THE NATIVES OF
BRITISH CENTRAL AFRICA

Women Carrying Water-jars, Chiromo

The Native Races of the British Empire

THE NATIVES
OF
BRITISH CENTRAL AFRICA

BY
A. WERNER

WITH THIRTY-TWO FULL-PAGE
ILLUSTRATIONS

LONDON
ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE
AND COMPANY, LTD.
1906

Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty

IN MEMORIAM
J. R. W.
ELMINA, AUGUST 16, 1891

... ‘Desiderio ...

Tam cari capitis....’

CONTENTS

ERRATA

LIST OF PLATES

THE NATIVES OF
BRITISH CENTRAL AFRICA

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY

Geography. Botany: bush-fire. Climate. Fauna: beasts, birds, fish, insects.

When you steam up the Shiré, you pass on the first, second, or some subsequent day (according to the state of the river and the capabilities of your craft), after turning out of the Zambezi at Chimwara, a tree on the western bank. This tree bears a notice-board which marks the beginning of the British Central Africa Protectorate.

But the globe-trotter who is anxious to record in his diary the precise hour and minute of all momentous events of a monotonous voyage may easily overlook the all-important tree. The most eager inquirer may find his experiences pall upon him when for hour after hour he sees nothing but level shore, and a foreground of green bango-reeds festooned with dull magenta convolvulus. In fact, the reason why the boundary had to be marked by a board affixed to a tree, is because this particular angle of alluvial land is so level and devoid of natural features that, in the rainy season, there is usually one navigable channel, if not more, cutting it off into an island, by connecting the Shiré and Zambezi. On the eastern bank we have left Mount Morambala behind—a massive ridge, extending over several miles and reaching a height of 4000 feet. Beyond the flats in the north-east you see the strangely shaped cone of Chinga-Chinga Mountain against the sky, and later on other ranges come into view; but just here the river valley is a marsh (some parts of it an actual lake) in the wet season, and a dusty plain at the end of the dry.

The Portuguese territory on the eastern bank extends a little farther north till it reaches a more tangible boundary in the river Ruo, which rushes down from Matapwiri’s Mountain in the north-east, throwing itself over a fall of 200 feet, and then, winding through the same sort of plain as that already described, enters the Shiré through a sort of miniature delta, by the reedy island of Malo and the ‘lip’ of land where now stands the British township of Chiromo.

I have spoken all along of the Shiré River; and it is not now to be expected that Europeans will ever call it anything else; but it is perhaps unnecessary to say that no native, unless thoroughly accustomed to Europeans and their ways, would ever know it by that name. To him it is the Nyanja, or, if he happens to be a Yao, the Nyasa—a word which means any large body of water, whether river or lake. To those living near Lake Nyasa, it is the lake which is Nyanja or Nyasa, as the case may be; it is only European usage which has stereotyped the Yao word on our maps. Chiri, in the Mang’anja language, means ‘a steep bank,’ and was misunderstood (by the Portuguese, probably, as it seems to have been in use before Livingstone penetrated the country) as the name of the river; since a native would say, ‘I am going to the bank,’ where we should say, ‘I am going to the river.’ As Sir H. H. Johnston has remarked, the Zambezi is the only one of the four great African rivers which bears a name given by, or even known to, the people dwelling on it.

Roughly speaking, the British Protectorate, to which we have been referring, comprises the basin of Lake Nyasa and its outlet, the Shiré. This general statement, of course, requires some qualification. The north end of the lake (the British boundary is the Songwe River, running out in about 10° of S. latitude) and nearly half the eastern side are German; south of that, i.e. from 11° 30´ S. to Fort Maguire, is Portuguese. From Fort Maguire, the border-line runs south-east to the small lake called Chiuta, then south, by the salt lake Chilwa and Mlanje Mountain to the Ruo.

The western frontier of the Protectorate is an irregular line, following more or less the watershed between the streams that flow into the lake and those that flow into the Luangwa (a tributary of the Zambezi which, unlike most tributaries, goes up-stream to join its river—in this case in a south-westerly direction), and meeting the Portuguese border about 14° S. Thence it keeps on to the south-east, as far as the point on the Shiré already mentioned, where the notice-board is affixed to the tree.

Measurements in square miles convey little or nothing to my mind, as a rule, and I shall abstain as far as possible from inflicting them on the reader; but it may as well be noted here that the area of the Protectorate is estimated at 40,980.

West of the territory thus defined, and between the Zambezi and the upper waters of the Congo, lies a vast region known officially as North-east Rhodesia, and reaching up to the south end of Lake Tanganika. We shall have something to say about the tribes living in this part of the country; some of them, indeed, are identical with those in the Protectorate proper; but it is with the latter that we shall chiefly have to do.

We have seen that British Central Africa is a land of lakes and rivers; it is a land of mountains also. ‘Before the discovery of Lake Ng’ami and the well-watered country in which the Makololo dwell,’ said Livingstone, ‘the idea prevailed that a large part of the interior of Africa consisted of sandy deserts into which rivers ran and were lost.’ His great journey of 1852-56 dispelled this idea, and ‘the peculiar form of the continent was then ascertained to be an elevated plateau, somewhat depressed in the centre, and with fissures in the sides by which the rivers escaped to the sea.’ The great lakes all lie on this central plateau, and the rivers which drain them to the sea escape over its edge in the cataracts which for so many centuries, by interrupting navigation, have prevented the exploration of the interior. The Zambezi first throws itself into a huge crack in the earth in the Victoria Falls, and afterwards, between Zumbo and Tete, come the Kebrabasa Rapids.

Lake Nyasa is a narrow trough, 360 miles long, between mountain-ranges which hem it in closely on the west (sending down, during the rains, innumerable small torrents from their steep slopes), and retreat somewhat from it on the east, leaving room for a few larger, but still inconsiderable streams, such as the Songwe, the Rukuru, the Bua, and one or two more. The Shiré is the lake’s only outlet, flowing through a level alluvial valley (something like a delta reversed) till, a little below Matope, it comes to the edge of the plateau and plunges over in a series of falls known as the Murchison Cataracts. These extend over forty miles of river, and make a difference in its level of some 1200 feet, though none of them, individually, are of any great height.

The level of the lake, and consequently of the river which it feeds, is very different at different seasons of the year. During the rains, and for some time after, steamers can go to the foot of the Murchison Cataracts—the usual terminus is Katunga’s, about twelve miles below them. In the dry season they cannot always come within sight of Chiromo, and, during the great drought of 1903, the natives of that place were hoeing their maize-gardens far out in the channel of the river. The salt Lake Chilwa, east of the Shiré, disappeared almost, if not quite, at that time, but reappeared with subsequent rains. It is thought, however, that there is a continuous fall in the level of Nyasa, which is unaffected by the rise and fall of successive seasons. In some places a series of old beaches can be traced, ascending like terraces from the lake-shore to the foot-hills.

This fall is attributed to several causes—the wearing away of the outlet channel, allowing more water to escape; the disappearance of the forests and consequent diminution of the rainfall; and the raising of the ground by volcanic action. There are not now any active volcanoes in the country, but earthquakes are common in the neighbourhood of the lake, and there are hot springs near Kotakota, and also on Mount Morambala (Lower Shiré). Mlanje Mountain is of volcanic origin; in the German territory, north of Nyasa, there are numerous extinct volcanoes and crater-lakes.

The district called the Shiré Highlands proper is enclosed between the Shiré, the Ruo, and Lake Chilwa. It was so named by Livingstone, and others besides him have noticed the similarity to the Scottish mountains, in these rugged peaks and crags of quartzite and grey granite, especially in the dry season, when the brown grass is very nearly the colour of the dead heather and bracken. Sochi, near Blantyre, is, in general outline, not unlike Ben Cruachan. The highest of these mountains are Mlanje and Zomba—they are ranges rather than mountains; or, more precisely still, Mlanje is an isolated mass, a plateau with peaks rising from it like buttresses—the highest point 9680 feet. The plateau has a height of 6000 feet, and a temperate climate—cool enough for hoar-frost at night. From these mountains the land sinks in a series of irregular undulations, to the Shiré, covered sometimes with bush, sometimes with the thick, coarse grass so feelingly described by all travellers, which is really more like canes. After it is burned, as it is every year, it is a greater nuisance than ever, for the larger stalks (about as thick as one’s finger) never get quite consumed, and neither stand up nor lie flat, but lie across each other at every conceivable angle—too high to step on and too low to push one’s way under. Other mountains are Chiperone, Chiradzulo and Tyolo, Nyambadwe and Ndirande—the two latter close to Blantyre. It is difficult to make out their relation to each other. At a bird’s-eye view—as from the top of Nyambadwe, or some point on Ndirande—they look like a confused sea of peaks and ridges; but they are more or less continuous to Zomba, and are separated from Mlanje by the Chilwa plain and the valley of the Tuchila, which runs into the Ruo. West of the Shiré we have the Kirk Mountains, running north and south, with some striking peaks—Dzonze, a collection of rounded humps; Mvai, a rocky pyramid, with a three-cleft peak; Lipepete; and, far to the north, Chirobwe, with a sharp rock pointing from its summit like a finger.

These mountains are mostly granite and quartzite. West of the lake and the Shiré, there are outcrops of sandstone, and this part of the country also contains coal. Iron ore is abundant almost everywhere, especially the form called hæmatite—a soft, red stone, known to the natives as ng’ama or kundwe, and used by them as paint, and as medicine; lumps of this can be picked up in the beds of all the mountain streams. Graphite, or black lead, is found in the same way, and is used by the women for colouring their pottery, to which it gives an effect exactly like stove-polish. I think these are the only minerals of which they themselves take much account. Gold exists in the quartz in some places, and Sir Harry Johnston says: ‘In the valleys of the rivers flowing south to the Zambezi (in Mpezeni’s country), gold really does exist, and was worked at Misale by the half-caste Portuguese,’ in the eighteenth century, and even later. But the Mang’anja and Yaos only know it through their dealings with Portuguese and Arabs, and have no word for it in their languages. Ndalama, which, with the addition of ‘red,’ means gold, and of ‘white,’ silver, and by itself = ‘money,’ is, I fancy, a borrowed word—the Arabic dirhem. I once bought (in the West Shiré district) a bangle of pure copper, which was vaguely said to have been obtained from a place to the north-west, but where it had been worked, I could not ascertain. The brass which is fashioned by native craftsmen is always bought from traders.

Carriers Resting in the Bush

There are no deserts in this part, neither are there any dense forests of huge trees, such as we usually think of when Central Africa is mentioned, and such as are really to be found in the Upper Congo basin, on the Gold Coast, and elsewhere. Two Yao boys, who had served in Ashanti with the King’s African Rifles, spoke of the West African forest with the same sort of surprise and wonder as any English rustic might have done. Both, independently, answered the question, ‘What is that country like?’ with the same expression—‘Palibe kuona, one cannot see!’ adding that the trees were high—very high (with an upward gesture of hands and eyes)—away up above one’s head. Large trees, growing close together, are just what one does not find, as a rule, in the country we are thinking of. The Bush (tengo, or chire) usually consists of small trees, thinly scattered, with tufts of grass, small bushes, and various herbaceous plants growing between them, and here and there a large tree standing by itself—perhaps a baobab, or a wild fig, or a silver-thorn acacia, covered with bright golden blossom. Or we have the kind of scenery described by travellers as park-like—open glades, covered with short grass (which, however, never makes turf; you can see the soil between the separate tufts), and dotted with clumps of scrub and small trees, singly or in groups. This is the kind of place where the zebras come to graze—not that I ever had the luck to see any. The small boys who had held out hopes of this treat, said, when we passed the place early in the afternoon, that it was still too hot—the mbidzi were all hidden in the bush, resting in the shade; they would come out to feed on the dambo when it grew cooler. When we returned along the same path the sun was declining, but there were still no mbidzi—a party of natives on their way to the village we had left had scared them.

Where there are no trees or bushes, the grass is usually of the tall, coarse-growing kind already referred to, which is used in hut-building, and has to be burned off at the end of every dry season—otherwise it would become an impenetrable jungle. The grass-fires serve a double purpose—that of clearing the ground and manuring it—but they nearly always spread to the bush, even if it is not fired purposely, to clear a space for new gardens, or accidentally, by some travellers’ camp-fire. These fires cause the scarcity of large trees, which, as a rule, are only found either in deep ravines along watercourses, which have always escaped the flames, or in the burying-grounds (the sacred groves called nkalango), where the people carefully beat out the fire before it reaches them.

These fires have from the earliest ages formed one of the characteristic features of African travel. One of the oldest records of exploration—the Periplus of Hanno—describes them, with other phenomena, in a weird and mysterious passage which fascinated my youth, and has not lost its charm even when the marvels are resolved into tolerably commonplace occurrences:—

‘Having taken in water, we sailed thence straight-forwards, until we came to a great gulf, which the interpreters said was called the Horn of the West.’ (This must have been somewhere near Sierra Leone, since the farthest point reached by the expedition seems to have been Sherbro Island.) ‘In it was a large island, and in the island a lake like a sea, and in this another island, on which we landed; and by day we saw nothing but woods, but by night we saw many fires burning, and heard the sound of flutes and cymbals, and the beating of drums, and an immense shouting. Fear came upon us, and the soothsayers bade us quit the island.’

Evidently the people were ‘playing,’ as the Anyanja say—and their dances last sometimes from dark to daylight, even now—or there was a lyke-wake on. Or else, maybe, they were well aware of the presence of the strangers, and kept out of sight by day, and the effect of the drums and flutes on the Carthaginian soothsayers was that desired by the performers.

‘Having speedily set sail, we passed by a burning country full of incense, and from it huge streams of fire flowed into the sea; and the land could not be walked upon because of the heat. Being alarmed, we speedily sailed away thence also, and going along four days, we saw by night the land full of flame, and in the midst was a lofty fire, greater than the rest, and seeming to touch the stars. This by day appeared as a vast mountain, called the Chariot of the Gods. On the third day from this, sailing by fiery streams, we came to a gulf called the Horn of the South.’

This, though the uninitiated would think it referred to a volcanic eruption, is really a very good description of a bush-fire on a large scale. On a moonless night in September, perhaps, you will see the black hills seamed with curved and zigzag lines of fire, as the blaze advances. Here and there a clump of dry scrub, or a dead tree, will burst into a sheet of flame, lighting up the dense white clouds of smoke. The heated air within the hollow stalks of grass and reeds expands till they burst with a sound like the firing of guns, which rises above a roar loud as that of the traffic of a great city. The smoke, rising from several points at once, hangs in the air and collects into a dense canopy of cloud, making the heat still more stifling, till, at last, sheet-lightnings begin to play about it, followed by low growls of thunder, and, perhaps, by the blessed relief of a shower. I have seen this happen more than once, though some writers appear to doubt it.

While these fires are going on, the air is full of black particles, which come floating down like an unnatural kind of snow, and the ground is covered with charred, crunching vegetation and grey ashes. The native name for this burning, or rather burnt stuff, is lupsya, and the early rains, which wash it away, are called kokalupsya, ‘that which sweeps away the lupsya.’ These rains are usually expected in October, and are a kind of prelude to the real rains, which should begin in November, but are sometimes delayed another month or even longer. While they last there may be continuous, soaking rains for three days together; but, more commonly, after a fine morning, the clouds begin to gather about 2 P.M., then a more or less heavy thunderstorm comes up, and the rain which follows continues into the night. By morning it is fine again, and then follows a half-day of the most exquisite weather, when you can almost feel things growing—till the thunderstorm comes up again as before. This will go on, day after day, till you get one without rain, as a change, or maybe a spell of steady rain, as aforesaid. There is usually a break of a few weeks about the end of the year—then the rains begin again, and last till March or April. Then begins the ‘hungry time,’ when the old food is done and the new crops are not yet ripe; it is sometimes a time of real scarcity, as the supplies barely last out the year, and leave no margin for emergencies. This is not so much from improvidence as from the difficulty of preserving the stores from mice and weevils. But some relief comes before long when the pumpkins, gourds, and cucumbers—many of which may be gathered wild—are ready, and they help to bridge over the time before the first ears of green maize can be plucked, though there is always a good deal of more or less serious illness at this season. About May the crops are ripe, and the dry season has fairly set in. There are occasional cold showers in June and July, and sometimes in the hills a week’s rain in August. At this time a chilly wind blows from the Indian Ocean, bringing with it heavy clouds, which, on some days, hang low, drifting along the slopes of the hills, and hurrying away to the west. Now and then, too, there is a thick white mist, like a sea-fog. But the sunny days, in the cold season, are bright and exhilarating. On such a day the difference between the temperature at noon and at night may be as much as 30°; and the dews are very heavy; a walk through long grass in the early morning drenches one like heavy rain. After this the air gets hotter and drier every day, and when the fires begin, it becomes still more oppressive. The most trying time of the year is the three or four weeks when the earth and all that is on it are ‘waiting for the rains.’ Curiously enough, the trees burst into leaf—with a greater variety of colour than our own in autumn—just before the rain comes, when the ground is so baked and hard that any growth seems impossible.

The variety of trees and plants growing in this country is very great, though it is somewhat difficult to give any clear idea of them, for most have no names except native ones, which are pretty, but convey nothing to the reader, and botanical ones, which are ugly, and in most cases convey not much more. Such a general term as ‘palms,’ for instance, is of little use; still, every one knows, to a certain extent, what the different kinds of palms are like. We have several, all growing on the lower levels; none are to be found so high as Blantyre, unless cultivated, except the wild date, which grows beside the streams. The tall, graceful fan-palms (Borassus and Hyphæne) are very abundant in the plains. I remember quite a forest of them near Maparera, on the Shiré. When you descend from the hills either towards the river or towards Lake Chilwa, baobabs and fan-palms make their appearance and remind you that you are leaving the temperate heights behind and entering the hotter zone of the low country.

Ferns are numerous—from the tree-fern, growing in the gorges of Mlanje, to the smallest and most delicate species of maiden-hair, to be found in the damp crevices of rocks, and beside the streams. The asparagus and parsley ferns, and a beautiful kind of large hart’s-tongue, with the tip of the frond cleft in two, are among the more noticeable forms.

