Beans and ground-nuts, with the nzama, which is very like a ground-nut and grows in the same way, the seed-vessel burying itself in the earth after flowering, are planted in patches by themselves beside the maize-garden. These are boiled and eaten, green or ripe, and the ground-nuts are also used for oil. They are pounded, boiled, and the oil skimmed from the top of the water. Castor-oil is procured in the same way; it is not used as medicine, but only for anointing the head and body.
Hoeing and weeding are sometimes got through more quickly, when time is pressing (as when the first rains have fallen) by means of a ‘bee.’ The owner invites all his neighbours, men and women, and prepares large quantities of beer, with which they regale themselves after a hard morning’s work. Sometimes the pots are carried out to the garden, and the party consume the refreshment there. Each person has a certain piece of ground allotted to him or her—a ‘row to hoe,’ and the work is got through with singing and mirth. When the chief sends for a number of villagers to hoe his gardens, he entertains them royally with meat and beer.
After the harvest is gathered in comes the mpakasa season, which might be rendered ‘autumn’; the deciduous trees lose their leaves; the grass is dry and ready for burning, and, as the people say, ‘the wind blows and says pi!’ After this comes the real winter (malimwe), when people walk abroad and sit and drink beer, saying, ‘At present there is no hoeing to do, only odds and ends of work about the house’—though, even then, ‘some break up the new hoeing-ground.’ Then comes the time of the grass and bush-fires, when the air is full of flying soot, and then the kokalupsya—the driving rain which sweeps away the burnt grass—and then the last interval of waiting, when the new leaves show themselves in vivid green, red, and yellow, the thorn-trees burst into golden bloom and ‘Mpambe thunders’ in distant mutterings along the horizon.
Women Carrying Baskets of Maize
The soil is exhausted by maize in two years, or three at the most; after that new ground is broken up, and the old is planted with beans and other less important crops for another year or two. This seems to have gone on for centuries, the forest closing up again over the deserted gardens, as if they had never been; it is this repeated cutting down, together with the bush-fires, which has changed so much of the primeval forest into straggling scrub.
HUNTING
None of the tribes of British Central Africa can be said to live by hunting, or even to make it one of their principal occupations. The nearest approach to a hunting tribe are the Apodzo, or Akombwi, of the Lower Zambezi, who are professional hippopotamus-hunters, and are sometimes spoken of as a clan, but as they speak a language of their own, they should perhaps be reckoned as a separate people.
Forty-five years ago, game seems to have been scarce in the Shiré Highlands proper, though abundant near the Lake and west of the Shiré. The subsequent wars and famine allowed it to increase again; and of late years some of the protected kinds have actually come back to their old haunts. The native who wishes to hunt now has to take out a gun-licence, and can no longer dig pitfalls for elephants, or set snares for buck, as he did in the old days.
No close time was recognised, but nature took care of that, for it is impossible to see or pursue animals through the thick grass of the spring and summer. Where game was at all abundant, hunting parties were organised: a long line of men would advance in a semicircle on the patch of grass or bush to be surrounded. The leader, who carried the ‘medicines’ for luck, was in the middle, and with those on either side of him would wait till the ends of the two ‘wings’ had met on the other side. When the circle was complete, the signal was given by whistling, and the hunters advanced all at once. These men would probably be armed with spears; perhaps a few of them with guns. The Chipetas and Mang’anja shoot a great deal with bows; they do not seem to be first-class marksmen, though I have heard that some of the boys from the Katunga’s district were very expert in bringing down birds flying. The only archer whose exploits I ever had the opportunity of witnessing seemed unable to hit a bird which I suppose to have been a white heron at a moderate distance. But it may have been an unlucky day with him. The bow was used as a weapon of war (with or without poisoned arrows) before the Angoni introduced the shield and stabbing spear. War arrows are a yard long and tipped with iron; blunt cane or wooden arrows are used for shooting birds. The iron arrow-heads are of a great many different patterns; some are smooth, others have as many as half a dozen barbs below the point.