IN A BUSHONGO VILLAGE
The run from Batempa to Lusambo, aided by the strong stream of the
Sankuru, occupied but a few hours, and we reached the capital of the
district of Lualaba-Kasai well before sundown. We immediately landed
our baggage and called upon the Commissioner of the District to inquire
where we could sleep. Commandant Gustin courteously placed a house at
our disposal, with a small yard or garden at the back where we could
pitch our tents, using the building as a store for the rest of our
baggage. That evening, as it was too late to prepare a meal of our own,
we were invited to dinner with the Government officials at their mess.
The Commissioner of the District, the officer commanding the troops,
and the magistrate and his assistants each take their meals in their
own houses, but all the other officials dine in the mess-room, where
Commandant Saut, the Deputy-Commissioner, takes the head of the table.
This gentleman introduced us to his subordinates in a lengthy and rather
flattering speech, after which we sat down to a good square meal, which
included the rare luxury of beef, for Lusambo is one of the very few
places in the Kasai district where cattle are kept. Next morning we
wandered round the Government station. All the bungalows are built of
brick and are commodious and weatherproof; they are laid out in streets,
each house having its small garden, the trees of which afford a certain
amount of shade to the highway. The house of the Commissioner of the
District, which stands just to the west of the other buildings upon an
eminence overlooking the river, is the only one which boasts of an upper
storey. With the exception of one or two Roman Catholic missionaries
the whole population of Lusambo is made up entirely of Government
officials, including the Commissioner and his Deputy, the judge and his
subordinates, a lieutenant and an N.C.O., transport officials, armourers,
secretaries, &c., to the total number of about fifteen. There are no
ladies at Lusambo. For the use of the Commissioner two or three ponies
are kept. These come, I believe, from the Welle district, and a couple of
colts have been bred at Lusambo, but, owing to the numerous swamps and
streams necessitating log bridges in the country round, the use of the
horses when travelling is seldom if ever resorted to, and they appear
to be kept rather as an experiment in horse-breeding than for actual
work, though of course they are used for “hacking” round the station.
In the course of our wanderings round Lusambo we visited the quarters
of the native troops, of whom about one hundred and fifty are kept at
the headquarters of the district, together with a couple of very light
field guns, which are carried in sections by porters when on service.
The men are very well housed, their buildings being of brick, and very
comfortable compared with the straw or plaster huts occupied by soldiers
in remote stations, which, in turn, are superior to the dwellings the men
were used to in their villages before they enlisted. Some of the older
men have furnished their quarters quite neatly with substantial beds,
upon which spotless blankets and sheets of cotton material are spread,
and in many instances crucifixes are to be found upon the walls. One
hut that I went into unexpectedly to change a camera film was a perfect
model of cleanliness and order. The black population of Lusambo must
be enormous, but consisting as it does of natives of several different
tribes it does not inhabit one large town, but a number of separate
villages scattered around the Europeans’ settlement. Where the people
of so many tribes are brought into daily contact with one another it
is certain that many tribal customs are exchanged among them or, under
the influence of the “civilisation” introduced by the presence of the
white officials and the missionaries, many customs totally disappear. A
residence, therefore, in a big centre like Lusambo can be of little value
to any one desiring to study the primitive life of the natives, but for
the artist in search of models the place offers a wonderful selection of
various negro types. We therefore spent some days at Lusambo giving Hardy
an opportunity of making some portrait studies before going on to the
eastern part of the Bushongo country.
Around Lusambo are to be found villages inhabited by Batetela, Basonge,
Babinji, Baluba, and Bushongo, the latter being the real inhabitants
of the district. In addition to these, there is a very large mixed
population of natives belonging to no particular village, who are
generally termed Baluba by the white men of the Kasai, but who in
reality belong to that tribe no more than to any other. These people are
the “undesirable aliens” who frequent nearly every big centre. Their
existence is a curse to the Kasai district. When the Arab slave raiders
were finally put down their slaves had to find homes somewhere, and
accordingly settled in places such as Lusambo; many of them who had been
born in slavery or who had been captured as infants did not even know to
what country they originally belonged; they had no villages; they owed
allegiance to no chiefs. They were, mentally, far below the average free
man of a primitive tribe. These unfortunates have settled in places like
Lusambo and Luebo, and have there produced children of a type as debased
as themselves. Add to this population the riff-raff of the district—men
who had to leave their village for the village good and have fled to the
centre of Government to avoid the vengeance of their chiefs, “domestic”
slaves whose idleness has induced their masters to ill-treat them,
thieves, murderers, runaway workmen from factories, and loose women—add
these to the number of freed slaves and you have the “undesirable alien”
population of places like Lusambo.
These miserable creatures for some reason or other, probably because
in their chequered careers they have seen more of the world than the
ordinary native of the villages, consider themselves superior to the
simple tribesmen, and lose no opportunity of sneering at him and his
ways. They despise him and he hates and despises them. Unfortunately a
very large percentage of workmen employed in Government stations and
factories are drawn from this lowest caste of native. It is often quite
impossible to obtain workmen from the local tribe, so the agent who
requires labour has to recruit it in some big centre where any number of
these so-called Baluba are always to be found ready to work when their
resources are at an end. Unless very carefully watched these gentry will
probably cause trouble with the natives in the district in which they are
employed. In the cases of factories being attacked, white men murdered
or molested, or some other “outrage” on the part of the local natives,
which are by no means so infrequent as might be supposed, the cause can
nearly always be traced to the white man’s followers, his Baluba. They
are overbearing until real trouble arises, and then they desert their
master and run. A sure way for the traveller to find difficulties is
to employ a large number of such men and not to keep them perfectly
under control. They swagger into the villages, call the inhabitants
“bush-men” (Basenshi), and threaten to turn the anger of their master
upon the people if they do not supply them with everything they ask for.
With such men, too, endless disputes about women are certain to arise.
These so-called Baluba must not be confused with the real Baluba, a fine
warrior race inhabiting the south-eastern part of the Belgian Congo. I
have used for them the name by which they are generally known to the
white men of the district, and as our work did not take us into the
country of the real Baluba, and I shall therefore have little or nothing
to say about these people, I have not tried to invent a special term for
the riff-raff of the big towns. The Arabs called them “Ruga-Ruga.”
What the future of these people is to be is extremely difficult to
imagine. It is one thing for the white man to introduce his civilisation
and his religion into a community such as an ordinary native tribe,
which has its own laws and customs often convertible to those of a
European, but it is quite a different task to attempt the reformation
of a heterogeneous mass of scoundrels to whom law and order are utterly
distasteful. If taken when quite young the children of these Baluba could
doubtless be made to grow into useful members of society, but I am afraid
that until the present generation has died out it will continue to be a
curse to the country.
I have mentioned the “freed” slaves of the Arabs and the “domestic”
slaves of the natives. It may not be out of place to say here a few
words upon the great difference between the old-time slave trade and
the system of domestic slavery which obtains to-day all over the Kasai
district, and which will, I think, continue to exist for a long time
to come. The horrors of the slave trade, with its burned villages, its
massacres, and the terrible sufferings of the victims on the road, are
well known to most people, but many are apt to confuse the capture and
sale of slaves with the state of “domestic slavery,” which is, not
infrequently, a condition by no means more terrible than that of domestic
service in Europe. Of course the life of the slave in one tribe differs
considerably from his lot in another. Among the Bankutu of the great
forest, as I shall show later on, slaves are invariably eaten, and in
many districts it has been customary to bury slaves alive at the funeral
of some important personage; but, on the other hand, in the case of most
tribes, the master is obliged to provide his slave with a house and
even with a wife; and at the court of the King of the Bushongo, as my
narrative will show, some of the highest positions are held by slaves,
and cases are not rare nowadays of a slave being allowed to marry a free
woman. The work done by the slave of an ordinary native of a primitive
tribe appears to consist solely of hunting, building, or cultivating for
his master, and the amount of it they have to do is by no means great.
