the ground and so bring them intact. Thus I have
two badly damaged specimens, and the owners, instead of praise,
come in for a blowing-up.
The Makua huts in the environs of Newala are especially
miserable; their more than slovenly construction reminds one of the
temporary erections of the Makua at Hatia’s, though the people here
have not been concerned in a war. It must therefore be due to
congenital idleness, or else to the absence of a powerful chief. Even
the baraza at Mlipa’s, a short hour’s walk south-east of Newala,
shares in this general neglect. While public buildings in this country
are usually looked after more or less carefully, this is in evident
danger of being blown over by the first strong easterly gale. The only
attractive object in this whole district is the grave of the late chief
Mlipa. I visited it in the morning, while the sun was still trying with
partial success to break through the rolling mists, and the circular
grove of tall euphorbias, which, with a broken pot, is all that marks
the old king’s resting-place, impressed one with a touch of pathos.
Even my very materially-minded carriers seemed to feel something
of the sort, for instead of their usual ribald songs, they chanted
solemnly, as we marched on through the dense green of the Makonde
bush:—
 “We shall arrive with the great master; we stand in a row and have
no fear about getting our food and our money from the Serkali (the
Government). We are not afraid; we are going along with the great
master, the lion; we are going down to the coast and back.”
With regard to the characteristic features of the various tribes here
on the western edge of the plateau, I can arrive at no other
conclusion than the one already come to in the plain, viz., that it is
impossible for anyone but a trained anthropologist to assign any
given individual at once to his proper tribe. In fact, I think that even
an anthropological specialist, after the most careful examination,
might find it a difficult task to decide. The whole congeries of peoples
collected in the region bounded on the west by the great Central
African rift, Tanganyika and Nyasa, and on the east by the Indian
Ocean, are closely related to each other—some of their languages are
only distinguished from one another as dialects of the same speech,
and no doubt all the tribes present the same shape of skull and
structure of skeleton. Thus, surely, there can be no very striking
differences in outward appearance.
 Even did such exist, I should have no time
to concern myself with them, for day after day,
I have to see or hear, as the case may be—in
any case to grasp and record—an
extraordinary number of ethnographic
phenomena. I am almost disposed to think it
fortunate that some departments of inquiry, at
least, are barred by external circumstances.
Chief among these is the subject of iron-
working. We are apt to think of Africa as a
country where iron ore is everywhere, so to
speak, to be picked up by the roadside, and
where it would be quite surprising if the
inhabitants had not learnt to smelt the
material ready to their hand. In fact, the
knowledge of this art ranges all over the
continent, from the Kabyles in the north to the
Kafirs in the south. Here between the Rovuma
and the Lukuledi the conditions are not so
favourable. According to the statements of the
Makonde, neither ironstone nor any other
form of iron ore is known to them. They have
not therefore advanced to the art of smelting
the metal, but have hitherto bought all their
THE ANCESTRESS OF
THE MAKONDE
iron implements from neighbouring tribes.
Even in the plain the inhabitants are not much
better off. Only one man now living is said to
understand the art of smelting iron. This old fundi lives close to
Huwe, that isolated, steep-sided block of granite which rises out of
the green solitude between Masasi and Chingulungulu, and whose
jagged and splintered top meets the traveller’s eye everywhere. While
still at Masasi I wished to see this man at work, but was told that,
frightened by the rising, he had retired across the Rovuma, though
he would soon return. All subsequent inquiries as to whether the
fundi had come back met with the genuine African answer, “Bado”
(“Not yet”).
 BRAZIER

