Cloth He Does Not Want; He Utterly Fails To
See What Good The Stuff Is, For He Abhors Clothes.
The Spanish
authorities insist that the natives who come into the town should
have something on, and so they
Array themselves in a bit of cotton
cloth, which before they are out of sight of the town on their
homeward way, they strip off and stuff into their baskets, showing
in this, as well as in all other particulars, how uninfluencible by
white culture they are. For the Spaniards, like the Portuguese, are
great sticklers for clothes and insist on their natives wearing
them - usually with only too much success. I shall never forget the
yards and yards of cotton the ladies of Loanda wore; and not content
with making cocoons of their bodies, they wore over their heads, as
a mantilla, some dozen yards or so of black cloth into the bargain.
Moreover this insistence on drapery for the figure is not merely for
towns; a German officer told me the other day that when, a week or
so before, his ship had called at Anno Bom, they were simply
besieged for "clo', clo', clo';" the Anno Bomians explaining that
they were all anxious to go across to Principe and get employment on
coffee plantations, but that the Portuguese planters would not
engage them in an unclothed state.
You must not, however, imagine that the Bubi is neglectful of his
personal appearance. In his way he is quite a dandy.
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