Sweet potatoes, tobacco, beans, and some of the minor crops are grown in, or close to, the villages, in among the huts of the more scattered ones, or outside the reed fences of the kraal enclosures. The tubers of the sweet potato are planted in flat mounds, about six feet by four or five, and the convolvulus-like stems and leaves trail over the ground. Cassava is sometimes planted close to the villages, sometimes in the regular gardens; it is grown from cuttings; a piece of the stem about a foot long, and cut off sloping at each end, is stuck into the ground and grows into a handsome shrub about six feet high, with light green, palmate leaves. These are used as a vegetable, being boiled like spinach. This plant is supposed to have been introduced by the Portuguese; a great number of varieties are cultivated; that usually seen is the sweet kind, which requires no special preparation, and can be eaten raw. Some of the others are buried for some time before being taken up, then steeped in water to get rid of the poisonous juice, and allowed to dry before being pounded.
Of beans there are endless varieties; one kind, often grown close to villages, is a small shrub with yellow flowers; these beans are gathered and eaten green.
Tobacco is grown both for home consumption and for sale. A good deal of attention is paid to the plants, the leaf-buds being pinched out to make the rest of the leaves grow larger. When ready, they are gathered, soaked in water till they turn brown, and spread in the sun to dry. The Yaos plait them into twists; the Shiré Anyanja pound them with water, and make them up into balls; the Chipetas and Angoni make theirs into pyramids. Tobacco is used for smoking, but more frequently in the form of snuff. To make this, the leaves are dried by the fire in a potsherd, and then ground on stones. When tobacco is chewed, it is mixed with lime got by burning snail-shells. Smoking is not a continuous process as with Europeans, but a large pipe is passed round, and each man takes a pull or two at it. This is the usual method of refreshment, when halting for a short time on a journey. Men will also smoke the intoxicating hemp (chamba or dakha), which they say is ‘instead of food and drink’ to them when they are tired, though they likewise admit that it ‘catches their legs.’ The plant grows about the villages without any special cultivation. Its use seems to be older than that of tobacco; it was smoked by the Bushmen before the Bantu penetrated into South Africa.
Grinding Snuff
The gardens proper may be a short distance from the villages, or they may be three or four miles away. The people begin by hoeing the land close to their dwellings; when the soil is exhausted, they move farther out, and so on, from year to year. When the gardens come to be inconveniently far away, the village is moved; and thus the population is continually shifting from place to place, and one sometimes finds sites of old gardens in what one had thought was untouched bush.
When a man has selected a site for a new garden, he marks the place, and bespeaks, or as the natives say, ‘betroths’ the ground, by tying some bunches of grass into knots, or, if there are trees on the spot, twisting some grass round their trunks. He is perfectly free to choose, so long as the land is not in cultivation, or has not been bespoken by some one else; and, once marked, no one can interfere with it. The grass is then burnt off at the end of the dry season, and with the rains, in November, or the early part of December, the hoeing begins.
Where there are bits of alluvial soil close to a watercourse, which are either kept moist by the stream or can be easily irrigated, maize is sown during the dry season, so as to be gathered green early in the year when no other is to be had.
Some people break up the ground for their gardens during the winter or dry season, but the earth is then very hard, and most consider that it is no use doing so till after the rains have begun. If the garden is a new one, the ashes of the burnt grass (or the grass itself, if any has sprung up before the hoeing begins) are hoed into the soil for manure; if maize was grown in it the previous year, the dry stalks are carefully burnt for the same purpose.
The universal agricultural implement is the hoe, which, in this part of Africa, has a short handle, so that the person wielding it has to stoop, but also gains much more power for the stroke than one has with a long handle. The blade is leaf-shaped, rounded to a blunt point in front, and tapering to a spike at the back, which is driven into the handle, and, if it projects at the back, hammered down. The blade was formerly made by native blacksmiths, but is now generally bought at a trader’s store and fixed into a handle by the purchaser, who chooses a stout piece of wood with a knob at the end—either a root of a tree, or a strong branch with a piece of the fork it springs from. Wooden hoes are still used in some remote places among the hills. They have very long, rather narrow blades, set into the handle at an acuter angle than the usual iron hoe, but, like it, suggesting the origin of the implement from the primitive forked branch with one of its ends cut short. Where hoes are unattainable, as in the case of refugees cultivating ‘scratch’ gardens in the bush in time of war, a still older instrument is used—the sharp-pointed digging-stick of bamboo. There are stories which seem to point to a time when this was in general use, and speak of the introduction of hoes.