Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume I Part 4

Circ.u.mcision, between the fourth and eighth year, is universal in Pongo-land, and without it a youth could not be married. The operation is performed generally by the chief, often by some old man, who receives a fee from the parents: the thumb nails are long, and are used after the Jewish fas.h.i.+on:[FN#10] neat rum with red pepper is spirted from the mouth to "kill wound." It is purely hygienic, and not balanced by the excisio Judaica, Some physiologists consider the latter a necessary complement of the male rite; such, however, is not the case. The Hebrews, who almost everywhere retained circ.u.mcision, have, in Europe at least, long abandoned excision. I regret that the delicacy of the age does not allow me to be more explicit.

The Mpongwe practise a rite so resembling infant baptism that the missionaries have derived it from a corruption of Abyssinian Christianity which, like the flora of the Camarones and Fernandian Highlands, might have travelled across the Dark Continent, where it has now been superseded by El Islam. I purpose at some period of more leisure to prove an ancient intercourse and rapprochement of all the African tribes ranging between the parallels of north lat.i.tude 20 and south lat.i.tude 30. It will best be established, not by the single great family of language, but by the similarity of manners, customs, and belief; of arts and crafts; of utensils and industry. The baptism of Pongo-land is as follows. When the babe is born, a crier, announcing the event, promises to it in the people's name partic.i.p.ation in the rights of the living. It is placed upon a banana leaf, for which reason the plantain is never used to stop the water-pots; and the chief or the nearest of kin sprinkles it from a basin, gives it a name, and p.r.o.nounces a benediction, his example being followed by all present. The man-child is exhorted to be truthful, and the girl to "tell plenty lie," in order to lead a happy life. Truly a new form of the regenerative rite!

A curious prepossession of the African mind, curious and yet general, in a land where population is the one want, and where issue is held the greatest blessing, is the imaginary necessity of limiting the family. Perhaps this form of infanticide is a policy derived from ancestors who found it necessary. In the kingdom of Apollonia (Guinea) the tenth child was always buried alive; never a Decimus was allowed to stand in the way of the nine seniors. The birth of twins is an evil portent to the Mpongwes, as it is in many parts of Central Africa, and even in the New World; it also involves the idea of moral turpitude, as if the woman were one of the lower animals, capable of superfetation. There is no greater insult to a man, than to point at him with two fingers, meaning that he is a twin; of course he is not one, or he would have been killed at birth. Albinos are allowed to live, as in Dahome, in Ashanti, and among some East African tribes, where I have been "chaffed" about a brother white, who proved to be an exceptional negro without pigmentum nigrum.

There is no novelty in the Mpongwe funeral rites; the same system prevails from the Oil Rivers to Congo-land, and extends even to the wild races of the interior. The corpse, being still sentient, is accompanied by stores of raiment, pots, and goats' flesh; a bottle is placed in one hand and a gla.s.s in the other, and, if the deceased has been fond of play, his draught-board and other materials are buried with him. The system has been well defined as one in which the "ghost of a man eats the ghost of a yam, boiled in the ghost of a pot, over the ghost of a fire." The body, after being stretched out in a box, is carried to a lonely place; some are buried deep, others close to the surface. There is an immense show of grief, with keening and crocodiles' tears, perhaps to benefit the living by averting a charge of witchcraft, which would inevitably lead to "Sa.s.sy" or poison-water. The wake continues for five days, when they "pull the cry," that is to say, end mourning. If these pious rites be neglected, the children incur the terrible reproach, "Your father he be hungry."

The widow may re-marry immediately after "living for cry," and, if young and l.u.s.ty, she looks out for another consort within the week. The slave is thrown out into the bush--no one will take the trouble to dig a hole for him.