Though, as we have seen, there are no forests on a large scale, a fair number of fine timber-trees are to be found. There is the mbawa, a kind of mahogany, and the mpingo, or ebony, both of large size and handsome growth, and the Mlanje cedar (really a Widdringtonia), the only indigenous conifer, and growing nowhere but on that mountain. Its wood is pale red, smooth, and deliciously scented. Most of the native wood which can be used at all is hard and heavy, and somewhat difficult to work; but the result, especially in the case of the cedar, is worth the trouble. Another useful timber-tree, whose wood is never attacked by the destructive borer-beetle, is the msuku (Napaca Kirkii), only found at a height of over two thousand feet, and very common on the hills about Blantyre. It bears the favourite wild fruit of the natives, consisting of a skin and a quantity of large seeds, with a little sweet pulp, and a moderate allowance of juice; what there is of it is so good that it would be well worth cultivation. Other wild fruits are not so attractive to the European palate. There is one about the size of an orange, with a hard shell, and seeds embedded in a juicy pulp, slightly bitter, slightly acid, and slightly sweet, and at the same time not unpleasant in flavour. I believe the tree is a kind of Strychnos, consequently one would expect the fruit to be poisonous, yet native children eat any quantity, and seem none the worse.

The myombo, with leaves like our ash, is a very common tree, and the one from which bark-cloth is usually obtained. The bark of the wild fig is used for the same purpose.

The thorn-trees—acacias and mimosas—are among the most characteristic plants of the country, and some of them have very handsome flowers. The mlungusi, which has particularly vicious, hooked thorns, is sometimes planted in hedges. Another tree which makes a very effectual hedge is the cactus euphorbia. Of the same family (Spurges) are the weird candelabrum euphorbia, growing in the hills, and a leafless, fleshy, pale-green kind, often found in the villages, whose acrid, milky juice is used for stupefying fish.

There is no season of the year quite without flowers, and no place in which some kind or other is not to be found; but, of course, the best time is the first few weeks of the rains. It would be hopeless to attempt a description, or even a mere enumeration, of the lovely and wonderful forms to be found side by side with familiar home growths, such as buttercups, penny-royal, and self-heal. Some slight idea of what is to be seen in the Shiré Highlands, and especially on Mlanje, where you pass from tropical to temperate, and even to Alpine, vegetation, may be gathered from the botanical chapter in Sir H. H. Johnston’s British Central Africa.

We must say a few words about the fauna of British Central Africa, not only because it is interesting in itself, but because it plays an important part in the life and thought of the people. Elephants are less numerous than they were forty years ago, when herds of them haunted the marsh to which they have given their name; but they are still frequently seen between Chikala and Mangoche, north-east of Lake Chilwa, and since they have been protected by Government, have even been returning to the banks of the Shiré. In 1877 the late Consul Elton saw a herd of over three hundred near the north end of Lake Nyasa.

Chingomanje Stream, Mlanje

The hippopotamus is found in the Shiré and Lake Nyasa, and indeed almost in any stream or lake where the water is deep enough to cover him. The rhinoceros is known, but not very common. There are many Cape buffaloes in the plains and marshes of the Shiré, and the solitary bulls, driven out of the herd on account of bad temper or other defects, are sometimes extremely savage. Such an animal, in 1894, charged out of the long grass on a party of carriers, near Chiromo, and knocked down, gored and trampled on, one man, who was rescued from him with difficulty. This man, a Tonga named Kajawa, when treated at Blantyre, was found to have seventeen wounds about him, but ultimately recovered.

Of other large animals, we have already mentioned the zebra; and the eland, though not very common, is also met with. There are several kinds of smaller antelopes, and, in the mountains, the beautiful little creature called the klipspringer, or, by the natives, the gwapi, which is something like a chamois.

Of monkeys, there are baboons, which go about in troops and plunder the growing crops, when they get a chance, and several smaller kinds.

The curious ant-eater called Manis or ‘Pangolin,’ and by the natives nkaka, is three or four feet long, shaped like a lizard and covered with lozenge-shaped brown scales, more like those on a fir-cone (the long, thin-scaled cones of the Norway spruce) than anything else I can think of. With his powerful claws he digs his way into the hills of the white ants on which he feeds, catching them on his sticky tongue, as he has no teeth wherewith to eat them. He is a slow-moving, nocturnal creature, and seldom seen, unless dug out of his burrow.

Another underground creature who ventures out by night is the porcupine, whose black and white quills are sometimes picked up in the bush and brought for sale by natives. It is fond of pumpkins and other vegetables, and often comes to feed on the crops at night.

Of beasts of prey we have the lion, the leopard, several smaller kinds of cats, the spotted hyena (disgusting in habits and contemptible in character, but interesting from his place in native folk-lore), jackals, and wild dogs (mimbulu), which hunt in packs like wolves.

Lions are common enough to be a plague. Thirteen years ago they were looked on as a thing of the past at Blantyre, though even then they were met with a few miles out on the Matope road, and I have heard, though not seen, them in the Upper Shiré district. (The roaring we heard two or three times, on stormy nights, came, we were assured, from the banks of the Kapeni, six miles away.) But the mysterious disease among the wild buffaloes, antelopes, and other game, which in 1894 spread westward to the lakes and then southward, and when it attacked the cattle in South Africa was known as rinderpest, deprived them of their food, and drove them to invade the more settled districts. Twelve were shot within a few weeks on one plantation, and a planter in the neighbourhood of Zomba, who was riding a bicycle, was chased for some miles by a lion, but ultimately escaped. In some parts, as, for instance, on the low ground near the Shiré, below the Murchison Cataracts, the natives build their huts on raised platforms so as to be safe from lions at night. Leopards also are apt to be dangerous; they prowl about habitations by night, usually in the hope of getting into the goat-kraal, or picking up some stray dog unlucky enough to have been left outside, and are by no means above carrying off the miserable fowls to be found in native villages, one of which can scarcely be a mouthful. But they frequently attack human beings; and at one village a leopard had made a habit of waiting in the grass beside a certain path along which the women went to fetch water from the river, and had killed several before he was shot. Wizards are supposed to take this shape, among others.

Hut, near Shiré River

Domestic animals are not numerous, but we shall come back to them in a later chapter.

British Central Africa, says Sir H. H. Johnston, ‘is a country singularly rich in bird life.’ On the Shiré we have a wonderful variety of water-birds—flamingoes, herons, cranes, ducks, geese, plovers—and, to mention no more (these two are among the first noticed by the new comer), the handsome black-and-white fishing-eagle, and the tiny kingfisher, ‘like a flash of blue light.’ Among the hills we have strange forms, like the hornbill, and gorgeous colouring, as in the plantain-eaters and rollers and some of the fly-catchers, and familiar home birds, and their near relations—swallows, thrushes, larks, woodpeckers (the native name for the latter, gogompanda, is very expressive). As to singing-birds, I may quote again from Sir Harry Johnston: ‘Both Mr. Whyte and myself have remarked with emphasis at different times on the beauty of the birds’ songs in the hilly regions of British Central Africa. The chorus of singing-birds is quite as beautiful as anything one hears in Europe, thus quite disposing of one of the numerous fictions circulated by early travellers about the tropics, to the effect that the birds, though beautiful, had no melodious songs, and the flowers, though gorgeous, no sweet and penetrating scents. The song of the Mlanje thrush is scarcely to be told from that of the English bird.’ This entirely accords with my own experience. A bird which often sang at night sounded just like a thrush.

As to reptiles, crocodiles abound in the Shiré and the lake, and are so dangerous that in many places the women draw water from the top of a high bank by means of a calabash attached to a long pole, instead of going down to the edge of the stream, as they would naturally do. Though accidents are so frequent, the crocodile can hardly be called a habitual eater of human flesh. His staple food is fish, and ‘it is only a rare incident for them to capture a mammal of any size; an incident which, given a number of crocodiles in any stream or lake, can only occur to each one at most once a year on an average.’[1] The natives (women sometimes do take the precaution I have mentioned) are strangely reckless in venturing into the water; they provide themselves with ‘crocodile medicine’ in whose efficacy they firmly believe; and if any bather comes to grief notwithstanding, it is presumed that his ‘medicine’ was not of the right kind, or had lost its power. But it seems that the crocodile will only seize a solitary person; consequently, if a whole party go into the water together, as usually happens, and make a great splashing, they are comparatively safe.

Of other reptiles, we shall have to notice the iguana and the tortoise (of which there are several kinds) in connection with folk-lore. There are also several kinds of chameleon and some small lizards, very beautifully coloured. Snakes, venomous and non-venomous, are of all sizes, from the python downward to the harmless little mitu iwiri or ‘two-heads,’ silver-grey, and not much thicker than a pencil. It is a kind of slow-worm, and gets its native name from the bluntness of its tail, which makes it difficult to see which end is which.

Fish are numerous, but as yet insufficiently studied.

As for the insects, volumes might be written on them; though the beetles and butterflies are, on the whole, less gorgeous in colouring, and the objectionable insects less execrable than in other tropical countries. It is curious that, while the native languages have a word for ‘butterfly’ (usually more or less expressive of the peculiar movements of its flight—chipuluputwa in Yao, peperu and gulugufe in Nyanja), they never seem to distinguish between different kinds. Every kind of beetle, on the other hand, has its own name, but I could never get hold of a designation for beetles as a class. Perhaps this is the outcome of a severely practical turn of mind—beetles can be utilised, and therefore compel a certain degree of individual attention—butterflies, so far as I know, are not. Some beetles are eaten, for instance a glossy dark-green one, about an inch and a half long, called nkumbutera, and another kind is manufactured into a snuff-box; and the useful ball-rolling beetles (all related to the sacred scarab of Egypt) have been observed and named accordingly.

Archdeacon Woodward assures me that the natives at Magila (Wa-Bondei and Wa-Shambala) absolutely refused to believe, till convinced by ocular demonstration (which must have taken time and trouble), that the butterfly came from the caterpillar. I did not ascertain whether this was the case at Blantyre; on the whole, the people seemed fairly good observers of insects and their ways. But, on consideration, it seems probable, for there are names for many different kinds of caterpillars; and the reason for this closer observation is similar to that in the case of the beetles—some destroy man’s food (as the mpeza which eats the young maize), and others are food for him—notably a green and yellow striped kind which is roasted on the equivalent for a hot shovel.

Ants, of course, abound—those that get into the food, those that eat you (or would if they got the chance), and those (only, properly speaking, they are not ants at all) that build mounds and destroy wood-work, besides others, which seem to do nothing in particular. The hill-building termites vary their erections according to locality—the huge, conical mounds are chiefly found on low land liable to floods. Sometimes they build curious erections like irregular chimneys. The chapter devoted to these in the late Professor Drummond’s Tropical Africa shows that they do an important work in the economy of Nature; but it is a mistake to suppose that there are no earth-worms in Africa, though they are not so common as with us. I do not know, however, if the Nyasaland ones are ever as large as one I measured in Natal, which was 22 inches long, and except for its size, just like those in our gardens. Bees make their nests in hollow trees, or in boxes hung up for them; mason-wasps build tiny clay nests the shape of the common native water-jar, about the length of one’s finger-nail. One must not conclude even the most imperfect review without a glance at the locusts (of which we shall have something to say later on), grasshoppers, and the extraordinary group of insects which look like leaves and sticks, and are comprehended under the name of Mantis.

Having now taken a hasty survey of the country in its main outlines, of the vegetation which clothes it, and the wild creatures which (in their various ways) enliven it, let us see, in the next chapter, who are the people that live there.

CHAPTER II
INHABITANTS

Classification of tribes. Physical characters. Keloids and tribal marks. Ear ornaments. Tooth-chipping. Hair.

The principal tribes inhabiting British Central Africa are as follows:

In the Protectorate proper:—

• 1. The Anyanja, or Mang’anja.
• 2. The Yaos (Wayao or Ajawa).
• 3. The Alolo.
• 4. The Awankonde.
• 5. The Batumbuka.
• 6. The Angoni.

The Angoni are placed last, as being the most recent arrivals in the country. They are, as will be explained later on, rather a ruling caste than a distinct race. The Makololo, as we shall see, cannot be counted as a tribe; neither can the Achikunda of the Middle and Lower Zambezi, ‘compounded of the old slaves of the Portuguese, brought from many different parts of Eastern and Central Africa,’[2] who, moreover, scarcely come into British Central Africa, though some of them are to be found on the Shiré.

Of the above, 1 and 6 extend beyond the Protectorate into North-eastern Rhodesia, where we find, in addition,

• The Awemba (Babemba).
• The Alunda.
• The Alungu.
• The Batonga—above Zumbo on the Zambezi.

The Anyanja extend, under several different names, from the Shiré valley to the Luangwa, and as far north as the middle of Lake Nyasa. At one time they seem to have occupied this country continuously, but they have been displaced and broken up by intrusions of strange tribes. The Makalanga (of whom the Mashona are a subdivision) appear to have formed a powerful kingdom in the sixteenth century, and they are nearly related to the Anyanja, if not actually the same people. Their language so closely resembles Anyanja that a European, who had acquired the latter at Likoma, could make himself understood without difficulty in Mashonaland. The languages called by some writers ‘Sena,’ and ‘Tete’ (Nyungwe) are dialects of Nyanja, and the following tribes may all be reckoned as closely united branches of the same stock: Achewa, Achipeta (Maravi), Basenga, Makanga, Badema (north bank of the Zambezi, near Kebrabasa Rapids), Anguru, Ambo, and Machinjiri, the last-named in Portuguese territory, between the Ruo and the coast.

Livingstone first came across these people under the name of the Maravi, when he descended the Zambezi from Linyanti in 1855. ‘Beyond Senga,’ he says, ‘lies a range of mountains called Mashinga, to which the Portuguese in former times went to wash for gold, and beyond that are great numbers of tribes which pass under the general name Maravi.’ A little above Zumbo, he first came across women wearing the characteristic lip-ring (pelele), and adds: ‘This custom prevails throughout the country of the Maravi.’ It is now more prevalent among the Yaos—the Anyanja, from whom they adopted it, having more or less disused it. Between Kebrabasa and Zumbo there were two independent Anyanja chiefs, Mpende and Sandia; all the rest were subject to these. ‘Formerly all the Mang’anja were united under the government of their great chief, Undi, whose empire extended from Lake Shirwa (Chilwa) to the river Luangwa; but after Undi’s death it fell to pieces, and a large portion of it on the Zambezi was absorbed by their powerful southern neighbours, the Banyai.’[3]

These are the people marked on the Portuguese maps as ‘Mang’anja d’alem Chire’ (beyond the Shiré).

In attempting to describe the physical type of this people, one finds that there is so much variety as to make it difficult to fix on any one as specially characteristic. This is not to be wondered at, when we remember how the various tribes have been blended together in the course of the wars and migrations to which we shall come back in a later chapter. I think I may say I have noticed three well-marked varieties of physique among Anyanja, or men reckoned as such. Before considering these, it may be well, however, to glance at the characteristics possessed in common by the people with whom we have to do in this book.

They all belong to the ‘Bantu’ family of African natives, which, as regards language, is sharply distinguished from the ‘Negro’ peoples of West Africa and the Soudan. In other respects, it is more difficult to draw the line. As long as our ideas of the ‘Negro’ were taken from degraded and exaggerated types found in the unhealthy Niger delta and the slave-trading ports of the Guinea coast, it was easy to say that the Bantu were altogether on a higher level, and attribute the difference to some hypothetical admixture of Arab or other Asiatic blood. A better acquaintance with the inland peoples of the Guinea region shows that the difference is not so great as one had supposed. But the question which was the main stock whence the other parted off, and that as to the exact nature of the difference between them, need not be discussed here, as our concern is entirely with the Bantu.

Perhaps it is scarcely necessary to explain that this word, or something very like it, means ‘people,’ in the language of (roughly speaking) every tribe from the Cape of Good Hope to Lake Victoria and the great loop of the Congo, with the exception of the Kora and Nama (Hottentots), the Bushmen, and the Masai. It was adopted as a convenient designation when Bleek had shown how closely these languages were interrelated, and has never been superseded by any other.

The Bantu, then, are brown (not black), and have woolly hair, growing continuously over the head, and not in separate tufts, like the Bushmen. The nose is broad and somewhat flattened (but the last is by no means invariably the case), and the lips thick, from being turned outward more than they are in Europeans; but this, too, is not always very marked. The hair is black, and the eyes generally dark brown, sometimes hazel.

The colour of the skin varies very much in different tribes, and even in individuals of the same tribe. Sir Harry Johnston says: ‘There are extremes met with in the individual members of a tribe, as well as a general tendency to be detected in one tribe or another towards greater average darkness or lightness of skin. As a rule, the negro of British Central Africa is decidedly black, so far as any human skin is really black—the nearest approach to actual black being a deep, dull slaty-brown. I should say that the average skin-tint is ... a dark chocolate.’

If I can trust my recollection of the Anyanja, they were many of them not quite so dark as this; but in the Blantyre district they are intermixed with the Yaos, who are described by the same writer as ‘probably the lightest-tinted tribe’ in the region under review. The soles of the feet and palms of the hands are always much lighter, and give a curious impression, as if the colour had been washed out.

Among these Anyanja you find, chiefly on the River, tall, broad-shouldered, finely built men, with well-developed muscles, though rather smoother and more rounded in outline than an athletic European. The Rev. H. Rowley, who saw them before the Yao invasion, describes the Hill Mang’anja as smaller and poorer in physique than the River people, and lays stress on their small jaws and weak mouths and chins. Their physical inferiority and want of union among themselves fully account for their subjugation. This writer also says: ‘In stature, the Mang’anja were not a tall race, though you rarely met a little man.’ But tall individuals are fairly common. The length of the arms is particularly noticeable. Measurements show that very often the distance between the finger-tips of the outstretched arms is considerably greater than the height of the individual, whereas, in a well-proportioned European, they are supposed to be equal.

