The Lake Regions of Central Africa: A Picture of Exploration, Vol. 2

by Sir Richard Francis Burton

THE BASIN OF KISANGA.

The African rises with the dawn from his couch of cow’s hide. The hut is cool and comfortable during the day, but the barred door impeding ventilation at night causes it to be close and disagreeable. The hour before sunrise being the coldest time, he usually kindles a fire, and addresses himself to his constant companion, the pipe. When the sun becomes sufficiently powerful, he removes the reed-screen from the entrance, and issues forth to bask in the morning-beams. The villages are populous, and the houses touching one another enable the occupants, when squatting outside and fronting the central square, to chat and chatter without moving. About 7 A.M., when the dew has partially disappeared from the grass, the elder boys drive the flocks and herds to pasture with loud shouts and sounding applications of the quarter-staff. They return only when the sun is sinking behind the western horizon. At 8 P.M. those who have provisions at home enter the hut to refection with ugali or holcus-porridge; those who have not, join a friend. Pombe, when procurable, is drunk from the earliest dawn.

After breaking his fast the African repairs, pipe in hand, to the Iwánzá—the village “public,” previously described. Here, in the society of his own sex, he will spend the greater part of the day, talking and laughing, smoking, or torpid with sleep. Occasionally he sits down to play. As with barbarians generally, gambling in him is a passion. The normal game is our “heads and tails,” its implement a flat stone, a rough circle of tin, or the bottom of a broken pot. The more civilised have learned the “bao” of the coast, a kind of “tables,” with counters and cups hollowed in a solid plank. Many of the Wanyamwezi have been compelled by this indulgence to sell themselves into slavery: after playing through their property, they even stake their aged mothers against the equivalent of an old lady in these lands,—a cow or a pair of goats. As may be imagined, squabbles are perpetual; they are almost always, however, settled amongst fellow-villagers with bloodless weapons. Others, instead of gambling, seek some employment which, working the hands and leaving the rest of the body and the mind at ease, is ever a favourite with the Asiatic and the African; they whittle wood, pierce and wire their pipe-sticks—an art in which all are adepts—shave one another’s heads, pluck out their beards, eyebrows, and eyelashes, and prepare and polish their weapons.

At about 1 P.M. the African, unless otherwise employed, returns to his hut to eat the most substantial and the last meal of the day, which has been cooked by his women. Eminently gregarious, however, he often prefers the Iwánzá as a dining-room, where his male children, relatives, and friends meet during the most important hour of the twenty-four. With the savage and the barbarian food is the all-in-all of life:—food is his thought by day,—food is his dream by night. The civilised European, who never knows hunger or thirst without the instant means of gratifying every whim of appetite, can hardly conceive the extent to which his wild brother’s soul is swayed by stomach; he can scarcely comprehend the state of mental absorption in which the ravenous human animal broods over the carcase of an old goat, the delight which he takes in superintending every part of the cooking process, and the jealous eye with which he regards all who live better than himself.

The principal articles of diet are fish and flesh, grain and vegetables; the luxuries are milk and butter, honey, and a few fruits, as bananas and Guinea-palm dates; and the inebrients are pombe or millet-beer, toddy, and mawa or plantain-wine.