Some consolation was afforded me by a brassfounder, whom I

came across in the bush near Akundonde’s. This man is the favourite
of women, and therefore no doubt of the gods; he welds the glittering
brass rods purchased at the coast into those massive, heavy rings
which, on the wrists and ankles of the local fair ones, continually give
me fresh food for admiration. Like every decent master-craftsman he
had all his tools with him, consisting of a pair of bellows, three
crucibles and a hammer—nothing more, apparently. He was quite
willing to show his skill, and in a twinkling had fixed his bellows on
the ground. They are simply two goat-skins, taken off whole, the four
legs being closed by knots, while the upper opening, intended to
admit the air, is kept stretched by two pieces of wood. At the lower
end of the skin a smaller opening is left into which a wooden tube is
stuck. The fundi has quickly borrowed a heap of wood-embers from
the nearest hut; he then fixes the free ends of the two tubes into an
earthen pipe, and clamps them to the ground by means of a bent
piece of wood. Now he fills one of his small clay crucibles, the dross
on which shows that they have been long in use, with the yellow
material, places it in the midst of the embers, which, at present are
only faintly glimmering, and begins his work. In quick alternation
the smith’s two hands move up and down with the open ends of the
bellows; as he raises his hand he holds the slit wide open, so as to let
the air enter the skin bag unhindered. In pressing it down he closes
the bag, and the air puffs through the bamboo tube and clay pipe into
the fire, which quickly burns up. The smith, however, does not keep
on with this work, but beckons to another man, who relieves him at
the bellows, while he takes some more tools out of a large skin pouch
carried on his back. I look on in wonder as, with a smooth round
stick about the thickness of a finger, he bores a few vertical holes into
the clean sand of the soil. This should not be difficult, yet the man
seems to be taking great pains over it. Then he fastens down to the
ground, with a couple of wooden clamps, a neat little trough made by
splitting a joint of bamboo in half, so that the ends are closed by the
two knots. At last the yellow metal has attained the right consistency,
and the fundi lifts the crucible from the fire by means of two sticks
split at the end to serve as tongs. A short swift turn to the left—a
tilting of the crucible—and the molten brass, hissing and giving forth
clouds of smoke, flows first into the bamboo mould and then into the
holes in the ground.
The technique of this backwoods craftsman may not be very far
advanced, but it cannot be denied that he knows how to obtain an
adequate result by the simplest means. The ladies of highest rank in
this country—that is to say, those who can afford it, wear two kinds
of these massive brass rings, one cylindrical, the other semicircular
in section. The latter are cast in the most ingenious way in the
bamboo mould, the former in the circular hole in the sand. It is quite
a simple matter for the fundi to fit these bars to the limbs of his fair
customers; with a few light strokes of his hammer he bends the
pliable brass round arm or ankle without further inconvenience to
the wearer.
SHAPING THE POT

