After a while the pounding ceases, the women draw long breaths and wipe the perspiration from their faces and chests. It has been hard work, and, performed as it is day by day, it brings about the disproportionate development of the upper arm muscles which is so striking in the otherwise slight figures of the native women. With a quick turn of the hand, the third woman has now taken the pounded mass out of the mortar and put it into a flat basket about two feet across. Then comes the winnowing; stroke on stroke at intervals of ten and twenty seconds, the hand with the basket describes a semicircle, open below—not with a uniform motion, but in a series of jerks. Now one sees the husks separating themselves from the grain, the purpose served by the mortar becomes manifest, and I find that it has nothing to do with the production of flour, but serves merely to get off the husk.
The winnowing is quickly done, and with a vigorous jerk the shining grain flies into another basket. This is now seized by the fourth woman, a plump young thing who has so far been squatting idly beside the primitive mill of all mankind, the flat stone on which the first handful of the grain is now laid. Now some life comes into her—the upper stone passes crunching over the grains—the mass becomes whiter and finer with each push, but the worker becomes visibly warm. After a time the first instalment is ready, and glides slowly down, pushed in front of the “runner” into the shallow bowl placed beneath the edge of the lower stone. The woman draws breath, takes up a fresh handful and goes to work again.
This preparation of flour is, as it was everywhere in ancient times, and still is among the maize-eating Indians of America, the principal occupation of the women. It is, on account of the primitive character of the implements, certainly no easy task, but is not nearly so hard on them as the field-work which, with us, falls to the lot of every day-labourer’s wife, every country maid-servant, and the wives and daughters of small farmers. I should like to see the African woman who would do the work of one German harvest to the end without protesting and running away.
NATIVE WOMEN PREPARING MEAL. (POUNDING, SIFTING, GRINDING)
The care of the household is not unduly onerous. The poor man’s wife in our own country cannot indeed command a great variety of dishes, but her housekeeping is magnificence itself compared with the eternal monotony of native cooking—millet-porridge to-day, maize-porridge to-morrow, and manioc-porridge the day after, and then da capo. It may be admitted that the preparation of this article of diet is perhaps not so simple as it seems. I might suggest a comparison with the Thuringen dumpling, which takes the inspiration of genius to prepare faultlessly—but surely the most stupid negress must some time or other arrive at the secret of making ugali properly. Knudsen, in his enthusiasm for everything genuinely African, eats the stuff with intense relish—to me it always tastes like a piece of linen just out of the suds. The operation is simple enough in principle—you bring a large pot of water to the boil and gradually drop in the necessary meal, stirring all the time. The right consistency is reached when the whole contents of the pot have thickened to a glassy, translucent mass. If a European dish is wanted for comparison, we need only recall the polenta of Northern Italy, which is prepared in a similar way, and tastes very much the same.
I am glad to say that my own cook’s performances go far beyond those of the local housewives, though his ability—and still more, unfortunately, his willingness—leave much to be desired. Omari’s very appearance is unique—a pair of tiny, short legs, ending in a kind of ducks’ feet, support a disproportionately long torso, with a head which seems as if it would never end at all; the man, if we may speak hyperbolically, is all occiput. He is a Bondei from the north of the colony, but of course calls himself a Swahili; all the back-country Washenzi do, once they have come in contact with the Coast civilization which is so dazzling in their eyes. Omari is the only married man among my three servants; he says that he has four children, and speaks of his wife with evident awe. She did not, indeed, let him go till he had provided liberally for her support, i.e., induced me to open an account of seven rupees a month for her with the firm who do my business at Dar es Salam.
I have put my three blackamoors into uniform khaki suits, whereupon all three have appointed themselves corporals of the Field Force, by persuading the tailor to sew a chevron in black, white and red on their left sleeve. They are inexpressibly proud of this distinction, but their virtues, unfortunately, have not kept pace with their advancement. At Masasi I had to begin by applying a few tremendous cuffs to stimulate Omari’s energy. This corrective has proved inefficient in the case of the other two, as they will move for nothing short of the kiboko. If each of the three had to be characterised by a single trait, I should say that Omari is superstition personified; Moritz, crystallized cunning; and Kibwana, a prodigy of stupidity; while a mania (which has not yet entirely disappeared) for coming to me at every spare moment to demand an advance, is common to all three. All three, of course, make their exit in the same hurried manner. If in forming my ethnographical collections I had to deal entirely with people like my cook, I should not secure a single specimen. The fellow displays an amulet on his left arm—a thin cord, with, apparently, a verse from the Koran sewn into it. I remarked to him, in an off-hand way, “Just sell me that thing!” He protested loudly that he could not and would not do so, for he would infallibly die the moment it left his arm. Since then I have been in the habit of amusing myself by now and then making him an offer for his talisman; on each successive occasion he raises the same outcry. And as for his drawing! At Lindi, he once brought me the map of his native country, charted by himself on a piece of greasy paper. No one could make head or tail of it, except perhaps the devil whose presentment he brought me the following day, drawn on the reverse of the same piece of paper. Omari’s Prince of Darkness has no less than four heads, but only two arms and one leg—at least such is the verbal description he gives me; his drawing, like his map, is an inextricable chaos of crooked lines. My carriers are artists of quite another stamp. What spirit, for instance, is shown in a drawing by Juma, usually the most phlegmatic of mortals, intended to represent a troop of monkeys attacking a plantation—his own shamba in point of fact. But we shall have to come back later on to the draughtsmanship of the natives.
MONKEYS ATTACKING A PLANTATION. DRAWN BY JUMA