The natives of British Central Africa

by Alice Werner

SALT-MAKING

Salt is so much in demand, for reasons already adverted to, in this part of Africa, that its production is an important industry. Its principal centre is near Lake Chilwa, but inferior salt is made in places at a distance from that lake, for home consumption, by burning various grasses and other plants. In either case the process is the same. The ashes, or the salt earth dug up from the banks of the lake, are put into a flat basket, preferably an old, worn nsengwa, and water slowly poured on and allowed to drain through into a pot placed beneath to receive it. ‘The water so strained through is saltish,’ says the Rev. H. Barnes, speaking of Likoma, ‘and is used with food to flavour it. In some parts this water is boiled till it is boiled away, and the result is a very white salt.’ Sometimes the water is allowed to evaporate without boiling; I do not know if this is done at Chilwa, but the salt brought from thence is distinctly grey—certainly not white. People come in small parties from a distance, and live at the kulo, or salt-pit, where the earth is dug, till they have finished making all they want. The process is a slow one; it usually takes a month to make eighty pounds of salt, as large numbers of people do not engage in the work at once. They pack it in matting bags holding about twenty pounds’ weight apiece, and carry it down to Blantyre and elsewhere for sale. A ‘salt ulendo’ is always sure of a speedy sale for its wares.

People who make salt at home—it is generally the women—do not, as a rule, take the trouble to boil or evaporate it, but use the liquor as it is for cooking.

Besides Lake Chilwa, there are some places near the mouth of the Ruo, whence salt is obtained, and some is said to come from the neighbourhood of Lake Nyasa, but this last is bitter and more like saltpetre. Sir A. Sharpe describes the process of salt-making in the saline swamps of Mweru, in very much the same way as the above, only the apparatus is different—‘funnels made of closely woven grass rope’ taking the place of baskets. Evidently these funnels or strainers are specially made for the purpose, showing that the industry is more specialised.

CHAPTER IX
LANGUAGE AND ORAL LITERATURE

Structure of the Bantu languages. Riddles. Songs. Music and dancing. Story-telling.

The languages spoken in British Central Africa belong to the great Bantu family, which, as is now known, occupies (with a few exceptions) the whole continent of Africa south of a line drawn from the Gulf of Cameroons to the mouth of the Tana River on the east coast. Those spoken within the Protectorate are Nyanja, Yao, the Lomwe dialect of Makua, Tonga, Tumbuka, Nkonde, and a Zulu dialect spoken by the Angoni clans. In Northern Rhodesia we may mention Bisa, Bemba, Luba, and Lunda as the principal languages.

All the Bantu languages are as closely related together as English, Dutch, German, and the Scandinavian dialects. There are several points about them which are extremely interesting to the comparative philologist. They have no grammatical gender—the same pronoun is used for a man and a woman; and, accordingly, most natives who learn English come to grief on this point, like Winwood Reade’s interpreter who asked: ‘What you say when him son be girl?’ On the other hand, nouns are divided into eight or ten classes, each with its own plural inflection, and adjectives and pronouns agreeing with it as they agree with each of the three genders in Latin. This agreement extends also to the verbs.

The Bantu languages further differ from those with which most of us are familiar, in that their inflections are indicated, not by suffixes, but by prefixes—a fact which first meets us in the various and perplexing forms assumed by the names of tribes and countries. Thus Myao is ‘a Yao’ (man or woman), Wayao is ‘Yaos,’ and Chiyao the Yao language. Each noun-class has its own prefix (sometimes much atrophied or even dropped altogether) for singular and for plural, and though these prefixes vary greatly in the different languages, they are always recognisable as having come from the same original, just as we know that the English oak, the German Eiche, the Dutch eik, and the Danish eeg are all derived from one primitive form. The inflectional prefixes of adjectives and verbs are derived from the noun-prefixes, though not always identical with them in form; and the pronouns are modifications of the prefix. In fact, broadly speaking, the prefix may be called a pronoun, and the group of languages under consideration are sometimes called the prefix-pronominal languages.

The careful reader may think that a somewhat Hibernian assertion has been made above—viz. that the prefix is recognisable even where it has been dropped; but this is in fact the case: the pronoun, which must be inserted before the verb, always shows what the lost prefix of the noun has been. Thus we have in Nyanja the word njoka, ‘a snake’; it has no prefix as it stands, but when used in a sentence we find it takes the pronoun i: njoka i luma, ‘the snake bites.’ Now in Zulu, which has kept its prefixes better than Nyanja, we find that ‘snake’ is inyoka.

This principle of agreement, by which all the words governed by the noun repeat its prefix in some form or another at their beginning, is called the alliterative concord, and may be illustrated by the following sentences:—

Nyanja

Mtengo	watu	u-li	wotari,	u-dza-gwa.
Tree	our	it is	high	it will fall.

The pronoun for the class to which mtengo (anciently umtengo) belongs is u, which is quite clearly seen before the verbs ‘to be’ and ‘to fall.’ In the possessive pronoun and the adjective, it is a little disguised, because it becomes w before another vowel (watu = u + atu).

The plural of this is:

Mitengo yatu i-ri yetari, i-dza gwa.

Here the pronoun is i, or, before a vowel, y. R and L are interchangeable; the verb ‘to be’ is usually li after a and u, ri after i.

Another class is thus exemplified:

Chiko	chánga	chabwino	chi-dza-sweka.
Gourd	my	good	it will be broken.

In the plural:

Ziko zanga zabwino zidzasweka.

Yao

Lu-peta	a-lu	lu-li	lu-angu	ngunu-lu-jasika,	lu-enu	’lu-la lu-jasiche.
Basket	this	is	mine	not it is lost	yours	that is lost.

Here the prefix is lu.

(‘This basket is mine, it is not lost; yours is lost.’)

In the plural: Mbeta asi sili syangu, nginisijasika, syenu ’sila sijasiche. The plural prefix corresponding to lu is izim (isim), or izin, and p following this prefix changes to b; hence (isi)mbeta is the plural of lupeta.

There are very few adjectives in the Bantu languages; their place may be supplied by a noun preceded by the possessive particle corresponding to the word ‘of’: thus chiko chabwino is literally ‘a gourd of goodness.’ There are a good many verbs which can be used where we should use adjectives, as ku ipa, ‘to be bad’ (ku is the sign of the infinitive); ku uma, ‘to be dry,’ etc.

Verbs can express, by means of changes in the stem, a number of modifications in their meaning which we have to convey by separate words. These modifications are usually called ‘forms,’ but are really extensions of the principle of ‘voice.’ We have to be content with two voices—the active and passive, with traces of a middle; Hebrew has seven; some Bantu languages have as many as nine or ten; while, counting the secondary and tertiary derivatives, and the compounds, the late W. H. Bentley reckoned out over three hundred forms of one verb, all actually in use, in the language of the Lower Congo.

The aspirate exists neither in Yao nor Nyanja, and when heard in English words is often turned into S; thus the name Hetherwick becomes Salawichi. But the people west of the Shiré use it in words and names borrowed from the Zulus, and seem to find no difficulty with it. L and R are interchangeable, as already stated, or rather it would be more correct to say that the sound intended is really distinct from both and heard by some Europeans as l, by others as r. There are no very difficult sounds, except perhaps ng (pronounced as in ‘sing’) when it comes at the beginning of a word. There are no clicks in any language used in the region under consideration, except the Zulu spoken by some of the Angoni, and in this they tend to disappear. The accent is almost invariably on the penultimate.

The Bantu languages have, of course, no written literature—for we can hardly count the translations, etc., produced by missionaries and their pupils, or even the two or three native newspapers appearing in Cape Colony and Natal. But like most primitive tongues, they are rich in traditional tales, songs, proverbs, etc. Of the folk-stories we shall give some examples in the next chapter. Here are some specimens of Nyanja proverbs:—

‘If you are patient, you will see the eyes of the snail.’

‘Speed in walking in sand is even.’ (‘Bei Nacht sind alle Katzen grau.’)

‘You taste things chopped with an axe, but meat cut up with a knife you don’t get a taste of.’ (The sound of the axe directs passers-by to the place where the food is being prepared—perhaps inside the reed-fence of the kraal—when, of course, they must be asked to partake; had a knife been used, they would have heard nothing, and gone on.)

‘If your neighbour’s beard takes fire, quench it for him’—i.e. you may need a similar service some day.

‘When a man or a reed dies, there grows up another.’ (‘Il n’y a pas d’homme nécessaire.’)

‘Sleep has no favourite.’

‘Lingering met with liers in wait.’

Riddles, as already mentioned, are very popular. They are usually of the simple kind which describes some well-known object in more or less veiled and allusive language, something after the style of

‘Walls there are as white as milk,

Lined with skin as soft as silk,

Within a fountain crystal-clear,

A golden apple doth appear;

but much more crudely expressed.

‘I built my house without a door’ is one which has the same answer as the above—viz. ‘an egg.’

Others are:—

‘Spin string that we may cross the river.’—A spider.

‘The people are round about, their chief is in the centre.’—A fire, and the people sitting round it.

‘I saw a chief walking along the road with flour on his head.’—Grey hair.

‘Such an one built his house with one post only.’—A mushroom.

‘A large bird covering its young with its wings.’—A house—referring to the roof with its broad eaves.

‘My child cried on the road.’—A hammer.

‘The sick man walks, but does not want to run, but when he sees this, he runs against his will.’—A steep hill (which forces people to run in descending it).

At Likoma they have a set form for riddle-contests, as thus: A. begins, ‘A riddle!’ The rest reply in chorus, ‘Let it come!’ A. ‘I have built my house on the cliff!’ All guess; if their guesses are wrong, A. repeats his riddle. If they still cannot guess right, they say, ‘We pay up oxen.’ A. ‘How many?’ They give a number. If A. is satisfied, he will now explain his riddle—‘the ear’ being the answer to the one given above. If any one guesses right, all clap their hands, and another player asks a fresh riddle.

Another popular amusement might be described as a ‘debate.’ Boys and grown men both delight in it, though with the former it is sometimes the prelude to a fight. One of a party sitting round the fire, or wakeful in the dormitory, will say, ‘Tieni, ti chita mákani’—‘Come, let us have a discussion,’—and will start it, perhaps, by asking whether a hippopotamus can climb a tree. The arguments for and against the proposition are then advanced with the greatest eagerness, till the point is settled, amid volleys of laughter, or the company tired out.

I have never, in Nyanja, come across any of the curious itagu (‘catch-word compositions’) which the Yaos delight in, and which are recited by two or more speakers. The following specimen of a duologue is given by Mr. Duff Macdonald:—

First Speaker.	Second Speaker.
Nda.	Nda kuluma.
Kuluma.	Kuluma mbale.
Mbale.	Mbale katete.
Katete.	Katete ngupe.
Ngupe.	Ngupe akane.
Kane.	Kane akongwe.
Kongwe.	Akongole chimanga.
Chimanga.	Chimanje macholo.
Macholo.	Gachole wandu.

It will be seen that the second speaker repeats the word given by the first (or something like it), and adds another to it, while the first in like manner catches up his last word, or part of it, sometimes giving it a different sense. It is almost impossible to translate this sort of thing, but the following composition on the same lines may serve to show how it is done.

A.	B.
Ten.	Tender and true.
True.	Truth shall prevail.
Veil.	Veil thy diminished head.
Head.	Head of the clan.
Plan.	Plant a new city, etc. etc.

Here, of course, there is no pretence of connection, but the itagu are really connected stories. The language of these itagu is very difficult; either because they are very old, or because words are purposely distorted.

Songs are numerous, and continually improvised afresh as wanted, though many old traditional ones are current, some of which are embodied in tales, and sung in chorus by the audience when the narrator comes to them. Natives nearly always sing when engaged in concerted work, such as paddling, hauling a heavy log, carrying a hammock, etc. They sometimes sing in unison, but not unfrequently in parts. Very often one sings the recitative, another answers, and others add the chorus. There is no metre, properly so called, in the songs, but there is a sort of rhythm, and they usually go very well to chants. Both Yao and Nyanja are exceedingly melodious languages, and it is possible, though not easy, to write rhymed verses in them, especially in trochaic metres, which violate no rule of accent or construction. Many, if not most, however, of the European tunes which have been adapted to native words in mission hymn-books are hopelessly unsuitable, and the result, as regards the accentuation of the words, is sometimes nothing short of grotesque.

No systematic study has yet been made of the native melodies by means of phonographic records; a few of the Nyanja and Chikunda songs have been written down, more or less tentatively by ear, and a good many Chinamwanga tunes have been noted down by Mrs. Dewar, of the Livingstonia Mission. These last, which are all associated with stories, come from a district outside the bounds of the Protectorate, about half-way between Nyasa and Tanganyika.

