Lost City in the Heart of Africa

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 904, 22 February 1930, Page 18

Lost City in the Heart of Africa

TRIBE of people, entirely different in their make-up from any race we know today is believed to live in interior Africa, near Lake Chad.

They may be the direct descendants of the first human beings. It is believed that they may be more nearly like the Neanderthal man than any other tribe or race of people now living. The few individuals who have been seen by tL ' two white explorers who have reached the region are not believed to be freaks cr incidental cases of abnormality—there are too many of them—but the representatives of a tribe which has somehow kept its racial characteristics down through the ages. No one has ever seen their home town, if they have one. It is a lost city which is really lost, although it is believed to exist somewhere along the fringes of the Military Province of Chad, or of Northern Nigeria, where the desert merges with the jungle. These people have been described as bisexual. Outwardly in their physical appearance they have some features of both man and wc man. Dr. Arthur Torrance, author, explorer and bacteriologist, Fellow of the British Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, who has spent the greater part of the last 15 years in tropical Africa, Asia and the Pacific Islands, reports the discovery of these people. Naturally, he wants to learn

more about them and he is now planning his return to the little known part of Africa where he believes they make their tribal home.

He believes that possibly the first individuals of the human race may have had the same physical characteristics he has seen in these peculiar people, and that through the ages, as the demands of environment changed, the race developed the two distinct sexes. This is just one of a thousand interesting stories which might grow < it of the finding of such a human species. Dr. Torrance may have stumbled upon one of the greatest ethnological finds of the ages. Just how these people have maintained their individuality, surrounded as they are by the tribes of desert and jungle, is a mystery. Perhaps they know secrets of self-preservation and of immunity against disease which are yet unknown to civilised man. The few glimpses which two recent travellers in the interior of Africa —Lieutenant Gosta Moberg and Dr. Torrance —have had of these people have set the faces of both men southward in the hope of unravelling the secret.

Dr. Torrance is now in the United States perfecting his plans for a return to Africa, while Lieutenant Moberg is already in Africa and has started his trek toward the interior. “I consider these people one of the most fascinating studies which has presented itself to me in all my years of work in tropical medicine,” Dr. Torrance said. “We hope that we can build up enough Interest among anthropologists in those individuals who exist today so that, if we do not return from our expedition, the work will be taken up by others and carried on to its solution. My interest centres, of course, in the medical phases of the work which the discovery of such a race of people would present It would be of value to science to know how they had maintained their individuality, surrounded

Race Approximating Neanderthal Man Believed to Exist in Jungle Depths Near Lake Chad.

by other tribes whose physical characteristics are like our own, and how they have been able to resist the encroachments of the hundreds of tropical diseases to which they must have been exposed from time to time/* Dr. Torrance's work in Africa has been the treating of sleeping-sickness patients, lepers and natives afflicted with the 40-odd different types of fevers which infest the jungle, as well as the other ailments which humanity falls heir to in that part of the world. Trader Horn was once a member of one of Dr. Torrance’s expeditions in a humble capacity, but now the doctor laughingly says that his fate in America has been to be known as “Trader Horn's doctor.”

“He was known to us as Zambesi Jack,’ ” the doctor explained, “a remarkable old man who is an astonishing example of the survival of the fittest. He went to Africa at the time of Livingstone, when white men could not live on the continent, and the stories that he can tell of those early days have a remarkable value. They are the vivid impressions of a person

living an astounding life in an almost unknown period of Africa’s history.” Trader Horn wrote an appreciative foreword to Dr. Torrance’s recent book on his researches in tropical medicine entitled “Tracking Down the Enemies of Man.”

Prom time to time weird stories of the existence of abnormally peculiar people had drifted to travellers from this almost impenetrable area round Lake Chad. For the most part, scientists have taken these stories, with the proverbial grain of salt. Mysterious individuals are reported to •have appeared on the edges of the underbush and to have scuttled away as soon as they were observed. Nobody has ever captured one of these natives and no accurate description of them is ’in existence.

"When I was travelling through Northern Nigeria in 1924, on an expedition to cure victims of sleepingsickness, I got my first glimpse of these strange people,” Dr. Torrance said.