The industry of the Mpongwe is that of the African generally; every man is a host in himself; he builds and furnishes his house, he makes his weapons and pipes, and he ignores division of labour, except in the smith and the carpenter; in the potter, who works without a wheel, and in the dyer, who knows barks, and who fixes his colours with clay. The men especially pride themselves upon canoe-making; the favourite wood is the buoyant Ok.u.meh or bombax, that monarch of the African forest. I have seen a boat, 45 feet 10 inches by 5 feet 11 inches in beam, cut out of a single tree, with the Mpano or little adze, a lineal descendant of the Silex implement, and I have heard of others measuring 70 feet. These craft easily carry 10 tons, and travel 200 to 300 miles, which, as Mr. Wilson remarks, would land them, under favourable circ.u.mstances, in South America. Captain Boteler found that the Mpongwe boat combined symmetry of form, strength, and solidity, with safeness and swiftness either in pulling or sailing. And of late years the people have succeeded in launching large and fast craft built after European models.

The favourite pleasures of the Mpongwe are gross and gorging "feeds," drinking and smoking. They recall to mind the old woman who told "Monk Lewis" that if a gla.s.s of gin were at one end of the table, and her immortal soul at the other, she would choose the gin. They soak with palm-wine every day; they indulge in rum and absinthe, and the wealthy affect so-called Cognac, with Champagne and Bordeaux, which, however, they p.r.o.nounce to be "cold." I have seen Master Boro, a boy five years old, drain without winking a winegla.s.sful of brandy. It is not wonderful that the adults can "stand" but little, and that a few mouthfuls of well-watered spirit make their voices thick, and paralyze their weak brains as well as their tongues. The Persians, who commence drinking late in life, can swallow strong waters by the tumbler.

Men, women, and children when hardly "cremn.o.batic," have always the pipe in mouth. The favourite article is a "dudheen," a well culotte clay, used and worn till the bowl touches the nose. The poor are driven to a "Kondukwe," a yard of plantain leaf, hollowed with a wire, and charged at the thicker end. The "holy herb" would of course grow in the country, and grow well, but it is imported from the States without trouble, and perhaps with less expense. Some tribes make a decent snuff of the common trade article, but I never saw either s.e.x chew--perhaps the most wholesome, and certainly the most efficacious form. The smoking of Lyamba, called Dyamba in the southern regions, is confined to debauchees. M. du Chaillu a.s.serts that this Cannabis sativa is not found wild, and the people confirm his statement; possibly it has extended from Hindostan to Zanzibar, and thence across the continent. Intoxicating hemp is now grown everywhere, especially in the Nkommi country, and little packages, neatly bound with banana leaves, sell on the river for ten sous each. It is smoked either in the "Kondukwe" or in the Ojo. The latter, literally meaning a torch, is a polished cow-horn, closed at the thick end with wood, and banded with metal; a wooden stem, projecting from the upper or concave side, bears a neat "chillam" (bowl), either of clay or of brown steat.i.te brought from the upper Gaboon River.

This rude hookah is half filled with water; the dried hemp in the bowl is covered with what Syrians call a "Kurs," a bit of metal about the size of half-a-crown, and upon it rests the fire. I at once recognized the implement in the Brazil, where many slave- holders simply supposed it to be a servile and African form of tobacco-pipe. After a few puffs the eyes redden, a violent cough is caused by the acrid fumes tickling the throat; the brain, whirls with a pleasant swimming, like that of chloroform, and the smoker finds himself in gloria. My Spanish friends at Po tried but did not like it. I can answer for the hemp being stronger than the Egyptian has.h.i.+sh or the bhang of Hindostan; it rather resembled the Fasukh of Northern Africa, the Dakha and Motukwane of the southern regions, and the wild variety called in Sind "Bang i Jabali."

The religion of African races is ever interesting to those of a maturer faith; it is somewhat like the study of childhood to an old man. The Jew, the high-caste Hindu, and the Guebre, the Christian and the Moslem have their Holy Writs, their fixed forms of thought and wors.h.i.+p, in fact their grooves in which belief runs. They no longer see through a gla.s.s darkly; nothing with them is left vague or undetermined. Continuation, resurrection, eternity are hereditary and habitual ideas; they have become almost inseparable and congenital parts of the mental system.

This condition renders it nearly as difficult for us to understand the vagueness and mistiness of savage and unwritten creeds, as to penetrate into the modus agendi of animal instinct.

