African Folk: A Further Consideration
I
IT is often said about the negro that, unlike the Red Indian, he is apt rapidly to forget both a kindness and an injury. As to the latter, I have my doubts. I have known cases when natives nursed their resentment for many years, apparently quite oblivious of the injury inflicted; and then, when the opportunity and the probability of impunity offered themselves, struck with a vengeance. As regards the reproach of habitual ingratitude, it must be said that natives do not always look on treatment experienced from Europeans as the latter themselves do, and often take as their due, or as a condescension on their own part, what the latter fondly imagine to have been an act of kindness, condescension, or generosity. It has repeatedly occurred in the interior, to me as well as to others, that natives, after they had been successfully treated for some ill, came and claimed their reward.
Another circumstance that helps to explain the negro’s indifference regarding kindness received is that all native races, without exception, look upon the white man as a usurper, who has robbed them of their country; although the common people — not, of course, the chiefs — admit, as far, but only as far, as the British are concerned, that they are better protected now than they were before. Still, they all feel that a grievance exists, and many of them look upon anything for their relief or comfort that Europeans do, only as a small part-payment of a debt.
But manifestations of gratitude do occasionally occur, mostly on the part of children, who are probably instigated to them by their mothers. Many years ago, a little Swahili boy in the hospital in Zanzibar, to whom an orange was brought, handed it back and begged that it should be given to the kind lady who had put medicine on his sore eyes. In British East Africa I once, without the slightest danger to myself, rescued a little boy from drowning. A month afterward he appeared in my camp with a dozen eggs, for which he refused to be paid. He must have collected them one by one, for they were all rotten!
Negroes do not feel as we do, or, if they do, they show their feelings in a different way. I once had a Kikuyu servant, an excellent fellow, named Tairara. We were camped for some time in the Mweli hills, in the Sayidie Province of British East Africa, and the village, a market-place, was periodically visited by Waduruma and Wanyika, who came from a considerable distance, to get, by barter, what articles they required. Tairara had already spoken to me about one of his sisters, who, years before, had been kidnaped from her native country and taken to the coast.
And one day, sure enough, just as in a story-book, the two met in the principal street of Mideli. The emotion of Tairara was genuine and violent and, I must say, most affecting. He sat on the ground, holding with one hand the hand of his sister, who was standing near him, while, with the open palm of his other hand, he kept beating the ground; and, all the time, tears were streaming from his eyes. The sister showed much less emotion. She looked, if anything, rather embarrassed.
Well, I left them in this position. What followed, however, was the curious part of it. From that day onward they took no more notice of one another than if they had been strangers! I saw them pass each other a week or so later without exchanging even a word; and when I asked Tairara how that was, his reply was to the effect that they had now met, and that the incident was closed.
No native, I think, would hesitate to indorse the opinion of Bernard Shaw’s charming heroine, Miss Lydia Carew, when she coldly remarks that ‘grief of two years’ duration is only a bad habit,’ To the native, there is a time for grief and a time for pleasure, which may alternate without transition. Also, natives are, I believe, able to produce emotion at will; at least, the women are. At the wakes after the death of a relative or acquaintance, their wails are accompanied by genuine tears; yet both before and after, they are absolutely unconcerned, as if nothing had happened.
Ties of affection are strongest between mother and child, setting aside the transitory attachments of paramours. They are deep and lasting, and, in some tribes, manifest, themselves in a touching way. Among the Wabuanji and Wakissi, for instance, the son, even when he is grown up, when he encounters his mother, steps aside and kneels down, and in this attitude waits until she has passed. I remember how once, when I was walking in Buanji with a great chief, he suddenly left my side and knelt down near the path, until his old mother, who was coming our way, and who might have stood for a portrait of ‘She’ after her second baptism of fire, had passed without taking the slightest notice of him or me.
What a difference between this beautiful custom and that ruling among those dreadful Sakalavas of Madagascar ! There every woman, as soon as she has reached the great climacteric, is degraded to the state of village idiot, becomes the butt of children’s practical jokes, is forbidden the entrance of the house, fed on refuse, and never spoken to except in rough accents, even by her own children; whereas the old men receive every attention.
