This Young Man
Certainly Hit Off The Character Of Sodom And Gomorrah To The Life,
In Describing The Towns Towards The Rembwe, Though He Had Never
Heard Sodom And Gomorrah Named.
He assured me I should see the
difference between them and Egaja the Good, and I thanked him and
Gave him his dash when we parted; but told him as a friend, I feared
some alteration must take place, and some time elapse before he saw
a regular rush of pilgrim worshippers of Virtue coming into even
Egaja the Good, though it stood just as good a chance and better
than most towns I had seen in Africa.
We went on into the gloom of the Great Forest again; that forest
that seemed to me without end, wherein, in a lazy, hazy-minded sort
of way, I expected to wander through by day and drop in at night to
a noisy savage town for the rest of my days.
We climbed up one hill, skirted its summit, went through our
athletic sports over sundry timber falls, and struck down into the
ravine as usual. But at the bottom of that ravine, which was
exceeding steep, ran a little river free from swamp. As I was
wading it I noticed it had a peculiarity that distinguished it from
all the other rivers we had come through; and then and there I sat
down on a boulder in its midst and hauled out my compass. Yes, by
Allah! it's going north-west and bound as we are for Rembwe River.
I went out the other side of that river with a lighter heart than I
went in, and shouted the news to the boys, and they yelled and sang
as we went on our way.
All along this bit of country we had seen quantities of rubber
vines, and between Egaja and Esoon we came across quantities of
rubber being collected. Evidently there was a big camp of rubber
hunters out in the district very busy. Wiki and Kiva did their best
to teach me the trade. Along each side of the path we frequently
saw a ring of stout bush rope, raised from the earth on pegs about a
foot to eighteen inches. On the ground in the middle stood a
calabash, into which the ends of the pieces of rubber vine were
placed, the other ends being supported by the bush rope ring. Round
the outside of some of these rings was a slow fire, which just
singes the tops of the bits of rubber vine as they project over the
collar or ring, and causes the milky juice to run out of the lower
end into the calabash, giving out as it does so a strong ammoniacal
smell. When the fire was alight there would be a group of rubber
collectors sitting round it watching the cooking operations,
removing those pieces that had run dry and placing others, from a
pile at their side, in position. On either side of the path we
continually passed pieces of rubber vine cut into lengths of some
two feet or so, and on the top one or two leaves plaited together,
or a piece of bush rope tied into a knot, which indicated whose
property the pile was.
The method of collection employed by the Fan is exceedingly
wasteful, because this fool of a vegetable Landolphia florida
(Ovariensis) does not know how to send up suckers from its root, but
insists on starting elaborately from seeds only. I do not, however,
see any reasonable hope of getting them to adopt more economical
methods. The attempt made by the English houses, when the rubber
trade was opened up in 1883 on the Gold Coast, to get the more
tractable natives there to collect by incisions only, has failed;
for in the early days a man could get a load of rubber almost at his
own door on the Gold Coast, and now he has to go fifteen days'
journey inland for it. When a Fan town has exhausted the rubber in
its vicinity, it migrates, bag and baggage, to a new part of the
forest. The young unmarried men are the usual rubber hunters.
Parties of them go out into the forest, wandering about in it and
camping under shelters of boughs by night, for a month and more at a
time, during the dry seasons, until they have got a sufficient
quantity together; then they return to their town, and it is
manipulated by the women, and finally sold, either to the white
trader, in districts where he is within reach, or to the M'pongwe
trader who travels round buying it and the collected ivory and
ebony, like a Norfolk higgler. In districts like these I was in,
remote from the M'pongwe trader, the Fans carry the rubber to the
town nearest to them that is in contact with the black trader, and
sell it to the inhabitants, who in their turn resell it to their
next town, until it reaches him. This passing down of the rubber
and ivory gives rise between the various towns to a series of
commercial complications which rank with woman palaver for the
production of rows; it being the sweet habit of these Fans to
require a life for a life, and to regard one life as good as
another. Also rubber trade and wife palavers sweetly intertwine,
for a man on the kill in re a wife palaver knows his best chance of
getting the life from the village he has a grudge against lies in
catching one of that village's men when he may be out alone rubber
hunting. So he does this thing, and then the men from the victim's
village go and lay for a rubber hunter from the killer's village;
and then of course the men from the killer's village go and lay for
rubber hunters from victim number one's village, and thus the blood
feud rolls down the vaulted chambers of the ages, so that you,
dropping in on affairs, cannot see one end or the other of it, and
frequently the people concerned have quite forgotten what the
killing was started for.
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