Ask whatever you wish,' and the
King's son asked for a remedy for every disease he could remember;
and the spirit gave him the medicines, and when he had done so, he
said, 'There is one sickness you have forgotten - it is the Krawkraw,
and of that you shall die.'
"A tribe named Ndiva was then strong but now none remain (Winwood
Reade says four remain). They gave Raychow's son a canoe and forty
men, to take him back to his father's town, and when he saw his
father he did not speak. His father said, 'My son, if you are
hungry eat.' He did not answer, and his father said, 'Do you wish
me to kill a goat?' He did not answer; his father said, 'Do you
wish me to give you new wives?' He did not answer. Then his father
said, 'Do you want me to build you a fetish hut?' Then he answered,
'Yes,' and the hut was built, and the medicines he had brought back
from the Hole were put into it.
"'Now,' said the son of King Raychow, 'I go to make Moondah enter
the Orongo' (Gaboon); so he went and dug a canal and when this was
finished all his men were dead. Then he said, 'I will go and kill
river-horse in the Benito.' He killed four, and as he was killing
the fifth, the people descended from the mountains against him. So
he made fetish on his great war-spear and sang
My spear, go kill these people,
Or these people will kill me;
and the spear went and killed the people, except a few who got into
canoes and flew to Fernando Po. Then said their King, 'My people
shall never wear cloth till we have conquered the M'pongwe,' and to
this day the Fernando Poians go naked and hate with a special hatred
the M'pongwe."
Now this is a noble story - there is a lot of fine confused feeding
in it, as the Scotchman said of boiled sheep's head.
You learn from it -
A. The name of the first man, and also that he was filled with a
desire for topographical nomenclature.
B. You hear of the Hole Wonga Wonga, and this is most interesting
because to this day, apart from the story, you are told by the
natives of a hole that emits fire, and Dr. Nassau says it is always
said to be north of Gaboon; but so far no white man has any
knowledge of an active volcano there, although the district is of
volcanic origin. The crater of Fernando Po may be referred to in
the legend because of the king's son being sent home in a canoe; but
I do not think it is, because the Hole is known not to be Fernando
Po, and it has got, according to local tradition, a river running
from it or close to it.
C. The kraw-kraw is a frightfully prevalent disease; no one has a
remedy for it, presumably owing to Raychow's son's forgetfulness.
D. The silence of the son to the questions is remarkable, because
you always find people who have been among spirits lose their power
of asking for what they want, for a time, and can only answer to the
right question.
E. The sudden way in which Raychow's son gets fired with the desire
to turn civil engineer just when he has got a magnificent opening in
life as a doctor is merely the usual flightiness of young men, who
do not see where their true advantages lie - and the conduct of the
men in dying, after digging a canal is normal, and modern
experiences support it, for men who dig canals down in West Africa
die plentifully, be they black, white, or yellow; so you can't help
believing in those men, although it is strange a black man should
have been so enterprising as to go in for canal digging at all.
There is no other case of it extant to my knowledge, and a
remarkable fact is, that the Moondah does so nearly connect, by one
creek, with the Gaboon estuary that you can drag a boat across the
little intervening bit of land.
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.
