There is a certain system of abstinence from different kinds of food which is probably connected originally with totemism; but either no one has succeeded in getting at the matter except in a very fragmentary way, or else the natives of the present day have forgotten the reasons for the practice, and it only survives in a number of apparently casual and isolated usages. Certain people will not eat some particular kind of meat, either ‘because it makes one ill, or because of some religious scruple or vow, or because one’s mother has for no apparent reason decreed in one’s infancy that a certain food is to be tabu to one.’ It might be more correct to reduce these three alternative reasons to one, because, as a matter of fact, people who have been forbidden some food in their infancy usually become ill if they eat it; and it is no stretch of language to say that they are transgressing ‘a religious scruple’ in doing so. Further inquiry is needed before we can decide whether or not there is a reason behind these prohibitions; quite possibly, as already stated, the people have forgotten that there ever was one, and have no notion of any relationship supposed to exist between them and the forbidden animal or plant, such as the Bechwana clans recognise in the case of the lion, the crocodile, etc. The Rev. D. C. Scott says: ‘Each tribe or family has its particular abstinence from certain foods.’ The Achikunda, so my boatmen told me on the Zambezi, don’t eat hippo; the Apodzo do, as might be expected, they being a tribe who get their living by hunting that animal. This really resolves itself into ‘Apodzo and not Apodzo,’ because the Achikunda are not really a tribe, but a mixed multitude of slaves brought into the country by the Portuguese; and a good many different tribes look on the hippopotamus as sacred. Some of the boys at Blantyre mission-school ‘did not eat hippo’—but on what exact tribal or family grounds, I never made out. The practical result was that some other food had to be provided for them, when one of the teachers arrived from the River with a supply of this meat sufficient for the whole school. The Machinga are looked down on by some other tribes because they eat fish, which the Angoni, e.g., never touch. Rats are forbidden to women, and to those who offer sacrifice; they are considered ‘uncanny,’ for very comprehensible reasons, though this does not prevent their being a very popular article of diet with those not so restricted. Doctors or others who have to treat a patient by scarifying, or, as the natives say, ‘cutting medicine in,’ must not eat elephant. ‘In other cases the individual himself objects to certain meats as being bad for him, specially producing heat and spots all over.... God, they say, made men with these necessities in them; people can’t make mistakes in what abstinence is essential for them.’ On the whole, the various regulations one can find look like scattered parts of a system no longer understood. Doctors, as on the Congo, prescribe abstinence from various things when their patients are recovering from illness. The animals most generally avoided are those which we should class as unclean feeders, such as crocodiles, hyenas, vultures, etc.; because they are afiti—feeding on the dead.
Folk-stories frequently refer to such prohibitions. Thus, in one, when a girl is married, her mother tells the bridegroom that she must never be asked to pound anything but castor-oil beans. His mother, determined to overcome this fancied laziness, insists on the young wife’s helping to pound the maize; she does so, and is immediately turned to water.
Various ‘dances on several occasions,’ which are important items in native life, ought, perhaps, to be mentioned in this place, since they undoubtedly are religious ceremonies; but they can be considered more fully in the course of the following chapters. The same may be said of the unyago or chinamwali ‘mysteries’; but one or two points in connection with the latter may be just touched on here. The zinyao dances held in the villages of the Anyanja on these occasions perhaps embody some tradition, though what it is, no one, so far as I know, has yet made out. Figures are traced by scattering flour on the smooth ground of the bwalo, representing animals, usually the leopard, the crocodile, and, strangely enough, the whale. What the word namgumi, which is thus translated in Dr. Scott’s dictionary, really means, or is derived from, it would be interesting to know—though reports of such an animal may have been received from the coast people. Never having seen the zinyao, as these figures are called, I can form no opinion as to what the namgumi is intended to represent. The word is common to Nyanja and Yao; perhaps adopted by the former from the latter, in which it means ‘a large fish, the picture of which is drawn on the ground by the head-instructor on the day of sending the boys back to their homes.’ But some light may be thrown on the matter by the fact that Mr. Lindsay (of the Limbi, Blantyre), passing through the bush where one of these ceremonies had been held, saw a huge clay model (he thought about forty feet long) of some creature which the English-speaking native with him told him was ‘a whale,’ but which was more like one of the extinct saurians of the Oolitic period. He was certain it was like no living creature he knew of. One observer describes circles filled with geometrical patterns traced on the ground, but makes no mention of the animals, except from hearsay. Besides the drawing of these figures, dances are performed by men got up as various animals. This is done by means of real heads carefully preserved and mounted on sticks, while the bodies are represented by calico stretched over wooden hoops. One such figure—say that of an elephant or buffalo—requires several men to move it, of course hidden by the draperies. Other performers wear masks of plaited grass, and are weird figures supposed to represent the spirits of the dead. These dances are held by moonlight; and the explanation generally given is that they are intended to frighten and impress the young people who have that day come of age. What ideas are embodied may be a matter of conjecture, but, for the present at least, nothing certain can be said on the subject.
Note.—Since the above chapter was written, I have learned from a correspondent in Nyasaland that there are secret societies among the Yaos, which practise cannibalism, and that the practice has been spreading of late years. In the absence of further particulars, it is impossible to determine how much of this was ceremonial in origin and how much due to a depraved taste in certain individuals which may have originated in a time of famine. See also Sir H. H. Johnston, British Central Africa, pp. 446, 447.
CHAPTER V
NATIVE LIFE—I. CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH
Villages. Huts. Birth. Naming. Dress. Childhood’s rights. Games. Plastic art-work. Daily life.
I cannot begin this chapter better than by describing one of the villages I know best—those of the Anyanja in the Upper Shiré district.
This district lies between the Kirk Mountains on the west and the Zomba range on the east, and the part I am thinking of is a fertile plain, slightly undulating in parts and crossed by two good-sized streams, which slopes down from the western mountains to the river. As you look from the hill on which our house stood, you see a wide level—green during the rains, yellow when the grass is dry, with patches of bush here and there and one grove of great trees plainly in sight—the nkalango, where the dead are buried. Here and there, dotted about the plain, are little groups of huts, several of which, taken together, may be held to constitute a village. Each group, as a rule, contains one family (i.e. husband and wife or wives with their children), and is enclosed in a stout fence of grass and reeds, woven as closely as matting, and tall enough to keep any ordinary wild beast from leaping over. There is a door to this enclosure, but, not being on hinges, it is usually invisible in the daytime, as the people take it down, and, as often as not, lay it on some short posts fixed in the ground, and use it as a table, on which they can spread out grain or other things to dry. At night the door is fastened by cross-bars, and perhaps thorn-bushes are stuck in at the sides to give additional security.
Inside the enclosure stand the round huts, with their conical thatched roofs—three, four, or more, according to the number of the family. Between them are the corn-bins, called nkokwe—in a small enclosure only one, or perhaps two. In the picture, which is that of a Yao village near Domasi, several of these nkokwe are to be seen—one with the top off—but they do not look as neat as one often sees them. They are like huge round baskets, woven of split bamboo, seven or eight feet high, without top or bottom, raised from the ground on a low platform roughly floored with small logs, and covered with a conical roof like those of the huts, but not fastened down, so that it can be tilted up by means of a stick, or taken off altogether when corn is wanted. They are reached by a primitive ladder made of two poles, and cross-pieces lashed between them with bark.