it may be called. Among them, as among most Africans,
the “ musimo,” or spirits of the dead, are the one immaterial
idea which the native mind can grasp. Even this,
however, is only very crudely spiritual, as the fact of
offering a disembodied soul beer shows plainly enough.
They also attribute other evils besides disease to the
spirits of the dead. With this belief in ghosts they
combine- curiously enough the doctrine of metempsychosis,
as do many other tribes. The spirits of the
dead are believed to pass into other animals—men of
rank become hyaenas—but never into men.
Except that a man of these tribes will divide anything
that is given him among all his companions, they
have no idea of morality. I could tell many stories of
all kinds of unnatural and barbarous abominations
among them, and especially among the black Portuguese,
but I do not think there would be any useful
purpose served by their recital.
Industrially, however, these people take a comparatively
high rank among negroes. Of course witchcraft enters
largely into all their operations. When a man intends
to build a house, the inevitable sorcerer is; called in.
He brings- with him some flour and makes a little
heap of it on the ground. If next morning this heap is
undisturbed the site is a good one. If the rats have
eaten it or it has been scattered in any other way, it
would be madness to build in so unpropitious a spot. The
huts are always round, built of wood, and covered with
mud. Poor families live together; the rich have,.as I said
above, a hut for each wife. There are no windows, and the
smoke of the fire escapes through any interstices it can
find. Each hut is surrounded by a fence of reeds, making
a little court four or five yards in extent. One of these
joins , on to another, and as they are all square it is
very difficult, despite the number of little paths, about
a yard wide, to find your way to any particular hut in
a village. The whole village is surrounded by a similar
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fence of rushes with several gates. All refuse is carried
outside. In each village there are a scertain number of
enclosures roofed in, containing grindstones for making
flour; the women perform this work all in a body.
They both spin and weave the native cotton, and know
two vegetable dyes, one yellow, the other black, obtained
by soaking the bark of certain trees in hot water. They
make very strong string, both of cotton and of bark
AXES FROM TH E LOWER ZAMBEZI.
fibre. They also make considerable use of leather,
especially for bags, and are not unhandy at pottery
work. Their canoes are dug out of the trunk of a
tree, but are very much larger than those of the
Barotse. They are propelled either by paddles, with a
very large crew sitting the whole length of the canoe,
and the captain steering with a long oar astern, or
else in shallow water with a punt pole. I have seen
as many as twenty-five people in one canoe. Their
principal food is flour made of mealies called mapira,
besides which they grow beans and maize. They take
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