CHAPTER III

IN A BUSHONGO VILLAGE

The run from Batempa to Lusambo, aided by the strong stream of the Sankuru, occupied but a few hours, and we reached the capital of the district of Lualaba-Kasai well before sundown. We immediately landed our baggage and called upon the Commissioner of the District to inquire where we could sleep. Commandant Gustin courteously placed a house at our disposal, with a small yard or garden at the back where we could pitch our tents, using the building as a store for the rest of our baggage. That evening, as it was too late to prepare a meal of our own, we were invited to dinner with the Government officials at their mess. The Commissioner of the District, the officer commanding the troops, and the magistrate and his assistants each take their meals in their own houses, but all the other officials dine in the mess-room, where Commandant Saut, the Deputy-Commissioner, takes the head of the table. This gentleman introduced us to his subordinates in a lengthy and rather flattering speech, after which we sat down to a good square meal, which included the rare luxury of beef, for Lusambo is one of the very few places in the Kasai district where cattle are kept. Next morning we wandered round the Government station. All the bungalows are built of brick and are commodious and weatherproof; they are laid out in streets, each house having its small garden, the trees of which afford a certain amount of shade to the highway. The house of the Commissioner of the District, which stands just to the west of the other buildings upon an eminence overlooking the river, is the only one which boasts of an upper storey. With the exception of one or two Roman Catholic missionaries the whole population of Lusambo is made up entirely of Government officials, including the Commissioner and his Deputy, the judge and his subordinates, a lieutenant and an N.C.O., transport officials, armourers, secretaries, &c., to the total number of about fifteen. There are no ladies at Lusambo. For the use of the Commissioner two or three ponies are kept. These come, I believe, from the Welle district, and a couple of colts have been bred at Lusambo, but, owing to the numerous swamps and streams necessitating log bridges in the country round, the use of the horses when travelling is seldom if ever resorted to, and they appear to be kept rather as an experiment in horse-breeding than for actual work, though of course they are used for “hacking” round the station. In the course of our wanderings round Lusambo we visited the quarters of the native troops, of whom about one hundred and fifty are kept at the headquarters of the district, together with a couple of very light field guns, which are carried in sections by porters when on service. The men are very well housed, their buildings being of brick, and very comfortable compared with the straw or plaster huts occupied by soldiers in remote stations, which, in turn, are superior to the dwellings the men were used to in their villages before they enlisted. Some of the older men have furnished their quarters quite neatly with substantial beds, upon which spotless blankets and sheets of cotton material are spread, and in many instances crucifixes are to be found upon the walls. One hut that I went into unexpectedly to change a camera film was a perfect model of cleanliness and order. The black population of Lusambo must be enormous, but consisting as it does of natives of several different tribes it does not inhabit one large town, but a number of separate villages scattered around the Europeans’ settlement. Where the people of so many tribes are brought into daily contact with one another it is certain that many tribal customs are exchanged among them or, under the influence of the “civilisation” introduced by the presence of the white officials and the missionaries, many customs totally disappear. A residence, therefore, in a big centre like Lusambo can be of little value to any one desiring to study the primitive life of the natives, but for the artist in search of models the place offers a wonderful selection of various negro types. We therefore spent some days at Lusambo giving Hardy an opportunity of making some portrait studies before going on to the eastern part of the Bushongo country.

Around Lusambo are to be found villages inhabited by Batetela, Basonge, Babinji, Baluba, and Bushongo, the latter being the real inhabitants of the district. In addition to these, there is a very large mixed population of natives belonging to no particular village, who are generally termed Baluba by the white men of the Kasai, but who in reality belong to that tribe no more than to any other. These people are the “undesirable aliens” who frequent nearly every big centre. Their existence is a curse to the Kasai district. When the Arab slave raiders were finally put down their slaves had to find homes somewhere, and accordingly settled in places such as Lusambo; many of them who had been born in slavery or who had been captured as infants did not even know to what country they originally belonged; they had no villages; they owed allegiance to no chiefs. They were, mentally, far below the average free man of a primitive tribe. These unfortunates have settled in places like Lusambo and Luebo, and have there produced children of a type as debased as themselves. Add to this population the riff-raff of the district—men who had to leave their village for the village good and have fled to the centre of Government to avoid the vengeance of their chiefs, “domestic” slaves whose idleness has induced their masters to ill-treat them, thieves, murderers, runaway workmen from factories, and loose women—add these to the number of freed slaves and you have the “undesirable alien” population of places like Lusambo.

