For
Marriage Ceremonies I Refer You To Mr. Hutchinson.
Burial customs
are exceedingly quaint in the southern and eastern districts, where
the bodies are buried in the forest with their heads just sticking
out of the ground.
In other districts the body is also buried in
the forest, but is completely covered and an erection of stones put
up to mark the place.
Little is known of all West African fetish, still less of that of
these strange people. Dr. Oscar Baumann brought to bear on them his
careful unemotional German methods of observation, thereby giving us
more valuable information about them and their island than we
otherwise should possess. Mr. Hutchinson resided many years on
Fernando Po, in the capacity of H. B. M.'s Consul, with his hands
full of the affairs of the Oil Rivers and in touch with the Portos
of Clarence, but he nevertheless made very interesting observations
on the natives and their customs. The Polish exile and his
courageous wife who ascended Clarence Peak, Mr. Rogoszinsky, and
another Polish exile, Mr. Janikowski, about complete our series of
authorities on the island. Dr. Baumann thinks they got their
information from Porto sources - sources the learned Doctor evidently
regards as more full of imagination than solid fact, but, as you
know, all African travellers are occasionally in the habit of pooh-
poohing each other, and I own that I myself have been chiefly in
touch with Portos, and that my knowledge of the Bubi language runs
to the conventional greeting form: - "Ipori?" "Porto." "Ke Soko?'"
"Hatsi soko": - "Who are you?" "Porto." "What's the news?" "No
news."
Although these Portos are less interesting to the ethnologist than
the philanthropist, they being by-products of his efforts, I must
not leave Fernando Po without mentioning them, for on them the trade
of the island depends. They are the middlemen between the Bubi and
the white trader. The former regards them with little, if any, more
trust than he regards the white men, and his view of the position of
the Spanish Governor is that he is chief over the Portos. That he
has any headship over Bubis or over the Bubi land - Itschulla as he
calls Fernando Po - he does not imagine possible. Baumann says he
was once told by a Bubi: "White men are fish, not men. They are
able to stay a little while on land, but at last they mount their
ships again and vanish over the horizon into the ocean. How can a
fish possess land?" If the coffee and cacao thrive on Fernando Po
to the same extent that they have already thriven on San Thome there
is but little doubt that the Bubis will become extinct; for work on
plantations, either for other people, or themselves, they will not,
and then the Portos will become the most important class, for they
will go in for plantations. Their little factories are studded all
round the shores of the coast in suitable coves and bays, and here
in fairly neat houses they live, collecting palm-oil from the Bubis,
and making themselves little cacao plantations, and bringing these
products into Clarence every now and then to the white trader's
factory.
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