In general the character of all Bantu music is much the same; the singing has a curious, monotonous, droning effect, which, however, is not without its charm, when heard amid the proper surroundings. It is sometimes said that all the melodies are in the minor key; but this is a mistake. M. Junod, who has made a very careful study of the music of the Baronga, says that the effect which gives rise to this impression is produced by the songs beginning on a high note and descending; and this turns out, on examination, to be the case with many of those collected by Mrs. Dewar, though the height of the opening note is often only comparative. As a specimen, I give the melody (as written down by Mrs. Pringle of Yair) of the famous canoe-song Sina mama.

Si-na ma-ma Si-na ba-bai Si-na ma-

ma Ma-ri-ya si-na ba-bai, si-na ma-ma.

Si-na ma-ma wa-ku le-wa na-ye, si-

na ma-ma, ma-ma ndi-we Ma-ri-ya.

The meaning of the words (collated from two printed sources and my own notes) is: ‘I have no mother, I have no father; I have no mother, Mary, I have no father; I have no mother, to be nursed by her; I have no mother—thou art my mother, O Mary!’ This song is often heard on the Shiré; but, containing as it does, a faint echo of Romanist teaching, probably originated in one of the Portuguese settlements on the Zambezi.

Another Shiré boat-song is Wachenjera kale, which, when I heard it, I took for a very à propos improvisation, having, I suppose, utterly forgotten the following passage from Livingstone’s Zambezi Expedition, which I must have read, but which struck me as quite new when I came across it a few months later. ‘In general they [the men of Mazaro or Vicenti on the Lower Zambezi] are trained canoe-men, and man many of the canoes plying to Senna and Tette; their pay is small, and, not trusting the traders, they must always have it before they start.... It is possible they may be good-humouredly giving their reason for insisting on being invariably paid in advance in the words of their favourite canoe-song, “Uachingere [uniformity in spelling African words is, even now, not much more than a pious aspiration], uachingere kale,” “You cheated me of old,” or “Thou art slippery, slippery truly.”’ I prefer the former rendering; and, moreover, my men repeated the Wachenjera thrice. There seemed to be no more of the song.

A very pretty corn-pounding song heard at Blantyre is as follows:—

Gu! gu! ndikatinka nkasinja.

Mai! tate! Zandia, gu!

Mwanawe uliranji?

Kuchenjera kwa amako,

Kundikwirira pa moto,

Kuti ine ndipsyerere.

It is not easy to get a satisfactory translation of this, though the words, on the face of them, are not very difficult. ‘Gu! gu! (the sound of the pestle descending into the wooden mortar)—I am going to pound corn; father! mother! Zandia! gu! (I take Zandia to be a proper name). You, child, why are you crying?—They are clever (or, they cheated me) at your mother’s—to cover me up on the fire that I might be burnt—Zandia!’ The ‘child’ addressed is perhaps the corn in the mortar, which cries out and complains of being crushed (‘burnt’), or it may be meant of some maize-cobs put down to roast while the pounding is going on, which may be heard popping and crackling.

Several songs I have taken down are full of allusions to local chiefs and events of which I did not succeed in getting the explanation; they show, at all events, how passing incidents are commemorated and kept in mind. One speaks of ‘Mandala, who ran away from the flag’ (mbendera—the Portuguese bandeira), and ‘Gomani (i.e. Chekusi), who died (or, no doubt, “was kilt entirely”—he being still alive at the time of recitation) in the dambo.’ This may refer to one of the many wars between Chekusi and Chifisi, or Bazale.

Some of the songs are difficult to understand, as, even if not very old, they abound in unfamiliar words and constructions, and also in local allusions, which need explanation to outsiders. One I have written down seems to be about Chekusi’s marriage, and brings in the names of several chiefs. Another says that ‘I have seen Domwe’ (a mountain in Angoniland)—‘Ntaja is dead,—we are ravaged this year.’ Another obscure effusion, after stating that something or other is at Matewere’s (a son of the famous Mponda), goes on to say that ‘I refuse (him or them) the oxhide shield,’ or, maybe, the oxhide to make a shield.

These are ‘Angoni’ songs, and recognised as such on the other side of the river, though the language is not Zulu, but ordinary Nyanja. The original text of the last named is this:—

Ta iye (?) zi ri kwa Matewere chinkumbaleza—Ga da o ho!

Ndimana ine, ndimana cha ng’ombe chikopa tu!

The rhythm of the songs is rather indefinite; it resembles that of some sailors’ chanties—e.g. the well-known Rio Grande. They often consist of only a few words, repeated ad infinitum, with a refrain of meaningless syllables, sometimes mere open vowel sounds—as: e, e, e, e, o, o, o, o—wo ya yo ho, etc. In canoe-songs and the like, time is marked by the beat of the paddles, the rise and fall of the women’s pestles, and so on; at a dance, it is given by the drums. Some soloist usually leads off with an improvised line, which is either taken up and sung in chorus, or a response to it is so sung, and the principal performer continues till he has exhausted his idea. If the song ‘catches on,’ it is remembered and repeated, and passes into the common stock. Some dances have their recognised songs, as ‘Kanonomera e! e!’ at the Angoni women’s kunju dance, and ‘Leka ululuza mwana hiye! (Stop winnowing, child!)—e! e! e! e!—o! o! o! o!’ at the chamba dance.

The Dancing-man

Singing, music, and dancing, or other rhythmic action, are very much mixed up together, as is always the case in the elementary stages of those arts; and a combination of all three is practised by the itinerant poet known as the ‘dancing-man.’ Of his instrument, the chimwenyumwenyu, Mr. Barnes says that ‘performers on it are rare and are most welcome guests in any village.’ It is a primitive kind of fiddle, with one string and a gourd resonator, played with a bow, which, when made, has its string passed over the string of the instrument, and so can never be taken off. The man in the illustration, however, appears to be playing on the limba, which has six strings strung on a piece of wood across the mouth of a large gourd, and is played with both thumbs. The gourd is hung round with bits of metal or of shells, to jingle and rattle when it is shaken. The ‘dancing-man’ teaches the children the chorus of his songs, and then, ‘carries on a dialogue of song with his audience, with the excitement and rhythm of an inspired improvisatore.’ Another kind of limba is that shown in the illustration, which was obtained from some Atonga:—a shallow wooden trough with a handle at one end, and pierced at top and bottom with six holes, through which a cord is strung backwards and forwards, and tightened up by winding round the handle. Like the other kind of limba, it is played with the thumbs. But the word limba is of wide application; it (or its plural malimba, marimba) sometimes denotes the xylophone or ‘Kafir piano’ (Ronga timbila), while natives use it for a harmonium, organ, or piano.

Other stringed instruments are the pango, resembling the dancing-man’s limba, but played with a stick or plectrum instead of the thumbs; the mngoli, the body of which is made like a small drum—it has one string with a bridge, and is played with a bow; the kalirangwe, with one string and a gourd resonator, played either with the fingers or a bit of grass; and the very primitive one (mtangala) represented in the illustration, which is played by women only, and is simply a piece of reed, slightly bent, with a string fastened at one end and wound on the other, so that it can be tightened up at pleasure. One end of this is held in the mouth and the string twanged with the finger, producing a very slight but not unpleasant sound, which, as Bishop Colenso remarked of a somewhat similar instrument in Natal, ‘gratifies the performer and annoys nobody else.’

The sansi has a set of iron keys fixed on a wooden sounding-box, and played with the thumbs; it has a piece of metal fixed on the front of the box, to which are attached small discs cut from the shells of the great Achatina snail, so as to clash when shaken, like the bells on a tambourine. A very similar instrument has the keys made of bamboo.

Musical Instruments

1. Limba (Atonga)

2. Sansi

3. Reed (mtangala)

From Specimens in the Ethnological Museum at Cambridge

A flute (chitoliro) is made out of a piece of bamboo about a foot long, cut off immediately above and below the joints, so that it is closed at both ends, and from three to six holes bored in the side, some of which are closed with the fingers while playing. Bvalani, the boy with the coronet, used to play on this flute a pretty, though somewhat monotonous, little tune, consisting apparently of three or four notes, repeated over and over again; but neither I nor any other mzungu has yet succeeded in getting a sound out of the one in my possession. It has one hole at one end, to blow into, and three at the other.

Whistles, made out of a small goat’s or antelope’s horn, and used for calling dogs and perhaps for signalling to each other on the road, are worn round the neck by Angoni and Chipetas; and Pan-pipes are made of reeds. Trumpets are made of gourds, sometimes fixed with wax on a long reed; the same word, lipenga, is used for a horn employed in the same way, or for a European key-bugle, or (in hymns) for the Tuba mirum spargens sonum of the Last Day. Some of the people near the south end of Tanganyika have huge trumpets cut out of a large tusk of ivory, like those used on the Upper Congo and elsewhere. One such is figured in Sir H. H. Johnston’s book, p. 465.

The instrument above referred to as the ‘Kafir piano’ is, in a modified form, very popular throughout the Shiré Highlands and on the Lake, and may often be seen in the village bwalo. The Delagoa Bay timbila is portable (see the figure in M. Junod’s Chants et Contes des Baronga, p. 27), with the wooden keys fixed on a flat frame—elsewhere, the frame is curved into the arc of a circle, so that the performer can easily reach all the keys when the instrument is slung round his neck. In both cases, resonators, made of gourds, or the hard shells of the matondo fruit, are attached to the keys. I once saw a very elaborately made and beautifully finished specimen which had come either from Delagoa Bay or Inhambane, and had polished iron keys padded with leather; but this was a sophisticated timbila, scarcely the genuine article. The Nyanja form of it, variously called magologodo, mangondongondo, mangolongondo, and mangolongodingo, usually has to be played in situ, or, if removed, must be carried away in pieces. Two logs of soft wood (banana-stems are the best), perhaps a yard long, are laid on the ground a certain distance apart, and on these are arranged six, or sometimes seven, cross-bars (the Ronga ‘piano’ has ten) cut from the wood of certain trees, and carefully trimmed to shape. Sometimes they are merely laid on the logs, sometimes there are short pegs to keep them in place. The keys on the Ronga instrument are carefully tuned, and each one is cut away underneath in such a way as to make it give a different sound; but some of those I saw at Blantyre seemed to be merely rough bits of wood which fulfilled no condition beyond that of making a noise when struck. It is played by striking the keys with two sticks; the performer holds one in each hand and squats on his heels in front of it: sometimes there are two players, who face each other; the first leads, and the second is said to ‘make a harmony with the one who is playing.’

But the drum is perhaps the commonest and most characteristic instrument, and the one which has been brought to the greatest perfection. There are many different kinds, from the little kandimbe, a mere toy for children, four or five inches across, and tapped with the fingers, to the great mpanje and kunta, five feet or more in length, or the mgulugulu war-drum, which is beaten with sticks to call the people together. None of them have two heads; the body is made of a single piece of wood hollowed out, and the head of goat-skin, or perhaps oxhide; some small drums (more like tambourines) are covered with snake or lizard skin. The sound of the large ones can be heard five or six miles away. Some are beaten with sticks, some with the hand—either with the fist (as the big mpangula, which is supported on a forked piece of wood), or the open palm, or the fingers. Some of the smaller drums are held against the chest and beaten with the open hands, which gives a peculiar, soft, booming sound; one kind is held under the arm; another is laid lengthwise on the ground, and the drummer sits astride it. Still another has legs like a small round stool, and is beaten with two sticks as it stands on the ground. The mfinta drum (large, but not the largest kind) calls the people together when the mabisalila is investigating a case of witchcraft; it is also used in a dance where the performers carry hoes and strike them together. There is a wonderful variety in the notes; ‘the smaller drums are made to answer the big ones, the rapid and slower beats blending in the most perfect time.... There are skilled drummers who go to the dances like a piper at a Scotch wedding’ (Scott).

Drums are tuned when necessary by leaving them in front of a fire, or burning some grass inside them to dry the skin and draw it tighter. The skin is fastened on by small wooden pegs, and has a piece of rubber fastened to the middle of its underside.

Besides the drums, most dances require an additional sound-producing agency in the shape of rattles. These are worn on the arms and legs of the dancers, or shaken in their hands. The commonest kind are made of a hard-shelled fruit called tseche, about two inches or less in diameter; it is allowed to dry till the seeds shake about inside it, and then four or five are strung on a stick, and several of these sticks attached round the ankles of the dancers. Women never wear these maseche at their chamba dance, above referred to; but men always do at their corresponding one, called chitoto.

