“Between each district of Manyema large belts of the primeval forest still stand. Into these the sun, though vertical, cannot penetrate, except by sending down at midday thin pencils of rays into the gloom. The rain water stands for months in stagnant pools made by the feet of elephants; and the dead leaves decay on the damp soil, and make the water of the numerous rivulets of the color of strong tea. The climbing plants, from the size of whipcord to that of a man-of-war’s hawser, are so numerous the ancient path is the only passage. When one of the giant trees falls across the road it forms a wall breast high to be climbed over, and the mass of tangled ropes brought down makes cutting a path round it a work of time which travellers never undertake.”
At this time, Dr. Livingstone was not persuaded that the Manyema were men-eaters. Toward the conclusion of his letter to Lord Stanley, he thus describes them:
“I lived in what may be called the Tipperary of Manyema, and they are certainly a bloody people among themselves. But they are very far from being in appearance like the ugly negroes on the West Coast. Finely formed heads are common, and generally men and women are vastly superior to the slaves of Zanzibar and elsewhere. We must go deeper than phrenology to account for their low moral tone. If they are cannibals they are not ostentatiously so. The neighboring tribes all assert that they are men-eaters, and they themselves laughingly admit the charge. But they like to impose on the credulous, and they showed the skull of a recent victim to horrify one of my people. I found it to be the skull of a gorilla, or soko--the first I knew of its existence here--and this they do eat. If I had believed a tenth of what I heard from traders, I might never have entered the country. Their people told tales with shocking circumstantiality, as if of eye witnesses, that could not be committed to paper, or even spoken about beneath the breath. Indeed, one wishes them to vanish from memory. I have not yet been able to make up my mind whether the Manyema are cannibals or not. I have offered goods of sufficient value to tempt any of them to call me to see a cannibal feast in the dark forests where these orgies are said to be held, but hitherto in vain. All the real evidence yet obtained would elicit from a Scotch jury the verdict only of ‘not proven.’”