Fish is found in the lakes and in the many rivers of this well-watered land; it is despised by those who can afford flesh, but it is a “godsend” to travellers, to slaves, and to the poor. Meat is the diet most prized; it is, however, a luxury beyond the reach of peasantry, except when they can pick up the orts of the chiefs. The Arabs assert that in these latitudes vegetables cause heartburn and acidity, and that animal food is the most digestible. The Africans seem to have made the same discovery: a man who can afford it almost confines himself to flesh, and he considers fat the essential element of good living. The crave for meat is satisfied by eating almost every description of living thing, clean or unclean; as a rule, however, the East African prefers beef, which strangers find flatulent and heating. Like most people, they reject game when they can command the flesh of tame beasts. Next to the bullock the goat is preferred in the interior; as indeed it is by the Arabs of Zanzibar Island; whereas those of Oman and of Western Arabia abandon it to the Bedouins. In this part of Africa the cheapest and vilest meat is mutton, and its appearance—pale, soft, and braxy—justifies the prejudice against it. Of late years it has become the fashion to eat poultry and pigeons; eggs, however, are still avoided. In the absence of history and tradition, it is difficult to decide whether this aversion to eggs arises from an imported or an indigenous prejudice. The mundane egg of Hindoo mythology probably typified the physiological dogma “omne vivum ex ovo,” and the mystic disciples would avoid it as representing the principle of life. In remote ages the prejudice may have extended to Africa, although the idea which gave birth to it was not familiar to the African mind. Of wild flesh, the favourite is that of the zebra; it is smoked or jerked, despite which it retains a most savoury flavour. Of the antelopes a few are deliciously tender and succulent; the greater part are black, coarse, and indigestible. One of the inducements for an African to travel is to afford himself more meat than at home. His fondness for the article conquers at times even his habitual improvidence. He preserves it by placing large lumps upon a little platform of green reeds, erected upon uprights about eighteen inches high, and by smoking it with a slow fire. Thus prepared, and with the addition of a little salt, the provision will last for several days, and the porters will not object to increase their loads by three or four pounds of the article, disposed upon a long stick like gigantic kababs. They also jerk their stores by exposing the meat upon a rope, or spread upon a flat stone, for two or three days in the sun; it loses a considerable portion of nutriment, but it packs into a conveniently small compass. This jerked meat, when dried, broken into small pieces, and stored in gourds or in pots full of clarified and melted butter, forms the celebrated travelling provision in the East called kavurmeh: it is eaten as a relish with rice and other boiled grains. When meat is not attainable and good water is scarce, the African severs one of the jugulars of a bullock and fastens upon it like a leech. This custom is common in Karagwah and the other northern kingdoms, and some tribes, like the Wanyika, near Mombasah, churn the blood with milk.

The daily food of the poor is grain, generally holcus, maize, or bajri (panicum); wheat is confined to the Arabs, and rice grows locally, as in the Indian peninsula. The inner Africans, like the semi-civilised Arabs of Zanzibar, the Wasawahili, and the Wamrima, ignore the simple art of leavening bread by acidulated whey, sour bean-paste, and similar contrivances universally practised in Oman. Even the rude Indian chapati or scone is too artificial for them, and they have not learned to toast grain. Upon journeys the African boils his holcus unhusked in an earthen basin, drinks the water, and devours the grain, which in this state is called masango; at home he is more particular. The holcus is either rubbed upon a stone—the mill being wholly unknown—or pounded with a little water in a huge wooden mortar; when reduced to a coarse powder, it is thrown into an earthen pot containing boiling water sufficient to be absorbed by the flour; a little salt, when procurable, is added; and after a few stirrings with a ladle, or rather with a broad and flat-ended stick, till thoroughly saturated, the thick mass is transferred into a porous basket, which allows the extra moisture to leak out. Such is the ugali, or porridge, the staff of life in East Africa.

During the rains vegetables are common in the more fertile parts of East Africa; they are within reach of the poorest cultivator. Some varieties, especially the sweet potato and the mushroom, are sliced and sun-dried to preserve them through the year. During the barren summer they are boiled into a kind of broth.

Milk is held in high esteem by all tribes, and some live upon it almost exclusively during the rains, when cattle find plentiful pasture. It is consumed in three forms—“mabichi,” when drunk fresh; or converted into mabivu (butter-milk), the rubb of Arabs; or in the shape of mtindi (curded milk), the laban of Arabia, and the Indian dahi. These Africans ignore the dudh-pinda, or ball of fresh-milk boiled down to hardness by evaporation of the serum, as practised by the Indian halwaí (confectioner); the indurated sour-clot of Arabia, called by the Bedouins el igt, and by the Persians the Baloch, and the Sindhians kurut, is also unknown; and they consider cheese a miracle, and use against it their stock denunciation, the danger of bewitching cattle. The fresh produce, moreover, has few charms as a poculent amongst barbarous and milk-drinking races: the Arabs and the Portuguese in Africa avoid it after the sun is high, believing it to increase bile, and eventually to cause fever: it is certain that, however pleasant the draught may be in the cool of the morning, it is by no means so much relished during the heat of the day. On the other hand, the curded milk is everywhere a favourite on account of its cooling and thirst-quenching properties, and the people accustomed to it from infancy have for it an excessive longing. It is procurable in every village where cows are kept, whereas that newly-drawn is generally half-soured from being at once stored in the earthen pots used for curding it. These East Africans do not, however, make their dahi, like the Somal, in lumps floating upon the tartest possible serum; nor do they turn it, like the Arabs, with kid’s rennet, nor like the Baloch with the solanaceous plant called panir. The best is made, as in India, by allowing the milk to stand till it clots in a pot used for the purpose, and frequently smoked for purity. Butter-milk is procurable only in those parts of the country where the people have an abundance of cattle.