He treats his wife pretty well, but has an odd ascending series of punishments. Should he detect her in an infidelity, he boils a pot of oil, cuts off the offender’s left hand, and plunges the stump into the oil to heal the bleeding. For the second offence she loses the right hand, and for the third the head, on which occasion the boiling oil is not required. Partly on account of this law, and partly on account of their ugliness, which is said to be portentous, the women display better morals than the generality of their African sisters.
Dr. Hutchinson, who resided in Fernando Po for some time, has not a very favorable opinion of the Bubés, thinking that the twenty or thirty thousand of their tribe form the greatest obstacle to civilization. He states, moreover, that although the Baptist missionaries have been hard at work among them for seventeen years, they had not succeeded in Christianizing or civilizing, or even humanizing, a single Bubé.
They are not an intellectual race, and do not appear to know or care much about the division of time, the new moon and the beginning of the dry season marking their monthly and annual epochs. The latter begins in November, and for two months the Bubés hold a festival called Lobo, in which marriages are generally celebrated. Dr. Hutchinson was able to witness a Bubé marriage, and has given a very amusing account of it. The reader may find it [illustrated] on the preceding page. The bride was a daughter of the king. “On getting inside of the town our first object of attraction was the cooking going on in his Majesty’s kitchen. Here a number of dead ‘ipa’ (porcupines) and ‘litcha’ (gazelles) were in readiness to be mingled up with palm oil, and several grubs writhing on skewers, probably to add piquancy to the dishes. These are called ‘inchaee,’ being obtained from palm trees, and look at first sight like Brobdignagian maggots. Instead of waiting to see the art of the Fernandian Soyer on these components, I congratulated myself on my ham sandwiches and brandy-and-water bottle safely stowed in my portmanteau, which one of the Krumen carried on his back, and sat on my camp-stool beneath the grateful shade of a palm tree to rest a while.
“Outside a small hut belonging to the mother of the bride expectant, I soon recognized the happy bridegroom, undergoing his toilet from the hands of his future wife’s sister. A profusion of tshibbu strings (i. e. small pieces of Achatectona shell, which represent the currency in Fernando Po) being fastened round his body, as well as his legs and arms, the anointing lady (having a short black pipe in her mouth) proceeded to putty him over with tola paste. He seemed not altogether joyous at the anticipation of his approaching happiness, but turned a sulky gaze now and then to a kidney-shaped piece of brown-painted yam, which he held in his hand, and which had a parrot’s red feather fixed on its convex side. This I was informed was called ‘ntsheba,’ and is regarded as a protection against evil influence during the important day.
“Two skewer-looking hair-pins, with heads of red and white glass beads, fastened his hat (which was nothing more than a disk of bamboo plaiting) to the hair of his head; and his toilet being complete, he and one of the bridesmen, as elaborately dressed as himself, attacked a mess of stewed flesh and palm oil placed before them, as eagerly as if they had not tasted food for a fortnight. In discussing this meal they followed the primitive usage of ‘fingers before forks,’ only resting now and then to take a gulp of palm wine out of a calabash which was hard by, or to wipe their hands on napkins of cocoa-leaf, a process which, to say the least of it, added nothing to their washerwomen’s bill at the end of the week.
“But the bride! Here she comes! Led forth by her own and her husband-expectant’s mother, each holding her by a hand, followed by two ‘nepees’ (professional singers) and half-a-dozen bridesmaids. Nothing short of a correct photograph could convey an idea of her appearance. Borne down by the weight of rings, wreaths, and girdles of ‘tshibbu,’ the tola pomatum gave her the appearance of an exhumed mummy, save her face, which was all white—not from excess of modesty (and here I may add, the negro race are expected always to blush blue), but from being smeared over with a white paste, symbolical of purity.
“As soon as she was outside the paling, her bridal attire was proceeded with, and the whole body was plastered over with white stuff. A veil of strings of tshibbu shells, completely covering her face, and extending from the crown of her head to the chin, as well as on each side from ear to ear, was then thrown over her; over this was placed an enormous helmet made of cowhide; and any one with a spark of compassion in him could not help pitying that poor creature, standing for more than an hour under the broiling sun, with such a load on her, whilst the nepees were celebrating her praises in an extempore epithalamium, and the bridegroom was completing his finery elsewhere.
“Next came a long chant—musical people would call it a howl—by the chief nepee. It was about as long as ‘Chevy Chase,’ and celebrated the beauties and many virtues of the bride, among which was rather oddly mentioned the delicious smell which proceeded from her. At every pause in the chant the audience struck in with a chorus of ‘Hee! hee! jee! eh!’ and when it was over the ceremony proceeded.
“The candidates for marriage having taken their positions side by side in the open air, fronting the little house from which the bride elect had been led out by the two mothers, and where I was informed she had been closely immured for fifteen months previous, the ceremony commenced. The mothers were the officiating priests—an institution of natural simplicity, whose homely origin no one will dare to impugn. On these occasions the mother-bishops are prophetically entitled ‘boowanas,’ the Fernandian for grandmother.
“Five bridesmaids marshalled themselves alongside the bride postulant, each, in rotation, some inches lower than the other, the outside one being a mere infant in stature, and all having bunches of parrots’ feathers on their heads, as well as holding a wand in their right hands. The mother stood behind the ‘happy pair,’ and folded an arm of each round the body of the other—nepees chanting all the while, so that it was barely possible for my interpreter to catch the words by which they were formally soldered. A string of tshibbu was fastened round both arms by the bridegroom’s mother; she, at the same time, whispering to him advice to take care of this tender lamb, even though he had half-a-dozen wives before. The string was then unloosed. It was again fastened on by the bride’s mother, who whispered into her daughter’s ear her duty to attend to her husband’s farm, tilling his yams and cassava, and the necessity of her being faithful to him. The ratification of their promise to fulfil these conditions was effected by passing a goblet of palm wine from mother to son (the bridegroom), from him to his bride, from her to her mother, each taking a sip as it went round.