Chapter III: In a Bushongo Village (2)

Although the Batwa are the real hunters of Misumba, the Bushongo themselves very frequently indulge in a little sport (if so their hunting can be termed), for Pongo-Pongo possesses two muzzle-loaders, and dearly loves an opportunity of displaying them. I accompanied him upon one of his shooting excursions near the village. The day was very hot, and a start was not made until nearly noon. This should have shown me that I was not likely to get many shots myself, as, of course, all game would long since have sought the shade of the dense woodlands, in which one’s chance of bagging it with the rifle is very small; but I was anxious to watch the Batwa and Bushongo hunting in their own way, so I was glad of the opportunity of accompanying them. We left the village amid considerable noise, several members of the party performing a sort of “A-hunting we will go” upon horns made from the points of young elephant tusks, and others giving vent to the Bushongo war-cry, a sound suggestive of both a “view holloa” and the neighing of a horse. We numbered about fifty altogether (including some sportsmen of very tender years), and were accompanied by some twenty of the tan-and-white prick-eared dogs which are to be found in every Congo village. Pongo-Pongo carried one of his muzzle-loaders, while the second one was entrusted to a slave who walked behind him. The rest of the party were armed only with bows and arrows and spears, while several of them carried the long nets into which the game was to be driven. About three-quarters of an hour’s walk brought us to the side of the wood in which we were to commence operations. Here a consultation was held as to the arrangements for the “beat.” This was conducted with all possible noise, and should have been sufficient to warn any animal within a radius of a mile or two that something very desperate in the way of hunting parties was about to be held. One man who, as we subsequently discovered, held an official position as chief hunter in the village, at last succeeded in shouting down the others and obtaining a hearing, whereupon he delivered a lengthy speech at the top of his voice, evidently pointing out to the various people the parts they were to take in the afternoon’s work. His remarks were received with universal hand-clapping. The men who had charge of the nets then departed into the wood. The nets are very long and only about three feet high. They are placed in a line, and the game is driven towards them, so that, when entangled in their meshes, it may be speared or shot by men concealed behind them. Pongo-Pongo now loaded his guns. His bullet-box was a real curio. It contained scraps of metal of all kinds, and of all sizes and shapes, none of which, of course, properly fitted the bore of his guns, so that any accuracy of shooting was entirely out of the question; all the same, I would rather be hit and mercifully despatched by any expanding bullet from a modern rifle than receive in my person a few of those jagged lumps of copper with which Pongo-Pongo (after much careful examination of his stock of projectiles) proceeded to charge his guns. While he was so engaged, the owners of the dogs were busy tying rattles round these animals. Each dog had a spherical rattle hollowed from a solid piece of wood strapped tightly round its loins, their object being to make a noise as the line of dogs and beaters advances, and so frighten the game into the nets, for the dogs themselves do not as a rule give tongue unless they actually get a view of their quarry. Everything being at last ready, we moved off into the wood. I noticed carefully what Pongo-Pongo’s movements would be, and upon finding that he intended accompanying the beaters, I suggested taking up a stand near the nets, for I knew that my life would not be worth a moment’s purchase if I happened to be within range of my host or his slave when they happened to see a pig, and I had no desire to perish of copper poisoning as a result of a shot in the leg from his gun. I was accordingly conducted to a position near the line of nets to await the arrival of game as it retired before the advancing line of dogs and men. For some time everything was still. At length a little movement among the countless inhabitants of the forest trees showed that the birds had become aware that something unusual was going on, and a few minutes later a hornbill and some plantain-eaters hurriedly left their perches and departed farther into the wood, the latter emitting that deep rolling cry which is one of the most beautiful of all the sounds that break the stillness of the African forest. A little later a crashing of branches in the tree-tops, growing rapidly nearer, indicated the approach of a troop of monkeys, and I had an opportunity of bagging specimens of both a coal-black colobus and a cercopithecus monkey; an opportunity which, to the disgust of my Bushongo companions, I did not embrace, as I was not desirous of turning back with the noise of a shot any more important beast which might be approaching. Soon the beaters could be heard drawing nearer and nearer, and the rattles of the dogs could be distinguished as these animals darted hither and thither in the dense undergrowth, occasionally (though very rarely) giving vent to a short, sharp yelp. Suddenly some shouting in the distance caused my companions to quiver with excitement as they told me that a pig (a red river hog) had been seen by the beaters, and directed me to keep a keen look-out for the animal, which, if all had gone well, might be expected to come in our direction. Unfortunately, however, all had not gone well. The line of beaters converged upon the nets, driving nothing before them at all, for two pigs (the only animals seen) had broken back through the line without so much as an arrow in their hides. I have no doubt that the noisy discussion at the woodside before commencing the beat had driven all the small antelopes which inhabit the forest far away into the depths of the wood, and pigs are notoriously alert and difficult to surprise. Pongo-Pongo, upon rejoining me, suggested a return home, and we reached Misumba at dusk, very hot, very scratched, and very thirsty, without bringing with us a single trophy. This by no means infrequently occurs.