I once ventured to remonstrate on that subject, with a beautiful young mulatto woman, much courted by Europeans, whose white-haired old grandmother was even then living in that, miserable status. ‘In my country,’ I said, ‘old women are treated with particular respect and consideration by all people alike, men and women and children. The older a woman is, the more respect, we consider her to be entitled to.’
To which this heartless young lady replied pertly: ‘Well, that is the custom in your country — and the custom in our country is different, you see.’
But that was twenty years ago, and, perhaps, since then, the innumerable missions scattered along the Mozambique channel may have succeeded in changing this disgusting state of affairs.
On the whole, I am inclined to believe that the feelings of East and Central African natives are deeper than we think. Cases of the most passionate and romantic love occur, sometimes with a tragic ending. Some years ago, I brought down with me into the Shire Highlands, a Ngoma from the north of the lake, whose name was Barbarossa. The Wangoma are notorious for their intelligence, their pride, their cunning, and the violence of their character; and Barbarossa was no exception. He left behind him a wife and two little children — a circumstance that did not prevent him from soon forming a new tie in the Shire.
The object of his attachment was a lady of ample charms, a widow, with two little children and some means. She had obviously lived much among Europeans, dressed Swahili fashion, and was, in her way, quite a swell. I fancy it was this that took so strong a hold of Barbarossa’s imagination; he had been a naked savage when he first came to me.
I did not encourage this liaison, as I wanted him to go back to his family; and I looked upon it as a passing flirtation only, until, one day, I happened to speak to him about his return home, when he emphatically declared that he would never again leave the Shire Flighlands and his new love.
I remonstrated, reminding him of his poor wife and children.
His reply was: ‘But don’t you know that with us, when a man leaves his country, his brother takes over his family? My wife and my children are now living with my brother.’
I believed that this infatuation would cool down in time, and, in the meanwhile, I discouraged as much as possible the visits to his mistress, who lived about four miles away, in the village of a chief who was supposed to be her brother. In time she became pregnant, and then followed the catastrophe. She died in child-bed, and that beast of a chief did not send a messenger to inform Barbarossa of her death until after she had been buried.
For two days the poor fellow looked absolutely crashed, and then recovered so rapidly from his grief, to all appearances, chatting and laughing just as before, that I thought that here was another example of native shallowness of feeling. I was mistaken. Three days later, during a heavy downpour of rain which deadened all sounds, he hanged himself in his hut, which stood not a hundred yards from my own.
I decided that he must be buried alongside the woman whom he had loved so much, and dispatched a messenger to the chief to inform him that I would send up the body for burial as soon as I should have got the eight carriers required, whom I was expecting. But before they had arrived, my messenger came back in breathless haste, to say that the chief and the villagers refused to allow Barbarossa to be buried in their burial-ground, because he did not belong to the same tribe. I sent back word to say that I should use force if they persisted in their refusal, and at last they gave way and the two now lie side by side.
I intended to adopt the baby, who was then still alive; but it followed its parents into the grave a few weeks later, because, so I was told, its fostermother’s milk did not agree with it.
II
The refusal on the part of the chief to let Barbarossa be buried alongside his mistress, because he did not belong to the same tribe, is significant of the native clannishness, which cannot have been exceeded by the particularism of the small German principalities before 1870. Although it undoubtedly has its disadvantages, both for the administrator and the missionary, the fact that in it lies the chief European safeguard for the future is so obvious, that all attempts to ‘educate’ the native out of it ought to be made punishable by law.
In East and Central Africa, the exchange of children for food in periods of dearth is a common transaction; and, heartless though this kind of bargain appears to be, it must be admitted that it is one by which both sides profit, besides, in my own experience, the children, after years have passed since the famine, frequently return to their old home of their own accord.
In Ukinga, until a few years ago, not always under the stress of hunger, children were sold to lake-shore dwellers for a basket of fish each, but the distance from the range to the lake is in reality so small, that the sale really only amounted to sending the child to the lake to be taught to fish and row, and accepting a basket of fish in celebration of the occasion.