These miserable creatures for some reason or other, probably because in their chequered careers they have seen more of the world than the ordinary native of the villages, consider themselves superior to the simple tribesmen, and lose no opportunity of sneering at him and his ways. They despise him and he hates and despises them. Unfortunately a very large percentage of workmen employed in Government stations and factories are drawn from this lowest caste of native. It is often quite impossible to obtain workmen from the local tribe, so the agent who requires labour has to recruit it in some big centre where any number of these so-called Baluba are always to be found ready to work when their resources are at an end. Unless very carefully watched these gentry will probably cause trouble with the natives in the district in which they are employed. In the cases of factories being attacked, white men murdered or molested, or some other “outrage” on the part of the local natives, which are by no means so infrequent as might be supposed, the cause can nearly always be traced to the white man’s followers, his Baluba. They are overbearing until real trouble arises, and then they desert their master and run. A sure way for the traveller to find difficulties is to employ a large number of such men and not to keep them perfectly under control. They swagger into the villages, call the inhabitants “bush-men” (Basenshi), and threaten to turn the anger of their master upon the people if they do not supply them with everything they ask for. With such men, too, endless disputes about women are certain to arise. These so-called Baluba must not be confused with the real Baluba, a fine warrior race inhabiting the south-eastern part of the Belgian Congo. I have used for them the name by which they are generally known to the white men of the district, and as our work did not take us into the country of the real Baluba, and I shall therefore have little or nothing to say about these people, I have not tried to invent a special term for the riff-raff of the big towns. The Arabs called them “Ruga-Ruga.”

What the future of these people is to be is extremely difficult to imagine. It is one thing for the white man to introduce his civilisation and his religion into a community such as an ordinary native tribe, which has its own laws and customs often convertible to those of a European, but it is quite a different task to attempt the reformation of a heterogeneous mass of scoundrels to whom law and order are utterly distasteful. If taken when quite young the children of these Baluba could doubtless be made to grow into useful members of society, but I am afraid that until the present generation has died out it will continue to be a curse to the country.

I have mentioned the “freed” slaves of the Arabs and the “domestic” slaves of the natives. It may not be out of place to say here a few words upon the great difference between the old-time slave trade and the system of domestic slavery which obtains to-day all over the Kasai district, and which will, I think, continue to exist for a long time to come. The horrors of the slave trade, with its burned villages, its massacres, and the terrible sufferings of the victims on the road, are well known to most people, but many are apt to confuse the capture and sale of slaves with the state of “domestic slavery,” which is, not infrequently, a condition by no means more terrible than that of domestic service in Europe. Of course the life of the slave in one tribe differs considerably from his lot in another. Among the Bankutu of the great forest, as I shall show later on, slaves are invariably eaten, and in many districts it has been customary to bury slaves alive at the funeral of some important personage; but, on the other hand, in the case of most tribes, the master is obliged to provide his slave with a house and even with a wife; and at the court of the King of the Bushongo, as my narrative will show, some of the highest positions are held by slaves, and cases are not rare nowadays of a slave being allowed to marry a free woman. The work done by the slave of an ordinary native of a primitive tribe appears to consist solely of hunting, building, or cultivating for his master, and the amount of it they have to do is by no means great. In fact in most instances, I think, the lot of a domestic slave compares favourably with that of the “maid-of-all-work” of a London suburb. Among people with whom gambling is the besetting sin it is quite common for a man who has risked and lost his all to finally stake his family and even his own liberty upon the game and thus become the slave of the winner; this occurs frequently among the Bambala of the Kwilu. There is, however, another side to the question of domestic slavery which has been brought into existence by the low class Baluba referred to above. Such of these people as possess sufficient means will often purchase a slave and then compel him to enter the employ of the white man. At the end of his term of service the slave has to hand over to his master all the goods that he has earned. Of course in theory all the slave has to do is to call upon a Government official—a magistrate, if there is one within reach, or, failing him, any _chef de poste_—who will at once tell him that his earnings are his own, as slavery no longer exists, and therefore his master has no right to any of his possessions; but in practice this does not work out as well as it might if the country were more effectually occupied by greater numbers of Government officials. The slave very rarely appeals to the official, for he knows that he would be ill-treated and robbed as soon as he returned to the village of his master, and that the white man would be powerless to prevent this. One would imagine that no slave, unless he were an absolute fool, would ever return within reach of his master when he has earned a good sum in the white man’s employ, but as a rule he does so, and therefore it is largely his own fault if he is robbed. My own “boy” Sam is a case in point. We discovered that he was a slave of a Bushongo of Lusambo, and we frequently advised him not to return to Lusambo when he left our service. He was fully determined, however, to do so; he had a sister and many friends in the neighbourhood. We pointed out carefully to him that if any attempt was made to rob him of his pay he must at once call upon the authorities, and, before sailing for Europe, we handed over the considerable sum which he had earned to Mr. Westcott, the missionary at Inkongu, who kindly consented to act as the lad’s banker, as we had done for the last two years. In this way he could scarcely be robbed, but in the case of the ordinary workman returning from a factory such precautions are well-nigh impossible. In addition to this, the slave often has a great dislike to appealing to the white man for protection against his master. Sam expressed his intention of voluntarily paying to his master the usual price of a slave (not a large sum), and in this we encouraged him, for though it was legally quite unnecessary we considered the idea a very fair one, as domestic slavery, repugnant as it is to our ideas of liberty, is one of the accepted principles of negro life, and we felt that by thus redeeming himself the boy would be acting honourably to his master. The idea originated from Sam himself, and, I think, does him credit. The large centres, such as Lusambo and Luebo, are hotbeds of this kind of slavery, and it is very difficult, if not quite impossible, to prevent it. When we remember that even in civilised capitals blackguards are to be found living upon the illgotten gains of their fellow-creatures, and the best efforts of modern police systems have been powerless to stamp out the evil, it is perhaps not surprising that a very similar state of affairs should exist in the heart of Africa, where the Government is, in my opinion at any rate, considerably undermanned.