And there is yet another obstacle in dealing with such people, their intense and childish sensitiveness and secretiveness. They are not, as some have foolishly supposed, ashamed of their tenets or their practices, but they are unwilling to speak about them.

They fear the intentions of the cross-questioner, and they hold themselves safest behind a crooked answer. Moreover, every Mpongwe is his own "pontifex maximus," and the want, or rather the scarcity, of a regular priesthood must promote independence and discrepancy of belief.

Whilst noticing the Fetis.h.i.+sm of the Gaboon I cannot help observing, by the way, how rapidly the civilization of the nineteenth century is redeveloping, together with the "Religion of Humanity" the old faith, not of Paganism, but of Cosmos, of Nature; how directly it is, in fact, going back to its olderG.o.ds.

The UNKNOWABLE of our day is the Brahm, the Akarana-Zaman, the Gaboon Anyambia, of which nothing can be predicated but an existence utterly unintelligible to the brain of man, a something free from the accidents of personality, of volition, of intelligence, of design, of providence; a something which cannot be addressed by veneration or wors.h.i.+p; whose sole effects are subjective, that is, upon the wors.h.i.+pper, not upon the wors.h.i.+pped. Nothing also can be more illogical than the awe and respect claimed by Mr. Herbert Spencer for a being of which the very essence is that nothing can be known of it. And, as the idea grows, the several modes and forms of the UNKNOWABLE, the Hormuzd and Ahriman of the Dualist, those personifications of good and evil; the Brahma, Vishnu, and s.h.i.+va, creation, preservation, and destruction; the beginning, the middle, and the end of all things; the Triad, adored by all Triadists under some modification, as that of Osiris, Isis, and Horus, father, mother, and son, type of the family; or Jupiter, Neptune, and Pluto, the three great elements; these outward and visible expressions lose force and significance, making place for that Law of which they are the rude exponents. The marvellous spread of Spiritualism, whose G.o.d is the UNKNOWABLE, and whose prophet was Swedenborg, is but the polished form of the Mpongwe Ibambo and Ilogo; the beneficent phantasms have succeeded to the malevolent ghosts, the shadowy deities of man's childhood; as the G.o.d of Love formerly took the place of the G.o.d of Fear. The future of Spiritualism, which may be defined as "Hades with Progress," is making serious inroads upon the coa.r.s.e belief, worthy of the barbarous and the middle ages, in an eternity of punishment, easily expressed by everlasting fire, and in ineffable joys, which no one has ever successfully expressed. The ghosts of our childhood have now become bona fide objective beings, who rap, raise tables, display fireworks, rain flowers, and brew tea. We explain by "levitation"

the riding of the witch upon the broom-stick to the Sabbath; we can no longer refuse credence to Canidia and all her spells. And the very vagueness of the modern faith serves to a.s.similate it the more to its most ancient forms, one of which we are studying upon the Gaboon River.

The missionary returning from Africa is often asked what is the religion of the people? If an exact man, he will answer, "I don't know." And how can he know when the people themselves, even the princes and priests, are ignorant of it? A missionary of twenty years' standing in West Africa, an able and conscientious student withal, a.s.sured me that during the early part of his career he had given much time to collecting and collating, under intelligent native superintendence, negro traditions and religion. He presently found that no two men thought alike upon any single subject: I need hardly say that he gave up in despair a work hopeless as psychology, the mere study of the individual.

Fetis.h.i.+sm, I believe, is held by the orthodox to be a degradation of the pure and primitive "Adamical dispensation," even as the negro has been supposed to represent the accursed and degraded descendants of Ham and Canaan. I cannot but look upon it as the first dawn of a faith in things not seen. And it must be studied by casting off all our preconceived ideas. For instance, Africans believe, not in soul nor in spirit, but in ghost; when they called M. du Chaillu a "Mbwiri," they meant that the white man had been bleached by the grave as Dante had been darkened by his visit below, and consequently he was a subject of fear and awe.

They have a material, evanescent, intelligible future, not an immaterial, incomprehensible eternity; the ghost endures only for awhile and perishes like the memory of the little-great name.

Hence the ign.o.ble dread in East and West Africa of a death which leads to a shadowy world, and eventually to utter annihilation.