It was, of course, quite different in the old days of slavery, when children thus sold had to follow their new masters to the coast. Mr. Giraud, a French naval officer, who visited the lake region in the early eighties, relates howdisgusted he was with a mother who, after she had sold her little girl to a trader from the coast, turned round, without the least sign of emotion, and went her way without once looking back. He says that he intended to buy back the child and return it to its mother; but that the latter’s callousness deterred him from doing so. I am not certain that the poor woman did not feel a great deal more than Mr. Giraud gives her credit for. He expresses equal disgust with the child, because it was soon laughing and playing with another child. Perhaps the tears came at night.
Although natives are capable of forming strong ties of affection or love, it is quite impossible to deny, on the other hand, the truth of the assertion that they are, like the man in Christmas carols who had lost his heart, utterly incapable of feeling pity for suffering fellow creatures, man or beast. They never volunteer to lend a hand for the necessary functions around a sick-bed. Many a time, sick people, even children, could not be brought to my camp from ever so short a distance, because there was not one among the idle adults who surrounded them who would consent to bring them; and the same thing happened when a sick man’s hut had to be cleaned, or an ointment applied. Among the Wayao, the most grasping of all the tribes with which I am acquainted, a traveler, surprised by a heavy shower of rain, and seeking shelter, not inside, but under the overhanging roof of a hut, unless the owner happens to be a relation, is mercilessly chased away unless he agrees to pay as much, sometimes, as sixpence.
The death of a European master, even if they appear to be attached to him, does not seem to affect negroes in the least. As a rule, they avoid, when they can, being present at the deathbed of a master, — particularly when within reach of an authority, — because they are afraid of inquiries. I myself, when down with fever, have twice been deserted by ‘boys,’ who thought that my last moment had come.
But they do not go far when a harvest is expected. The late H. Hyde Baker, that, ‘great hunter,’ a nephew of Sir Samuel Baker, told me that once, when he was lying ill with fever and apparently unconscious in his tent in the wilds, he heard his devoted servants, who were squatting just outside his lent, settle how they would divide among themselves their master’s spoils as soon as he died, the one to get the watch, another this, another that. And yet, although strict, Baker was a generous master.
But the master, to the negro, is only the source of food, and nothing beyond that. I remember how once, in the Fare mountains, when I was walking along a steep incline, followed by one of my servants, I happened to slip. He uttered an exclamation of anxiety. I looked back, gratified about his concern for my person, and the faithful creature said: ‘ Who will feed me if you fall down there?’ This child of Nature was nothing if not frank. Once he commented upon a golden tooth I am afflicted with.
‘ Aha! ’ I said, ‘ you would like to cut my head off while I sleep, and run away with that tooth!’
‘Oh! Master,’ he replied, ‘who could do such a thing now, with so many Police-Askaris about!’
But it must be said, in justice to them, that natives do not look upon death in the same light that we do. I have heard men who were suspected of having sleeping sickness discuss the eventuality eagerly and with a great show of interest, entirely as if they had been talking, not about themselves, but about strangers.
Natives, as is well known, are admirable mimics and, during the war, imitations of people dying and being killed were a great feature, and, I regret to say, a great source of amusement, in the villages. On one occasion I witnessed the representation, to an audience made up of all the people in my camp, of the bayoneting of a man. The actor was an invalided Askari, who had entered my service a short time before. First, one cut downward from the left, then another in the same direction from the right, then one upward, from the left, and then a terribly realistic imitation of the death-rattle. The audience was delighted; my cook, the brute, laughed so much that he had to lie on t he ground.
III
It is not to be expected that people who are so indifferent to the sufferings of man should be actuated by softer feelings in their attitude toward the animal kingdom. In general, they do not go out of their way in order to inflict pain, but they are completely indifferent to the sufferings of animals, and they all delight in killing. It really docs appear as if the witnessing of the transition from life to death in another creature gave the savage a peculiarly gratifying sensation. Where they commit acts of cruelty, they are generally meant as reprisals of a wholly irrational and wanton kind; as for instance, when they cut off the beaks of birds which they have caught feeding on their fields; or when they pull out the tongue of a live chameleon, for no other reason than because chameleons frighten them; or when they hang dogs which have committed a larceny. Negro children, I think, are not naturally as cruel as the children of Europeans, although they, too, enjoy walking about with a miserable little bird fluttering on a string fastened to its leg, as does the son of Rubens in his father’s famous picture.
