A little rum, a few beads, and finish - then he will turn
the rest of his attention to catching porcupines, or the beautiful
little gazelles, gray on the back, and white underneath, with which
the island abounds.
And what time he may have on hand after this,
he spends in building houses and making himself hats. It is only
his utterly spare moments that he employs in making just sufficient
palm oil from the rich supply of nuts at his command to get that rum
and those beads of his. Cloth he does not want; he utterly fails to
see what good the stuff is, for he abhors clothes. The Spanish
authorities insist that the natives who come into the town should
have something on, and so they array themselves in a bit of cotton
cloth, which before they are out of sight of the town on their
homeward way, they strip off and stuff into their baskets, showing
in this, as well as in all other particulars, how uninfluencible by
white culture they are. For the Spaniards, like the Portuguese, are
great sticklers for clothes and insist on their natives wearing
them - usually with only too much success. I shall never forget the
yards and yards of cotton the ladies of Loanda wore; and not content
with making cocoons of their bodies, they wore over their heads, as
a mantilla, some dozen yards or so of black cloth into the bargain.
Moreover this insistence on drapery for the figure is not merely for
towns; a German officer told me the other day that when, a week or
so before, his ship had called at Anno Bom, they were simply
besieged for "clo', clo', clo';" the Anno Bomians explaining that
they were all anxious to go across to Principe and get employment on
coffee plantations, but that the Portuguese planters would not
engage them in an unclothed state.
You must not, however, imagine that the Bubi is neglectful of his
personal appearance. In his way he is quite a dandy. But his idea
of decoration goes in the direction of a plaster of "tola" pomatum
over his body, and above all a hat. This hat may be an antique
European one, or a bound-round handkerchief, but it is more
frequently a confection of native manufacture, and great taste and
variety are displayed in its make. They are of plaited palm leaf -
that's all you can safely generalise regarding them - for sometimes
they have broad brims, sometimes narrow, sometimes no brims at all.
So, too, with the crown. Sometimes it is thick and domed, sometimes
non-existent, the wearer's hair aglow with red-tail parrots'
feathers sticking up where the crown should be. As a general rule
these hats are much adorned with oddments of birds' plumes, and one
chief I knew had quite a Regent-street Dolly Varden creation which
he used to affix to his wool in a most intelligent way with bonnet-
pins made of wood. These hats are also a peculiarity of the Bubi,
for none of the mainlanders care a row of pins for hats, except "for
dandy," to wear occasionally, whereas the Bubi wears his
perpetually, although he has by no means the same amount of sun to
guard against owing to the glorious forests of his island.
For earrings the Bubi wears pieces of wood stuck through the lobe of
the ear, and although this is not a decorative habit still it is
less undecorative than that of certain mainland friends of mine in
this region, who wear large and necessarily dripping lumps of fat in
their ears and in their hair. His neck is hung round with jujus on
strings - bits of the backbones of pythons, teeth, feathers, and
antelope horns, and occasionally a bit of fat in a bag. Round his
upper arm are bracelets, preferably made of ivory got from the
mainland, for celluloid bracelets carefully imported for his benefit
he refuses to look at. Often these bracelets are made of beads, or
a circlet of leaves, and when on the war-path an armlet of twisted
grass is always worn by the men. Men and women alike wear armlets,
and in the case of the women they seem to be put on when young, for
you see puffs of flesh growing out from between them. They are not
entirely for decoration, serving also as pockets, for under them men
stick a knife, and women a tobacco pipe, a well-coloured clay.
Leglets of similar construction are worn just under the knee on the
right leg, while around the body you see belts of tshibbu, small
pieces cut from Achatectonia shells, which form the native currency
of the island. These shells are also made into veils worn by the
women at their wedding.
This native coinage-equivalent is very interesting, for such things
are exceedingly rare in West Africa. The only other instance I
personally know of a tribe in this part of the world using a native-
made coin is that of the Fans, who use little bundles of imitation
axe-heads. Dr. Oscar Baumann, who knows more than any one else
about these Bubis, thinks, I believe, that these bits of
Achatectonia shells may have been introduced by the runaway Angola
slaves in the old days, who used to fly from their Portuguese owners
on San Thome to the Spaniards on Fernando Po. The villages of the
Bubis are in the forest in the interior of the island, and they are
fairly wide apart. They are not a sea-beach folk, although each
village has its beach, which merely means the place to which it
brings its trade, these beaches being usually the dwelling places of
the so-called Portos, {51} negroes, who act as middle-men between
the Bubis and the whites.
You will often be told that the Bubis are singularly bad house-
builders, indeed that they make no definite houses at all, but only
rough shelters of branches.
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