Single seat used by the Women.
Benches and stools, such as are exclusively used by the women, are made in every diversity of shape. They are carved out of a single block, for, to say the truth, no people of Central Africa seems to have acquired the art of joining one piece of wood to another, so that the craft of the cabinet-maker may be said to be unknown. The seats of these stools are circular and somewhat hollowed out, surmounting a prettily carved stem, which rises from a circular or polygonal base. Close to the edge of the seat is a triangular aperture, which serves as a handle. They are usually made from twelve to sixteen inches high, and are hardly to be distinguished from certain contrivances for meal-times, which are here made so as to serve at once for table and plate. Wooden platters there are of every possible size: one kind of them has two open ring-shaped handles; another stands upon four feet, and both are patterns quite worthy of our own factories at home. Besides the single seats they are in the habit of making long benches also with four feet. The practice of making all their utensils to stand upon feet is all but universal among the Niam-niam and the Monbuttoo, even the little cylindrical boxes covered with bark for storing away their knick-knacks being finished off in this fashion. The ordinary seats of the men are made exclusively from the leaf-stalks of the Raphia palm: they always keep to precisely the same form, and in their manufacture appear to indicate a first attempt at the joiner’s art. The benches of the Monbuttoo men are about five feet long and of corresponding width; they are made of such lightness that one of our bearers, without any apparent exertion, carried six of them at once; but they are nevertheless of very extraordinary firmness, and the way in which the separate parts are fixed together is really very ingenious. The Monbuttoo do not fasten their benches or any of their structures by means of nails or pegs, but they sew them, as it were, together by fine split Spanish reeds, which by their unyielding toughness answer as admirably as in the manufacture of our cane-chairs.
SEATS AND SHIELDS.
Backs are not attached to the Monbuttoo seats; but as some support of the kind is clearly indispensable, they endeavour to supply its place by placing by the side of their benches a singular sort of crutch. This is obtained by taking a young tree and cutting a section of it, where what botanists call its “verticillate ramification” has developed itself into four additional separate limbs: the main stem and two of the boughs supply the three feet, the other two boughs serving, with the continuation of the stem, to make the arms and back. No wood is so available for the purpose as that of the cotton tree (Eriodendron).
Seat-rest.
The shields of the warriors are hewn out of the thickest stems by means of the axe, and consist of perfectly smooth rectangular boards, not more than half an inch thick, but which are long enough to cover two-thirds of the person. These inelegant instruments of defensive warfare, in which the recommendation of solidity is ill sacrificed for the sake of their lightness, require to be protected from splitting or starting, and to secure this a number of parallel seams of rotang are fixed across the width, and both the upper and lower edges are provided with a strong border of rotang twist, and a strong rib run across the middle gives them an additional firmness. They are generally decorated with tails of the guinea-hog (Potamochærus), and are invariably stained quite black. If any fissures or cracks should be detected, they are at once drawn together by iron and copper braces.