FURTHER RESULTS
CHINGULUNGULU, August 31, 1906.
I am still at Chingulungulu, cursing the infernal heat, horrible dust
and dirty natives with more fervour than ever, but unable to get away
from them. The reason for this is the fact that while at first my stay
here seemed utterly barren of scientific results, this state of things
gradually reversed itself, so that the difficulty now lay in dealing
with the mass of new impressions and observations. It is impossible to
relate in full detail the exact way in which I obtained an insight into
native customs and ideas—this would fill several volumes, and my time is
limited. I shall therefore content myself with a few personal touches
and a small selection from the various departments of the material and
mental life of the tribes inhabiting this vast plain.
The most important incident affecting my expedition was the engagement
of Nils Knudsen as a permanent member of its staff, subject, of course,
to the consent of the Agricultural Committee. I fancy the arrangement is
satisfactory to both parties. As I have already remarked, Knudsen is in
the service of the Lindi Municipality, as master of the Industrial
School. At the request of the District Commissioner, he had been granted
leave of absence to make a tour through the plain west of the Makonde
Plateau and exercise a sort of supervision over the village headmen. For
reasons of which I am not called on to judge, the plan of appointing
such European inspectors has been given up again, and, as the Lindi
municipality naturally saw no occasion to let their industrial teacher
travel about the country for his own amusement, he was recalled. I must
honestly confess that I had long found Knudsen quite indispensable, and
therefore took the opportunity of applying to the District Commissioner
for permission to engage him, when the latter, a few days ago, visited
us on one of his official tours. He has seemed ever since to enjoy an
increased sense of his own importance and, in fact, the task of
initiating a German scholar into the deepest secrets of alien life is no
doubt a far pleasanter one than that of teaching lazy native boys to
plane, saw, forge and solder.
The second incident is a severe attack of fever, with which I have been
laid up during the last few days. I was just about to photograph the old
Sudanese sergeant who had come up with Ewerbeck, and who was chiefly
remarkable for a cough which kept everyone awake at night. When I saw
him going to muster his men for roll-call in the middle of the
afternoon, I went to take down my 9 x 12 cm. camera which hung from a
nail on one of the pillars of the _baraza_; but let it fall in lifting
it down, and found, on picking it up, that the sliding front had got
bent and the instantaneous shutter injured by the fall. The first
accident was remedied by energetic pressure, for the second nothing
could be done. I do not to this day understand why the loss of this
instrument should have thrown me into such a state of excitement; but
there are moments in life when we do, or omit to do, things for which we
afterwards vainly try to account. I suppose I never even remembered at
the time that I still possessed a 13 × 18 cm. apparatus of excellent
quality. That I did not recall the fact later on, is easier to
understand, as by sunset I found that my temperature was rapidly rising.
I tried a remedy previously found effectual for bringing on
perspiration—huge quantities of tea with citric acid in it, but in vain.
After a terrible night with an average temperature of over 104°, the
fever had so far abated that I could exert myself to make the working
drawings for additional slides to my 13 × 18 cm. camera, which I wished
to send to the Indian _fundi_ at Lindi. Up to this moment I had thought
my photographic equipment perfect, but the possibility of such an
accident as befell my smaller camera and of remedying it by the use of
simple wooden frames had not occurred either to me or the firm who
supplied me. By exerting all my energies, I was just able to finish the
drawings and send them off by a runner to Lindi, when my temperature
again rose above 100° and I was forced to go back to bed. The attack
then ran its course and came to an end, as fever always does. To-day I
should almost feel inclined to smoke, if we had any tobacco worthy of
the name. However, I have now had quite enough of Chingulungulu, and as
the Rovuma with its green banks and clear, cool water, its sand-banks
and islands is only a day’s march distant, we intend to go thither
shortly for a rest and change after all the discomforts, great and
small, of our stay here.
Before leaving, I feel that I ought to set down at least a few of the
observations made at this place.
Among many other diseases, such as malarial, black-water and remittent
fever, sleeping-sickness, guinea-worm, beriberi, and whatever other
ills, great or small, mankind may suffer from in these otherwise
favoured regions, leprosy is unfortunately endemic in our colony on the
Indian Ocean. On the coast of the southern district, the Government is
trying to prevent the further spread of this terrible disease, by
establishing an isolation hospital on an island in the Lukuledi Estuary,
where the patients, at present about forty in number, are treated by the
medical staff at Lindi. Here in the interior, lepers are for the present
entirely dependent on the care of their fellow-tribesmen. Among the Yaos
this care is a mixture of human sympathy and the crudest barbarity. The
patient is taken to a hut built specially for him in a remote part of
the bush, where his friends or relations bring him food, till the end
seems to be approaching. If the wise men of the tribe come to the
conclusion that this diagnosis is correct, a last and very abundant meal
is carried out to the hut, which is then fastened up from the outside,
so strongly that, even had the patient the power and the will to make an
effort, he could not free himself. He is thus, should he still have any
vitality left by the time the last of the food and drink is consumed,
condemned to perish of starvation.
