Its Leaves Are A Softer,
Brighter, Deeper Green, And In Due Season (August) It Is Covered -
Not Ostentatiously Like The
Real mango, with great spikes of bloom,
looking each like a gigantic head of mignonette - but with small
yellow-green
Flowers tucked away under the leaves, filling the air
with a soft sweet perfume, and then falling on to the bare shaded
ground beneath to make a deep-piled carpet. I do not know whether
it is a mango tree at all, for I am no botanist: but anyhow the
fruit is rather like that of the mango in external appearance, and
in internal still more so, for it has a disproportionately large
stone. These stones are cracked, and the kernel taken out. The
kernels are spread a short time in the shade to dry; then they are
beaten up into a pulp with a wooden pestle, and the pulp put into a
basket lined carefully with plantain leaves and placed in the sun,
which melts it up into a stiff mass. The basket is then removed
from the sun and stood aside to cool. When cool, the cheese can be
turned out in shape, and can be kept a long time if it is wrapped
round with leaves and a cloth, and hung up inside the house. Its
appearance is that of almond rock, and it is cut easily with a
knife; but at any period of its existence, if it is left in the sun
it melts again rapidly into an oily mass.
The natives use it as a seasoning in their cookery, stuffing fish
and plantains with it and so on, using it also in the preparation of
a sort of sea-pie they make with meat and fish. To make this, a
thing well worth doing, particularly with hippo or other coarse
meat, reduce the wood fire to embers, and make plantain leaves into
a sort of bag, or cup; small pieces of the meat should then be
packed in layers with red pepper and odeaka in between. The tops of
the leaves are then tied together with fine tie-tie, and the bundle,
without any saucepan of any kind, stood on the glowing embers, the
cook taking care there is no flame. The meat is done, and a superb
gravy formed, before the containing plantain leaves are burnt
through - plantain leaves will stand an amazing lot in the way of
fire. This dish is really excellent, even when made with python,
hippo, or crocodile. It makes the former most palatable; but of
course it does not remove the musky taste from crocodile; nothing I
know of will.
The great and important difference between the M'pongwe, {167}
Igalwa, and Ajumba fetish, and the Fetish of those tribes round
them, consists in their conception of a certain spirit called O
Mbuiri. They have, as is constant among the Bantu races of South-
West Africa, a great god - the creator, a god who has made all
things, and who now no longer takes any interest in the things he
has created.
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