In fact in most instances, I think, the lot of a domestic slave compares
favourably with that of the “maid-of-all-work” of a London suburb. Among
people with whom gambling is the besetting sin it is quite common for
a man who has risked and lost his all to finally stake his family and
even his own liberty upon the game and thus become the slave of the
winner; this occurs frequently among the Bambala of the Kwilu. There
is, however, another side to the question of domestic slavery which has
been brought into existence by the low class Baluba referred to above.
Such of these people as possess sufficient means will often purchase a
slave and then compel him to enter the employ of the white man. At the
end of his term of service the slave has to hand over to his master all
the goods that he has earned. Of course in theory all the slave has to
do is to call upon a Government official—a magistrate, if there is one
within reach, or, failing him, any _chef de poste_—who will at once
tell him that his earnings are his own, as slavery no longer exists,
and therefore his master has no right to any of his possessions; but in
practice this does not work out as well as it might if the country were
more effectually occupied by greater numbers of Government officials.
The slave very rarely appeals to the official, for he knows that he
would be ill-treated and robbed as soon as he returned to the village
of his master, and that the white man would be powerless to prevent
this. One would imagine that no slave, unless he were an absolute fool,
would ever return within reach of his master when he has earned a good
sum in the white man’s employ, but as a rule he does so, and therefore
it is largely his own fault if he is robbed. My own “boy” Sam is a case
in point. We discovered that he was a slave of a Bushongo of Lusambo,
and we frequently advised him not to return to Lusambo when he left our
service. He was fully determined, however, to do so; he had a sister
and many friends in the neighbourhood. We pointed out carefully to him
that if any attempt was made to rob him of his pay he must at once call
upon the authorities, and, before sailing for Europe, we handed over the
considerable sum which he had earned to Mr. Westcott, the missionary
at Inkongu, who kindly consented to act as the lad’s banker, as we had
done for the last two years. In this way he could scarcely be robbed,
but in the case of the ordinary workman returning from a factory such
precautions are well-nigh impossible. In addition to this, the slave
often has a great dislike to appealing to the white man for protection
against his master. Sam expressed his intention of voluntarily paying to
his master the usual price of a slave (not a large sum), and in this we
encouraged him, for though it was legally quite unnecessary we considered
the idea a very fair one, as domestic slavery, repugnant as it is to our
ideas of liberty, is one of the accepted principles of negro life, and we
felt that by thus redeeming himself the boy would be acting honourably
to his master. The idea originated from Sam himself, and, I think, does
him credit. The large centres, such as Lusambo and Luebo, are hotbeds of
this kind of slavery, and it is very difficult, if not quite impossible,
to prevent it. When we remember that even in civilised capitals
blackguards are to be found living upon the illgotten gains of their
fellow-creatures, and the best efforts of modern police systems have been
powerless to stamp out the evil, it is perhaps not surprising that a very
similar state of affairs should exist in the heart of Africa, where the
Government is, in my opinion at any rate, considerably undermanned.
Even to this day “razzias,” or raids for the capture of slaves,
occasionally take place in the south-western part of the Congo. Usually
the offenders belong to the Badjok tribe, occupying part of the frontier
between Angola and the Belgian Congo, with whom we came into contact
at the end of our journey. We met an officer who had surprised and
defeated a caravan of these scoundrels; but the old-time slave-trade is
practically dead in the country of which I am writing.
I have tried to point out that slavery in the Southern Congo can be
divided into three kinds—the slave trade as introduced by the Arabs; the
pernicious system of letting out slaves existing among the riff-raff
of the big centres; and the often innocuous and very prevalent system
of domestic slavery which obtains in the primitive villages. Detailed
discussions of the status of the domestic slave in the various tribes
among whom Torday has worked will be found in the scientific record
of this journey which he and Mr. Joyce are publishing, and also in
various papers by them which have appeared in the _Journal of the
Royal Anthropological Institute_; it will therefore be unnecessary for
me to deal at greater length with this question in my narrative of our
wanderings in the Kasai.
The market of Lusambo is held every Sunday in a large open space just
to the north of the European quarter. The crowd is enormous, and, as is
usual with negro crowds, rather unpleasant to the white man’s olfactory
organ; but it is interesting in the extreme. Food-stuffs preponderate
among the articles offered for sale, and these were of sufficient variety
to tempt the appetite of any negro gourmet; manioc, maize, millet, dried
locusts, caterpillars, young rats (in the pink stage and held together on
wooden skewers), and a host of other delicacies were laid out upon leaves
on the ground, and around them eager crowds of natives (male and female)
added their voices to the general hum as they loudly bargained for their
week’s supply of stores. The haggling over prices was keen, but we saw no
sign of any disturbance, and we were told that trouble in the market is
extremely rare. The buyers and sellers themselves varied in appearance
as much as did the goods over which they were arguing. One noticed a
tall sergeant from the Welle, with an almost Arab type of countenance,
elbowing his way between red-painted, scantily clothed women of the real
Baluba people from across the Sankuru, upon the head of one of whom a
tall plume of feathers denoted that she had recently given birth to a
child; here and there a stately elder of the local Bushongo tribe could
be seen, easily distinguishable by his dignified manner and refined
features from the crowd of riff-raff slaves by which he was surrounded.
Sometimes one sees in the market of Lusambo one of the most frightful
members of the human family, an albino negro. We noticed two of these
freaks. One, a small boy with a deathly white skin and white woolly hair,
was not so ugly as a grown-up man, whose face seemed to possess every
characteristic which exists in the negro countenance horribly accentuated
by the pallor of his complexion. His face was almost inhuman and, once
seen, is likely never to be forgotten.
There are no booths or shelters of any kind in the market-place, all
the dealing being carried on in the open, the wares being displayed on
the ground. We found little to interest us in those of the villages
constituting the native quarters of Lusambo, which we found time to
explore; they were all modern in design, with plaster huts, and bore no
resemblance to the national form of village of the tribes which inhabited
them. But we were able to do some ethnographical work among the local
branch of the Bushongo tribe, whose kinsmen of Misumba we were shortly to
visit. A large number of these people came to see us at our residence,
and Torday lost no opportunity of interrogating them. One of them turned
out to be a very old and important personage—the prime minister of the
Bushongo of Lusambo. This old fellow, now very decrepit and nearly blind,
remembered perfectly the arrival of the first white man upon the Sankuru.
One day the natives of Lusambo had been terrified by the apparition on
the river of a huge canoe, breathing fire as it advanced; they fled from
the banks of the stream, believing that some devil had descended upon
them. Then they noticed that one of the white men, of whose existence
they had heard, was standing in the bow of the vessel waving cloth to
them, so a few of the bolder spirits remained by the riverside to await
his arrival. When the white man landed, they discovered that he was
not only flesh and blood, but agreeable as well, as our aged informant
quaintly put it.
