Alice Werner

“ O love! thine arms were about me then,
Thy warm tears called me to life again, —
But — O God! that I came alone! —
We dwell in peace, my beautiful one
And I, by the streams in the West, —
But oft through the mist of my dreams along
Rides Bannerman of the Dandenong,
With the blood-red rose on his breast. ”

“ I once, at Blantyre, questioned some Chikundas from the River about this old woman, and they said that they had heard of her, and that her name was Mbonda. I knew nothing about Mbona at the time, and perhaps misheard Mbonda instead of it; the sounds are not unlike, if both o‘s are pronounced open. The application of the spirit’s name to the woman is just the sort of confusion that might arise when a tradition is falling into oblivion. ”

“ So universally is the Kalulu's superiority insisted on, that I am inclined to think that the tales showing him as the defeated party (I can only recall one at this moment) are incomplete, and, like Cambuscan's, left half-told.
I may add that, to the best of my belief, there is only one Kalulu in the Shire Highlands, and he is quite as much of a hare as he is of a rabbit; more so indeed, for he does not live in warrens, but makes himself a form in the bush, even as our hare at home. ”

“ Annancy speaks of himself. He sends word that the man here (himself) is more clever than her (the old lady) . Straightforwardness is a quality which the Negro absolutely lacks. If you try to get at the truth of any story he brings, and cross-question him upon it, he will shuffle and change it little by little, and you cannot fix him to any point. Language with him is truly, as the cynic said, the art of disguising thought. ”

“ Duff Macdonald has made it clear that the ‘gods’ of the Yaos—or, at least, those most definitely thought of as such, are the spirits of the dead—of a man’s father or grandfather, or the chief of his village,—sometimes of a great chief, who ruled over a large extent of country, like Kangomba of Sochi. When such an one lived long ago, people are apt to forget who he was when alive, and to think of him as a spirit only. Such spirits are often associated with particular hills, as is the case with Sochi and Ndirande, and might easily be mistaken by inquirers for genuine nature-powers. ”

“ The people then came up, extricated him from the Tar-Baby's embraces, and informed him that they were going to kill him. "Very well," said he, "but don't kill me on the ground, kill me on the chief's back!" They returned to the village and spread a mat on the ground, on which the chief obligingly lay down, and the Rabbit squatted on his back. A strong warrior then prepared to spear the Rabbit and, as might be expected, killed the chief. Brer Rabbit having leaped into the air at the critical moment, made his escape without any difficulty, and the indignant villagers massacred the warrior. ”

“ To go to church is a mark of respectability. To obtain that mark is one of his reasons for going. The other reason is to show his clothes and his boots. He will talk like a saint for the mere pleasure of rolling out words, and the ministers have to pretend to believe something of what he says. They are not, however, really deceived, and will tell you in private with a sigh that Christianity makes no progress; it is profession without practice. Of the Negro's real religion, which is bound up with Obeah, we get hardly a hint in the sings. ”

“ As you look from the hill on which our house stood, you see a wide level—green during the rains, yellow when the grass is dry, with patches of bush here and there and one grove of great trees plainly in sight—the nkalango, where the dead are buried. Here and there, dotted about the plain, are little groups of huts, several of which, taken together, may be held to constitute a village. ”

“ As the hills are being dug, the rum bottle circulates, and the digging-sings, which began quietly enough, get more and more lively. The Negro is cheery at all times, but when well primed with liquor he is hilarious. Nothing more joyous can be imagined than a good "digging-sing" from twenty throats, with the pickers—so they call their pickaxes—falling in regular beat. The pickers work faster and faster to the strains of a rousing "Oh, Samwel, oh!" or "The one shirt I have ratta cut ahm." ”

“ Before they bore the corpse away, they swung it to and fro outside the hut, where it had passed out, chanting the while, “We are leaving to-day; we follow our fellows.” In front of the procession walked a man blowing a reed whistle, while other mourners followed the bier carrying weapons, utensils, trinkets, and offerings to be buried in the grave or laid on the top. Last of all went a woman with a hoe and a basket, into which she dropped various roots growing beside the path which the funeral had followed, and which she had dug up with the hoe. ”