SMOOTHING WITH MAIZE-COB

CUTTING THE EDGE

 FINISHING THE BOTTOM

LAST SMOOTHING BEFORE

BURNING

FIRING THE BRUSH-PILE

 LIGHTING THE FARTHER SIDE OF
THE PILE

TURNING THE RED-HOT VESSEL

NYASA WOMAN MAKING POTS AT MASASI

Pottery is an art which must always and everywhere excite the
interest of the student, just because it is so intimately connected with
the development of human culture, and because its relics are one of
the principal factors in the reconstruction of our own condition in
prehistoric times. I shall always remember with pleasure the two or
three afternoons at Masasi when Salim Matola’s mother, a slightly-
built, graceful, pleasant-looking woman, explained to me with
touching patience, by means of concrete illustrations, the ceramic art
of her people. The only implements for this primitive process were a
lump of clay in her left hand, and in the right a calabash containing
the following valuables: the fragment of a maize-cob stripped of all
its grains, a smooth, oval pebble, about the size of a pigeon’s egg, a
few chips of gourd-shell, a bamboo splinter about the length of one’s
hand, a small shell, and a bunch of some herb resembling spinach.
 Nothing more. The woman scraped with the
shell a round, shallow hole in the soft, fine
sand of the soil, and, when an active young
girl had filled the calabash with water for her,
she began to knead the clay. As if by magic it
gradually assumed the shape of a rough but
already well-shaped vessel, which only wanted
a little touching up with the instruments
before mentioned. I looked out with the
MAKUA WOMAN closest attention for any indication of the use
MAKING A POT. of the potter’s wheel, in however rudimentary
SHOWS THE a form, but no—hapana (there is none). The
BEGINNINGS OF THE embryo pot stood firmly in its little
POTTER’S WHEEL
depression, and the woman walked round it in
a stooping posture, whether she was removing
small stones or similar foreign bodies with the maize-cob, smoothing
the inner or outer surface with the splinter of bamboo, or later, after
letting it dry for a day, pricking in the ornamentation with a pointed
bit of gourd-shell, or working out the bottom, or cutting the edge
with a sharp bamboo knife, or giving the last touches to the finished
vessel. This occupation of the women is infinitely toilsome, but it is
without doubt an accurate reproduction of the process in use among
our ancestors of the Neolithic and Bronze ages.
There is no doubt that the invention of pottery, an item in human
progress whose importance cannot be over-estimated, is due to
women. Rough, coarse and unfeeling, the men of the horde range
over the countryside. When the united cunning of the hunters has
succeeded in killing the game; not one of them thinks of carrying
home the spoil. A bright fire, kindled by a vigorous wielding of the
drill, is crackling beside them; the animal has been cleaned and cut
up secundum artem, and, after a slight singeing, will soon disappear
under their sharp teeth; no one all this time giving a single thought
to wife or child.
To what shifts, on the other hand, the primitive wife, and still more
the primitive mother, was put! Not even prehistoric stomachs could
endure an unvarying diet of raw food. Something or other suggested
the beneficial effect of hot water on the majority of approved but
indigestible dishes. Perhaps a neighbour had tried holding the hard
roots or tubers over the fire in a calabash filled with water—or maybe
an ostrich-egg-shell, or a hastily improvised vessel of bark. They
became much softer and more palatable than they had previously
been; but, unfortunately, the vessel could not stand the fire and got
charred on the outside. That can be remedied, thought our
ancestress, and plastered a layer of wet clay round a similar vessel.
This is an improvement; the cooking utensil remains uninjured, but
the heat of the fire has shrunk it, so that it is loose in its shell. The
next step is to detach it, so, with a firm grip and a jerk, shell and
kernel are separated, and pottery is invented. Perhaps, however, the
discovery which led to an intelligent use of the burnt-clay shell, was
made in a slightly different way. Ostrich-eggs and calabashes are not
to be found in every part of the world, but everywhere mankind has
arrived at the art of making baskets out of pliant materials, such as
bark, bast, strips of palm-leaf, supple twigs, etc. Our inventor has no
water-tight vessel provided by nature. “Never mind, let us line the
basket with clay.” This answers the purpose, but alas! the basket gets
burnt over the blazing fire, the woman watches the process of
cooking with increasing uneasiness, fearing a leak, but no leak
appears. The food, done to a turn, is eaten with peculiar relish; and
the cooking-vessel is examined, half in curiosity, half in satisfaction
at the result. The plastic clay is now hard as stone, and at the same
time looks exceedingly well, for the neat plaiting of the burnt basket
is traced all over it in a pretty pattern. Thus, simultaneously with
pottery, its ornamentation was invented.
Primitive woman has another claim to respect. It was the man,
roving abroad, who invented the art of producing fire at will, but the
woman, unable to imitate him in this, has been a Vestal from the
earliest times. Nothing gives so much trouble as the keeping alight of
the smouldering brand, and, above all, when all the men are absent
from the camp. Heavy rain-clouds gather, already the first large
drops are falling, the first gusts of the storm rage over the plain. The
little flame, a greater anxiety to the woman than her own children,
flickers unsteadily in the blast. What is to be done? A sudden thought
occurs to her, and in an instant she has constructed a primitive hut
out of strips of bark, to protect the flame against rain and wind.
This, or something very like it, was the way in which the principle
of the house was discovered; and even the most hardened misogynist
cannot fairly refuse a woman the credit of it. The protection of the
hearth-fire from the weather is the germ from which the human
dwelling was evolved. Men had little, if any share, in this forward
step, and that only at a late stage. Even at the present day, the
plastering of the housewall with clay and the manufacture of pottery
are exclusively the women’s business. These are two very significant
survivals. Our European kitchen-garden, too, is originally a woman’s
invention, and the hoe, the primitive instrument of agriculture, is,
characteristically enough, still used in this department. But the
noblest achievement which we owe to the other sex is unquestionably
the art of cookery. Roasting alone—the oldest process—is one for
which men took the hint (a very obvious one) from nature. It must
have been suggested by the scorched carcase of some animal
overtaken by the destructive forest-fires. But boiling—the process of
improving organic substances by the help of water heated to boiling-
point—is a much later discovery. It is so recent that it has not even
yet penetrated to all parts of the world. The Polynesians understand
how to steam food, that is, to cook it, neatly wrapped in leaves, in a
hole in the earth between hot stones, the air being excluded, and
(sometimes) a few drops of water sprinkled on the stones; but they
do not understand boiling.
To come back from this digression, we find that the slender Nyasa
woman has, after once more carefully examining the finished pot,
put it aside in the shade to dry. On the following day she sends me
word by her son, Salim Matola, who is always on hand, that she is
going to do the burning, and, on coming out of my house, I find her
already hard at work. She has spread on the ground a layer of very
dry sticks, about as thick as one’s thumb, has laid the pot (now of a
yellowish-grey colour) on them, and is piling brushwood round it.
My faithful Pesa mbili, the mnyampara, who has been standing by,
most obligingly, with a lighted stick, now hands it to her. Both of
them, blowing steadily, light the pile on the lee side, and, when the
flame begins to catch, on the weather side also. Soon the whole is in a
blaze, but the dry fuel is quickly consumed and the fire dies down, so
that we see the red-hot vessel rising from the ashes. The woman
turns it continually with a long stick, sometimes one way and
sometimes another, so that it may be evenly heated all over. In
twenty minutes she rolls it out of the ash-heap, takes up the bundle
of spinach, which has been lying for two days in a jar of water, and
sprinkles the red-hot clay with it. The places where the drops fall are
marked by black spots on the uniform reddish-brown surface. With a
sigh of relief, and with visible satisfaction, the woman rises to an
erect position; she is standing just in a line between me and the fire,
from which a cloud of smoke is just rising: I press the ball of my
camera, the shutter clicks—the apotheosis is achieved! Like a
priestess, representative of her inventive sex, the graceful woman
stands: at her feet the hearth-fire she has given us beside her the
invention she has devised for us, in the background the home she has
built for us.
At Newala, also, I have had the manufacture of pottery carried on
in my presence. Technically the process is better than that already
described, for here we find the beginnings of the potter’s wheel,
which does not seem to exist in the plains; at least I have seen
nothing of the sort. The artist, a frightfully stupid Makua woman, did
not make a depression in the ground to receive the pot she was about
to shape, but used instead a large potsherd. Otherwise, she went to
work in much the same way as Salim’s mother, except that she saved
herself the trouble of walking round and round her work by squatting
at her ease and letting the pot and potsherd rotate round her; this is
surely the first step towards a machine. But it does not follow that
the pot was improved by the process. It is true that it was beautifully
rounded and presented a very creditable appearance when finished,
but the numerous large and small vessels which I have seen, and, in
part, collected, in the “less advanced” districts, are no less so. We
moderns imagine that instruments of precision are necessary to
produce excellent results. Go to the prehistoric collections of our
museums and look at the pots, urns and bowls of our ancestors in the
dim ages of the past, and you will at once perceive your error.
MAKING LONGITUDINAL CUT IN
BARK