Among the Bushongo of Lusambo the use of a red dye made from a wood
locally called “tukula” is very prevalent. Although, as is only natural
in a large place where imported goods are so easily obtainable,
loin-cloths of European cotton-stuffs are to some extent replacing the
old-time material made of the fibre of the raphia leaf, but this imported
cotton is almost invariably dyed red with the “tukula,” which is also
plentifully applied to the bodies and hair of the Bushongo. It gives them
a very picturesque appearance. Several little girls, about five or six
years old, used to come to visit us at meal-times, when we regaled them
with lumps of sugar and other delicacies, and really very pretty they
were with white cowrie shells plaited into the front of their “tukula”
dyed hair, ropes of blue glass beads hanging around their necks, and
their little bodies freshly covered with the red dye. We made great
friends with these children, as indeed we always endeavoured to do with
the little ones of every village we visited, and Hardy painted one or two
charming portraits of them. The tukula is so commonly used by all the
Bushongo people, about whom I shall have a good deal to say later on,
that I must give my reader some idea of what it is and where it comes
from. The tree is a large one, growing in many parts of the equatorial
forest north of the Sankuru; its wood is hard and very heavy. In colour
it is about maroon. When rotten the wood is rubbed into powder on a stone
and then, mixed with oil, is applied to the hair, body, or clothes. We
brought home several small logs of this wood, after our journey in the
forest, and it appears to be cam-wood. I have had a little of it made up
into small articles of furniture, and it is certainly very ornamental,
but its great weight prevents large pieces of it being brought to the
river, where only human portage is available. The Bushongo to the south
of the Sankuru import large quantities of their wood from the tribes
of the great forest. While at Lusambo we made friends with a very
intelligent lad belonging to the Bushongo tribe, and we were anxious
to engage him as an additional “boy,” with a view to obtaining further
information from him about the manners and customs of his people. One
of our servants noticed, however, that the glands behind his ears were
slightly swollen, an early symptom of sleeping sickness, so we could
not imperil the rest of our party by taking him with us. None of the
Bushongo, as I was presently able to discover, are famous for their skill
in hunting, and therefore they, in common with other peoples who live
around Lusambo, employ a race of dwarfs, known as the Batwa, to kill
game for them in the forest. These people are extremely interesting,
and we were fortunate enough to meet with a party of them while staying
at Lusambo. They very rarely visit the centre of government, but one of
the chiefs who employs them had been requested to bring a few to see us.
This he did with some difficulty, for the Batwa are true children of the
forest, and hate the crowds and bustle of Lusambo, but he could not
induce them to stay more than one day, and the most extravagant offers on
our part failed to persuade one of them to accompany us in the capacity
of hunter. Six Batwa, all full-grown men, came to see us. They appeared
to vary from about four feet eight inches to five feet in height, and
looked extremely wiry. Their costumes consisted of a couple of monkey
skins suspended from their belts, one in front and one behind, so that
the tails dragged upon the ground, and they wore tiny antelope horns as
charms around their necks. Each carried a bow and a bundle of poisoned
arrows “feathered” with simple leaves. They were very reticent in talking
to us, but when we suggested a little archery practice in the back garden
they brightened up considerably. We put up a small lemon (some two inches
in diameter) to serve as a mark, and the shooting was conducted at a
range of about fifteen yards. The accuracy of their aim was astonishing,
and they appeared to thoroughly enjoy the proceedings, chaffing the man
whose arrow flew a few inches wide of the lemon, and applauding with
grunts the successful shot. These people have no settled villages, living
a nomad’s life in the forest, sleeping under temporary shelters built of
leaves, and moving their camp according to the movements of game. They
supply their overlord with meat. Their success in hunting is largely due
to the extraordinary skill with which they can creep up to within a few
yards of a sleeping animal and then carefully place a poisoned arrow, to
the deadly effects of which the beast shortly succumbs. I noticed that
the knees of some of the Batwa who visited us were worn as if by much
crawling. In addition to larger game they kill great numbers of monkeys
and birds with their arrows.
Near Misumba we came across other settlements of these Batwa, but south
of the Sankuru they attain to a greater stature than those who inhabit
the great forest, and Torday, at his lecture at the Royal Geographical
Society, has pointed out that this may very probably be due to the more
open, and therefore more airy and sunny, nature of their surroundings.
The Bushongo are firm in the belief that the forest trees opened and
gave birth to the original Batwa; one of the quaint legends which make
the folk-lore of the Bushongo so interesting. About this time, when we
were desirous of moving on from Lusambo to the country of the eastern
Bushongo, a small Government steamer was about to go down the Sankuru to
take an official to Luebo. Commandant Gustin kindly gave us permission
to travel in this vessel, thus saving us the extra time which a canoe
journey would have entailed. We therefore, after only a brief stay at the
chief town of the Kasai district, continued our journey, glad to move
on to a spot more suitable for our work, but remembering with gratitude
the hospitality which had been accorded to us by the Commissioner of the
District and his subordinates. The _Schlagerstrom_ (the vessel in which
we travelled) was in reality nothing but a launch in which there was only
sufficient sleeping accommodation for the captain and the Government
official who was going to Luebo. We therefore encamped by the riverside
when the vessel was moored for the night, a proceeding to which our
weary voyage from Dima to Batempa had well accustomed us. We stopped at
a little fuel-station called Gandu (or “crocodile”), on the left bank
of the river a few miles below the now disused trading post of Isaka
(which is marked upon the map accompanying this volume), and here Hardy
disembarked with most of our baggage, leaving Torday and me to proceed
a little farther in the steamer to search for the burial-place of an
Englishman who had perished in the Sankuru some years before. Commandant
Gustin had requested us to try and find the exact locality of the grave
amid the ruins of the factory, to clear it of grass, and to secure photos
of the spot to be sent to the dead man’s family. Upon reaching the site
of the factory, however, we were unable in the time at our disposal to
find out exactly where the grave was situated, and we could see no local
native fisherman, who would doubtless have been able to take us straight
to the place; we therefore had to return to Hardy, unsuccessful in our
search.
[Illustration: BATWA DWARFS.]
[Illustration: A STREET IN MISUMBA.]
The voyage on the _Schlagerstrom_ was by no means unpleasant, and we
struck up quite a friendship with the captain, a German who had served
in the Kaiser’s navy on board, I believe, the royal yacht. This man was
extremely fond of animals, and his pet at the time we knew him was an
ordinary and very skinny domestic chicken! The bird used to perch upon
his boot as he sat with his knees crossed directing his helmsman from
his easy chair, and took all its food from his hand. A few months later
the _Schlagerstrom_, her captain, and all her crew (with the exception
of one man) were hurled to eternity down the falls of the Congo just
below Stanley Pool. A terrible end for a man whose kindly nature and
unassuming manners made him universally popular among the Europeans
with whom he came in contact, and who was deservedly liked by his native
crew. When Hardy landed at Gandu, we had despatched a messenger to the
Kasai Company’s agent at Misumba requesting him to ask the local Bushongo
chief to send porters to carry our loads to the village, so we had not
long to wait at the fuel-station before the men arrived. We had heard
that buffalo and elephant existed in fair numbers around Misumba, so we
were in high hopes of obtaining some shooting, hopes which were still
further raised when the porters told us that an elephant had been killed
by means of a trap in the neighbourhood not long before, and when, in the
village at which we broke our journey to Misumba, we were shown the tomb
of a man who had held a great reputation as an elephant hunter. Marching
at a fair pace a European can reach Misumba from Gandu in one long day;
but we preferred to halt for the night at the village of Zappo-Lubumba,
a Basongo-Meno settlement about seven or eight miles south of the river
on the edge of the great grassy plains that lie behind the belt of
woodland which clothes the banks of the Sankuru. The track through the
forest is considerably broken by swamps, some of them of sufficient
width to necessitate the use of a dug-out. For a time no canoe could be
obtained, for the people of Zappo-Lubumba were evidently not disposed
to be very friendly, but at last, after sending several messengers to
him, we prevailed upon the chief to cause his subjects to ferry us over
the water, and we pitched our tents that night in the broad, picturesque
street of his village. These Basongo-Meno of the left bank of the Sankuru
belong to the great tribe of that name who inhabit the right bank of
the Kasai and Sankuru. They have adopted Bushongo dress and ways, and to
outward appearance differ in no respect from the Bushongo inhabitants of
Misumba, but between the two villages there is a good deal of ill-feeling
and their inhabitants rarely exchange visits. At Misumba we heard dark
tales of border warfare between them: how in the dead of the night,
usually during a tornado, the Basongo-Meno would creep into outlying
Bushongo villages and murder the people as they slept, the noise of their
coming passing unnoticed in the roar of the storm, and the rain removing
all traces of the direction of their flight should pursuit be attempted
in the morning. The Basongo-Meno, even here to the south of the river,
are by no means friendly to the European, but they are not sufficiently
numerous to oppose him as effectually as have their brethren on the right
bank, whose ferocity has caused their country to be a _terra incognita_
to the white man even to this day.