[Illustration: VILLAGE OF THE NGONI CHIEF MAKACHU]
[Illustration: GRAVE OF THE YAO CHIEF MALUCHIRO, AT MWITI]
Another picture connected with death presents itself. We have already
seen the mysterious, legend-haunted site of Hatia’s grave on Unguruwe
mountain; those of other mortals are unpretending enough and quite
prosaic in character. In the country round Chingulungulu I have found
graves, both old and recent, at various places in the bush, none of them
outwardly distinguishable from graves in our own country, except that
the mounds over those of children are round or oval, instead of long
like those of adults. So far I have seen nothing of the custom reported
to me by several informants, of building a hut over the grave, and
decorating it with calico. Only one grave at Masasi had such a hut, but
I was told that it was an Arab grave, and there was no cloth.[35] The
grave of Nakaam’s predecessor, Maluchiro, at Meviti, has unfortunately
quite lost the traditional character. Here the traveller finds a large
oval hut, and, stooping under the wide, overhanging eaves to enter, he
sees, in the solemn twilight within, massive clay pillars at the head
and foot of the grave, and a somewhat lower wall on either side of it.
Such monuments are shown with pride by the natives to the passing
European, but they are a proof how far Islamitic culture has penetrated
the old African life.
European influence also has a share in the disappearance of old customs,
though, in one point, at least, it is less far-reaching than I had
supposed. I imagined that a box of matches would be found in every
native hut, but I have seen nothing of the sort, and, moreover, have
observed no other way of procuring fire. Yet no hut is ever without it.
Here we have the startling solution of a question which has long
occupied the attention of ethnographers. Not so many decades ago,
inquirers of the standing of Tylor and Lubbock seriously believed in the
existence of fireless tribes—even our brown fellow-subjects in the
Marianne Islands being classed with such unfortunates. The contrary of
this hypothesis has now been irrefutably demonstrated, and it is known
that there is no tribe in the world ignorant of the use of fire, or even
of the mode of producing it artificially. The problem has therefore
assumed another aspect. Did men first use fire, and then learn to
produce it? that is to say, did they begin by making use of its natural
sources, such as volcanoes and lava currents, burning naphtha-beds,
trees kindled by lightning, or heaps of vegetable matter ignited by
spontaneous combustion?—or did they first learn to bring out the divine
spark by boring, friction, or percussion, and then proceed to harness
the kindly element to household tasks? Both sequences of events are _a
priori_ possible, though, of course, the first is much the more probable
of the two. To-day we may say that it is the only one recognised. This
knowledge we owe entirely to ethnography.
At a time when hundreds of students are continually busy investigating
and describing the remotest and most forlorn of primitive tribes at
present accessible—when the existing ethnographic museums are filled to
overflowing with new collections, and new museums are opened every year,
it is strange to think of the earlier and less favoured period which had
to be content with mere arm-chair theories. Two branches of a tree rub
together in a storm. As the wind grows stronger, the friction becomes
more rapid, till the surfaces are heated; at last a tiny spark appears,
it becomes a larger spark, and then a devouring flame which consumes the
whole tree. Primitive man, standing under the tree, has been watching
the process with amazement. “Oh!” says he, “is that how it’s done?” and
thereupon takes a couple of sticks and does likewise.
[Illustration: KINDLING FIRE BY FRICTION]
In this description we have a typical specimen of the old-fashioned
theory devoid of any concrete basis of fact. It is the hypothesis
propounded by Kuhn, the philologist, who, fifty years ago, was at least
as famous for his “Origin of Fire”[36] as for his work in comparative
linguistics. We of a generation which knows no reverence have grown
accustomed to laugh at the venerable scholar; but such is the way of the
world.
It is always well to remember, in the case of a widely-distributed art,
like the production of fire, that it may have originated in more ways
than one. When we see to-day that by far the greater number of primitive
tribes make use of a boring implement, while a smaller section uses
friction, and a third an instrument like a saw, and the rest have
already advanced to the principles of the flint and steel, the concave
mirror and the pneumatic fire-producer—it follows of itself that such
must be the case. At the same time this variety of method shows us that
the production of fire is everywhere a secondary matter, an accidental
discovery, made while pursuing some entirely different end. This is even
found to be the case with the Malay fire-pump of South-Eastern Asia.