Seeing nought beyond the present-future, there is no hope for them in the grave; they wail and sorrow with a burden of despair.

"Ame-kwisha"--he is finished--is the East African's last word concerning kinsman and friend. "All is done for ever," sing the West Africans. Any allusion to loss of life turns their black skins blue; "Yes," they exclaim, "it is bad to die, to leave house and home, wife and children; no more to wear soft cloth, nor eat meat, nor "drink" tobacco, and rum." "Never speak of that" the moribund will exclaim with a shudder; such is the ever- present horror of their dreadful and dreary times of sickness, always aggravated by suspicions of witchcraft, the only cause which their imperfect knowledge of physics can a.s.sign to death-- even Van Helmont a.s.serted, "Deus non fecit mortem." The peoples, who, like those of Dahome, have a distinct future world, have borrowed it, I cannot help thinking, from Egypt. And when an African chief said in my presence to a Yahoo-like naval officer, "When so be I die, I come up for white man! When so be you die, you come up for monkey!" my suspicion is that he had distorted the doctrine of some missionary. Man would hardly have a future without a distinct priestly cla.s.s whose interest it is to teach "another and a better,"--or a worse.

Certain missionaries in the Gaboon River have detected evidences of Judaism amongst the Mpongwe, which deserve notice but which hardly require detailed refutation. 1. Circ.u.mcision, even on the eighth day as amongst the Efik of the old Calabar River; but this is a familiar custom borrowed from Egypt by the Semites; it is done in a mult.i.tude of ways, which are limited only by necessity; the resemblance of the Mpongwe rite to that of the Jews, though remarkable, is purely accidental. 2. The division of tribes into separate families and frequently into the number twelve; but this again appears fortuitous; almost all the West African people have some such division, and they range upwards from three, as amongst the Kru-men, the Gallas, the Wakwafi,and the Wanyika.[FN#11] 3.

Exogamy or the rigid interdiction of marriage between clans and families nearly related; here again the Hindu and the Somal observe the custom rigidly, whilst the Jews and Arabs have ever taken to wife their first cousins. 4. Sacrifices with blood- sprinkling upon altars and door-posts; a superst.i.tion almost universal, found in Peru and Mexico as in Palestine, preserved in Ashanti and probably borrowed by the Hebrews from the African Egyptians. 5. The formal and ceremonial observance of new moons; but the Wanyamwezi and other tribes also hail the appearance of the lesser light, like the Moslems, who, when they sight the Hilal (crescent), e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.e a short prayer for blessings throughout the month which it ushers in. 6. A specified time of mourning for the dead (common to all barbarians as to civilized races), during which their survivors wear soiled clothes (an instinctive sign of grief, as fine dresses are of joy), and shave their heads (doubtless done to make some difference from every- day times), accompanied with ceremonial purifications (what ancient people has not had some such whim?). 7. The system of Runda or forbidden meats; but every traveller has found this practice in South as in East Africa, and I noticed it among the Somal who, even when starving, will not touch fish nor fowl.

Briefly, external resemblances and coincidences like these could be made to establish cousinhood between a c.o.c.kney and a c.o.c.katoo; possibly such discovery of Judaism dates from the days about 1840, when men were mad to find the "Lost Tribes," as if they had not quite enough to do with the two which remain to them.

The Mpongwe and their neighbours have advanced a long step beyond their black brethren in Eastern Africa. No longer contented with mere Fetishes, the Egyptian charms in which the dreaded ghost "sits,"[FN#12] meaning, is "bound," they have invented idols, a manifest advance toward that polytheism and pantheism which lead through a triad and duad of deities to monotheism, the finial of the spiritual edifice. In Eastern Africa I know but one people, the Wanyika near Mombasah, who have certain images called "Kisukas;" they declare that this great medicine, never shown to Europeans, came from the West, and Andrew Battel (1600) found idols amongst the people whom he calls Giagas or Jagas, meaning Congoese chiefs. Moreover, the Gaboon pagans lodge their idols.

