AMONG
CONGO CANNIBALS
INTRODUCTION
When living at San Salvador, in what is now known as the Portuguese Congo, in the early eighties of last century, the writer frequently conversed with the natives about the inhabitants of the far interior who occupied the banks of the Great Congo River and its tributaries. The San Salvador folk assured him that the natives of the mysterious hinterland were “half fish and half human”; that “from the navel upwards they were human, and downwards they were fish.” No arguments would alter their opinion, and no amount of good-natured raillery would shift them from their position; and they generally clinched the matter by saying: “You have never seen these people; but some of our grandfathers saw them, and told our fathers about them.”
One night this general belief that up-river folk were “half fish and half human,” received a severe shock from which, I think, it never recovered. A caravan that had been trading towards Stanley Pool returned to San Salvador bringing with it a slave woman from far up the river. About midnight I was aroused to go and see this woman. No one understood her language; but she was making vigorous signs, and her owner was not sure whether the gestures indicated hunger, fatigue, or illness; so there was nothing for it but to “call the white man to interpret the signs,” or, perchance to talk with her, “for these white men know everything, therefore let us send for one residing in our town.”
On arriving at the hut we saw, by the flickering blaze of the fire, a fine, well-proportioned woman of splendid physique. Her hair was arranged in a coiffure, coloured, stiffened, and kept in shape by being plastered with palm-oil, and the powder of burnt pea-nuts, or soot. It looked as though she wore a shining black fez on her head, slightly tilted backwards. She was probably a Bambala, or a Kiteke woman of that branch of the tribe that lived behind the riverine folk three hundred miles above Stanley Pool.
The signs were interpreted as denoting some stomach trouble, and after a little medicine had been given we heard no more about it. During the short time she remained in the town she was the observed of all observers—a curiosity from afar; but her appearance killed once for all “the half human and half fish” theory the San Salvador natives had so fondly held respecting the inhabitants of the Upper Congo.
When in later years I went to live among the Bangalas on the Upper River, I found that they held as strange theories about the remoter peoples higher up, or north and south of them. They would tell of monsters down south whose chief was a woman[[1]] with a white skin that shone so fiercely that the eyes of those who looked on her were scorched; or of people away north who lived in trees and ate raw flesh, etc., because they did not know how to make a fire; or of folk far away in the watery west who lived half their time in the water and had webbed feet like ducks. It would seem as though folk of all climes, of all ages, and of all degrees of civilization have amused themselves by peopling unknown regions with mythical monsters—Cyclops, men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders, centaurs, mermaids, etc., and that even the savages of barbarous Africa beguiled the long evenings around their fires by conjuring up freaks in nature, like the more learned ancients, to inhabit the countries beyond their ken.
[1]. Had the fact that some portions of South Africa were governed by a woman—Queen Victoria—filtered through the tribes in this distorted fashion?
There is another peculiarity of the natives, worthy, perhaps, of notice in this connection: those who live on the coast always refer to the hinterland folk in contemptuous terms as “bush-people,” i.e. ignorant, dull, slow in the up-take, or as we say, country yokels, clod-hoppers. When you arrive in the hinterland you find that dwellers in the large towns speak of those who live in the villages and hamlets as “bush-people,” and they put into their tones such contempt that one is surprised to find that they belong to the same tribe and speak the same language.