The women are only allowed to wear two of these pieces of cloth, the size of the wearer not being taken into consideration. One is hung at each side, and the edges are joined before and behind, so that a large and fat woman presents a very absurd appearance, the pieces of cloth being too short to meet properly.
The Ishogos seldom go armed, and although they have spears, and bows and arrows, they do not carry them except when actually required. It is thought etiquette, however, for them to take their swords with them when they go to visit another village. They are a quiet and peaceful people, and although they have at hand the means of intoxicating themselves, they are remarkable for their sobriety, in which virtue they present a pleasing contrast to their noisy, quarrelsome, and intemperate neighbors, the Apono tribe.
The villages of the Ishogo tribe are often very large, containing two hundred or more huts. Each hut is, on an average, twenty-two feet in length, and ten or twelve feet in width, and is divided by partitions into three compartments. The mud Avails are not quite five feet in height, and the top of the roof is about nine feet from the ground. The doors are placed in the middle of the central compartment, and are very small, only a little more than two feet and a half in height, and are not hung on hinges, but turn in the middle on a couple of pivots, one at the top and the other at the bottom. Perhaps one reason for this diminutive size is, that the natives have no saws, and their only method of making a door is by felling the trunk of a tree, cutting it into the proper length, and laboriously chipping away the wood at each side. The doors are decorated with various devices, complicated and even elegant patterns being painted on them in red, black, and white, &c. Most of the houses have the outer surface of the walls covered with the bark of trees.
The furniture of these huts is scarcely equal to the excellence of the architecture. Hanging from the roof are a quantity of calabashes, which contain water, palm wine, and oil, and are accompanied by plenty of cotton bags and cooking vessels. A well-furnished hut has also a number of plates and dishes, made either from reeds or from the rind of a plant called “astang,” divided into strips, and against the avails are stored the bundles of palm fibres from which the bongos are woven. Tobacco is also stored within the hut, and is completely enveloped in leaves.
(1.) THE CEREMONY OF M’PAZA.
(See [page 479].)
(2.) OBONGO MARKET.
(See [page 482].)
The usual form of a village is a single street, of great length, and sometimes exceedingly wide. The street of one village was fully a hundred yards in width, and was kept so neatly that not a single weed was to be seen in it,—a really remarkable fact when we remember the exceeding rapidity with which vegetation grows in this country. Each village has at least one “palaver-house,” while many have several. The “palaver-house” is more of a shed than a house, and consists chiefly of a roof and the posts which support it. In this house the men meet daily, to smoke, to hold trials, to receive strangers, and to indulge in that interminable gossip of which a relic still exists in the “discoursing” of Ireland.