UGANDA JOURNAL.


 II. The Inception of the Saga.

 It is first necessary to examine sources, to throw what light we can on the
inception of the stories.
 Tales of West Africa first came to the ears of Edgar Wallace at an early
stage of his career. After various unsuccessful attempts to earn his living in
sundry capacities, which included those of news-boy, printer's assistant, hand
in a rubber-works, hand in a boot-shop, hand on a Grimsby Trawler, builder's
labourer, concrete-mixer for a road-maker, and milkman, he enlisted at the age of
19 as a Private in the Royal West Kent Regiment. From that Regiment he
transferred later to the Royal Army Medical Corps as a Hospital Orderly, and
in that capacity was posted in 1896 to South Africa, where he remained several
years, as soldier and civilian.
 In 1897 there took place a British naval punitive expedition to Benin, from
which the wounded were evacuated to the Hospital at Simonstown where Wal-
lace was stationed. It was through talks with these wounded men and the tales they
told him that he picked up his first knowledge of the West Coast, though he
did not utilize that knowledge till many years afterwards.
 A more direct contact with the type of African conditions which he de-
scribes was obtained about ten years later, when he was sent out to report on the
allegations of atrocities in the Congo Free State, in connection with the rubber
trade, that had recently been made by Sir Roger Casement (1903) and E.D. Morel
(1906). He spent a year as the guest of Missionaries at the station of Bonga-
ndanga, 1000 miles up the Congo River, the same place from which Casement
had written his report.
 His missionary hosts were able to supply him with plenty of information about
the subject of his enquiry, but he naturally preferred not to be content with
second-hand evidence and so he spent a good deal of time visiting villages and
interviewing natives wth the help of a French-speaking interpreter. He soon
became much more interested in native affairs in general than he was in the
actual matters he was investigating. "He was fascinated by the life of these prim-
itive tribes, their feuds, their witch-doctors, their artless logic and forest-
born superstition." (2)
 On the Congo River also he picked up all kinds of tales of British and other
European Colonial Administrators, men of the type of Sir Harry Johnston, who
had ruled half-explored Native Territories of the size of a European country,
and whose life was a continual struggle against tribal warfare, cannibalism, secret
societies, sleeping sickness and other diseases, and the peculiar beliefs and
peculiar cunning of the peoples they ruled.
 He also applied himself to the study of the Lomongo language, apparently
of a Bantu type, simple and of limited vocabulary but rich in proverb and meta-

 (2) Edgar Wallace. A biography, by Margaret Lane. I am much indebted to this book
 for information concerning the inception of the Saga.