This is a tube, closed below, into which a tightly-fitting piston, whose
hollow lower end encloses a small piece of tinder, is forcibly driven,
when the compression of the air heats it sufficiently to ignite the
tinder. The blow-pipe, which has the same distribution, gives us a hint
as to the invention of this appliance. In drilling the hole to make this
weapon, it would soon be observed that the air within the tube readily
becomes hot enough to ignite the dust or shavings; and it would not be
difficult to do the same thing again intentionally. In the very oldest
culture of mankind, we can find indications of how all other forms of
fire-producing implements came to be invented. The earliest primitive
man had to scrape, bore, rub and saw, in order to shape his elementary
weapons and implements in accordance with the purpose for which they
were to be used. All these processes produced dust, which under
favourable circumstances became ignited through the heat engendered by
rapid motion.
This is the view taken by present-day ethnographers of the way in which
the use of fire originated. No doubt the invention was made
independently in many places and at various times, but only, in all
probability, after men were already familiar with fire as a natural
phenomenon. This necessarily follows from the fact, observed by careful
travellers among all primitive people, that fire is looked after and
cherished as a kind of domestic animal, all possible precautions being
taken to prevent its going out. It is even probable that the invention
of the house was suggested by the necessity of protecting the fire from
rain and snow. In the tribes which have come under my own observation,
nothing is so touching as their care for the “eternal fire.” If I had
not made a point of getting young and old people to show me, in every
place visited, the mode of making fire by boring, I might live ten years
in the country without seeing the slightest indication of their being
acquainted with such a thing. They carry the smouldering brand with them
for enormous distances, and only when, in spite of all care, it has gone
out, and no other fire can be borrowed, the man takes up his two sticks
and kindles a new fire by short but severe exertion. It is not every man
who can do this. I have seen skilled practitioners who had a bright
flame leaping up within half a minute from the first twirl of the stick,
while others toiled away for a long time and effected nothing. One
essential point is the notch at one side of the bore-hole, so that the
first spark can reach the little cone of dust as quickly as possible. It
is also necessary to twirl the stick quietly and with a uniform, not a
hurried motion, and to blow gently and steadily. In my Leipzig
experiments in fire-boring I tried all possible methods, and my students
and I wearied ourselves out in vain, for want of knowing and attending
to these three points.
I see, somewhat to my surprise, that the distinction between the skilled
and unskilled use of weapons is also fully recognised. What sort of
shooting the men here can do with their muzzle-loaders I am unable to
judge, as the importation of powder has been prohibited since the
rising,[37] and therefore these weapons are not now in use. This is one
reason why the old-fashioned arms are more in evidence at present; and,
besides, everyone knows that the stranger from Ulaya is interested in
such things. As far as hunting is concerned, however, (and this is the
principal purpose for which weapons are required,) the use of firearms
has occasioned little or no change in tactics. The difficulty of getting
within shot of the game with these antediluvian flint-lock guns is
almost as great as with bows and arrows, and the innumerable precautions
taken before and during hunting expeditions are intended to overcome
these difficulties. The local hunters, among whom Nils Knudsen easily
takes the first place, have, in the course of the month spent at
Chingulungulu, described to me with the fullest details, all native
methods of hunting, and everything connected therewith. When everything
else failed, when I was weary with the continuous work of photographing,
making phonographic and cinematographic records, sketching,
cross-examining and taking notes, and when it became evident that my
unlucky informants were only being kept awake by consideration for their
distinguished visitor, I had only to touch on the subject of hunting,
and everyone was quite fresh again, myself included; for, as a matter of
fact, no more interesting ethnographical picture can be conceived than
that suggested by these conditions.
[Illustration: MY COMPANION, NILS KNUDSEN]
In one of those daily conferences in which the men of the village pass
much of their time during the greater part of the year, the assembly has
to-day decided on a great hunt, to be held shortly. With an eagerness
not usually seen in these muscular but fairly plump figures, everyone
immediately hurried to his hut to inspect his weapons. It is a
well-known fact that the native always keeps his gun in first-rate
condition, but this is not the point just now. What has to be done is to
cast a spell on the quarry and to secure the assistance of higher powers
for the matter in hand. For this purpose, medicine, much and strong
medicine, is needed. The most powerful charms are parts of the bodies of
still-born children; for, as they have been unable to do any harm in the
world, every part of them is, in the native view, calculated to have a
beneficent influence. Similar ideas seem to underlie the efforts made to
obtain the human placenta for such purposes. On the other hand, bones of
men long dead, especially of such as were famous hunters in their
lifetime, are eagerly sought in the belief that the qualities of the
deceased will be transferred to the user. All these things, together
with the roots of certain plants, are made up into amulets with which
the hunter adorns both himself and his gun. Not until he has assured
himself that he is forearmed against any possible casualty can he start
with an easy mind.