Behind each larger establishment there is a dwarf hut, the miniature of a dwelling-place, carefully closed; I thought these were offices, but Hotaloya Andrews taught me otherwise. He called them in his broken English "Compa.s.s-houses," a literal translation of "Nago Mbwiri," and, st.u.r.dily refusing me admittance, left me as wise as before. The reason afterwards proved to be that "Ologo he kill man too much."

I presently found out that he called my pocket compa.s.s, "Mbwiri,"

a very vague and comprehensive word. It represents in the highest signification the Columbian Manitou, and thus men talk of the Mbwiri of a tree or a river; as will presently be seen, it is also applied to a tutelar G.o.d; and I have shown how it means a ghost. In "Nago Mbwiri" the sense is an idol, an object of wors.h.i.+p, a "medicine" as the North-American Indians say, in contradistinction to Munda, a grigri, talisman, or charm. Every Mpongwe, woman as well as man, has some Mbwiri to which offerings are made in times of misfortune, sickness, or danger. I afterwards managed to enter one of these rude and embryonal temples so carefully shut. Behind the little door of matting is a tall threshold of board; a bench lines the far end, and in the centre stands "Ologo," a rude imitation of a human figure, with a gum-torch planted in the ground before it ready for burnt offerings. To the walls are suspended sundry mystic implements, especially basins, smeared with red and white chalk-mixture, and wooden crescents decorated with beads and ribbons.

During wors.h.i.+p certain objects are placed before the Joss, the suppliant at the same time jangling and shaking the Ncheke a rude beginning of the bell, the gong, the rattle, and the instruments played before idols by more advanced peoples. It is a piece of wood, hour-gla.s.s-shaped but flat, and some six inches and a half long; the girth of the waist is five inches, and about three more round the ends. The wood is cut away, leaving rude and uneven raised bands horizontally striped with white, black, and red. Two bra.s.s wires are stretched across the upper and lower breadth, and each is provided with a ring or hinge holding four or five strips of wire acting as clappers.

This "wicker-work rattle to drive the devil out" (M. du Chaillu, chap, xxvi.) is called by the Mpongwe "Soke," and serves only, like that of the Dahomans and the Ashantis (Bowdich, 364) for dancing and merriment. The South American Maraca was the sole object of wors.h.i.+p known to the Tupi or Brazilian "Indians."

[FN#13]

The beliefs and superst.i.tions popularly attributed to the Mpongwe are these. They are not without that which we call a First Cause, and they name it Anyambia, which missionary philologists consider a contraction of Aninla, spirit (?), and Mbia, good. M. du Chaillu everywhere confounds Anyambia, or, as he writes the word, "Aniambie," with Inyemba, a witch, to bewitch being "punga inyemba." Mr. W. Winwood Reade seems to make Anyambia a mysterious word, as was Jehovah after the date of the Moabite stone. Like the Brahm of the Hindus, the G.o.d of Epicurus and Confucius, and the Akarana-Zaman or Endless Time of the Guebres, Anyambia is a vague being, a vox et praeterea nihil, without personality, too high and too remote for interference in human affairs, therefore not addressed in prayer, never represented by the human form, never lodged in temples. Under this "unknown G.o.d"

are two chief agencies, working partners who manage the business of the world, and who effect what the civilized call "Providence." Mbwiri here becomes the Osiris, Jove, Hormuzd or Good G.o.d, the Vishnu, or Preserver, a tutelar deity, a Lar, a guardian. Onyambe is the Bad G.o.d, Typhon, Vejovis, the Ahriman or Semitic devil; s.h.i.+va the Destroyer, the third person of the Aryan triad; and his name is never mentioned but with bated breath.

They have not only fear of, but also a higher respect for him than for the giver of good, so difficult is it for the child- man's mind to connect the ideas of benignity and power. He would harm if he could, ergo so would his G.o.d. I once hesitated to believe that these rude people had arrived at the notion of duality, at the Manichaeanism which caused Mr. Mill (sen.) surprise that no one had revived it in his time; at an idea so philosophical, which leads directly to the ne plus ultra of faith, El Wahdaniyyeh or Monotheism. Nor should I have credited them with so logical an apparatus for the regimen of the universe, or so stout-hearted an attempt to solve the eternal riddle of good and evil. But the same belief also exists amongst the Congoese tribes, and even in the debased races of the Niger.

