This question of the rapid transmission of news among the native races, both in Africa and India, has for a long time been a favourite subject for discussion and argument among white men who have had much to do with the native races. The well-known instances of the disaster to Hicks Pasha’s force and the fall of Khartoum being known in the bazaars of Cairo long before any official intimation was received by the Government are cases in point. Personally, after fifteen years spent in close association with natives in Africa, I have absolutely no belief in the theory of any superhuman agency being employed. In the first place, there is always the fact that much of this wonderfully transmitted news is false, which discounts the value of such news generally and discredits its value though it turns out afterwards to be true. The white man who has sufficient experience of the nigger and his ways can generally winnow the grain of truth from the bushel of fiction with which it is wrapped about; while in the next place it must be borne in mind that the natives nearly all have recognized methods of passing news quickly from one point to another, of which I may mention a few.
The Kikuyu shouts his news from hill to hill, while the Masai runner thinks no more of carrying a message sixty miles in a day than we should of a three-mile stroll: the Congolese have a system of whistle signals, by which they can convey messages from one end of a district to the other in a very short time; while the West African native tells his news from village to village by means of a sort of Morse code, tapped out on drums. The Matabele uses a system of signalling by long and short obscurations of a fire, by means of a skin, or in daytime by long or short puffs of smoke regulated by the same means; while the Red Indian of North America was in the habit of using a similar method of communication. By these various methods it is quite possible to convey news enormous distances in a remarkably short space of time, and I think that they are quite sufficient to account for the many remarkable stories told of this sort of thing, without calling in the theory of any unknown agency at all.
I accomplished the trip with the food for the soldiers without any mishap, and began the return journey to railhead, travelling light, with nothing on the wagons; and having by this time become thoroughly used to the work, and knowing better how to handle the men, things went much more smoothly than on the previous trip.