But
When He Has Surmounted His Many Difficulties, And Dodged His
Relations, And Married, He Is Seemingly A Better Husband Than The
Man Of A More Cultured Tribe.
He will turn a hand to anything, that
does not necessitate his putting down his gun outside his village
gateway.
He will help chop firewood, or goat's chop, or he will
carry the baby with pleasure, while his good lady does these things;
and in bush villages, he always escorts her so as to be on hand in
case of leopards, or other local unpleasantnesses. When inside the
village he will lay down his gun, within handy reach, and build the
house, tease out fibre to make game nets with, and plait baskets, or
make pottery with the ladies, cheerily chatting the while.
Fan pottery, although rough and sunbaked, is artistic in form and
ornamented, for the Fan ornaments all his work; the articles made in
it consist of cooking pots, palm-wine bottles, water bottles and
pipes, but not all water bottles, nor all pipes are made of pottery.
I wish they were, particularly the former, for they are occasionally
made of beautifully plaited fibre coated with a layer of a certain
gum with a vile taste, which it imparts to the water in the vessel.
They say it does not do this if the vessel is soaked for two days in
water, but it does, and I should think contaminates the stream it
was soaked in into the bargain. The pipes are sometimes made of
iron very neatly. I should imagine they smoked hot, but of this I
have no knowledge. One of my Ajumba friends got himself one of
these pipes when we were in Efoua, and that pipe was, on and off, a
curse to the party. Its owner soon learnt not to hold it by the
bowl, but by the wooden stem, when smoking it; the other lessons it
had to teach he learnt more slowly. He tucked it, when he had done
smoking, into the fold in his cloth, until he had had three serious
conflagrations raging round his middle. And to the end of the
chapter, after having his last pipe at night with it, he would lay
it on the ground, before it was cool. He learnt to lay it out of
reach of his own cloth, but his fellow Ajumbas and he himself
persisted in always throwing a leg on to it shortly after, and there
was another row.
The Fan basket-work is strongly made, but very inferior to the Fjort
basket-work. Their nets are, however, the finest I have ever seen.
These are made mainly for catching small game, such as the beautiful
little gazelles (Ncheri) with dark gray skins on the upper part of
the body, white underneath, and satin-like in sleekness all over.
Their form is very dainty, the little legs being no thicker than a
man's finger, the neck long and the head ornamented with little
pointed horns and broad round ears. The nets are tied on to trees
in two long lines, which converge to an acute angle, the bottom part
of the net lying on the ground. Then a party of men and women
accompanied by their trained dogs, which have bells hung round their
necks, beat the surrounding bushes, and the frightened small game
rush into the nets, and become entangled. The fibre from which
these nets are made has a long staple, and is exceedingly strong. I
once saw a small bush cow caught in a set of them and unable to
break through, and once a leopard; he, however, took his section of
the net away with him, and a good deal of vegetation and sticks to
boot. In addition to nets, this fibre is made into bags, for
carrying things in while in the bush, and into the water bottles
already mentioned.
The iron-work of the Fans deserves especial notice for its
excellence. The anvil is a big piece of iron which is embedded
firmly in the ground. Its upper surface is flat, and pointed at
both ends. The hammers are solid cones of iron, the upper part of
the cones prolonged so as to give a good grip, and the blows are
given directly downwards, like the blows of a pestle. The bellows
are of the usual African type, cut out of one piece of solid but
soft wood; at the upper end of these bellows there are two chambers
hollowed out in the wood and then covered with the skin of some
animal, from which the hair has been removed. This is bound firmly
round the rim of each chamber with tie-tie, and the bag of it at the
top is gathered up, and bound to a small piece of stick, to give a
convenient hand hold. The straight cylinder, terminating in the
nozzle, has two channels burnt in it which communicate with each of
the chambers respectively, and half-way up the cylinder, there are
burnt from the outside into the air passages, three series of holes,
one series on the upper surface, and a series at each side. This
ingenious arrangement gives a constant current of air up from the
nozzle when the bellows are worked by a man sitting behind them, and
rapidly and alternately pulling up the skin cover over one chamber,
while depressing the other. In order to make the affair firm it is
lashed to pieces of stick stuck in the ground in a suitable way so
as to keep the bellows at an angle with the nozzle directed towards
the fire. As wooden bellows like this if stuck into the fire would
soon be aflame, the nozzle is put into a cylinder made of clay.
This cylinder is made sufficiently large at the end, into which the
nozzle of the bellows goes, for the air to have full play round the
latter.
The Fan bellows only differ from those of the other iron-working
West Coast tribes in having the channels from the two chambers in
one piece of wood all the way.
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