Dr. Oscar Baumann, Who Knows More Than Any One Else
About These Bubis, Thinks, I Believe, That These Bits Of
Achatectonia shells may have been introduced by the runaway Angola
slaves in the old days, who used to fly from
Their Portuguese owners
on San Thome to the Spaniards on Fernando Po. The villages of the
Bubis are in the forest in the interior of the island, and they are
fairly wide apart. They are not a sea-beach folk, although each
village has its beach, which merely means the place to which it
brings its trade, these beaches being usually the dwelling places of
the so-called Portos, {51} negroes, who act as middle-men between
the Bubis and the whites.
You will often be told that the Bubis are singularly bad house-
builders, indeed that they make no definite houses at all, but only
rough shelters of branches. This is, however, a mistake. 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.
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