The Martyrdom of Man by Winwood Reade (mobi ebook reader TXT) 📖

on the fruit of net and spear, eked out with insects and berries

and shells. Property is ill defined among them; if a man makes a canoe

the others use it when they please; if he builds a better house than his

neighbours they pull it down. Others, though still in the hunting

condition, have gardens of plantains and cassada. In this condition the

headman of the village has little power, but property is secured by law.

Other tribes are pastoral, and resemble the Arabs in their laws and

customs; the patriarchal system prevails among them. There are regions

in which the federal system prevails; many villages are leagued together;

and the headmen, acting as deputies of their respective boroughs, meet in

congress to debate questions of foreign policy and to enact laws. Large

empires exist in the Sudan. In some of these the king is a despot who

possesses a powerful bodyguard equivalent to a standing army, a court

with its regulations of etiquette, and a well-ordered system of patronage

and surveillance. In others he is merely an instrument in the hands of

priests or military nobles, and is kept concealed, giving audience from

behind a curtain to excite the veneration of the vulgar. There are also

thousands of large walled cities resembling those of Europe in the Middle

Ages, or of ancient Greece, or of Italy before the supremacy of Rome,

encircled by pastures and by arable estates, and by farming villages to

which the citizens repair at harvest-time to superintend the labour of their

slaves. But such cities, with their villeggiatura, their municipal

government, their agora or forum, their fortified houses, their feuds and

street frays of Capulet and Montague, are not indigenous in Africa; their

existence is comparatively modern and is due to the influence of religion.

 

An African village (old style) is usually a street of huts, with walls like

hurdles, and the thatch projecting so that its owner may sit beneath it in

sun or rain. The door is low—one has to crawl in order to go in. There

are no windows. The house is a single room. In its midst burns a fire

which is never suffered to go out, for it is a light in darkness, a servant, a

companion, and a guardian angel; it purifies the miasmatic air. The roof

and walls are smoke-dried but clean; in one corner is a pile of wood

neatly cut up into billets, and in another is a large earthen jar filled with

water on which floats a gourd or calabash, a vegetable bowl. Spears,

bows, quivers, and nets hang from pegs upon the walls. Let us suppose

that it is night; four or five black forms are lying in a circle with their feet

toward the fire, and two dogs with pricked-up ears creep close to the

ashes which are becoming grey and cold.

 

The day dawns; a dim light appears through the crevices and crannies of

the walls. The sleepers rise and roll up their mats, which are their beds,

and place on one side the round logs of wood which are their pillows.

The man takes down his bow and arrows from the wall, fastens wooden

rattles round his dogs’ necks, and goes out into the bush. The women

replenish the fire, and lift up an inverted basket whence sally forth a hen

and her chickens which make at once for the open door to find their daily

bread for themselves outside. The women take hoes and go to the

plantation, or they take pitchers to fill at the brook. They wear round the

waist, before and behind, two little aprons made from a certain bark,

soaked and beaten until it is as flexible as leather. Every man has a

plantation of these cloth-trees round his hut. The unmarried girls wear no

clothes at all, but they are allowed to decorate themselves with bracelets

and anklets of iron, flowers in their ears, necklaces of red berries like

coral, girdles of white shells, hair oiled and padded out with the chignon,

and sometimes white ashes along the parting.

 

The ladies fill their pitchers and take their morning bath, discussing the

merits or demerits of their husbands. The air is damp and cold, and the

trees and grass are heavy with dew; but presently the sun begins to shine,

the dewdrops fall heavy and large as drops of rain; the birds chirp; the

flowers expand their drowsy leaves and receive the morning calls of

butterflies and bees. The forest begins to buzz and hum like a great

factory awaking to its work.

 

When the sun is high, boys come from the bush with vegetable bottles

frothing over with palm wine. The cellar of the African, and his glass and

china shop, and his clothing warehouse, are in the trees. In the midst of

the village is a kind of shed, a roof supported on bare poles. It is the

palaver house, in which at this hour the old men sit and debate the affairs

of state or decide law suits, each orator holding a spear when he is

speaking, and planting it in the ground before him as he resumes his seat.

Oratory is the African’s one fine art. His delivery is fluent; his

harangues, though diffuse, are adorned with phrases of wild poetry. That

building is also the club house of the elders, and there, when business is

over, they pass the heat of the day, seated on logs which are smooth and

shiny from use. At the hour of noon their wives or children bring them

palm wine, and present it on their knees, clapping their hands in a token

of respect. And then all is still; it is the hour of silence and tranquillity,

the hour which the Portuguese call “ the calm.” The sun sits enthroned

on the summit of the sky; its white light is poured upon the earth; the

straw thatch shines like snow. The forest is silent; all nature sleeps.

