This country well repays the collector, though East Africa is considered a rather dull ethnographical area compared with the Congo basin, North Kamerun, and some other parts of West Africa. It is true that one must not be very exacting as to the artistic quality of weapons and implements produced by these tribes. I was all the more surprised to find among the specimens of wood-carving, collected in my district, some veritable little gems. The dancing-masks are for the most part mere conventional representations of human faces (those of women being distinguished by the pelele and ear-ornaments), or of animal heads. A few specimens in my collection are supposed to be portraits of celebrities—some heroes of the late insurrection, a young girl famous for her beauty, and sundry others, but on the whole, it cannot be denied that they are very roughly executed. Of a somewhat higher type are the statues of the Ancestress alluded to in a previous chapter. They leave, it is true, a great deal to be desired on the score of anatomical knowledge and harmony of proportions, but, on the other hand, some of these figures are, so far as I know, the only ones from Africa in which the feet have been worked out in detail.
MAKONDE WOMEN WITH ELABORATE KELOIDS
But it is above all the mitete, the little wooden boxes in which the people keep their snuff, their medicines, and sometimes their gunpowder—which show real taste and a style and execution which can pass muster even from our point of view. The ornamentation which the elder generation of men carry about on their skins in the form of keloids is applied to the lids of these boxes. Some of them take the shape of heads of animals: various kinds of monkeys, the gnu, the bush-buck, and other antelopes, but oftenest the litotwe. This is a creature of all others likely to catch the artist’s eye and tempt him to reproduce it. It is a large rat, about the size of a rabbit, and with a head which, by its shape, suggests that of the elephant, or at least the ant-eater, the snout terminating in a long delicate proboscis. At Chingulungulu Salim Matola caught one of these creatures for me, but it escaped before I had time to sketch more than its head.
AFRICAN ART. CARVED POWDER, SNUFF AND CHARM-BOXES FROM THE MAKONDE HIGHLANDS
MAKONDE MAN WITH KELOID PATTERNS
Human heads, too, are found among these carvings, and are executed with the same skill in technique. Most of them have the hair dressed in a long pig-tail, and the face still more cicatrized than the Makonde; these, I learn, represent members of the Mavia tribe. I cannot discover whether they are the work of local artists, or of the Mavia themselves. The vendors either give no answer at all when asked or say, as all natives do when ignorant of the origin of an article, “mshenzi,” that is to say, “some unknown person away at the back of the bush.” However, this does not affect our critical judgment.
In the practice of one kind of art the Makonde seem to be deficient. As has been my custom elsewhere, I occupy all my spare time in long walks, in order to observe the natives in their own homes. This, however, is not so easy as it was in other places. I think it would be possible to walk over the whole Makonde plateau without finding a single settlement, so closely are the little hamlets hidden away in the bush. But we have here an ideal guide, Ningachi, the teacher, whose name means, “What do you think?” Ningachi is a very decent, honest man, but thinking, in spite of his name, does not appear to be his strong point. Indeed, he has but little time for thought, being my courier and interpreter, and in that capacity kept busy from morning to night. He has even made himself useful by walking enormous distances to fetch plump young fowls for our table.