The subject of dances is a large one, celebrating, as they do, every important event in life, from birth to death, besides ordinary merrymakings which have no particular motive beyond cheerfulness and sociability. In place of attempting to enumerate all the varieties, which would be wearisome and convey no particular impression, I shall content myself with extracting one or two descriptions from my notes. ‘Passing through Mlomba’s village (near Blantyre) found a grand masewero[26] going on. The dancing man was performing, but not singing—calico turban on his head, leather belt under his arms, with a great bunch of long feathers stuck into it in front, some falling down over his waistcloth, others reaching to his shoulders, a wild-cat skin hanging down his back, and dance-rattles on his legs. This dance is called the tseche. There were also six drummers: one sat on the ground and beat his drum (the kind with legs like a stool) with two sticks; the rest held theirs against their chests and beat them with both hands, the drum being supported by a piece of twine passing under it and looped over both wrists. They were well-made, muscular fellows, and danced pretty hard while drumming: this, it seems, is called the nkonde. Two younger boys came forward at intervals and danced pas seuls, and at the end a collection was taken up, chiefly in fowls.’ Sometimes the beads contributed by a gratified audience are put into a hole in the gourd of the chimwenyumwenyu.

Preparing for the Dance

I remember the drums going all night long for the chamba dance at Ntumbi (which, by the bye, in spite of the name, has nothing to do with the smoking of the pernicious Indian hemp), and the ball was still in full swing between 7 and 8 A.M., when some of our boys and girls requested permission to go down before school hours and ‘see the Angoni playing.’

Another dance which I witnessed at a Yao village near Blantyre, I am not sure whether to class as a diversion or a ritual solemnity. I think it was the latter, but not (as I was at one time inclined to suppose) the chimbandi, or ‘great unyago,’ which precedes the birth of a woman’s first child (see Macdonald, Africana, i. 128), unless the latter has been considerably modified. In the first place, my friend Chewilaga, who appeared to play the principal part, had a baby about six weeks old; in the second, so far from only women being present, there were three men and a boy working the drums, and one man among a few casual spectators who gathered from outside; and there were other points of difference. Eight or ten women (two of them quite young girls) took part in the dance, led by Chewilaga; they were all freshly anointed, almost dripping with oil, and had on their best calicoes, and (apparently) all their beads, and wore rattles on one leg only. The drummers sat in a row on a form made out of a split log: the three men held their drums against their chests and beat them with their hands; the boy had a four-legged standing drum, which he beat with two sticks. The women—one with a baby tied to her back—stood in front of the band in a semicircle, ‘marking time,’ then formed in couples and ‘set to partners,’ then marched round, in Indian file, then bent forward from the hips, and all danced together in a kind of jigging step; then formed in semicircle again, and so da capo. The song (sung by the dancers) consisted of a few words only, which I failed to catch.

Some of the dances for amusement are confined to one sex; in others, both take part. In one, partners are chosen and led out into the middle; in another, the man who beats the big drum leaves it at intervals and dances alone in the centre of the ring, while every one claps hands to fill up the gap.

The war-dance of the Angoni—executed, perhaps, by hundreds of men leaping into the air at once and beating their shields—is very striking; the Yaos and Anyanja also have one, though the latter are not a particularly warlike race. ‘One in the war-dance,’ says a native account, ‘comes and stretches his leg, stamping down his foot, di! and his gun, di! before his chief, saying, “Chief, we are here, none can come to kill you, for we are not dead yet.”’

The zinyao dances have been already touched on in connection with the mysteries, and the mourning dances in the chapter on funeral ceremonies. The Rev. D. C. Scott thus describes the latter, and at the same time successfully conveys the impression produced by all: ‘The heavy, deep di! di! of the great bass drum, with silence succeeding, broken by the responsive wail and clapping of hands, then with the rapid call of the small garanzi drum, and again with the deep hollow bass, and the never-ceasing circling of the dance, produces a weird sensation only possible in Africa.’[27]

CHAPTER X
FOLK-STORIES

Methods of story-telling. Animal stories. Brer Rabbit. Borrowed tales. Value of native folk-lore.

We have mentioned that one of the great amusements, both of children and grown-up people, is story-telling—ku imba ntanu. This means literally ‘to sing a story,’ and points to the way in which tales are usually told. Most of them contain short pieces which are sung, and are known to every one—so that, when the narrator comes to them, the audience all join in. Steere points out that these sung parts are very common in the Swahili tales, and that the language found in them is older than what is usually spoken, or than the rest of the story.

Another curious point is that, when a man is telling a story late at night—say, beside the camp-fire or on a journey—at every pause in his narrative the hearers exclaim in chorus, ‘We are all here!’ As the tale goes on, the responses become fewer and fewer, and at last, when no one is left awake to answer, the recitation stops.

The stories told by the Bantu of British Central Africa are, broadly speaking, of three kinds. First, we have legends about the origin of men and things, such as we noticed in the fourth chapter, with which may be grouped the traditions telling whence the different tribes came, and how they reached their present homes. About these last I shall have something to say in the next chapter. Secondly, we have the kind of animal story so well exemplified in Uncle Remus. And, thirdly, tales in which people, animals, and sometimes preternatural beings are mixed up together in a series of more or less marvellous incidents—like our own fairy stories, in fact. Some of these we can trace as imported; but they are none the less curious on that account.

The animal stories seem to be the commonest and best known among the Anyanja—at least, nearly all the stories I could induce natives to tell me were of this kind. The tales collected by Mr. Macdonald, and published in Africana, however, belong largely to the first and second classes. Some are like very faint and far-off echoes of the Arabian Nights; these have probably been heard on the coast by Yaos who have gone down with trading-parties, and retold in the villages on their return. An example of this kind is ‘The Story of the Chief,’ which will be given later on.

Every one knows the delightful Uncle Remus tales, and will remember the cunning and resourcefulness of ‘Brer Rabbit,’ who, with his family, ‘wuz at de head er de gang when any racket wuz on hand, en dar dey stayed!’ It is now generally agreed that these stories came from Africa; and wherever any Bantu folk-tales have been written down, there we are pretty sure to find Brer Rabbit, under one alias or another. The Anyanja call him Kalulu, the Yaos Sungula—generally Che Sungula, ‘Mr. Rabbit’; though naturalists remind us, by the bye, that he is not properly a rabbit but a hare. One comes across the Kalulu by himself in the bush, and he makes a form in the grass, not a burrow in the ground. If I can trust my recollection of him, he is a little smaller than an English hare.

I cannot help feeling surprised that some writers on African folk-lore have chosen to ‘translate’ sungula, or its equivalent in other Bantu languages, by ‘fox,’ because the character assigned to the hare is in their opinion more appropriate to the fox. By doing so, we spoil one of the most characteristic features in the stories, and, moreover, lose an important distinction; for the place given by the Bantu to the Hare is occupied in Hottentot folk-lore by the Jackal.

Of course the animals in Uncle Remus are not all the same as those in the African tales; as some of the latter do not live in America, better-known ones have been substituted for them. Thus the Elephant, the Hippopotamus, the Lion, and the Python have disappeared, so has the Crocodile (‘Uncle Remus’ lived in Middle Georgia, where there are no alligators); and I fancy that Brer Wolf and Brer Fox have taken the place of the Hyena, who sometimes gets the better of the Hare for a time, but is always worsted by him in the end. The Tortoise (a land and not a water tortoise, usually) is as clever as Brer Terrapin, but is more bloodthirsty and vindictive—a kind of Shylock. The Baboon (nyani) does not seem to have an American counterpart, and the Cat, the Cock, and the Swallow, though one does not see why, have also dropped out.

A somewhat puzzling creature in the Nyanja tales is the Dzimwe, sometimes translated ‘elephant,’ though the native explanations are rather hazy, and leave one with the impression that he is a kind of bogey—perhaps akin to Chiruwi. One boy actually states that dzimwe (or, in the Likoma dialect, jimwe) sometimes means ‘an elephant,’ and sometimes ‘a spirit.’ In the present case, it seems more satisfactory to take it as the former; though in one or two stories we have the elephant under his proper Nyanja name of njobvu. In neither case does he act up to his reputation for wisdom, for in the end he is always cruelly victimised by the Hare.

The latter’s manners, I think, must have been softened by his sojourn in the States; for only on rare occasions—as when he puts an end to Brer Wolf with the boiling kettle—are his actions really cruel. We cannot say the same of the Kalulu; yet it would be a mistake to conclude, from the enjoyment with which these stories are received, that the African natives are a bloodthirsty and ferocious race. What they enjoy is the cleverness with which the tables are turned by the weaker party on the stronger, who seemed to have him entirely in his power. And, after all, generation after generation of English children have been fascinated by Jack the Giant-Killer, without being precisely horrified by the murderous stratagem practised by Jack on the Cornish giant.

The native does not recognise such a clear distinction between animals and human beings as we do. Animals do not speak, it is true, but, for all he knows, there may be nothing to prevent their doing so if they choose. He believes (and acts on the belief) that certain human beings can change themselves into animals and back again. So, in telling stories about animals, he seems continually to forget that they are not human, or perhaps, rather, he assumes that their habits, abodes, and domestic arrangements are very much the same as those of his own people.

One of the most typical of the Kalulu stories is the following, told me by one of the Blantyre native teachers. Being an educated man, accustomed to composition and dictation, he was able to give it in a very clear and connected form; whereas it is difficult, and sometimes impossible, to make sense of those written down from the dictation of village children, who perhaps did not know the stories very well to begin with, and continually lost the thread when entreated to go slower or repeat a phrase.

‘The Hare and the Elephant were once friends, and the Hare said, “Come, man, and let us go and look for food.” And they went to a village and said, “We want to hoe for you, if you will give us food”; and the head-man said “Good.” And he let them hoe in his garden, and gave them some beans to eat there in the garden (in the middle of the day). And they went to the garden and cooked those beans. (They could make a fire as soon as they arrived, and put on the pot with the beans, so as to let them cook slowly while they worked.) When they had finished hoeing, the beans were done, and the Elephant said, “I am going to the water to bathe, do you look well after the beans, and we will eat them together when I return.” Then he went away and took off his skin, and ran, and came to the place where the Hare was. (We are to understand that he was quite unrecognisable in this condition.) When the Hare saw him, he was afraid, thinking that he was a wild beast, and he ran away; and the Elephant ate up those beans, and went back to the water, and put on his skin again, and returned, and said, “Have you taken off the pot with the beans?” And the Hare said, “No, my friend, there came here a terrible wild beast, and I ran away, and it ate those beans.” And the Elephant said, “No, you are cheating me—you ate those beans yourself—it was not a wild beast, no!” And the next day they went again to hoe, and cooked their beans. When the beans were nearly done, the Elephant said to the Hare, “I shall go and bathe—we will eat the beans when I return.” And he did just the same as before. When he returned and asked if the beans were ready, the Hare answered, “The wild beast came again to-day and has eaten the beans.” The Elephant said, “My friend, it is very deceitful of you to eat the beans twice over, and not let me have any!” And the Hare said, “Now, I am going to make a bow—if it comes again I will shoot it.” Next day, they put on their beans again; and the Elephant took the bow which the Hare had made, and said, “You have not made it well—give it to me; I will make it right for you.” And he kept on paring and shaving it, a little here and a little there, till he had made it too thin in one place, and said, “Now it is good; if the wild beast comes, you can shoot it.” Then he went down to the water, and took off his skin, and ran, and came where the Hare was. When the Hare saw that wild beast coming, he took his bow to shoot it, and the bow broke. So he ran away again, and the Elephant ate the beans, and came back as before, and asked, “Did you shoot the wild beast?” And the Hare answered, “No, my bow broke, and I ran away.” Next day they put on the beans once more, and the Hare went aside and made his bow, and hid it. When the Elephant went away to bathe, the Hare took his bow and held it in his hand, and took a barbed arrow, and when the wild beast came once more, he shot him through the heart, and the Elephant said, “Mai! mai! mai! mai! (mother!) Oh! my friend, to shoot me like this, because of those miserable beans! I meant to have left some for you to-day, that you too might eat!” And the Hare said, “Ha! my friend!—then it was you who finished up those beans by yourself, and I thought it was a wild beast!” The Elephant said, “Ha! to shoot me with a barbed arrow!—you have hurt me, my friend!—and how shall I get this out?” And he tried to pull out the arrow, and died. And the Hare ate the beans by himself, and went home.’

