language almost takes the place in Central West Africa that the
Swahili takes on the eastern side. It will carry you fairly well,
at all events, along the main foot-paths of trade. They are richer
than other tribes, too; they live a little better, they wear rather
larger cloths, and get more to eat. But they are naturally despised by
neighbors who live by fighting, hunting, fishing, and the manly arts.
They are tainted with the softness of trade. In the rising against the
Portuguese in 1902, which brought such benefits to all this part of
Angola, nearly all of them refused to take any share. They are losing
all skill and delight in war. They are almost afraid of their own oxen,
and scarcely have the courage to train them. For the wilder side of
African life a Bihéan is becoming almost as useless as a board-school
boy from Hackney. For skill or sense of beauty in the common arts of
metal-work, wood-work, basket-weaving, or ornament, they cannot compare
to any of the neighboring tribes. In fact, they are a commercial
people, and they pay the full penalty which all commercial peoples have
to pay.
Away from the main trade route the country is rather thickly inhabited.
The villages lie scattered about in clusters of five or six together.
All are strongly stockaded, for custom rather than defence (unless
against leopards), and all have rough gates of heavy swinging beams
that can be dropped at night, like a portcullis. Most people would say
the huts were round; but only the cattle-breeding tribes, like the
Ovampos in the south, have round huts. The Bihéan huts are intended to
be oblong or square, but as natives have no eye for the straight line,
and the roofs are invariably conical, one is easily mistaken. Except to
those who have seen nothing better than the filth and grime of English
cities, the villages would not appear remarkably clean. They cannot
compare for neatness and careful arrangement to the Zulu villages,
for instance, nor even to the neighboring Chibokwe. But each family
has its separate enclosure, with huts according to its size or the
number of the wives, and usually a little patch of garden--for peppers,
tomatoes the size of damsons, and perhaps some tobacco. Somewhere in
the centre of the enclosures there is sure to be a largish open space
with a town hall or public club (onjango). This is much the same in
all villages in Central Africa--a pointed, shady roof, supported by
upright beams, set far enough apart to admit of entrance on any side.
It serves as a parliament-house, a court of justice, a general workshop
(especially for metal-workers among the Chibokwe), and for lounge, or
place of conversation and agreeable idleness. Perhaps a good club is
the best idea we can form of it. It forms a meeting-place for politics,
news, chatter, money-making, and games, nor have I ever seen a woman
inside.
On the dusty floor a piece of hard ground, three or four inches above
the rest of the surface, is usually left as the throne or place of
honor for the chief. There he reclines, or sits on a stool six inches
high, and exercises the usual royal functions. He is clothed in apparel
which one soon comes to recognize as kingly. It is some sort of cap or
hat and a shirt. The original owners of both were probably European,
but time enough has elapsed to secure them the veneration due to the
symbols of established authority, and they are covered with layer
upon layer of tradition. Thus arrayed, the chief sits from morning
till evening in the very heart of his kingdom and contemplates its
existence. Sometimes a criminal case or a dispute about debt comes up
for his decision. Then he has the assistance of three elders of the
village, and in extreme cases he is supposed to seek the wisdom of
the white man at the fort. But the expense of such wisdom is at least
equal to its value, and rather than risk the delay, the uncertainty
of justice, and the certainty of some contribution to the legal fees
in pigs, oxen, or rubber, the villagers usually settle up their own
differences more quickly and good-naturedly now than they used, and
so out of the strong comes forth sweetness. In the last resort the
ancient tests of poison and boiling water are still regarded as final
(as, indeed, they are likely to be), and men who have lived long in
the country and know it well assure me that those tests are still
recommended by the wisdom of the white man at the fort.
Adjoining the public square the chief has his own enclosure, with the
royal hut for his wives, who may number anything from four to ten or
so, the number, as in all countries, being regulated by the expense.
Leaving the politics, law, games, and other occupations of public life
to the more strictly intellectual sex, the wives, like the other women
of the village, follow the primeval labor of the fields (which, as a
rule, are of their own making), and go out at dawn with basket and hoe
on their heads and babies wrapped to their backs, returning in the
afternoon to pound the meal in wooden mortars, and otherwise prepare
the family’s food.