 

Then down, down, down sinks the sun, and its rays shoot slantwise

through the trees. The hunters return, and their friends run out and greet

them as if they had been gone for years, murmuring to them in a kind of

baby language, calling them by their names of love, shaking their right

hands, caressing their faces, patting them upon their breasts, embracing

them in all ways except with the lips—for the kiss is unknown among the

Africans. And so they toy and babble and laugh with one another till the

sun turns red, and the air turns dusky, and the giant trees cast deep

shadows across the street. Strange perfumes arise from the earth; fireflies

sparkle; grey parrots come forth from the forest, and fly screaming round

intending to roost in the neighbourhood of man. The women bring their

husbands the gourd-dish of boiled plantains or bush-yams, made hot with

red pepper, seasoned with fish or venison sauce. And when this simple

meal is ended, boom! boom! Goes the big drum; the sweet reed flute

pipes forth; the girls and lads begin to sing. In a broad, clean swept place

they gather together, jumping up and down with glee; the young men

form in one row, the women in another, and dance in two long lines,

retreating and advancing with graceful undulations of their bodies and

arms waving in the air. And now there is a squealing, wailing, unearthly

sound, and out of the wood, with a hop, skip, and jump, comes Mumbo

Jumbo, a hideous mask on his face and a scourge in his hand. Woe to the

wife who would not cook her husband’s dinner, or who gave him saucy

words, for Mumbo Jumbo is the censor of female morals. Well the guilty

ones know him as they run screaming to their huts. Then again the dance

goes on, and if there is a moon it does not cease throughout the night.

 

Such is the picturesque part of savage life. But it is not savage life—it

merely lies upon the surface as paint lies upon the skin. Let us take a

walk through that same village on another day. Here in a hut is a young

man with one leg in the stocks, and with his right hand bound to his neck

by a cord. The palm wine, and the midnight dance, and the furtive

caresses of Asua overpowered his discretion; he was detected, and now

he is “put in log.” If his relations do not pay the fine he will be sold as a

slave; or if there is no demand for slaves in that country he will be killed.

His friends reprove him for trying to steal what the husband was willing

to sell; and might he not have guessed that Asua was a decoy?

 

Another day the palaver-house has the aspect of a Crockford’s. An old

man who is one of the village grandees is spinning nuts for high stakes,

and has drunk too much to see that he is overmatched. He loses his mats,

his weapons, his goats, his fowls, his plantation, his house, his slaves

whom he took prisoners in his young and warlike days, his wives, his

children, and his aged mother who fed him at her breast—all are lost, all

are gone. And then, with flushed eyes and trembling hand, he begins to

gamble for himself. He stakes his right leg and loses it. He may not

move it until he has won it back or until it is redeemed. He loses both

legs; he stakes his body and loses that also, and becomes a bond-servant,

or is sold as a slave.

 

Let us give another scene. A young man of family has died; the whole

village is convulsed with grief and fear. It does not appear natural to

them that a man should die before he has grown old. Some malignant

power is at work among them. Is it an evil spirit whom they have

unwittingly offended and who is taking its revenge, or is it a witch? The

great fetish-man has been sent for, and soon he arrives, followed by his

disciples. He wears a cap waving with feathers and a parti-coloured

garment covered with charms—horns of gazelles, shells of snails, and a

piece of leopards’s liver wrapped up in the leaves of a poison-giving tree.

His face is stained with the white juice from a dead man’s brain. He rings

an iron bell as he enters the town, and at the same time the drum begins to

beat. The drum has its language, so that those who are distant from the

village understand what it is saying. With short, lively sounds it

summons to the dance; it thunders forth the alarm of fire or war, loudly

and quickly with no interval between the beats; and now it tolls the hour

of judgment and the day of death. The fetish-man examines the dead man

and says it is the work of a witch. He casts lots with knotted cords; he

mutters incantations; he passes round the villagers and points out the

guilty person, who is usually some old woman whom popular opinion has

previously suspected and is ready to condemn. She is, however, allowed

the benefit of an ordeal: a gourd filled with the “red water” is given her to

drink. If she is innocent it acts as an emetic; if she is guilty it makes her

fall senseless to the ground. She is then put to death with a variety of

tortures—burnt alive or torn limb from limb; tied on the beach at low

water to be drowned by the rising tide; rubbed with honey and laid out in

the sun; or buried in an ant-hill, the most horrible death of all.

 

These examples are sufficient to show that the life of the savage is not a

happy one, and the existence of each clan