Another story in which these two figure is given by Mr. Macdonald under the title of ‘The Fox and the Hyena’; but this is in two parts—in the first, the Hyena plays a series of tricks on a long-suffering creature called the mbendu, apparently a kind of civet-cat; in the second, he tries to repeat these tricks on the Hare (for this is a case where ‘fox’ is used to translate sungula), and fails. In my version, the Hare is cheated at first, and learns by bitter experience; the closing incident, too, is different. The Hare and the Dzimwe went on a journey together, begging food (as native travellers do) at all the villages they came to. At the first, the Elephant said, ‘Let us ask for sugar-cane and bango reeds’ (which are uneatable); he then took the sugar-cane and gave the Hare the bango. At the next village he acted in the same way with millet and pebbles. At the next, the people had been cooking porridge; and the Elephant, in order to secure both the Hare’s portion and his own, sent the latter back to gather some ‘medicine’ leaves from a tree he had noticed on the way, saying that the nsima would not be good without them. The Hare, however, produced some from his bag; he had run back on the road, just after passing the tree, saying that he wanted to look for an arrow he had dropped, and had then picked the leaves. The Dzimwe was so disgusted at being outwitted that he would not eat, but left all the nsima to the Hare. Next day, however, when they reached another village, he contrived to get him out of the way for a time, and, on his return, refused to share his porridge with him (an almost unheard-of thing in native manners), alleging that, in the interval, ‘many strangers’ had arrived, and eaten up all the cooked food in the village, so that there was barely enough for himself. The Hare then retired, stripped off his skin, tied maseche rattles to his legs, and came and danced at the door of the hut where the Elephant was eating. The latter, thinking that he was a chirombo, fled and left him to finish the porridge. Subsequently, he was induced, by a stratagem not detailed in my version, to strip off his own skin, which the Hare hid while his back was turned. ‘And he said, “Who has taken my skin?” and since he was without a skin, he died of the heat.’

Brer Rabbit’s methods of disguise are less drastic. ‘He slip off en git in a mud-hole, en des lef’ his eyes stickin’ out’; and when Brer B’ar passed by and said, ‘Howdy, Brer Frog, is you see Brer Rabbit go by?’ answered, without turning a hair, ‘He des gone by.’ He plays the same trick on Mrs. Cow; but this time by hiding in a ‘brier-patch.’ In a Basuto story, he cuts off both his ears and pretends to grind meal on a flat stone; the hyenas in pursuit of him fail to recognise him, and ask him where the Hare has gone.

The trick by which the Hare induced the Elephant to destroy himself, is repeated with endless variations in other stories. In fact, it is found in all countries and all ages. The Cornish giant, already referred to, is one of the best known examples, and no doubt the men who chipped flints in Kent’s Hole laughed themselves into fits over something of the same sort. In one Nyanja story the Swallow invites the Cock to dinner, and pretends to fly into the pot where the pumpkins are cooking. In reality he disappears into the shadows of the nsanja, and then shows himself up aloft, afterwards alleging that his temporary presence in the pot has greatly improved the flavour of the pumpkins. The Cock, when returning the invitation, tries the same experiment, and is cooked most effectually. In another tale, the ntengu bird treats the wild-cat in the same way.

Apparently the Hare meets his match in the Tortoise—though the famous race is by the Anyanja related as taking place between the Tortoise and the Bushbuck (mbawala). On one occasion these two hoed a garden together, and the Hare cheated the Tortoise out of his dinner, as, on another occasion, the Elephant cheated him. The Tortoise, however, had his revenge a little later, when they were sowing ground-nuts; he crawled into the Hare’s seed-bag, as it lay on the ground, and ate up the supply. The Hare took this defeat so much to heart that he ‘went away and cried.’

All over the world we find tales intended to explain how animals came by this or that peculiarity which is striking enough to catch the attention, but has no obvious use. Thus, the Calabar people tell how the Tortoise fell off a tree and broke his shell to pieces, and had it stuck together again, so that the joins are visible to this day; and the Hottentots say that the Hare has a split lip because the Moon threw a piece of wood at him. We know how Brer Rabbit lost his long, bushy tail, through letting it hang in the water while fishing. The Anyanja also think that the Hare once had a long tail, and there is a story which relates how he had a piece cut off it at every village he passed through; but I have never been able to secure it in detail. There is a Yao tale to the effect that baboons are descended from a woman who ran away to the Bush because the chief had killed one of her children. She refused to shave her head (in mourning), and hair subsequently grew all over her body.

The Spider, who on the Guinea Coast is the principal figure in the animal stories, is, so far as I know, almost absent from Bantu folk-lore. One exception I have already referred to, in a Yao creation-myth; in another Yao tale he crosses a stream and makes a bridge for a chief to escape from his enemies. Here, however, he does not take a specially prominent part, being only one of four helpers provided by the spirit of the chief’s elder brother. The Spider is very prominent in the folk-lore of the Duala, who have probably borrowed him from their western neighbours.

We have mentioned that the natives see nothing strange in men assuming the forms of animals—they believe that it happens every day. Their stories give us many instances of the converse process—animals taking human shape whenever it suits them. Thus a girl marries a lion who has turned himself into a man, and, finding out his real nature, runs away from him. Another I give as I have it written down.

‘A person (a girl) refused (all) men; there came a baboon; he took off the skin from his body and was turned into a man. The Angoni woman married the baboon, and he hoed the crops, and his companions came from the Bush and ate the crops of his mother-in-law’s garden, and (so) he went (with them) into the Bush.’

But a better example still is that of the ‘Girl and the Hyena,’ which Mr. Macdonald thinks is intended as a warning to girls not to be too fastidious in their choice of husbands, and to accept those first suggested to them, lest worse befall. It might equally well be a warning against marrying a stranger from a distance, and certainly shows the tie between brother and sister in a very pleasing light. Here it is, as told me by Katembo at Blantyre.

‘There was a woman who refused all husbands, and at last there came a hyena, and she said, “I want this one.” (So they were married), and the husband said, “My wife, let us go home.” Her brother, who had sore eyes, followed after them, and she (saw him and) said, “Where are you going?” The brother crouched down and hid in the grass, and when they were out of sight he followed them again, till he came to the village. When his sister found he was there, she hid him in the hen-coop. When it was quite dark, a number of hyenas came outside the hut and sang:

“Here is meat, we will eat it; but it is not fat enough yet.”

‘The girl was asleep, but her brother heard them, and as soon as it was light he went and told her that they meant to eat her. She would not believe it, so he told her to tie a string to her little finger that night before she went to sleep, and leave the end outside the hut, so that he could take it with him into the chicken-house. In the middle of the night the hyenas came again, and, when he heard them, he pulled the string and woke his sister; so she, too, heard them singing:

“Here is meat, we will eat it; but it is not fat enough yet.”

‘In the morning she said, “I heard them, my brother.” Then he said to her husband, “Brother-in-law, lend me an adze, I want to make myself a big wooden top” (chinguli).[28] When he had finished it, he put it into his sister’s baskets (the luggage she had brought from home), and fastened it firmly, and put his sister into the baskets, and sang:

“Chínguli chánga, nde, nde, nde,

Mpérekezéni, nde, nde, nde,

Kúli amái, nde, nde, nde,

Chínguli chánga, nde, nde, nde.”

That is, “My top! take her home to her mother!”

‘It flew up and flew away over the Bush, and the hyenas followed; but he repeated the same song again, and they flew on till they were just above their mother’s village. Then he sang again, Chínguli chánga (and so on, as above), and the people heard it in the air over their heads, and looked up, and saw them; and the chinguli came to a stop, and let them down right on top of the grain-mortar. And then the brother said, “My sister wanted to send me back because I had sore eyes; but they would have eaten her at that village, and I have brought her home.”’ In another version, the mother follows this up with some more good advice, pointing out what she owes to her brother, and warning her ‘never to do it again.’

A favourite Yao story is that of the python (Sato) who was befriended by a man when caught in a bush-fire. He appealed first to a passing herd of buck to stop and save him, but they, considering that he had just eaten one of their number, not unnaturally refused. Then a man passed by with a hoe in his hand, and, on being assured that the python would not devour him, hoed up a piece of ground all round him, and thus saved him from the fire. The grateful python told him to come back in four days’ time, which he did, and found that it had changed into a young lad, who took him home, entertained him with plenty of beer, and finally presented him with two pieces (1 piece = 16 yards) of calico and a magic bottle, which was to be opened in presence of his enemies.

When the man went home, he found there was war; his family had fled, and the enemy were occupying the village. He opened his bottle, and they were immediately annihilated. He then went to hoe in the gardens, leaving his bottle and other property in his hut. Another detachment of the enemy arrived—they took possession of the village and all that was in it, pursued him to his garden, and took him prisoner. He was tied up, with his neck in a gori-stick, with a view to being killed next day. During the night he felt a rat gnawing his feet, and asked it to go to the chief’s house and bring the bottle. The rat did so, and the man said, ‘I will pay you in the morning.’ When the people were all assembled, and the man was brought out into the bwalo to be killed, he opened his bottle. ‘The people who sat there when he held it up were dead and gone’—there was no one there! So he rewarded the rat with two cows.

Animal stories sometimes vary in having one or more of their characters replaced by human beings: thus there is one in which the Antelope sets a trap and catches a Leopard in it. He spares the Leopard’s life, but meets with no gratitude, for the latter eats all his children, and then his wife. He appeals for help to a number of animals in succession, without getting it, till the Hare takes the case in hand, and induces the Leopard to put his head once more into the trap, and show how he was caught. Once in, the Hare advises the Antelope to kill him. Now the same story is told to explain why there should be a standing feud between crocodiles and men. The Crocodile behaved very much in the same way as the Leopard, and finally jumped on the man’s back and made him carry him. The Hare intervened, heard the whole story, and then asked the Crocodile to show him how he got into the trap, with results as above.

The Yao tale of the Hyena and the Bees is a version, with animal actors, of a story which, in various shapes, is probably found throughout the whole of Bantu Africa. The Basuto tell it of a girl called Tselane, who was carried off by a cannibal. He put her into a bag, which he threw over his shoulder, and started for home. On the way he stopped at a hut, which turned out to be her uncle’s, and laid down his sack while he went in to rest. Tselane’s relatives discovered her plight, let her out, and put in a dog and a quantity of venomous ants in her place. Consequently the cannibal, when he had shut himself up in his hut to enjoy his feast alone, died a miserable death. In the Yao story, the Hyena steals the fox’s (or jackal’s) cubs, and puts them into a bag; but the mother contrives to substitute a swarm of bees for them before he carries them off. ‘So the Hyena and his brethren died.’

There is a rather curious Nyanja story, introducing a being very like the Chiruwi mentioned in Chapter III. Some children went out into the Bush to gather masuku fruit. While they were out, it came on to rain, and the stream which they had crossed easily was full when they reached it on the way home, and too deep to ford. While they were considering what to do, there came along ‘a big bird, with one wing, one eye, and one leg,’ and carried them over, strictly charging them to tell no one at home that it had done so. One boy, however, told his mother what had happened; the rest all denied it, and asked people not to listen to him, saying they had crossed in the ordinary way. Next time they went to look for masuku they forded the stream, and some of them held out a branch to the boy who had talked, to help him over; it was rotten, and broke, and he was swept away by the current. They called out after him, ‘You told.’

Mr. Macdonald gives a story which in some respects reminds one of Grimm’s ‘Frau Holle,’ though not so much as does a Ronga one given by M. Junod under the title of La Route du Ciel. Both of these, though differing greatly from one another, are evidently the same tale. In the Yao one, a woman who has been persuaded by a trick to throw her baby into the water, and has seen it swallowed by a crocodile, climbs a tree in her distress, and says, ‘I want to go on high.’ The tree grows up with her and carries her to a strange country, where she meets, first, leopards, then the Nsenzi (a large kind of water-rat, or perhaps a bird), and lastly, some great fishes, who all show the way to Mulungu. When she reached ‘the village of Mulungu,’ she told her story. ‘Then Mulungu called the crocodile, and it came. Mulungu said, “Give up the child,” and it delivered it up. The girl received the child and went down to her mother. Her mother was much delighted and gave her much cloth and a good house.’

Her wicked companions were now envious, and, wishing to enjoy like good fortune, began by throwing their babies into the water. They climbed the tree and reached Mulungu’s country, but gave rude answers to the leopards, the nsenzi, and the fishes. ‘Then they came to Mulungu. Mulungu said, “What do you want?” The girls said, “We have thrown our children into the water.” But Mulungu said, “What was the reason of that?” The girls hid the matter and said “Nothing.” But Mulungu said, “It is false. You cheated your companion, saying, ‘Throw your child into the water,’ and now you tell me a lie.” Then Mulungu took a bottle of lightning, and said, “Your children are in here.” The girls took the bottle, and the bottle made a report like a gun. The girls both died.’