I have had difficulty in finding out why one man is chief rather
than another. It is not entirely a matter of blood or of wealth,
still less of character. But all these go for something, and the
villagers themselves appear to have a certain voice in the selection,
though the choice must lie within the bounds of the “blood royal.”
Constitutionally, I believe, the same principle holds in the case of
the British crown. I have never heard of a disputed succession in an
African village, though disputes often arise in the larger tribes, as
among the Cunyami, where a very intelligent chief was lately poisoned
by his brother, as too peaceable and philosophic for a king. But there
is no longer a king or head chief in Bihé. The last was captured over
twenty years ago, after a mythical resistance in his umbala or capital
of Ekevango, the ancient trees of which can be seen from the American
mission at Kamundongo. So he joined the kings in exile, and, I believe,
still drags out an existence of memories in the Santiago of Portuguese
Guinea. There remain the chiefs of districts, and the headmen of
villages, and though, as I have described, their state is hardly to be
distinguished from that of royalty, they are generally allowed to live
to enjoy it.
But best of all I like a chief in his moments of condescension, when
he steps down from his four inches of mud and squats in the level
dust with the rest, just to show the young men how games should be
played. Chiefs appear to be specially good at the games which take
the place of cards and similar leisurely pastimes in European courts.
The favorite is a mixture of backgammon and “Archer up.” It is played
either on a hewn log or in the dust, and consists in getting a large
number of beans through four rows of holes. At first it looks like “go
as you please,” but in time, as you watch, certain rules rise out of
chaos, and you find that the best player really wins. The best player
is nearly always the chief, and I have no doubt he devotes long hours
of his magnificent leisure to pondering over the more scientific
aspects of the pursuit. In the same way one has heard of European kings
renowned for their success at Monte Carlo, baccarat, and bridge.
But, besides the games, the chiefs are the repositories of traditional
wisdom, and for this function it is harder to find a parallel among
civilized courts. The wisdom is usually expressed in symbolic diagrams
upon the dust. In his moments of fatherly instruction the chief will
smooth a surface with his hand, and on it trace with his fingers a
mystic line--I think it must always be a continuous and unbroken
line--which expresses some secret of human existence. Sometimes the
design is merely heraldic, as in this conventional figure of a
one-headed eagle, which I recommend to the German Emperor for a new
flag. But generally there is a hidden significance, not to be detected
without superior information. The chief, for instance, will imprint
five spots on the sand, and round them trace an interminable line
which just misses each spot in turn. The five spots signify the vain
ambitions of man, and the line is man’s vain effort ever to reach
them. Or again, he will mark nine points with his finger on the sand
and trace a line which will surround eight of them and always come
back to the ninth, which stands in the centre. Till superior wisdom
informed you, probably you would hardly guess that the eight points are
the “thoughts” of man, and that the ninth, to which the line always
returns, is the end of the whole matter--that no solution of the
thoughts of man is ever to be found:
“Earth could not answer, nor the seas that mourn.”
It is surprising to find a philosophy so Omarian so far from Nashipur
and Babylon, but there it is.
The Ovimbundu of Bihé, like all the natives in this part of Africa,
have also a large stock of proverbs. Out of a number of Umbundu
proverbs I have heard, we may take three as pretty fair samples of
wisdom: “If you miss, don’t break your bow,” which I like better than
the English doggerel of, “Try, try, try again,” or, “A bad carpenter
quarrels with his tools”; “Speak of water and the fish are gone,”
a proverb that will bear many interpretations, though I think it
really means, “Never introduce your donah to your pal”; and, “The lion
needs no servant,” which I like best of all, but can find no parallel
for among a race so naturally snobbish as ourselves. A variation of
the proverb runs, “A pig has no servant, a lion needs none.” I have
heard many stories of folk-lore, too--legends or fables of animals,
something in the manner of “Uncle Remus.” As that the mole came late
and got no tail, or that the hen one day claimed the crocodile for her
brother, and all the beasts, under the hippo, assembled to support the
crocodile, and all the birds, under the eagle, to support the hen.
After long argument the hen demanded whether the crocodile did not
spring from an egg like herself. The claim was admitted, and since then
the crocodile and the hen have been brother and sister.
