You Do Not Find Bikei Close Down To Libreville, Among The
Fans Who Are There In A Semi-Civilised State, Or More Properly
Speaking In A State Of Disintegrating Culture.
You must go for
bush.
I thought I saw in bikei a certain resemblance in underlying
idea with the early Greek coins I have seen at Cambridge, made like
the fore-parts of cattle; and I have little doubt that the articles
of barter among the Fans before the introduction of the rubber,
ebony, and ivory trades, which in their districts are comparatively
recent, were iron implements. For the Fans are good workers in
iron; and it would be in consonance with well-known instances among
other savage races in the matter of stone implements, that these
things, important of old, should survive, and be employed in the
matter of such an old and important affair as marriage. They thus
become ju-ju; and indeed all West African legitimate marriage,
although appearing to the casual observer a mere matter of barter,
is never solely such, but always has ju-ju in it.
We may as well here follow out the whole of the domestic life of the
Fan, now we have got him married. His difficulty does not only
consist in getting enough bikei together but in getting a lady he
can marry. No amount of bikei can justify a man in marrying his
first cousin, or his aunt; and as relationship among the Fans is
recognised with both his father and his mother, not as among the
Igalwa with the latter's blood relations only, there are an awful
quantity of aunts and cousins about from whom he is debarred. But
when he has surmounted his many difficulties, and dodged his
relations, and married, he is seemingly a better husband than the
man of a more cultured tribe. He will turn a hand to anything, that
does not necessitate his putting down his gun outside his village
gateway. He will help chop firewood, or goat's chop, or he will
carry the baby with pleasure, while his good lady does these things;
and in bush villages, he always escorts her so as to be on hand in
case of leopards, or other local unpleasantnesses. When inside the
village he will lay down his gun, within handy reach, and build the
house, tease out fibre to make game nets with, and plait baskets, or
make pottery with the ladies, cheerily chatting the while.
Fan pottery, although rough and sunbaked, is artistic in form and
ornamented, for the Fan ornaments all his work; the articles made in
it consist of cooking pots, palm-wine bottles, water bottles and
pipes, but not all water bottles, nor all pipes are made of pottery.
I wish they were, particularly the former, for they are occasionally
made of beautifully plaited fibre coated with a layer of a certain
gum with a vile taste, which it imparts to the water in the vessel.
They say it does not do this if the vessel is soaked for two days in
water, but it does, and I should think contaminates the stream it
was soaked in into the bargain.
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