The second type is that of the people usually, but erroneously called ‘Angoni,’ who live in the districts west of the Upper Shiré, and are really Anyanja conquered by the Zulu Angoni and subject to their chiefs. These are small, active, wiry men, usually rather dark. They sometimes have good features and even, aquiline noses.

Here and there, among these last, you find yet a third kind, very tall men, over six feet, but painfully lean and slender, and perhaps a shade lighter in complexion than their neighbours. So far as it was possible to trace the history of these men, they seemed to come from a distance; but I will recur to this in a later chapter. I do not remember any women of this type, though one of the men in question had two daughters, slim, delicate-looking girls, who might have been like him when grown up. One of them, a really pretty creature, died suddenly—I fancy of consumption—aged, most likely, about fifteen or sixteen.

The description given by the writer already quoted will still serve fairly well for a good many of the Anyanja:—

‘The forehead of the Mang’anja was high, narrow, but not retreating; and now and then, among the chiefs and men in authority, you found a breadth of brain not inferior to that of the best European heads. The nose, though decidedly African, was not always unpleasantly flat or expansive; occasionally you saw this feature as well formed as among the possessors of the most approved nasal organs. The cheek-bones were not high; indeed, they rarely interfered with the smooth contour of the face. The jaws were small and not very prominent; the chin, however, was insignificant and retreating. But the mouth was their worst feature.’

This requires some deductions, and Mr. Rowley goes on to qualify it in the case of the River people, who, however, ‘had less amiability of expression—indeed, many of them looked fiercely vile.’ Perhaps time had mellowed them in this respect, for I cannot say I observed any lack of amiability when I came on the scene some thirty years later; and I must own that I cannot form a very clear idea of a man’s expression when he looks ‘fiercely vile.’ A cast of countenance with which I am more familiar is that of the ‘Angoni’ (= Anyanja).

The original home of the Yaos seems to be in the Unango Mountains, between Lake Nyasa and the Mozambique coast. They were driven thence by the encroachments of other tribes from the north, and forced into the Shiré Highlands, where they partially displaced the population, but in course of time settled down side by side with them. In 1893-4 the villages surrounding the mission station at Blantyre were reckoned, some as Yao and some as Nyanja; but a good deal of intermarriage had taken place, and many of the present generation are Yao by the mother’s side, and Nyanja by the father’s, or vice versâ. When this is the case, they usually speak both languages. Even in the villages west of the Shiré, where the people are supposed to be pure Nyanja, there were families whose mothers were Yaos, brought back in the Angoni raids of 1880-1890.

Perhaps the appearance of the Yaos cannot be better described than by the authority already quoted for the Anyanja. ‘Compare an ordinary Mang’anja with an ordinary Ajawa man, and the latter was at once seen to be physically the superior: his face was broader; his frontal development more masculine; the organs of causality fuller; the perceptive faculties larger; the jaws not more prominent, but more massive; the chin large and well to the front; the mouth, though of full lip, shapely and expressive of strength of will; while the eyes ... had a steadfastness and an intensity of expression.... Compared with the Mang’anja, the Ajawa head was large and round.... The Ajawa varied greatly in height. You saw men not more than five feet two or three, and you saw others five feet eight or ten.’

I should have said—but it is dangerous to make such statements without actual measurements—that a good proportion of them were six feet and over.

The Yaos of some of the Ndirande villages used to have a great reputation for strength and stature, and were much in request as machila-carriers. A gang of them took me from Blantyre to Matope—forty miles, though, it is true, most of the way is downhill—between 8 A.M. and sunset—say 6 P.M.; and I do not think I ever saw a finer set of men. They are usually, as Mr. Rowley describes them, of square and sturdy build, even in youth; but sometimes you see lithe and slender boys, graceful, and at the same time full of fire and vivacity, like a spirited horse. The Yao women, as a rule, are bigger and stouter than those of the Anyanja, and are said to be not so good-looking. Personally, when I try to recall individuals among both, I should find it hard to say that they were typically different—one finds Yao girls with slender figures, and small, neat features, as well as faces on a larger scale, which are by no means unattractive. The younger woman in the illustration is, apart from the pelele, by no means a favourable specimen.

Two Yao Women

Group of Anguru: Women with “Pelele”

The Anguru, or Alolo, are a tribe belonging to the Makua group who occupy the country inland from Mozambique. Some of them live in the Mlanje district. The Lomwe country, which is entirely inhabited by them (A-lomwe is either a synonym for Alolo, or the name of a tribe closely allied to them), is west of Lake Chilwa. Some Alolo were, about forty years ago, living at the back of Morambala. A correspondent tells me: ‘Anguru are localised on the east side of Shirwa round the Luasi hills, and are a sort of mongrel lot, as these hills seem to have been a sort of junction of Yao, when they were driven from the north, Lomwe driven from the east, and Mang’anja, on the Shirwa shores.’ The Anguru speak a dialect of Nyanja, the Alolo one of Makua, a language, as Father Torrend points out, resembling Sechwana in several important particulars, in which the intervening languages differ from both. The Lomwe country was for many years harassed by slavers, and its people were continually at war with one another—so much so that, in 1894, the villagers did not know the names of hills more than a day’s journey from their own homes, and travellers could not get guides except to the next village ahead of them. Perhaps this state of things accounts for the comparatively poor physique of the Alolo.

The Batumbuka. These are a set of people considered by Sir H. H. Johnston as indigenous to the plateau west of Lake Nyasa, and including, besides the Batumbuka proper, the Wapoka, Wahenga, and Atonga. These last live along the western shore of the lake, to which they were driven by the conquering Angoni, under Mombera. Father Torrend, however, supposes that they are a branch of the Batonga on the Zambezi, whom he thinks ‘the purest representatives of the original Bantu.’ In that case, they have either disused or greatly changed their original language; that which they now speak being closely allied to Tumbuka, Henga, and Poka, which are virtually identical. The Atonga are well known at Blantyre, as they are (or were some years ago) in the habit of coming down in gangs to work in the plantations, or otherwise. They are usually tall, strongly built men, with well-developed muscles, and (like the Alolo) very dark skins.

The Awa-nkonde, or Nkonde people (this is said by some to mean ‘people of the plain’) live at the north end of Lake Nyasa—some of them in German territory. They include the Awakukwe, Awawiwa, and several others, whose names we need not enumerate. They are very dark, usually tall, and sometimes described as extremely well shaped; but to judge by the photographs reproduced by Sir H. H. Johnston and Dr. Fülleborn, a good many of them would seem to have a tendency to bow-legs, and to be what is called ‘in-kneed.’ The legs are also, in some cases, of excessive length in proportion to the rest of the body. M. Edouard Foà[4] says that the Awankonde are, on the whole, good-looking, and, both men and women, ‘plump and well-liking,’ in consequence, no doubt, of their diet, and the pleasant, easy life they lead—now that they are no longer raided by Arabs and others. They are, with the exception of the Angoni and Achewa, the only people in the Protectorate who keep cattle to any great extent; and they live chiefly on milk and bananas.

The Angoni were originally a Zulu clan who came from the south, under Zwangendaba, about 1825, and incorporated with themselves large numbers of the tribes whom they conquered by the way, so that there are now few, if any, of unmixed descent remaining. The ‘southern Angoni’—formerly known as ‘Chekusi’s people’—are mostly Anyanja; but there were, in 1894, a few head-men and others, besides Chekusi’s own family, who spoke Zulu, and some of the elders wore the head-ring, but of a different pattern from the Zulu isigcoco (which is a smooth, round ring), being more like a crown done in basket-work. The northern Angoni (Mombera’s people) all speak Zulu, with considerable dialectic modifications, such as the gradual elimination of the clicks, and the substitution of r for l. But their speech is quite intelligible to Zulus from the south. As already stated, there is a great variety of types. The young warriors introduced to me under the name of ‘Mandala’s boys’ (Mandala was the brother of Chekusi or Chatantumba, at that time chief of the southern Angoni) were big, swaggering, long-limbed fellows, somewhat vacant of face, and, I think, somewhat lighter in colour than the sturdy little men who went to work on the Blantyre plantations. But whether the difference between them was a matter of race, or merely of an easier life and a diet of beef, I would not venture to say; for these warriors must have been, in part at least, recruited from the sons of the small, dark, hard-working Anyanja, who lived on scanty rations of maize and millet porridge in the Upper Shiré villages. These were always liable to have their growing lads sent for ‘ku mdzi’—i.e. to the chief’s kraal in the hills—where they had to herd Chekusi’s cattle, and, later on, entered what we may call the ‘Life Guards.’

The history of the Angoni and their migrations will be considered in a later chapter.

The Makololo of the Shiré valley, though they cannot be enumerated as a separate tribe, have had no small influence on the affairs of the Shiré valley tribes, and must not therefore be passed over without notice. Their history will help to illustrate what I have already mentioned and shall have to come back to later on—the ceaseless drifting backwards and forwards, and consequent intermingling of the Bantu tribes, which has gone on, more or less, ever since Europeans knew anything about them, and may be compared with the movement which brought the Germanic peoples into the Roman world, and for which we seem to have no compendious designation equivalent to the German word Völkerwanderung. The original Makololo were a Basuto tribe, driven from their home by the onslaughts of the Matebele, about 1823. Under the name of ‘Mantatees,’[5] they spread terror and desolation among the Griquas and Bechuana, and finally, under the leadership of Sebituane, made their way northward and settled in the Barotse valley on the Zambezi, where Livingstone visited them in 1851. They had even then begun to incorporate with themselves the Barotse and other darker tribes about them, and had introduced their language into the country, where it is still spoken, though the Makololo were expelled, after Sekeletu’s death, by Sipopo, one of the former line of Barotse chiefs. Sekeletu, Sebituane’s son, furnished Livingstone with an escort, when he left Linyanti for Loanda in 1853, and again when, after his return from the West coast, he started down the Zambezi. These Makololo (most of whom, however, belonged to the subject tribes—Baloi and others) remained behind at Tete when Livingstone returned to England; and though, when he came out again in 1858, he offered to take them all back to Sekeletu’s, some preferred to stay where they were. Some others, among whom was the well-known Ramakukane, came back with him from Sesheke, after he had taken the rest home in 1860. In course of time, having settled on the Shiré below the Cataracts, and married women of the country, they became powerful chiefs, and, though somewhat oppressive towards the Anyanja, they were a check on the Yao advance from the east. One of these chiefs, Mlauri, is still living, and as active as ever, in spite of age. Masea, whose village was on the west bank of the Shiré, two or three miles below Katunga’s, died a few years ago. In 1893 he was still a very fine, vigorous old man, and his numerous family of sons and daughters (some of them educated at the Mission) are mostly noticeable for good looks and intelligence: they show their descent in the lighter complexion. Livingstone says that Sebituane was ‘of an olive or coffee-and-milk’ colour. As far as language and customs go, these descendants of the Makololo are now completely merged in the Anyanja.

As we have seen, the breaking-up and absorption of one tribe by another has gone on to such an extent that, though in some cases we might confidently pronounce a man to be a Yao or a Nyanja from his build and personal appearance generally, yet very often it would be quite impossible. A surer criterion—though even that is nowadays beginning to fail us—is that afforded by artificial deformations—such as the filing and chipping, or even removal, of the teeth, the boring of noses, lips, and ears for the insertion of ornaments, and the scarifying and tatuing of the skin. These arts seem to be resorted to all the world over by people who do not go in for much clothing—apparently on the principle that the human face and figure need some modification in order to differentiate them as such. If your teeth are not chipped, you might as well be a dog—such, in general, seems to be the native line of reasoning.

A Mnguru, showing Keloids down centre of Chest

The African knows nothing of tatuing proper, and the introduction of colouring matter under the skin is hardly known. For the coloured designs of Polynesia is substituted the raised scar. The process is very rough and usually consists in making cuts which heal and leave ‘proud flesh’ (keloid) behind. Dr. Kerr Cross says: ‘The tissues of the negro seem to have a tendency to take on a keloid growth. That is to say, the cicatricial tissue grows large. If a native gets a cut, it becomes like a tumour or a new growth. If he has been vaccinated, the mark rises up like a two-shilling piece. If he tatus (i.e. scars) himself, the surface becomes a series of little growths protruding above the general level of the skin.’ But in case the natural tendency should not be enough, the operator sometimes assists nature by pinching the lips of the cut away from each other. Some tatu-marks (mpini, konde) are not raised much above the level of the skin; they have a smooth surface and a dark-blue colour, which blends well with the skin, and is produced by rubbing in charcoal or wood-ash, and sometimes gunpowder. Formerly the various scars always indicated the tribe to which a person belonged, and the children were marked with the mother’s pattern; now the tribal marks are no longer strictly kept to. The distinctive Yao tatu (called mapalamba) was two rows of small cuts across the temples. Some have stars in dark blue on the chest and elsewhere. I have seen them on Yaos, but do not know if they are distinctive. The Nyanja women used to score long lines over shoulders, chest, and back. The Lomwe tribes have various patterns—one a crescent, turned downwards, just between the eyebrows, others a series of from three to six crescents in the same position. The Alolo have a mark on each side of the chest, consisting of a crescent turned up, and two short, vertical cuts below it. The Makua make a line of cuts above the eyes, deep enough to form ‘little pouches’ in which they keep snuff, as I hear from Mr. J. Reid. Some tribes add dots all over the forehead, and some, on the Zambezi, raise a line of small lumps down the middle of the forehead. I have seen Yao women whose chests and shoulders seemed to be covered with small marks like those left by ordinary vaccination; and some seem to have the whole body more or less covered. Besides marks intended for decoration, there are those caused by a favourite method of treatment for various kinds of indisposition, viz., to make a cut and rub in the juice of a herb, or some other form of ‘medicine’; and I remember a poor girl, evidently suffering from a bad attack of influenza, who had just had a series of these cuts made all down the inside of her arm.

I was once present at a discussion between a number of young people (this kind of debate is called mákani, and is a recognised fireside amusement) on the question whether ‘it is better to make holes in one’s lips, like the Yaos, or in one’s ears, like the Angoni.’ The pelele, which was referred to, was a Nyanja decoration, but is now seen more frequently amongst Yao women. The upper lip is bored and a bit of grass-stalk inserted into the hole, which at first is scarcely larger than would be made by a stout darning-needle. After this has been worn for some time—I have often seen girls of ten or twelve with it—a slightly thicker one is inserted, and that, in time, again exchanged for a thicker, till at last the hole is large enough to admit a small plug of ivory, say a quarter of an inch across. The plug becomes larger and larger, till a ring is substituted for it, which also grows in size, with the wearer’s advance in years, till you see matrons wearing one like an ordinary napkin-ring. It seemed to me, however, that there was a tendency to stop short at the earlier stages, as I remember quite elderly women, with only a moderate plug. The Alolo women, not content with the pelele, wear a brass nail, two or three inches long, in the lower lip as well. Certainly, as far as personal preference went, I was inclined to side with the Angoni in the mákani above alluded to.

The favourite ear ornaments are a kind of conical stud, ornamented in patterns with beads. They are quite small, and do not distend the lobe of the ear much. I think they are considered by natives to be a speciality of the Angoni. I have once or twice seen young warriors wearing in their ears ornaments about the length of one’s finger, which may have been very diminutive tusks of the bush-pig (nguluwe), or perhaps the teeth of some other animal. Both sexes have the ears bored. I have seen girls who had only recently had it done, wearing a flower stuck in the hole.

A style of ornament for the ear which I have only met with once was that of a woman at Mlanje, from Matapwiri’s (on the Portuguese border), who had her ears pierced with a series of holes in the outer edge of the cartilage, and loops of white beads strung through them. She probably belonged to the Alolo, or some other tribe of Makua. Some Yao and Makua women wear a stud (chipini) of lead or some other metal in the side of the nose.

As to the teeth, it was a standing wonder to me that the way they were treated did not ruin them entirely; but it does not seem as if chipped teeth decayed any more readily than whole ones. Naturally, as most travellers have reported, natives usually have splendid teeth; though Dr. Fülleborn, in his observations on tribes at the north end of Lake Nyasa, says he found a considerable percentage of people with decayed teeth. I have come across one or two cases of toothache myself, but should say that, on the whole, there is no need to revise the general opinion.

The Yaos chip the edge of the four upper front teeth into saw-like points. This is usually done to boys and girls at about fifteen or sixteen. I never saw the operation performed, but fancy that a mallet and chisel are the instruments used. They are brought up to face the prospect, I suppose, and seem to contemplate it with more equanimity than most of us do going to the dentist. The Mambwe (on the Nyasa Tanganyika plateau) have the two middle teeth of the lower jaw removed. One of them told M. Foà that they were knocked out with an axe, adding ‘it is very quickly done!’

A triangular gap between the two upper front teeth is made by different tribes—the Anyika[6] of North-west Nyasa being one. I have a note of a man whose teeth had been chipped in this way, and whom I understand to have been a Yao; but, as he had gone to Zanzibar early in life (‘I do not know how—probably through slavery,’ said my English-speaking informant), there may have been some irregularity about his teeth.

Some of the Makua tribes file each separate tooth to a point (as shown in the fourth example of our illustration); this is also done by the Basenga, and, I believe, other tribes near the Luangwa. The Batonga knock out the upper front teeth—or did so, in Livingstone’s time. ‘When questioned respecting the origin of this practice, the Batoka reply that their object is to be like oxen, and those who retain their teeth they consider to resemble zebras.’ As the Batonga venerate the ox and detest the zebra, we have here, what is absent elsewhere, some sort of a clue to a connection between this custom and the people’s religious beliefs. Livingstone further points out that the knocking out of the teeth is of the nature of a solemn ceremony, without which no young people can be considered grown up.

