Kituta is a beautiful but pestilential spot, chiefly remarkable for its abominable smells. It is also the scene of another lion story which deserves perpetuation.
There was once a very nervous agent in charge of the station with a particular horror of lions. One of these brutes commenced eating the natives of the village; so the agent barricaded himself in his room and slept with six native watchmen in case of attack. Hearing, or thinking that he heard, the lion prowling round, he fired out of the window and knocked a hole through the administration boat. The following night he again heard sounds and fired, bagging the collector's donkey at the first shot. A certain well-known sportsman, who was hunting in the vicinity, wrote in and congratulated him on shooting his first lion. He rose to the occasion, and now silences all sceptics by producing the letter, and has acquired quite a reputation as a hunter of big game.
While purchasing trade-cloth for the journey north, the carelessness of the British manufacturer was again brought home to me. All the loads contained different lengths, and as the marks had been rubbed off, the operation lasted several hours instead of ten minutes; and they were so badly packed that after a week's knocking about most of them came undone, and the contents were consequently in part spoiled. I wonder when the British exporter will realize the advisability of studying the requirements of his markets. Kituta was at one time the call-place of many Arab caravans, but now it has sunk into insignificance, although there is a flourishing rubber trade in the country, which is paying very handsomely.
CHAPTER VII.
THE CHAMBESI.
On reaching Mambwe I had the good fortune to find Mr. C. R. Palmer, the assistant-collector, on the point of starting for the Chambesi, with the object of waking up one or two of the chiefs who had been tardy in sending in labour. His offer to take me with him, and his glowing description of the game to be found there, were so tempting that next morning I found myself on the march to Tanzuka, a border village of the Mambwe; and on the following day we entered the country of the Awemba, a very powerful tribe apparently of Zulu origin. The difference between these people and the neighbouring Mambwe is as cheese from chalk: whereas the latter are of the ordinary dirty, stunted, cringing or insolent, ill-fed type of Central Africa, the former are of a very striking caste. Among the upper class are some magnificent specimens of the native, tall men of powerful build, with much of the well-bred carriage of the Zulu; their noses are straight and thin cut, their colour bronze; and their hair, which they wear in grotesque tufts down the middle of their head, is the only conspicuous negro characteristic. Many of the young women, with their regular features, beautiful colour, and small, delicate hands and feet, are quite pleasing. Until the advent of the Chartered Co. they led the rollicking life of the old Zulus; herding cattle and depending for the meaner necessaries of life and the replenishing of their harems on the efforts of their neighbours. Far and wide they used to raid even to the Atonga country on the east coast of Tanganyika, and many and wonderful are the tales told of their stupendous forced marches, when the weaker members used to fall out and die from sheer exhaustion. All the chiefs of any standing maintain bands, composed of singers, drummers, and players on the castanets, in which they take great pride. On the approach of any visitors to whom they wish to do honour, the band is sent forward to meet them; the leading part is usually taken by a man who sings the theme, some of them having remarkably fine voices, while the refrain is taken up by other men, playing drums of hollow wood with lizard or snake skin stretched over the apertures, and a chorus of boys rattling pods containing dry seeds; the whole is accompanied by grotesque dancing, the main object of which appeared to be to go as near falling down as possible without actually doing so. The strain, like most African music, plays on about three notes with untiring repetition, and, though rather pleasing at first, palls after the fourth or fifth hour. Should a chief find any singer of unusual power, he promptly removes his eyes to prevent him from going elsewhere, and many men thus mutilated are to be seen in every district. In fact mutilation in various forms appears to be the chief recreation of these autocrats. Mr. Palmer told me of three youths who came in to him without their eyes, which had been removed by their chief, because he thought his people were getting out of hand; so to teach them that he was still master he had selected haphazard these three unfortunates. I also heard of some women who had had their ears, lips, hands, and breasts cut off, and who actually travelled a distance of about sixty miles immediately afterwards to the collector of the district. I myself saw many men who had similarly lost their ears, lips, hands, or privates, and sometimes all these parts.
Mr. Law, the able collector at Abercorn, who is known to the natives by the appellation of the "Just man" (and who, by the way, charged me £25 for my rhino about six hours before I sailed north), when on some punitive expedition in the Awemba country, captured a delightful example of the grim humour of these pleasing gentry. It consisted of a large sable horn rudely adorned and fitted with a mask, into which the patient's head was fitted, his throat having been previously cut with a ferocious-looking knife, chiefly remarkable for its bluntness; the blood spurting forth into the horn rang a bell, a performance that gave general satisfaction, with, I suppose, one exception. Some of their old kraals are veritable fortresses, consisting of an outer ringed palisade banked with clay and loopholed; inside is a deep trench, and again an inner palisade similarly banked and loopholed, with, in many cases, a third palisade containing the chief's huts. The site is invariably selected on the edge of a dense thicket, into which the women and cattle are driven on the advent of strangers; nearly every respectable member of society has a gun imported by Arab traders from the north and Portuguese from the south, and there must be several thousand in the country. Such is the people who have been changed in half a dozen short years from a cruel, murdering, widespread curse into a quiet agricultural fraternity; and by whom? By a mere handful of men with less than a hundred native police, agents of that oppressor of the native, the Chartered Company; and this without fuss and practically without bloodshed. The chief industries of the country are pombe[#]-drinking and the making of bark cloth, which is a strong fibrous textile of a pleasing reddish-brown colour, made by beating out the bark of the fig-tree with little wooden hammers, till of the required thinness. A curious custom prevails here, and one that I have not noticed elsewhere in Africa, of wearing mourning for dead relatives; bands of cloth being tied round the head.
[#] Pombe: an intoxicating drink made from millet.
The following day we arrived at Changala's kraal; he is a large, powerful man, with a face expressive of determination and character. He came out two miles to meet us, carried on the shoulders of one of his men, as is the custom (for the chiefs never walk), with a following of two or three hundred people. He, as in fact did all the Awemba, gave us a very hearty reception. Having amicably settled all outstanding questions with Changala, we visited Makasa, the big man of the country, whose head village lies about twenty-six miles south-east of Changala's. He is a portly old gentleman of unprepossessing countenance, and rather inclined to make trouble--at a distance; however, guessing our intentions, he had made great preparations for our reception. On arrival we found our tents already pitched and grass shelters built above them to keep off the sun; while large crowds of obsequious gentlemen came out to meet us and insisted on carrying in our machilas at a run, a form of attention that would not be appreciated by Accident Insurance Companies. His village, which cannot contain less than five hundred huts, is of the usual Awemba pattern, and is a great centre of the bark-cloth industry.
Tales of rhino and elephant galore raised our hopes to the highest pitch, and after a day's rest we launched forth into the game country--a triangular patch of country that lies at the junction of the Chambesi, and its main tributary the Chosi--camping near Chipiri, the original site of the French mission. Here we got our first glimpse of the Chambesi, which, flowing with a devious course into Lake Bangweolo, is the real source of the Congo. It rises between Mambwe and Abercorn, and at Chipiri is already a river of some size, flowing through a beautiful grass plain clothed with patches of waving spear-grass. The plain, varying in width from a half to five miles, is hemmed in by forest bush and park land, dotted over with innumerable ant-hills, some 30 ft. in height, and is the haunt of countless herds of pookoo, two of which graced our larder shortly after pitching camp.