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 i t ; 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-
Y 2