RIVER SCENERY
Although the Kikuyu are fearless fighters when their blood is up and will slay their enemies without the slightest compunction, they have a most extraordinary fear of the dead, and would not on any account touch a corpse, for which reason they never bury their dead. I have known a few instances of particularly wealthy or important natives being accorded the honour of burial, but, as a rule, when a native dies, if he happens to be in his hut, the body is left there, and no one ever enters the hut again. If a poor man, or a man of no particular standing, happens to fall sick, and they think he is likely to die, he is carried into the bush at some distance from the village, a fire is lighted, and a pile of wood placed handy so that he can replenish it, and he is then left to die.
The Kikuyu, like nearly all other African tribes, are polygamous, and the general rule seems to be that any ordinary individual may have three or four wives, though, as marriage is simply a question of paying so much for the woman, the number is apt to vary with the man’s wealth, some of the bigger chiefs having as many as twenty or thirty. They do not, of course, regard women in the same way that we do, but look upon them more in the light of slaves, the value of a wife being reckoned at about thirty sheep. The women have to do all the work of the family and house, the man himself doing practically nothing. They build the huts, cultivate the shambas, and do all the field work, though at certain times of the year when new ground has to be cleared for cultivation the men condescend to take a share in the work. Each wife has her own separate hut, where she lives with her family, and, if her husband is a big chief, he may have a hut for his own individual use, but, as a rule, he resides with his different wives alternately. They have very large families, and the children begin to take their share of the work at a very early age—the little girl of three years of age relieving her mother of the care of the baby of one year, and, as they grow older, their share in the work increases in proportion. The very young boys have their share in the work too, and may be seen at a very early age tending the herds of cattle, sheep, and goats. This practice, prevalent almost throughout Africa, of making the woman support the family, while the man does little but loaf or fight, is at the root of the often openly expressed desire of the (so-called) Christian natives that the Church should allow polygamy among her African converts—a desire which has been quite as strongly expressed by the “civilized” and educated natives on the West Coast as among the more primitive tribes of the East and the interior.
On the whole, the people seemed to lead a very happy and contented life. They are almost vegetarians in their manner of living, their staple food being sweet potatoes, although they include a variety of other articles in their diet, such as yams (which they call kigwa), matama, beans, Indian corn (or maize), and a smaller grain called mawhali, besides bananas, sugar-cane, &c. They also have a very small grain like canary-seed, called umkanori, which they grind into flour by means of a hand-mill, composed of two stones—a large one at the bottom, on which they place the grain, and a smaller one on top, with which they grind it, after the fashion of the mills described in the Bible as being in use in the East thousands of years ago. With the flour made from the umkanori-seed they make a kind of porridge, which I found very palatable. The natives call it ujuru, and it combines the properties of both food and drink, being left to ferment until it somewhat resembles tywala, or Kafir beer, and is very nourishing. When the natives are going on a journey which takes them any distance from their homes, or out to work in the fields, they take a calabash of ujuru with them, a smaller calabash, cut in half, being used as a cup, into which the liquid is poured for drinking.
The Kikuyu appeared to have no regular hour for eating, except in the evening, when the day’s work is over. Then everybody, men, women, and children, could be seen sitting round a huge calabash, cut in half to form a kind of basin, all helping themselves from the contents of the vessel, which would, perhaps, consist of sweet potatoes, or Indian corn, or perhaps bananas, roasted. In connexion with this custom of the evening meal, I may here make mention of the open-handed hospitality which is the rule rather than the exception among all the native races of Africa; in fact, I make bold to say that any man who is willing to work at all cannot possibly be stranded in Africa, unless, it may be, in one of the larger towns. I have often noticed a native come into a village at the time of the evening meal, walk up to the circle, and sit down and help himself to sweet potatoes or whatever there might be; and on my remarking to the headman on the number of his grown-up sons I have been told, “Oh, that is not one of my sons; he is a stranger.” When I asked where he came from, I was told that they did not know; they had not asked him even his name, and knew nothing whatever about him. He would settle himself by the fire for the night, and go on his way the next morning without his host being any the wiser as to his name or where he came from.
This is only one of the points in which the ignorant heathen so often set an example worthy of imitation by some of the so-called civilized Christians.
They grow a calabash which serves them for almost every household purpose, such as storing liquid, carrying water, or as a drinking vessel. For carrying grain or other purposes of that kind they make a bag from the fibre which they obtain from certain trees, and which varies in size according to the purpose for which it is required; while for cooking or for storing large quantities of water they use earthenware pots, which are made in certain districts of the Kikuyu country in practically the same way as pottery was made in the early days in our own country, being fashioned out of a particular kind of clay and then burnt to harden them. The method of cooking is very much the same throughout Africa, a small fire being made within a triangle, composed of three large stones. An old camp may always be recognized by these three stones, which show where the fire was made for cooking, although all other traces of the camp may have disappeared under a luxuriant growth of grass, several feet high.
The Kikuyu make all their own weapons—spears, swords, and arrows—from the iron which is found in various parts of the country, and which they smelt in the old-fashioned way. I found that the style of bellows used by them was the same as those I had seen in other parts of Africa, being made out of a sheepskin, fashioned to a pointed bag, which, when opened, admitted the air and expelled it again when pressed down. Two sets of bellows were worked together, one with each hand. The native blacksmith uses a large stone as an anvil, and possesses a variety of hammers, some of them being simply ordinary pieces of stone, while others are in the form of a dumb-bell, which he grasps in the middle when striking with it. Singularly enough, the tongs which he uses to hold the heated iron are practically the same as those used by the English blacksmith. As the smith is, of course, paid for his labour in kind, he charges one sheep for a spear, while a sword may be had for the same price. I found that a lot of the iron-wire which I brought into the country was worked up into swords and spears, possibly because it entailed less labour than the working up of the native iron. In addition to the fighting weapons, they made iron rings and chains, which were worn as ornaments.
Speaking of ornaments, one very characteristic feature of Kikuyu adornment is the enormous size of their ear appendages—they cannot be called earrings. When the children are quite young a hole is made in the lobe of the ear, similar to the fashion in Europe of piercing the lobe for earrings. But they are not content with the comparatively small ornaments that satisfy the vanity of European women: their ambition is to have the ear ornament as large as they can possibly manage; so the hole in the lobe of the ear is distended by means of a series of wooden pegs, gradually increasing in size until it is large enough to allow of the insertion of a jam-jar or condensed milk tin, which are by no means unusual ornaments for a native to be seen wearing in the ear. And very proud they are as they go about wearing these extraordinary adornments, which one would think must be decidedly uncomfortable for the wearers; they certainly appear so to European eyes, but the natives do not seem to consider them so, and are quite satisfied with the effect.