Not So The Bantu, Whose Methods Cry Aloud For
Improvement, They Having Just The Very Easiest And Laziest Way
Possible Of Dealing With Food.
The food supply consists of
plantain, yam, koko, sweet potatoes, maize, pumpkin, pineapple, and
ochres, fish both wet and smoked, and flesh of many kinds - including
human in certain districts - snails, snakes, and crayfish, and big
maggot-like pupae of the rhinoceros beetle and the Rhyncophorus
palmatorum.
For sweetmeats the sugar-cane abounds, but it is only
used chewed au naturel. For seasoning there is that bark that
tastes like an onion, an onion distinctly passe, but powerful and
permanent, particularly if it has been used in one of the native-
made, rough earthen pots. These pots have a very cave-man look
about them; they are unglazed, unlidded bowls. They stand the fire
wonderfully well, and you have got to stand, as well as you can, the
taste of the aforesaid bark that clings to them, and that of the
smoke which gets into them during cooking operations over an open
wood fire, as well as the soot-like colour they impart to even your
own white rice. Out of all this varied material the natives of the
Congo Francais forests produce, dirtily, carelessly and wastefully,
a dull, indigestible diet. Yam, sweet potatoes, ochres, and maize
are not so much cultivated or used as among the Negroes, and the
daily food is practically plantain - picked while green and the rind
pulled off, and the tasteless woolly interior baked or boiled and
the widely distributed manioc treated in the usual way.
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