“ She is thinking it all over. "So you have got three acres of coffee and four acres of bare land, then why don't you come and ask for me?"
"Bare" land is good land which has not yet been taken into cultivation. The first money a poor boy earns he spends in boots, which are the outward and visible sign of being well-to-do. They hurt him, "burn him" as he says, but no matter. Next he buys a piece of land. This is probably in bush, covered that is with the rough growth of grass, bushes and trees that so quickly springs up in the tropics. ”

“ In the Upper Shiré district, I was not very successful in gleaning information, but have a note that a girl told me the ‘Angoni’ a-pempera Mulungu (‘pray to God’) after the following fashion: ‘The people here sometimes sacrifice (kwisula) a goat; it is done by the head-man, and the people all stand round nda! nda! nda! (i.e. in a row or circle) ; they eat the meat afterwards.’ Here too, evidently, the head-man acts on behalf of the village; and though it is not clear whether Mulungu here means the spirit of a dead chief, or a Supreme Deity, this is, for the moment, immaterial. ”

“ In every district there is an Obeah-man, or Bush-doctor, as he is often called, from his supposed knowledge of herb simples. He is by no means the innocent person which this latter designation would seem to imply. He deals in magic and sorcery of all descriptions, and there is not a Black man who does not believe in his powers. They consult him on every conceivable business and he gets heavy fees. He will secure a man the favour of his master so that he shall not lose his place, or help him to revenge a wrong, real or fancied. ”

“ One answers, ‘It was I,’ and the chief tells him to ‘bring the meat out.’ ‘So the man who killed him sounds a rattle and calls him by his early name’—the name he bore before he attended the mysteries, which has a compelling power over him—and he comes out. The wizard then reproaches him for real or imaginary insults and injuries—possibly there are unhealthy-minded persons who will brood for years over fancied wrongs, and when the man they are nursing a grudge against dies, imagine that they have killed him—and finally kills him over again. ”

“ Some natives once assured me that Chikumbu, a Yao chief, who at one time gave the Administration some trouble, was invulnerable by shot or steel; the only thing that could kill him—since he had not been fortified against it by the proper medicine—was a sharp splinter of bamboo. This reminds one of Balder and the mistletoe. The East African Wadoe have a legend about a magician who could be killed by one thing only—the stalk of a gourd. But as the gourd-stalk was ‘a forbidden thing’ to him, this suggests the subject of miiko or tabu-prohibitions, which we must take up presently. ”

“ The proportion of slaves to free people is probably not large—unless all the Anyanja subject to the Angoni are counted as slaves—which is not, strictly speaking, correct; they are rather in the position of serfs or villeins.
Slavery may be a matter of birth; the children of slaves, or of a slave mother and free father, are slaves also. ”

“ Duff Macdonald says, ‘The spirit of every deceased man and woman, with the solitary exception of wizards and witches, becomes an object of religious homage.’ Of course, no one can worship all, and the chief of a village worships his immediate predecessor as the representative of all the people who have lived in the village in past times, and the whole line of his ancestors. ”

“ Certainly one wonders how they learn some things which the smallest children do quite easily. Twisting string, for instance, out of bark, or the fibre of the bwazi, the sonkwe hibiscus, and other plants, is a thing which requires a certain knack, yet you see the whole population at it, when they have the materials handy, and nothing else to do—from the old grandmother sitting on the ground to have a chat with you, to the little boy or girl whose attention is found to be wandering in school. ”

“ I did not at the time understand the precise connection between the witches and the fire; but it appears that the grave itself becomes luminous when they gather there. ‘When a fire is seen on a distant hill, where no fire can be accounted for’—that is the place of their assembly. They call the dead man by his childish name (which none ever uses after he has once passed through the mysteries) , and he cannot choose but come out of the grave—then they tear him limb from limb and eat him. ”

“ None of the tribes of British Central Africa can be said to live by hunting, or even to make it one of their principal occupations. The nearest approach to a hunting tribe are the Apodzo, or Akombwi, of the Lower Zambezi, who are professional hippopotamus-hunters, and are sometimes spoken of as a clan, but as they speak a language of their own, they should perhaps be reckoned as a separate people. ”