Captain William Alien ("Niger Expedition," i. 227) thus records the effect when, at the request of the commissioners, Herr Schon, the missionary, began stating to King Obi the difference between the Christian religion and heathenism:

"Herr Schon. There is but one G.o.d.

"King Obi. I always understood there were two," &c.

The Mpongwe "Mwetye" is a branch of male freemasonry into which women and strangers are never initiated. The Bakele and Shekyani, according to "Western Africa" (Wilson, pp. 391-2), consider it a "Great Spirit." Nothing is more common amongst adjoining negro tribes than to annex one another's superst.i.tions, completely changing, withal, their significance. "Ovengwa" is a vampire, the apparition of a dead man; tall as a tree, always winking and clearly seen, which is not the case with the Ibambo and Ilogo, plurals of Obambo and Ologo. These are vulgar ghosts of the departed, the causes of "possession," disease and death; they are propitiated by various rites, and everywhere they are wors.h.i.+pped in private. Mr. Wilson opines that the "Obambo are the spirits of the ancestors of the people, and Inlaga are the spirits of strangers and have come from a distance," but this was probably an individual tenet. The Mumbo-Jumbo of the Mandengas; the Semo of the Susus; the Ta.s.sau or "Purrah-devil" of the Mendis; the Egugun of the Egbas; the Egbo of the Duallas; and the Mwetye and Ukukwe of the Bakele, is represented in Pongo-land by the Nda, which is an order of the young men. Nda dwells in the woods and comes forth only by night bundled up in dry plantain leaves[FN#14] and treading on tall stilts; he precedes free adult males who parade the streets with dance and song. The women and children fly at the approach of this devil on two sticks, and with reason: every peccadillo is punished with a merciless thras.h.i.+ng. The inst.i.tution is intended to keep in order the weaker s.e.x, the young and the "chattels:" Nda has tried visiting white men and missionaries, but his visits have not been a success.

The civilized man would be apt to imagine that these wild African fetis.h.i.+sts are easily converted to a "purer creed." The contrary is everywhere and absolutely the case; their faith is a web woven with threads of iron. The negro finds it almost impossible to rid himself of his belief; the spiritual despotism is the expression of his organization, a part of himself. Progressive races, on the other hand, can throw off or exchange every part of their religion, except perhaps the remnant of original and natural belief in things unseen--in fact, the Fetis.h.i.+st portion, such as ghost-existence and veneration of material objects, places, and things. I might instance the Protestant missionary who, while deriding the holy places at Jerusalem, considers the "Cedars of Lebanon" sacred things, and sternly forbids travellers to gather the cones.

The stereotyped African answer to Europeans ridiculing these inst.i.tutions, including wizard-spearing and witch-burning is, "There may be no magic, though I see there is, among you whites.

But we blacks have known many men who have been bewitched and died." Even in Asia, whenever I spoke contemptuously to a Moslem of his Jinns, or to a Hindu of his Rakshasa, the rejoinder invariably was, "You white men are by nature so hot that even our devils fear you."

Witchcraft, which has by no means thoroughly disappeared from Europe, maintains firm hold upon the African brain. The idea is found amongst Christians, for instance, the "reduced Indians" of the Amazonas River; and it is evidently at the bottom of that widely spread superst.i.tion, the "evil eye," which remains throughout Southern Europe as strong as it was in the days of Pliny. As amongst barbarians generally, no misfortune happens, no accident occurs, no illness nor death can take place without the agency of wizard or witch. There is nothing more odious than this crime; it is hostile to G.o.d and man, and it must be expiated by death in the most terrible tortures. Metamorphosis is a common art amongst Mpongwe magicians: this vulgar materialism, of which Ovid sang, must not be confounded with the poetical Hindu metempsychosis or transmigration of souls which explains empirically certain physiological mysteries. Here the adept naturally becomes a gorilla or a leopard, as he would be a lion in South Africa, a hyena in Abyssinia and the Somali country, and a loup-garou in Brittany.[FN#15]

The poison ordeal is a necessary corollary to witchcraft. The plant most used by the Oganga (medicine man) is a small red rooted shrub, not unlike a hazel bush, and called Ikazya or Ikaja. Mr. Wilson (p. 225) writes "Nkazya:" Battel (loc. cit.

