“If the scene were witnessed in a lunatic asylum, it would be nothing out of the way, and quite appropriate as a means of letting off the excessive excitement of the brain. But here, gray-headed men joined in the performance with as much zest as others whose youth might be an excuse for making the perspiration start off their bodies with the exertion. Motebe asked what I thought of the Makololo dance. I replied, ‘It is very hard work, and brings but small profit.’ ‘It is,’ he replied; ‘but it is very nice, and Sekeletu will give us an ox for dancing for him.’ He usually does slaughter an ox for the dancers when the work is over. The women stand by, clapping their hands, and occasionally one advances within the circle, composed of a hundred men, makes a few movements, and then retires. As I never tried it, and am unable to enter into the spirit of the thing, I cannot recommend the Makololo polka to the dancing world, but I have the authority of no less a person than Motebe, Sekeletu’s father-in-law, for saying that it is very nice.”
Many of the Makololo are inveterate smokers, preferring hemp even to tobacco, because it is more intoxicating. They delight in smoking themselves into a positive frenzy, “which passes away in a rapid stream of unmeaning words, or short sentences, as, ‘The green grass grows,’ ‘The fat cattle thrive,’ ‘The fishes swim.’ No one in the group pays the slightest attention to the vehement eloquence, or the sage or silly utterances of the oracle, who stops abruptly, and, the instant common sense returns, looks foolish.” They smoke the hemp through water, using a koodoo horn for their pipe, much in the way that the Damaras and other tribes use it.
Over-indulgence in this luxury has a very prejudicial effect on the health, producing an eruption over the whole body that is quite unmistakable. In consequence of this effect, the men prohibit their wives from using the hemp, but the result of the prohibition seems only to be that the women smoke secretly instead of openly, and are afterward discovered by the appearance of the skin. It is the more fascinating, because its use imparts a spurious strength to the body, while it enervates the mind to such a degree that the user is incapable of perceiving the state in which he is gradually sinking, or of exercising sufficient self-control to abandon or even to modify the destructive habit. Sekeletu was a complete victim of the hemp-pipe, and there is no doubt that the illness, something like the dreaded “craw-craw” of Western Africa, was aggravated, if not caused, by over-indulgence in smoking hemp.
The Makololo have an unbounded faith in medicines, and believe that there is no ill to which humanity is subject which cannot be removed by white man’s medicine. One woman who thought herself too thin to suit the African ideas of beauty, asked for the medicine of fatness, and a chief, whose six wives had only produced one boy among a number of girls, was equally importunate for some medicine that would change the sex of the future offspring.
The burial-places of the Makololo are seldom conspicuous, but in some cases the relics of a deceased chief are preserved, and regarded with veneration, so that the guardians cannot be induced to sell them even for the most tempting prices.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
THE BAYEYE AND MAKOBA TRIBES.
MEANING OF THE NAME — GENERAL APPEARANCE AND CHARACTER — THIEVING — ABILITY IN FISHING — CANOES — ELEPHANT-CATCHING — DRESS — THE MAKOBA TRIBE — THEIR LOCALITY — A MAKOBA CHIEF’S ROGUERY — SKILL IN MANAGING CANOES — ZANGUELLAH AND HIS BOATS — HIPPOPOTAMUS HUNTING WITH THE CANOE — STRUCTURE OF THE HARPOON — THE REED-RAFT AND ITS USES — SUPERSTITIONS — PLANTING TREES — TRANSMIGRATION — THE PONDORO AND HIS WIFE.
THE BAYEYE TRIBE.
As the Bayeye tribe has been mentioned once or twice during the account of the Makololo, a few lines of notice will be given to them. They originally inhabited the country about Lake Ngami, but were conquered by another tribe, the Batoanas, and reduced to comparative serfdom. The conquerors called them Bakoba, i. e. serfs, but they themselves take the pretentious title of Bayeye, or Men. They attribute their defeat to the want of shields, though the superior discipline of their enemies had probably more to do with their victory than the mere fact of possessing a shield.
On one notable occasion, the Bayeye proved conclusively that the shield does not make the warrior. Their chief had taken the trouble to furnish them with shields, hoping to make soldiers of them. They received the gift with great joy, and loudly boasted of the prowess which they were going to show. Unfortunately for them, a marauding party of the Makololo came in sight, when the valiant warriors forgot all about their shields, jumped into their canoes, and paddled away day and night down the river, until they had put a hundred miles or so between them and the dangerous spot.