would be a group of rubber collectors sitting round it watching
the cooking operations, removing those pieces that had
run dry and placing others, from a pile at their side, in position.
On either side of the path we continually passed pieces of
rubber vine cut into lengths of some two feet or so, and on
the top one or two leaves plaited together, or a piece of bush
rope tied into a knot, which indicated whose property the
pile was.
The method of collection employed by the Fan is exceedf
a n s w i t h i v o r y a n d r u b b e r .
mgly wasteful, because this fool of a vegetable Landolphia
flonda (Ovanensis) does not know how to send up suckers
from its root, but insists on starting elaborately from seeds
only. I do not, however, see any reasonable hope of getting
them to adopt more economical methods. The attempt made
by the English houses, when the rubber trade was opened
up in 1883 on the Gold Coast, to get the more tractable natives
there to collect by incisions only, has failed ; for in the early
days a man could get a load of rubber almost at his own door
on the Gold Coast, and now he has to go fifteen days’ journey
inland for it. When a Fan town has exhausted the rubber in
its vicinity, it migrates, bag and baggage, to a new part of the
forest. The young unmarried men are the usual rubber
hunters. Parties of them go out into the forest, wandering
about in it and camping under shelters of boughs by night,
for a month and more at a time, during the dry seasons,
until they have got a sufficient quantity together ; then they
return to their town, and it is manipulated by the women, and
finally sold, either to the white trader, in districts where he is
within reach, or to the M’pongwe trader who travels round
buying it and the collected ivory and ebony, like a Norfolk
higgler. In districts like these I was in, remote from the
M’pongwe trader, the Fans carry the rubber to the town nearest
to them that is in contact with the black trader, and sell it to
the inhabitants, who in their turn resell it to their next town,
until it reaches him.
This passing down of the rubber and ivory gives rise between
the various towns to a series of commercial complications
which rank with woman palaver for the production of rows ; it
being the sweet habit of these Fans to require a life for a life,
and to regard one life as good as another. Also rubber trade'
and wife palavers sweetly intertwine, for a man on the kill in
re a wife palaver knows his best chance of getting the life
from the village he has a grudge against lies in catching one
of that village’s men when he may be out alone rubber hunting.
So he does this thing, and then the men from the victim’s
village, go and lay for a rubber hunter, from the killer’s village ;
and then of course the men from the killer’s village go and lay
for rubber hunters from victim number one’s village, and thus
the blood feud rolls down the vaulted chambers of the ages,
so that you, dropping in on affairs, cannot see one end or the
other of it, and frequently the people concerned have quite
forgotten what the killing was started for. Not that this discourages
them in the least. Really if Dr. Nassau is right, and
these Fans are descendants of Adam and Eve, I expect the
Cain and Abel killing palaver is still kept going among
them.
Wiki, being great on bush rope, gave me much information
regarding rubber, showing me the various other vines besides