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.
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