334) terms the root "Imbando," a corruption of Mbundu. M. du Chaillu (chap. xv.) gives an ill.u.s.tration of the "Mboundou leaf"

(half size): Professor John Torrey believes the active principle to be a vegeto-alkali of the Strychnos group, but the symptoms do not seem to bear out the conjecture. The Mpongwe told me that the poison was named either Mbundu or Olonda (nut) werere--perhaps this was what is popularly called "a sell." Mbundu is the decoction of the sc.r.a.ped bark which corresponds with the "Sa.s.sy- water" of the northern maritime tribes. The accused, after drinking the potion, is ordered to step over sticks of the same plant, which are placed a pace apart. If the man be affected, he raises his foot like a horse with string-halt, and this convicts him of the foul crime. Of course there is some antidote, as the medicine-man himself drinks large draughts of his own stuff: in Old Calabar River for instance, Mithridates boils the poison-nut; but Europeans could not, and natives would not, tell me what the Gaboon "dodge" is. According to vulgar Africans, all test-poisons are sentient and reasoning beings, who search the criminal's stomach, that is his heart, and who find out the deep hidden sin; hence the people shout, "If they are wizards, let it kill them; if they are innocent, let it go forth!" Moreover, the detected murderer is considered a bungler who has fallen into the pit dug for his brother. Doubtless many innocent lives have been lost by this superst.i.tion. But there is reason in the order, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," without having recourse to the supernaturalisms and preternaturalisms, which have un.o.bligingly disappeared when Science most wants them. Sorcery and poison are as closely united as the "Black Nightingales," and it evidently differs little whether I slay a man with my sword or I destroy him by the slow and certain torture of a mind diseased.

The Mpongwe have also some peculiarities in their notions of justice. If a man murder another, the criminal is put to death, not by the nearest of kin, as amongst the Arabs and almost all wild people, but by the whole community; this already shows an advanced appreciation of the act and its bearings. The penalty is either drowning or burning alive: except in the case of a chief or a very rich man, little or no difference is made between wilful murder, justifiable homicide, and accidental manslaughter- -the reason of this, say their jurists, is to make people more careful. Here, again, we find a sense of the sanct.i.ty of life the reverse of barbarous. Cutting and maiming are punished by the fine of a slave.

And now briefly to resume the character of the Mpongwe, a nervous and excitable race of negroes. The men are deficient in courage, as the women are in chast.i.ty, and neither s.e.x has a tincture of what we call morality. To commercial shrewdness and eagerness they add exceptional greed of gain and rascality; foreign rum and tobacco, dress and ornaments, arms and ammunition have been necessaries to them; they will have them, and, unless they can supply themselves by licit, they naturally fly to illicit means.

Yet, despite threats of poison and charges of witchcraft, they have arrived at an inkling of the dogma that "honesty is the best policy:" the East African has never dreamed it in the moments of his wildest imagination. Pre-eminent liars, they are, curious to say, often deceived by the falsehoods of others, and they fairly ill.u.s.trate the somewhat paradoxical proverb:

"He who hates truth shall be the dupe of lies."

Unblus.h.i.+ng mendicants, cunning and calculating, their obstinacy is remarkable; yet, as we often find the African, they are at the same time irresolute in the extreme. Their virtues are vivacity, mental activity, acute observation, sociability, politeness, and hospitality: the fact that a white man can wander single-handed through the country shows a kindly nature. The brightest spot in their character is an abnormal development of adhesiveness, popularly called affection; it is somewhat tempered by capricious ruffianism, as in children; yet it ent.i.tles them to the grat.i.tude of travellers.

