The time, however, has now come to say farewell to Newala, with its roaring evening gale, its cool mornings, its jiggers, and its interesting congeries of tribes.
The weeks of my stay here have been a time of hard work—averaging, one day with another, about sixteen hours daily,—and this very circumstance has produced a sort of attachment to the place, making one loth to part from it. We leave at daybreak to-morrow.
Note.—The itondosha suggests in some points a comparison with the Zulu umkovu, or “familiar” of wizards, who “are said to dig up a corpse and give it certain medicines which restore it to life, when they run a hot needle up the forehead towards the back part of the head, then slit the tongue, and it becomes an umkovu, speaking with an inarticulate confused sound, and is employed by them for wicked purposes” (Colenso’s Zulu Dictionary). The umkovu, like certain animals (the baboon, the wild cat), is, however, sent out on errands of mischief, instead of being set up in the mode indicated by Dr. Weule’s informant. See also Mr. Dudley Kidd’s Essential Kafir, p. 147, and Among the Zulus and Amatonga, by the late David Leslie, who calls them Esemkofu (isikovu?) and says that the witches who bring them to life clip off the top of the tongue so that the creature can only wail out “Maieh, maieh,” “which is a sound like the soughing of the wind.”—[Tr.]
CHAPTER XVI
THE ROVUMA ONCE MORE
On the Rovuma, about 39° 40′ E., October 23, 1906.
From a height of 2,300 feet above sea-level at Newala we have descended to something under 200 feet, and instead of the usual noonday temperature of 76° or 77°, we are sweltering in the jungle at 97° or thereabouts, though in the immediate neighbourhood of our old friend the Rovuma. But I must proceed in chronological order, if my narrative is to be intelligible.
The early morning of October 11th was as misty, raw and cold as all its predecessors, yet to our perceptions it did not resemble them in the least. The spectacle of uproarious high spirits, which my men presented when we left Chingulungulu was here repeated if possible in an intensified form. Newala proved, in fact, anything but a Capua for these poor fellows. Even Pesa mbili II, formerly a fellow of generous proportions, has become quite slender. When I asked him yesterday, “Tumbo lako wapi?” (“Where is your stomach?”) he replied with a mournful glance at the place it had once occupied, “Tumbo limekwenda, Bwana” (“It has gone away, sir”). Knudsen and I, by the way, can say much the same, for our khaki suits hang quite loosely round our wasted limbs.
Mahuta is the only place at which I could think of pursuing my Makonde studies. It is not only the political centre of the hill country, and the residence of the highest Government official, the Wali, but is from a geographical point of view very favourably situated for my purposes, as roads lead from it in all directions, by which I can easily reach the various native tribes, or by which, this being in every way more convenient, the natives can come to me. But, in the meantime, another goal was beckoning—the Wangoni enclave on the southern edge of the plateau.
From the day of my leaving Lindi I have heard all sorts of statements as to these Wangoni, who of course are supposed to be akin to the Kafir tribes of that name on the eastern shore of Lake Nyasa. On one of the many raids in which these tribes, whether called Mazitu, Mafiti, Magwangwara, Wamachonde, or Wangoni, have more or less laid waste, the whole southern part of German East Africa, this division was separated from the main body by a gallant counter-attack of the Yaos under Matola I, and driven into the Nchichira district, on the southern edge of the Makonde plateau. Nils Knudsen had more information to give me than this; he described the Wangoni as splendid figures of warriors, in every respect immeasurably superior to their present neighbours, and even to his beloved Wayao. And if I wanted to see regular villages—rows of houses with fine streets between them,—he said, I must go to Nchichira. “So I will, but of course you must come, too,” was my answer. Honest Nils did not wait for a second invitation: the Rovuma and elephant-hunting are in his mind inseparably connected, and I think he would walk straight to the Congo without stopping, if anyone told him that a decent-sized tusker had been seen there. He is a good shot, too, in spite of the unwieldy old-fashioned guns—in a very shaky condition, moreover—which form his armoury.
I therefore determined on an excursion to Nchichira, to see something of the Wangoni, before going on to Mahuta, where I mean to spend some weeks in order to finish my inquiries. I feel already as if I had collected nearly all the information I am capable of assimilating at present, and that there is some danger of my receptive faculties failing me one of these days, amid the abundance of new impressions.