From Tura westward to Unyanyembe, the central district of Unyamwezi, caravans usually number seven marches, making a total of 60 rectilinear geographical miles. As far as Kigwa there is but one line of route; from that point travelling parties diverge far and wide, like ships making their different courses.
The races requiring notice in this region are two, the Wakimbu and the Wanyamwezi.
The Wakimbu, who are emigrants into Unyamwezi, claim a noble origin, and derive themselves from the broad lands running south of Unyanyembe as far westward as K’hokoro. About twenty masika, wet monsoons, or years ago, according to themselves, in company with their neighbours, the Wakonongo and the Wamia, they left Nguru, Usanga, and Usenga, in consequence of the repeated attacks of the Warori, and migrated to Kipiri, the district lying south of Tura; they have now extended into Mgunda Mk’hali and Unyanyembe, where they hold the land by permission of the Wanyamwezi. In these regions there are few obstacles to immigrants. They visit the Sultan, make a small present, obtain permission to settle, and name the village after their own chief; but the original proprietors still maintain their rights to the soil. The Wakimbu build firmly stockaded villages, tend cattle, and cultivate sorghum and maize, millet and pulse, cucumbers, and water-melons. Apparently they are poor, being generally clad in skins. They barter slaves and ivory in small quantities to the merchants, and some travel to the coast. They are considered treacherous by their neighbours, and Mapokera, the Sultan of Tura, is, according to the Arabs, prone to commit “avanies.” They are known by a number of small lines formed by raising the skin with a needle, and opening it by points literally between the hair of the temples and the eyebrows. In appearance they are dark and uncomely; their arms are bows and arrows, spears and knives stuck in the leathern waistbelt; some wear necklaces of curiously plaited straw, others a strip of white cowskin bound around the brow—a truly savage and African decoration. Their language differs from Kinyamwezi.
The Wanyamwezi tribe, the proprietors of the soil, is the typical race in this portion of Central Africa: its comparative industry and commercial activity have secured to it a superiority over the other kindred races.
The aspect of the Wanyamwezi is alone sufficient to disprove the existence of very elevated lands in this part of the African interior. They are usually of a dark sepia-brown, rarely coloured like diluted Indian ink, as are the Wahiao and slave races to the south, with negroid features markedly less Semitic than the people of the eastern coast. The effluvium from their skins, especially after exercise or excitement, marks their connection with the negro. The hair curls crisply, but it grows to the length of four or five inches before it splits; it is usually twisted into many little ringlets or hanks; it hangs down like a fringe to the neck, and is combed off the forehead after the manner of the ancient Egyptians and the modern Hottentots. The beard is thin and short, there are no whiskers, and the moustachio—when not plucked out—is scant and straggling. Most of the men and almost all the women remove the eyelashes, and pilar hair rarely appears to grow. The normal figure of the race is tall and stout, and the women are remarkable for the elongation of the mammary organs. Few have small waists, and the only lean men in the land are the youths, the sick, and the famished. This race is said to be long-lived, and it is not deficient in bodily strength and savage courage. The clan-mark is a double line of little cuts, like the marks of cupping, made by a friend with a knife or razor, along the temporal fossæ from the external edges of the eyebrows to the middle of the cheeks or to the lower jaws. Sometimes a third line, or a band of three small lines, is drawn down the forehead to the bridge of the nose. The men prefer a black, charcoal being the substance generally used, the women a blue colour, and the latter sometimes ornament their faces with little perpendicular scars below the eyes. They do not file the teeth into a saw-shape as seen amongst the southern races, but they generally form an inner triangular or wedge-shaped aperture by chipping away the internal corners of the two front incisors like the Damaras, and the women extract the lower central teeth. Both sexes enlarge the lobes of the ears. In many parts of the country skins are more commonly worn than cloth, except by the Sultans and the wealthier classes. The women wear the long tobe of the coast, tightly wrapped round either above or more commonly below the breast; the poorer classes veil the bosom with a square or softened skin; the remainder of the dress is a kilt or short petticoat of the same material extending from waist to knee. Maidens never cover the breast, and children are rarely clothed; the infant, as usual in East Africa, is carried in a skin fastened by thongs behind the parent’s back. The favourite ornaments are beads, of which the red coral, the pink, and the “pigeon-eggs” made at Nuremberg are preferred. From the neck depend strings of beads with kiwangwa, disks of shell brought from the coast, and crescents of hippopotamus teeth country made, and when the beard is long it is strung with red and particoloured beads. Brass and copper bangles or massive rings are worn upon the wrists, the forearm bears the ponderous kitindi or coil bracelet, and the arm above the elbow is sometimes decorated with circlets of ivory or with a razor in an ivory étui; the middle is girt with a coil of wire twisted round a rope of hair or fibre, and the ankles are covered with small iron bells and the rings of thin brass, copper, or iron wire, called sambo. When travelling, a goat’s horn, used as a bugle, is secured over the right shoulder by a lanyard and allowed to hang by the left side: in the house many wear a smaller article of the same kind, hollowed inside and containing various articles intended as charms, and consecrated by the Mganga or medicine-man. The arms are slender assegais with the shoulders of the blade rounded off: they are delivered, as by the Somal, with the thumb and forefinger after a preliminary of vibratory motion, but the people want the force and the dexterity of the Kafirs. Some have large spears for thrusting, and men rarely leave the hut without their bows and arrows, the latter unpoisoned, but curiously and cruelly barbed. They make also the long double-edged knives called sime, and different complications of rungu or knob-kerries, some of them armed with an iron lance-head upon the wooden bulge. Dwarf battle-axes are also seen, but not so frequently as amongst the western races on the Tanganyika Lake. The shield in Unyamwezi resembles that of Usagara; it is however rarely used.