Fashions in Tooth-chipping

1. Makua; 2 and 4. Yao; 3. Anyika and other North-end Tribes

Fashions in hairdressing, though not precisely of the same kind with the adornments just enumerated, may perhaps best be considered here. Most natives, I fancy, would look on a person who let his or her hair grow without doing anything to it (unless in mourning, or otherwise debarred from ordinary social intercourse) as little better than a wild beast. The usual thing among the Yaos and Anyanja is to shave the head from time to time for the sake of coolness and cleanliness, never letting the hair grow more than an inch or two in length. This is often clipped and shaved into all sorts of patterns. A favourite one for little girls is to have two bands shaved diagonally across the head, from the left temple to the back of the right ear. Sometimes a ridge or crest is left, running along the middle of the head, from front to back, and then clipped into points like a cock’s comb; or some young men, while shaving the back of the head, leave the hair an inch or two long over the brow, like a coronet. The Angoni are very fond of the long pigtails called minzu; these are not plaited, but very neatly and tightly rolled round with twisted palm-fibre, fastened off at the ends. The most popular fashion used to be to have these arranged in a line (like the crest already referred to), forming a kind of lateral halo, if such a thing were possible. The dandy with minzu nine or ten inches long is a proud youth indeed. It is a quaint spectacle to see such an one seated on the ground and a chum squatting beside him, doing his hair. But the caprices of fashion are endless. The illustration shows another style of coiffure worn by a Mngoni, who may have evolved it out of his own inner consciousness, or borrowed it, directly or indirectly, from the Bashukulumbwe of the Kafue. As many Angoni have of late years travelled overland to Salisbury and even farther south, to work in the mines or otherwise, it is possible that the subject of the picture may have seen his model for himself in the course of his wanderings.

Referring back to the picture of the Mnguru already given, we find that he wears his hair fairly long and divided into strands, with beads tied to the ends of them. Now and again we see a Yao woman (but I think the fashion is not confined to any particular tribe; it is not very extensively followed, comparative wealth, leisure, and one or more skilled assistants being necessary) with what looks like a wig of red beads. This is made by stringing on every few hairs the beads known as chitalaka, which are like red coral, and white inside. How long it takes to complete the dressing of a head in this way, I have no notion; but African women possess an almost unlimited capacity for passive endurance. A pretty variant of this is sometimes seen in little girls who have a few loops of chitalaka strung to the hair on the top of the head, adding a touch of bright colour and no suggestion of discomfort. Some of the Atonga shave the hair all round, leaving a patch on the top of the scalp, which they plait into small tails.

2. Women Making Porridge in an (Imported) Iron Pot

The one on the left takes out a handful and moulds it into shape to add to the pile on the basket ([p. 136])

1. Exceptional Coiffure of Mngoni

The Progress of Civilization!

Dress, which is a comparatively simple matter, apart from the singlets, shirts, and other garments of European introduction, may be reserved for another chapter which deals with native life from the cradle to the grave.

CHAPTER III
RELIGION AND MAGIC—I

Ancestor-worship. Offerings. Mulungu. Mpambe. Chitowe. Evil spirits. Spirits of the dead. Dreams. Morality.

In 1894 swarms of locusts, for the first time in thirty years, came down on the Shiré Highlands and consumed all the crops in the native gardens—even attacking at last the white men’s coffee-trees. Fresh broods kept succeeding each other throughout the dry season, and as the time for the rains drew near, the villagers became anxious. What was the good of sowing their maize if the dzombe were there, ready to eat up the young shoots as soon as they appeared above ground? Great discussions went on among the elders in the bwalo as to the source of this visitation—if one could only conjecture its reason, it might be possible to find a remedy. Chesinka, an old head-man on Mlanje mountain, had a dream, one night in October, which, at any rate, suggested a solution. His old friend, Chipoka, dead some four years, appeared to him, and told him that it was he himself who had sent the locusts, as a hint to his people that they were not treating him properly; it was a long time since they had given him any beer, and he was very thirsty in the spirit-world. So Chesinka sent word to Chipoka’s son, who at once took steps for repairing the omission.

Chipoka had been ‘a person of importance in his day’; he was the principal chief on Mlanje in Livingstone’s time, and, when he died in 1890, ‘had, with the consent of all his sub-chiefs and subjects, transferred the sovereign rights of his country to the Queen, in order to pledge the British Government to the protection of the indigenous Nyanja people against Yao attacks.’[7] His son, of course, does not occupy anything like the same position; but the village, when I saw it, must have been in its old place—or very near it—on the bank of the Mloza, a clear stream coming down out of the heart of Mlanje, between the two peaks of Chinga and Manga. Chipoka’s grave, with some huge bamboos growing on it, was within a short distance of the huts.

I had heard that a ceremony was to take place for the purpose of propitiating the old chief’s spirit; and when I walked over, on the morning of October 29, I found a sort of subdued stir, the people very busy, but all looking extremely solemn. Young Chipoka—a man of about thirty—and some other men were seated under the eaves of a hut, while the women moved in and out of the huts with pots of beer, and other people were busied about a group of neat miniature huts, made of grass, about two feet high. The roofs of these huts, which had been finished separately, were not yet put on, and I could see that a couple of earthen jars were sunk in the ground inside each. These jars were now filled with beer, and then the roof was lifted on. Chipoka, draped in his blue calico, came forward very courteously to greet me, and explained that the houses were ‘for Mulungu.’

Now ‘Mulungu’ is the word which is generally translated ‘God,’ and it really does sometimes seem to denote a supreme Deity; but here it clearly meant Chipoka’s spirit. Mr. Duff Macdonald has made it clear that the ‘gods’ of the Yaos—or, at least, those most definitely thought of as such, are the spirits of the dead—of a man’s father or grandfather, or the chief of his village,—sometimes of a great chief, who ruled over a large extent of country, like Kangomba of Sochi. When such an one lived long ago, people are apt to forget who he was when alive, and to think of him as a spirit only. Such spirits are often associated with particular hills, as is the case with Sochi and Ndirande, and might easily be mistaken by inquirers for genuine nature-powers.

I have more than once seen these little spirit-huts in villages, though I never on any other occasion received so straightforward an explanation of them. Once, the children who were with me objected to my approaching the hut, saying there was a chirombo there. Chirombo is a comprehensive word which may mean an insect, objectionable or otherwise, a lion, or other beast of prey, a mythical monster or bogy, or, simply, any animal or plant not good to eat. They may have meant the uncanny Something which was believed to have its abode there, or they may have been trying to keep out unauthorised intrusion by the fiction of a palpable chirombo with claws and teeth. Whether or not they consciously think of the dead as little shadowy figures, a few inches high[8] (like the representation of the soul as it issues from the body, on some Greek vases), such was evidently the thought that suggested the erection of these miniature dwellings.

Duff Macdonald says, ‘The spirit of every deceased man and woman, with the solitary exception of wizards and witches, becomes an object of religious homage.’ Of course, no one can worship all, and the chief of a village worships his immediate predecessor as the representative of all the people who have lived in the village in past times, and the whole line of his ancestors. In presenting his offering, he will say, ‘“Oh, father, I do not know all your relatives, you know them all, invite them to feast with you.” The offering is not simply for himself, but for himself and all his relatives.’ Sometimes a man approaches his deceased relatives on his own behalf; but, as a rule, it is the chief who prays and sacrifices on behalf of the village. As all the people living there are usually related to the chief, the deceased chief is the one to whom they would naturally pray; but any immigrants from elsewhere would probably pray to their own ancestors on matters connected with their own private concerns, while joining on public occasions in the recognised worship of the village god.

Naturally it is difficult for an outsider to gain any exact information as to religious practices, and, still more, religious beliefs. The Rev. Duff Macdonald, whom we have just quoted, enjoyed almost unequalled advantages, as regards the Yaos—spending three years in their country at a time when it was still virtually untouched by European influences, and being able to acquire a sufficient knowledge of the language to obtain the people’s own account of things at first hand. Great patience and tact, it is needless to say, are necessary for inquiries of this sort; and, even if one knows the language, it is not, as a rule, much use asking direct questions—unless of natives with whom you are fairly well acquainted. Of things which the stranger can see for himself in passing through the villages, the most noticeable are the little spirit-houses already mentioned, where sacrifices are presented from time to time. Sometimes these offerings are seen under trees, either in the village, or away from it—in fact, Mr. Macdonald says that the huts are erected, if there is no tree handy, close to the dead man’s house. (The house itself, as we shall see, is usually either pulled down, or shut up and left to decay.) If the tree is quite outside the village, the site may have been shifted, as often happens; or perhaps the spirit may be one of the ‘old gods of the land.’ This is possibly the case with the tree in the illustration, which is on Ndirande mountain, a few miles from Blantyre, though I am not sure whether this particular tree is close to a village or not. Ndirande, like Sochi, has a spirit of its own; and I suppose this is the reason why the boy who was accompanying me in the ascent of Nambanga (an isolated peak or knob at the northern end of the mountain) showed a sudden reluctance to go on. I thought he was tired, and told him to rest, and I would go on alone; but this seemed equally objectionable, and he was evidently making up his mind to go with me, as the lesser evil, when I decided to avoid the risk of inhumanity by turning back. As I could by no manner of means induce him to explain, I suspected the spirit might have something to do with the matter.

Tree, with Offerings to Spirits

In Mr. Macdonald’s time, the chiefs of the Blantyre and Zomba villages were all Yaos, and their canonised predecessors therefore belonged to the same tribe; but a certain amount of reverence was also paid to ‘the old gods of the land’—i.e. the spirits of dead Nyanja chiefs who haunted the principal mountains, and were specially appealed to for rain. We have already alluded to Kangomba of Sochi. The Rev. H. Rowley, when at Magomero, in 1861, saw Kangomba in the flesh; he was then ‘about forty years of age, had a frank, open countenance and a good head, and was altogether a very manly fellow.’ Apparently he did not live to be old. Mr. Macdonald says: ‘One tradition concerning him is this—When the Wayao were driving the Wanyasa[9] out of the country, Kangomba, a Wanyasa chief, saw that defence was hopeless, and entered a great cave on the mountain-side. Out of this cave he never returned; “he died unconquered in his own land.” The Wayao made the old tribe retire before them, but the chief, Kangomba, kept his place, and the new comers are glad to invoke his aid to this day. Their supplication for rain takes the form Ku Sochi, kwa Kangomba ula jijise, “Oh, Kangomba of Sochi, send us rain!” The Wayao chief, Kapeni, often asks some of the Wanyasa tribe that can trace connection with Kangomba to help him in these offerings and supplications.’

The offerings usually consist of native beer and maize flour (ufa), sometimes also calico, as seen in the illustration. It is torn into strips lest it should be appropriated by some needy and unscrupulous passer-by, or perhaps because each offerer only feels it incumbent on him to present a mere shred as a symbolic gift, since spirits, properly speaking, have no use for calico. Mr. Macdonald quotes the native reasoning on the subject. Spirits intimate their desire for various things—in dreams, or by means of the oracle, and, if their request be at all reasonable, it is granted. But, ‘if a spirit were to come, saying, “I want calico,” his friends would “just say that he was mad,” and would not give it. “Why should he want calico? What would he do with it? There was calico buried with him when he died, and he cannot need more again.”’ Food and tobacco, and even houses, are, it would appear, quite another matter.

Perhaps this opinion as to calico has been modified since the above was written; certainly I have seen at least one tree covered with strips of calico, and that within a mile or two of a mission station. That on the Ndirande tree is a special sacrifice for rain. Usually the stones at the foot of the tree support one or more pots of moa (native beer made of millet), and there is either a little basket of flour, or some is poured in a heap on the ground.

According to Mr. Macdonald, men would often sacrifice to their own particular ancestor, by putting down a little flour inside the hut, at the head of their sleeping-mat. Omens were drawn from the shape of this little heap of flour—whether it fell so as to form a neat cone, or otherwise. Beer, also, was made to furnish omens; it was poured out on the ground, and if it sank in, the god accepted the offering.

The same writer says that ‘when a deceased smoker wants tobacco, his worshippers put it on a plate and set fire to it.’ Matope, the chief of a village near Blantyre, died in 1893. In the following year, the Rev. J. A. Smith (now of Mlanje), happening to be at the village, saw, as he told me, the head-men take out the dead chief’s snuff-box, fill it with snuff, and place his stool in a certain spot, sprinkling snuff all round it. ‘This is done from time to time’ (I quote from my diary) ‘during the first year or two after a death—after this time the spirit ceases to haunt the place.’

In the Upper Shiré district, I was not very successful in gleaning information, but have a note that a girl told me the ‘Angoni’ a-pempera Mulungu (‘pray to God’) after the following fashion: ‘The people here sometimes sacrifice (kwisula) a goat; it is done by the head-man, and the people all stand round nda! nda! nda! (i.e. in a row or circle); they eat the meat afterwards.’ Here too, evidently, the head-man acts on behalf of the village; and though it is not clear whether Mulungu here means the spirit of a dead chief, or a Supreme Deity, this is, for the moment, immaterial. I do not know whether the word kwisula is Nyanja or not, as I never heard it on any other occasion, and have hitherto been unable to trace it.

We have already seen that Mulungu is a name applied to the spirits of the dead—the amadhlozi or amatongo of the Zulus (we shall come back to these presently), and as local deities seem to be in many instances (perhaps in all, if we could trace them) identical with deceased chiefs, it looks as if the religion of the Bantu consisted, in the main, of ancestor-worship. However, other ideas, though dim and vague, seem to attach to the word Mulungu. Originally, perhaps, it meant no more than ‘the great ancestor’—the Zulu Unkulunkulu. This name, literally ‘the Great, Great One,’ seems to have been used by the Zulus as if conveying the notion of a supreme being and creator; but some of them, on being questioned, stated that he was the first man, the common ancestor, at any rate, of themselves and those tribes whom they acknowledged as akin to them. No special worship, however, was offered to him, as he had lived so long ago that no family could now trace its descent to him; and worship is (as with the ancient Romans) a family, or at most a tribal matter. The word um-lungu, in Zulu, means ‘a European’; it is used in no other sense, but seems originally to have been bestowed under the idea that white men were supernatural beings of some sort.

One might feel inclined to doubt the above etymology, which is Bleek’s, since, in some languages, as in Nyanja, the word Mulungu and the adjective -kulu (‘great’) exist side by side. But against this we may set the possibility of the former being borrowed from other tribes. Mr. Rowley, writing of the time when the Yaos were only beginning to settle in the Shiré Highlands, says expressly that they used the name Mulungu where the Anyanja spoke of Mpambe. Speaking from my own observation, I should say that the former had quite displaced the latter throughout the Blantyre and Upper Shiré districts. Now in Yao, precisely, the word for ‘great’ is not -kulu, but -kulungwa.

However that may be, some Yaos, at any rate, think of Mulungu as ‘the great spirit of all men, a spirit formed by adding all the departed spirits together.’ This might almost seem too abstract a conception to be a genuine native view, but it was clearly stated to Mr. Macdonald, and is confirmed by Dr. Hetherwick, who has had many years’ experience of the Yaos. This writer also states the view (which Mr. Macdonald hesitated to accept), that the form of the word, or rather its plural (which shows it to belong, not to the first, or ‘personal’ class, but to the second, including things without a separate life of their own, such as parts of the body, trees, etc.), points to Mulungu not being regarded as a person. Dr. Hetherwick was once trying to convey to an old head-man the idea of the personality of God. The old man, as soon as he began to grasp what was meant, talked of Che Mulungu, ‘Mr. God!’

I have noted down some uses of the word I have come across, which I think could not possibly be set down to missionary influence. On two occasions, people told me that their dead friends or relatives had ‘gone to Mulungu’; on another, a mother said that ‘Mulungu had taken away’ the little sick girl I was inquiring after. On hearing thunder, at the beginning of the rainy season, another woman remarked, ‘Mulungu anena’—‘Mulungu is speaking.’ This is very suggestive of the theory on the subject of earthquakes held, according to the Rev. A. G. MacAlpine, by the Atonga of Lake Nyasa, viz., ‘that it was the voice of God calling to inquire if his people were all there. When the rumble of the earthquake was heard, they all shouted in answer, “Ye, ye,” and some went to the flour mortars and beat on them with the pounding sticks.’ Any person who failed thus to answer ‘Adsum’ would be sure (it was believed) to die before long. The name used, in this case, was not Mulungu, but Chiuta.

We have mentioned the name Mpambe as used by the Anyanja. Livingstone, on his first visit to the Shiré Highlands, notes, ‘They believe in the existence of a supreme being called Mpambe and also Morungo’ (Mulungu). Mr. Rowley gives an interesting account of supplications addressed to Mpambe for rain. The principal part was taken by a woman—the chief’s sister. She began by dropping ufa on the ground, slowly and carefully, till it formed a cone, and in doing this called out in a high-pitched voice, ‘Imva Mpambe! Adza mvula’ (‘Hear thou, O God, and send rain!’), and the assembled people responded, clapping their hands softly and intoning—they always intone their prayers—‘Imva Mpambe.’ The beer was then poured out as a libation, and the people, following the example of the woman, threw themselves on their backs and clapped their hands (a form of salutation to superiors), and, finally, danced round the chief where he sat on the ground. The ceremony concluded with a rain-charm; but as this is rather magic than religion (the previous proceedings, as being distinctly an appeal to unseen and superior powers, come under the latter head), it will be more convenient to return to it later on. In this very neighbourhood, I heard, one sultry afternoon in September 1894, weird, shrill cries, which I was told were ‘the people shouting for rain’ on Mpingwe—one of the mountains between Blantyre and Magomero. Distant peals of thunder had been heard before the crying began, and the rain came before morning.

It is worth noting that, here, Mpambe is thought of as sending rain, while, in some parts, as on Nyasa, the word means ‘thunder.’ The connection between rain and thunder is obvious, especially where, as is the case in these countries, the latter always heralds the breaking-up of the dry season. Sometimes the word is said to mean ‘lightning’—which comes to much the same thing as far as the idea is concerned.

This certainly looks like a personification of nature-powers, which seems more probable than the suggestion that mpambe only came to mean thunder or lightning because these were the work of the being to whom the name was originally applied.

It is worth noticing that in Yao the rainbow is called Mulungu, or ukunje wa Mulungu (‘the bow of Mulungu’) and an earthquake chilungu, which is the same word with another prefix.