Unfortunately, the generality of Europeans do not find it worth their while to try to teach the native to exercise a little kindness toward his dumb brethren, and sometimes, alas, they are themselves the very pioneers of cruelty toward animals. Years ago, when I was living in a part of British East Africa where settlers were still conspicuous by their absence, and the aborigines still almost untouched by civilization, there appeared a taxidermist who collected small mammals for a great museum, and the parasites of small mammals for a private gentleman — a happy combination.
Up to then, in that locality, I had not seen a single act of cruelty to animals committed by young or old, although, or possibly because, the inhabitants were fearless hunters of wild beasts. But this state of affairs was now changed, almost at a moment s notice. All the little boys and some adults were called, rewards were lavishly promised, and the chase began. Whoever has read records of naturalists in both hemispheres, knows how difficult it is to persuade natives to abstain from wounding or maiming specimens which they bring in. For one intact animal they injure a dozen. There was no exception to this rule in this instance, and, worst of all, animals not needed, or past repair, were simply refused.
I remember one particularly odious occurrence. Some boys had brought a quantity of live bats, fastened, for convenience of transport, to a string, like the beads of a necklace, the string passing through a hole which had been made in each bat’s wings! But the taxidermist had no more use for bats, and refused to take them; and so the lot was simply thrown away by the side of the road, alive and, of course, not untied; for where is the negro who would take the trouble to untie a knot, unless compelled to do so by necessity?
This will, to some people, appear a small thing only; but who can doubt that that taxidermist has sown a seed which will, in the future, cause much suffering to an incalculable number of living creatures? As he was a peripatetic taxidermist, the place where I met him was only one in a hundred.
To the lover of animals it must also be a matter of great regret that the different commissions on tropical diseases have to use native help when they experiment on animals; for, given the negro’s passion for imitation, and his passion for ‘showing off’ before other natives, one shudders at the thought of what these helpers may be doing after they have returned to their homes.
Although natives love to see animals die, especially mammals, they often omit to take the trouble to finish small wounded animals and birds, and will carry the latter, fluttering and struggling, for miles and miles, to their place of destination. It is pitiful to know, in this connection, that both settlers and officials, who are collecting, either for themselves or to supply museums, in the hope of perpetuating a name, otherwise doomed to oblivion, by having it affixed to a new species of animal, are in the habit of sending out fully equipped natives on collecting expeditions, which sometimes last for months at a time. It is all done for the promotion of science, we are told, when we dare to utter a mild word of remonstrance. Many a poor bird, or small mammal, which has been carried for half a day, alive and suffering unspeakable torment, if it had the gift of speech, might conceivably, before dying, utter a variant of Madame Roland’s famous exclamation at the foot of the scaffold.
IV
One cannot mention the negro’s attitude toward the animal kingdom without speaking about his relations with the ‘friend of man.’ It is only after making acquaintance with the pariah dogs of native villages that one fully understands why Moses branded the dog, forever, as an unclean beast. Except in those regions where he is still used for hunting, when scanty remains of a devoured animal sometimes fall to his lot, he feeds only on nameless offal, and is expected to do so. Among some tribes the licking clean of human ulcers is, as in the Old Testament, a recognized and admitted part of a dog’s duties. The most startling of the various uses to which he is put, however, exists among the Wangoni, where he has to replace, with his tongue, the baby’s morning tub! This is done quite as a matter of course, the mother, sometimes helped by the father, holding the baby, while the dog conscientiously accomplishes his duty. The babies do not seem to mind it much, and struggle mildly, as babies will do when they object to being washed. Expressions of disgust and indignation on my part, when I first witnessed this performance, were met with undisguised astonishment on the part of the parents.
And those unfortunate creatures breed like rabbits! It is a pitiful sight to see a poor native bitch, reduced to skin and bones, trying to satisfy the ravenous hunger of half a dozen halfgrown young gluttons. In many places these curs, hunting either in packs by themselves or with their masters, have entirely extirpated whole species of small mammals. In Buanji, where they were formerly numerous, all the mongooses have been destroyed by the joint voracity of man and dog; and, surely, anyone who has had the good fortune to make the personal acquaintance of a mongoose, not to mention the famous Ricky-ticky, will admit that one mongoose is worth a hundred native dogs.