More in the character of “Uncle Remus” is the favorite story how the
dog became the friend of man. Once upon a time a leopard intrusted a
starving dog with the care of her cubs. All went well till a turtle
appeared upon the scene and induced the dog to bring out one of the
cubs and share it between them, saying she could show the leopard
the same cub twice over and persuade her that the whole brood was
flourishing. This went on very satisfactorily for some days, the dog
and turtle devouring a cub daily, and the dog producing one of the cubs
for the leopard’s inspection twice, three times, four times over, as
the case demanded. At last only one cub was left alive, and it had to
be produced eight or nine times, according to the original number of
the litter. Next day there was no cub left at all, and the dog invited
the leopard to walk into the den and contemplate her healthy young
nursery for herself. No sooner had she entered the cave than the dog
bolted for the nearest village, and rushed among the huts, crying,
“Man, man, the leopard is coming!” Since which day the dog has never
left the village, but has remained the friend of man.
Nearly akin to folk-lore are the quaint sayings and brief stories
which sum up the daily experience of a people. Take, for instance,
this dilemma, turning on an antipathy which appears to be the common
heritage of all mankind: “I go to bury my mother-in-law. The king sends
for me to attend his council. If I do not go to the king, he will cut
my head off. If I do not bury my mother-in-law, she may come to life.
I go to bury my mother-in-law.” More unusual to English ears was the
statement made quite seriously in my presence by a young man who was
inquiring about the manner of life in England. “If you can buy things
there,” he said, “there is no need to marry.” Certainly not; when
you can buy meal in a shop, why expose yourself to the annoyance and
irritation of keeping wives to sow and gather and pound and sift the
mealies for you?
Like all the tribes of this region, the Bihéans are much given to
dancing, especially under a waxing moon, and when the dry season is
just beginning--say in the end of April. It so happens that the Bihéan
dances I have seen have been almost always the dances of children, and
they were very pretty. Sometimes a girl is lifted on the hands of a
group of children and jumped up and down in that perilous position,
while the others dance and sing round her. Sometimes the dance is a
kind of “hen and chickens” or “prisoners’ base.” But the prettiest
dance I know is the frog dance, in which the children crouch down in
rows and leap over the ground, clapping their elbows sharply against
their naked sides, with exactly the effect of Spanish castanets, while
their hard, bare feet stamp the dust in time. Then they have a game
something like “hunt the slipper,” two rows sitting on the ground
opposite each other, and tossing about a knotted cloth with their
legs. All these dances and games are accompanied by monotonous and
violent singing, the words of the song being repeated over and over
again. They are generally of the simplest kind, and have no apparent
connection with the dance. The song which I heard to the frog dance,
for instance, ran: “I am going to my mother in the village. I am going
to my mother in the village.”
Various musical instruments are used all through this part of Africa,
perhaps the simplest being the primeval fiddle. A string of bark is
stretched across half a gourd, and made to vibrate with a notched
stick drawn to and fro across it. The player holds the gourd against
his breastbone, and hisses through his teeth in time to the movement,
sometimes adding a few words of song. After an hour or so he thus
works himself and his audience up almost to hypnotic frenzy. If this
is the simplest instrument, the alimba is the most elaborate. It is
a series of wooden slats--twelve or fourteen--attached to a curved
framework about six feet long. Behind the slats gourds are fixed
as sounding-boards, but the number of gourds does not necessarily
correspond to the slats. The player squats in the middle of the curve
and strikes the wood with rubber hammers. Though there is no true scale
of any kind, the individual notes are often fine and the result very
beautiful, especially before the singing begins.
But the true instruments of Central Africa are the ochisanji and
the drum. The ochisanji is the primeval piano, a row of iron keys
(sometimes two rows) being laid upon a small oblong board, which
is covered with carving. The keys are played with the thumbs, and
some loose beads or bits of iron at the bottom of the board set up a
rattling which, to us, does not improve the music. But it is really
a beautiful instrument, and I can well imagine that when a native hears
it far from his village he is filled with the same yearning that a
Swiss feels at the sound of a cow-horn. It is the common accompaniment
to all native songs, the words being spoken to it rather than sung.