Chiuta (which is treated by the Rev. D. C. Scott as synonymous with Mulungu and Mpambe) is perhaps derived from the Nyanja word uta, ‘a bow,’ and connected with the rainbow (called in this language uta wa Lezi). Lezi, or Leza, meaning ‘lightning’ in the Kotakota dialect, is another synonym.[10] I have never heard it used except in the above compound. Chiuta is the word used by the Atonga, and, according to the Rev. A. G. MacAlpine, ‘is very difficult to derive with certainty, but whatever its root may be, it now denotes one who inspires wonder and awe.’ If, however (as is quite possible), the name was borrowed by the Atonga from the Anyanja, this may be a secondary meaning imported into it.

We shall see, later on, that a distinction seems to be made between deaths ‘by the act of Mpambe,’ and from other causes.

Before leaving this part of the subject, we may note that, according to the Yao belief, Mulungu ‘arranges the spirits of the dead in rows or tiers,’ and some mysterious beings called ‘the people of Mulungu’ figure in their fragmentary legends of creation.

Besides the above, the Yaos seem to have had special deities of their own, connected with the country whence they came, and, therefore, probably, ancient chiefs of theirs, as ‘the old gods of the country’ were of the Anyanja. Such was Mtanga, supposed to dwell on Mount Mangoche, lying midway between Lake Chiuta and the Shiré, and the old home of the Mangoche tribe. It was believed that the voice of Mtanga could still be heard on Mangoche. Some said (twenty or thirty years ago) that ‘Mtanga was never a man,’ and the name is only ‘another word for Mulungu.’ However, both meanings would seem to have been lost sight of in more recent times, since, in Dr. Hetherwick’s Yao vocabulary we only find ‘Mtanga, a hobgoblin.’ This definition would also suit Chitowe (or Siluwi), who is enumerated along with Mtanga by Dr. Macdonald, but figures in fairy tales as a kind of monstrous being, with only one arm, one leg, one eye, etc., the rest of his body being made of wax. ‘He is associated with famine.... He is invoked by the women, on the day of initiating their fields ... when the new crop has begun to grow.’ Chitowe may become a child or a young woman. In this disguise he visits villages and tells whether the coming year will bring food or famine. He receives their hospitality, but throws the food over his shoulder without eating it. Chitowe is a child or subject of Mtanga, and some speak of several Chitowe who are messengers of Mtanga. The Nyanja bogy, Chiruwi (the word is translated in Scott’s Dictionary, ‘a mysterious thing’), is probably the same as Chitowe; he is constructed as above described, and, in addition, carries an axe. He is in the habit of meeting travellers and wrestling with them in lonely places; if the traveller falls, ‘he returns no more to his village—he dies.’ If, on the contrary, he throws Chiruwi, he says, ‘I will kill you, Chiruwi,’ and Chiruwi entreats for his life, promising to show the man ‘lots of medicines.’ Then the man lets him go, ‘and Chiruwi goes on before and says this tree is for such a disease, and that tree is for such a disease’—in short, gives him a lecture on materia medica, which proves exceedingly useful.

Mbona of Tyolo seems to have been one of these local deities. Mr. Rowley says that he was supposed to be the supreme ruler of the Anyanja, superior to the Rundo, or Paramount Chief, who consulted him in all special emergencies. This was done through the medium of Mbona’s wife—a woman chosen for the purpose, who lived in a solitary hut on Tyolo Mountain—or elsewhere, for ‘he was thought to be ubiquitous,’ and huts on other mountains were consecrated to his service. ‘He was spoken of as having a visible presence, but no one could say they had actually seen him or heard him.... If the Rundo wished for Bona’s advice, he or his deputies would proceed to the top of the mountain, with horn-blowing and shouting, to make the bride of Bona know of his approach. She then retires to the seclusion of her hut, hears without seeing those who come to her, seeks and finds Bona in sleep, receives from him, in this condition, that which he wishes her to declare, and when she awakes she declares to the expectant people the message Bona has given her to deliver.’ As Mbona’s wife was thus condemned to solitude for the rest of her days, the position was naturally not much coveted, and the Rundo usually had women kidnapped to fill it. Mr. Macdonald, some twenty years later, merely refers to this spirit in passing, as a ‘local deity.’ The word appears now to be used as a common noun, in the following senses: (1) ‘A wonder,’ (2) ‘something desirable’, (3) ‘one who looks after people or things’—as the overseer at the namwali ceremonies, which will be referred to later on, and (4) ‘a witness.’ It may be connected with the verb bona, meaning ‘to look at’ (in Nyanja, ona is ‘to see’); and possibly (3) is or was used as the name of the spirit. I cannot help wondering whether a story I once heard, of an old woman living on Morambala, who kept a number of spirits shut up in her house, has any reference to this tradition. I once, at Blantyre, questioned some Chikundas from the River about this old woman, and they said that they had heard of her, and that her name was Mbonda. I knew nothing about Mbona at the time, and perhaps misheard Mbonda instead of it; the sounds are not unlike, if both o‘s are pronounced open. The application of the spirit’s name to the woman is just the sort of confusion that might arise when a tradition is falling into oblivion. About the same time (in 1894) I heard of another old woman living in a cave on Malabvi—a mountain a few miles east of Blantyre. No European had been able to acquire the land in the immediate neighbourhood, as the people refused to sell it during her lifetime. It has since occurred to me that she might have been one of ‘Mbona’s wives.’

I do not think that, as a rule, the Bantu have much notion of anything that can be called a devil, or, indeed, of evil spirits as such; the spirits of the dead seem to be thought of as beneficent or hostile, according to their dispositions when alive, or the behaviour of the survivors. Dr. Hetherwick says, ‘While there is no trace of a devil in the Mang’anja faith, they have the ziwanda, who are ... the mizimu of men and women, but who work only ill. They are always feared. Their nature is that of the other mizimu, but they have only the wish to do harm.’ The Wankonde, however, according to Dr. Kerr Cross, ‘firmly believe in a spirit of evil’—Mbasi.

‘In one place Mbasi is a person, an old man, who exercises extraordinary power. He only speaks at night, and to the head-men of the tribe, and during the interview every other voice must be silent and every light extinguished. In Wundale the people believe in such a person as having the power to make lions, and being able to send them off as messengers of evil ... against whom he chooses. His house is surrounded with long grass, in which he keeps his lions as other men keep dogs.’

Coming back to the spirits of the dead, we find that the Yaos use the word lisoka to express that part of a man which survives when he dies; when it is an object of worship, it is called mulungu. These spirits, as we have already seen, are frequently prayed to, and may give evidence of their existence in three ways—by answering the prayers addressed to them, in dreams, and through the prophetess. There are also various means of divination (such as that of the flour already mentioned) and omens, which may be consulted and interpreted by professional diviners.

Every village has its ‘prayer-tree,’ under which the sacrifices are offered. It stands (usually) in the bwalo, the open space which Mr. Macdonald calls the ‘forum,’ and is, sometimes, at any rate, a wild fig-tree.[11] The Wankonde offer prayers—at least their priests (waputi) do—in the sacred groves where the dead are buried. The nearest approach to a temple among the Anyanja is a small hut called kachisi, which is sometimes built near the house of the village chief, if not actually under his eaves—sometimes in the bush, at a short distance from the village. ‘The chief utters the prayers in the house himself, alone, while the people answer by chanted accompaniments and clapping of hands at the door.’ The same sort of ritual was observed in the prayers for rain described by Mr. Rowley. The shower which fell on that occasion was, of course, accepted as an answer to the people’s supplications.

The natives say, ‘A man complains, and the spirits can hear him, but they can have no intercourse with man except in dreams, and in the silent care which they can exercise, having power to lead men, and to watch over them with favour, or when a man is going into danger to turn him back.’ If more explicit communication is needed, they inspire some person, and make him rave (bwebweta); his words are not directly intelligible, but some one is found to interpret them; ‘one man is laid hold of by the spirits that he may tell all people and they may hear.’ The person thus inspired may be a man or a woman—among the Yaos perhaps more frequently the latter.

The dead may manifest themselves in the shape of animals; but this does not happen so often as among the Zulus, who quite expect their deceased relatives to come back, like Cadmus and Harmonia, as ‘bright and aged snakes,’ and are very glad to see them when they do. The Yao theory seems to be that none of the departed will do this, unless they mean to be nasty. ‘If a dead man wants to frighten his wife, he may persist in coming as a serpent. The only remedy for this is to kill the serpent’—which no Zulu in his senses would dream of doing. However, the accidental killing of ‘a serpent belonging to a spirit’ seems to demand some sort of apology. ‘A great hunter generally takes the form of a lion or a leopard; and all witches seem to like the form of a hyena.’ But witches often turn into hyenas without dying first—which belongs to another part of the subject. The Makanga, in the angle between the Shiré and Zambezi, refrain from killing lions, believing that the spirits of dead chiefs enter into them.

There seems to be some difference of opinion with regard to the degree to which the spirits will make communications in dreams. An old Nyanja chief said to Livingstone, ‘Sometimes the dead do come back, and appear to us in dreams; but they never speak nor tell us where they have gone, nor how they fare.’ On the other hand, as we have seen, communications in dreams are expected as a regular thing. The Anyanja and Makololo (says Mr. Macdonald) were inclined to lay more stress on dreams than on the oracle of the ufa cone. They argued that, if you put the flour down carefully enough, it will always assume the proper pyramidal shape, and if you cover it with an upturned pot overnight (the usual practice), it will keep it—unless the rats overturn the pot. Perhaps this was due to the rationalising influence of the Makololo, who had been longer in contact with white men, and (like other natives in like case) were always burning to assert the superiority which this gave them.

If the dreams are not sufficiently explicit, we must fall back on the prophet or prophetess. Macdonald’s account tallies with the description of the woman set apart for the service of Mbona, except that he speaks of one living in a village with her family, who may arouse the neighbours with her shrieks in the dead of night. The people assemble to hear the message delivered by the spirits, and then return to bed; ‘or there may be a great meeting in the morning, when the prophetess appears, her head encircled with Indian hemp, and her arms cut as if for new tatus.’

But the Kubwebweta inspiration may come on any one, at any time, or in any place. Thus, one of a party of carriers on a journey suddenly finds himself ‘possessed,’ and his companions listen to his ravings with the greatest reverence. These utterances of possessed people always require some one to interpret them, and ‘an old woman or other skilled person’ is usually found. Macdonald says nothing of this, in the case of the prophetess, but if, as is probably the case, she is more or less of a professional,[12] she will have the necessary skill herself. The messages are not, as a rule, of a very recondite character—either the deceased chief wishes to help his people by warning them of war, or telling them where game may be found; or he feels himself neglected (like old Chipoka), and demands such and such offerings. Namzuruwa, an ancient chief of the district below the Murchison Cataracts, occasionally inspires people in this way.

The dead sometimes appear in visible form, as a native told the Rev. D. C. Scott: ‘People sometimes see those who have died and are dead walking outside in the gardens.’[13] I have never had the luck to hear a ghost story at first hand myself—the ‘night fears’ of the small boys whom I found objecting to go out after dark were connected, not with ghosts, but with wizards, of whom more presently.

There are haunted places in the Bush, where spirits are supposed to be heard, but not seen. M. Junod was told, over and over again, in the Delagoa Bay country, of people who had heard the drumming and singing of the spirits. These haunted spots were the burial-places of the chiefs, and no doubt this is so in other cases. The Anyanja have a curious account of ‘the spirits’ hill,’ where people who go, carrying pots on their heads, have them lifted off by the baboons, and hear a sound, ‘as of people answering.’ They also speak of the ‘spirit-drums’—the small ones sounding piye! piye! and the big ones, pi! pi! as though a dance were going on, and so far as one can gather, these spirits seem to be thought of as in sight like ordinary men and women—not the little εἴδωλα who dwell in the spirit-houses.

The notion of a connection between religion and morality comes comparatively late in human development; but we can perhaps see traces of it in the idea of the chirope. This means that, when a man has killed another man, he will either be ill, or be seized by a sort of murderous madness till he has performed some expiatory ceremony. The accounts I have before me are somewhat different, but are not, perhaps, inconsistent with one another. Among the Yaos, in Macdonald’s time, it seems to have been a condition that the victim should not be an enemy (towards whom no obligations were recognised), or even a person of the same tribe, whose kinsfolk could take up the feud and demand compensation. But, if a Yao killed his own slave (or, apparently, his child, his younger brother, or any one under his charge), he feared that he ‘would pine away, lose his eyesight, and die miserably, unless he went to the chief, paid him a certain fee, and said, “Give me a charm, for I have slain a man.”’ The Angoni, like the Zulus, apply the notion to killing a man in battle, and think that, unless they gash the bodies of the slain, so as to let out the air from the intestines, and prevent the corpse from swelling, they will be attacked by a mysterious disease which causes their own bodies to swell up. (This precise symptom is not given in the accounts before us, but is believed in by the Zulus, and probably by the Angoni.) The Angoni afterwards dance a war-dance ‘to throw off the chirope.’ The word appears to be connected with mlopa, ‘blood,’ used particularly of blood shed in killing—as of animals in hunting—and the idea is that the spirit of the slain enters the body of the slayer. This is even the case with animals; and hence it is the custom for the hunter to cut off a small piece of the meat as soon as he has shot any animal, throw it on the fire, and eat it, ‘because of the spirit of the beast that enters into one if one does not.’

The Angoni and various other tribes west of the Lake have a belief that there is a distinct relation between smallpox and morality; that, if the disease attacks a village where the moral tone is good, all the patients will recover; whereas, in a place given, as the native statement puts it, ‘to adultery and other sins,’ every one who sickens, young or old, will die. The locality, and various other circumstances, make it unlikely that this is an imported notion.

It is generally believed that the Eastern Bantu have no ‘idols’ properly so called; and their charms, to which we shall come back later, do not usually take the form of human figures. But the Tonga chiefs used to carry about with them little wooden images called angoza—representing men, women, or animals. Sometimes they were only sticks with a little head carved at one end. The Rev. A. G. MacAlpine, who seems puzzled what to make of them, does not state whether any are now in existence. ‘Long ago they used to be owned by chiefs only, and were lodged in the house of the head-wife.... They were not displayed except on special occasions. In the talking of important cases, they are said to have been brought out and planted in the ground at some little distance from the chief, and when he went on a journey they might be carried along with him, both of which uses would suggest their being an emblem of authority.... Often people came asking to see them, when they would be brought out covered up and not exposed till some gift had been made.’ We find that the Achewa have articles described as ‘fetiches’ and consisting ‘of a few short pieces of wood the size of one’s forefinger, bound together with a scrap of calico into the figure of a child’s doll. Inside the calico is concealed a tiny box made of the handle of a gourd-cup, ... [and] supposed to contain the spirit of some dead ancestor.’ Spirits wandering homeless in the bush are apt to annoy the living in various ways, till captured by a ‘doctor’ and confined in one of these receptacles.

The Yao children play with dolls bearing about as much resemblance to the human figure as a ninepin, but evidently intended to represent it. If games are survivals of religious ceremonies, they may originally have been teraphim, or fetiches of some sort. The ‘ugly images’ found by Livingstone near Lake Mweru, in ‘huts built for them,’ which were used in rain-making and cases of illness, seem to have been somewhat different from the angoza of the Atonga.[14]

CHAPTER IV
RELIGION AND MAGIC—II

Creation. Origin of death. Lake Nyasa. Rain-making. Charms. Witchcraft. Lycanthropy. Divination. Food tabus. Dances.

So far as we can get at the notions of the Bantu about creation, they do not seem to have thought that this world ever had a beginning. All the stories one has met with assume it as already existing, and explain how this or that feature—mountains, rivers, lakes, animals, men—was introduced into it. The Yaos tell that Mtanga pinched up the surface of the earth into mountains, Chitowi—who had failed in performing the operation himself—having called him in for the purpose. He then dug channels for rivers, and brought down rain to fill them. The Yaos, being mountaineers, assumed that a plain would be unfit for human habitation: Mtanga, on first viewing their country, remarked, ‘This country is bad because it is without a hill.’ There are also legends of the introduction of the sun, moon, and stars, and of the origin of clouds, wind, and rain; but all these presuppose the existence of people on the earth.

Mankind is held to have originated at Kapirimtiya, a hill—or as some say, an island in a lake, far to the west of Nyasa. Here it is believed that there is a rock covered with marks like the footprints of men and animals, and that, when men were first created, the island was a piece of soft mud, and Mulungu sent them across it, so as to leave their footmarks there, before they were dispersed over the world. One native account says that ‘they came from heaven and fell down below upon the earth’; another, that they came out of a hole in the rock, which was afterwards closed by ‘the people of Mulungu,’ and is now ‘in a desert place towards the north.’

In the Bemba country, the natives speak of two such places; and one of them was seen in 1902 by a European, who describes it in a letter to Life and Work as ‘a conglomerate rock showing what the natives call footprints of a man, a child, a zebra or horse, and a dog.’ The Bemba people say that these footprints were made by Mulungu (or, as they call him, Luchereng’anga) ‘and the people and animals he brought to occupy the country.’ Offerings of beads, calico, and beer are placed on this rock. The writer thought the marks certainly looked like footprints, but were merely hollows where the rain had washed out the softer parts of the rock. The old head-man of the place, naturally enough, would not hear of this explanation, and maintained that the marks had once been much plainer, but were now partly washed away by the rains.

This account agrees well enough with the vague indications given by the Blantyre people as to the direction of Kapirimtiya. It seems to show that the Yaos and Bemba had some common centre, though the latter also say (which is confirmed by other testimony) that they came from the west in comparatively recent times.

The story of the Chameleon is found among so many of the Bantu as to suggest that they derived it from a common source. Whether it came from the Hottentot legend of the Moon and the Hare—or from the story out of which that was developed, I do not feel competent to discuss. The Yaos, the Anyanja, and the Atonga all possess it in slightly differing versions. I shall give the last-named.

