She Was Afraid, Too,
That The Balobale, Whose Country Lies To The West Of The River,
Not Knowing The Objects
For which we had come, would kill us.
To my reply that I had been so often threatened with death
If I visited a new tribe that I was now more afraid of killing any one
than of being killed, she rejoined that the Balobale would not kill me,
but the Makololo would all be sacrificed as their enemies.
This produced considerable effect on my companions, and inclined them
to the plan of Nyamoana, of going to the town of her brother
rather than ascending the Leeba. The arrival of Manenko herself on the scene
threw so much weight into the scale on their side that I was forced
to yield the point.
Manenko was a tall, strapping woman about twenty, distinguished by
a profusion of ornaments and medicines hung round her person;
the latter are supposed to act as charms. Her body was smeared all over
with a mixture of fat and red ochre, as a protection against the weather;
a necessary precaution, for, like most of the Balonda ladies,
she was otherwise in a state of frightful nudity. This was not
from want of clothing, for, being a chief, she might have been as well clad
as any of her subjects, but from her peculiar ideas of elegance in dress.
When she arrived with her husband, Sambanza, they listened for some time
to the statements I was making to the people of Nyamoana, after which
the husband, acting as spokesman, commenced an oration, stating the reasons
for their coming, and, during every two or three seconds of the delivery,
he picked up a little sand, and rubbed it on the upper part
of his arms and chest.
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