In the Ronga version, likewise, the wicked sister is killed by lightning. ‘Le ciel fit explosion et la tua.’ This story, which might almost be classed among religious legends (as, in fact, is done by Mr. Macdonald) has, in its simple way, something very pathetic about it.

The imported stories are interesting, as showing how their ideas and incidents have been translated, so to speak, into African. ‘Rombao,’ in Mr. Macdonald’s collection, told by a native of Quillimane, is perhaps of European origin. The names are Portuguese, and the theme is the familiar one of the Goose-girl; but it may be an Arab or Indian story which has acquired a Portuguese colouring on the Mozambique coast. M. Junod’s ‘Bonawasi’ is one of the Arab ‘Abû Nuwâs’ stories, which seem to be current all down the Swahili coast. Most of the Swahili tales in Steere’s collection are Arab, and some can be recognised in the ordinary editions of the Arabian Nights. It is curious to watch the gradual changes in the details, as these stories travel farther and farther into the interior. Harry Kambwiri, the Yao teacher who dictated the Hare story already given, once told me one which, he thought, must be ‘a story of the Azungu.’ He had got it from a Yao boy who had been to Zanzibar. I recognised it afterwards as the story of ‘The Three Blind Men,’ in Kibaraka. The Sultan’s treasure-chamber has become simply ‘the chief’s money,’ and the story is somewhat obscured by the loss of the distinctively Mohammedan touches. The ‘Story of a Chief,’ already referred to, was written down by one of the Yao boys educated at Domasi. It runs as follows:—

‘There was a chief who had ten sons, and three of them were poor. And the father brought three tusks of ivory to give to his three poor sons. The sons then said, “Let us go to the coast, let us buy goods.” And they called up men to carry their goods. Then they set off on their journey and came to the coast. When they arrived, they built a grass house and slept there one day. In the morning one of them set off with his tusk to buy goods, but his brothers did not know that he had gone to buy goods. And he bought a precious glass for looking into every land.

‘Then the second one set off and bought a mat for flying with into every land. Then the third bought a medicine for making people dead or alive. But each of these did not know that the others had gone to buy goods.

‘Afterwards, he who had the glass began to look into it. When he looked, he saw that in the land of his home there had died his friend. Then he told the others that there was a mourning, and they asked, “How do you know that at our home some one has died?” And he answered, “Because I looked in my glass.” Then he gave them the glass that they might look, and they saw their friend dead. Afterwards they began to grumble, saying, “If only we had medicine for flying”; and the second brother produced his mat. The others said, “Make us fly that we may reach our home to-day, that we may be at the funeral, because he was a friend of ours.” And he placed them on the mat, and they flew, and came to their village on the same day.

‘When they arrived, they again began to grumble, saying, “If only we had medicine to make this man alive, we would make him alive.” Then came the one who had medicine for making alive, and made the man alive again.

‘But afterwards there arose a dispute as to whom the man should belong. The one who had the glass said, “He is mine, because I saw him.” The one who had the mat answered, “I flew and conveyed you.” Then answered he who had the medicine, saying, “Did I not come and make him alive?” But the one with the mat said, “Could you have brought the man to life without him who carried you there?” The sons were then about to quarrel and came to the father, bringing the man with them. And the father said, “You have all done foolishly, because you bought precious things which take away all peace; you wished to excel beyond all men, but you have failed.”’

This story, it was found on inquiry, had long been known to several of the Domasi villagers. We see that the trading voyage has become the usual journey to the coast, and the magic carpet a mat; the claiming of the man as a slave (regardless of the fact that he is previously spoken of as a friend to be mourned), is a local touch. On the Lower Congo (see Dennett, Folk-Lore of the Fjort) we find a tale which is evidently the same as this, of two wives who between them brought their husband back to life. It is found in M. Junod’s collection under the title of Les Trois Vaisseaux; we have also a Swahili version, and one from the Kru coast in West Africa. The excellent moral does not suggest the Arabian Nights; but whether it is due to some shrewd old villager who had had sad experience of squabbles over the proceeds of prosperous ‘Coast ulendos,’ or is a reflection added by Peter Mlenjesi on his own account, may be left undecided.

There is yet another kind of story, which may be dismissed very briefly, as specimens of it have occurred in another connection. It contains nothing miraculous or even very wonderful, and is usually of a more or less humorous character, turning on absurd incidents of daily life, the little failings of husbands and wives, quarrels between neighbours, and the like; and might almost be considered as a rudimentary novel or farce. ‘The Man with the Bran-Porridge’ (Yao), and ‘The Man with Two Wives’ (Nyanja), are good examples of this.

These Bantu folk-tales are sometimes contemptuously dismissed as pointless and inane; and so, perhaps, they are, in translation, for it requires great skill in the language and knowledge of native ways to translate them intelligently, even when they are fairly well told. So much has to be supplied, or explained, which, in the original, is simply taken for granted, or has to be gathered from gesture and intonation. But though their literary value may be small, they are always instructive as a picture of native manners and ideas, which they illustrate by many little graphic touches. Besides, they furnish a kind of mental training to the people themselves. I have no hesitation in introducing here a quotation from M. Junod, because, though he is speaking of the Delagoa Bay natives, it will also apply to other Bantu tribes.

‘Every young man, every girl, knows one or two tales which he or she is always willing to repeat. Sometimes, even, they are expected to amuse the company with a story, told by way of forfeit, when they are the losers in a game. Beginners often get confused and break down. They mix up the incidents, or lose the thread of the narrative. “That is too much for you!” (literally, “that has overcome you,”) says the audience, and a more skilled reciter then takes the stage. Next time, the novice will acquit himself better. Besides, when the young people have come to an end of all they know, there remain the old women, who are the real repositories of tradition. Some of them know ten, twenty, or thirty tales, and I know more than one who could go on the whole evening, every day for a fortnight, without completely exhausting her stock.... Children exercise their memory in this way, and accustom themselves to speak in public; and it is perhaps to this custom that the South African races owe their extreme facility in expressing themselves.’[29]

CHAPTER XI
TRIBAL ORGANISATION, GOVERNMENT, ETC.

Totemistic clans. Kinship counted through women. The paramount chief: his powers. Succession to the chieftainship. Administration of justice. Crime and punishment. Slavery.

Both Yaos and Anyanja trace descent through the mother, and cannot marry within their own clan, which is, of course, the mother’s. The Yao clans are still clearly known and named. Mr. R. S. Hynde says: ‘The Yaos are divided among themselves into sub-tribes, stocks, or totemistic clans,[30] each with its own distinctive name, e.g. the Amwale, the Asomba, the Apiri clan. If you question them on the subject, they will usually be able to tell you this clan name, unless the person questioned be a slave, who, from various causes, may not know it.’ Somba means ‘a fish,’ and mwale ‘a girl’; piri in Nyanja is ‘a mountain,’ though I have been unable to discover its significance as a Yao word. Thus, if Mwepeta, of the Somba clan, marries Ndiagani, of the Mwale, their children will be Mwale, and none of them can marry a Mwale. Their nearest relation and natural guardian will be their mother’s brother, who (if the grandfather is dead) will be head of the family. But his children will be no relatives of theirs, as they belong to their mother’s clan, and she (by the rule) cannot be a Mwale. Any of Mwepeta’s sons or daughters will therefore be free to marry any of these cousins; but they could not marry the children of Ndiagani’s sisters, who would be Mwale.

Some tribes of Anyanja east of the Lake have, in addition to this, a system of agnatic descent, through the father, called chilawa. This may be borrowed from the Zulus (who always count descent in this way, though the importance assigned to the maternal uncle is probably a survival of a former state of things), and the more southern tribes call it ‘the Angoni system.’ These last do not appear to have surnames; but those who recognise chilawa do; these names descend in the male line, and show at once to what family a man belongs on his father’s side. ‘Although a person’s surname is not generally known to those who are not his near relations or intimate acquaintances, because, so to speak, he does not make personal use of it, and is not called by it, yet every one knows his own surname, and is ready to give it at once, if asked for it.’ The late Bishop Maples, who put the above facts on record, was of opinion that, in spite of the close relationship existing between the sister’s son and the mother’s brother, the father is really the head of the Nyanja family, and arrived at the conclusion that a distinction must be made between ‘kin’ and ‘blood’: ‘the mother preserves to her offspring the tie of kinship, the father that of blood.’

The Yao chief, Kapeni, belonged to the Abanda clan, and was succeeded on his death, not by any of his sons (who, of course, were not Abanda), but by the son of his sister, born of the same mother. Had any younger sons of his mother survived, they would have had the preference; but half-brothers or sisters (children of the same father, but not of the same mother), are not counted as relatives—except that they cannot marry. According to the Yao system of descent, a man should be able to marry his father’s sisters, but this is seldom done, and is, in fact, considered very wrong; but he may marry their daughters. Where chilawa prevails, however, these too are forbidden—they are really reckoned as sisters.

Native terms of relationship are often very puzzling. Mbale is a word which may be applied to a brother, sister, cousin, or relative of almost any sort—sometimes even to a friend. There is no word for ‘sister’ or ‘brother’; but there are words meaning ‘elder brother (or sister)’ and ‘younger brother (or sister)’; and these are never used apart from their possessive pronouns. There is a word which means ‘sister’ when used by a brother, and ‘brother’ when used by a sister, but is never applied to one of the same sex as the speaker. A man will call all his father’s brothers ‘father,’ and all his mother’s sisters ‘mother’; and the term ‘grandparents’ may include all the great-uncles and great-aunts.

Mr. Duff Macdonald well shows the process by which a family may grow into a small state. A man wishing to found a new village asks permission of his chief—which in most cases is readily granted—and moves out into the bush with his wives and children. Temporary shelters are built, and then the man cuts down the trees, while his wives hoe up the ground for gardens; and, when these are ready, and planted, more permanent dwellings are erected. If there are daughters old enough to marry, the village is soon enlarged by the sons-in-law who come and build their huts there. The new chief may be accompanied by his younger brothers, or by friends who call themselves by that name, and place themselves under his authority. As the new settlement grows in power and importance, it will be joined by others, and may grow wealthy by trading.

In general, the Bantu have everywhere much the same system of government: the same features can nearly always be traced, even when modified by local circumstances. The Anyanja, when they first became known to Europeans, lived in small villages (as they do now), each under the control of its own head-man. A district, containing a large number of villages, was ruled by a sub-chief: such were Chinsunzi and Kankomba, in the Shiré Highlands, in 1861; and over the whole country was the Paramount Chief, or Rundo (Lundu), who at the same period was Mankokwe.[31] Mankokwe’s dominions appear to have extended from Lake Chilwa to the Shiré, and down the latter river as far as the Ruo; below the Ruo was another paramount chief, Tingani. Above the confluence of the Shiré and the Zambezi, between Kebrabasa and Zumbo, were two other independent Nyanja chiefs, Sandia and Mpende. All these chiefs seem at one time to have been ‘united under the government of their great chief, Undi, whose empire extended from Lake Shirwa to the River Loangwa; 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.’[32] This process has been repeated over and over again in the history of Africa. The Anyanja, being an agricultural (and on the whole a peaceable) people, kept up no national life outside their little village communities, but tended more and more to what German historians call Particularism. Consequently, they were unable to withstand the shock of an invasion; and their organisation, such as it was, went to pieces before the onslaught of Yaos, Makololo, and Angoni.

Women chiefs are mentioned several times by Livingstone as ruling in various parts of this region: Chikandakadzi, near Morambala (her position with regard to Tingani is not stated); Nyango, who seems to have ranked as Rundo in part of the Upper Shiré Valley, and Mamburuma, near Zumbo on the Zambezi; also Manenko and Nyamosana in the Lunda country. More recently, we find Nalolo, a sister of Liwanika, occupying the position of a chief in the Barotse country. The present Kazembe appears to be a woman. Sebituane, the Makololo chief, appointed his daughter as his successor, ‘probably,’ says Livingstone, ‘in imitation of some of the negro tribes with whom he had come into contact.’ She, however, soon resigned what proved a distasteful position; for her father, unwilling that she should transfer her power to a husband, directed her not to marry, but to contract any number of temporary alliances. It may be, however, that this feature of the situation was due, not so much to Sebituane’s Bechuana ideas of the husband necessarily being ‘the woman’s lord,’ as to some lingering Rotse and Lunda traditions of polyandry; and a writer in the Livingstonia Missionary Magazine characterises the present Kazembe as ‘a thoroughly bad woman—a woman of Samaria over again,’ which may be due to a misunderstanding of a very peculiar institution.