DRAWING THE BARK OFF THE LOG

REMOVING THE OUTER BARK

 BEATING THE BARK

WORKING THE BARK-CLOTH AFTER BEATING, TO MAKE IT

SOFT

MANUFACTURE OF BARK-CLOTH AT NEWALA

To-day, nearly the whole population of German East Africa is
clothed in imported calico. This was not always the case; even now in
some parts of the north dressed skins are still the prevailing wear,
and in the north-western districts—east and north of Lake
Tanganyika—lies a zone where bark-cloth has not yet been
superseded. Probably not many generations have passed since such
bark fabrics and kilts of skins were the only clothing even in the
south. Even to-day, large quantities of this bright-red or drab
material are still to be found; but if we wish to see it, we must look in
the granaries and on the drying stages inside the native huts, where
it serves less ambitious uses as wrappings for those seeds and fruits
which require to be packed with special care. The salt produced at
Masasi, too, is packed for transport to a distance in large sheets of
bark-cloth. Wherever I found it in any degree possible, I studied the
process of making this cloth. The native requisitioned for the
purpose arrived, carrying a log between two and three yards long and
as thick as his thigh, and nothing else except a curiously-shaped
mallet and the usual long, sharp and pointed knife which all men and
boys wear in a belt at their backs without a sheath—horribile dictu!
[51]
Silently he squats down before me, and with two rapid cuts has
drawn a couple of circles round the log some two yards apart, and
slits the bark lengthwise between them with the point of his knife.
With evident care, he then scrapes off the outer rind all round the
log, so that in a quarter of an hour the inner red layer of the bark
shows up brightly-coloured between the two untouched ends. With
some trouble and much caution, he now loosens the bark at one end,
and opens the cylinder. He then stands up, takes hold of the free
edge with both hands, and turning it inside out, slowly but steadily
pulls it off in one piece. Now comes the troublesome work of
scraping all superfluous particles of outer bark from the outside of
the long, narrow piece of material, while the inner side is carefully
scrutinised for defective spots. At last it is ready for beating. Having
signalled to a friend, who immediately places a bowl of water beside
him, the artificer damps his sheet of bark all over, seizes his mallet,
lays one end of the stuff on the smoothest spot of the log, and
hammers away slowly but continuously. “Very simple!” I think to
myself. “Why, I could do that, too!”—but I am forced to change my
opinions a little later on; for the beating is quite an art, if the fabric is
not to be beaten to pieces. To prevent the breaking of the fibres, the
stuff is several times folded across, so as to interpose several
thicknesses between the mallet and the block. At last the required
state is reached, and the fundi seizes the sheet, still folded, by both
ends, and wrings it out, or calls an assistant to take one end while he
holds the other. The cloth produced in this way is not nearly so fine
and uniform in texture as the famous Uganda bark-cloth, but it is
quite soft, and, above all, cheap.
Now, too, I examine the mallet. My craftsman has been using the
simpler but better form of this implement, a conical block of some
hard wood, its base—the striking surface—being scored across and
across with more or less deeply-cut grooves, and the handle stuck
into a hole in the middle. The other and earlier form of mallet is
shaped in the same way, but the head is fastened by an ingenious
network of bark strips into the split bamboo serving as a handle. The
observation so often made, that ancient customs persist longest in
connection with religious ceremonies and in the life of children, here
finds confirmation. As we shall soon see, bark-cloth is still worn
during the unyago,[52] having been prepared with special solemn
ceremonies; and many a mother, if she has no other garment handy,
will still put her little one into a kilt of bark-cloth, which, after all,
looks better, besides being more in keeping with its African
surroundings, than the ridiculous bit of print from Ulaya.
MAKUA WOMEN