WOODEN UTENSILS OF THE BONGO.
Hardly inferior to the skill of the Bongo in the working of iron is their dexterity in wood-carving. Perhaps the most striking specimens of their art in this way may be noticed in the little low four-legged seats or stools which are found in every household, and are called “hegba.” These are invariably made from a single block, the wood chosen for the purpose being that of the Göll-tree (Prosopis lanceolata, Benth.), which is of a chestnut brown, and after use acquires an excellent polish; they are used only by the women, who are continually to be seen sitting on them in front of their huts, but they are altogether avoided by the men, who regard every raised seat as an effeminate luxury.
Bongo stool.
Other articles of their fabric in wood are the pestles, the troughs for oil-pressing, the flails for threshing corn, and, most remarkable of all, the goblet-shaped mortars in which the corn is bruised before it is ground into flour upon the grinding-stones. Very graceful in shape are these mortars, not unlike a drinking-goblet with a cut stem; they are not sunk below the ground, as is ordinarily the case with those of the Dinka and Dyoor, but they can be removed whenever it is requisite from place to place. Their height is about thirty inches. Mortars of very similar design were noticed by Barth amongst the Musgoo, and they are also used by the Ovambo, the Makololo, and other negro nations. They are worked by two women at once, who alternately pound away with heavy pestles in a regular African fashion, which has been long immortalised by the pictorial representations of ancient Egypt. Very cleverly, too, do the Bongo cut spoons of very choice design out of horn, of the same shape as may be found in nearly every market in Europe.
Consequent upon the oppression to which the Bongo have now for years been subject, and the remorseless appropriation of all their energies by the intruders, very many of the primitive habits of the people were disappearing; and at the time of my visit my attention was rather arrested by what were memorials of a bygone and happier condition of things, than by anything that was really done under my eyes. Just as in the Central Soudan, in Borneo, and in the Tsad countries, so here also the destructive power of Islamism has manifested itself by obliterating, in comparatively a brief space of time, all signs of activity and all traces of progress of any kind. Wherever it prevails, it annihilates the chief distinctions of race, it effaces the best vestiges of the past, and extends, as it were, a new desert upon the face of the land which it overruns. Those who have been eye-witnesses of the state of things when the intruders first broke in upon the country, gave me still further details of what had been the special industries of the people.
In the villages there are found very frequently whole rows of figures carved out of wood and arranged either at the entrances of the palisaded enclosures, forming, as it were, a decoration for the gateway, or set up besides the huts of the “Nyare” (chiefs), as memorials, to immortalise the renown of some departed character. In Moody, a district towards the west, I came across the remains (still in a perfect state of preservation) of an erection of this sort, which had been reared above the grave of the Bongo chieftain Yanga. Large as life, the rough-hewn figures represented the chief followed in procession by his wives and children, apparently issuing from the tomb. The curious conception of the separate individuals, and the singular mode in which they were rendered by the artist, awakened my keenest interest. The illustration which is subjoined may be accepted as a faithful representation of the first rude efforts of savages in the arts of sculpture.
