The Thump, Thump, Thump Of This
Manioc Beating Is One Of The Most Familiar Sounds In A Bush Village.
The
Meal, when beaten up, is used for thickening broths, and rolled
up into bolsters about a foot long and two
Inches in diameter, and
then wrapped in plantain leaves, and tied round with tie-tie and
boiled, or more properly speaking steamed, for a lot of the rolls
are arranged in a brass skillet. A small quantity of water is
poured over the rolls of plantain, a plantain leaf is tucked in over
the top tightly, so as to prevent the steam from escaping, and the
whole affair is poised on the three cooking-stones over a wood fire,
and left there until the contents are done, or more properly
speaking, until the lady in charge of it has delusions on the point,
and the bottom rolls are a trifle burnt or the whole insufficiently
cooked.
This manioc meal is the staple food, the bread equivalent, all along
the coast. As you pass along you are perpetually meeting with a new
named food, fou-fou on the Leeward, kank on the Windward, m'vada in
Corisco, ogooma in the Ogowe; but acquaintance with it demonstrates
that it is all the same - manioc.
It is a good food when it is properly prepared; but when a village
has soaked its soil-laden manioc tubers in one and the same pool of
water for years, the water in that pool becomes a trifle strong, and
both it and the manioc get a smell which once smelt is never to be
forgotten; it is something like that resulting from bad paste with a
dash of vinegar, but fit to pass all these things, and has qualities
of its own that have no civilised equivalent.
I believe that this way of preparing the staple article of diet is
largely responsible for that dire and frequent disease "cut him
belly," and several other quaint disorders, possibly even for the
sleep disease. The natives themselves say that a diet too
exclusively maniocan produces dimness of vision, ending in blindness
if the food is not varied; the poisonous principle cannot be
anything like soaked out in the surcharged water, and the meal when
it is made up and cooked has just the same sour, acrid taste you
would expect it to have from the smell.
The fish is boiled, or wrapped in leaves and baked. The dried fish,
very properly known as stink-fish, is much preferred; this is either
eaten as it is, or put into stews as seasoning, as also are the
snails. The meat is eaten either fresh or smoked, boiled or baked.
By baked I always mean just buried in the ground and a fire lighted
on top, or wrapped in leaves and buried in hot embers.
The smoked meat is badly prepared, just hung up in the smoke of the
fires, which hardens it, blackening the outside quickly; but when
the lumps are taken out of the smoke, in a short time cracks occur
in them, and the interior part proceeds to go bad, and needless to
say maggoty. If it is kept in the smoke, as it often is to keep it
out of the way of dogs and driver ants, it acquires the toothsome
taste and texture of a piece of old tarpaulin.
Now I will ask the surviving reader who has waded through this
dissertation on cookery if something should not be done to improve
the degraded condition of the Bantu cooking culture? Not for his
physical delectation only, but because his present methods are bad
for his morals, and drive the man to drink, let alone assisting in
riveting him in the practice of polygamy, which the missionary party
say is an exceedingly bad practice for him to follow. The inter-
relationship of these two subjects may not seem on the face of it
very clear, but inter-relationships of customs very rarely are; I
well remember M. Jacot coming home one day at Kangwe from an
evangelising visit to some adjacent Fan towns, and saying he had had
given to him that afternoon a new reason for polygamy, which was
that it enabled a man to get enough to eat. This sounds sinister
from a notoriously cannibal tribe; but the explanation is that the
Fans are an exceedingly hungry tribe, and require a great deal of
providing for. It is their custom to eat about ten times a day when
in village, and the men spend most of their time in the palaver-
houses at each end of the street, the women bringing them bowls of
food of one kind or another all day long. When the men are away in
the forest rubber or elephant-hunting, and have to cook their own
food, they cannot get quite so much; but when I have come across
them on these expeditions, they halted pretty regularly every two
hours and had a substantial snack, and the gorge they all go in for
after a successful elephant hunt is a thing to see - once.
There are other reasons which lead to the prevalence of this custom,
beside the cooking. One is that it is totally impossible for one
woman to do the whole work of a house - look after the children,
prepare and cook the food, prepare the rubber, carry the same to the
markets, fetch the daily supply of water from the stream, cultivate
the plantation, etc., etc. Perhaps I should say it is impossible
for the dilatory African woman, for I once had an Irish charwoman,
who drank, who would have done the whole week's work of an African
village in an afternoon, and then been quite fresh enough to knock
some of the nonsense out of her husband's head with that of the
broom, and throw a kettle of boiling water or a paraffin lamp at
him, if she suspected him of flirting with other ladies. That
woman, who deserves fame in the annals of her country, was named
Harragan.
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