There is, of course, no danger involved in hunting the numerous
antelopes of the country. The hunters assemble early in the morning at
the rendezvous agreed on, but before they start they are all rubbed down
with decoctions of certain roots. This is necessary to overpower by
means of a smell less alarming to the game, the strong bodily effluvium
already alluded to, together with the peculiar odour of wood smoke,
etc., from the huts, which hangs about them. Even the ordinary antelopes
require great care in this respect, the eland much more, and the
elephant, of course, most of all. Not till this is done does the hunt
begin. Having once found the track, the men follow it up without
stopping, ascending ant-heaps, climbing trees, and keeping a look-out
from hills. At last, having got within thirty or forty yards of the
quarry, whether a solitary animal or a herd, they fire a volley of shot
and slugs which either brings it down at once, or wounds it so severely
that, on following up the blood-spoor, they find it dead in the bush.
All the party now crowd round to dip their amulets in its blood, and so
make them more effectual for the future. The successful marksman gets
the tip of the tail as a much coveted ornament. He and his companions
now take a small piece of the animal’s nose as medicine, to strengthen
and sharpen their scent, of the apex of the heart, to give them
endurance and perseverance in stalking, of the eyes, to make their sight
keener, and of the brain to increase their intelligence. These parts are
eaten, and also a small piece of flesh from the place struck by the
bullet—this to ensure a similar result next time—and a piece of the
liver. I have not been able to ascertain the reason for this last; but
this organ being by many peoples regarded as the seat of life, perhaps
this association of ideas is at the bottom of the practice. All
particles of flesh or hide which adhere to the hands after partaking of
this remarkable hunting-breakfast must by an invariable rule be smeared
on the stock of the gun. Then they all hasten away. The animal is dead,
it is true, but its spirit has not been killed, and will want to revenge
itself. They return with various herbs and roots, the juice of which
they make haste to rub over their bodies, and so protect themselves.
But what are the observances connected with a mere antelope hunt
compared with the mass of superstitious practices which precede,
accompany and follow the chase of the elephant? I cannot here describe
in detail the preparation of the medicines and charms and their more
than fantastic ingredients. An elephant-hunt not only compels the master
of the house himself to adopt a particular regimen both by day and
night, but also exercises a similar constraint on his wife for at least
a week beforehand. As a rule, the native dislikes nothing more than any
interruption of his night’s rest, but at this time man and wife are
often kept on their feet half the night in order to prepare the
necessary charms. Portions of the human placenta, brain, etc., are again
among the principal ingredients, with the addition of human _semen_, and
in particular, decoctions of the bark of various trees with which the
hunter has to anoint himself and his gun. I must refer the reader to the
official report of my expedition, where these and many other details may
be found.
We cannot undertake to follow the hunters on their expedition, and have
to be content with pointing out that there is one infallible means of
stopping an elephant when all efforts to come up with him have failed.
It is very simple—you take some earth from the four footprints of the
animal pursued, mix it with a certain medicine made of roots, and tie
the mixture fast somewhere. After this the elephant will be unable to
move, let him try never so hard.
When at last the hunt has been successful and the elephant is killed,
the first thing done is to cut off the tip of his trunk, which is
immediately buried. It is believed that this is the most dangerous part
of an elephant and lives on long after the animal has been killed. It is
buried so that it may not see what is done next. The hunters dance round
the fallen colossus, firing off their guns over and over again in token
of rejoicing; then they seek for medicinal roots, with which they rub
their bodies as a protection against the elephant’s revengeful spirit.
This done, they are at leisure to cut out the tusks, cut up the carcase,
consume enormous quantities of the fresh meat, and dry the rest for
carrying away. This is done in the same manner in which fish are dried
on the Rovuma, that is, over a fire, on a stage about two feet high.
Others prefer to cut it into strips and let it dry in the sun. There is
probably not much left to be treated in this way; the native, like a
vulture, scents any bit of meat which might break the monotony of his
porridge diet, even though it should be miles away; and so, in an
incredibly short time, hundreds of guests see that none of the joint is
wasted.
[Illustration: FISH-DRYING ON THE ROVUMA]