Thanks to the greediness of certain Europeans, who do not scruple to sell to chiefs — who will pay almost any price for them — the pups of large European breeds, these nuisances constantly increase in number, size, and strength. The Wahehe, in what was formerly German East Africa, keep their dogs, not only to hunt with, but also as food; and those destined for that fate are prevented from moving about too much by having one of their legs broken!
Natives train their dogs for the hunt with great skill and cruelty. Once, in the Livingstone Range, not many hundred yards from my tent, and before I could interfere, a native from Buanji, who, with others, had been chasing a reed-buck, cudgeled his dog to death because he considered that he had been slack in the performance of his duty.
One wonders why administrators do not introduce a native dog-tax. It would affect only the well-to-do, and an unmitigated evil would gradually disappear. There would be no necessity for drastic measures, like the marooning of the dogs of Constantinople.
Among the hunting tribes, the men are incredibly swift of foot. I have known them to run down a buffalo, and get it, too. This was in Ubena, which is a hilly country, and the buffalo must have been old, as I have tasted of its meat, which was extremely tough. In a flat country, I think, such a feat would have been almost impossible, although I have been told by natives in the great plains of British East. Africa, that men exist who will run antelopes down.
The pivot around which all native conceptions of life turn is food — chakula! To eat as much as he possibly can at one sitting is looked upon by every native as a sacred duty; and, like those dung-beetles described by Henri Fabre, he never, never stops, so long as there is anything to eat before him. An American divine, as well known for his beautiful preaching as for his successes with the rifle in East Africa, has told us how a native with whom he remonstrated for gorging himself with the meat of butchered zebras, excused himself by saying that he might be dead by the morning, and then, what an opportunity would have been lost! If you ask a native why he goes and gets married, he never replies; ‘Because I love the girl’; but invariably by the question: ‘Who is to prepare my food?’
It is quite useless to try to give natives extras. I often started, but always gave it up again, quite disheartened. The more sugar and tea you give them, the quicker they finish it. They have no conception of husbanding provisions, and are never satisfied or grateful. There are, besides, always a lot of hangers-on; and the servants and porters, who fear retaliation in a moment of penury, simply dare not refuse to share. As one said to me once: ‘If a man sees that I have got something that he has not got, and if I refuse to give him some of it, perhaps some day, when I am very hungry and without food, and he has plenty of it, he will also refuse to share.’
That the native custom to share all food with everybody present is not, as some may imagine, the outcome of altruism, is amply proved by the heartless attitude toward the diseased and the disabled, where a reversal of the position appears an eventuality too remote to be worth being considered. Although all natives know how to cook, roast, fry, to a certain point, their palate is absolutely devoid of taste. The great majority will, like Mark Twain’s Goshoot Indians, cat anything that the raven and the hyena — which latter, in Africa, stands for coyote — eat — or leave.
The variety of the native bill of fare is enormous, and, roughly speaking, implies, besides vegetable food, everything that breathes. Not all tribes, however, are so catholic in their taste. Some will look with disgust on what others consicler a delicacy, and vice versa; and Mohammedans will, although they are not by any means strict as regards the ritual, abstain from certain things as long as they have to fear the censure of public opinion. Unfortunately all natives, including Mohammedans, eat all birds, with the exception, in some cases, of birds of prey, or of birds which are fetish, like the ground hornbill. Not even the smallest birds, like nectarines or waxbills, are safe from pursuit — a state of affairs which clamors for legislative interference.
Rats and moles are in great demand among many tribes; some, like the Wahehe, eat dogs; the Wangoni eat cats; the Wangulu, snakes and lizards. Several kinds of caterpillars, both smooth and hairy, are collected in baskets and eaten as a relish or kitoveo; locusts and white ants replace in native cuisine our oysters and turtles; and some people are particularly fond of a large, strongsmelling tree-bug.
