At some seasons, especially at the end of the rainy months, fishing and hunting offer productive sources for obtaining the means of subsistence. Hunting is sometimes practised by independent individuals going out separately; but at other times it takes the form of an extensive battue, in which the men belonging to a whole district will combine to take a share. Occasionally, too, a rich booty is obtained from the trenches and snares. Nets are used in all the battues for game, and the Bongo devote as much attention to the construction of these nets as they do to the weaving of their fish-snares and basket-pots. Their fishery is principally limited to the winter months.
HUNTING-SNARES.
Elephant-hunting has for the last twelve years been among the things of the past. It is only the oldest of the men—and here the number of the men that are really old is very small—who appear to have any distinct recollection of it at all. The huge lance-heads, which are now only weapons of luxury in the possession of the wealthy, or upon some rare occasions used for buffalo-hunting, are the sole memorials of the abundance of ivory of which Petherick, as an eye-witness, has given so striking a description. The snares by which the Bongo succeed in catching the smaller kinds of game generally consist of the stem of a tree balanced horizontally by means of ropes.[29] A spot which the game is known to haunt is selected for the erection of these snares; a hedge, or some sort of enclosure, is set up on each side of the tree so that the game may be obliged to run underneath: it is arranged so that the animals as they pass tread upon a kind of noose or slip-knot which slackens the ropes by which the tree is suspended, and the falling weight crushes and kills the game below. The numbers of snares of this description which are found in the bush-thickets is a sufficient proof of their efficacy. The smaller species of antelopes, ichneumons, civets, genets, wild cats, servals, and caracals, are all in turn caught by this stratagem.
Hunting on a minor scale is a very favourite recreation, and the children find a daily amusement in catching rats and field-mice. They weave baskets in the form of long tubes, which they lay flat upon the ground in the immediate neighbourhood of the mouse-holes; they then commence a regular battue, when the scared mice, scampering back to regain their homes, run through the stubble, and often rush into the open traps, where, like fish in a weir-basket, they are easily secured. In this way the Bongo boys catch considerable quantities of meriones, Mus gentilis, and M. barbarus, which they tie together by their tails in clusters of about a dozen, and barter them to each other as dainty morsels. “These are our cows,” they would shout to me with great glee whenever I met them returning after their sport had been successful. Another use which is made of the mice which are captured by this simple artifice is to employ them for a bait for securing what they esteem the especial delicacy of roast cat. On the narrow paths which traverse the steppes like rifts in the long grass, they construct diminutive huts out of some twisted reeds; by placing the mice inside these they are very often able to entice the cats into a snare.
With the exception of human flesh and the flesh of dogs, the Bongo seem to consider all animal substance fit for eating, in whatever condition it may be found. The putrefying remnant of a lion’s feast, which lies in the obscurity of a forest and is only revealed by the kites and vultures circling in the air above, is to them a welcome discovery. That meat is “high” is a guarantee for its being tender, and they deem it in that condition not only more strengthening than when it is fresh, but likewise more easy of digestion. There is, however, no accounting for taste, certainly not with the Bongo, who do not recoil from the most revolting of food. Whenever my cattle were slaughtered, I always saw my bearers eagerly contending for the half-digested contents of the stomach, like the Esquimaux, whose only ideas of vegetables appears to be what they obtain from the contents of the paunches of their reindeers; and I have seen the Bongo calmly strip off the disgusting amphistoma-worms which literally line the stomachs of all the cattle of this region, and put them into their mouths by handfuls. After that, it was not a matter of surprise to me to find that the Bongo reckons as game everything that creeps or crawls, from rats and mice to snakes, and that he is not particular what he eats, from the carrion vulture to the mangy hyæna, or from the fat earth-scorpions (Heterometrus palmatus) to the caterpillars of the winged termites with their oily beetle-bodies.
Having thus dilated with more minuteness than elsewhere upon the external features of Bongo life, such as their agriculture, hunting, and fishing, I may proceed to call attention to those arts by which, even in this low grade of development, man seeks to ameliorate and embellish his existence.
BONGO DWELLINGS.
First of all, the dwelling-place may demand our notice, that which binds every man more or less to the soil which affords him his subsistence—that family nucleus, from which the wide-branching tree of human society has derived its origin.
In the period when the Khartoomers first made their way into the country, the Bongo, quite unlike the other tribes, inhabited extensive villages, which, similar to the present Seribas, were encompassed by a palisade. Neither towns nor villages are now to be seen, and the districts which are occupied at all are only marked by scattered enclosures and little gatherings of huts, as in the country of the Dinka and the Niam-niam. Very rarely are more than five or six families resident in the same locality, so that it is almost an exaggeration to speak of their being villages in any sense. The communities in past times seem to have had a preference for gathering round some great tamarind, ficus, or butter-tree, which often still survives and constitutes the only relic of habitations which have long fallen to decay; and even to the present time the Bongo appear to retain this partiality, and more often than not they may be found beneath the natural shade of a spreading roof of foliage, enjoying the light and space which are prohibited to their cramped and narrow dwellings. The ground for a considerable circuit about the huts is all well cleared and levelled, its surface being the general scene of labour on which all the women perform their ordinary domestic duties. The corn is there thrashed and winnowed; there it is brayed in the wooden mortars or pounded by the mill; there are the leaves of the tobacco plant laid out to dry; there stand the baskets with the loads of mushrooms or supply of fruit; and there may be seen the accumulated store of nutritious roots. Dogs and poultry alike seem to revel in security under the majestic covering, while the little children at their play complete the idyllic picture of life in Central Africa.[30]
Upon the erection of their dwellings there is no people in the Gazelle district who bestow so much pains as the Bongo. Although they invariably adopt the conical shape, they allow themselves considerable diversity in the forms they use. The general plan of their architecture has already been sketched. The materials they employ are upright tree-stems, plaited faggots, canes of the bamboo, clay from the mushroom-shaped white-ant hills, and tough grass and the bast of the Grewia.