Nearly all carriers have an ochisanji tied round their necks, and one
of my carriers used to sing me a minor song, lamenting his poverty, his
loss of an ox, and loss of a lover, and between each verse he put in
a sobbing refrain, very musical and melancholy. The ochisanji also is
sometimes laid across half a hollow gourd, to improve the tone.
[Illustration: BIHÉAN MUSICIANS]
And then there is the drum! The drum is undoubtedly as much the
national instrument of Africa as the bagpipe is of Scotland. It is
made out of almost anything--the bark of a tree stitched together into
a cylinder and covered with goat-skin at each end, or a hollow stump,
or even a large gourd will serve. But there is one kind of drum valued
above all others--so precious that, when a village owns one, it is
kept in a little house all to itself. This drum is shaped just like an
old-fashioned carpet-bag, half open, except that the top is longer than
the bottom. It measures about four feet high by three feet long, and is
about eight inches broad at the bottom, the sides tapering as towards
the mouth. The inside is hollowed out with axes, the whole being made
of one solid block of wood. Half-way along the sides, near the top or
mouth, rough lumps of rubber are fixed, and these are thumped either
with a rubber-headed drumstick or with the fist, while a second player
taps the wood with a bit of stick. The result is the most overwhelming
sound I have heard. I know the war-drum, and I know the glory of the
drums in the Ninth Symphony, but I have never known an instrument that
had such an effect upon the mind as this African ochingufu. To me it
is intensely depressing. At its first throb my heart sinks into my
boots. Far from being roused to battle by such a sound, my instinct
would be to hide under the blanket. But to the native soul it is truly
inspiring. To all their great dances this is the sole accompaniment,
and for hour after hour of the night they will keep up its unvaried
beat without intermission, one drummer after another taking his turn,
while the dance goes on, and from time to time the dancers and the
crowd raise their monotonous chant. The invention of this terrible
instrument was altogether beyond Bihéan art, though they sometimes
imitate the models for themselves. But the greater number of the drums
are still imported from the far interior, around the sources of the
Zambesi, and they have become a regular article of commerce. Many
a time, along the great foot-path of trade, I have seen a carrier
bringing down the drum as part of his load from some village hundreds
of miles east of Bihé, and I have wondered at the demon of terror and
revelry which lay enchanted in that common-looking piece of hollow wood.
But then the whole country is full of other demons, not of revelry,
but certainly of terror. At the gates (that is, the narrow gaps in the
stockade) of nearly all villages stands a little cluster of sticks with
the skulls of antelopes on their tops. Sometimes the sticks are roofed
over with a little straw. Sometimes they are tied up with strips of
cloth like little flags, or a few bits of broken pot are laid in the
shrine and a little meal is scattered around. Often a similar shrine is
set up inside the village itself, and where a chief lives in his umbala
or capital among the ancient trees it will very likely have developed
into a “Kandundu”--the abode of a great magic spirit, who dwells in a
kind of cage on the top of a long pole. The worship of the Kandundu is
in some vague way connected with a frog, and the spirit is supposed to
reveal himself and utter his oracles to the witch-doctor in that form.
But if you get a chance of exploring that cage on the palm pole, you
generally find no frog, but only greasy rags. The bright point about
the Kandundu is that the spirit can become actively benevolent instead
of being merely a terror to be averted, like most of the spirits in
Africa. The same high praise can also be given to Okevenga, whose name
may be connected with the great river Okavango, and who is certainly
a benevolent spirit, watching over women, and helping them with their
fields, their sowing, and their children.
These are the only two exceptions I have hitherto met with to the
general malignity of the spiritual world in this part of Africa. The
spirits of the dead are always evil disposed, when they return at
all, and they are the common agents of the witchcraft that plays so
large a part in village life and is the cause of so much slavery. It
is not uncommon for a woman to kill herself in order to haunt her
mother-in-law or another wife of whom she is jealous. And it is partly
to keep the spirit quiet for the year or so before it gradually fades
away into nothingness that poles surmounted by the skulls of oxen are
set above a grave. Partly also this is to display the wealth of the
family, which could afford to kill an ox or two at the funeral feast;
just as in England the mass of granite heaped upon a tomb is intended
rather to establish the respectability of the deceased than to secure
his repose.