But if the white man stands aghast before the native articles of diet, the native reciprocates as far as many of our food-stuffs are concerned. Tinned food, especially since the war brought enormous quantities of it into the country, is a source of incessant interest and inquiries. Natives have often expressed to me their wonder at the great variety of things which Europeans eat. One of them could not be persuaded that what he had seen in a tin was not chameleon!
A settler whom I knew in Uhehe once poisoned some wild dogs with strychnine and then buried them. On the following day several men came to him and asked permission to unearth the carrion, in order to eat it. The settler refused, explaining that the dogs had been poisoned; but they came back in the night, dug the dogs out, and took them away.
Once, in the Transvaal, I opened a tin of mortadella di Bologna, and, finding it entirely spoiled, threw it away. A European who was staying with me presently saw my headboy pick up the tin, and, before he could interfere, swallow the contents. We both expected the fellow to die of ptomaine poisoning, but nothing happened; he seemed, if anything, rather more cheerful after, than before, his meal.
I remember that once, when I was camped on the shore of Lake Nyasa, a very large dead fish floated slowly past, poisoning the atmosphere with its effluvium. Suddenly I noticed that several of my men rushed to the landing-place and jumped into a dugout; and when I asked them what they were up to, the reply was, that they wanted to haul the fish ashore. ‘What for?’ I asked, horrified. ‘Because we want to eat it!' I screamed a peremptory warning and was grudgingly and wonderingly obeyed.
Up to fifteen years ago, in the socalled Kaffir eating-houses on the Rand, native mining boys used to buy, by preference, meat full of grubs. They said it was richer. It really would appear, from these and other instances, as if the digestive organs of wild people were constructed on a model different from ours.
The quantity of food that a single native is able to absorb at one sitting is phenomenal. About twelve years ago, in Tavita, in British East Africa, I once shot a large rhino at a distance of about ten miles from the old disused house of the Church Missionary Society, where I was living at the time. When I walked back, my gun-bearer ran ahead and called my immediate neighbors, mostly Masai and Wachagga belonging to the Mission. I met these people —eight including the gun-bearer — going out to the kill, as I was reaching home. After I had bathed and changed, I sent one of my boys into the next village of the Wataweta, a mile farther back in the forest, to inform them also of my chase, so that they, too, might go and fetch meat for themselves and their families; soon afterward I saw them trooping out, past my house. They passed it again toward evening, returning home, and I noticed that they were not carrying anything except a few pieces of hide. I asked them if they had eaten plenty, and received the despondent reply: ‘There was nothing left when we arrived.’ I do not, of course, mean to imply that the first lot of eight natives had eaten the whole rhino in a few hours. But what happened was probably this: they ate, each as much as he could carry inside, and then took away on their shoulders as much as they could carry outside, having first cached the balance. My gun-bearer, a few days later, fell ill with an intestinal disease, from which he died within a month.
Natives do not look upon the appropriating of foodstuffs from Europeans as theft. When caught in the act, they indignantly repudiate the charge of theft. They look upon the food as their due. It is a tribute. Because no one of their race would refuse them part of his provisions if they were staying with him, they think they are entitled to part of the provisions of the white man; and if he does not give it willingly, they take it. Bernard Shaw’s assertion, that ‘what an Englishman wants, he takes,’ might much more appropriately be applied to the negro. This thieving is an institution with which every European has to reckon — a fact to be accepted.
V
It is a mistake to believe that a native servant in whom you show confidence will try to live up to it. On the contrary, he will, as a general rule, consider your confidence as an invaluable asset in the occasions of pilfering that it will give him. And the women are much greater thieves than the men. They know practically no restraint, and even rob each other incessantly, even of the smallest trifles, or of medicines, bandages, and the like. I have known several cases where natives parted from their wives because they could not keep the latter from stealing.
It is interesting to remember, in this connection, that Sir Harry Johnston mentions the incessant pilferings perpetrated by the Askari women as one of the causes of the Soudanese rebellion in the early nineties. England was then engaged in one of her small wars in Equatorial Africa, and the women who had followed the black soldiers committed such depredations among the friendly tribes, that they had to be sent back to Uganda. This their husbands resented, and it was, if not the only, at least the principal cause of the ensuing revolt.