‘Chiuta deputed the Chameleon and the Lizard (or Frog, as it is variously given) to take to men the message, the one of life and the other of death. The Chameleon was to tell men that they would die, but that they would return again, while the Lizard was bid tell them that when they died, they would die for good. The Chameleon had the start, but in its slow, hesitating pace was soon outrun by the swift Lizard, which darted in among men with its tale that dying they should end their existence. A good while after, the Chameleon came lazily along and announced that, though men should die, they would return to life again; but he was met by the angry and sorrowful reply that they had already heard that they must die without returning, and that they had accepted the message first delivered.’

This is exactly like the Zulu story, where the people say, ‘Oh! we have taken hold of the word of the Lizard, when it said, “People shall die.” We never heard that word of yours, Chameleon—people will die!’ Consequently, Zulus, Yaos, Anyanja, Atonga, and, I suppose, most Bantu, detest the poor Chameleon, and consider him an unlucky beast. The Anyanja never pass one without putting snuff into its mouth, ‘that it may die,’ and any one who knows what a value they set on this commodity, and what minute quantities they seem, as a rule, to carry about with them, will allow that this is, indeed, carrying enmity very far. However, the Lake Anyanja seem to take a different view of the matter from the Blantyre people. They hold that their ancestors were grateful for the Chameleon’s message, though it came too late—perhaps they reflected that it was not his fault: he was not built for fast travelling;—and they give him tobacco as a reward; so that chameleons who die by nicotine poisoning are the victims of ill-judged kindness, not of revenge. It is worth noticing that the creature’s name in the Lake dialect—gulumpambe or gwilampambe—seems to mean ‘seize the lightning’ (or ‘Mpambe’). Possibly there is some still recoverable tradition at the back of this.

The Yaos have another very curious tale, in which the Chameleon is directly concerned in the introduction of Man into the world. At first Man was not—only Mulungu and the beasts. Apparently the Chameleon has been forced by changed circumstances to alter his mode of living, for, in those days he used to set traps for fish in the river—wicker arrangements on the principle of the lobster-pot—as natives do now. One morning, on visiting his trap, he found two unknown beings in it—no other than the first man and woman, who had somehow blundered into it during the night. (I have seen a mono big enough to contain one person, with his knees drawn up, but the size of the First Parents is not stated.) He consulted Mulungu as to what he should do with them, and was told, ‘Place them here, they will grow.’ They did grow, and developed various activities—among others that of making fire by twirling a hard stick on a bit of soft wood (kupeka moto), as is done to this day. But in the end they set the grass alight, and thus drove Mulungu from his abode on this earth. The Chameleon escaped by climbing a tree; but ‘Mulungu was on the ground, and he said, “I cannot climb a tree.” Then Mulungu set off and went to call the Spider. The Spider went on high and returned again and said, “I have gone on high nicely,” and he said, “You now, Mulungu, go on high.” Mulungu then went with the spider on high. And he said, “When they die, let them come on high here.” And behold, men on dying go on high in order to be slaves of God, the reason being that they ate his people here below.’

That is, as soon as they had found out the use of fire, they began to kill and cook buffaloes and other animals. No hint is given here as to where or how these human beings originated. Mulungu evidently knows nothing about them (while the animals, with which they have been interfering, are ‘his people’), and makes the Chameleon responsible for them, just as a chief at the present day would hold any man who introduced strangers into a village responsible for their conduct. Two other points are noteworthy—the region into which Mulungu makes his escape is ‘above’; and the Spider, who helps him, is a conspicuous figure in West African folk-lore and mythology. This is the only instance except one where I have met with him in an Eastern Bantu story; but we have numerous examples in Duala, and one at least from the Congo.

This tale seems to be a very crude form of the myth in which a divine being is driven from earth by the wickedness of mankind—like Astræa and the Kintu of the Baganda. The curious, and, to us, inconsistent limitations of his power are just what one may expect to find in stories of this kind.

Perhaps we might include among legends of creation a story told at the mysteries (to which we shall recur later on) to account for the origin of Lake Nyasa.

‘In old days the Lake was small as a brook. Then there came a man out of the west with a silver sceptre.’ (The story is ‘taken down from native lips’; I do not know what is the original wording in this place; but we may suppose that the Lake people knew silver through the coast traders even before they were acquainted with Europeans. In any case, the ‘silver sceptre’ need not prove the story to be a recent invention; one constantly finds touches of ‘actuality’ introduced by the tellers of these tales.) ‘He married, and brought his wife to return with him to his country. She consented, and her brother said, “Yes, and I will go too.” But his brother-in-law said, “I will not have you go too.” Then he wept bitterly for his sister, when he saw her cross the lake, and he grew very angry, and he took his stick and struck the water, till it swelled up and covered all things and became a flood. Then the woman and her brother died, both of them together, and the corpse of the woman went to the north, and that of her brother to the south. When a cloud weeps in the south, the sister rests quietly in the north, and when a cloud appears and weeps in the north, the brother rests quietly in the south.’

In another chapter we shall find a legend of a river struck with a staff with the opposite purpose, viz., to make a passage through it. It is possible that these may be echoes of the Biblical stories heard from the missionaries, though, as a matter of fact, I do not think this is the case.

In the last chapter I spoke of magic as distinguished from religion. By the latter I mean appeals to—or attempts to propitiate—some unseen, superior powers, whether these be thought of as ancestral spirits, nature-powers, or what we generally understand by a Deity. Magic, on the other hand, consists in performing certain actions which will, in some occult way, have such an effect on natural forces as to produce the result desired; that is to say (to put it roughly), it enables man to control nature on his own account. I must confess, however, that I do not always see where the line should be drawn, and have included several matters in this chapter without attempting to decide how they should be classified. Usually people attempt to do magic on the principle that like produces like—as when water is poured out on the ground in the hope of bringing rain.

It will be remembered that, when we spoke in the last chapter of Chigunda’s people calling on Mpambe for rain, it was said that the ceremony concluded with ‘a rain-charm.’ This is described as follows:—‘The dance ceased, a large jar of water was brought and placed before the chief; first Mbudzi (his sister) washed her hands, arms, and face; then water was poured over her by another woman; then all the women rushed forward with calabashes in their hand, and dipping them into the jar, threw the water into the air with loud cries and wild gesticulations.’

This, however, might be taken as prayer and not magic, if we are to understand the water to be thrown into the air as a sign that water is wanted. Sometimes people smear themselves with mud and charcoal to show that they want washing. If the rain still does not come, they go and wash themselves in the rivers and streams.

In 1893 the rains were unusually late. In the West Shiré district we only had one or two showers up to December 12—by which time the crops should have been in the ground in the ordinary course of things; and though that day and the next were wet, the weather cleared again—except for delusive thunder and lightning which led to nothing. After about a week of this, I happened to go to a village, and found all the women busy cleaning out the well whence they obtained their usual water-supply. It was a large hole, three or four feet across, and perhaps ten or twelve feet deep, and pegs had been driven into one side, by which even the white-haired old grandmother of the party ascended and descended with the greatest agility. They had already dug out a large heap of mud, and seemed serious and preoccupied, and none of the men were to be seen—in fact, the huts appeared to be deserted. But it never struck me that they were doing anything else but digging out their well because the water had come to an end.

Some years later, when I read M. Junod’s Les Baronga, a passage in it forcibly recalled this scene, and showed that it had a meaning which had never occurred to me at the time. The Ronga women, it appears, have a solemn rite of clearing out the wells in time of drought. For this, they lay aside all their usual garments, clothing themselves only with grass or leaves, and start for the well, with special songs and dances. I did not notice anything special about the costume of the women at Pembereka’s, nor did I hear any singing, but probably that would accompany the dance, which would have taken place before they actually got to work. As the well was quite close to the huts, there would be no marching in procession—two or three of the women may have come from other kraals, but there were so few in all that the ceremony must have taken place on a very small scale. Not knowing of the Ronga usage, I could not ascertain whether or not the Anyanja women carried it out on the following points: (1) Before starting for the well, they go in a body to the house of a woman who has had twins, and pour water over her out of their calabash dippers; (2) When they have finished cleaning out the well, they go and pour water on the graves in the sacred grove.

It will be remembered that the ceremony at Chigunda’s was conducted (though in the presence of the chief and all his people) by women only. I did not hear of any case of twins among these people during the time of our stay, and do not know how they are looked on. I have been told that the Yaos, when twins are born, kill one, but this is an unsupported statement (made by a native, however), which I have not been able to test. It seems clear that the Atonga and other tribes by the lakeside consider them unlucky, and act on that belief in varying degrees.

We do not find a special class of rain-doctors apart from the ordinary sorcerer, diviner, or ‘witch-doctor.’ Public ceremonies are conducted—or at least presided over—by the chief, though no doubt the ‘doctor’ is frequently consulted. M. Junod, in the account above referred to, says that the chief gives orders for the women to go out and clean the wells, after having ascertained, through lots cast by the principal diviners, that such a step is necessary.

There is no bar, however, to the exercise of special powers by individuals who possess them. Sir Harry Johnston speaks of an old rain-maker named Mwaka Sungula, at the north end of Lake Nyasa. His power extended to wind as well as rain. He was once resorted to by the native crew of the Domira when she stuck on a sandbank, and, as the wind changed during the night following his incantations, he had a triumphant success.

There are charms, as might be expected, not only for bringing rain, but for keeping it away. When travelling from the Upper Shiré district to Blantyre towards the close of the rainy season, I found that one of the carriers was provided with mankwala a mvula (rain-medicine) to ensure fair weather during the journey. I inspected this talisman, and found it to consist of two sticks, about a foot long, firmly lashed together with strips of bark, and, inserted between them, a piece of charred wood, and perhaps some other things which I could not clearly make out. He had paid the local practitioner a goat for it. He kept it in his hand on the march, and, from time to time, pointed it towards the quarter from which rain might be expected. It is a fact that none fell till we were within a few miles of the Mission; and Chipanga might have argued that the power of the charm was here neutralised by the more powerful influence of the white men.

This brings us to the subject of mankwala, variously translated ‘medicine,’ or ‘charms,’ and including what we understand by both terms. I have never been able to ascertain the etymology of the Nyanja word mankwala (a plural without a singular); in Yao, mtela, ‘a tree or plant,’ is, like the Zulu umuti, used with this meaning. Native doctors, both men and women, often have a very good knowledge of medicinal herbs, but it is the other kind of ‘medicine’ with which we have to do just now.

This may be divided, roughly, into offensive and defensive. You enter the little courtyard and see growing in the space between the huts, a cherished bush of cayenne peppers, to which is tied a protective apparatus consisting of a small wooden hoop with a goat’s or ram’s horn filled with heaven knows what messes, fastened into it. Or a string is hung at the door of a house, which is supposed to turn into a snake if any one enters to steal. Or a bamboo is set up close to the garden, with a horn on the top of it; or a string is run round the crops, or you may see ashes laid beside the path which passes by them; or, again, the medicine may be buried. Snail-shells and bundles of leaves may be used in this way. Those who attempt to steal in spite of these contrivances will either die on the spot or be taken ill afterwards.

The word winda, which means to protect a garden (or anything else) in this way, is also used of women letting their hair grow while their husbands are on a journey, lest any ill should befall the travellers. They are also supposed (among the Yaos at any rate) to refrain from washing their faces or anointing their heads till the absent ones return.

It would be impossible to enumerate all the different varieties of ‘medicine.’ I believe there is some preventive of every ill likely to befall mankind, and those who understand such things can do a profitable business. The Shiré people venture recklessly into the water if they are provided with ‘crocodile medicine’; and there are medicines against lions, leopards, and, I suppose, every variety of dangerous wild beast, not to mention the ‘gun medicine,’ which enables the hunter to shoot straight, and which, perhaps, ought to be classed in the ‘offensive’ category, but that it is free from sinister associations. Most European sportsmen, if at all successful, have been importuned for this, and it used to be firmly believed that the late Mr. Monteith Fotheringham, who was a very good shot, wore a belt charged with exceedingly powerful ‘medicines’ next his skin. There are also ‘medicines’ to make a man bullet-proof, like Chibisa, the Nyanja chief, who was brought down at last by a sand-bullet, as Dundee was with a silver one at Killiecrankie. Some natives once assured me that Chikumbu, a Yao chief, who at one time gave the Administration some trouble, was invulnerable by shot or steel; the only thing that could kill him—since he had not been fortified against it by the proper medicine—was a sharp splinter of bamboo. This reminds one of Balder and the mistletoe. The East African Wadoe have a legend about a magician who could be killed by one thing only—the stalk of a gourd. But as the gourd-stalk was ‘a forbidden thing’ to him, this suggests the subject of miiko or tabu-prohibitions, which we must take up presently.

Various seeds, nuts, claws of animals, and other things are worn round the neck as ‘medicine’ of this kind. Sometimes it takes the shape of wedge-shaped wooden tablets, or bits of stick about an inch long, which are also seen strung on the band which people wear round the head as a remedy for headache—a kind of combination of ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ means, as the string is supposed to give relief by pressure.

As for ‘offensive’ medicine, there are various kinds. Some are ‘buried against people’—usually in the form of horns—by the witch (mfiti) who wishes to do the said people a mischief. I have no doubt that horns are really sometimes buried with such intent; but it more frequently happens that they are unburied by the witch-detective who has probably the best of reasons for knowing where to find them. Then there is a very immoral kind of medicine which, like the Hand of Glory, enables thieves to steal without detection, by throwing the owners of the stolen property into a deep sleep, or even (adding insult to injury) forces them to answer, unconsciously, any questions as to the whereabouts of their wealth. There are several kinds of this charm, but I do not know the composition of any; though, in some parts of East Africa, a plant with the botanical name of Steganotaenia is supposed to possess these marvellous properties. There is also a charm by means of which thieves can make themselves invisible; but as it might also enable honest men to escape from their enemies, it ought perhaps to have been enumerated in the first category. One kind, at least, of this medicine is the drug strophanthus (obtained from a plant locally called kombe), and with this the chief Msamara poisoned himself in 1892, imagining that it would enable him to walk unseen out of prison at Fort Johnston. He had previously taken off all his clothes, reasoning that the drug would not make them invisible.

I remember being told that native burglars (I understand that such exist, but cannot say I have come across them personally, and do not believe that they are common, except in the coast towns), when setting out for their night’s work, strip and oil themselves all over. This, I understood at the time, was to make it difficult for any one to get a grip of them, if caught; but it has since occurred to me that it was also part of the process for rendering themselves invisible—the medicine being applied externally as an unguent.

Secret theft is looked on with horror, as probably connected with witchcraft. Natives are so ready to share everything they have with their neighbours, that a person who stealthily takes what he might have for the asking lays himself open to suspicion of yet darker dealings. It is the Bewitcher, the Mfiti, who is the great terror of native life.

Witchcraft is not, so far as I can make out, thought of as a system of compelling the unseen powers (whether dead ancestors or nature-spirits) to work one’s will. The mfiti, however, employs certain animals as messengers—the owl, and the jackal, whose bark summons him to midnight orgies; but I do not know that he intrusts these creatures, as Zulu sorcerers are said to do the baboon and the wild-cat, with ‘sendings’ to injure an enemy. Besides bewitching, as aforesaid, by means of ‘medicines,’ the things one most frequently hears of his doing are turning himself into a hyena, leopard, or other animal, and digging up graves to eat the flesh of corpses. But I am not sure that the latter ever happens without the former, it being usually for this purpose that the hyena shape is supposed to be assumed. So much of the funeral ceremonies is connected with this belief that we shall have to treat it more fully when we come to them.

Witchcraft and cannibalism are synonymous. ‘Why did So-and-So have to drink mwavi?’ ‘Chifukwa wodiera antu—because he was an eater of men.’ This need not imply that he actually has eaten any one, only that he has caused (or tried to cause) some one’s death with the intention of eating the corpse. It is the reverse of the vampire superstition, where the corpse will not stay dead, but gets up and feeds on the living; and as there was a recognised remedy for this evil in the Middle Ages, so there are various ways of preventing witches from getting at the graves, as we shall see in due course. It has been said that cannibalism of this sort is actually prevalent among the Anyanja; but the statements on this subject require to be carefully sifted. The Yaos were thirty years ago in the habit of using certain parts of their slain enemies as a charm for producing strength and courage; they reduced them to ashes and mixed them with gruel, which had to be eaten in a particular way. Ordinary cannibalism may have been practised in times of scarcity. But the Europeans who were in the Shiré during the terrible famine of 1862-3, heard of no such cases, though nine-tenths of the Anyanja population perished, many committing suicide in despair. There may, of course, be some foundation in fact for this very widespread belief, but it is quite capable of flourishing on little or none.[15]

Certain medicines (called mphiyu by the Atonga) have the power of turning those who take them into some animal—each kind, leopard, hyena, crocodile, or what not, having its own particular medicine. The Atonga belief presents some interesting features.

‘The living man might inform his friends that he had medicine to change him into a crocodile, and if after his death a crocodile made its appearance in a pool where crocodiles had not often been seen before, it was of course believed to be their friend come back. If these animals took to killing people, a representation would very probably be made to the relatives of the dead to go and attend to their spirit, and have it appeased. That a man-eating lion or other beast of prey was a real mzuka (one risen from the dead under another form) people could easily tell, when the corpses were left uneaten: a real lion, it was thought, would be sure to devour its victim. If this killing went on after complaint had been made to the supposed relatives of the mzuka, the issue would probably be a mlandu with these on account of their alleged carelessness of the rites due to their dead. People who were known to have eaten mphiyu were not mourned for in the ordinary way with loud wailing and outcry. They were silently wept for by their relatives, the only sound of mourning that might be heard being the mimic pounding in the empty grain-mortar into which pieces of rubber were thrown from time to time to still further deaden the sound. When after a time they heard lions or leopards roaring in the bush, the villagers said, “There’s Karakatu (i.e. one risen), he’s mourning for himself.”’

