The education of the girls is very limited; they are taught to repeat the salam, and a few prayers, but seldom to write; some of them however are tolerably well informed. The boys learn the Koran by heart; but it is to the education of the marabouts that most attention is paid; some of them are very well read in the precepts of their religion, and pretend to know more than we do of sacred history. They were quite surprised that I should know any thing of the Bible, and I gained great applause by reciting some of the adventures in the lives of the patriarchs; but they were still more astonished that I was acquainted with the history of Mahomet, and this gained me their good-will more than any thing else.
Till the education of the children is supposed to be finished they go very ill clad, or even naked; the boys have only a coussabe made out of a pagne; the girls are usually naked till the age of puberty; some wearing a small guinea cloth when they have left school, or when they have made especial progress in their studies, by way of distinction.
A father seldom instructs his own children, unless there is no school in the camp, in which case he teaches the girls, because it is not the custom to send them to school in another camp. The father does not complete the education of the boys; they commonly learn the first elements from him, and are then sent to some marabout who keeps school. The parents give each of them two cows, the milk of which supplies them with food; the master does not receive his salary till the education of the pupil is finished. The hassanes seldom learn to write, and their principal ambition is to ride a horse well and to fight.
The Moors assemble to prayers five times a day, the king always attending. Amongst the Braknas the mosque is formed by an enclosure of thorns, sometimes under the shelter of a mimosa, if there happens to be one at hand. The Moors often meet here to discuss affairs of business or politics; they even pass the whole of the day in chatting on indifferent subjects; but this holy place the women are not permitted to enter; they perform the salam before their own tents. Even the men, when they enter the mosque, observe a peculiar ceremonial, which consists in putting the right foot first, and leaving it with the left foremost: on entering the mosque they perform an ablution. They have no public crier, as amongst the negroes, to call them to prayer; but, according to ancient custom, one of the oldest marabouts summons them together by calling Allah akbar; several of the other marabouts repeat this cry on entering the mosque; the practice is not obligatory, but they seem to consider it as a duty.
The king’s tent differs in nothing from those of his subjects; it is twenty feet long and ten wide, and covered like all the others, with a stuff made of sheep’s hair;[22] at each end are eight leather straps, and as many stakes, upon which it is stretched. Two upright poles ten or twelve feet long, crossing at top and fitting into a cross-piece a foot long and six inches wide, are placed in the centre to raise it; this cross-piece rises above the uprights, and prevents their ends from piercing the awning. A carpet of sheep’s hair manufactured in the country surrounds the interior of the tent; four stakes are driven in at one end, supporting two cross-bars, over which a cord or string is passed in the form of a net, and upon this is placed their baggage. Their things are stowed in square leather sacks shaped like portmanteaus with an opening at the end; and these bags have a lid secured by a padlock.
The harness of the horses and camels hangs up round the tent. The king’s bed is after the same fashion as that of the negroes, consisting of a hurdle covered with mats, and raised by stakes and cross-bars about a foot from the ground. A mat spread on the ground covers the unoccupied part of the tent, and serves the king’s attendants for a bed. The common people lie on the ground on mats, under which they sometimes spread a little straw. A matting is put round the goods at the end of the tent, to preserve them from thieves. The store of water is kept in skins upon stakes in the inside of the tents; it is reserved for the masters and the calves, and refused to the slaves; and even she who has had the trouble to fetch it cannot obtain a little but by dint of entreaties and after enduring all sorts of mortifications.
The king’s table service consists of six or eight deep round wooden dishes, each containing about three quarts, and used to hold milk and other articles; three metal pots and two of earthen-ware, which they obtain from the Fouta, form the cooking apparatus, and complete the list of the furniture. This description will serve for all other tents as well as the king’s, except that the poorer class have mats instead of a carpet.
Hamet-Dou is almost always surrounded by guéhués or strolling singers, who abound among the Moors, and are always to be found in the train of the princes, from whom they obtain whatever they want, sometimes by threats, at others by the basest flattery. Every prince has one of these men in his retinue, and Hamet-Dou’s guéhué follows him wherever he goes. When they are seated together in the tent, he sings the king’s praise, and loads him with such outrageous panegyric, that none but an African monarch could hear it without blushing; the king’s wife and children usually join and repeat in chorus all the absurdities he can invent. These parasites have contrived to make themselves as much feared as despised by the Moors; they understand the art of persuasion in perfection; and though they are noted impostors and consigned to everlasting fire by public opinion, their calumny is so ingenious that it always injures the character of those against whom it is aimed. The marabouts have the greatest contempt for the guéhués, but they always receive them politely when they make their appearance, for fear of the false reports which they would raise if they were offended. The instruments which the guéhués use to accompany their songs are of two kinds. One, in the form of a guitar, is nothing but an oval gourd, covered with a well dried sheep-skin; this is crossed horizontally by a stick a foot long, upon which the strings of the instrument, five in number, are fastened: these strings are made of twisted hair, and the tone of this instrument, which is touched by the hand, is pleasing enough. The second is a sort of harp with fourteen strings of sheep’s gut, mounted upon a stick two feet long, and placed obliquely in a round calabash of much larger dimensions than the other. A leather thong, stretched horizontally over the skin which covers the gourd, serves to fasten the lower end of the strings, or sometimes they are attached to a bit of wood placed across. At the edge of the calabash and under the last string is a piece of iron, flat and oval, about five inches long, and set round with small iron rings, which tinkle when the harp is played upon, and add to the effect. The musicians never fail to ask for presents from the princes whose praises they sing, and as they are seldom refused they have numerous flocks and good beasts of burden. Sometimes they make presents to the marabouts to conciliate their esteem; and the marabouts accept the gift and despise them nevertheless.
During the month that I passed with the king, I never once saw him take any solid food, or drink any thing but milk. When I asked him why he took neither sangleh nor meat, he replied that he preferred milk to all other food. To distinguish themselves from the common people, the king and his nobles always drank camel’s milk, and said they preferred it; but I always suspected that their only motive was the difficulty of procuring it, which prevented the slaves from drinking it also; a sort of distinction of which they are jealous. I have seen the queen several times eat meat swimming in melted butter.
In the rainy season the Moors seldom take any other food than milk, which they have in abundance at that period of the year. The rich sometimes kill a sheep, but not often. The king’s guéhué killed a sheep one day, and was roasting it on the embers while I was in his tent; presently as many as thirty Moors collected, having found out what was going on by the smell of the meat; and they watched like so many ravenous beasts for the moment when they could satisfy their voracious appetite. The guéhué hoped to have got rid of them by distributing some small pieces among them; but no sooner had he sat down to the feast with his wife, than the Moors fell upon it and carried it all off, tearing the scraps from one another’s hands and mouths; they even fought for the bones, and dispatched the poor guéhué’s sheep without giving him a taste. I could only compare them to dogs fighting for a piece of meat that one of them had stolen; and I, who had been invited to partake with the lawful proprietor, was not more fortunate than himself. This was a great disappointment to me, as I was very hungry. I was told that this scene could not have taken place except at a guéhué’s, and that they would not have dared to behave so to a person of more importance.