F. Is A Sporting Story That Turns Up A Little Unexpectedly,
Certainly; But The Benito Is Within Easy Distance North Of The
Moondah, So The Geography Is All Right.
G. The inhabitants of Fernando Po have still an especial hatred for
the M'pongwe, and both they and the M'pongwe have this account of
the one tribe driving the other off the mainland.
Then the Bubis
{295} - as the inhabitants on Fernando Po are called, from a
confusion arising in the minds of the sailors calling at Fernando
Po, between their stupidity and their word Babi = stranger, which
they use as a word of greeting - these Bubis are undoubtedly a very
early African race. Their culture, though presenting some
remarkable points, is on the whole exceedingly low. They never wear
clothes unless compelled to, and their language depends so much on
gesture that they cannot talk in it to each other in the dark.
I give this as a sample of African stories. It is far more
connected and keeps to the point in a far more business-like way
than most of them. They are of great interest when you know the
locality and the tribe they come from; but I am sure if you were to
bring home a heap of stories like this, and empty them over any
distinguished ethnologist's head, without ticketing them with the
culture of the tribe they belonged to, the conditions it lives
under, and so forth, you would stun him with the seeming inter-
contradiction of some, and utter pointlessness of the rest, and he
would give up ethnology and hurriedly devote his remaining years to
the attempt to collect a million postage stamps, so as to do
something definite before he died.
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