Even to this day “razzias,” or raids for the capture of slaves, occasionally take place in the south-western part of the Congo. Usually the offenders belong to the Badjok tribe, occupying part of the frontier between Angola and the Belgian Congo, with whom we came into contact at the end of our journey. We met an officer who had surprised and defeated a caravan of these scoundrels; but the old-time slave-trade is practically dead in the country of which I am writing.

I have tried to point out that slavery in the Southern Congo can be divided into three kinds—the slave trade as introduced by the Arabs; the pernicious system of letting out slaves existing among the riff-raff of the big centres; and the often innocuous and very prevalent system of domestic slavery which obtains in the primitive villages. Detailed discussions of the status of the domestic slave in the various tribes among whom Torday has worked will be found in the scientific record of this journey which he and Mr. Joyce are publishing, and also in various papers by them which have appeared in the _Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute_; it will therefore be unnecessary for me to deal at greater length with this question in my narrative of our wanderings in the Kasai.

The market of Lusambo is held every Sunday in a large open space just to the north of the European quarter. The crowd is enormous, and, as is usual with negro crowds, rather unpleasant to the white man’s olfactory organ; but it is interesting in the extreme. Food-stuffs preponderate among the articles offered for sale, and these were of sufficient variety to tempt the appetite of any negro gourmet; manioc, maize, millet, dried locusts, caterpillars, young rats (in the pink stage and held together on wooden skewers), and a host of other delicacies were laid out upon leaves on the ground, and around them eager crowds of natives (male and female) added their voices to the general hum as they loudly bargained for their week’s supply of stores. The haggling over prices was keen, but we saw no sign of any disturbance, and we were told that trouble in the market is extremely rare. The buyers and sellers themselves varied in appearance as much as did the goods over which they were arguing. One noticed a tall sergeant from the Welle, with an almost Arab type of countenance, elbowing his way between red-painted, scantily clothed women of the real Baluba people from across the Sankuru, upon the head of one of whom a tall plume of feathers denoted that she had recently given birth to a child; here and there a stately elder of the local Bushongo tribe could be seen, easily distinguishable by his dignified manner and refined features from the crowd of riff-raff slaves by which he was surrounded. Sometimes one sees in the market of Lusambo one of the most frightful members of the human family, an albino negro. We noticed two of these freaks. One, a small boy with a deathly white skin and white woolly hair, was not so ugly as a grown-up man, whose face seemed to possess every characteristic which exists in the negro countenance horribly accentuated by the pallor of his complexion. His face was almost inhuman and, once seen, is likely never to be forgotten.

There are no booths or shelters of any kind in the market-place, all the dealing being carried on in the open, the wares being displayed on the ground. We found little to interest us in those of the villages constituting the native quarters of Lusambo, which we found time to explore; they were all modern in design, with plaster huts, and bore no resemblance to the national form of village of the tribes which inhabited them. But we were able to do some ethnographical work among the local branch of the Bushongo tribe, whose kinsmen of Misumba we were shortly to visit. A large number of these people came to see us at our residence, and Torday lost no opportunity of interrogating them. One of them turned out to be a very old and important personage—the prime minister of the Bushongo of Lusambo. This old fellow, now very decrepit and nearly blind, remembered perfectly the arrival of the first white man upon the Sankuru. One day the natives of Lusambo had been terrified by the apparition on the river of a huge canoe, breathing fire as it advanced; they fled from the banks of the stream, believing that some devil had descended upon them. Then they noticed that one of the white men, of whose existence they had heard, was standing in the bow of the vessel waving cloth to them, so a few of the bolder spirits remained by the riverside to await his arrival. When the white man landed, they discovered that he was not only flesh and blood, but agreeable as well, as our aged informant quaintly put it.