The Bushongo are a most interesting people; I believe Torday’s work among them has shown them to be quite one of the most interesting tribes of Central Africa; they are easy to get on with, and in every way desirable; but I am afraid their dearest friend could not truthfully make out for them any claim whatever to be considered sportsmen. They are quite the worst hunters we met during our journey in the Kasai. Occasionally large animals are killed by them, but usually this is done by means of traps. The elephant which I have already mentioned as having been killed near Misumba was trapped by means of a large harpoon, heavily weighted with a log, falling upon the nape of his neck from a tree-top, a very common means of killing elephant and hippopotami. When a large animal is bagged, a sacrifice is always made to the hunting fetish in Misumba. We were present at that which took place after the death of the elephant alluded to above. The fetish, which is supposed to influence the fortunes of the chase, consists of a wooden image of a man (nearly all head, the body being of microscopic proportions and covered with cloth). It is very poorly carved in comparison with the beautifully worked cups and boxes for which the Bushongo are famous, and in place of the usual tukula dye, its face is stained with soot. At the ceremony which I am about to describe, it was placed in the village street, and was surrounded by a large crowd, including several drummers, who contributed to the sacrifice quite their fair share of the uproar without which no negro festival is complete. In front of the image the fetish-man—quite a young man, by the way—executed a _pas seul_, advancing to the pedestal on which the fetish stood and then retiring backwards to the edge of the crowd. His dance at an end (and he displayed considerable endurance before he ceased his antics), the fetish-man solemnly poured water into the ear of the figure, while another man, with equal solemnity, blew some tobacco smoke in its face from his long wooden pipe. An unfortunate (and very skinny) chicken was then produced, and its throat was cut, the poor bird being allowed to die slowly on the ground before the image, while the fetish-man continued his dance and the drummers furiously beat their tom-toms. The sacrifice was then at an end. Very often similar ceremonies precede a day’s hunting, and these are sometimes held beneath a sacred tree in the grounds of the Kasai Company’s factory. The social organisation of Misumba is almost exactly identical with that of the court of the great Bushongo king at the Mushenge, although, of course, Isambula N’Genga being only a viceroy, it is on a smaller scale. We enjoyed ample opportunities for gaining insight into the intricate organisation of this miniature court owing to the friendliness of the chief and Pongo-Pongo; indeed, so friendly did they become that they suggested to Torday that he should be formally made an “elder” of Misumba, a suggestion which, after due consideration, he tactfully declined.

