Venezuela

by Leonard V. Dalton

The Banibas are found chiefly along the Guainia and the Atabapo Rivers, their villages extending into Brazil and Colombia. They are said to be intelligent and peaceable, of a sedentary mode of life, excellent boatmen and hammock-makers. Tavera-Acosta, adopting the view that they are a branch of the ancient Quichua nation, gives d’Orbigny’s description of the latter thus: “The head is oblong, nose long, slightly aquiline, eyes horizontal, profile almost European, though the cheek-bones are higher. They are serious, somewhat melancholy, industrious, with an intelligent expression, but reserved. Neither red nor copper in colour, but bronze. The foot is small, but instep rather high.”

Their villages are composed of round conical huts, built of poles covered with palm-leaves, each hut containing twenty or thirty of the same family. All the work is done by the young men and women, the elders living a life of absolute idleness; the men hunt and collect the rubber and other produce of the forest, travelling about in canoes; the women attend to the household duties, fish, and sow the small fields with maize and manioc. The hammocks made by the Banibas are especially noted, some being beautifully interwoven with feathers; the best have been known to fetch as much as £40.

Their staple foods are maize flour, manioc meal, and the cakes of arepa or cassava made therefrom; the meal they preserve by treating it with a preparation of bitter yuca, known as murujui; fish, smoked and dried tapir meat, and small game vary their diet, and in default of other beverages they drink yucuta, the chicha of the Warraus.

Their religious beliefs and customs have been considerably affected by the presence in the region of Jesuits and other missionaries from an early period in the Spanish occupation; hence Roman scapularies and pagan fetiches are found side by side, and their form of worship, as well as their faith, is a similar mixture of pagan and heathen dogmas.

Their customs as regards birth, sickness, and death are sufficiently similar to the rest of the aborigines to render description unnecessary, but the marriage ceremony is bound up with the celebration of the pubescence of the girls, which is extraordinarily barbarous in view of the high standard of their morals and general character.

When a maiden of the tribe attains the age of puberty her mother communicates the fact to the elders of the village, and her daughter is shut up alone in a hut, where she is expected to lie in a hammock, eating and drinking only a little manioc and water. Notice being given, the eligible youths of the community apply to her father for the girl, who is promised to him who shall bring as a present the best piece of curare, the finest hammock, or certain kinds of fish or game. The bridegroom having been thus selected, the girl’s seclusion is over. She is led forth, with eyes bandaged and head covered with a kind of bonnet, to a stake in the centre of the village, where the elders tie up and beat the unfortunate damsel with whips of cord or fish-skin, sometimes studded with sharp stones; the proceedings are accompanied by the blowing of conches. The two senior elders then advance inside the revolving circle and command the supposed demon in the girl to leave her and enter the stake to which she is tied, and presently, at a given signal, the flagellation ceases. The girl, often fainting from pain and weakness, is released and taken away to a distance; her wounds are washed and soothing herbs applied, while the youngest elder present is dispatched to advise the bridegroom that his future wife has been freed from the demon and is to be found in such and such a place. Then he goes from house to house shouting, “Come and burn the demon which would have taken possession of such and such a girl!”

Meanwhile the bridegroom has found the bride and taken her to his father’s house, and the rest of the population is collected round the stake, which is surrounded with faggots; the women, wearing fringed belts and holding one another by the waist, dance round in a ring execrating the demon; the men shout and sing and drink strong liquors prepared previously by the girl’s parents. The bridegroom, having left the bride with his mother, approaches with a torch to fire the pile, and apostrophises the demon, telling him that the girl he wished to harm is now his wife, paid for with curare (or whatever the present may have been), and finally, in token of their vengeance, he lights the faggots to the sound of a fearful din from the conches, tambourines, and maracas. All the people dance up to the fire and back again, the men lined up on one side, the women on the other, finally circling round till everything is consumed. In this way the safety of the bride from evil influences is secured, and she is recognised henceforth as the wife of her purchaser.

Sir Everard im Thurn described the Arawaks, of whom there are many families, as one of the most advanced groups in British Guiana, whence they extend into Venezuela. They build the cleanest and best houses, sometimes square and sometimes round, especially on the savannahs. Their standard of morality is high, and their religious belief, where untouched by those of the colonists, is a pure animism. He notes, however, that they use one general term very frequently in apostrophising a heavy rain, severe thunderstorm, or other unpleasant display of the powers of the air, without any definite idea of one being. This term, Oenicidu, he suggests, represents an approach to recognition of a single force behind all the phenomena of Nature, which might grow into a belief in a Supreme Spirit. Those who wish to know the folklore of these and neighbouring peoples should turn to Sir Everard’s book on the Indians of Guiana.

We have already seen that, while the early Romish missionaries in the north of Venezuela did much good in civilising and settling the Indians there, who have since become amalgamated with the Castilian element, in Guiana the atrocities perpetrated by the Jesuits far outweighed any good effect produced by the lessons of industry inculcated in the mission settlements. It is not surprising, therefore, in view of the early opposition of some of even the better ecclesiastics to the republic, that foreign priests and monks of all denominations were prohibited from entering the republic. There has been absolute freedom for all beliefs within the country since 1854, however, and the State contributes to the support of the Catholic churches throughout the land, while reserving the right to make all ecclesiastical appointments and to admit or reject papal bulls as it sees fit.

These remarks are made here in partial explanation of the absence of any recent attempts on the part of any branch of the Christian Church to convert or civilise the natives of Guayana. There is little inducement for the 409 priests who serve the 547 churches of the country to penetrate the unattractive regions of Guayana, and no Protestant missionaries have been found willing to sacrifice their nationality in order to take up the work. Yet these Indians are fine material for a sincere apostle to work upon, and were they given an incentive to use their time well, the talents of the best among them might soon lessen the distance between that visionary prosperous future of Guayana and the present day, when both land and inhabitants are standing still amid the progress of the world.