The
Appearance Of This Strange Eerie Light In Among The Bush Is Very
Weird And Charming.
I have seen it before in dark forests at night,
but never so much of it.
September 27th. - Fine morning. It's a blessing my Pappenheimers
have not recognised what this means for the afternoon. We take
things very leisurely. I know it's no good hurrying, we are dead
sure of getting a ducking before we reach Buea anyhow, so we may as
well enjoy ourselves while we can.
I ask my boys how they would "make fire suppose no matches live."
Not one of them thinks it possible to do so, "it pass man to do them
thing suppose he no got live stick or matches." They are coast
boys, all of them, and therefore used to luxury, but it is really
remarkable how widely diffused matches are inland, and how very
dependent on them these natives are. When I have been away in
districts where they have not penetrated, it is exceedingly rarely
that the making of fire has to be resorted to. I think I may say
that in most African villages it has not had to be done for years
and years, because when a woman's fire has gone out, owing to her
having been out at work all day, she just runs into some neighbour's
hut where there is a fire burning, and gives compliments, and picks
up a burning stick from the fire and runs home. From this comes the
compliment, equivalent to our "Oh! don't go away yet," of "You come
to fetch fire." This will be said to you all the way from Sierra
Leone to Loanda, as far as I know, if you have been making yourself
agreeable in an African home, even if the process may have extended
over a day or so. The hunters, like the Fans, have to make fire,
and do it now with a flint and steel; but in districts where their
tutor in this method - the flint-lock gun - is not available, they
will do it with two sticks, not always like the American Indians'
fire-sticks. One stick is placed horizontally on the ground and the
other twirled rapidly between the palms of the hands, but sometimes
two bits of palm stick are worked in a hole in a bigger bit of wood,
the hole stuffed round with the pith of a tree or with silk cotton
fluff, and the two sticks rotated vigorously. Again, on one
occasion I saw a Bakele woman make fire by means of a slip of rafia
palm drawn very rapidly, to and fro, across a notch in another piece
of rafia wood. In most domesticated tribes, like the Effiks or the
Igalwa, if they are going out to their plantation, they will enclose
a live stick in a hollow piece of a certain sort of wood, which has
a lining of its interior pith left in it, and they will carry this
"fire box" with them.
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