He felt that when we visited the king (which, after what we had seen of the eastern Bushongo, we were now firmly determined to do) it might not add much to his dignity if he had become an elder at the court of a viceroy; and as there appeared to be nothing to be gained by going through the ceremony, all particulars of which we had already learned, he contrived to put off the question indefinitely until the idea had left the minds of the people of Misumba. I will not give my reader any detailed account of the composition of Isambula N’Genga’s court, as I shall describe more fully the organisation of the great court at the Mushenge. There is one dignitary, however, who must be mentioned here, the old Bilumbu, or “instructor of the young.” We became friendly with him under circumstances worthy of a boy’s book of adventure. He was ill, very ill, with an attack of fever which he could not shake off, and the continued strain of which seemed likely to wear him out, for he was very old indeed. Having tried various native remedies without success, he at last decided to ask the white man for medicine. He appealed to Torday. Now, Torday is a very fair doctor, and upon this occasion he surpassed himself in his treatment of the case. In a few days the old man had recovered. The administration of quinine tabloids was attended with no small amount of ceremony. Torday, of course, had impressed upon the Bilumbu the almost magic power of Messrs. Burroughs & Wellcome’s drugs, and the old man came to regard them with a good deal of superstitious awe, so that he would never allow any one to see him actually swallow the tabloids. When we arrived with his dose he used to insist upon being completely covered up in a blanket, from the folds of which he would extend one bony hand, into which the pills were placed; he then swallowed the drugs, concealed from view by the blanket. He made such a mystery over the taking of the pills that we had the greatest difficulty in preventing ourselves from laughing, but, of course, any unseemly levity on our part would have materially hindered the cure. In return for Torday’s medical attendance the old man imparted to him many of the strange legends of the Bushongo, which, as “instructor of the young,” it was his duty to teach to the rising generation. Day after day Torday would go down to the Bilumbu’s hut, and seated in the shade in some secluded spot he would listen by the hour to the old man’s tales, and, as a result, he was able to gain an extensive knowledge of Bushongo folk-lore. These legends are preserved only in the brain of the Bilumbu, for, of course, the art of writing is quite unknown to the Bushongo, and they are sacred; it was therefore entirely due to Torday’s good fortune in being able to cure the old man of his fever that he obtained this splendid opportunity of learning the stories from the man who knew them best. The old Bilumbu evidently considered that the dignity of his office required that he should surround himself with as much mystery as possible—hence no doubt his habit of taking pills under a blanket; and accordingly the relating of his legends was not without its ceremony, in the course of which the old fellow generally succeeded in making something out of somebody. This is the sort of thing that used to occur. We would go and call upon the Bilumbu, accompanied by a youth of the name of Masolo (a great friend of ours who usually accompanied us wherever we went, and who had temporarily attached himself to the expedition in the capacity of guide to Misumba, interpreter, extra boy, and gun-bearer). Masolo spoke Chituba well, and as the old “instructor of the young” spoke no language but his own, the lad used to act as interpreter between us. The Bilumbu, with as mysterious an air as possible, would conduct us to a yard between two huts, or to some other quiet place, and then seat himself on the ground. For a few minutes he would say nothing, or merely make conversation upon general subjects. Then he would think of some particular legend which he wished to impart to us, and he would turn furiously upon the crowd of youths and children, who always tried to be present at these interviews, and drive them away with a flow of language ill befitting an instructor of the young. Every one but Masolo having departed, he would turn to our youthful interpreter and inquire what he meant by remaining (he always did this, although he knew perfectly well that the lad was going to act as interpreter). Masolo would then explain that his presence was a necessity, and the old man would say, “The things that I am about to relate are too strong for the ears of children, but if you must hear them give me your knife.” Masolo would then always hand over his knife, or whatever object the Bilumbu asked for, without demur, and the old man, having secured something for himself, would then proceed to relate his story. This occurred practically every time we visited him, and as, of course, we had to return to Masolo the value of the things thus extorted from him, the process of studying folk-lore became rather expensive. The old man had, no doubt, many similar ways of increasing his income, for an incident occurred during our stay at Misumba which clearly demonstrated his readiness to turn anything to account. There was a violent tornado one night, in the course of which the lightning struck a tree quite close to the old Bilumbu’s hut. Now this would have terrified nine natives out of ten, and led them to procure for themselves a number of charms against lightning, but the “instructor of the young” realised at once that there was money in the occurrence. He concealed his fears (if he had any), and at once proclaimed to his neighbours how fortunate it was for them that such a person as himself resided in their midst who could thus induce the lightning to expend its wrath upon a tree instead of destroying life in the village. He was then good enough to accept a few tokens of gratitude from those whose lives he had saved by his magic control of the storm. Truly the old fellow was a shrewd business man! The tales themselves which we gleaned from our aged friend were many of them of a nature only to be printed in a strictly scientific work, and even then some of them would benefit by translation into Latin; others, however, were merely stories indicating the origin of quite harmless proverbs. To give my reader some idea of Bushongo folk-tales, I will narrate one story as told to us by the Bilumbu; it has reference to the “yuka,” the animal whose weird cry had attracted our attention at Batempa, and of which we had secured two living specimens.

Once upon a time a man met a personal enemy in the road between two villages, to neither of which he nor his enemy belonged. He took the opportunity of administering a good thrashing to the man who had incurred his anger. The screams of his victim were so loud as to be heard in both villages, and the warriors of each turned out equipped for war. Arriving upon the scene, they found the thrashing in progress, and immediately took sides in the affair, with the result that a general _mêlée_ ensued, in the course of which several people were killed. After the battle it occurred to the warriors to wonder what they had been fighting about, and they discovered that all the bloodshed had been caused by a quarrel between two men, in whom none of them had the slightest interest. So it is when a man has climbed a palm tree to obtain “malafu” (palm wine), he hears the cry of the yuka, and, mistaking it for the shriek of a human being in distress, he hurriedly climbs down to go to the rescue. In his descent he slips and breaks his leg. Nowadays when a young man shows his intention of doing anything without due consideration or of meddling in other people’s affairs, the other men will say to him, “Remember the yuka’s cry,” and he will then perhaps reconsider his plans. I have told this tale exactly as told to us, and it appears to point a similar moral to our proverb, “Look before you leap.” Bushongo folk-lore is full of such stories, but some of them are even more far-fetched than this one, and some are practically unintelligible.