Next morning we proceeded to march the sixteen or seventeen miles through
the plains that lay between Zappo-Lubumba and Misumba. The day was
extremely hot and the road for the most part entirely devoid of shade, so
our faces soon began to wear that peculiar sneering grin which intense
heat produces by contracting the skin on the cheeks. We were not without
music on the way, for one of the porters had made a horn of the stem of
a pawpaw tree upon which he attempted some ghastly imitations of bugle
calls, learned, doubtless, at Lusambo. This pawpaw stem was capable
of producing quite a clear note like that of a coach horn. The track
through the plains was of the ordinary native kind; that is to say, it
was only a few inches wide and very tortuous, for the negro will always
walk round a stick dropped on the path rather than kick it out of his
way, and accordingly everything dropped on the road causes a fresh bend
to appear in the way. About midway between Zappo’s village and Misumba,
a mile or so to the west of the road, we noticed for the first time one
of the volcanic crevices which are quite a feature of this country. Seen
from the track the earth upon the side of a grassy slope appears to
have been cut away as if with a gigantic shovel, leaving a quarry-like
excavation about two hundred feet deep, and a little over a quarter of a
mile in length. The earth in this hole was red in colour, and at the base
of it was an extensive patch of woodland containing, as I learned later
when exploring the place, a lake. There is a queer legend concerning the
origin of this crevice. About seventy years ago a chief of Misumba was
proceeding to Zappo-Lubumba to attend some important ceremony, and on
the way he encountered two dwarfs, who instead of saluting him with that
respect which a chief of the aristocratic Bushongo people considered
his due, passed him by without so much as a word. The chief, in anger,
had them stopped and brought before him. On being asked why they had
failed to salute so important a personage they gave some impertinent
answer which so angered the chief’s escort that they killed the dwarfs
forthwith. No sooner were they slain than the chief fell down dead.
The dwarfs had been wizards. The Bushongo who were accompanying the
chief were naturally infuriated at their master’s death, and, imagining
that the Basongo-Meno people had sent the wizards to kill him, they
hastened on to Zappo’s village, and there took vengeance by stealing
goats. On their way home they were startled to find that the chief’s
body had vanished, and that a mountain had arisen where it had lain by
the roadside! Not very long afterwards a second Bushongo chief passed
along the same track. When he reached the newly made hill he paused and
poured out the vials of his wrath upon it, cursing it with a fine flow
of Bushongo rhetoric; a peal of supernatural laughter interrupted him,
and in a moment the hill had disappeared, swallowing up the second chief
and leaving in its place the crevice and lake which now exist on the
spot. Such is the legend of the earthquake as told to-day at Misumba.
During our stay in this country we felt one slight shock on April 1,
1908, and this same shock was felt in the great forest as far north as
the Lomela River within a few hours of the same time. Crevices such
as the one I have described are quite common in this country, usually
marking the sources of small streams. After searching for about fourteen
miles we passed, but did not enter, a small village inhabited by the
Batwa who hunt for the chief of Misumba, and then entered a patch of
woodland which was very swampy, and had to be crossed on a roughly made
log bridge. Immediately upon regaining the open country we entered the
village of Misumba. We found that the factory of the Kasai Company lay
between two portions of the village adjoining both, so we pitched our
tents opposite to the agent’s bungalow and accepted his offer of a room
wherein to work, for we felt that we could not possibly be more in the
village if we actually camped in the street. Almost as soon as we arrived
two important personages called upon us—Pongo-Pongo, recognised by
Government as chief of Misumba, and Isambula N’Genga, viceroy of the
Bangongo sub-tribe of the Bushongo (of which Misumba is the capital),
under the great paramount chief of the nation who resides at the Mushenge
or capital, five days’ march to the west. It struck us as being a little
remarkable that these two men should appear to be on such excellent terms
with one another, and more remarkable still that the “chief,” who wore
around his neck the Government badge of authority (a white metal disc on
a chain), should treat Isambula N’Genga with obvious deference, but the
matter soon explained itself.
The ruler of the great Bushongo nation is Kwete Peshanga Kena, the Nyimi,
or king, who resides at the Mushenge. To facilitate the government of his
people he (or rather one of his ancestors) has appointed viceroys of the
outlying sub-tribes, who possess practically unlimited powers and who pay
tribute to the Nyimi. Isambula N’Genga is the viceroy and real ruler of
the Bangongo sub-tribe. In order to save himself trouble the viceroy has
appointed one of his elders (Pongo-Pongo) to act as his representative
in dealing with the Belgian Government. When an officer went round the
country to meet and officially “recognise” the local chiefs he met
Pongo-Pongo, Isambula N’Genga keeping in the background. Pongo-Pongo
represented himself as the chief, and received the official medallion,
but in reality he is no more the chief of Misumba than any of the other
dignitaries who are subordinate to the viceroy. He is merely a sort of
minister for foreign affairs, and acts as a buffer between the chief and
the State. Should the Bangongo incur the displeasure of the Government,
Pongo-Pongo would have to bear the brunt of it; should the representative
of the State give him any presents, I believe that he hands them over
to the viceroy. Pongo-Pongo, therefore, has a somewhat thankless task,
for he would have absolutely no power to prevent Isambula N’Genga doing
anything for which he himself would be punished.
[Illustration: MISUMBA.]
This system of appointing some ordinary person to pose as chief before
Government officials is very common in the Belgian Congo (as doubtless in
other parts of Africa as well), and arises from the too hasty recognition
of chiefs by officials who have had no opportunity of learning much about
the peoples whose country they are supposed to administer. Pongo-Pongo
was evidently told off by the viceroy to attend to our business during
our stay at Misumba, and although we saw a good deal of the real chief
and became very friendly with him, we owe most of the information we
obtained to the readiness with which Pongo-Pongo answered the questions
Torday put to him about his tribe. Isambula N’Genga was a real dandy.
We nicknamed him “Beau Brummell.” When sauntering about his village
accompanied by one or two slaves he was the very personification of
supercilious vanity. All the “elders” of Misumba carry, as a sort of
wand of office, a walking-stick around which some creeper has left a
special mark. These sticks add considerably to the grand air with which
these gentlemen strut about the village. When used as walking-sticks they
are held at arm’s length in an attitude very suggestive of the English
dandies of a century ago; at other times they are carried across the
shoulders, the hands hanging idly over the ends of the sticks. The sticks
themselves are regarded with some respect, doubtless reflected from the
grandeur of their owners, by the common people of the village, for if an
elder leaves his wand across the doorway of a hut which he has entered no
one dares to cross the threshold till the stick has been removed. Of all
the dandies of Misumba, Isambula N’Genga was the most exquisite. He was
always faultlessly “tukulaed,” his hair evidently gave his wives infinite
trouble every morning, he was scrupulously shaved, and his dress, a
long loin-cloth of raphia fibre arranged carefully in many folds, was
invariably clean and neat. He appeared almost too bored to live, and was
much too indolent to be of any great service to Torday when he desired to
obtain information about the Bushongo. At the same time Isambula N’Genga
was as civil to us as he could summon up energy to be, and doubtless if
he had not been friendly we should not have got on half so well with his
people as we did.