The language of the Mpongwe has been fairly studied. T. Edward Bowdich ("Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee," London, Murray, 1819) when leaving the West Coast for England, touched at the Gaboon in a trading vessel, and visited Naango (King George's Town), on Abaaga Creek, which he places fifty miles up stream. He first gave (Appendix VI.) a list of the Mpongwe numerals. In 1847 the "Missionaries of the A. B. C. F. M." Gaboon Mission, Western Africa, printed a "Grammar of the Mpongwe Language, with Vocabularies" (New York,Snowden and Pratt, Vesey Street), perhaps a little prematurely; it is the first of the four dialects on this part of the coast reduced to system by the American Missionaries, especially by the Rev. Mr. Leighton Wilson, the others being Bakele, Benga, and Fan.

In 1856, the same gentleman, who had taken the chief part in the first publication, made an able abstract and a comparison with the Grebo and Mandenga tongues ("Western Africa," part iv. chap.

iv.). M. du Chaillu further abridged this abridgement in his Appendix without owning his authority, and in changing the examples he did all possible damage. In the Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London (part ii. vol. i. new series), he also gave an abstract, in which he repeats himself. A "vocabulaire de la langue Ponga" was printed in the "Memoires de la Societe Ethnologique," tome ii., by M. P. H. Delaporte.

The other publications known to me are:--

1. The Book of Proverbs, translated into the Mpongwe language at the mission of the A. B. C. F. M., Gaboon, West Africa. New York.

American Bible Society, inst.i.tuted in the year MDCCCXVI. 1859.

2. The Books of Genesis, part of Exodus, Proverbs, and Acts, by the same, printed at the same place and in the same year.

The missionary explorers of the language, if I may so call them, at once saw that it belongs to the great South African family Sichwana, Zulu, Kisawahili, Mbundo (Congoese), Fiote, and others, whose characteristics are polysyllabism, inflection by systematic prefixes, and an alliteration, the mystery of whose reciprocal letters is theoretically explained by a euphony in many cases unintelligible, like the modes of Hindu music, to the European ear.[FN#16] But they naturally fell into the universally accepted error of a.s.serting "it has no known affinities to any of the languages north of the Mountains of the Moon," meaning the equatorial chain which divides the Niger and Nile valleys from the basin of the Congo.

This branch has its peculiarities. Like Italian--the coquette who grants her smiles to many, her favours to few--one of the easiest to understand and to speak a little, it is very difficult to master. Whilst every native child can thread its way safely through its intricate, elaborate, and apparently arbitrary variations, the people comprehend a stranger who blunders over every sentence. Mr. Wilson thus limits the use of the accent: "Whilst the Mandenga ("A Grammar of the Mandenga Language," by the Rev. R. Maxwell Macbriar, London, John Mason) and the Grebo ("Grammar," by the Right Rev. John Payne, D.D. 150, Na.s.sau Street, New York, 1864), distinguish between similar words, especially monosyllables, by a certain pitch of voice, the Mpongwe repel accent, and rely solely upon the clear and distinct vowel sounds." But I found the negative past, present, and future forms of verbs wholly dependent upon a change of accent, or rather of intonation or voice-pitch, which the stranger's ear, unless acute, will fail to detect. For instance, Mi Taund would mean "I love;" Mi taunda, "I do not love." The reverend linguist also a.s.serts that it is almost entirely free from guttural and nasal sounds; the latter appeared to me as numerous and complicated as in the Sanskrit. Mr. Wilson could hardly have had a nice ear, or he would not have written Nchigo "Ntyege," or Njina "Engena," which gives a thoroughly un-African distinctness to the initial consonant.

The adjectival form is archaically expressed by a second and abstract substantive. This peculiarity is common in the South African family, as in Ashanti; but, as Bowdich observes, we also find it in Greek, e.g. , "heresies of destruction" for destructive. Another notable characteristic is the Mpongwe's fondness for the pa.s.sive voice, never using, if possible, the active; for instance, instead of saying, "He was born thus," he prefers, "The birth that was thus borned by him."

The dialect changes the final as well as the initial syllable, a process unknown to the purest types of the South African family.

As we advance north we find this phenomenon ever increasing; for instance in Fernando Po; but the Mpongwe limits the change to verbs.