On the anniversary of the death of the last Mangwendi they assemble from all the country round and hold a great feast in honour of the late chief, at which the present chief conducts the sacrifice. Dos Santos, in his ‘De Asia,’ describes almost the same thing as taking place amongst the Mocarangas in his day: ‘Obsequies are made every year to defunct kings; every year, in the month of September, when the first moon appears, the king makes grand obsequies for his predecessors, who are all buried there on a high rock where he lives, called Zimbaohe.’ This hill-set village, where the people of Mangwendi now sacrifice, is still called by them their Zimbabwe. Dos Santos describes the eating, drinking, and dancing just as it might be done now.
Another curious custom to which Dos Santos also alludes is continued amongst them to-day. At Mangwendi’s, during the ploughing season, they only work for five consecutive days; they observe the sixth, and call it Muali’s day, and rest in their huts and drink beer. The chief always announces this day of rest publicly to his tribe. Dos Santos gives the following account of it: ‘There are days on which they are not to work, appointed by the king, unknown to them, when they make feasts, and they call these days Mozimos, or the days of the holy who are already dead.’ The term Mozimo for the spirits of ancestors is still used in many parts of the country, and has been compared with the term molimo, used by the Bechuana for the Supreme Being. Alvarez [[342]]mentions the muzimo as the god of the Monomatapa, and Gravenbroek (A.D. 1695) also states: ‘Divinitatem aliquam Messimo dictam in lucis summo cultu venerantur.’ This day of rest is observed during the ploughing season only; it may possibly be of Semite origin, but more probably has been suggested by the obvious necessity and advantage of intervening days of rest during a period of hard work.
Mangwendi’s kraal is a very fine one, quite a long climb from the spot where we were encamped. It is surrounded by palisades, and at the entrance is a tree filled with trophies of the chase, the antlers of many deer, and the skins of many wild beasts, which present quite an imposing appearance. The chief was seated on a rock outside, chatting with his indunas, when we arrived. He took us into the village and had beer fetched for our delectation. He is an extremely courteous, gentlemanly man, and seems most friendly to the white men who come in his way; and as his kraal is not very far from the new road into Manicaland, and as this district is very populous, he is constantly visited by traders and others.
Mangwendi has ten wives, and two young girls, whom he has bought but not yet married, and his family consists of ten sons and ten daughters, one of whom, a bright-looking girl of about fifteen, came down to our camp to sell us meal and beer. Unfortunately we could get little else, for the traders had bought up all the available provisions, and from this point until we reached Umtali we suffered more from [[343]]starvation than during any part of our journeyings in Mashonaland. ’Mtoko’s bullock was done; we could get no meat at any of the kraals, or game along our road; our coffee, sugar, and jams were all done, and our meals, with rare exceptions, reduced themselves to millet-meal porridge, rice, and tea, none of which were very palatable without the ingredients of milk and sugar; and the provoking thing about Kaffir meal is that it will not bind to make bread, so that for the staff of life cold rice made into a shape was our only substitute. We generally kept our pockets full of the ground-nuts (arachis), commonly called ‘monkey-nuts,’ which are excellent when roasted in the embers, and capital assistants in warding off hunger.
On leaving Mangwendi’s we had regretfully to part with our bearers, who had accompanied us all the way from Kunzi’s, and engage fresh ones in their place. One of these, to our surprise, chose to take his wife with him, but as she had to carry her baby on her back and food for herself and her husband, she, poor thing, was so done up after our first day’s march of seventeen miles, that her husband sent her back again.
Our first camp after leaving Mangwendi’s was at a very interesting spot—an isolated granite kopje called Nyanger, rising about two hundred feet above the surrounding plain. It was entirely covered with old walls, irregular in shape, and similar to those above mentioned, and evidently in former years a place of great strength. It had been long abandoned, for [[344]]there were no signs of habitation thereon, and the approaches were full of débris. To the north-east of this kopje is a very curious grotto, or domed cave, entirely covered with Bushman drawings. A kudu and a buffalo are excellently drawn, almost worthy of a Landseer, and in their drawings one can distinctly trace three different periods of execution: (1) Crude and now faint representations of unknown forms of animal life. (2) Deeper in colour, and admirably executed, partly on the top of the latter, are the animals of the best period of this art in red and yellow. (3) Inartistic representations of human beings, which evidently belong to a period of decadence in the execution of this work.
The colours are invariably red, yellow, and black. I am told that the two former are obtained from certain coprolites found in these parts, which, when broken open, have a yellow dust inside.
In this curiously decorated cave we found also many graves formed by plastering up holes in the rock with a hard kind of cement. We opened one of them, and found that the corpse had been wrapped in skins and placed here. In the centre of the cave is a large semicircular wall, entered in the middle by a rounded entrance; behind this is a sort of palisade of grass matting placed against poles, to protect it from the wind, and behind this are similar cement-covered graves. Now the present race do not bury in this way, but evidently come here at certain times to keep the place in order, and doubtless venerate the [[345]]spot as the resting-place of remote ancestors. There are also several other graves on the flat space around Nyanger rock, piles of stones placed around a crescent-shaped wall, which is evidently a sort of rudimentary temple in which the sacrifices take place.
BUSHMAN DRAWINGS FROM NYANGER ROCK