We took an early opportunity of exploring the village of Misumba.
Two points struck us as remarkable directly we entered the village
streets—firstly, the fact that every one was busy; and secondly, the
entire absence of any outward sign of the presence of the white man in
the country. Usually upon arriving in an African village one finds that,
although the women are busy enough working in the fields, pounding manioc
into flour or looking after the children, the men are sleeping or idling
away their time beneath the shade of the palms. At Misumba things are
very different. In the midst of the long wide streets are situated many
sheds under which work of all sorts is going on. In one of them the
blacksmith—a much respected member of the community—may be seen at all
hours busily engaged in the manufacture of the broad-bladed Bushongo
knives, arrows, and spear-heads, iron bracelets, &c., while around him
are clustered many bright-eyed smiling children, clothed in nature’s
garb, who love to catch the sparks that fly and eagerly await a turn at
manipulating the primitive hand-bellows with which the small fire is
fanned. Around the sides of the shed old men squat, gravely smoking green
tobacco in their long curved pipes of neatly carved wood, talking over
local politics with the smith, whose opinion is, apparently, worth taking
on any subject.
[Illustration: EMBROIDERING THE RAPHIA CLOTH.]
Beneath the shade of other similar structures men are always engaged
in the manufacture of cloth from the fibre of the raphia leaf, and
continuous “thud-thud” of the hand-looms tells that work is in progress
from early morning till dark. Basket-makers and men working at the
manufacture of hunting nets are to be found in every patch of shade,
while here and there a man is to be seen decorating wooden cups or
boxes with those elaborate and really artistic carvings of which many
specimens are now in the British Museum. So much for the men. The women,
in addition to their ordinary agricultural and household duties, spend
a good deal of time in embroidering with coloured patterns the raphia
cloth woven by the men. This embroidery is of a very high order, some old
pieces which we collected later being extraordinarily fine; they are
now to be seen in the British Museum. The children attend to the goats
and chickens, the only live stock (with the exception of dogs) kept at
Misumba. Any one who has travelled in Africa and has been struck with the
indolence of the negro, would be considerably surprised were he to visit
Misumba. Except the very aged, every one appeared to have something to
do. We could not help feeling at the time of our visit what a pity it is
that up to now no suitable industry has been introduced among a people
so skilful with their hands as the Bushongo. I am sure that if once some
useful and congenial manufacture were introduced at Misumba the people
would show themselves to be remarkably clever workmen. It is difficult
to suggest a suitable industry, but I should think that the manufacture
of wooden articles would appeal to the native if tactfully introduced.
The Bushongo are, however, extremely conservative, and would probably be
slow to adopt any new enterprise. Their conservatism is manifested by
their complete disregard of the ways of the white man and his “Baluba”
employees, although the Kasai Company’s factory is situated actually
within their village (or rather was so situated in 1908, but I believe
there was some talk of its removal to the banks of the Lubudi River about
six miles to the west).
Among the Batetela people of the Lubefu, as I have shown, European
cotton-stuff has practically taken the place of the old-time raphia
cloth, and plaster buildings are fast replacing the original native huts;
among the eastern Bushongo, however, no such change is taking place.
One very rarely sees trade cloth worn at Misumba, the people preferring
to manufacture their own material, which is much more durable and very
little rougher in texture. All the dwellings in the village consist of
the picturesque Bushongo huts which add so much to the neatness and
beauty of the place. They are rectangular buildings about ten feet by
nine feet in size, made of sticks cut from the stem of the palm leaf, and
upon their walls neat patterns are interwoven in black fibre representing
some form of what is known as the “lozenge” pattern. They are usually
very neat and in good repair. Upon several occasions when shooting at
some distance from Misumba I have slept in these huts, and I found them
completely weatherproof even during the heavy storms of the rainy season.
Before sleeping in one of them it is necessary to be sure that the owner
has not prepared for your arrival by brushing out the hut, for, should he
have done so, he will probably have disturbed a number of inhabitants,
other than human, who may cause you to regret having left your tent
behind; but it is only fair to say that the Bushongo are a very cleanly
race on the whole. The houses are as similar to one another in their
internal arrangement as in their outward appearance. The doors are very
small, and the bed, consisting of a mat laid over a rough frame of logs,
is always situated on the left-hand side of the entrance as you go in. A
fire of logs usually occupies the middle of the house, and a large square
box, acting as a larder, is suspended in one corner to keep the food
supply out of the reach of rats and mice. Sticks are thrust into the
walls from which to suspend baskets, cooking pots, and other utensils,
while the corners are filled with hunting nets, bows and arrows, and
spears. Most of the huts have some small charm such as a little curved
figure stuck in the wall under the eaves outside the door. The huts are
laid out in fine straight streets, about thirty yards wide; and built
as it is upon the edge of a wood and containing a fair number of palm
trees, Misumba must rank as one of the neatest and prettiest villages we
visited. We were soon hard at work among the natives. One of the first
things that Torday did was to examine the Batwa, who hunt for the chief
of Misumba. These people, although smaller than the stalwart Bushongo,
are considerably larger than those we had seen at Lusambo, and they
appear to have largely adopted the manners and customs of the Bushongo.
I went out with them upon several occasions in the hopes of obtaining a
shot at some buffalo which used to feed in the plains between Misumba
and Zappo-Lubumba, but I did not get a chance of testing their nerve
when tackling dangerous game, for we were unable to come up with the
beasts; from what I saw of their tracking, however, I consider them the
inferiors of many natives I have hunted with, and I have no doubt that
they cannot compare with the Batwa of the great forest in the matter
of stalking and shooting game. Torday was at great pains to obtain a
vocabulary from these people, and one of the men he interrogated caused
us some amusement. He had been requested to answer clearly the words that
Torday put to him (using as a medium the Chituba language), and so he
sat opposite to him on the other side of a small camp table and roared
out his replies at the top of a remarkably powerful voice. Frequently
he would pause and exchange pleasantries with a number of natives who
were present, and this caused such an interruption of work that we
were obliged to drive the spectators away by threatening them with the
contents of a glass of water. The prospect of having the water thrown
over them caused them to run out into the pouring rain (a real tornado)
to avoid it! The vocabulary proceeded well until we came to the numerals.
Here a real difficulty arose. Our informant was no mathematician. He
insisted upon counting 1, 2, 5, 3, 8, 10, 7, &c. &c., and we could not
induce him to count consecutively; I firmly believe that he was quite
unable to do so. It is, as a matter of fact, by no means so uncommon to
find the primitive negro unable to count beyond the number “five,” up to
which numeral his fingers and thumb act as a guide to his calculations.
