ever seen, are undoubtedly the Bakwiri of Cameroon* Mountain
who are also liable to be bearded, or possibly I shou
say more liable to wear beards, for a good deal of th eA rican
hairlessness you hear commented on— in the West African a
any rate -arises from his deliberately pulling his hair ou
his beard, moustache, whiskers, and occasionally, as among
Fans, his eyebrows. .
Dr. Baumann, the great authority on the Bubi langu g
says it is a Bantu stock.1 I know nothing of it myself save
that it is harsh in sound. Their method of c°™tmg 1
usually by fives but they are notably weak in an
ability^ differing in this particular from the -amlanders, and
especially from their Negro neighbours, who arew y g
figures, surpassing the Bantu in this, as indeed they do m
most branches of intellectual activity. . , Hubis
But the most remarkable instance of inferiority the Bub
display is their ignorance regarding methods of working iron.
I do not know that iron in a native state is found on Fernando
Po but scrap-iron they have been in touch with for some
hundreds of years. The mainlanders are all cogmsant of
native methods of working iron, although many tribes of them
“ w depend entirely on European trade for then supply j f
knives, &c., and this difference between
would seem to indicate that the migration of the latter to
island must have taken place at a fairly remote perrod a penod
before the iron-working tribes came down to the coast.
S S if you take the Bubfs j M I
of his origin, namely that he came out of the crater
on the top of Clarence. Peak, this argument falls throug ,
but he has also another legend, one moreover whic
likewise to be found upon the mainland, which says he was
driven from the district north of the Gaboon estuary by the
coming of the M’pongwe to the coast, and as this eSen
the more likely of the two I think we may accept it as t ,
or nearly so. But what adds another difficulty to the matter
is that the Bubi is not only unlearned in iron lore but he
was learned in stone, and up to the time of the youth of many
i “ Beit rage zur Kenntniss der Bubisprache auf Fernando P6o,’- O.
Baumann, Zeitschrift f u r afrikanische Sfirachen. Berlin, 1888.
Porto-negroes on Fernando Po, he was making and using.stone
implements, and none of the tribes within the memory of
man have done this on the mainland. 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, as far as I have been able
to find, o f 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. The worthy Father spent some time chivying
his flock about the forest, but in vain, and he returned
home disgusted, deciding that the Creator, for some wise
purpose, had dedicated the Bubis to the Devil.
The spears used by this interesting people are even to this
day made entirely of wood, and have such a Polynesian look
about them that I intend some time or other to bring some
home and experiment on that learned Polynesian-culture-expert,
Baron von Hiigel, with them :_ i ntellectually experiment
not physically, pray understand.
The pottery has a very early-man look about it, but in this
it does not differ much from that of the mainland, which is
quite as poor, and similarly made without a wheel, and sun