Among the Bushongo of Lusambo the use of a red dye made from a wood locally called “tukula” is very prevalent. Although, as is only natural in a large place where imported goods are so easily obtainable, loin-cloths of European cotton-stuffs are to some extent replacing the old-time material made of the fibre of the raphia leaf, but this imported cotton is almost invariably dyed red with the “tukula,” which is also plentifully applied to the bodies and hair of the Bushongo. It gives them a very picturesque appearance. Several little girls, about five or six years old, used to come to visit us at meal-times, when we regaled them with lumps of sugar and other delicacies, and really very pretty they were with white cowrie shells plaited into the front of their “tukula” dyed hair, ropes of blue glass beads hanging around their necks, and their little bodies freshly covered with the red dye. We made great friends with these children, as indeed we always endeavoured to do with the little ones of every village we visited, and Hardy painted one or two charming portraits of them. The tukula is so commonly used by all the Bushongo people, about whom I shall have a good deal to say later on, that I must give my reader some idea of what it is and where it comes from. The tree is a large one, growing in many parts of the equatorial forest north of the Sankuru; its wood is hard and very heavy. In colour it is about maroon. When rotten the wood is rubbed into powder on a stone and then, mixed with oil, is applied to the hair, body, or clothes. We brought home several small logs of this wood, after our journey in the forest, and it appears to be cam-wood. I have had a little of it made up into small articles of furniture, and it is certainly very ornamental, but its great weight prevents large pieces of it being brought to the river, where only human portage is available. The Bushongo to the south of the Sankuru import large quantities of their wood from the tribes of the great forest. While at Lusambo we made friends with a very intelligent lad belonging to the Bushongo tribe, and we were anxious to engage him as an additional “boy,” with a view to obtaining further information from him about the manners and customs of his people. One of our servants noticed, however, that the glands behind his ears were slightly swollen, an early symptom of sleeping sickness, so we could not imperil the rest of our party by taking him with us. None of the Bushongo, as I was presently able to discover, are famous for their skill in hunting, and therefore they, in common with other peoples who live around Lusambo, employ a race of dwarfs, known as the Batwa, to kill game for them in the forest. These people are extremely interesting, and we were fortunate enough to meet with a party of them while staying at Lusambo. They very rarely visit the centre of government, but one of the chiefs who employs them had been requested to bring a few to see us. This he did with some difficulty, for the Batwa are true children of the forest, and hate the crowds and bustle of Lusambo, but he could not induce them to stay more than one day, and the most extravagant offers on our part failed to persuade one of them to accompany us in the capacity of hunter. Six Batwa, all full-grown men, came to see us. They appeared to vary from about four feet eight inches to five feet in height, and looked extremely wiry. Their costumes consisted of a couple of monkey skins suspended from their belts, one in front and one behind, so that the tails dragged upon the ground, and they wore tiny antelope horns as charms around their necks. Each carried a bow and a bundle of poisoned arrows “feathered” with simple leaves. They were very reticent in talking to us, but when we suggested a little archery practice in the back garden they brightened up considerably. We put up a small lemon (some two inches in diameter) to serve as a mark, and the shooting was conducted at a range of about fifteen yards. The accuracy of their aim was astonishing, and they appeared to thoroughly enjoy the proceedings, chaffing the man whose arrow flew a few inches wide of the lemon, and applauding with grunts the successful shot. These people have no settled villages, living a nomad’s life in the forest, sleeping under temporary shelters built of leaves, and moving their camp according to the movements of game. They supply their overlord with meat. Their success in hunting is largely due to the extraordinary skill with which they can creep up to within a few yards of a sleeping animal and then carefully place a poisoned arrow, to the deadly effects of which the beast shortly succumbs. I noticed that the knees of some of the Batwa who visited us were worn as if by much crawling. In addition to larger game they kill great numbers of monkeys and birds with their arrows.