Although the Batwa are the real hunters of Misumba, the Bushongo
themselves very frequently indulge in a little sport (if so their hunting
can be termed), for Pongo-Pongo possesses two muzzle-loaders, and dearly
loves an opportunity of displaying them. I accompanied him upon one of
his shooting excursions near the village. The day was very hot, and a
start was not made until nearly noon. This should have shown me that I
was not likely to get many shots myself, as, of course, all game would
long since have sought the shade of the dense woodlands, in which one’s
chance of bagging it with the rifle is very small; but I was anxious
to watch the Batwa and Bushongo hunting in their own way, so I was
glad of the opportunity of accompanying them. We left the village amid
considerable noise, several members of the party performing a sort of
“A-hunting we will go” upon horns made from the points of young elephant
tusks, and others giving vent to the Bushongo war-cry, a sound suggestive
of both a “view holloa” and the neighing of a horse. We numbered about
fifty altogether (including some sportsmen of very tender years), and
were accompanied by some twenty of the tan-and-white prick-eared dogs
which are to be found in every Congo village. Pongo-Pongo carried one of
his muzzle-loaders, while the second one was entrusted to a slave who
walked behind him. The rest of the party were armed only with bows and
arrows and spears, while several of them carried the long nets into which
the game was to be driven. About three-quarters of an hour’s walk brought
us to the side of the wood in which we were to commence operations. Here
a consultation was held as to the arrangements for the “beat.” This was
conducted with all possible noise, and should have been sufficient to
warn any animal within a radius of a mile or two that something very
desperate in the way of hunting parties was about to be held. One man
who, as we subsequently discovered, held an official position as chief
hunter in the village, at last succeeded in shouting down the others and
obtaining a hearing, whereupon he delivered a lengthy speech at the top
of his voice, evidently pointing out to the various people the parts
they were to take in the afternoon’s work. His remarks were received
with universal hand-clapping. The men who had charge of the nets then
departed into the wood. The nets are very long and only about three feet
high. They are placed in a line, and the game is driven towards them, so
that, when entangled in their meshes, it may be speared or shot by men
concealed behind them. Pongo-Pongo now loaded his guns. His bullet-box
was a real curio. It contained scraps of metal of all kinds, and of all
sizes and shapes, none of which, of course, properly fitted the bore
of his guns, so that any accuracy of shooting was entirely out of the
question; all the same, I would rather be hit and mercifully despatched
by any expanding bullet from a modern rifle than receive in my person a
few of those jagged lumps of copper with which Pongo-Pongo (after much
careful examination of his stock of projectiles) proceeded to charge his
guns. While he was so engaged, the owners of the dogs were busy tying
rattles round these animals. Each dog had a spherical rattle hollowed
from a solid piece of wood strapped tightly round its loins, their object
being to make a noise as the line of dogs and beaters advances, and so
frighten the game into the nets, for the dogs themselves do not as a rule
give tongue unless they actually get a view of their quarry. Everything
being at last ready, we moved off into the wood. I noticed carefully
what Pongo-Pongo’s movements would be, and upon finding that he intended
accompanying the beaters, I suggested taking up a stand near the nets,
for I knew that my life would not be worth a moment’s purchase if I
happened to be within range of my host or his slave when they happened to
see a pig, and I had no desire to perish of copper poisoning as a result
of a shot in the leg from his gun. I was accordingly conducted to a
position near the line of nets to await the arrival of game as it retired
before the advancing line of dogs and men. For some time everything was
still. At length a little movement among the countless inhabitants of
the forest trees showed that the birds had become aware that something
unusual was going on, and a few minutes later a hornbill and some
plantain-eaters hurriedly left their perches and departed farther into
the wood, the latter emitting that deep rolling cry which is one of the
most beautiful of all the sounds that break the stillness of the African
forest. A little later a crashing of branches in the tree-tops, growing
rapidly nearer, indicated the approach of a troop of monkeys, and I
had an opportunity of bagging specimens of both a coal-black colobus
and a cercopithecus monkey; an opportunity which, to the disgust of my
Bushongo companions, I did not embrace, as I was not desirous of turning
back with the noise of a shot any more important beast which might be
approaching. Soon the beaters could be heard drawing nearer and nearer,
and the rattles of the dogs could be distinguished as these animals
darted hither and thither in the dense undergrowth, occasionally (though
very rarely) giving vent to a short, sharp yelp. Suddenly some shouting
in the distance caused my companions to quiver with excitement as they
told me that a pig (a red river hog) had been seen by the beaters, and
directed me to keep a keen look-out for the animal, which, if all had
gone well, might be expected to come in our direction. Unfortunately,
however, all had not gone well. The line of beaters converged upon the
nets, driving nothing before them at all, for two pigs (the only animals
seen) had broken back through the line without so much as an arrow in
their hides. I have no doubt that the noisy discussion at the woodside
before commencing the beat had driven all the small antelopes which
inhabit the forest far away into the depths of the wood, and pigs are
notoriously alert and difficult to surprise. Pongo-Pongo, upon rejoining
me, suggested a return home, and we reached Misumba at dusk, very hot,
very scratched, and very thirsty, without bringing with us a single
trophy. This by no means infrequently occurs.
[Illustration: THE HUNTING FETISH, MISUMBA.]
[Illustration: A BUSHONGO OF MISUMBA.]
The Bushongo are a most interesting people; I believe Torday’s work among
them has shown them to be quite one of the most interesting tribes of
Central Africa; they are easy to get on with, and in every way desirable;
but I am afraid their dearest friend could not truthfully make out for
them any claim whatever to be considered sportsmen. They are quite the
worst hunters we met during our journey in the Kasai. Occasionally large
animals are killed by them, but usually this is done by means of traps.
The elephant which I have already mentioned as having been killed near
Misumba was trapped by means of a large harpoon, heavily weighted with
a log, falling upon the nape of his neck from a tree-top, a very common
means of killing elephant and hippopotami. When a large animal is bagged,
a sacrifice is always made to the hunting fetish in Misumba. We were
present at that which took place after the death of the elephant alluded
to above. The fetish, which is supposed to influence the fortunes of the
chase, consists of a wooden image of a man (nearly all head, the body
being of microscopic proportions and covered with cloth). It is very
poorly carved in comparison with the beautifully worked cups and boxes
for which the Bushongo are famous, and in place of the usual tukula
dye, its face is stained with soot. At the ceremony which I am about to
describe, it was placed in the village street, and was surrounded by a
large crowd, including several drummers, who contributed to the sacrifice
quite their fair share of the uproar without which no negro festival is
complete. In front of the image the fetish-man—quite a young man, by the
way—executed a _pas seul_, advancing to the pedestal on which the fetish
stood and then retiring backwards to the edge of the crowd. His dance
at an end (and he displayed considerable endurance before he ceased his
antics), the fetish-man solemnly poured water into the ear of the figure,
while another man, with equal solemnity, blew some tobacco smoke in its
face from his long wooden pipe. An unfortunate (and very skinny) chicken
was then produced, and its throat was cut, the poor bird being allowed
to die slowly on the ground before the image, while the fetish-man
continued his dance and the drummers furiously beat their tom-toms. The
sacrifice was then at an end. Very often similar ceremonies precede a
day’s hunting, and these are sometimes held beneath a sacred tree in
the grounds of the Kasai Company’s factory. The social organisation
of Misumba is almost exactly identical with that of the court of the
great Bushongo king at the Mushenge, although, of course, Isambula
N’Genga being only a viceroy, it is on a smaller scale. We enjoyed ample
opportunities for gaining insight into the intricate organisation of this
miniature court owing to the friendliness of the chief and Pongo-Pongo;
indeed, so friendly did they become that they suggested to Torday that
he should be formally made an “elder” of Misumba, a suggestion which,
after due consideration, he tactfully declined.
[Illustration: THE BILUMBU TAKING PILLS UNDER A BLANKET.]
[Illustration: THE BILUMBU DISMISSING AN INQUISITIVE CHILD.]