It is impossible not to connect these scattered indications with those afforded by the Yao system of kinship, and marriage customs, as to the state of things in an earlier period of which we have no record.

The Yao tribal organisation is in itself much the same as that of the Anyanja, but it was more closely knit, owing to the exigencies of war; and the relations of the conquerors to the conquered tribes must be distinguished from those which obtained among themselves. But it must be remembered that the Yaos were not an aggressive tribe, organised for conquest, under a chief like Tshaka or Mziligazi. In their own country—between Lake Chilwa and the Upper Rovuma—they seem to have been both a pastoral and an industrial people. ‘Yao-land proper,’ says Archdeacon Johnson, ‘had plenty of smelting-furnaces, cattle, and peas and beans, plenty for man and beast.’ They cultivated ‘down both sides of the Lujenda, till the valleys were full of Indian corn, and settlement extended its fields to those of the next settlement.’ The Machinga, who occupied this country, were dislodged by the Alolo (Makua) from the south-east, who themselves expelled from the north by the (Zulu) Magwangwara, drove them into the country of the Mangoche, forcing the latter into the Shiré Highlands. This was the so-called invasion of 1861.

There are five branches of the Yao nation: the Makale, near the sources of the Rovuma; the Namataka (or Mwembe people), on the hills west of the Lujenda; the Masaninga, Mangoche, and Machinga. The last three were the tribes who entered the Shiré Highlands. Their chiefs seem to have been quite independent of one another; Kapeni of Sochi was perhaps the most powerful.

The chieftainship is hereditary, and passes, as already stated, to the deceased’s younger brothers in succession, or, failing those, to the eldest son of his sister. The new chief takes, at the same time, his predecessor’s official name, so that there is always a Kapeni, or Malemya, or Mponda, as the case may be. The Angoni chiefs, however, observe the Zulu rule of inheritance, and are succeeded by the eldest son of the principal (or ‘official’) wife, who is the one married after accession—earlier ones do not count.

But there are some chiefs who have not succeeded to their position by right of birth, but attained it by superior cleverness and energy. Such a man may even be a slave, as was said to have been the case with Chibisa, who, in the early sixties, had much more real power than his neighbour Mankokwe, the Rundo of the Shiré Highlands. This man began by representing himself as possessed by the spirit of Chibisa, a deceased prophetess of note among the Nyungwe tribe, near Tete, whose name he assumed. The Nyungwe believed him, and he gradually obtained a complete ascendency over their chief, Kapichi, finally inducing part of the latter’s people to secede with him and settle at the foot of the Murchison Cataracts. His history may be read in the Rev. H. Rowley’s Story of the Universities’ Mission, where it is related how, at last, he fell in battle, fighting Terere, though without mention of the sand-bullet which killed him—the only thing against which he had no charm.

The unexpected rise of a man like this has often been the agency in breaking up Bantu ‘empires’ like that of Undi. But the new power is seldom permanent, as it does not often happen that such parvenu chiefs leave behind them successors of equal ability; while, having no backing but their own immediate followers, they lack that support of custom and tradition which in normal times will keep a mere average ruler in his place, so long as he does not forfeit it by any act of his own.

The customary order of succession is sometimes set aside, not so much by the tribe collectively (though it, too, being represented by the head-men, has a share in deciding the question), as by the household of the late chief. As both wives and slaves have a personal interest in the appointment of the successor, it is but just that they should have a chance to express their objections, if any. When Malemya of Zomba died, in 1878, his slaves, and many of his head-men, disliked the obvious heir, his younger brother Kumtaja, while the widows openly preferred a nephew, Kasabola. The head-men announced that, if Kumtaja were appointed, the people of the chief’s village would all leave and go to live elsewhere. Kasabola, accordingly, was installed, and took the name of Malemya, while Kumtaja left, taking with him such head-men as would go, and founded a new village not far off. Malemya, finding him an inconvenient neighbour, called in the Angoni, who came and raided Kumtaja’s village in August 1884. He fled first to Lake Chilwa, and then to the Upper Shiré, where he died some years ago.

When the new chief is appointed, some little time is allowed to pass before he is formally inducted. The day is then fixed for him to assume his official title (literally, ‘to enter the name’), after which his old name is never heard again. He is lectured on his duties to his people—which are held to consist chiefly in exercising hospitality, and not beating them too much; and, if he is a Yao of certain families, he is invested with the lisanda, a white head-band with hanging ends. Some Yao chiefs are not entitled to wear the lisanda; while, on the other hand, the right is enjoyed by some minor head-men who belong to the privileged families. It is henceforth worn on all solemn occasions—and sometimes at beer-drinkings—and the chief’s first appearance in it is hailed with songs of rejoicing. The proceedings, as might be expected, end with feasting.

On the Lake a special oblong house, with one side open, is built for the chief’s investiture. The insignia of royalty are here, a red blanket, and a red fez, called chisoti cha zindi—both probably imported.

The chief’s powers are not despotic;[33] he is not supposed to act without consulting his head-men, who represent the general views of the tribe; and he seldom disregards their opinion to any serious extent. Should he persist in doing so, his career would either come to a sudden and violent end, or his people would leave him to seek some more congenial ruler, and he would find himself lord of deserted villages. This is a recognised and constitutional remedy for grievances, and no chief refuses an asylum to such refugees; indeed, it is to his interest to welcome them. Fugitive slaves, on the other hand, are often returned to their masters.

The village head-man settles all local matters, usually with the assistance of the elders or heads of families, who are called his ‘younger brothers.’ He consults them before engaging in war, or undertaking any public work, such as constructing a stockade round the village; but he cannot summon them to work on his own private account, nor exact tribute from them. He settles any disputes among them, but if they are not satisfied with his decision, they can appeal to a higher head-man, or sub-chief, or to the chief himself.

Graver matters are reported by the head-man to the sub-chief, and by him, if necessary, to the chief. The latter holds the head-man responsible for any wrong-doing of his people which may come to his ears, just as the chief in his turn will be held responsible for any aggression of his head-men against outsiders. So far is this principle carried that, when a man has been injured by an inhabitant of a certain village, he and his friends are quite satisfied if they can catch any other man belonging to the same village, whom they will either put to death or hold to ransom till reparation is made.

The mlandu and the ordeal are the two great judicial institutions of Bantu Africa. With the ordeal we have partly dealt elsewhere, but there will be a little more to say about it presently.

Mlandu is a word which may be variously rendered as ‘lawsuit,’ ‘complaint,’ ‘discussion,’ ‘crime,’ and otherwise, according to the context. It is the same thing known as a ‘palaver’ in West Africa, and an indaba by the Zulus. Civil cases are thus settled. The head-man and his ‘younger brothers’ take their seats in the bwalo, and, as a rule, the whole village is assembled, the men sitting on one side, and the women—a little apart—on the other. The accuser speaks first, then the accused, and the various members of the council give their opinions in turn. The speeches are often long and eloquent, and the case may extend over days or even weeks before the head-man gives his decision, or, as the natives say, ‘cuts the case.’ If no decision is come to, or if either party wishes to appeal, the case is transferred to a higher court, and ‘the mlandu spoken’ before the sub-chief or the chief. An important case of this sort is sometimes attended by hundreds of people. The successful party in the suit makes the judge a present out of the damages. Matrimonial cases are settled before a court of this kind—if, for instance, a wife feels herself aggrieved and returns to her relatives. She is represented before the court by her ‘surety.’ The husband may also bring an action for divorce in this way.

Criminal charges, too, in the first instance, are brought before the chief’s or head-man’s court. A man caught stealing may, by native law, be killed, and his death entails no prosecution. He may be caught alive, and would then be put into a slave-stick for safe-keeping, till ransomed by his friends; and killed, or kept as a slave, if no ransom were forthcoming.

When a theft has been committed, without suspicion falling on any particular person, the diviner or the mabisalila is consulted, and the person pointed out by him or her accused before the court. The prosecutors demand restitution of the stolen goods; the defendant pleads not guilty, and offers to drink mwavi to prove it. His friends, if they believe him innocent, will demand the ordeal on his behalf; if they have misgivings, they will be afraid to run the risk, convinced, as they are, that the guilty party invariably dies, and knowing that, in such a case, they will have to pay the full value of whatever was stolen. If guilty, a man will probably confess rather than risk the ordeal—he, or his relations, will have to make restitution and pay a fine besides, the head-man of his village being held responsible. These payments also have to be made for him, if his confidence in the judgment of the ordeal turns out to have been misplaced—his death, in the native view, conclusively proving his guilt. If, on the other hand, he survives, the accusers have to pay over a fine to him, and the sorcerer is assumed to have been mistaken. Some try a second sorcerer, but he must not point out the man just acquitted, as no man can be made to drink mwavi twice on the same charge.

Theft, if brought into court at all, is always punished by a fine; but sometimes the thief is handed over as a slave to the injured party. Other ordeals are sometimes used besides the mwavi—plunging the hand into hot water, or touching red-hot iron—but the principle is the same: injury to the hand proves guilt. It will be noticed that the head-man is held responsible for thefts committed by his villagers, in accordance with the principle already stated. (He may, in fact, be the receiver of the stolen goods.) If he refuses to take the matter up when it is brought to his notice, war may be the result.

A murderer, if caught red-handed, may be killed by the friends of his victim; or they may put him in a slave-stick till slaves have been paid over for his ransom. Some of these are sometimes sacrificed to the manes of the victim. If the actual slayer cannot be caught, a man from the same village may be captured and held to ransom in the same way. In some cases, no distinction is made between accidental homicide and murder; sometimes a gun which has been the cause of an accident is seized instead of the owner, and held till he pays several slaves for it. Sometimes, however, the view is taken that the man or his gun may have been bewitched, and steps are taken to find out and punish the person who has done this. The man who kills his own slave, or even his younger brother, or other ward, is not amenable to justice, but—unless he can protect himself by a charm—he is afraid of the mysterious chirope which overtakes those who shed blood within the tribe. The chief, to whom he goes if he has committed such a murder, procures the charm for him from his own medicine-man, and uses it himself as well, ‘because of the blood that has been shed in his land.’

Adultery is theoretically a capital crime with most Bantu tribes; that is, the man may be (and frequently is) shot or speared by the husband; the wife is frequently let off with a warning the first time, but for a second offence either killed or divorced and sent back to her relatives, who in such a case must return whatever present was made at the marriage. Sometimes she drinks mwavi, and is, of course, accounted guilty if she dies. But in practice, the matter is often arranged by paying damages, or the guilty man may be sold into slavery. Still there can be no question that (where they have not been corrupted by outside influences, or their customs and institutions disorganised by war, etc.) they look on it as a very serious affair.

Slave wives are more summarily dealt with, and are often either killed or sold. I have seen one ‘Angoni’ woman who had had her nose and ears cut off, but seemed to be living on in her husband’s (or master’s) family, as before,—though evidently doing most of the heavy work. But such cases are not common, except perhaps among the coast Arabs, who have large slave harems and rule them by terror.

From what has already been said, it will be seen that in ordinary procedure formal executions are not common; if the criminal has not been killed red-handed, or if he does not undergo the ordeal, the trial usually ends in a fine, or in his being handed over as a slave to his accusers. But where the chief orders a man to be executed, he is usually stabbed or has his throat cut. Sometimes a wizard is shot at once on being detected by the Mabisalila, and sometimes, when convicted by the ordeal, the crowd fall upon him and lynch him without waiting for the poison to do its work: an outbreak of panic ferocity which has its parallel, in a more deliberate form, in the records of English and Scottish witch-trials.

Witches were in former times sometimes burned alive by the Yaos; but Mr. Macdonald says that in his time this was only done if they refused the mwavi test, which was not likely to happen. It was done also by the Anyanja at Likoma, and the stake where these executions took place stood on the site of the present Cathedral. But by far the greater number of cases were left to be decided by the issue of the poison.

At one time, the Yaos used to torture the person pointed out by the witch-detective by squeezing his head between two pieces of wood, till he pointed out where the horns were buried; but in later times the Mabisalila found the horns (as already described) as well as naming the witch. But I do not think that this, or judicial torture to extort confession of ordinary crime, is common.

An act of sacrilege held to be penal is when a free man sets fire to grass or reeds near a lake supposed to be the abode of a tutelary spirit, in which case he would be thrown into the lake. This perhaps would be rather a sacrifice than an execution.

