The ‘fairer’ half of black world is not less note-worthy. There is the tall and sooty-skinned woman from Uhiáo, distinguished by the shape of her upper lip. A thorn-pierced hole is enlarged with stalks of green reed till it can admit a disk of white-painted wood nearly as big as a dollar. The same is the system of the Dors, the tribe dwelling north of the equator and west of the Nile; their lip-plates equal the thick end of a cheroot; and the ‘pelele’ of the southern regions is a similar disk of bamboo, ivory, or tin, which causes the upper lip to project some two inches beyond the nose-tip, giving it an anserine proportion. In the elder women the ornament is especially hideous. As a rule, the South American ‘Indians’ pierce for their labrets the lower lip, evidently the more unclean fashion—no wonder that kissing (should I say osculation?) is unknown. Yet even amongst the Somal, if you attempt to salute a woman—supposing that you have the right—she will draw back in horror from the act of incipient cannibalism. Often the lip-disk is absent, and then through the unsightly gap a pearly tooth is seen to gleam, set off by the outer darkness of ‘Spoonbill’s’ skin. This woman, broad-shouldered and thick-waisted, is almost as stalwart as her Mhiás, whose tattoo (chale) is a single line forked at both ends:[[25]] in others the cuticle and cutis are branded, worked, and raised in an intricate embroidery over all the muscular trunk. An abnormal equality of strength and stature between the sexes prevails amongst many African tribes, especially the agricultural, where women are the workers. The same may be observed in parts of North Britain and of northern Europe. The difference in this matter between the Teutonic and the Latin races never struck me so strongly as when seeing German families land at Rio de Janeiro.
The half-caste Zanzibar girl enviously eyes the Arab woman, a heap of unwashed cottons on invisible feet, with the Maskat masque exposing only her unrecognizable eyeballs. The former wears a single loose piece of red silk or chequered cotton. Her frizzly hair is twisted into pigtails; her eyelids are stained black; her eye-brows are lengthened with paint; her ear-rims are riddled with a dozen holes to admit rings, wooden buttons, or metal studs, whilst the slit lobes, distended by elastic twists of coloured palm-leaf, whose continual expansion prodigiously enlarges the aperture, are fitted with a painted disk, an inch and a half in diameter. The same device was practised (according to the missionary Gumilla) by the Aberne tribe of the Orinoco. If pretty, and therefore wealthy, she wears heavy silver earrings run through the shell of the ear; her thumbs have similar decorations, and massive bangles of white metal adorn, like manacles and fetters, her wrists and ancles. One wing of her nose is bored to admit a stud—even the patches of Europe were not more barbarous. The Zanzibarian slave girl shaves her head smooth, till it shows brown and shiny like a well-polished cocoa-nut; and she drags along her ‘hopeful’—she has seldom more than one—a small black imp, wholly innocent of clothing. The thing already carries on its head a water-jar bigger than its own ‘pot-belly,’ and it screams Ná-kujá (I come!) to other small fry disporting itself more amusingly.
CHAPTER V.
GEOGRAPHICAL AND PHYSIOLOGICAL.
‘To my surprise, the information concerning Zanzibar and the N. E. coast of Africa ... scarcely contains meagre phrases destitute of precision.’—(Col. Sykes’ Journal, R. G. S., vol. xxiii. 1853.) He forgets that entering from the coast is like jumping from the street into the window.—(R. F. B.)
Section 1.
Africa, East and West—‘Zanzibar’ explained—Menouthias—Position and Formation—The East African Current—Navigation—Aspect of the Island.
It is an old remark that Africa, the continent which became an island by the union of the twin seas in the year of grace 1869, despite her exuberant wealth and her wonderful powers of reproduction, is badly made—a trunk without limbs, a monotonous mass of painful symmetry, wanting opposition and contrast, like the uniform dark complexion of her sons and of her fauna—a solid body, like her own cocoa-nut, hard to penetrate from without, and soft within; an ‘individual of the earth,’ self-isolated by its savagery from the rest of the world. This is especially true of intertropical Africa.
The western coast was, until the last four centuries, cut off from intercourse with mankind by the storm-lashed waters of the northern approach; and to the present day the unbroken seaboard, so scanty in good harbours, and the dangerous bars and bores which defend the deadly river mouths, render it the least progressive part of the old world.
The more fortunate north-eastern and subtropical shores were enabled by their vast crévasse, the Red and riverless Sea, to communicate with Western Asia, whilst the rich productions, gold and ivory, tortoise-shell and ambergris, the hot sensuous climate—which even now induces the northern sailor to ship in the fatal West African squadron—and the amene scenery of the equatorial regions, invited, during pre-historic ages, merchants, and even immigrants, from rugged Persia and sterile Arabia.
Between the two upper coasts, eastern and western, there is, as might be expected, great similarity of grim aspect. The northern seaboards offer, for the space of a thousand miles, the same horrid aspect; deceitful roadsteads and dangerous anchorages, forbidding lines of chalky cliff and barren brown sandstone bluff; flat strands and white downs, hazed over by the spray of desert sand; and lowlands backed by maritime sub-ranges, masses of bald hill and naked mountains, streaked with dry wadis and water-courses, that bear scatters of dates and thorns, and which support miserable villages of tents or huts. The fierce and wandering tribes, Berber, Arab, and Arabo-African—an especially ‘crooked and perverse generation,’—are equally dangerous to the land traveller and to the shipwrecked mariner.