Angola and the River Congo, vol. 2

by Joachim John Monteiro

“Diamba,” or wild hemp for smoking, is also largely sold.

The women vendors at these booths are amongst the best-looking and cleanest to be seen in Loanda, and with often quite small and well-formed hands and feet; they are very sharp traders, and all squat or lie down at full length on the hot sand, enjoying the loud gossip and chatter so dear to the African women with their friends and customers.

A square at the back of the custom-house is the general market of Loanda, and presents a curious scene, from the great variety of articles sold, and the great excitement of buyers and sellers crying out their wares and making their purchases at the top of their voices. The vendors, here again, are mostly women, and, as no booths are allowed to be put up, they wear straw hats with wide brims, almost as large as an ordinary umbrella, to shade themselves. Every kind of delicacy to captivate the negro palate and fancy is to be had here:—wooden dishes full of small pieces of lean, measly-looking pork; earthen pots full of cooked beans and palm-oil, retailed out in small platters, at so much a large wooden spoonful, and eaten on the spot; horrible-looking messes of fish, cakes, and pastry, &c., everything thickly covered with black flies and large bluebottles; large earthen jars, called “sangas,” and gourds full of “garapa,” or indian-corn beer; live fowls and ducks, eggs, milk, Chili peppers, small white tomatoes, bananas, and, in the season, oranges, mangoes sour-sop, and other fruits, “quiavos,” a few cabbage-leaves and vegetables, firewood, tobacco, pipes and stems, wild hemp, mats, pumpkins, sweet potatoes, palm and ground-nut oil, and dried and salt fish. The women squat on their heels, with their wares in front, all round and over the square, while hundreds of natives are jabbering and haggling over their bargains, as if their existence depended on their noisy exertions.

To the markets, especially, the black women take their dirty babies (they all seem to have babies, and the babies seem always dirty), and they let them roll about in the sand and rubbish, along with a swarm of children, mongrel dogs, and most miserable, lean, long-snouted pigs that turn over the garbage and quarrel for the choice morsels.

There are two other marketing places, one principally for fruit and firewood, the other where fried fish is the chief article, and where a number of negresses are always busy frying fish in oil in the open air. The natives swarm round to buy and eat the hot morsels which the greasy cooks are taking out of the hissing pans placed on stones on the ground over a wood fire,—these they put into wooden platters by their side, and then suck their oily fingers with their thick lips or rub them over their warm and perspiring faces and heads.

Loanda is most abundantly supplied with fish of many kinds, and fortunate it is for many of its inhabitants that the sea is so prodigal of its riches to them. The fish-market is an open space at the southern end of the town, under the cliff on which stands the Fort of San Miguel. Here, in the early morning and in the afternoon, come the fishermen with laden canoes and toss their cargoes on the sandy beach, loud with a perfect Babel of buyers and vendors. The smallest copper coin enables a native to buy enough fish for one day;—the crowd that collects daily at the fish-market, and the strange scene that it presents of noisy bustle, can therefore be imagined.

A number of women and children are always busy scaling and gutting fish, or cutting the large “pungos” and sharks into small pieces in large wooden tubs, where they lie slopping in their reddish, watery blood; others are frying fish, and roasting a fish like a herring, held in cleft sticks ([Plate XIV.]), six or seven in each, stuck upright in the sand all round a fire, or opening fish flat to dry in the sun for sale to the natives from the interior. The fish are caught, both in the bay and out at sea, with hook and line and with nets made of native-spun cotton.

The quantity of fish on the coast is incredible. I have often watched the bay at night to listen to the wonderful swishing noise made by the fish on the surface of the water, as they were scared by every flash of lightning. Steaming once into Ambriz Bay, its whole surface was alive and boiling, as it were, with fish. The captain of the steamer, who had in his lifetime been to all parts of the world, declared that he had never witnessed such a sight.

A small shark is often caught which is much esteemed by the natives, and is dried in the sun; also the “pungo,” which attains to as much as a hundred pounds in weight. It is no unusual sight to see one slung on a stick passed through the gills and carried on the shoulders of two blacks, with the tail dragging on the ground. It has very large, flat scales, and the flesh is not at all coarse in flavour. Latterly, the Portuguese have salted this fish in barrels, and when I was last at Loanda I was told of one man who had already salted 2000, and the season was not then over. It is this fish that is said by the natives to make the very loud and extraordinary noise that one hears so plainly at night or early morning, when in a boat or ship; it is said to press its snout against the vessel and then make the curious sound. I have heard it so strongly and plainly when lying in a bunk on board steamers that I have no doubt whatever the fish must have been touching the side of the vessel, and I have seen the blacks at other times splashing the water with an oar, because the loud drumming of the pungo kept them awake when lying in the bottom of a barge. The sound is like a deep tremolo note on a harmonium, and is quite as loud, but as if played under water. This low, sustained note has a very strange effect when first heard so unexpectedly in the still water. It is a migratory fish, and comes in shoals on the coast only from about June to August.

Another fish like a small cod, called “corvina,” is also migratory, visiting the coast from July to September, and appears to come from a northerly direction, as it is a month later in arriving at Mossamedes than it is at Benguella, a distance of about 160 miles.