Imprisonment as a punishment is scarcely known, and indeed scarcely possible, though, as has been said, men are sometimes detained in the slave-stick till ransomed or otherwise disposed of. It is a small log with a fork at one end, long enough for the other end to rest on the ground when a man’s neck is inserted into the fork and secured with an iron pin. Slaves are confined in these sticks on the march (as in the familiar picture in Livingstone’s Zambezi Expedition), or when they are likely to run away,—or sometimes as a punishment. Debtors, adulterers, and thieves may be put in the slave-stick till their debts or fines are paid up. Slaves, when thus confined, sometimes have the other end of the stick fastened up to a tree, so that they can do their usual work of pounding corn, or the like. There is also a form of stocks called in Yao ugwalata, consisting of a hole in the verandah-part of a hut, through which a man’s arm or leg is passed, and secured so that he cannot draw it back. Slaves are sometimes severely beaten.

The Makololo chiefs approach more nearly the idea of an irresponsible despot than any others in this part of Africa; but this is owing to a special set of circumstances, and they cannot be taken as typical. It is the more necessary to bear this in mind, because the chapter of horrors which Mr. Macdonald gives under the heading, ‘A Slave Government,’ may seem to contradict some of the statements we have made. These chiefs, then, were placed in a very exceptional position. They were a small minority of warriors in the midst of an unwarlike population whom they regarded with contempt, but who were strong enough to make them think they must secure their position by ruthless severity. Some of them had actually been slaves themselves, though the only Makololo among them, Ramakukane, was of good family. Cruelty is not a Makololo trait, though Sebituane and Sekeletu could act with firmness and even harshness when the occasion seemed to demand it. But some unusually barbarous punishments seem to have been used in the Barotse valley where the Makololo had settled, and to which some of these chiefs belonged by birth. They may have brought some of these customs with them; and their becoming possessed of virtually unlimited power, while at the same time their footing was but a precarious one, did the rest. None of them was subject to the others; they were far enough apart to be quite independent; but they acted together in face of a common enemy. It is a pleasing fiction that their despotism was on the whole of a benevolent character, and voluntarily submitted to by the Mang’anja, who welcomed them as protectors against the Yaos; but this illusion is dispelled by a closer acquaintance with the facts. Even before the departure of the Livingstone expedition, they had begun to tyrannise over the Shiré population; but it was only after that event that their power became fully established. Several of them were undoubtedly men of fine qualities; but a careful examination of their careers before and after (roughly speaking) 1861, leads to the conclusion that some at least must have degenerated sadly.

They took advantage of the famine of 1862-3 to enslave the Mang’anja, and ‘their power increased every day till they could claim all on the Lower Shiré for their subjects.’ They had no council of head-men, and though each village had a head-man, he was not a responsible local ruler, but a mere taskmaster appointed by the chief. Forced labour and oppressive tribute were exacted. No woman had a ‘surety,’ as with the Yaos, but the chief disposed at will of his subjects’ daughters—assigned them to husbands of his own choosing, or took them into his harem, as he felt disposed. Wholesale mwavi-drinkings took place, at which no one was allowed to refuse the cup; and judicial torture was frequent.

The ordinary tribute paid to chiefs varies in different tribes, but is not in general excessive. In some parts, when an elephant is killed, the chief claims ‘the ground tusk’—i.e. the one which touches the ground when it falls; elsewhere this is not insisted on. Presents are usually expected from strangers passing through the country, but they get something in return; and a chief (though in practice he may fall short of the ideal) is always supposed to be generous. Yao local head-men send their chief a percentage of the ivory when they kill elephants, and (if they live near enough) a haunch of any large animal (such as an eland) which they may shoot. It is also the custom for them to invite him to a beer-drinking at least once in the year. Sometimes the chief sends for the village head-men, or orders them to find men, to do some work for him at his village—hoeing, or building huts. This was frequently done by the Angoni chiefs, who also (as has been said before) made periodical levies of their subjects’ sons to herd their cattle, and of their daughters for the harem.

There is no regular priestly class. The professional diviners and medicine-men to a certain extent occupy the same position, and a Yao chief sometimes appoints a ‘sacrificer,’ whose duties are of a somewhat miscellaneous character. Besides taking the omens before a battle, he has to carry the banner and lead the army—the chief himself, like David in later life, not going into action. (He stays behind to ‘supply powder and deal with deserters.’) The ‘sacrificer’ tastes the beer offered to the chief’s guests, to show that it is not poisoned, and beats one of the drums at witch-dances, where he represents the chief, if the latter is unable to be present. Whether he is the same as the chief’s medicine-man is not clear.

But the strictly religious functions of a priest, as we have seen, are performed by the chief on behalf of his tribe, by the head-man for the village, by the father for the family, and (in private matters) by the individual for himself.

We have seen how the chief presides over, or at least takes part in, public prayers for rain; but the Yaos and Anyanja do not at present seem to have anything corresponding to the ‘feast of first-fruits’ among the southern Bantu, where the chief ceremonially ‘tastes’ the first of the new crops before the people are allowed to gather them. There are traces of such a rite among the Yaos, and I am inclined to think that the Angoni keep up something of the kind, or did a few years back, because I was informed at one of the Ntumbi kraals, about the beginning of the harvest season, that the father of the family was away at Chekusi’s, ‘eating maize,’—an expression of which I did not at the time grasp the probable bearing. The Zulus keep the ukutshwama with great solemnity, and the Angoni would have brought the custom with them from the south, though I do not know how they observe it in detail.

The chief is supposed to be the owner of all the land, but in strictness he cannot alienate it without the consent of the tribe. It seems, however, as if, apart from European or Arab influence, the idea of permanent property in land scarcely existed. No one is supposed to own land except so long as he actually cultivates it; and, owing to the method of agriculture, it is abandoned every few years. Any member of the tribe can make a fresh garden where he likes, provided no one else has bespoken the ground; but a stranger would require the chief’s permission to settle. The chief’s land is well defined, and has recognised boundaries, but there seem to be no definite limits to the territory occupied by a tribe.

The Mang’anja used to recognise certain animals as nyama ya lundu, ‘king’s meat,’ not allowed to be eaten by the people in general. Among these were the nkaka, or scaly ant-eater, whereof the Rev. D. C. Scott was on one occasion invited to partake by Ramakukane, and a certain kind of large frog or toad called tesi, said to be very delicate eating.

It remains to speak of slavery, which has always been, in varying proportions, a feature of Bantu society. The outside slave trade does not so much concern us here, as (in this part of Africa, at any rate) it is entirely an exotic thing, introduced and fostered by the Portuguese on one side and the Arabs on the other. And though this has been largely, if not wholly, done away with (it is certain that there was some smuggling going on, twelve years ago), yet domestic slavery, which is very difficult for governments to interfere with, still continues in fact, if not in name, and will only die out gradually. The proportion of slaves to free people is probably not large—unless all the Anyanja subject to the Angoni are counted as slaves—which is not, strictly speaking, correct; they are rather in the position of serfs or villeins.

Slavery may be a matter of birth; the children of slaves, or of a slave mother and free father, are slaves also. Some slaves are persons taken prisoners in war, or sold (probably to pay a debt) by father, grandfather, or elder brother. Others may have been condemned to slavery as criminals, or bewitchers, or possessed of ‘the evil eye,’ and these are sold to some one at a distance—to get rid of them. Or they may be seized on account of a debt they cannot pay; or, lastly, they may voluntarily become slaves, in time of famine, in order to get food.

The owner has the power of life and death over his slaves, but subject to the moral restraint already mentioned. Slaves may be beaten—sometimes cruelly—or confined in gori-sticks, at the will of their masters, but as a rule they are kindly treated, and, in fact, to an outsider, are often indistinguishable from the family. In speaking of or to them, the master says mwana (‘child’), or mnyamata (‘boy’), rather than kapolo (‘slave’). Some of the families at Nziza and Ntumbi had Yao slaves who must have been captured in the raids across the Shiré a few years before, and who seemed quite contented with their lot.

Slaves are employed about the usual work of a house and garden: the women are generally the master’s junior wives, and share the household labours among them; the men sometimes relieve them of part of the heavy work, such as pounding corn, or fetching wood and water, but are also engaged in more strictly masculine pursuits. They are supplied with guns and go out hunting; they spin, weave, sew, make baskets, etc.; and sometimes they are sent to carry loads for a trading party, or accompany their master to war. A man may even send a confidential slave to the coast to trade on his account. A chief often gives considerable authority to his principal slave, who may attain a position of great importance, and cases are not unknown where such a slave has become a chief.

People kidnapped from another tribe may be, and sometimes are, ransomed by their friends. After a fight it is common to send word that such and such prisoners have been taken, so that a ransom may be sent. It does not seem to be possible, in practice, for a slave to redeem himself; but once free, there are no special disabilities attaching to his position. A slave who runs away places himself under the protection of another master, if he can find one to shelter him; but if he can escape being caught, he may achieve freedom for himself, as, apparently, Chibisa did. But in general a masterless slave does not find the highroad a safe place, and hastens to put himself under some one’s protection.

Slaves are not distinguished by any special mark, badge, or dress. They may possess property (such as cloth, guns, and ivory), as their owner frequently allows them to keep part of what they earn. They may even, in some cases, own other slaves. The master gives the slave a wife—usually a slave woman, but occasionally he may let him marry his daughter. The case of a free woman marrying a slave husband is, however, rare; and he is likely to be superseded at any time.

On the death of a slave-owner, such of his slaves as are not chosen to accompany him (and this, as we have seen, is by no means universal) pass into the possession of his heir. If a slave dies possessed of property, it all goes to his master.

The Machinga, at Mponda’s on the Upper Shiré, made a raid on Ntumbi and Nziza, in May 1894, for the purpose of capturing women and children, but the men of the place frustrated this attempt, and took two prisoners, who were sent up to Chekusi’s, but released (I believe) after their guns had been taken from them. There is reason to believe that they had been more successful on previous occasions, not so very long before, and that the women in question had been smuggled across the Shiré, and, as there was no safe opportunity of sending them down to the coast, bought by various Yaos in the Shiré Highlands, who set them to work in their gardens, and, if inquiry was made, passed them off as their wives. In Livingstone’s time even the Anyanja, who have themselves suffered so much from the slave-trade, at times kidnapped people and sold them to the Portuguese. There is a special word for this (fwamba), and though practised it seems to have been always more or less reprobated—or at any rate felt to be wrong.

CHAPTER XII
TRADITIONS AND HISTORY

Probable origin of the Yaos. The Makalanga. Undi. Migrations of the Angoni. The Tambuka.

The Yaos believe themselves to be descended from the same stock as the Anyanja, Anguru, and Awisa, while they count the Angoni as a different race, and do not profess to know whence they came. These four tribes, therefore, must have kept together till a much later period than that at which the Zulus separated from the main stock of the Bantu. The Yaos imagined the tribes with whom they acknowledged kinship to have started with them from Kapirimtiya, and gone in different directions.

The story of how Mtanga improved the Yao country in the beginning by moulding it into hills and valleys, seems to bear out the opinion that the mountainous region of Unangu was the early home of the race; but how long they lived there, before the raids of the Magwangwara sent them forth on their wanderings, is hard to say. Dr. M’Call Theal says: ‘There is not a single tribe in South Africa to-day that bears the same title, has the same relative power, and occupies the same ground as its ancestors three hundred years ago. The people we call Mashona are indeed descended from the Makalanga of the early Portuguese days, and they preserve their old name and part of their old country; but the contrast ... is striking.’

The more one studies the wars and migrations of the Bantu tribes, the more one is reminded of the state of things in our own island between (roughly speaking) 500 and 1000 A.D. We are apt to forget the length of time over which this process extended, and that though the Bantu, so far as we can tell, began it later, there seems no valid reason why it should not, in their case, have a similar termination. However, as we have to do with facts, not speculations, it seems futile to discuss a point which only posterity will have an opportunity of deciding.

The Makalanga speak much the same language as the various tribes comprehended under the general name of Anyanja, and may, at one time, have formed a homogeneous body with them. The kingdom of the Makalanga, as described by the Portuguese writers, would almost seem to have been something more than an ordinary African state; but their way of describing everything, so to speak, in terms of Europe, is somewhat misleading. Probably it was not unlike the ‘empire’ of Undi at a later date and fell to pieces much in the same way. These decentralised agricultural tribes either fell victims to internal quarrels, or to aggressive action on the part of some warlike neighbour—or, very possibly, to both together.