He felt that when we visited the king (which, after what we had seen
of the eastern Bushongo, we were now firmly determined to do) it might
not add much to his dignity if he had become an elder at the court of
a viceroy; and as there appeared to be nothing to be gained by going
through the ceremony, all particulars of which we had already learned,
he contrived to put off the question indefinitely until the idea had
left the minds of the people of Misumba. I will not give my reader any
detailed account of the composition of Isambula N’Genga’s court, as I
shall describe more fully the organisation of the great court at the
Mushenge. There is one dignitary, however, who must be mentioned here,
the old Bilumbu, or “instructor of the young.” We became friendly with
him under circumstances worthy of a boy’s book of adventure. He was ill,
very ill, with an attack of fever which he could not shake off, and the
continued strain of which seemed likely to wear him out, for he was very
old indeed. Having tried various native remedies without success, he at
last decided to ask the white man for medicine. He appealed to Torday.
Now, Torday is a very fair doctor, and upon this occasion he surpassed
himself in his treatment of the case. In a few days the old man had
recovered. The administration of quinine tabloids was attended with no
small amount of ceremony. Torday, of course, had impressed upon the
Bilumbu the almost magic power of Messrs. Burroughs & Wellcome’s drugs,
and the old man came to regard them with a good deal of superstitious
awe, so that he would never allow any one to see him actually swallow
the tabloids. When we arrived with his dose he used to insist upon
being completely covered up in a blanket, from the folds of which he
would extend one bony hand, into which the pills were placed; he then
swallowed the drugs, concealed from view by the blanket. He made such a
mystery over the taking of the pills that we had the greatest difficulty
in preventing ourselves from laughing, but, of course, any unseemly
levity on our part would have materially hindered the cure. In return
for Torday’s medical attendance the old man imparted to him many of the
strange legends of the Bushongo, which, as “instructor of the young,”
it was his duty to teach to the rising generation. Day after day Torday
would go down to the Bilumbu’s hut, and seated in the shade in some
secluded spot he would listen by the hour to the old man’s tales, and,
as a result, he was able to gain an extensive knowledge of Bushongo
folk-lore. These legends are preserved only in the brain of the Bilumbu,
for, of course, the art of writing is quite unknown to the Bushongo,
and they are sacred; it was therefore entirely due to Torday’s good
fortune in being able to cure the old man of his fever that he obtained
this splendid opportunity of learning the stories from the man who knew
them best. The old Bilumbu evidently considered that the dignity of his
office required that he should surround himself with as much mystery as
possible—hence no doubt his habit of taking pills under a blanket; and
accordingly the relating of his legends was not without its ceremony,
in the course of which the old fellow generally succeeded in making
something out of somebody. This is the sort of thing that used to occur.
We would go and call upon the Bilumbu, accompanied by a youth of the name
of Masolo (a great friend of ours who usually accompanied us wherever we
went, and who had temporarily attached himself to the expedition in the
capacity of guide to Misumba, interpreter, extra boy, and gun-bearer).
Masolo spoke Chituba well, and as the old “instructor of the young” spoke
no language but his own, the lad used to act as interpreter between us.
The Bilumbu, with as mysterious an air as possible, would conduct us to
a yard between two huts, or to some other quiet place, and then seat
himself on the ground. For a few minutes he would say nothing, or merely
make conversation upon general subjects. Then he would think of some
particular legend which he wished to impart to us, and he would turn
furiously upon the crowd of youths and children, who always tried to be
present at these interviews, and drive them away with a flow of language
ill befitting an instructor of the young. Every one but Masolo having
departed, he would turn to our youthful interpreter and inquire what he
meant by remaining (he always did this, although he knew perfectly well
that the lad was going to act as interpreter). Masolo would then explain
that his presence was a necessity, and the old man would say, “The things
that I am about to relate are too strong for the ears of children, but
if you must hear them give me your knife.” Masolo would then always
hand over his knife, or whatever object the Bilumbu asked for, without
demur, and the old man, having secured something for himself, would then
proceed to relate his story. This occurred practically every time we
visited him, and as, of course, we had to return to Masolo the value of
the things thus extorted from him, the process of studying folk-lore
became rather expensive. The old man had, no doubt, many similar ways
of increasing his income, for an incident occurred during our stay at
Misumba which clearly demonstrated his readiness to turn anything to
account. There was a violent tornado one night, in the course of which
the lightning struck a tree quite close to the old Bilumbu’s hut. Now
this would have terrified nine natives out of ten, and led them to
procure for themselves a number of charms against lightning, but the
“instructor of the young” realised at once that there was money in
the occurrence. He concealed his fears (if he had any), and at once
proclaimed to his neighbours how fortunate it was for them that such
a person as himself resided in their midst who could thus induce the
lightning to expend its wrath upon a tree instead of destroying life in
the village. He was then good enough to accept a few tokens of gratitude
from those whose lives he had saved by his magic control of the storm.
Truly the old fellow was a shrewd business man! The tales themselves
which we gleaned from our aged friend were many of them of a nature only
to be printed in a strictly scientific work, and even then some of them
would benefit by translation into Latin; others, however, were merely
stories indicating the origin of quite harmless proverbs. To give my
reader some idea of Bushongo folk-tales, I will narrate one story as told
to us by the Bilumbu; it has reference to the “yuka,” the animal whose
weird cry had attracted our attention at Batempa, and of which we had
secured two living specimens.
Once upon a time a man met a personal enemy in the road between two
villages, to neither of which he nor his enemy belonged. He took the
opportunity of administering a good thrashing to the man who had incurred
his anger. The screams of his victim were so loud as to be heard in both
villages, and the warriors of each turned out equipped for war. Arriving
upon the scene, they found the thrashing in progress, and immediately
took sides in the affair, with the result that a general _mêlée_ ensued,
in the course of which several people were killed. After the battle it
occurred to the warriors to wonder what they had been fighting about,
and they discovered that all the bloodshed had been caused by a quarrel
between two men, in whom none of them had the slightest interest. So it
is when a man has climbed a palm tree to obtain “malafu” (palm wine), he
hears the cry of the yuka, and, mistaking it for the shriek of a human
being in distress, he hurriedly climbs down to go to the rescue. In his
descent he slips and breaks his leg. Nowadays when a young man shows his
intention of doing anything without due consideration or of meddling in
other people’s affairs, the other men will say to him, “Remember the
yuka’s cry,” and he will then perhaps reconsider his plans. I have told
this tale exactly as told to us, and it appears to point a similar moral
to our proverb, “Look before you leap.” Bushongo folk-lore is full of
such stories, but some of them are even more far-fetched than this one,
and some are practically unintelligible.
On the whole our life at Misumba was very quiet. We were busy at our
work from morning until night, and the place was too peaceful for any
particularly exciting incident to be likely to occur. At Misumba, too,
we heard none of those rumours of wars which are ever in the atmosphere
of the Congo, and which, true or untrue, dogged our footsteps almost
wherever we went. When one is in hourly contact with interesting and
hitherto unspoilt natives amusing things are continually brought to
one’s notice, and one of the quaintest divorce cases I have ever heard
of came to our ears at Misumba. A resident in the village whose name
I have forgotten, but whom we will term “A,” accused a bachelor, also
a native of Misumba, whom we may call “B,” of undue familiarity with
his wife. B emphatically denied the accusation, and brought a charge
of slander against A. The case was taken before the chief, and pending
his decision, B proceeded to steal a chicken belonging to the chief.