“The entrances to their homes are long tunnels made from some cementlike material. The homes are underground chambers covered with low roofs which make them almost invisible. These forbidden cities seem in some mysterious manner to be under the protection of the Hoggar people of the Central Sahara. “The lost city must lie somewhere near these mysterious forbidden cities The inhabitants of the forbidden cities know of its existence, but they are vague about its location. It was in the vicinity of the forbidden cities that I saw the peculiar individuals who inhabit the lost city. “I had heard fantastic tales concerning their existence more than 10 years previously from natives of the Gold Coast -whom I was treating. There was no definite information—at best stories passed from one to another by word of nmuth, which sounded improbable in the extreme, but in enough

detail to pique one's curiosity interest. **•

"Efforts have been made by n* explorers and writers to trace in 7 tain of the existing inhabitants th remnants of aboriginal races which inhabited the Sahara before the arrival of the Berbers and the Arabs “The peculiar people I saw ~ represent a type which grew 0 p « the time of the Neanderthal 0 - they may be the Neanderthal mas himself. The Neanderthal man «•*, found in the Neanderthal valley 0 f the Rhine in 1856—a skeleton of a human being of the Paleolithic Age Specimens of humanity of a nearer age have been discovered in Norther* Rhodesia. These people of Lake Chad may be paleolithic descendants of the real Neanderthal type. "Perhaps this type, if It evolved in Europe, was killed off by the trn human type. Dr. Ales Hrdlleka sa« that the ‘greatest discovery of <h» modern age (anthropologically) would be to find a perfect skeleton of th. Neanderthal man or ape.' We » tainly hope to do this in Africa f» they must be there! The type mar have been protected by the adran tages of environment— by walls of sand from the Sahara which gH. them perfect isolation from the races which flourished so early in Northern Africa. Thus they may have preserved their racial integrity as well as their mode of living.” Dr. Torrance believes that a few centuries ago these people may have existed in greater numbers and moved about in larger groups than they do today. He points out that they may haT« contributed something to the cnknre which travelled northward through Africa and eventually reached Spain where it was carried to the Moors' The explorer is planning to travel nn through Nigeria from the Western Coast along the old caravan route to Timbuktu and then eastward to Lake Chad region. At Timbuktu he will be joined by an official Swedish ex. pedition under the command of Lieutenant Moberg. The two expeditions will then join their forces for mutual safety.

The records of travellers in Northern Nigeria reveal the fact that most of them have come in contact with peoples and tribes who undoubtedly have lived in that area for long periods of time—a fact which lends colour to Dr. Torrance’s conclusions. The area is just west of Chad on the Plateau of Bouchi in the country of the Montoils and Yergums, of whom the late Lieutenant Boyd Alexander, of the British Army, told the Manchester Geographical Society: “They are pagan cannibals, the early state of whose civilisation is shown by the fact that they have not yet evolved as fax as the village stage.” The terrific heat, the prevalence of tropical diseases and the unfriendliness of some of the tribes of this area have served to keep the white man at bay. A. C. G. Hastings, in writing of a trip eastwards to the town of Yo on Lake Chad in his “Nigerian Days,” says:—

“My road lay parallel with the To River, which curved and twisted lti way to the Chad, where it touched the banks seldom enough. The water pools and green vegetation and trees refresh the eye and gave a touch of coolness to the air. “Mostly, the road dragged its weary way through sand and thorn-scrub is the deadliest monotony.” “In all that four days’ ride I never saw, except along the river, one single farm or any sort of crop, which had not died. The sun, a blinding white halation in a blue sky, ponred dowi upon us a heat which seemed more than a heat—a demon sent to torture. Sometimes a dust storm blew up to torture us further. I never felt such heat as along that road to Chad. It was the acme of all hast, setting the whole landscape jumping and shimmering with its waves, deadening all life beneath its hammer blows. "To the north of this area live the wild desert men of the Asben tribes, who live in territory where it his been known not to rain for live years.” Dr. James H. Breasted, director of the Oriental Institution of the University of Chicago, has declared that the human career conld be traced in Egypt for at least several hundred thousand years. He bases his assumption that the beginnings of the human race occurred in Egypt partially on the fact that Egypt escaped the glacial rigours of the Ice Age and the devastating floods of the period immediately following. Dr. Torrance and Lieutenant Moberg hope, on their forthcoming expedition, to settle the long controverted question as to whether man'i beginnings were in Asia or in Africa by finding alive the direct descendants of the Neanderthal man himself.