A Modern Slavery

by Henry Woodd Nevinson

More in the character of “Uncle Remus” is the favorite story how the dog became the friend of man. Once upon a time a leopard intrusted a starving dog with the care of her cubs. All went well till a turtle appeared upon the scene and induced the dog to bring out one of the cubs and share it between them, saying she could show the leopard the same cub twice over and persuade her that the whole brood was flourishing. This went on very satisfactorily for some days, the dog and turtle devouring a cub daily, and the dog producing one of the cubs for the leopard’s inspection twice, three times, four times over, as the case demanded. At last only one cub was left alive, and it had to be produced eight or nine times, according to the original number of the litter. Next day there was no cub left at all, and the dog invited the leopard to walk into the den and contemplate her healthy young nursery for herself. No sooner had she entered the cave than the dog bolted for the nearest village, and rushed among the huts, crying, “Man, man, the leopard is coming!” Since which day the dog has never left the village, but has remained the friend of man.

Nearly akin to folk-lore are the quaint sayings and brief stories which sum up the daily experience of a people. Take, for instance, this dilemma, turning on an antipathy which appears to be the common heritage of all mankind: “I go to bury my mother-in-law. The king sends for me to attend his council. If I do not go to the king, he will cut my head off. If I do not bury my mother-in-law, she may come to life. I go to bury my mother-in-law.” More unusual to English ears was the statement made quite seriously in my presence by a young man who was inquiring about the manner of life in England. “If you can buy things there,” he said, “there is no need to marry.” Certainly not; when you can buy meal in a shop, why expose yourself to the annoyance and irritation of keeping wives to sow and gather and pound and sift the mealies for you?

Like all the tribes of this region, the Bihéans are much given to dancing, especially under a waxing moon, and when the dry season is just beginning—say in the end of April. It so happens that the Bihéan dances I have seen have been almost always the dances of children, and they were very pretty. Sometimes a girl is lifted on the hands of a group of children and jumped up and down in that perilous position, while the others dance and sing round her. Sometimes the dance is a kind of “hen and chickens” or “prisoners’ base.” But the prettiest dance I know is the frog dance, in which the children crouch down in rows and leap over the ground, clapping their elbows sharply against their naked sides, with exactly the effect of Spanish castanets, while their hard, bare feet stamp the dust in time. Then they have a game something like “hunt the slipper,” two rows sitting on the ground opposite each other, and tossing about a knotted cloth with their legs. All these dances and games are accompanied by monotonous and violent singing, the words of the song being repeated over and over again. They are generally of the simplest kind, and have no apparent connection with the dance. The song which I heard to the frog dance, for instance, ran: “I am going to my mother in the village. I am going to my mother in the village.”

Various musical instruments are used all through this part of Africa, perhaps the simplest being the primeval fiddle. A string of bark is stretched across half a gourd, and made to vibrate with a notched stick drawn to and fro across it. The player holds the gourd against his breastbone, and hisses through his teeth in time to the movement, sometimes adding a few words of song. After an hour or so he thus works himself and his audience up almost to hypnotic frenzy. If this is the simplest instrument, the alimba is the most elaborate. It is a series of wooden slats—twelve or fourteen—attached to a curved framework about six feet long. Behind the slats gourds are fixed as sounding-boards, but the number of gourds does not necessarily correspond to the slats. The player squats in the middle of the curve and strikes the wood with rubber hammers. Though there is no true scale of any kind, the individual notes are often fine and the result very beautiful, especially before the singing begins.

But the true instruments of Central Africa are the ochisanji and the drum. The ochisanji is the primeval piano, a row of iron keys (sometimes two rows) being laid upon a small oblong board, which is covered with carving. The keys are played with the thumbs, and some loose beads or bits of iron at the bottom of the board set up a rattling which, to us, does not improve the music. But it is really a beautiful instrument, and I can well imagine that when a native hears it far from his village he is filled with the same yearning that a Swiss feels at the sound of a cow-horn. It is the common accompaniment to all native songs, the words being spoken to it rather than sung. Nearly all carriers have an ochisanji tied round their necks, and one of my carriers used to sing me a minor song, lamenting his poverty, his loss of an ox, and loss of a lover, and between each verse he put in a sobbing refrain, very musical and melancholy. The ochisanji also is sometimes laid across half a hollow gourd, to improve the tone.