Slavery exists quite openly throughout Bihé in the three forms of
family slavery among the natives themselves, domestic slavery to the
Portuguese traders, and slavery on the plantations. The purchase of
slaves is rendered easier by certain native customs, especially by the
peculiar law which gives the possession of the children to the wife’s
brother, even during the lifetime of both parents. The law has many
advantages in a polygamous country, and the parents can redeem their
children and make them their own property by various payments, but,
unless the children are redeemed, the wife’s brother can claim them
for the payment of his own debts or the debts of his village. I think
this is chiefly done in the payment of family debts for witchcraft,
and I have seen a case in which, for a debt of that kind, a mother has
been driven to pawn her own child herself. Her brother had murdered
her eldest boy, and, going into the interior to trade, had died there.
Of course his wives and other relations charged her with witchcraft
through her murdered boy’s spirit, and she was condemned to pay a fine.
She had nothing to pay but her two remaining children, and as the girl
was married and with child, she was unwilling to take her. So she
pawned her little boy to a native for the sum required, though she knew
he would almost certainly be sold as a slave to the Portuguese long
before she could redeem him, and she would have no chance of redress.
In that particular case, which happened recently, a missionary, who
knew the boy, advanced an ox in his place; but the missionary’s
intervention was, of course, entirely accidental, and the facts are
only typical of the kind of thing that is repeatedly happening in
places where there is no one to help or to know.
In a village in the northwest of Bihé I have seen a man--the headman
of the place--who has been gradually tempted on by a Portuguese trader
till he has sold all his children and all the other relations in his
power for rum. Last of all, one morning at the beginning of this winter
(1905), he told his wife to smarten herself up and come with him to
the trader’s house. She appears to have been a particularly excellent
woman, of whom he was very fond. Yet when they arrived at the store he
received a keg of rum and went home with it, leaving his wife as the
trader’s property.
In the same district I met a boy who told me how his father was sold
in the middle of last January. They were slaves to a native named
Onbungululu in the village of Chariwewa, and his father, in company
with twenty other of the slaves, was sold to a certain Portuguese
trader, who acts on behalf of the “Central Committee of Labor and
Emigration,” and was draughted quietly away through the bush for the
plantations in San Thomé.
To show how low the price of human beings will run, I may mention a
case that happened in January, 1905, on the Cuanza, just over the
northeast frontier of Bihé. I think I noticed in an earlier chapter
that there was much famine there last winter, and so it came about that
a woman was sold for forty yards of cloth and a pig (cloth being worth
about fourpence a yard), and was brought into Bihé by the triumphant
purchaser.
But that was an exception, and the following instance of the
slave-trader’s ways is more typical. Last summer a Portuguese, who is
perhaps the most notorious and reckless slave-trader now living in
Bihé, and whose name is familiar far in the interior of Africa, sent a
Bihéan into the southern Congo with orders to bring out so many slaves
and with chains to bind them. As the Bihéan was returning with the
slaves, one of them escaped, and the trader demanded another slave and
three loads of rubber as compensation. This the Bihéan has now paid,
but in the mean time the trader’s personal slaves have attacked and
plundered his village. The trader himself is at present away on his
usual business in the remote region of the Congo basin called Lunda,
and it is thought his return is rather doubtful; for the “Révoltés” and
other native tribes in those parts accuse him of selling cartridges
that will not fit their rifles. But he appears to have been flourishing
till quite lately, for the natives in the village where I am staying
say that he has sent out a little gang of seven slaves, which passed
down the road only the day before yesterday, on their way to San Thomé.
But about that road, which has been for centuries the main slave route
from the interior to the Portuguese coast, I shall say more in my next
letter, when I have myself passed up and down it for some hundreds of
miles and had an opportunity of seeing its present condition.
VI
THE WORST PART OF THE SLAVE ROUTE
I was going east along the main trade route--the main slave route--by
which the Bihéans pass to and fro in their traffic with the interior.
It is but a continuation of the track from Benguela, on the coast,
through the district of Bihé, and it follows the long watershed of
Central Africa in the same way. The only place where that watershed is
broken is at the passage of the Cuanza, which rises far south of the
bank of high ground, but has made its way northward through it at a
point some three days’ journey east of the Bihéan fort at Belmonte, and
so reaches the sea on the west coast, not very far below Loanda.