Donkeys, Oxen and Elephants: in Search for an Alternative to Human Porters in 19th century Tanzania

The aim of this article is to explore some of the European efforts that took place in the 1870s in East Africa, where human porters were the only means to reach the regions of the interior. Although many European travelers and missionaries praised their porters, to many of them human porterage appeared to be a primitive and expensive system to carry the goods and to travel into to the interior. The absence of wheeled transport, together with slavery and cannibalism, was seen by 19th-century Europeans as an index of the backwardness of African societies and as a demonstration of their lack of economic initiative or at least of their shortage of concern for economic progress. The Europeans were accustomed to a mechanized system of transport, and that is the main reason laying behind the several projects that were drawn up in Europe to be applied in East Africa. The analysis of these attempts demonstrates how the Europeans’ first encounter with the interior of East Africa was marked by a considerable ignorance of its climatic, environmental and morphologic conditions. The European “image of Africa”, as Curtin as defined it, did not often correspond to the reality. After a short introduction on the European knowledge of Africa in the 19th century, the first part of this article is devoted to the analysis of the system of porterage and to the problems that it presented to the Europeans of the time. A second part focuses on the first attempts to use draft and pack animals, as it was the case of Rev. Roger Price of the London Missionary Society (LMS) and of the Swiss trader Philippe Broyon, who both tried the use of oxen, and then of the experiment of King Leopold of Belgium to use Indian elephants. The third part is then devoted to the efforts made in the 1870s by the Church Missionary Society (CMS) and by the Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEA) to construct new cart roads. All the attempts made by Europeans to find an alternative to human porterage failed, not only because of their misleading image of Africa, but also because the initiative in East African trade remained, at least until the colonial period, largely in the hands of African porters and traders.