Near Misumba we came across other settlements of these Batwa, but south of the Sankuru they attain to a greater stature than those who inhabit the great forest, and Torday, at his lecture at the Royal Geographical Society, has pointed out that this may very probably be due to the more open, and therefore more airy and sunny, nature of their surroundings. The Bushongo are firm in the belief that the forest trees opened and gave birth to the original Batwa; one of the quaint legends which make the folk-lore of the Bushongo so interesting. About this time, when we were desirous of moving on from Lusambo to the country of the eastern Bushongo, a small Government steamer was about to go down the Sankuru to take an official to Luebo. Commandant Gustin kindly gave us permission to travel in this vessel, thus saving us the extra time which a canoe journey would have entailed. We therefore, after only a brief stay at the chief town of the Kasai district, continued our journey, glad to move on to a spot more suitable for our work, but remembering with gratitude the hospitality which had been accorded to us by the Commissioner of the District and his subordinates. The _Schlagerstrom_ (the vessel in which we travelled) was in reality nothing but a launch in which there was only sufficient sleeping accommodation for the captain and the Government official who was going to Luebo. We therefore encamped by the riverside when the vessel was moored for the night, a proceeding to which our weary voyage from Dima to Batempa had well accustomed us. We stopped at a little fuel-station called Gandu (or “crocodile”), on the left bank of the river a few miles below the now disused trading post of Isaka (which is marked upon the map accompanying this volume), and here Hardy disembarked with most of our baggage, leaving Torday and me to proceed a little farther in the steamer to search for the burial-place of an Englishman who had perished in the Sankuru some years before. Commandant Gustin had requested us to try and find the exact locality of the grave amid the ruins of the factory, to clear it of grass, and to secure photos of the spot to be sent to the dead man’s family. Upon reaching the site of the factory, however, we were unable in the time at our disposal to find out exactly where the grave was situated, and we could see no local native fisherman, who would doubtless have been able to take us straight to the place; we therefore had to return to Hardy, unsuccessful in our search.

[Illustration: BATWA DWARFS.]

[Illustration: A STREET IN MISUMBA.]

The voyage on the _Schlagerstrom_ was by no means unpleasant, and we struck up quite a friendship with the captain, a German who had served in the Kaiser’s navy on board, I believe, the royal yacht. This man was extremely fond of animals, and his pet at the time we knew him was an ordinary and very skinny domestic chicken! The bird used to perch upon his boot as he sat with his knees crossed directing his helmsman from his easy chair, and took all its food from his hand. A few months later the _Schlagerstrom_, her captain, and all her crew (with the exception of one man) were hurled to eternity down the falls of the Congo just below Stanley Pool. A terrible end for a man whose kindly nature and unassuming manners made him universally popular among the Europeans with whom he came in contact, and who was deservedly liked by his native crew. When Hardy landed at Gandu, we had despatched a messenger to the Kasai Company’s agent at Misumba requesting him to ask the local Bushongo chief to send porters to carry our loads to the village, so we had not long to wait at the fuel-station before the men arrived. We had heard that buffalo and elephant existed in fair numbers around Misumba, so we were in high hopes of obtaining some shooting, hopes which were still further raised when the porters told us that an elephant had been killed by means of a trap in the neighbourhood not long before, and when, in the village at which we broke our journey to Misumba, we were shown the tomb of a man who had held a great reputation as an elephant hunter. Marching at a fair pace a European can reach Misumba from Gandu in one long day; but we preferred to halt for the night at the village of Zappo-Lubumba, a Basongo-Meno settlement about seven or eight miles south of the river on the edge of the great grassy plains that lie behind the belt of woodland which clothes the banks of the Sankuru. The track through the forest is considerably broken by swamps, some of them of sufficient width to necessitate the use of a dug-out. For a time no canoe could be obtained, for the people of Zappo-Lubumba were evidently not disposed to be very friendly, but at last, after sending several messengers to him, we prevailed upon the chief to cause his subjects to ferry us over the water, and we pitched our tents that night in the broad, picturesque street of his village. These Basongo-Meno of the left bank of the Sankuru belong to the great tribe of that name who inhabit the right bank of the Kasai and Sankuru. They have adopted Bushongo dress and ways, and to outward appearance differ in no respect from the Bushongo inhabitants of Misumba, but between the two villages there is a good deal of ill-feeling and their inhabitants rarely exchange visits. At Misumba we heard dark tales of border warfare between them: how in the dead of the night, usually during a tornado, the Basongo-Meno would creep into outlying Bushongo villages and murder the people as they slept, the noise of their coming passing unnoticed in the roar of the storm, and the rain removing all traces of the direction of their flight should pursuit be attempted in the morning. The Basongo-Meno, even here to the south of the river, are by no means friendly to the European, but they are not sufficiently numerous to oppose him as effectually as have their brethren on the right bank, whose ferocity has caused their country to be a _terra incognita_ to the white man even to this day.