On the whole our life at Misumba was very quiet. We were busy at our work from morning until night, and the place was too peaceful for any particularly exciting incident to be likely to occur. At Misumba, too, we heard none of those rumours of wars which are ever in the atmosphere of the Congo, and which, true or untrue, dogged our footsteps almost wherever we went. When one is in hourly contact with interesting and hitherto unspoilt natives amusing things are continually brought to one’s notice, and one of the quaintest divorce cases I have ever heard of came to our ears at Misumba. A resident in the village whose name I have forgotten, but whom we will term “A,” accused a bachelor, also a native of Misumba, whom we may call “B,” of undue familiarity with his wife. B emphatically denied the accusation, and brought a charge of slander against A. The case was taken before the chief, and pending his decision, B proceeded to steal a chicken belonging to the chief. He openly confessed to having done so, and told the chief that he must repay himself for the loss of his bird by purloining something belonging to the slanderer, A! The case was altogether too complicated for the chief, who invited Torday to give an opinion upon it. The parties were therefore brought to us one morning, B appearing armed with a spear. It is most unorthodox to carry arms at meetings of this kind, so Torday inquired why he had come to a palaver with a weapon in his hand. “Oh, it’s all right,” replied the fellow; “I am not going to hurt you.” He, however, laid aside the spear. We then went on to examine the facts of the case, and finally inquired of B why he should steal one of the chiefs chickens, when he felt himself aggrieved at A’s accusations. His answer was rather unexpected: “I knew I should never get justice from the chief unless he was personally concerned in the matter, so I took his chicken to draw him into it. Now he can get it out of A!” This truly remarkable way of currying favour with his judge was not entirely successful, for he was at once found guilty of an intrigue with A’s wife, and sentenced to pay a large fine in cowrie shells (the small change of the district) to the chief, as well as damages to the petitioner, and was removed in custody until he could hand over the amount required. A few days later we met him, at liberty and quite cheerful, having paid his fine and having married the lady who had been at the bottom of the trouble. Had the petitioner stolen the chicken I think it is very unlikely that the decree would have been granted, for justice among the African natives is by no means untempered with corruption.

As time went on we amassed a very extensive collection of articles for the ethnographical department of the British Museum, of which specimens of wood-carving constituted a great proportion. The Bakuba decorate with elaborate carvings even the simplest of wooden household utensils; the bellows used by the blacksmith are carved, the long tobacco-pipes, the mugs from which palm wine is drunk, the boxes (all hewn out of solid blocks of wood, for the Bushongo do not yet _join_ wood together) in which the red tukula dye is kept are all ornamented with raised patterns, and many of them show a high degree of artistic talent. These carvings have received unstinted praise from several prominent anthropologists since our return from the Congo, for very little had previously been known about them. People very often imagine that such things are picked up for next to nothing in Africa, and, of course, sometimes this is true, but among the Bushongo it is by no means the case. The native of Misumba is a very good hand at a bargain, and is also by no means so anxious to sell his possessions as are the Batetela. We came across an instance of Bushongo business dealing which rivals, if it does not excel, the greed of the old Bilumbu alluded to above. We met one day the deformed boy who had charge of the chickens belonging to the Kasai Company’s factory going towards the village with a bundle of native cloth under his arm. We casually inquired what he was going to buy with so much money, and he informed us that he was not going to make any purchases at all, but was about to lend the cloth to a friend who had got into debt. Torday thought at the time that this generosity sounded a little too good to be strictly true, so he made a few inquiries into the case, and discovered that the boy was going to lend the cloth to a man for a couple of months at a rate of interest of 200 per cent.; at the expiration of the two months, if the full amount was not paid back, the debtor would become the slave of the chicken-keeper! It may well be imagined therefore that in bargaining for curios with a people who are as grasping as this we had to dip into our pockets rather more deeply than we cared about.