It is not known when the Zulus moved southward into the territory they now occupy, and where they must have been settled for some generations before the beginning of the nineteenth century, as the graves of at least four kings (some say eight), of earlier date than that epoch, are still to be seen at Mahlabatini, in the valley of the White Umfolozi. In 1687 they, and tribes allied to them, seem to have been in peaceful occupation of Natal and Zululand, living so close together that migration on a large scale was impossible. Yet, about the same time, the Amaxosa, or ‘Cape Kafirs,’ who are very closely related to them, seem to have been pressing on to the south; and they reached the Great Fish River soon after the beginning of the eighteenth century. However this may be, the Zulu king Senzagakona had, about 1800, risen to a position of some importance, though still subject to Dingiswayo, chief of the Umtetwas in Natal. His son, Tshaka, succeeded in 1810, and, after Dingiswayo’s death, assumed a paramount position, his career resembling that of Napoleon, or rather (since he may be said to have consolidated, if not erected, a nation), Theodoric or Charlemagne. But what chiefly concerns us here is the northward migration of the Zulus which took place in his time. Umziligazi, one of his captains, quarrelled with him and fled, taking his clan with him. These are the people now known as the Matabele, having settled in the early thirties between the Limpopo and Zambezi.

Another chief, Manukosi, seceded about 1819, and invaded the country about Delagoa Bay, gradually subduing the Tonga tribes. This branch of the Zulus is called Gaza; their last king, Gungunyana (Manukosi’s grandson), was deposed by the Portuguese in 1896.

Angoni Warriors

The Angoni (Abanguni) were originally the tribe of Zwide, the son of Yanga. He, too, rebelled against Tshaka (about 1820), and was defeated; his people fled north—the only direction open to them—under Zwangendaba, and, according to a native account, came first into the Tonga country, where they fought with the people, and took many captives, then into the Basuto country (meaning probably the Bapedi of the Eastern Transvaal), where they did the same, and thence to the Karanga (Makalanga) country. Here they were overtaken by Ngaba, one of Tshaka’s captains, with whom they fought two battles, and then fled, crossing the Zambezi in 1825. The date is fixed by the tradition of an eclipse, known to have occurred in that year; and in the terror of that mysterious darkness, so inexplicable to the native mind, Zwangendaba’s son, Mombera, was prematurely born. This is the Mombera whose funeral was described in an earlier chapter. He was a man of great shrewdness and force of character, and remained to the last, in spite of some passing misunderstandings, a staunch friend to Dr. Laws and the Livingstonia missionaries. He refused to be a party to sending his own or his people’s children to school on the ground that they would soon become wiser than their parents, and so learn to despise them. If the missionaries liked to try their hand at teaching the grown men, they were welcome to do so; and Mombera, not content with this negative permission, took reading lessons himself, with praiseworthy assiduity. Unfortunately, he began too late in life, and though he mastered the alphabet quickly enough, he failed, in spite of all his efforts, to grasp the principle of combining letters into syllables. He would not, however, allow the blackboard used by his instructor (the Rev. J. A. Smith, now of Mlanje) to remain at his kraal, for fear of magic.

A curious tradition about the crossing of the Zambezi was given by the Ntumbi head-men, who said that, when the Angoni reached the river and found no canoes to take them over, their chief, Chetusa, struck the water with his staff, and it divided to let them pass. Then he struck it again, and it returned to its place. It is only fair to add, that this account was written down by one of the Blantyre teachers, and, if not unconsciously coloured by him, may possibly contain an echo of his own narratives. On the other hand, he had been but a short time in contact with them, and these older and more responsible men, while well up in the traditions of their own people, were less likely to have been impressed by ‘the stories of the white men.’

This account then goes on to state that they went north, and came ‘to Magomero,’ and fought two days with the Atonga, ‘who dwell there to this day’; and the Atonga ‘clasped their feet,’ i.e. submitted, and acknowledged them as chiefs. The name of Magomero is given by the Blantyre people to the Konde country at the north end of the Lake, as well as to the place of that name, near to Lake Chilwa. As the word seems to mean ‘the slopes,’ it may be of frequent occurrence. They then passed round the north end of the Lake, and turned south again. Harry Kambwiri’s written account says nothing of this, but it is evidently to be understood, as the next fact mentioned is that they crossed the Rovuma. Crossing the Lichilingo, and another stream called the Luli, they came to Mwalija’s, where there were cattle, and intended to push on thence to the Lujenda, but ‘found a desert without water,’—so they returned, lifted Mwalija’s cattle, and struck off south-westward, wishing to return whence they came. They reached the Shiré at Matope (the regular crossing-place, a few miles north of the Cataracts), and wished to settle there; but one Sosola cheated them into going on by showing them a basket of cow-dung, and saying that cattle had passed by, but were now in the Chipeta country. The raiders’ instinct at once rose to the bait, and they crossed to Mponda’s, and went on north-westward to Mount Chirobwe. Finally, they settled near Domwe Mountain, somewhat to the north of it, and while there fought with Mpezeni, son of Zwangendaba, and defeated him. ‘Mpezeni’s people ran away,’ and this must have been when they settled in the old Undi country (near the present Fort Jameson), where Mpezeni died a few years ago.

It is interesting to note that, in 1903, Madzimavi, a son of Mpezeni’s, but not the one chosen as his successor, applied to the Native Commissioner for permission to take the name of Zwangendaba (Sungandawa, as spelt in the official document), on the ground that his grandfather’s spirit had appeared to him in a dream, and ordered him to do so. His request was refused, after discussion with the principal chiefs, a majority of whom seemed to be of the opinion that such a step on Madzimavi’s part was only preliminary to declaring himself independent, if not ousting his brother altogether.

Champiti, the Ntumbi head-man, who seemed to be between forty and fifty years of age, a tall, thin man, of a type common both among the Mashona of the south and the Wahima of Uganda, said that his father came from the south and crossed the Zambezi, with many of his people. They passed by the district where he was then living, ‘but none of them died by the way,’ and went on to the north, and round the top of the Lake. This might very well be, even if Champiti’s father had been grown up in 1825—and he need not have been, as it seems to have been a wholesale migration of families. Or he might have been impressed as a mat-carrier for the army; every Zulu warrior was attended by several of these boys, usually under ten years old. Champiti himself was born somewhere on the northward march. He mentioned passing through a country called Bena, up in the north, where the people ‘had no clothes and howled like dogs’; they had cattle there with long horns—the length of the walking-stick he carried (about four feet). The Wabena, at the present day, live in German East Africa, some sixty or seventy miles to the north of Lake Nyasa, though in accordance with Dr. Theal’s principle, stated above, they may have been anywhere in the middle of last century. But the absence of clothes, and the possession of long-horned cattle—if not the howling like dogs—would equally well fit the Wankonde.

Coming south again, Champiti’s people lived at Matengo, wherever that may have been, till he was the age of a small boy whom he pointed out to me—say, at a rough guess, eleven or twelve. Pembereka and Kaboa, whom I have had occasion to mention more than once, accompanied the party when they left Matengo, after which they passed Zomba, Lake Chilwa, and Blantyre, and ‘crossed a big river with a great deal of sand in it’—evidently the Shiré at, or above, Lake Malombe. After this they seem to have settled pretty much where we found them.

The above is sufficient to show that the ‘Angoni’ are a very mixed multitude; there were probably no Zulus in this particular band; and we find in another account that Chiwere, one of the leading chiefs, was a Senga, who detached himself from the main body because his people, being regarded as a subject race, had been ‘treated badly’ by the Zulus. And, while those who crossed the Shiré from the east brought some new elements back with them, they left some of their own forces behind in the shape of those ‘Magwangwara,’ who have been thorns in the sides of Yaos and Anyanja ever since.

Other bands, under different names, penetrated still farther north, some of them even reaching Lake Victoria.

The date of the crossing referred to is fixed at 1867, or soon after, by the late Mr. E. D. Young, who, reaching Chibisa’s with the Livingstone Search Expedition, in August of that year, found that the ‘Mazitu’ were encamped on the hills at Magomero. They had taken the place formerly occupied by the Yaos in the estimation of the Anyanja, and the former foes united to oppose them. The Makololo, too, began to regard them as a serious danger, and expelled their old adversary, Mankokwe, from his position near Tyolo, lest he should make common cause with the Angoni. The latter were at this time occupying the left, or eastern, bank of the Shiré, and negotiating with the Anyanja to be ferried across, while the Machinga Yaos were in possession of the right bank, from the Cataracts to the Lake.

The Angoni are variously known as Mazitu, Mavitu (Maviti), and, in more northern regions, as Magwangwara, Wamachonde, and Ruga-Ruga.

From this time forward, Chekusi’s Angoni raided Yaos and Anyanja impartially for some years. The former fled to the hill-tops, the latter to islands in the Shiré. When the invaders retired, they came from their hiding-places and cultivated their gardens in the plains, but only to have their crops swept off by fresh raids, as soon as they were ripe, and (as we have previously mentioned) their women and children carried off as slaves beyond the river. These raids occurred with unfailing regularity, till the settlement of the Mission party at Blantyre in 1876. There was an alarm in July 1877, but the invasion did not take place, probably owing to the presence of the Europeans.

The last of these raids took place in 1884, but was brought to a peaceable conclusion. The Rev. D. C. Scott, accompanied by Mrs. Scott and Dr. Peden, visited Chekusi’s kraal and succeeded in coming to a friendly understanding with that chief; and thenceforth the only Angoni hosts to cross the river were gangs of porters, or of men seeking work on the plantations. Chekusi died subsequent to the proclamation of the British Protectorate in 1891; his son was executed by the British administration after the ‘rising’ of 1896; and Mandala, whose village, after the delimitation of 1901 was found to be in Portuguese territory, was taken prisoner and died on the march to Tete. Mpezeni’s son and successor is a minor, and Mombera has been succeeded by a chief who has but little real authority, so that the prestige of these Zulu clans is now a thing of the past.

We have already seen how the Makololo came to be settled on the Shiré.

The Tambuka, or Tumbuka, according to their own account, ‘came from the north,’ where they were one tribe, ruled over by one chief, named Chikulamayembe. This was in some indefinite time long ago, before the Angoni had come. When they separated, they were living on the Rukuru river, where it flows through a natural arch of rock. Here ‘they worshipped a hill called Chikangombe; there is there a hot spring which they worshipped also.’ They split up and went in different directions, living much as the Mang’anja of the Shiré Highlands did before they were displaced by invaders. ‘They lived separately. One said, “I am chief,” and another said so also. They did not build big villages, but small ones of a few huts, containing their slaves, wives, and others.’ When they elected a chief, they anointed him with lion’s fat. ‘Chikulamayembe’ seems to mean ‘giver of hoes,’ and this chief was so called ‘because they saw his kindness and bounty to the poor. When a person had no hoe, he came to the chief and asked one, and he got it.’ Hoes are used as money by some tribes—as by those of the Upper Congo, and formerly by the Baronga of Delagoa Bay.

Chikulamayembe’s people moved on from the Rukuru to the hill Zabula, which appears to have been regarded with superstitious awe. ‘The old people of the tribe thought this hill could give rain.’ Here another separation took place, and, soon after, they were attacked by the Angoni. ‘The Tambuka had many cattle and goats,’ says the native account, ‘but the Ngoni hearing that they had cattle came and fought with them. The Ngoni killed the Tambuka, took their cattle, and sent them to their chief Zwangendaba. Thus the Tambuka failed to withstand the Ngoni, through their living apart and being scattered.’ For a time the invaders carried all before them; then they met with a temporary check, being defeated by three Tambuka chiefs in succession. The last of these, Chigamuka, inflicted such a crushing blow on them that, ‘to-day, if a Tambuka reminds a Ngoni of Chigamuka, the latter will strike him, because the Ngoni died and were beaten there.’

They recovered, however, after a time, and resumed their career of conquest. ‘To-day,’ said Dr. Steele’s informant, in 1893, ‘they are the masters of the Tambuka, Tonga, Chewa, Bisa, and Senga. There is no chief of the Tambuka, but the Ngoni alone. The records of these wars and migrations are necessarily very imperfect. They serve, however, to explain the great mixture of types which attentive observation shows us in most tribes of the Bantu race. Probably, if we may judge by analogy from similar processes in the past, the ultimate result will be the building up of several distinct nationalities, each with a well-marked type of its own, and institutions modified by so much of European culture as they can receive and assimilate. But such speculation belongs to the future. Our business here is only with the present, and our attempt has been to give some notion of these people as they now are, or (in cases where they have been influenced by contact with Europeans) as they were until lately.

Note.—It appears that there were really two Zulu migrations, the second one led by Ngola, Chekusi’s predecessor. It was the latter who fought with Mpezeni’s people, as stated on [page 281], and Champiti’s account must probably be taken to refer to them. It seems that at one time they even reached the sea at Mozambique.