It Strikes Me As
Remarkable That The Igalwa, Like The Dualla Of Cameroons, Have Their
Slaves In Separate Villages; But This Is The Case, Though I Do Not
Know The Reason Of It.
These Igalwa slaves cultivate the
plantations, and bring up the vegetables and fruit to their owners'
villages and do the housework daily.
The interior of the island is composed of high, rocky, heavily
forested hills, with here and there a stream, and here and there a
swamp; the higher land is towards the up-river end; down river there
is a lower strip of land with hillocks. This is, I fancy, formed by
deposits of sand, etc., catching in among the rocks, and connecting
what were at one time several isolated islands. There are no big
game or gorillas on the island, but it has a peculiar and awful
house ant, much smaller than the driver ant, but with a venomous,
bad bite; its only good point is that its chief food is the white
ants, which are therefore kept in abeyance on Lembarene Island,
although flourishing destructively on the mainland banks of the
river in this locality. I was never tired of going and watching
those Igalwa villagers, nor were, I think, the Igalwa villagers ever
tired of observing me. Although the physical conditions of life
were practically identical with those of the mainland, the way in
which the Igalwas dealt with them, i.e. the culture, was distinct
from the culture of the mainland Fans.
The Igalwas are a tribe very nearly akin, if not ethnically
identical with, the M'pongwe, and the culture of these two tribes is
on a level with the highest native African culture. African
culture, I may remark, varies just the same as European in this,
that there is as much difference in the manners of life between,
say, an Igalwa and a Bubi of Fernando Po, as there is between a
Londoner and a Laplander.
The Igalwa builds his house like that of the M'pongwe, of bamboo,
and he surrounds himself with European-made articles. The neat
houses, fitted with windows, with wooden shutters to close at night,
and with a deal door - a carpenter-made door - are in sharp contrast
with the ragged ant-hill looking performances of the Akkas, or the
bark huts of the Fan, with no windows, and just an extra broad bit
of bark to slip across the hole that serves as a door. On going
into an Igalwa house you will see a four-legged table, often covered
with a bright-coloured tablecloth, on which stands a water bottle,
with two clean glasses, and round about you will see chairs - Windsor
chairs. These houses have usually three, sometimes more rooms, and
a separate closed-in little kitchen, built apart, wherein you may
observe European-made saucepans, in addition to the ubiquitous
skillet. Outside, all along the clean sandy streets, the
inhabitants are seated. The Igalwa is truly great at sitting, the
men pursuing a policy of masterly inactivity, broken occasionally by
leisurely netting a fishing net, the end of the netting hitched up
on to the roof thatch, and not held by a stirrup. The ladies are
employed in the manufacture of articles pertaining to a higher
culture - I allude, as Mr. Micawber would say, to bed-quilts and
pillow-cases - the most gorgeous bed-quilts and pillow-cases - made of
patchwork, and now and again you will see a mosquito-bar in course
of construction, of course not made of net or muslin because of the
awesome strength and ferocity of the Lembarene strain of mosquitoes,
but of stout, fair-flowered and besprigged chintzes; and you will
observe these things are often being sewn with a sewing machine.
The women who may not be busy sewing are busy doing each other's
hair. Hair-dressing is quite an art among the Igalwa and M'pongwe
women, and their hair is very beautiful; very crinkly, but fine. It
is plaited up, close to the head, partings between the plaits making
elaborate parterres. Into the beds of plaited hair are stuck long
pins of river ivory (hippo), decorated with black tracery and
openwork, and made by their good men. A lady will stick as many of
these into her hair as she can get, but the prevailing mode is to
have one stuck in behind each ear, showing their broad, long heads
above like two horns; they are exceedingly becoming to these black
but comely ladies, verily, I think, the comeliest ladies I have ever
seen on the Coast. Very black they are, blacker than many of their
neighbours, always blacker than the Fans, and although their skin
lacks that velvety pile of the true negro, it is not too shiny, but
it is fine and usually unblemished, and their figures are charmingly
rounded, their hands and feet small, almost as small as a high-class
Calabar woman's, and their eyes large, lustrous, soft and brown, and
their teeth as white as the sea surf and undisfigured by filing.
The native dress for men and women alike is the cloth or paun. The
men wear it by rolling the upper line round the waist, and in
addition they frequently wear a singlet or a flannel shirt worn MORE
AFRICANO, flowing free. Rich men will mount a European coat and
hat, and men connected with the mission or trading stations
occasionally wear trousers. The personal appearance of the men does
not amount to much when all's done, so we will return to the ladies.
They wrap the upper hem of these cloths round under the armpits, a
graceful form of drapery, but one which requires continual
readjustment. The cloth is about four yards long and two deep, and
there is always round the hem a border, or false hem, of turkey red
twill, or some other coloured cotton cloth to the main body of the
paun. In addition to the cloth there is worn, when possible, a
European shawl, either one of those thick cotton cloth ones printed
with Chinese-looking patterns in dull red on a dark ground, this
sort is wrapped round the upper part of the body:
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