Next morning we proceeded to march the sixteen or seventeen miles through the plains that lay between Zappo-Lubumba and Misumba. The day was extremely hot and the road for the most part entirely devoid of shade, so our faces soon began to wear that peculiar sneering grin which intense heat produces by contracting the skin on the cheeks. We were not without music on the way, for one of the porters had made a horn of the stem of a pawpaw tree upon which he attempted some ghastly imitations of bugle calls, learned, doubtless, at Lusambo. This pawpaw stem was capable of producing quite a clear note like that of a coach horn. The track through the plains was of the ordinary native kind; that is to say, it was only a few inches wide and very tortuous, for the negro will always walk round a stick dropped on the path rather than kick it out of his way, and accordingly everything dropped on the road causes a fresh bend to appear in the way. About midway between Zappo’s village and Misumba, a mile or so to the west of the road, we noticed for the first time one of the volcanic crevices which are quite a feature of this country. Seen from the track the earth upon the side of a grassy slope appears to have been cut away as if with a gigantic shovel, leaving a quarry-like excavation about two hundred feet deep, and a little over a quarter of a mile in length. The earth in this hole was red in colour, and at the base of it was an extensive patch of woodland containing, as I learned later when exploring the place, a lake. There is a queer legend concerning the origin of this crevice. About seventy years ago a chief of Misumba was proceeding to Zappo-Lubumba to attend some important ceremony, and on the way he encountered two dwarfs, who instead of saluting him with that respect which a chief of the aristocratic Bushongo people considered his due, passed him by without so much as a word. The chief, in anger, had them stopped and brought before him. On being asked why they had failed to salute so important a personage they gave some impertinent answer which so angered the chief’s escort that they killed the dwarfs forthwith. No sooner were they slain than the chief fell down dead. The dwarfs had been wizards. The Bushongo who were accompanying the chief were naturally infuriated at their master’s death, and, imagining that the Basongo-Meno people had sent the wizards to kill him, they hastened on to Zappo’s village, and there took vengeance by stealing goats. On their way home they were startled to find that the chief’s body had vanished, and that a mountain had arisen where it had lain by the roadside! Not very long afterwards a second Bushongo chief passed along the same track. When he reached the newly made hill he paused and poured out the vials of his wrath upon it, cursing it with a fine flow of Bushongo rhetoric; a peal of supernatural laughter interrupted him, and in a moment the hill had disappeared, swallowing up the second chief and leaving in its place the crevice and lake which now exist on the spot. Such is the legend of the earthquake as told to-day at Misumba. During our stay in this country we felt one slight shock on April 1, 1908, and this same shock was felt in the great forest as far north as the Lomela River within a few hours of the same time. Crevices such as the one I have described are quite common in this country, usually marking the sources of small streams. After searching for about fourteen miles we passed, but did not enter, a small village inhabited by the Batwa who hunt for the chief of Misumba, and then entered a patch of woodland which was very swampy, and had to be crossed on a roughly made log bridge. Immediately upon regaining the open country we entered the village of Misumba. We found that the factory of the Kasai Company lay between two portions of the village adjoining both, so we pitched our tents opposite to the agent’s bungalow and accepted his offer of a room wherein to work, for we felt that we could not possibly be more in the village if we actually camped in the street. Almost as soon as we arrived two important personages called upon us—Pongo-Pongo, recognised by Government as chief of Misumba, and Isambula N’Genga, viceroy of the Bangongo sub-tribe of the Bushongo (of which Misumba is the capital), under the great paramount chief of the nation who resides at the Mushenge or capital, five days’ march to the west. It struck us as being a little remarkable that these two men should appear to be on such excellent terms with one another, and more remarkable still that the “chief,” who wore around his neck the Government badge of authority (a white metal disc on a chain), should treat Isambula N’Genga with obvious deference, but the matter soon explained itself.

The ruler of the great Bushongo nation is Kwete Peshanga Kena, the Nyimi, or king, who resides at the Mushenge. To facilitate the government of his people he (or rather one of his ancestors) has appointed viceroys of the outlying sub-tribes, who possess practically unlimited powers and who pay tribute to the Nyimi. Isambula N’Genga is the viceroy and real ruler of the Bangongo sub-tribe. In order to save himself trouble the viceroy has appointed one of his elders (Pongo-Pongo) to act as his representative in dealing with the Belgian Government. When an officer went round the country to meet and officially “recognise” the local chiefs he met Pongo-Pongo, Isambula N’Genga keeping in the background. Pongo-Pongo represented himself as the chief, and received the official medallion, but in reality he is no more the chief of Misumba than any of the other dignitaries who are subordinate to the viceroy. He is merely a sort of minister for foreign affairs, and acts as a buffer between the chief and the State. Should the Bangongo incur the displeasure of the Government, Pongo-Pongo would have to bear the brunt of it; should the representative of the State give him any presents, I believe that he hands them over to the viceroy. Pongo-Pongo, therefore, has a somewhat thankless task, for he would have absolutely no power to prevent Isambula N’Genga doing anything for which he himself would be punished.

