Shelters
of this kind that you come across are merely the rough huts put up
by hunters, not true houses.
The village is usually fairly well
built, and surrounded with a living hedge of stakes. The houses
inside this are four-cornered, the walls made of logs of wood stuck
in edgeways, and surmounted by a roof of thatch pitched at an
extremely stiff angle, and the whole is usually surrounded with a
dug-out drain to carry off surface water. These houses, as usual on
the West Coast, are divisible into two classes - houses of assembly,
and private living houses. The first are much the larger. The
latter are very low, and sometimes ridiculously small, but still
they are houses and better than those awful Loango grass affairs you
get on the Congo.
Herr Baumann says that the houses high up on the mountain have
double walls between which there is a free space; an arrangement
which may serve to minimise the extreme draughtiness of an ordinary
Bubi house - a very necessary thing in these relatively chilly upper
regions. I may remark on my own account that the Bubi villages do
not often lie right on the path, but, like those you have to deal
with up the Calabar, some little way off it. This is no doubt for
the purpose of concealing their whereabouts from strangers, and it
does it successfully too, for many a merry hour have I spent dodging
up and down a path trying to make out at what particular point it
was advisable to dive into the forest thicket to reach a village.
But this cultivates habits of observation, and a short course of
this work makes you recognise which tree is which along miles of a
bush path as easily as you would shops in your own street at home.
The main interest of the Bubi's life lies in hunting, for he is more
of a sportsman than the majority of mainlanders. He has not any big
game to deal with, unless we except pythons - which attain a great
size on the island - and crocodiles. Elephants, though plentiful on
the adjacent mainland, are quite absent from Fernando Po, as are
also hippos and the great anthropoid apes; but of the little
gazelles, small monkeys, porcupines, and squirrels he has a large
supply, and in the rivers a very pretty otter (Lutra poensis) with
yellow brown fur often quite golden underneath; a creature which is,
I believe, identical with the Angola otter.
The Bubis use in their hunting flint-lock guns, but chiefly traps
and nets, and, I am told, slings. The advantage of these latter
methods are, I expect, the same as on the mainland, where a
distinguished sportsman once told me: "You go shoot thing with gun.
Berrah well - but you no get him thing for sure. No, sah. Dem gun
make nize. Berrah well. You fren hear dem nize and come look him,
and you hab to go share what you done kill. Or bad man hear him
nize, and he come look him, and you no fit to get share - you fit to
get kill yusself. Chii! chii! traps be best." I urged that the
traps might also be robbed. "No, sah," says he, "them bian (charm)
he look after them traps, he fit to make man who go tief swell up
and bust."
The Bubis also fish, mostly by basket traps, but they are not
experts either in this or in canoe management. Their chief sea-
shore sport is hunting for the eggs of the turtles who lay in the
sand from August to October. These eggs - about 200 in each nest -
are about the size of a billiard-ball, with a leathery envelope, and
are much valued for food, as are also the grubs of certain beetles
got from the stems of the palm-trees, and the honey of the wild bees
which abound here.
Their domestic animals are the usual African list; cats, dogs,
sheep, goats, and poultry. Pigs there are too, very domestic in
Clarence and in a wild state in the forest. These pigs are the
descendants of those imported by the Spaniards, and not long ago
became such an awful nuisance in Clarence that the Government issued
instructions that all pigs without rings in their noses - i.e. all in
a condition to grub up back gardens - should be forthwith shot if
found abroad. This proclamation was issued by the governmental
bellman thus: - "I say - I say - I say - I say. Suppose pig walk - iron
no live for him nose! Gun shoot. Kill him one time. Hear re! hear
re!"
However a good many pigs with no iron living in their noses got
adrift and escaped into the interior, and have flourished like the
green bay-tree, destroying the Bubi's plantation and eating his
yams, while the Bubi retaliating kills and eats them. So it's a
drawn battle, for the Bubi enjoys the pig and the pig enjoys the
yams, which are of singular excellence in this island and celebrated
throughout the Bight. Now, I am told, the Government are firmly
discouraging the export of these yams, which used to be quite a
little branch of Fernando Po trade, in the hope that this will
induce the native to turn his attention to working in the coffee and
cacao plantations. Hope springs eternal in the human breast, for
the Bubi has shown continually since the 16th century that he takes
no interest in these things whatsoever. Now and again a man or
woman will come voluntarily and take service in Clarence, submit to
clothes, and rapidly pick up the ways of a house or store. And just
when their owner thinks he owns a treasure, and begins to boast that
he has got an exception to all Bubidom, or else that he knows how to
manage them better than other men, then a hole in that man's
domestic arrangements suddenly appears.
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