It Is True That
Up The Niger And About Benin And Axim You Get Polished Stone Celts,
But These Are
Regarded as weird affairs, - thunderbolts - and suitable
only for grinding up and making into medicine; there is no trace in
The traditions of these places, as far as I have been able to find,
of any time at which stone implements were in common use, and
certainly the M'pongwe have not been a very long time on the coast,
for their coming is still remembered in their traditions. The Bubi
stone implements I have seen twice, but on neither occasion could I
secure one, and although I have been long promised specimens from
Fernando Po, I have not yet received them. They are difficult to
procure, because none of the present towns are on really old sites,
the Bubi, like most Bantus, moving pretty frequently, either because
the ground is witched, demonstrated by outbreaks of sickness, or
because another village-full of his fellow creatures, or a horrid
white man plantation-making, has come too close to him. A Roman
Catholic priest in Ka Congo once told me a legend he laughed much
over, of how a fellow priest had enterprisingly settled himself one
night in the middle of a Bubi village with intent to devote the
remainder of his life to quietly but thoroughly converting it. Next
morning, when he rose up, he found himself alone, the people having
taken all their portable possessions and vanished to build another
village elsewhere.
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