All the Bushongo are extremely fond of dancing; the great chief at the Mushenge, as we subsequently discovered, dearly loves a dance, and is only too glad of any excuse to organise one, while at Misumba dances on a large scale are very frequently held. One portion of the village will often invite the inhabitants of the other to come over in the afternoon for a dance to be held in the wide street, and upon such occasions the people turn out _en masse_ bent upon enjoyment. The band (that is to say, a number of the ubiquitous tom-toms), performs in the midst of the street, while the people, attired in their best loin-cloths and carefully tukulaed, dance around it in single file, the dresses of the women, some spotlessly white and some red, gleaming in the sun as the wearers move stiffly in a by no means graceful variety of _danse du ventre_. We have seen as many as three hundred women taking part in one of these dances, varying in age from tiny girls to matrons whose dancing days, one would have thought, had long since passed away. They were arranged in the line according to the colour of their dresses—a batch of red, then some wearing white, then more red, and so on. As not infrequently occurs among peoples more advanced in civilisation than the Bushongo, a great many of the young men of Misumba are far too _blasé_ to take any part in the proceedings other than honouring them with their presence and lounging in the shade of the huts as they cast critical glances at the ladies. A few, however, do dance, and these are usually very smartly attired in loin-cloths bordered with innumerable tassels and brightly coloured feathers in their hair. The viceroy is always present at the large dances, sitting beneath a shed surrounded by his elders.

During our stay at Misumba both Torday and I found time to make excursions into the surrounding country. Torday undertook a journey of some days’ duration to the country of the Bangendi, sub-tribe of the Bushongo, who live on the western side of the Lubudi River, while I on several occasions went out to neighbouring villages in search of sport, staying away from one to four nights at a time. During my wanderings to the east of Misumba I came across several of the quarry-like crevices, such as I have described on the way from the Sankuru, and we found out that formerly the Bushongo used to extract a good deal of iron from them, but nowadays the metal used in the manufacture of knives, arrow-heads, &c., is nearly all obtained from the Kasai Company. Game is by no means abundant near Misumba. I have seen a few small duikers and a bush-buck, and I have come across the tracks of small herds of buffalo, though I was never able to get a glimpse of these latter animals. To judge by the size of their tracks they are probably members of the same species of dwarf buffalo as those which I shot later near the Mushenge, namely _Bos caffer nanus_. The herds are small, containing as a rule from three to half-a-dozen animals. A kind of sitatunga antelope is said to exist in the swamps near the Lubudi, but of this beast I never saw so much as a track. With the addition of an occasional leopard and some elephants (the latter, I think, merely pass through the district and are not permanently resident there), the above beasts constitute the game list of Misumba.

The patches of woodland which are to be found in all the hollows of the undulating grass land abound with monkeys, and a number of interesting small mammals can be collected in the neighbourhood, of which we were lucky enough to discover a new species of _petrodomus_, which has been named after Torday. The tsetse-fly does not exist in the plains around Misumba, but as this insect is so very local I am not prepared to say that it is not to be found in the swampy woodlands of the district. On the whole Misumba is fairly healthy, but the climate is considerably hotter than that of Mokunji; with the exception of one very mild attack of fever, which laid me up for a few hours, none of us suffered from malaria.

In the middle of April the time arrived for Hardy to return to Europe, so Torday decided to interrupt his work among the Bushongo, and, after seeing Hardy off to the coast, to visit the primitive Batetela tribes which inhabit the great forest to the north of the Sankuru before going on to the capital of the Bushongo king. Had we proceeded from Misumba direct to the court of the king, which lies to the west near the confluence of the Kasai and the Sankuru, we should have had to undertake a long journey in order to reach the forest peoples, so it seemed wiser to visit them at once and to postpone for a few months the completion of our work among the Bushongo.

But we discovered that it was one thing to decide to leave Misumba and quite a different matter to procure carriers to transport our loads across the river. Cloth is the currency of the district, and, as I have shown, very large quantities of cloth is woven at Misumba. It is not surprising, therefore, that when a man wants “money” he should prefer to manufacture it quietly at his own loom in the village instead of undertaking some irksome work such as load-carrying in order to earn it. We found that no one was in the least desirous of carrying our baggage to the Sankuru. In our difficulty the ethnographical information which Torday had obtained demonstrated its practical value. We had heard from some of our Bushongo friends of a powerful secret society which existed to maintain the authority and dignity of the chief in case of any attempt to dispute his rights. Nearly all the men in the village belonged to this society, and Torday, who had learned all about its organisation, knew that if he could persuade its “grand master” to use his influence on our behalf we should most probably be able to get as many porters as we wanted. The evening before we wished to depart he accordingly visited this dignitary, and returned having left him a good sum in trade goods, but having received a promise of assistance. Next morning a couple of hundred men turned up at daybreak to carry our loads! The study of native manners and customs can certainly be of practical service to the traveller.