There are but few ceremonies amongst the Wanyamwezi. A woman about to become a mother retires from the hut to the jungle, and after a few hours returns with a child wrapped in goatskin upon her back, and probably carrying a load of firewood on her head. The medical treatment of the Arabs with salt and various astringents for forty days is here unknown. Twins are not common as amongst the Kafir race, and one of the two is invariably put to death; the universal custom amongst these tribes is for the mother to wrap a gourd or calabash in skins, to place it to sleep with, and to feed it like, the survivor. If the wife die without issue, the widower claims from her parents the sum paid to them upon marriage; if she leave a child, the property is preserved for it. When the father can afford it, a birth is celebrated by copious libations of pombe. Children are suckled till the end of the second year. Their only education is in the use of the bow and arrow; after the fourth summer the boy begins to learn archery with diminutive weapons, which are gradually increased in strength. Names are given without ceremony; and as in the countries to the eastward, many of the heathens have been called after their Arab visitors. Circumcision is not practised by this people. The children in Unyamwezi generally are the property not of the uncle but of the father, who can sell or slay them without blame; in Usukuma or the northern lands, however, succession and inheritance are claimed by the nephews or sisters’ sons. The Wanyamwezi have adopted the curious practice of leaving property to their illegitimate children by slave girls or concubines, to the exclusion of their issue by wives; they justify it by the fact of the former requiring their assistance more than the latter, who have friends and relatives to aid them. As soon as the boy can walk he tends the flocks; after the age of ten he drives the cattle to pasture, and, considering himself independent of his father, he plants a tobacco-plot and aspires to build a hut for himself. There is not a boy “which cannot earn his own meat.”
Another peculiarity of the Wanyamwezi is the position of the Wahárá or unmarried girls. Until puberty they live in the father’s house; after that period the spinsters of the village, who usually number from seven to a dozen, assemble together and build for themselves at a distance from their homes a hut where they can receive their friends without parental interference. There is but one limit to community in single life: if the Mhárá or “maiden” be likely to become a mother, her “young man” must marry her under pain of mulct; and if she die in childbirth, her father demands from her lover a large fine for having taken away his daughter’s life. Marriage takes place when the youth can afford to pay the price for a wife: it varies according to circumstances from one to ten cows. The wife is so far the property of the husband that he can claim damages from the adulterer; he may not, however, sell her, except when in difficulties. The marriage is celebrated with the usual carouse, and the bridegroom takes up his quarters in his wife’s home, not under her father’s roof. Polygamy is the rule with the wealthy. There is little community of interests and apparently a lack of family affection in these tribes. The husband, when returning from the coast laden with cloth, will refuse a single shukkah to his wife, and the wife succeeding to an inheritance will abandon her husband to starvation. The man takes charge of the cattle, goats, sheep, and poultry; the woman has power over the grain and the vegetables; and each must grow tobacco, having little hope of borrowing from the other. Widows left with houses, cattle, and fields, usually spend their substance in supporting lovers, who are expected occasionally to make presents in return. Hence no coast slave in Wanyamwezi is ever known to keep a shukkah of cloth.