He openly confessed to having done so, and told the chief that he must
repay himself for the loss of his bird by purloining something belonging
to the slanderer, A! The case was altogether too complicated for the
chief, who invited Torday to give an opinion upon it. The parties were
therefore brought to us one morning, B appearing armed with a spear. It
is most unorthodox to carry arms at meetings of this kind, so Torday
inquired why he had come to a palaver with a weapon in his hand. “Oh,
it’s all right,” replied the fellow; “I am not going to hurt you.” He,
however, laid aside the spear. We then went on to examine the facts of
the case, and finally inquired of B why he should steal one of the chiefs
chickens, when he felt himself aggrieved at A’s accusations. His answer
was rather unexpected: “I knew I should never get justice from the chief
unless he was personally concerned in the matter, so I took his chicken
to draw him into it. Now he can get it out of A!” This truly remarkable
way of currying favour with his judge was not entirely successful, for
he was at once found guilty of an intrigue with A’s wife, and sentenced
to pay a large fine in cowrie shells (the small change of the district)
to the chief, as well as damages to the petitioner, and was removed in
custody until he could hand over the amount required. A few days later we
met him, at liberty and quite cheerful, having paid his fine and having
married the lady who had been at the bottom of the trouble. Had the
petitioner stolen the chicken I think it is very unlikely that the decree
would have been granted, for justice among the African natives is by no
means untempered with corruption.
As time went on we amassed a very extensive collection of articles for
the ethnographical department of the British Museum, of which specimens
of wood-carving constituted a great proportion. The Bakuba decorate with
elaborate carvings even the simplest of wooden household utensils; the
bellows used by the blacksmith are carved, the long tobacco-pipes, the
mugs from which palm wine is drunk, the boxes (all hewn out of solid
blocks of wood, for the Bushongo do not yet _join_ wood together) in
which the red tukula dye is kept are all ornamented with raised patterns,
and many of them show a high degree of artistic talent. These carvings
have received unstinted praise from several prominent anthropologists
since our return from the Congo, for very little had previously been
known about them. People very often imagine that such things are picked
up for next to nothing in Africa, and, of course, sometimes this is
true, but among the Bushongo it is by no means the case. The native of
Misumba is a very good hand at a bargain, and is also by no means so
anxious to sell his possessions as are the Batetela. We came across
an instance of Bushongo business dealing which rivals, if it does not
excel, the greed of the old Bilumbu alluded to above. We met one day
the deformed boy who had charge of the chickens belonging to the Kasai
Company’s factory going towards the village with a bundle of native cloth
under his arm. We casually inquired what he was going to buy with so much
money, and he informed us that he was not going to make any purchases at
all, but was about to lend the cloth to a friend who had got into debt.
Torday thought at the time that this generosity sounded a little too
good to be strictly true, so he made a few inquiries into the case, and
discovered that the boy was going to lend the cloth to a man for a couple
of months at a rate of interest of 200 per cent.; at the expiration of
the two months, if the full amount was not paid back, the debtor would
become the slave of the chicken-keeper! It may well be imagined therefore
that in bargaining for curios with a people who are as grasping as this
we had to dip into our pockets rather more deeply than we cared about.
All the Bushongo are extremely fond of dancing; the great chief at the
Mushenge, as we subsequently discovered, dearly loves a dance, and is
only too glad of any excuse to organise one, while at Misumba dances on
a large scale are very frequently held. One portion of the village will
often invite the inhabitants of the other to come over in the afternoon
for a dance to be held in the wide street, and upon such occasions the
people turn out _en masse_ bent upon enjoyment. The band (that is to
say, a number of the ubiquitous tom-toms), performs in the midst of the
street, while the people, attired in their best loin-cloths and carefully
tukulaed, dance around it in single file, the dresses of the women, some
spotlessly white and some red, gleaming in the sun as the wearers move
stiffly in a by no means graceful variety of _danse du ventre_. We have
seen as many as three hundred women taking part in one of these dances,
varying in age from tiny girls to matrons whose dancing days, one would
have thought, had long since passed away. They were arranged in the
line according to the colour of their dresses—a batch of red, then some
wearing white, then more red, and so on. As not infrequently occurs among
peoples more advanced in civilisation than the Bushongo, a great many
of the young men of Misumba are far too _blasé_ to take any part in the
proceedings other than honouring them with their presence and lounging
in the shade of the huts as they cast critical glances at the ladies.
A few, however, do dance, and these are usually very smartly attired
in loin-cloths bordered with innumerable tassels and brightly coloured
feathers in their hair. The viceroy is always present at the large
dances, sitting beneath a shed surrounded by his elders.
[Illustration: A CEREMONIAL DANCE BY AN ELDER.]
[Illustration: A DANCE AT MISUMBA.]
During our stay at Misumba both Torday and I found time to make
excursions into the surrounding country. Torday undertook a journey of
some days’ duration to the country of the Bangendi, sub-tribe of the
Bushongo, who live on the western side of the Lubudi River, while I on
several occasions went out to neighbouring villages in search of sport,
staying away from one to four nights at a time. During my wanderings to
the east of Misumba I came across several of the quarry-like crevices,
such as I have described on the way from the Sankuru, and we found out
that formerly the Bushongo used to extract a good deal of iron from them,
but nowadays the metal used in the manufacture of knives, arrow-heads,
&c., is nearly all obtained from the Kasai Company. Game is by no means
abundant near Misumba. I have seen a few small duikers and a bush-buck,
and I have come across the tracks of small herds of buffalo, though I
was never able to get a glimpse of these latter animals. To judge by the
size of their tracks they are probably members of the same species of
dwarf buffalo as those which I shot later near the Mushenge, namely _Bos
caffer nanus_. The herds are small, containing as a rule from three to
half-a-dozen animals. A kind of sitatunga antelope is said to exist in
the swamps near the Lubudi, but of this beast I never saw so much as a
track. With the addition of an occasional leopard and some elephants (the
latter, I think, merely pass through the district and are not permanently
resident there), the above beasts constitute the game list of Misumba.
The patches of woodland which are to be found in all the hollows of the
undulating grass land abound with monkeys, and a number of interesting
small mammals can be collected in the neighbourhood, of which we were
lucky enough to discover a new species of _petrodomus_, which has been
named after Torday. The tsetse-fly does not exist in the plains around
Misumba, but as this insect is so very local I am not prepared to say
that it is not to be found in the swampy woodlands of the district. On
the whole Misumba is fairly healthy, but the climate is considerably
hotter than that of Mokunji; with the exception of one very mild attack
of fever, which laid me up for a few hours, none of us suffered from
malaria.
In the middle of April the time arrived for Hardy to return to Europe,
so Torday decided to interrupt his work among the Bushongo, and, after
seeing Hardy off to the coast, to visit the primitive Batetela tribes
which inhabit the great forest to the north of the Sankuru before going
on to the capital of the Bushongo king. Had we proceeded from Misumba
direct to the court of the king, which lies to the west near the
confluence of the Kasai and the Sankuru, we should have had to undertake
a long journey in order to reach the forest peoples, so it seemed wiser
to visit them at once and to postpone for a few months the completion of
our work among the Bushongo.
But we discovered that it was one thing to decide to leave Misumba and
quite a different matter to procure carriers to transport our loads
across the river. Cloth is the currency of the district, and, as I have
shown, very large quantities of cloth is woven at Misumba. It is not
surprising, therefore, that when a man wants “money” he should prefer
to manufacture it quietly at his own loom in the village instead of
undertaking some irksome work such as load-carrying in order to earn it.
We found that no one was in the least desirous of carrying our baggage
to the Sankuru. In our difficulty the ethnographical information which
Torday had obtained demonstrated its practical value. We had heard from
some of our Bushongo friends of a powerful secret society which existed
to maintain the authority and dignity of the chief in case of any attempt
to dispute his rights. Nearly all the men in the village belonged to
this society, and Torday, who had learned all about its organisation,
knew that if he could persuade its “grand master” to use his influence
on our behalf we should most probably be able to get as many porters as
we wanted. The evening before we wished to depart he accordingly visited
this dignitary, and returned having left him a good sum in trade goods,
but having received a promise of assistance. Next morning a couple of
hundred men turned up at daybreak to carry our loads! The study of
native manners and customs can certainly be of practical service to the
traveller.