BIHÉAN MUSICIANS

And then there is the drum! The drum is undoubtedly as much the national instrument of Africa as the bagpipe is of Scotland. It is made out of almost anything—the bark of a tree stitched together into a cylinder and covered with goat-skin at each end, or a hollow stump, or even a large gourd will serve. But there is one kind of drum valued above all others—so precious that, when a village owns one, it is kept in a little house all to itself. This drum is shaped just like an old-fashioned carpet-bag, half open, except that the top is longer than the bottom. It measures about four feet high by three feet long, and is about eight inches broad at the bottom, the sides tapering as towards the mouth. The inside is hollowed out with axes, the whole being made of one solid block of wood. Half-way along the sides, near the top or mouth, rough lumps of rubber are fixed, and these are thumped either with a rubber-headed drumstick or with the fist, while a second player taps the wood with a bit of stick. The result is the most overwhelming sound I have heard. I know the war-drum, and I know the glory of the drums in the Ninth Symphony, but I have never known an instrument that had such an effect upon the mind as this African ochingufu. To me it is intensely depressing. At its first throb my heart sinks into my boots. Far from being roused to battle by such a sound, my instinct would be to hide under the blanket. But to the native soul it is truly inspiring. To all their great dances this is the sole accompaniment, and for hour after hour of the night they will keep up its unvaried beat without intermission, one drummer after another taking his turn, while the dance goes on, and from time to time the dancers and the crowd raise their monotonous chant. The invention of this terrible instrument was altogether beyond Bihéan art, though they sometimes imitate the models for themselves. But the greater number of the drums are still imported from the far interior, around the sources of the Zambesi, and they have become a regular article of commerce. Many a time, along the great foot-path of trade, I have seen a carrier bringing down the drum as part of his load from some village hundreds of miles east of Bihé, and I have wondered at the demon of terror and revelry which lay enchanted in that common-looking piece of hollow wood.

But then the whole country is full of other demons, not of revelry, but certainly of terror. At the gates (that is, the narrow gaps in the stockade) of nearly all villages stands a little cluster of sticks with the skulls of antelopes on their tops. Sometimes the sticks are roofed over with a little straw. Sometimes they are tied up with strips of cloth like little flags, or a few bits of broken pot are laid in the shrine and a little meal is scattered around. Often a similar shrine is set up inside the village itself, and where a chief lives in his umbala or capital among the ancient trees it will very likely have developed into a “Kandundu”—the abode of a great magic spirit, who dwells in a kind of cage on the top of a long pole. The worship of the Kandundu is in some vague way connected with a frog, and the spirit is supposed to reveal himself and utter his oracles to the witch-doctor in that form. But if you get a chance of exploring that cage on the palm pole, you generally find no frog, but only greasy rags. The bright point about the Kandundu is that the spirit can become actively benevolent instead of being merely a terror to be averted, like most of the spirits in Africa. The same high praise can also be given to Okevenga, whose name may be connected with the great river Okavango, and who is certainly a benevolent spirit, watching over women, and helping them with their fields, their sowing, and their children.

These are the only two exceptions I have hitherto met with to the general malignity of the spiritual world in this part of Africa. The spirits of the dead are always evil disposed, when they return at all, and they are the common agents of the witchcraft that plays so large a part in village life and is the cause of so much slavery. It is not uncommon for a woman to kill herself in order to haunt her mother-in-law or another wife of whom she is jealous. And it is partly to keep the spirit quiet for the year or so before it gradually fades away into nothingness that poles surmounted by the skulls of oxen are set above a grave. Partly also this is to display the wealth of the family, which could afford to kill an ox or two at the funeral feast; just as in England the mass of granite heaped upon a tomb is intended rather to establish the respectability of the deceased than to secure his repose.