The usual way of disposing of a corpse in former times was, to carry it out on the head and to throw it into some jungle strip where the fisi or cynhyæna abounds,—a custom which accounts for the absence of graveyards. The Wanyamwezi at first objected to the Arabs publicly burying their dead in their fields, for fear of pollution; they would assemble in crowds to close the way against a funeral party. The merchants, however, persevered till they succeeded in establishing a right. When a Mnyamwezi dies in a strange country, and his comrades take the trouble to inter him, they turn the face of the corpse towards the mother’s village, a proceeding which shows more sentiment than might be expected from them. The body is buried standing, or tightly bound in a heap, or placed in a sitting position with the arms clasping the knees: if the deceased be a great man, a sheep and a bullock are slaughtered for a funeral feast, the skin is placed over his face, and the hide is bound to his back. When a sultan dies in a foreign land his body is buried upon the spot, and his head, or what remains of it, is carried back for sepulture to his own country. The chiefs of Unyamwezi generally are interred by a large assemblage of their subjects with cruel rites. A deep pit is sunk, with a kind of vault or recess projecting from it: in this the corpse, clothed with skin and hide, and holding a bow in the right hand, is placed sitting, with a pot of pombe, upon a dwarf stool, whilst sometimes one, but more generally three female slaves, one on each side and the third in front, are buried alive to preserve their lord from the horrors of solitude. A copious libation of pombe upon the heaped-up earth concludes the ceremony. According to the Arabs, the Wasukuma inter all their sultans in a jungle north of Unyanyembe, and the neighbouring peasants deposit before seed-time small offerings of grain at the Mzimo or Fetiss-house which marks the spot.
The habitations of the eastern Wanyamwezi are the Tembe, which in the west give way to the circular African hut; among the poorer sub-tribes the dwelling is a mere stack of straw. The best Tembe have large projecting eaves supported by uprights: cleanliness, however, can never be expected in them. Having no limestone, the people ornament the inner and outer walls with long lines of ovals formed by pressing the finger tips, after dipping them into ashes and water for whitewash, and into red clay or black mud for variety of colour. With this primitive material they sometimes attempt rude imitations of nature—human beings and serpents. In some parts the cross appears, but the people apparently ignore it as a symbol. Rude carving is also attempted upon the massive posts at the entrances of villages, but the figures, though to appearance idolatrous, are never worshipped. The household furniture of the Tembe differs little from that described in the villages generally. The large sloping Kitanda, or bedstead of peeled tree-branch, supported by forked sticks, and provided with a bedding of mat and cowhide, occupies the greater part of the outer room. The triangle of clay cones forming the hearth are generally placed for light near the wall-side opposite the front door; and the rest of the supellex consists of large stationary bark cornbins, of gourds and bandboxes slung from the roof, earthen-pots of black clay, huge ladles, pipes, grass-mats, grinding-stones, and arms hung to a trimmed and branchy tree trunk planted upright in a corner. The rooms are divided by party walls, which, except when separating families, seldom reach to the ceiling. The fireplace acts as lamp by night, and the door is the only chimney.
The characteristic of the Mnyamwezi village is the “İwánzá”—a convenience resulting probably from the instinct of the sexes, who prefer not to mingle, and for the greater freedom of life and manners. Of these buildings there are two in every settlement, generally built at opposite sides, fronting the normal Mrimba-tree, which sheds its filmy shade over the public court-yard. That of the women, being a species of harem, was not visited; as travellers and strangers are always admitted into the male İwánzá, it is more readily described. This public-house is a large hut, somewhat more substantial than those adjoining, often smeared with smooth clay, and decorated here and there with broad columns of the ovals before described, and the prints of palms dipped in ashes and placed flat like the hands in ancient Egyptian buildings. The roof is generally a flying thatch raised a foot above the walls—an excellent plan for ventilation in these regions. Outside, the İwánzá is defended against the incursions of cattle by roughly-barked trunks of trees resting upon stout uprights: in this space men sit, converse, and smoke. The two doorways are protected by rude charms suspended from the lintel, hares’ tails, zebras’ manes, goats’ horns, and other articles of prophylactic virtue. Inside, half the depth is appropriated to the Ubiri, a huge standing bedframe, formed, like the plank-benches of a civilised guard-room, by sleepers lying upon horizontal cross-bars: these are supported by forked trunks about two feet long planted firmly in the ground. The floor is of tamped earth. The furniture of the İwánzá consists of a hearth and grinding-stone; spears, sticks, arrows, and shillelaghs are stuck to smoke in the dingy rafter ceiling, or are laid upon hooks of crooked wood depending from the sooty cross-beams: the corners are occupied by bellows, elephant-spears, and similar articles. In this “public” the villagers spend their days, and often, even though married, their nights, gambling, eating, drinking pombe, smoking bhang and tobacco, chatting, and sleeping like a litter of puppies destitute of clothing, and using one another’s backs, breasts, and stomachs as pillows. The İwánzá appears almost peculiar to Unyamwezi.