Nguru Hut
This is fairly typical for the whole of B.C.A., though the posts are unusually thick
In a small village, the men and boys all eat together, in the Bwalo. The women of the several families take it in turns to prepare the food. The porridge, when not eaten out of the pot, is ladled out into a wooden platter or a flat basket, which is set down on the mat on which the men are sitting, with the ndiwo in a pot or bowl beside it; and they squat round and eat from the dish with their fingers, which they are careful to wash before and after. The women and little girls eat by themselves either in a different place or later; the mother, or hostess, helps every one else, putting their portions by hand into their plates, which may be small flat baskets, or shallow bowls of wood or earthenware. A mouthful is scraped off with the forefinger, rolled into the palm and eaten; being first, if the ndiwo is boiled fowl or the like, dipped in the gravy. No spoons are used except the large wooden ladles, often neatly carved, which serve to remove the porridge from the pot. On the Lake, shells are sometimes used for the same purpose. Salt is put into the food when cooking, if it is to be had at all; it is greatly valued because rather scarce, especially in the western part of the Upper Shiré district, where men, women, and children suffered from an insufficiently nutritious diet and consequent poorness of blood. One result of this was a great craving for salt; they gladly accepted a few spoonfuls as payment for work or provisions brought for sale; another was the formation of a virulent ulcer every time a person stubbed a toe or barked a shin. The need for salt is not the same among people who, like the Zulus, have plenty of fresh meat and milk. Language affords a curious corroboration of this: there is no native Zulu word for salt—they call it usaoti, from the Dutch zout. There are genuine Bantu words for it in Yao, Nyanja, and all the neighbouring languages. The method of making salt will be described in treating of Industries.
I do not know of any other condiment, strictly so called, used by natives, except Chile peppers, which are common on the River and near the Portuguese settlements, but rare up-country. They are called sabola, which is the Portuguese cebola, ‘an onion.’ The word is used in its proper sense as well, and probably, to the native mind, conveys the idea of ‘flavouring’ simply.
The only sort of bread known to the natives of this part of Africa is a kind of roll called mkate, made of maize-flour, bananas, and honey. I have neither seen nor eaten it, but it appears to be either baked by being put on the fire, in a pot without water, or rolled in leaves and dried in the sun.
Food, cooked or uncooked, is stored within the hut in baskets or bags of various kinds, but maize, and also millet, beans and ground-nuts, are kept in the nkokwe already described. It can only be the unhusked millet that is so kept; I have never, myself, seen anything but maize come out of a nkokwe. Some of the Middle Zambezi people tie up grain in bundles of grass, plaster them over with clay, and keep them on low sand islands in the river. The Badema, near Kebrabasa Falls, who in Livingstone’s day were much harassed by their enemies, used to make cylindrical bins out of the bitter bark of a certain tree, which mice and monkeys will not touch, to put their grain in, and bury them in the ground. The Anyanja have large narrow-necked baskets, which they hang up to the rafters of the hut, and use for storing grain, beans half-cooked, manioc-leaves, and other things, and beans are also put into bags. The seed corn is left in the ear, and hung up, or laid on the stage over the fireplace, where the smoke keeps the insects from it, or sometimes sealed up with clay in earthen jars.
In building a house, the first thing is to drive in the posts, which are, so to speak, its skeleton. They are set in a circle about a yard apart, and forked at the top to support a circle of split bamboo which forms the top of the wall; then the interstices are filled with grass and bound with circles of bamboo perhaps a foot apart. A space is left for the doorway, and sometimes small shuttered loopholes,[20] about four feet from the ground—more for the purpose of letting the inmates see what is going on outside than of admitting light. Most huts have only one door, but at times and in places where raiding is habitual, they are constructed with two—to facilitate escape from enemies.
A strong central pole is planted to support the roof, which is made separately, like a huge basket, and afterwards hoisted into position. A number of sharpened bamboos are stuck, at an angle of about 45, into a bunch of grass, which is to form the point of the roof, and is sometimes plaited into fanciful shapes, or covered with an inverted pot, to finish up the construction and prevent the rain from running into the ends of the straws. The radiating spokes are united by concentric hoops made of twisted grass placed at regular intervals, and tied at the crossings with bark soaked in water, which of course tightens as it dries.
The roof is always made to project at least three feet beyond the walls, and its edges are supported by posts. The space under the eaves makes quite a small verandah, and is banked up with clay to the height of a foot so as to form a step or low platform running round the house. The walls are not more than four feet high, perhaps less; the centre of the hut may be twelve feet. Small huts have a diameter equal to their height, or even less, and require no support inside; larger ones are wider than they are high, and the roof is supported by a strong central post, and extra ones, if necessary, in proportion to the increased diameter. The walls are plastered with clay at the beginning of the cold (and dry) season; this plaster (at any rate in the lower-lying districts) is either removed during the summer, or not renewed when it drops away of itself. It is always done by the women, who also do the floor of the hut in the same way as the verandah, and mould it into a circular ridge about two feet in diameter for the central fireplace. Sometimes one or more oblong platforms are made for sleeping-places; but many people simply spread their mats on the floor, and some make regular bedsteads (or, as it has been described, a ‘family sleeping-shelf’) by fixing stout sticks in the ground and spreading a mat on top of them. Whatever the sleeping arrangements, people lie with their feet to the fire, which is fed at night with one or more logs laid end on to the fireplace, and kindled at the inner end, so that whoever happens to wake in the night can, without any trouble, put on fuel by merely pushing the outer. The fire is not much used for cooking except in wet or windy weather; and in fact the hut is mainly a place for sleeping and storing things in. The fireplace is generally surrounded by four posts supporting a stage or shelf (nsanja), which serves all the purposes of a storeroom and larder. Strips of meat and fish are hung on it to dry; provisions, cooked and uncooked, are placed there in pots and baskets, and the seed corn is kept there in the smoke, where the weevils and other insects will not attack it.
Other things—spears, bows and arrows, the spindle and weaving-stick, bags of beans, the gourds for drawing water, etc.—are hung from the rafters or stuck in the thatch. Cloth and beads are stored away in baskets. Besides the articles already mentioned, a few cooking-pots, a carved wooden pillow or two, a few skins, perhaps one or two small logs to sit on, or even a stool made out of the root of a tree, and a jar of water with a gourd dipper to drink it from, will about complete the inventory of the furniture.