Alice Werner

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is a pathetic belief in some parts that slaves going to the coast find a plant in the hills, which they eat ‘to make them forget the friends of their youth,’ lest their grief should be too great. It loses its efficacy as soon as anything happens to remind them of home, or they get a chance of returning. The often-made assertion that parents will sell their children into slavery has very little foundation, as far as Anyanja and Yaos are concerned. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The most trying time of the year is the three or four weeks when the earth and all that is on it are ‘waiting for the rains.’ Curiously enough, the trees burst into leaf—with a greater variety of colour than our own in autumn—just before the rain comes, when the ground is so baked and hard that any growth seems impossible. ”

“ When the gardens come to be inconveniently far away, the village is moved; and thus the population is continually shifting from place to place, and one sometimes finds sites of old gardens in what one had thought was untouched bush.
When a man has selected a site for a new garden, he marks the place, and bespeaks, or as the natives say, ‘betroths’ the ground, by tying some bunches of grass into knots, or, if there are trees on the spot, twisting some grass round their trunks. He is perfectly free to choose, so long as the land is not in cultivation, or has not been bespoken by some one else ”

“ 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. ”

“ When the circumstances of a death seem to warrant suspicion, the witch-detective, whose methods are described elsewhere, is sometimes called in, and the people pointed out by her are either killed at once or compelled to drink mwavi. But the ordeal is sometimes put in operation without resorting to her. Persons who feel [170] themselves under suspicion may demand it in order to clear their character. So firmly do they believe that it will not hurt them if innocent, that no one, unless conscious of guilt, ever seems to shrink from the trial. ”

“ In a village like Ntumbi, of small, scattered kraals, the grown-up men of each family will most likely have a small hut to themselves, as there will not be a regular bwalo, in this sense—which is not quite the same as when the word is used to mean the ‘village green’ or ‘forum.’
Like most other boys, they quarrel occasionally, and fight sometimes, with fists, sticks, and anything else—scratching and biting not barred. ”

“ D. C. Scott says: ‘Each tribe or family has its particular abstinence from certain foods.’ The Achikunda, so my boatmen told me on the Zambezi, don’t eat hippo; the Apodzo do, as might be expected, they being a tribe who get their living by hunting that animal. This really resolves itself into ‘Apodzo and not Apodzo,’ because the Achikunda are not really a tribe, but a mixed multitude of slaves brought into the country by the Portuguese; and a good many different tribes look on the hippopotamus as sacred. ”

“ Criminal charges, too, in the first instance, are brought before the chief’s or head-man’s court. A man caught stealing may, by native law, be killed, and his death entails no prosecution. He may be caught alive, and would then be put into a slave-stick for safe-keeping, till ransomed by his friends; and killed, or kept as a slave, if no ransom were forthcoming.
When a theft has been committed, without suspicion falling on any particular person, the diviner or the mabisalila is consulted, and the person pointed out by him or her accused before the court. ”

“ But the young men without, as yet, any family ties of their own, may join some caravan going to the coast, or (in the times when elephants were more abundant and there was no European administration to interfere) put in the time hunting or slave-raiding, or go to work for the white men, or, finally, stay about the villages, and have a good time at beer-drinkings and dances for a year or two.
There are several different forms of marriage, and there is no theoretical limit to the number of wives any man may have; but there is a difference between the status of free and slave wives. ”

“ The Chameleon was to tell men that they would die, but that they would return again, while the Lizard was bid tell them that when they died, they would die for good. The Chameleon had the start, but in its slow, hesitating pace was soon outrun by the swift Lizard, which darted in among men with its tale that dying they should end their existence. A good while after, the Chameleon came lazily along and announced that, though men should die, they would return to life again ”

“ The chief, to whom he goes if he has committed such a murder, procures the charm for him from his own medicine-man, and uses it himself as well, ‘because of the blood that has been shed in his land.’
Adultery is theoretically a capital crime with most Bantu tribes; that is, the man may be (and frequently is) shot or speared by the husband; the wife is frequently let off with a warning the first time, but for a second offence either killed or divorced and sent back to her relatives, who in such a case must return whatever present was made at the marriage. ”

“ The Yaos, being mountaineers, assumed that a plain would be unfit for human habitation: Mtanga, on first viewing their country, remarked, ‘This country is bad because it is without a hill.’ There are also legends of the introduction of the sun, moon, and stars, and of the origin of clouds, wind, and rain; but all these presuppose the existence of people on the earth.
Mankind is held to have originated at Kapirimtiya, a hill—or as some say, an island in a lake, far to the west of Nyasa. ”

“ When a man takes a fancy to a girl whom he finds to be disengaged, he first of all comes to an understanding with her, then goes to her village and tells her family—all the relations, including the grandparents, the elder brother, and, above all, the maternal uncle, are consulted, as well as the parents—and, if they have no objection, he then goes to his own people. ”

“ While he was doing so he saw his wife coming, and put the fez half full of bran and water on his head to hide what he had been doing. His wife, however, was too quick for him and asked, ‘What is that on your head that you are hiding?’ He said, ‘Medicine that I prepared for the journey.’
Whether she believed this or not is not recorded, but in any case, the fib availed him little, for very soon the bran-porridge began to trickle down his face. He said, ‘Oh! my wife, hunger, hunger! Some hunger eats weeds of the field, some hunger eats what is bad. ”

“ We never heard that word of yours, Chameleon—people will die!’ Consequently, Zulus, Yaos, Anyanja, Atonga, and, I suppose, most Bantu, detest the poor Chameleon, [73] and consider him an unlucky beast. The Anyanja never pass one without putting snuff into its mouth, ‘that it may die,’ and any one who knows what a value they set on this commodity, and what minute quantities they seem, as a rule, to carry about with them, will allow that this is, indeed, carrying enmity very far. However, the Lake Anyanja seem to take a different view of the matter from the Blantyre people. ”

“ From these mountains the land sinks in a series of irregular undulations, to the Shiré, covered sometimes with bush, sometimes with the thick, coarse grass so feelingly described by all travellers, which is really more like [7] canes. After it is burned, as it is every year, it is a greater nuisance than ever, for the larger stalks (about as thick as one’s finger) never get quite consumed, and neither stand up nor lie flat, but lie across each other at every conceivable angle—too high to step on and too low to push one’s way under. ”

“ This is the universal custom, where the marriage of free women is concerned, with both Anyanja and Yaos. It is connected with the fact (to which we shall return later on) that children belong to the mother’s kin, not the father’s. One of the new husband’s first duties is to hoe a garden for his mother-in-law, though he is bound by the rules of propriety to avoid her to a certain extent. He must not eat in her presence nor see her eat, and there are various other restrictions, all of which come to an end when he has brought her the first grandchild, with a present. ”