I mentioned that the articles coveted by the women are often mere trifles; but this applies to the men also. It is certainly a fact that nothing is too soiled, too torn, or too insignificant, to find a collector; which does not, however, mean, that natives have not a very keen sense of the value of things. But they are very clever in turning even what has been discarded as totally valueless, to some sort of use. I once gave a native, a carver in wood and ivory by trade, an old disused sweater, not thinking that he would be able to turn it to any account. A few days later he appeared in my camp with a rakish white cap, culminating in a red cocarde made out of a strip of flannel. This cap was the torn-off collar of the sweater, which had been sewn together on one side, and then decorated with the cocarde. Shortly afterward the owner told me that he had found a purchaser for his novel head-gear.
If, as some people pretend, the secret of making poverty endurable — of reconciling champagne tastes with a lagerbeer income — lies in abstaining from necessaries and indulging in luxuries instead, the negro undoubtedly has adopted this method. He buys unnecessary trifles — old watches past repair, matchboxes of metal, pencil-cases, whistles, motor-goggles — at ridiculous prices, while repudiating almost with indignation the suggestion to buy remedies for his own or his own people’s use, or a plate or a tumbler for his household. The latter particularity, by the way, presents the greatest obstacle to giving a native any medicine to take home with him. How can one expect a member of a numerous household, in which the only drinking vessel consists of an old condensed-milk tin, to take, every two or three hours a certain number of drops of, say, chlorodyne, diluted in water? —quite apart from the fact that every inhabitant of the village would insist on tasting the stuff! In this respect, as in some others, the Latin axiom, Cœlum, non animum, mutant,qui trans mare currunt, would seem to apply to the Ethiopian in the same degree as to the European. Has not Booker T. Washington told us how, in a negro household in Virginia, which could boast of a single cup only, he found a piano? This happy-go-luckiness is, perhaps, a manifestation of the artistic temperament. Everybody has seen reproductions of the celebrated drawings of the Kalshari bushmen, but it would be a mistake to imagine that this gift is their monopoly. Often, in countries hundreds of miles apart, I have bought little clay figures of animals, made by children in play, and have always been struck by the astounding accuracy with which the creatures’ main characteristics had been caught, however disproportionate the measurements. Among the grown-up people one often finds real artists who represent human beings and animals with equal skill. As an avocation, carving usually runs in families, descending from father to son, several brothers being sometimes employed in the same trade; and the self-manufactured implements which they use are almost as great a subject of surprise as the result produced.
At one time I saw a great deal of one of these carvers in wood and ivory. He was a Yao, called Beeboo — quite a remarkable creature, who might have posed as a sample of the artistic temperament quite as well as any Quartier Latin art student pictured in Mürger’s La Vie de Bohême. His likenesses of animals were extraordinarily lifelike, if occasionally somewhat out of symmetry; but he also gave free scope to his active imagination by inventing animals with new and grotesque shapes. When trade was brisk, as was the case during the war, he lived on the product of his knife and saw only, and walked about, a haughty and independent swell. When times were bad, he used to work for his livelihood on some plantation or farm, watering flowers or cropping the lawn. It was during one of these periods of penury, when I had given him a job, that I caught him helping himself to my provisions. I dismissed him immediately; but we remained on cordial terms all the same, and he often came into my camp afterward, either to offer me pieces of art for sale or to borrow a shilling.
I once entered his hut, where he was living alone at the time, having just been deserted by his wife — a usual occurrence with him. There was no furniture except his stretcher; but everywhere on the ground stood old oil tins and clay pots filled with decorative plants, flowers, ferns, and low shrubs with berries.
I cannot help thinking that Bceboo, if he had been born in Paris, might have developed into another Rodin, or a male Rosa Bonheur. Born in the Middle Ages, in a cathedral town, he would surely have been a famous gargoylesculptor. But he, too, was not free of those aberrations in taste to which I have alluded before. One day he shaved the lower part of his head all round in a circle, and then let the hair on the upper part grow to an enormous length, so that, he looked as if he wore a huge helmet of fur, like one of Napoleon’s grenadiers. He looked fearful, and I told him so, to his intense delight.