The natives of British Central Africa

								

a baobab, or a wild fig, or a silver-thorn acacia, covered with bright
golden blossom. Or we have the kind of scenery described by travellers as
park-like—open glades, covered with short grass (which, however, never
makes turf; you can see the soil between the separate tufts), and dotted
with clumps of scrub and small trees, singly or in groups. This is the
kind of place where the zebras come to graze—not that I ever had the
luck to see any. The small boys who had held out hopes of this treat,
said, when we passed the place early in the afternoon, that it was still
too hot—the mbidzi were all hidden in the bush, resting in the shade;
they would come out to feed on the dambo when it grew cooler. When we
returned along the same path the sun was declining, but there were still
no mbidzi—a party of natives on their way to the village we had left
had scared them.
Where there are no trees or bushes, the grass is usually of the tall,
coarse-growing kind already referred to, which is used in hut-building,
and has to be burned off at the end of every dry season—otherwise it
would become an impenetrable jungle. The grass-fires serve a double
purpose—that of clearing the ground and manuring it—but they nearly
always spread to the bush, even if it is not fired purposely, to clear a
space for new gardens, or accidentally, by some travellers’ camp-fire.
These fires cause the scarcity of large trees, which, as a rule, are
only found either in deep ravines along watercourses, which have always
escaped the flames, or in the burying-grounds (the sacred groves called
nkalango), where the people carefully beat out the fire before it
reaches them.
These fires have from the earliest ages formed one of the characteristic
features of African travel. One of the oldest records of exploration—the
Periplus of Hanno—describes them, with other phenomena, in a weird
and mysterious passage which fascinated my youth, and has not lost its
charm even when the marvels are resolved into tolerably commonplace
occurrences:—
‘Having taken in water, we sailed thence straight-forwards, until we
came to a great gulf, which the interpreters said was called the Horn
of the West.’ (This must have been somewhere near Sierra Leone, since
the farthest point reached by the expedition seems to have been Sherbro
Island.) ‘In it was a large island, and in the island a lake like a sea,
and in this another island, on which we landed; and by day we saw nothing
but woods, but by night we saw many fires burning, and heard the sound of
flutes and cymbals, and the beating of drums, and an immense shouting.
Fear came upon us, and the soothsayers bade us quit the island.’
Evidently the people were ‘playing,’ as the Anyanja say—and their
dances last sometimes from dark to daylight, even now—or there was a
lyke-wake on. Or else, maybe, they were well aware of the presence of the