[Illustration: MISUMBA.]

This system of appointing some ordinary person to pose as chief before Government officials is very common in the Belgian Congo (as doubtless in other parts of Africa as well), and arises from the too hasty recognition of chiefs by officials who have had no opportunity of learning much about the peoples whose country they are supposed to administer. Pongo-Pongo was evidently told off by the viceroy to attend to our business during our stay at Misumba, and although we saw a good deal of the real chief and became very friendly with him, we owe most of the information we obtained to the readiness with which Pongo-Pongo answered the questions Torday put to him about his tribe. Isambula N’Genga was a real dandy. We nicknamed him “Beau Brummell.” When sauntering about his village accompanied by one or two slaves he was the very personification of supercilious vanity. All the “elders” of Misumba carry, as a sort of wand of office, a walking-stick around which some creeper has left a special mark. These sticks add considerably to the grand air with which these gentlemen strut about the village. When used as walking-sticks they are held at arm’s length in an attitude very suggestive of the English dandies of a century ago; at other times they are carried across the shoulders, the hands hanging idly over the ends of the sticks. The sticks themselves are regarded with some respect, doubtless reflected from the grandeur of their owners, by the common people of the village, for if an elder leaves his wand across the doorway of a hut which he has entered no one dares to cross the threshold till the stick has been removed. Of all the dandies of Misumba, Isambula N’Genga was the most exquisite. He was always faultlessly “tukulaed,” his hair evidently gave his wives infinite trouble every morning, he was scrupulously shaved, and his dress, a long loin-cloth of raphia fibre arranged carefully in many folds, was invariably clean and neat. He appeared almost too bored to live, and was much too indolent to be of any great service to Torday when he desired to obtain information about the Bushongo. At the same time Isambula N’Genga was as civil to us as he could summon up energy to be, and doubtless if he had not been friendly we should not have got on half so well with his people as we did.

We took an early opportunity of exploring the village of Misumba. Two points struck us as remarkable directly we entered the village streets—firstly, the fact that every one was busy; and secondly, the entire absence of any outward sign of the presence of the white man in the country. Usually upon arriving in an African village one finds that, although the women are busy enough working in the fields, pounding manioc into flour or looking after the children, the men are sleeping or idling away their time beneath the shade of the palms. At Misumba things are very different. In the midst of the long wide streets are situated many sheds under which work of all sorts is going on. In one of them the blacksmith—a much respected member of the community—may be seen at all hours busily engaged in the manufacture of the broad-bladed Bushongo knives, arrows, and spear-heads, iron bracelets, &c., while around him are clustered many bright-eyed smiling children, clothed in nature’s garb, who love to catch the sparks that fly and eagerly await a turn at manipulating the primitive hand-bellows with which the small fire is fanned. Around the sides of the shed old men squat, gravely smoking green tobacco in their long curved pipes of neatly carved wood, talking over local politics with the smith, whose opinion is, apparently, worth taking on any subject.

[Illustration: EMBROIDERING THE RAPHIA CLOTH.]

Beneath the shade of other similar structures men are always engaged in the manufacture of cloth from the fibre of the raphia leaf, and continuous “thud-thud” of the hand-looms tells that work is in progress from early morning till dark. Basket-makers and men working at the manufacture of hunting nets are to be found in every patch of shade, while here and there a man is to be seen decorating wooden cups or boxes with those elaborate and really artistic carvings of which many specimens are now in the British Museum. So much for the men. The women, in addition to their ordinary agricultural and household duties, spend a good deal of time in embroidering with coloured patterns the raphia cloth woven by the men. This embroidery is of a very high order, some old pieces which we collected later being extraordinarily fine; they are now to be seen in the British Museum. The children attend to the goats and chickens, the only live stock (with the exception of dogs) kept at Misumba. Any one who has travelled in Africa and has been struck with the indolence of the negro, would be considerably surprised were he to visit Misumba. Except the very aged, every one appeared to have something to do. We could not help feeling at the time of our visit what a pity it is that up to now no suitable industry has been introduced among a people so skilful with their hands as the Bushongo. I am sure that if once some useful and congenial manufacture were introduced at Misumba the people would show themselves to be remarkably clever workmen. It is difficult to suggest a suitable industry, but I should think that the manufacture of wooden articles would appeal to the native if tactfully introduced. The Bushongo are, however, extremely conservative, and would probably be slow to adopt any new enterprise. Their conservatism is manifested by their complete disregard of the ways of the white man and his “Baluba” employees, although the Kasai Company’s factory is situated actually within their village (or rather was so situated in 1908, but I believe there was some talk of its removal to the banks of the Lubudi River about six miles to the west).