Not only do the natives firmly believe that their neighbours can thus on occasion transform themselves, but occasionally a man is found to be convinced that he can do so himself and has actually done it. Du Chaillu mentions a case like this in West Africa, and Sir H. H. Johnston has recorded another. A number of murders had taken place near Chiromo in 1891 or 1892, and were ultimately traced to an old man who had been in the habit of lurking in the long grass beside the path to the river, till some person passed by alone, when he would leap out and stab him, afterwards mutilating the body. He admitted these crimes himself.

‘He could not help it (he said), as he had a strong feeling at times that he was changed into a lion and was impelled, as a lion, to kill and mutilate. As according to our view of the law he was not a sane person, he was sentenced to be detained “during the chief’s pleasure,” and this “were-lion” has been most usefully employed for years in perfect contentment keeping the roads of Chiromo in good repair.’

An Englishman who had lived for some time in the Makanga country told me that these people credit the were-hyena with a human wife, who lives in a village and performs the ordinary work of a native woman by day, but by night opens the door of the goat-kraal to admit her husband, and then goes away into the bush with him to join in the feast. A goat was carried off one night from the village near which the narrator lived, and the people showed him, in the morning, the hyena’s tracks, and, running parallel with them, the print of bare human feet. It was in vain to point out that some one might have attempted to pursue the hyena and rescue his prey, or, at any rate, have run out to see what had happened—they were positive that the footprints were those of the hyena’s wife. Rats, too, may be wizards in animal shape, which is a reason for their nibbling the toes of sleepers.

Watching the grass-fires one night towards the end of the dry season, I remember seeing a strange, sudden blaze on Nyambadwe Hill; the flames rushing to an enormous height—whether from some change of wind, or because they had caught a large dead tree, I do not know. I happened to speak of this next day to an old man (a good-for-nothing old man he was, by the bye, though that is nothing to the present purpose), and he said that he had looked out of his hut and seen it too, remarking, cryptically, that it was due to afiti. He went on to tell me that he sometimes heard them passing by at night—they flew over the tree-tops with a great whirring of wings. In fact, it appeared that they could do ‘most anything.’ The boys, who dared not go out at night for fear of afiti, asserted that they carried a light which you could see afar off, but put it out when you came near them, and that they could make themselves large and small instantaneously. Some held that it was good to pluck up heart and address them; others, that if you spoke to them, you would become dumb like Mœris, when the wolf saw him first. I did not at the time understand the precise connection between the witches and the fire; but it appears that the grave itself becomes luminous when they gather there. ‘When a fire is seen on a distant hill, where no fire can be accounted for’—that is the place of their assembly. They call the dead man by his childish name (which none ever uses after he has once passed through the mysteries), and he cannot choose but come out of the grave—then they tear him limb from limb and eat him. When you consider that people believe this, not as a piece of curious folk-lore, but as a solid conviction forming part of everyday life, it is hardly surprising that they think no treatment too bad for the witches—if they can be caught.

This may be done in various ways—most, if not all of which, we must remember, are used for the detection of other things besides witches. There is the Mabisalila or Mavumbula, the woman who dances herself into a state of frenzy, and reveals the name of the guilty person. She comes to stay at the village which has requisitioned her services, and so gains time to glean all the gossip of the place before pronouncing her opinion, and also to bury the horns during her nightly prowls, ostensibly undertaken for the purpose of spying on the Witches’ Sabbath, and seeing who leaves the village to attend it. She is able to make her investigations quite undisturbed, as no one likes to venture out after dark during her stay, lest he should meet her and be fixed on as the culprit. When her preparations are complete, the people are called together by the sound of the great drum. Then she begins to dance, working up herself and the spectators to a furious pitch of excitement, rushes round, smells their hands to see if she can detect any traces of strange food eaten at the unholy banquet, and at last calls on the guilty person by the name she pretends to have heard him addressed by at the grave. When no one answers, she says ‘So-and-So is known in the village by such and such a name,’ and then leads the way to his house, where the horns are dug up. The enraged people usually lynch the accused on the spot.

The ordeal of the mwavi is resorted to when people are suspected either of witchcraft or of some other crime, such as theft; and as it is a regular form of judicial procedure, it is perhaps best to consider it more fully under that heading. Here I need only say that the poison is administered to the suspected person; if he dies, his guilt is established; if he recovers, he is ipso facto acquitted. In some districts the poison used does not cause death, but the guilt or innocence of the accused is decided according to the different symptoms produced.

Under the heading of ‘oracles’ we may include a great many different processes of divination, some partaking of a judicial character, such as the following, of which a very curious description is given by an eye-witness, the Rev. H. Rowley. If there was no cheating, it seems to have been a case of what is known as ‘motor automatism.’

‘Some corn had been stolen from the garden of one of Chigunda’s people. The owner complained to the chief, who employed the services of a celebrated medicine-man living near. The people assembled round a large fig-tree, and the magician ... first of all produced two sticks, about four feet long, and about the thickness of an ordinary broom-handle; these, after certain mysterious manipulations and utterings of unintelligible gibberish, he delivered, with much solemnity, to four young men, two being appointed to each stick. Then from his goat-skin bag he brought forth a zebra-tail, which he gave to another young man, and after that a calabash filled with peas, which he delivered to a boy. The medicine-man rolled himself about in hideous fashion and chanted an unearthly incantation; then came the man with the zebra-tail, followed by the boy with the calabash, moving, first of all, slowly round the men with the sticks, but presently quickening their pace and shaking the tail and the calabash over the heads of the stick-holders.... Ere long the spell worked. The men with the sticks were subject to spasmodic twitchings of the arms and legs. These increased rapidly, until they were nearly in convulsions; they foamed at the mouth; their eyes seemed starting from their heads.... According to the Mang’anja notion, it was the sticks that were possessed primarily, the men through them.... The men seemed scarcely able to hold the sticks, which took a rotary motion at first and whirled the holders round and round like mad things. Then headlong they dashed off into the bush, through stubborn grass and thorny shrub, over every obstacle—nothing stopped them; their bodies were torn and bleeding. Round to the gaping assembly again they came, went through a few more rotary motions, and then, rushing along the path at a killing pace, halted not until they fell down, panting and exhausted, in the hut of one of Chigunda’s slave-wives. The woman happened to be at home, and the sticks were rolled to her very feet.’ She, however, vehemently asserted her innocence, and offered to take mwavi to prove it, which she did by proxy, the poison being administered to a fowl. The second oracle reversed the decision of the first, and the defendant was acquitted; but, curiously enough, no one’s faith seems to have been shaken by the contradiction between two infallible ordeals.

The Rev. Duff Macdonald alludes to this kind of divination, but very briefly; it seems to be more Nyanja than Yao. He says that the sorcerer ‘occasionally makes men lay hold of a stick which, after a time, begins to move as if endowed with life, and ultimately carries them off bodily and with great speed to the house of the thief.’

I have never heard of this oracle of the sticks in the Blantyre or Upper Shiré district. Of course, it by no means follows that it is not used; but from various indications I fancy that the witch-detective, the Mabisalila, whose operations have already been described, has been more popular since the time of the Yao settlement. The ‘sticks’ are still in vogue on the Lake. The Rev. H. B. Barnes, of the Universities’ Mission, was told of a man at Ngofi who possessed this charm, and ‘had bought it with much money at the coast.... It was described to me as consisting of two short pieces of wood, with a large feather behind the second. The master of the charm sets it on the ground near the place whence the disappearance has taken place, and keeps his hand on the feather, following it as it moves off on the track. It is also used when war is threatening, in order to ascertain the safest direction in which to flee.’[16]

There are various methods of divination besides those already referred to. The sorcerer puts bits of stick and pebbles into a gourd, shakes them up, and throws them out, deducing his answer to the questions put from their position as they lie on the ground. I am sorry to say I never saw this done, and cannot discover from any of the native accounts before me whether there is a system of interpretation which allows one to get an answer out of almost any possible combination of the ‘pieces’—as among the Delagoa Bay people; but it is probable that the diviner follows some such rules. Neither the ‘divining tablets’ of the Mashona, nor the knuckle-bones of sheep and goats seem to be used—their place is taken by small pieces of wood (mpinjiri), sometimes neatly cut into shape, and the claws of the tortoise, which are divided into four pieces—the front or tip of the claw being halved to make a ‘male’ and a ‘female’ piece (which are marked on the under side), and in like manner the back. One way of consulting this oracle is to spread all the pieces on a dry skin and then knock it from underneath, and catch in the hand the piece (if any) which jumps off; if the same piece comes twice running, it is a conclusive proof that the person whom the diviner thought of, when he made the inquiry, is the correct one. Another way is to put the lots into a jar, cover it up, and leave it for a time; if they still keep their relative positions when next looked at, the omens for the journey or other undertaking inquired about are favourable. Mr. Macdonald found that the Yao professional diviners were usually very intelligent men, who gave sensible advice according to their own lights, and invested it with a certain impressiveness by means of the ‘lot,’ thinking people would care nothing about it, or perhaps take offence, unless they could attribute it to a supernatural source.

Many men consult the oracle on their own account, especially on a journey, either by means of the flour-pyramid, as already described, or by sticking a knife into the ground and leaning two small sticks against it, or laying two sticks on the ground, and a third across them. If they fall down, or are disturbed from their position, the omen is unfavourable. There are many other omens which would cause a party to turn back, unless very much set on an expedition—such as one of them striking his foot against a stump (a common accident, to judge by the number of ulcerated toes one sees), or certain creatures crossing the path—some kinds of snakes, the chameleon, etc.—the partridge’s cry, and so on. The evil-smelling mdzodzo and mtumbatumba ants, on the other hand, are supposed (perhaps by the rule of contraries) to be of good augury.

There is a certain system of abstinence from different kinds of food which is probably connected originally with totemism; but either no one has succeeded in getting at the matter except in a very fragmentary way, or else the natives of the present day have forgotten the reasons for the practice, and it only survives in a number of apparently casual and isolated usages. Certain people will not eat some particular kind of meat, either ‘because it makes one ill, or because of some religious scruple or vow, or because one’s mother has for no apparent reason decreed in one’s infancy that a certain food is to be tabu to one.’ It might be more correct to reduce these three alternative reasons to one, because, as a matter of fact, people who have been forbidden some food in their infancy usually become ill if they eat it; and it is no stretch of language to say that they are transgressing ‘a religious scruple’ in doing so. Further inquiry is needed before we can decide whether or not there is a reason behind these prohibitions; quite possibly, as already stated, the people have forgotten that there ever was one, and have no notion of any relationship supposed to exist between them and the forbidden animal or plant, such as the Bechwana clans recognise in the case of the lion, the crocodile, etc. The Rev. D. C. Scott says: ‘Each tribe or family has its particular abstinence from certain foods.’ The Achikunda, so my boatmen told me on the Zambezi, don’t eat hippo; the Apodzo do, as might be expected, they being a tribe who get their living by hunting that animal. This really resolves itself into ‘Apodzo and not Apodzo,’ because the Achikunda are not really a tribe, but a mixed multitude of slaves brought into the country by the Portuguese; and a good many different tribes look on the hippopotamus as sacred. Some of the boys at Blantyre mission-school ‘did not eat hippo’—but on what exact tribal or family grounds, I never made out. The practical result was that some other food had to be provided for them, when one of the teachers arrived from the River with a supply of this meat sufficient for the whole school. The Machinga are looked down on by some other tribes because they eat fish, which the Angoni, e.g., never touch. Rats are forbidden to women, and to those who offer sacrifice; they are considered ‘uncanny,’ for very comprehensible reasons, though this does not prevent their being a very popular article of diet with those not so restricted. Doctors or others who have to treat a patient by scarifying, or, as the natives say, ‘cutting medicine in,’ must not eat elephant. ‘In other cases the individual himself objects to certain meats as being bad for him, specially producing heat and spots all over.... God, they say, made men with these necessities in them; people can’t make mistakes in what abstinence is essential for them.’ On the whole, the various regulations one can find look like scattered parts of a system no longer understood. Doctors, as on the Congo, prescribe abstinence from various things when their patients are recovering from illness. The animals most generally avoided are those which we should class as unclean feeders, such as crocodiles, hyenas, vultures, etc.; because they are afiti—feeding on the dead.

Folk-stories frequently refer to such prohibitions. Thus, in one, when a girl is married, her mother tells the bridegroom that she must never be asked to pound anything but castor-oil beans. His mother, determined to overcome this fancied laziness, insists on the young wife’s helping to pound the maize; she does so, and is immediately turned to water.

Various ‘dances on several occasions,’ which are important items in native life, ought, perhaps, to be mentioned in this place, since they undoubtedly are religious ceremonies; but they can be considered more fully in the course of the following chapters. The same may be said of the unyago or chinamwali ‘mysteries’; but one or two points in connection with the latter may be just touched on here. The zinyao dances held in the villages of the Anyanja on these occasions perhaps embody some tradition, though what it is, no one, so far as I know, has yet made out. Figures are traced by scattering flour on the smooth ground of the bwalo, representing animals, usually the leopard, the crocodile, and, strangely enough, the whale. What the word namgumi, which is thus translated in Dr. Scott’s dictionary, really means, or is derived from, it would be interesting to know—though reports of such an animal may have been received from the coast people. Never having seen the zinyao, as these figures are called, I can form no opinion as to what the namgumi is intended to represent. The word is common to Nyanja and Yao; perhaps adopted by the former from the latter, in which it means ‘a large fish, the picture of which is drawn on the ground by the head-instructor on the day of sending the boys back to their homes.’ But some light may be thrown on the matter by the fact that Mr. Lindsay (of the Limbi, Blantyre), passing through the bush where one of these ceremonies had been held, saw a huge clay model (he thought about forty feet long) of some creature which the English-speaking native with him told him was ‘a whale,’ but which was more like one of the extinct saurians of the Oolitic period. He was certain it was like no living creature he knew of. One observer describes circles filled with geometrical patterns traced on the ground, but makes no mention of the animals, except from hearsay. Besides the drawing of these figures, dances are performed by men got up as various animals. This is done by means of real heads carefully preserved and mounted on sticks, while the bodies are represented by calico stretched over wooden hoops. One such figure—say that of an elephant or buffalo—requires several men to move it, of course hidden by the draperies. Other performers wear masks of plaited grass, and are weird figures supposed to represent the spirits of the dead. These dances are held by moonlight; and the explanation generally given is that they are intended to frighten and impress the young people who have that day come of age. What ideas are embodied may be a matter of conjecture, but, for the present at least, nothing certain can be said on the subject.

Note.—Since the above chapter was written, I have learned from a correspondent in Nyasaland that there are secret societies among the Yaos, which practise cannibalism, and that the practice has been spreading of late years. In the absence of further particulars, it is impossible to determine how much of this was ceremonial in origin and how much due to a depraved taste in certain individuals which may have originated in a time of famine. See also Sir H. H. Johnston, British Central Africa, pp. 446, 447.

CHAPTER V
NATIVE LIFE—I. CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH

Villages. Huts. Birth. Naming. Dress. Childhood’s rights. Games. Plastic art-work. Daily life.

I cannot begin this chapter better than by describing one of the villages I know best—those of the Anyanja in the Upper Shiré district.

This district lies between the Kirk Mountains on the west and the Zomba range on the east, and the part I am thinking of is a fertile plain, slightly undulating in parts and crossed by two good-sized streams, which slopes down from the western mountains to the river. As you look from the hill on which our house stood, you see a wide level—green during the rains, yellow when the grass is dry, with patches of bush here and there and one grove of great trees plainly in sight—the nkalango, where the dead are buried. Here and there, dotted about the plain, are little groups of huts, several of which, taken together, may be held to constitute a village. Each group, as a rule, contains one family (i.e. husband and wife or wives with their children), and is enclosed in a stout fence of grass and reeds, woven as closely as matting, and tall enough to keep any ordinary wild beast from leaping over. There is a door to this enclosure, but, not being on hinges, it is usually invisible in the daytime, as the people take it down, and, as often as not, lay it on some short posts fixed in the ground, and use it as a table, on which they can spread out grain or other things to dry. At night the door is fastened by cross-bars, and perhaps thorn-bushes are stuck in at the sides to give additional security.

Inside the enclosure stand the round huts, with their conical thatched roofs—three, four, or more, according to the number of the family. Between them are the corn-bins, called nkokwe—in a small enclosure only one, or perhaps two. In the picture, which is that of a Yao village near Domasi, several of these nkokwe are to be seen—one with the top off—but they do not look as neat as one often sees them. They are like huge round baskets, woven of split bamboo, seven or eight feet high, without top or bottom, raised from the ground on a low platform roughly floored with small logs, and covered with a conical roof like those of the huts, but not fastened down, so that it can be tilted up by means of a stick, or taken off altogether when corn is wanted. They are reached by a primitive ladder made of two poles, and cross-pieces lashed between them with bark.

This Yao village is in several ways different from the one I am describing. It is larger, and, being in a more settled district, not enclosed in a fence, though some of the huts may have a semicircular one before the door, to screen it from the wind. The houses, too, are many of them square, a fashion introduced, in some places by Europeans, in others by coast people.

The huts in the enclosure have their doors facing inward; there may be a tree (probably the ‘prayer-tree’) in the middle of the vacant space; in any case, you will see the mortars, in which the women pound the grain, perhaps a reed mat, with flour drying on it, or millet waiting to be husked, and one or more little fires, with their three stones for supporting the cooking-pot. Perhaps there will be also a pigeon-house, like a neatly plaited basket, with a pointed roof, raised on a post, and another post close by, supporting half an old water-jar, which has come to grief, but can still be used as a bath and drinking-place for the pigeons. The fowl-house, if any, is somewhere between, and rather behind the huts, and perhaps there is also a house for the goats, but some people prefer to have their stock sleeping in the hut with them, for security’s sake. I remember calling at Sambamlopa’s one day, and finding his mother engaged in plastering three or four stalls for the goats against the circular wall of the hut, just leaving room for some of the family to sleep between them and the central fireplace.

