As soon as children are able to eat solid food, they fare much the same as their elders, though there are two or three kinds of sweet, thick gruel, besides that already mentioned, which are made specially for the younger ones, and also sometimes for sick people. It is sweetened—not with sugar, but with malt (that is, sprouting maize or millet), or the juice of a kind of millet, which is almost as sweet as sugar-cane. The stalks of this msale—and also sugar-cane, where that is to be had—are constantly being chewed, both by children and grown-up people. The results are visible on every native path as little bundles of tousled white fibrous matter—and the new comer is apt to wonder what they are.
There is a game which mothers sometimes play with children supposed to be too old for special infant diet; they tickle the child’s back with a stalk of grass, and, if he starts, accuse him of having ‘eaten the baby’s gruel’—which would be more attractive than the ordinary nsima.
It can readily be inferred that the young are not overburdened in the way of education. Some training there must be—some elementary inculcation of modesty and manners, to judge by results: but the deference shown to very small children—especially boys; the girls begin to make themselves useful at an early age, and are duly kept in their places—is somewhat ludicrous, and one would expect it to be disastrous, only that the effects do not seem to answer such expectation. When a six-foot Ntumbi native informed me that his son (a precocious youth of perhaps eight, and extremely minute for that age) had failed to attend school because he had gone ‘to a beer-drinking at So-and-So’s,’ and I expressed some not unnatural surprise, not unmingled with reprobation, the father replied, ‘If he has made up his mind to go, who can hinder him?’ ‘Akana mwini—his lordship refuses,’ was the answer given by the female relatives of another youthful truant to the teacher of the Blantyre mission-school.
I was still new to the country when I went out for a walk at Blantyre with one Limwichi—aged, I suppose, ten, and with something of a reputation for chipongwe (the best translation is ‘cheek’)—to carry my butterfly-net. We met a big Yao, meditatively walking along and eating a piece of chinangwa (cassava root) as he went. Whether Limwichi was previously acquainted with this gentleman or not, I don’t know; but he walked coolly up to him and asked (with what degree of politeness my proficiency in the language did not enable me to judge) for a share in this delicacy. I half expected to see Limwichi’s ears boxed, instead of which the man broke off a piece of his chinangwa and handed it to him. I fear he did not say ‘Thank you.’ (Some hold that natives never do—perhaps not understanding that ‘Chabwino’—‘It is good’ conveys the same thing.)
Limwichi, I am sorry to say, had been to school—not long enough, let us say, to have his manners (though these were not precisely ferocious) softened by learning; but nothing could be gentler and prettier than the ways of the unschooled Ntumbi village children who, having got over their first shyness at the unwonted white faces which made babies shriek and dogs bark from end to end of the kraals, followed one along the narrow native paths—somewhat embarrassing in their desire to walk alongside, where the nature of the ground made it difficult, and to hold one’s hands, half a dozen at once—but not really forward or troublesome. I never, with fair opportunities to have come across that sort of thing if it had been at all common, saw a child struck or otherwise ill-treated. On the whole, I think, if native parents fail in their duty, it is through being too easy-going.
I cannot understand the statement sometimes made, that native children do not know how to play, are without toys and games, and have rather a melancholy time of it altogether. The traveller who speaks of their portentous and unnatural solemnity has, of course, only observed them under the inspiring influence of his own immediate neighbourhood. It is curious to contrast the pathetic appeals on this score to the compassion of English children which one sometimes reads with the experience of the missionaries at Magomero. ‘Indeed it was a question with us at one time what it was we could teach these children of ours in the way of amusement. At last, Scudamore and Waller thought to surprise them with a kite. The kite was made, the children assembled to see it ascend, but it was lop-sided and heavy, would not go up, went down, and the children made merry thereat. Said Waller, “You have never seen anything like this before, have you?” Said a little urchin in reply, “Oh yes! we have, though. We have seen them, but ours were different to yours. Ours went up, yours go down.”’
These children had been hunted away from their homes, some of them had lost their parents, they had all suffered more or less from hunger and some of them from illness, so that a certain amount of depression would have been excusable; but the spirit in which they entered into the kindly meant effort to amuse them is thoroughly characteristic. But for that casual question, their instructors would never have learned that they knew how to make kites which would go up. Miss Woodward tells me that she has seen the Likoma children playing with kites, but I have never seen one myself, and cannot describe their exact construction.
There are two kinds of tops, the wooden one (nguli), which is kept up by beating, like our whipping-top, with a lash of three strands of bark tied to a bit of stick. The other, the nsikwa, is made of a round piece of gourd-shell, with a spindle of cane through the middle of it.
‘The game is played by two parties sitting opposite to each other, with a bare space of hard ground between them, and spinning the tops across the empty space with as much force as a twirl between the finger and thumb is capable of, at little pieces of maize-cob set up before their adversaries.’ Any number can play, one top and one piece of maize-cob being allowed to each, and the game is to knock over all the pieces on the opposite side before those on one’s own side are overthrown. The player whose piece is knocked over catches his adversary’s top and fires it back at him.
Maize-cobs (zikonyo) are also used in the game of ponyana zikonyo, or throwing these missiles at each other; and in that of tamangitsana (literally ‘making run,’ in which one side pretend to be Angoni, and carry shields). There is a very popular game called chiwewe, which is a somewhat original exercise with a skipping-rope. One player squats down and whirls the cord, weighted at one end, round his head, so as to describe round himself a circle of two or three yards in diameter, while the others jump over it; the one who fails to clear it has to take his place in the middle.