Among the Batetela people of the Lubefu, as I have shown, European cotton-stuff has practically taken the place of the old-time raphia cloth, and plaster buildings are fast replacing the original native huts; among the eastern Bushongo, however, no such change is taking place. One very rarely sees trade cloth worn at Misumba, the people preferring to manufacture their own material, which is much more durable and very little rougher in texture. All the dwellings in the village consist of the picturesque Bushongo huts which add so much to the neatness and beauty of the place. They are rectangular buildings about ten feet by nine feet in size, made of sticks cut from the stem of the palm leaf, and upon their walls neat patterns are interwoven in black fibre representing some form of what is known as the “lozenge” pattern. They are usually very neat and in good repair. Upon several occasions when shooting at some distance from Misumba I have slept in these huts, and I found them completely weatherproof even during the heavy storms of the rainy season. Before sleeping in one of them it is necessary to be sure that the owner has not prepared for your arrival by brushing out the hut, for, should he have done so, he will probably have disturbed a number of inhabitants, other than human, who may cause you to regret having left your tent behind; but it is only fair to say that the Bushongo are a very cleanly race on the whole. The houses are as similar to one another in their internal arrangement as in their outward appearance. The doors are very small, and the bed, consisting of a mat laid over a rough frame of logs, is always situated on the left-hand side of the entrance as you go in. A fire of logs usually occupies the middle of the house, and a large square box, acting as a larder, is suspended in one corner to keep the food supply out of the reach of rats and mice. Sticks are thrust into the walls from which to suspend baskets, cooking pots, and other utensils, while the corners are filled with hunting nets, bows and arrows, and spears. Most of the huts have some small charm such as a little curved figure stuck in the wall under the eaves outside the door. The huts are laid out in fine straight streets, about thirty yards wide; and built as it is upon the edge of a wood and containing a fair number of palm trees, Misumba must rank as one of the neatest and prettiest villages we visited. We were soon hard at work among the natives. One of the first things that Torday did was to examine the Batwa, who hunt for the chief of Misumba. These people, although smaller than the stalwart Bushongo, are considerably larger than those we had seen at Lusambo, and they appear to have largely adopted the manners and customs of the Bushongo. I went out with them upon several occasions in the hopes of obtaining a shot at some buffalo which used to feed in the plains between Misumba and Zappo-Lubumba, but I did not get a chance of testing their nerve when tackling dangerous game, for we were unable to come up with the beasts; from what I saw of their tracking, however, I consider them the inferiors of many natives I have hunted with, and I have no doubt that they cannot compare with the Batwa of the great forest in the matter of stalking and shooting game. Torday was at great pains to obtain a vocabulary from these people, and one of the men he interrogated caused us some amusement. He had been requested to answer clearly the words that Torday put to him (using as a medium the Chituba language), and so he sat opposite to him on the other side of a small camp table and roared out his replies at the top of a remarkably powerful voice. Frequently he would pause and exchange pleasantries with a number of natives who were present, and this caused such an interruption of work that we were obliged to drive the spectators away by threatening them with the contents of a glass of water. The prospect of having the water thrown over them caused them to run out into the pouring rain (a real tornado) to avoid it! The vocabulary proceeded well until we came to the numerals. Here a real difficulty arose. Our informant was no mathematician. He insisted upon counting 1, 2, 5, 3, 8, 10, 7, &c. &c., and we could not induce him to count consecutively; I firmly believe that he was quite unable to do so. It is, as a matter of fact, by no means so uncommon to find the primitive negro unable to count beyond the number “five,” up to which numeral his fingers and thumb act as a guide to his calculations.

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.

[Illustration: THE HUNTING FETISH, MISUMBA.]

[Illustration: A BUSHONGO OF MISUMBA.]

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.

[Illustration: THE BILUMBU TAKING PILLS UNDER A BLANKET.]

[Illustration: THE BILUMBU DISMISSING AN INQUISITIVE CHILD.]

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.

[Illustration: A CEREMONIAL DANCE BY AN ELDER.]

[Illustration: A DANCE AT MISUMBA.]

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.