The administration of the ordeal-poison is a very solemn ceremony; commonly, as we have seen, it takes place in the bwalo, or village forum, but Livingstone speaks of some Batoka head-men making a pilgrimage to the graves of their ancestors for the purpose.
‘The ordeal by the poison of the muave is resorted to by the Batoka as well as by the other tribes; but a cock is often made to stand proxy for the supposed witch. Near the confluence of the Kafue the Mambo, or chief, with some of his head-men, came to our sleeping-place with a present; their foreheads were smeared with white flour, and an unusual seriousness marked their demeanour. Shortly before our arrival they had been accused of witchcraft; conscious of innocence, they accepted the ordeal. For this purpose they made a journey to the sacred hill of Nchomokela, on which repose the bodies of their ancestors; and after a solemn appeal to the unseen spirits to attest the innocence of their children, they swallowed the muave, vomited, and were therefore declared not guilty.’[25]
Note.—The Rev. H. Rowley says that the Mang’anja distinguished between deaths brought about by Mpambe (i.e. those resulting from old age or ‘the ordinary diseases of the country’), and those caused by the mfiti. The former were buried; the latter, as being accursed, rolled in mats and hung up in trees. One cannot help suspecting some confusion here—more especially as violent deaths are reckoned as the work of the mfiti,—a word which this writer translates by ‘evil spirit’—thus introducing another element of misconception. Dr. Hetherwick, in a communication received since this chapter has been in type, says: ‘The Yaos lay their dead with their faces to the east, and with the knees bent to the chin. This is the invariable rule, and so the niche which they make in the side of the grave to receive the corpse is dug out on the west side of the pit. The turning of the face to the east is interesting. At old Kapeni’s funeral one of his men went into the grave after the body was laid in its place, and fired an arrow up into the air. I have never found any explanation of this rite. It is not done on any other occasion that I have note of.’
CHAPTER VIII
ARTS, INDUSTRIES, ETC.
Agriculture: Maize, tobacco, gardens, etc. Hunting, trapping. Ant-catching. Fishing. Weaving. Basket-making. Bark cloth. Ironwork. Wood-carving. Pottery. Salt.
The principal crops cultivated in British Central Africa are maize, millet (of several kinds), rice, ground-nuts, beans, sweet potatoes, cassava, yams, pumpkins, several kinds of gourds, and tobacco. Bananas are planted near most villages in the Shiré Highlands, and are the staple crop of the Wankonde; they are less common west of the Upper Shiré. Cotton and sugar-cane are grown in some places; also the saccharine sorghum (the imfe of the Zulus); but no sugar is made—both kinds of cane are only used for chewing. Sesamum (chitowe) is grown in order to extract the oil from the seeds, and chamba (Indian hemp) for smoking. In villages near Blantyre, a few papaw-trees, pine-apples, and grenadillas are grown; but most of the fruits eaten by natives are wild ones.
A certain number of plants are utilised which grow with little or no cultivation. Most villages are surrounded by castor-oil bushes; tomatoes (and, where they have been introduced, Cape gooseberries) grow like weeds among the other crops; so does a tiny kind of grain (Eleusine, I believe), like small bird-seed, which is called maere, and is so troublesome to husk and prepare, besides not being very palatable, that it is not gathered except in times of scarcity. Various plants which grow wild, or spring up like weeds in the gardens, are eaten as vegetables in time of scarcity; the commonest is a kind of Prince of Wales’s feathers (Amaranthus caudatus), which when boiled is not unlike spinach.
Maize was probably introduced into Africa by the Portuguese, three hundred years ago. The Anyanja would seem to have obtained it from the Yaos, and the Yaos from the coast, if we may judge from the etymology of the name—in both languages, chimanga; Manga being the name for the coast. Nearly all Bantu languages have distinct words for it, showing, either that they did not derive it from each other, or that the name did not travel with the thing.