MANUAL CHRONOLOGY. “THAT HAPPENED WHEN I WAS SO HIGH”
The entire absence of a fixed chronology makes itself felt more especially in tribal history. Considering, on the one hand, the sublime indifference to space and time already referred to, and on the other the difficulty of framing intelligible questions guaranteed not to produce misleading answers, I was ready to despair of any satisfactory result; but I soon found that my informants possessed a primitive yet tolerably trustworthy method of dating occurrences.
“When was it that you lived on the Lumesule?” I asked old Akundonde. Without a word, he stretched his right arm out horizontally, at a height about corresponding to that of a twelve-year-old boy, and bent his hand gracefully upward, so that the elbow formed nearly a right angle. I watched this manœuvre in silent astonishment, but Knudsen immediately furnished the explanation amid an approving murmur from all present. It seems that this is the native way of indicating the height (and consequently the age) of a human being; the height of an animal is always shown by stretching the arm out straight without raising the hand. I must confess that, among all the new and strange impressions which have hitherto crowded in on my mind here in Africa, this delicate and yet so significant distinction between man and beast is the most striking. Nakaam at Mwiti made use of a somewhat different pantomime when relating to me the history of the Yaos. Nakaam draws a distinction between pure and mixed Yaos; reckoning among the former the Chiwaula, the Katuli, and the Kalanje. This is a point not hitherto recognised in the ethnological literature dealing with the Yaos; and it must be reserved for later criticism to test the evidence of my intelligent but perhaps somewhat slippery Chiwata informant. According to Nakaam, the home of the true Yaos is Likopolwe, a hilly district in the Chisi country, in Portuguese territory between Mataka’s and Unangu Mountain. They were expelled thence by the chief Mputa, when Nakaam’s mother was still a little child crawling on all fours. Nakaam is, on his own testimony, the fourth child of his mother, and may be any age from forty to forty-five. After Mputa came others of the Makua, and broke up the Yao tribe still more. Nakaam undoubtedly ranks as an intellectual giant, comparatively speaking, but even he could give no exact chronological date. Some compensation for this was to be found in the comical sight presented when the portly chief—who was usually dignity personified—was so carried away by his narrative as to forget what was due to his exalted position and show us, in most realistic pantomime, how his mother crawled about the ground when she was a baby.
Matola is in almost every point a contrast to Nakaam. The difference is seen even in their costume: Nakaam dresses, like a coast man, in the long, snow-white kanzu, while Matola is a European above and a Yao below, wearing a coloured cotton waist-cloth, like all his subjects, below a commonplace European jacket. The indications of cunning, so characteristic of Nakaam, are here quite absent; Matola impresses one as an honest man, and such, in fact, he is, if we may judge by the evidence of all the Europeans at Lindi who have ever come in contact with him. He is always occupied—either he is holding a court under his baraza, that is to say talking to the dozen or two dozen men who drop in and out there in the course of the day, or he is engaged with us and the satisfaction of our wants. In manners he differs little from his subjects. Smoking is all but unknown here, but everyone takes snuff and chews tobacco. One consequence of this habit is that the people are always expectorating, and Matola is no exception. Another objectionable habit, which he shares with his neighbours, is that of perpetually scratching himself. In fact, when one is surrounded by a crowd of them, it is difficult, in the midst of the universal scratching, to refrain from following the agreeable example. I assume that it is a result of the prevailing want of cleanliness; the water from the two or three holes in the nearest stream-bed is only just enough for cooking and drinking; there is none of the precious fluid left to wash one’s face, to say nothing of one’s whole body.
Of all my senses the olfactory is the best developed, and daily causes me acute suffering. When a party of natives honour me with a visit, their coming is heralded from afar off by a smell whose ingredients, including racial odour, perspiration, rancid oil, wood smoke, and a hundred others, our language is too poor to specify in full. What comes nearest to it is, perhaps, the exhalation from a large flock of sheep.
And then the flies! Along with the smell, which, so to speak, marches ahead of the main body, they come rushing in swarms on the unlucky European. I thought myself a model of prudence and foresight in bringing with me from Leipzig two pairs of spectacles with smoked glasses. One of these has long had its abiding-place on Moritz’s nose. The rascal appeared one fine day suffering from acute conjunctivitis, which, thanks to my energetic treatment, is by this time quite cured. But it has never entered the conceited fellow’s head to restore the glasses, which, in an access of exaggerated philanthropy, I had placed at his disposal. That he no longer really requires them is sufficiently shown by the fact that he usually takes them off in the bright sunlight, but wears them instead in the dusk of the house and of course stumbles over everything that happens to be standing about. The other pair serve me excellently well out of doors, but under the dark baraza they absorb too much light, and thus I am left without protection from the swarms of flies the natives bring with them. These African insects and our European house-flies are not to be mentioned in the same breath. Like a flash of lightning, a creature the size of a small bee comes rushing at you—not hitting the eye straight, but describing a tangent, and passing along inside the whole eyelid, with such incredible swiftness that defence is absolutely impossible. This is repeated over and over again, while the victim, in mingled astonishment and horror, watches the little wretches preparing for the attack by a short halt on the inflamed eyelids of the natives. Instinctively one hits out wildly all round to no purpose: the raid has already been successfully accomplished. Knudsen suffers less from this plague than I, and apparently also from the one previously mentioned; for, while I always feel more or less ill after a shauri lasting several hours, the blonde Norwegian sits all day long among the people unmoved.
There is not much to be seen of the women here. Matola has repeatedly issued stringent orders that they are all to come and be photographed, but so far only four or five have appeared. They no sooner see me than they make their escape as quickly as their native dignity and the peculiarities of the feminine mode of progression will permit.
On the other hand, I am persistently besieged by the male youth of the place. Our residence is surrounded by a perfect wall of small boys squatting on the ground, their mouths wide open, staring stupid and motionless at the white stranger. This open mouth is universal among the children here—as is also the well-known pot-belly; hardly a surprising phenomenon, if one sees the amount of indigestible vegetable food which one of these boys will stuff into himself in the course of the day. I am unable to judge how this unintentional deformation of the body disappears afterwards, but that it must do so is certain, the adults being without exception well-built men.
OUR CAMP AT CHINGULUNGULU