Sometimes there is a single enclosure, standing by itself; sometimes several are grouped very closely together, the entrances being reached by narrow, winding paths between the stockades, which, I suppose, are intended to puzzle the enemy, in case of a night attack. Two old men, brothers, Pembereka and Kaboa, had their enclosures side by side, and the sacred tree in the narrow space of ground between the two. A little way off, on one side of the path, was the well mentioned in the last chapter, which I saw the women clearing out; and near this, too, some trees had been left standing.

Entering Pembereka’s stockade, one day in early spring, we found a certain bustle and excitement pervading the place, the cause of which was soon apparent, when we saw the head-wife, old Anapiri (the same whom I found conducting the rain-ceremony a fortnight later), seated on a mat, with a new-born baby on her knees. It was a queer little yellow thing; they always start in life very light-coloured, but grow darker before long. They also seem, to me, at least, to have more hair than European babies, though they are not allowed to retain it. The mother on this occasion was not visible—she was a younger wife of Pembereka’s; she was in one of the huts, which she would not leave for some days—perhaps eight or nine, perhaps less. The baby is supposed to stay with her, till formally ‘brought out into the world’; but it may be that Anapiri had been giving it its first bath and oiling. The eldest child of a family is called the ‘child of the washing,’ or ‘of oil’—not that the others are not bathed and oiled, but this is a ceremonial washing (with ‘medicine’) and anointing. (Both children and grown-ups require plenty of oil to keep their skins from cracking and chapping; they neither look nor feel well without it.)

A Yao woman used—sometimes, at any rate, if not always—to go out into the bush a few days before the birth of a child. One or two women would go with her, to put up a little grass shelter and look after her, till they could bring back mother and baby to the village, where, in the case of a first child, they were met with great joy, the grandmother coming out to welcome them and singing, ‘I have got a grandchild, let me rejoice.’ The mother would then go into the special house set apart for her—no one being allowed to enter it except the older women—and stay there for three or six days. If the baby dies during this interval, no mourning is held for it; it has not been formally introduced into the world, and its spirit is not supposed to count, or require propitiating. Perhaps they think it has not really attained to a separate existence of its own.

When the time of seclusion is over, the old women shave the mother’s head and also the baby’s, and they are brought out and rejoiced over. The baby is now named by one of the women. I am not sure, however, that the name is always given quite so soon. A Nyanja woman once seemed very much amused when I asked her baby’s name, and said, ‘It has no name—it’s only an infant.’ She was going about with it on her back, so that it must have been more than a few days old if the custom of seclusion had been observed. But perhaps she only thought it unlucky to tell me the name, being a stranger.

Children are sometimes called after their father, or other relations, and frequently a person who is no relation ‘may make “friendship” with the babe and give it his own name, or the name of his brother or sister.’ Very often, too, the name is determined by some circumstance connected with the place or time of birth. The father may have been making a canoe (ngalawa), and finished it on the day of the child’s birth, so he will name it Ngalawa accordingly. I knew a small boy called Chipululu, ‘the wilderness,’ because, as his mother explained, ‘he was born at the time of the hunger, when the people had to go into the bush to gather food.’ The baby at Pembereka’s was named Donna,[17] in honour of ourselves, as we happened to visit the family on the day when he arrived. His being a boy is nothing to the purpose—there is no such thing as grammatical gender in the Bantu languages, and no one thinks (in Nyanja, at any rate) of making any difference between the names given to girls and boys. In fact, one occasionally finds the same name borne by both. Most names have some obvious meaning—‘Leaves,’ ‘Affliction,’ ‘Wind on the Water,’ ‘It goes,’ ‘We shall see it when we die,’ ‘I have been a Fool,’ ‘Ends of Grass,’ ‘The Day of Beer,’ are a few specimens. But there are others not so easy to make out, and if you ask, people will tell you ‘they are just names—nothing more.’ Probably, unless they are found to be borrowed from another language, these will be old words, obsolete except as proper names. Sometimes, too, a compound, used as a name, is so contracted that its separate parts are scarcely recognisable.

Mothers, when seated, hold their babies in their arms and on their knees, just as they do in other countries. But when walking about, they carry them on their backs, supported by a piece of cloth knotted in front, the two upper corners passing under the arms and over the breast, the lower round the waist; or, in some parts, by a goat-skin, with strings tied to the four legs. The babies develop a most marvellous power of holding on. One sees them sometimes spread out like the letter X; sometimes, when the cloth is quite firmly fixed, and allows of a comfortable attitude, seated in ‘the bight’ of it, with their feet appearing round the mother’s waist in front. I do not remember seeing babies seated astride the hip (as in India), but no doubt it is sometimes done, as shown in the group of Likoma Island women in the photograph.

1. Women on Likoma Island

2. A Makua Family

Babies are not dressed, but the mothers wash and oil them carefully, and hang a string of beads round their necks or waists, and a charm or two to keep them from sickness or accident. In some parts they shave their heads on both sides, leaving a little band in the middle, running from the forehead to the nape of the neck. Of course, in cold weather, they are wrapped in anything that comes handy, and the skin or cloth fastening them to the mother’s back keeps them as warm as clothing would do. When not being carried about, they are laid to sleep on a mat. They are not weaned till two or three years old—sometimes later; in tribes where cattle are not kept, it is somewhat difficult to get suitable food for them, but a kind of thin porridge or gruel is made. The Anyanja, though many of them keep goats, never drink milk.

As soon as the children can walk, or even crawl, they are left to play about among the huts while the mothers are busy, cooking or pounding grain. They are left in charge of the grandmother, and perhaps one of the elder children, when the women have to go away to the gardens. They are allowed to do pretty much as they like, so long as they keep out of the fire, or refrain from climbing up any of the many tempting places whence a fall might be dangerous—the fence, or the nkokwe ladder, or what not. If there is any one to keep an eye on them, they will be snatched back in the first case, and fetched down in the second, and slapped in both, to emphasise the lesson that ‘we don’t want to have a mourning for you because you died by accident’—that being a wholly wilful and gratuitous proceeding. One sometimes sees scars of bad burns that must have been caused by a tumble into the fire; but, on the whole, these infants learn to take care of themselves after a fashion at a wonderfully early age. It is when the mothers have begun to put them into European garments that fatal accidents are apt to occur; the child stands at what would be quite a safe distance from the fire but for the little shirt or frock, and the calico is ablaze before any one is aware.

Children wear nothing much for the first few years, unless they feel cold, and are supplied with a skin, or a piece of cloth, to wrap themselves in. The little boy in the illustration has a pretty complete toilet. This family, like the group above them, were photographed at Likoma, but the mother is a Makua and wears the chipini—the leaden ornament like a drawing-pin stuck through a hole in the side of the nose—which is in fashion among the coast women and some of the Yaos.

Very little Angoni boys have a mat of beads, three or four inches square, worked for them by their mother or elder sister, and wear it like an apron. Sometimes also they have a ‘sporran,’ made from the skin of some small animal, such as a field-rat. In most homes now there is enough calico to give each of the children a piece to wrap round the waist, as they grow bigger. The only difference between the dress of the boys and girls, as a rule, is that the latter put theirs on a little higher up. The stuff used is the cheap ‘unbleached,’ which can be got in this country for about twopence a yard. Babies are washed very carefully; older children are left to do much as they please in the matter of cleanliness; but they love bathing, when the means are accessible, and near a lake or river all know how to swim.

Small children’s heads are shaved, from time to time, in the interests of cleanliness, by their mothers; older boys and girls do it for each other. I saw a woman performing this service for her little girl who was squatting on the ground before her; she first greased the hair with some mixture which she took out of a small earthen pot, and which had the consistency of soft soap, and then scraped from the nape of the neck forward and upward, with a little spatula-shaped iron razor, held firmly in the right hand. Having finished the hair, she went on to shave the eyebrows, but I do not think this is always done.

The strings of beads which the very little girls wear round their waists disappear from view when they grow older and wear a cloth; but they are kept on all the same, and added to from time to time, till, when they are grown up, they may have several thick rolls. These, of course, are not worn for ornament, but it is considered the safest and handiest way of storing property, and a woman thus carries her private fortune about with her.

Children and young people often stick flowers in their hair, or into the perforation of the ear, and girls at Likoma weave wreaths or crowns out of the namteke blossoms, a small kind of sunflower.

As soon as children are able to eat solid food, they fare much the same as their elders, though there are two or three kinds of sweet, thick gruel, besides that already mentioned, which are made specially for the younger ones, and also sometimes for sick people. It is sweetened—not with sugar, but with malt (that is, sprouting maize or millet), or the juice of a kind of millet, which is almost as sweet as sugar-cane. The stalks of this msale—and also sugar-cane, where that is to be had—are constantly being chewed, both by children and grown-up people. The results are visible on every native path as little bundles of tousled white fibrous matter—and the new comer is apt to wonder what they are.

There is a game which mothers sometimes play with children supposed to be too old for special infant diet; they tickle the child’s back with a stalk of grass, and, if he starts, accuse him of having ‘eaten the baby’s gruel’—which would be more attractive than the ordinary nsima.

It can readily be inferred that the young are not overburdened in the way of education. Some training there must be—some elementary inculcation of modesty and manners, to judge by results: but the deference shown to very small children—especially boys; the girls begin to make themselves useful at an early age, and are duly kept in their places—is somewhat ludicrous, and one would expect it to be disastrous, only that the effects do not seem to answer such expectation. When a six-foot Ntumbi native informed me that his son (a precocious youth of perhaps eight, and extremely minute for that age) had failed to attend school because he had gone ‘to a beer-drinking at So-and-So’s,’ and I expressed some not unnatural surprise, not unmingled with reprobation, the father replied, ‘If he has made up his mind to go, who can hinder him?’ ‘Akana mwini—his lordship refuses,’ was the answer given by the female relatives of another youthful truant to the teacher of the Blantyre mission-school.

I was still new to the country when I went out for a walk at Blantyre with one Limwichi—aged, I suppose, ten, and with something of a reputation for chipongwe (the best translation is ‘cheek’)—to carry my butterfly-net. We met a big Yao, meditatively walking along and eating a piece of chinangwa (cassava root) as he went. Whether Limwichi was previously acquainted with this gentleman or not, I don’t know; but he walked coolly up to him and asked (with what degree of politeness my proficiency in the language did not enable me to judge) for a share in this delicacy. I half expected to see Limwichi’s ears boxed, instead of which the man broke off a piece of his chinangwa and handed it to him. I fear he did not say ‘Thank you.’ (Some hold that natives never do—perhaps not understanding that ‘Chabwino’—‘It is good’ conveys the same thing.)

Limwichi, I am sorry to say, had been to school—not long enough, let us say, to have his manners (though these were not precisely ferocious) softened by learning; but nothing could be gentler and prettier than the ways of the unschooled Ntumbi village children who, having got over their first shyness at the unwonted white faces which made babies shriek and dogs bark from end to end of the kraals, followed one along the narrow native paths—somewhat embarrassing in their desire to walk alongside, where the nature of the ground made it difficult, and to hold one’s hands, half a dozen at once—but not really forward or troublesome. I never, with fair opportunities to have come across that sort of thing if it had been at all common, saw a child struck or otherwise ill-treated. On the whole, I think, if native parents fail in their duty, it is through being too easy-going.

I cannot understand the statement sometimes made, that native children do not know how to play, are without toys and games, and have rather a melancholy time of it altogether. The traveller who speaks of their portentous and unnatural solemnity has, of course, only observed them under the inspiring influence of his own immediate neighbourhood. It is curious to contrast the pathetic appeals on this score to the compassion of English children which one sometimes reads with the experience of the missionaries at Magomero. ‘Indeed it was a question with us at one time what it was we could teach these children of ours in the way of amusement. At last, Scudamore and Waller thought to surprise them with a kite. The kite was made, the children assembled to see it ascend, but it was lop-sided and heavy, would not go up, went down, and the children made merry thereat. Said Waller, “You have never seen anything like this before, have you?” Said a little urchin in reply, “Oh yes! we have, though. We have seen them, but ours were different to yours. Ours went up, yours go down.”’

These children had been hunted away from their homes, some of them had lost their parents, they had all suffered more or less from hunger and some of them from illness, so that a certain amount of depression would have been excusable; but the spirit in which they entered into the kindly meant effort to amuse them is thoroughly characteristic. But for that casual question, their instructors would never have learned that they knew how to make kites which would go up. Miss Woodward tells me that she has seen the Likoma children playing with kites, but I have never seen one myself, and cannot describe their exact construction.

There are two kinds of tops, the wooden one (nguli), which is kept up by beating, like our whipping-top, with a lash of three strands of bark tied to a bit of stick. The other, the nsikwa, is made of a round piece of gourd-shell, with a spindle of cane through the middle of it.

‘The game is played by two parties sitting opposite to each other, with a bare space of hard ground between them, and spinning the tops across the empty space with as much force as a twirl between the finger and thumb is capable of, at little pieces of maize-cob set up before their adversaries.’ Any number can play, one top and one piece of maize-cob being allowed to each, and the game is to knock over all the pieces on the opposite side before those on one’s own side are overthrown. The player whose piece is knocked over catches his adversary’s top and fires it back at him.

Maize-cobs (zikonyo) are also used in the game of ponyana zikonyo, or throwing these missiles at each other; and in that of tamangitsana (literally ‘making run,’ in which one side pretend to be Angoni, and carry shields). There is a very popular game called chiwewe, which is a somewhat original exercise with a skipping-rope. One player squats down and whirls the cord, weighted at one end, round his head, so as to describe round himself a circle of two or three yards in diameter, while the others jump over it; the one who fails to clear it has to take his place in the middle.

1. “Mchombwa” or “Msuo”

2. Nyanja Ball-game

Children build little houses of grass, and otherwise imitate the proceedings of grown-up people; the boys make themselves little bows, with arrows of grass-stalks (sometimes these are tipped with sharp bits of bamboo and strong enough to kill small birds with), and girls grind soft stones to powder, pretending they are ufa, and carry maize-cobs on their backs for babies. The little Yao girls have a kind of wooden doll called a mwali (‘girl’): there is no attempt at representing the human figure; in fact, the thing is more like a ninepin than anything else, except that both ends are rounded, so that it will not stand up, and one of them, by way of suggesting the head, is covered with small scarlet seeds, fitted on like a wig.

Cat’s cradle is played, though I am not certain how, and there is a variety of guessing games, called ‘tricks’ (zinyao), such as chagwa, which is something like ‘hunt-the-slipper’; and another where ‘three arrows or three sticks are set, and one guesses which is chosen—if he guess wrongly, his companions laugh and beat him in fun with the sticks.’

An elementary kind of swing is sometimes extemporised by means of a convenient creeper hanging from the branch of a large tree; but I think I have also seen one made with a rope.

There is a genuine native ball-game (mpira) played with an india-rubber ball, in which the players stand in a circle, and, after every catch, clap their hands rhythmically and leap into the air. This, being done with great regularity, has a very pleasing effect. In one account I have seen, an umpire is described as calling out ‘Hock! hock!’ after every good catch. This is an impossible word in either Yao or Nyanja; one conjectures it may be meant for yaka, ‘catch.’ The well-known game of ‘mankala,’ which seems to be played all the way down from Abyssinia to Mashonaland, and to be of Arab origin, is here called mchombwa and msuo. The Abyssinians play it on a board, but this is not at all necessary; the four rows of holes can be made on any bit of smooth ground, and one often sees them in the bwalo of a Nyanja village, where the men sit smoking and gossiping and weaving baskets. It has been said that no European has ever succeeded in mastering this game; and I must own that I have always failed to follow the explanations obligingly given by the players, but Dr. Scott’s description seems fairly clear. Premising that there are two players, each provided with a handful of pebbles or seeds, and six (or nine) holes in each row, it is as follows: ‘The game consists in distributing one’s men along the rows of holes on one’s own side, and again moving them up one hole at a time, until those in any one hole surpass in number those in the enemy’s hole opposite, when the latter are appropriated and placed out of the game; the game is won when one is able to appropriate the last remaining one on his opponent’s side.’

Chuchu is a kind of combination of this game and ‘hunt-the-slipper.’ A spiral is drawn on the ground, and holes made in it; three stones are chosen and two put into the holes. ‘The people are divided into two bodies, and the stone belonging to each party is moved up according to the skill of that party in guessing who has the other stone—this third stone is put in the hands of one by a person who goes all round and pretends to give the stone to each.’ A somewhat similar game is played with ten holes and nine stones, and the boy who goes away (or hides his face) has to guess whether there is a stone in any particular hole at the moment he is asked, or not.

Some of the above, especially the mchombwa, are also played by adults, who enter into them with great zest. On the coast, and in the Portuguese settlements, they also play at cards, though the game, or that form of it which has now spread to the Shiré Highlands, is said to be ‘unintelligible to Europeans.’ They call the court-cards after local celebrities, such as Sir Harry Johnston (‘Jonsen’) and the late Mr. John Buchanan (‘Makanani’). Speaking of games adopted from Europeans—though it does not strictly belong to our subject—I cannot forbear quoting the following description from Mr. H. L. Duff’s Nyasaland under the Foreign Office:—

‘The football played at Kota Kota has scarcely more in common with Association than with Rugby or any other known rules. Indeed, the distinguishing peculiarity of the game would seem to be its gay immunity from any rules or restrictions whatever. No limit is apparently set to the extent of the ground, to the period of time to be covered, or to the number of those who participate in the game. The spectators may and do join in when and where they please, and continue to play as long as they can stand or see. The ball, once fairly committed to the mêlée, disappears for good. So, of course, does any man who has the misfortune to tumble down in a scrimmage. The goal-posts are rickety superfluities, a mere concession to appearances, heeded by nobody and nearly always prostrated at the first rush. The same abundant energy and the same lack of restraint are noticeable wherever these Central African natives take to any European game, and they take to European games of the rougher sort very readily indeed. I have seen them at Blantyre clubbing one another on the head, under pretence of playing hockey, just as they rend one another to pieces at Kota Kota under pretence of playing football. It is, however, only fair to add that they show great activity, enthusiasm, and pluck; nor is there much reason to doubt that they might develop into really sound players, if they could only be induced to adopt a coherent system and a somewhat more chastened style.’