IN WEST AFRICA

Greymouth Evening Star, 18 January 1930, Page 12

IN WEST AFRICA

TRIBAL CASTES AND FEUDS.

Caroline Singer, the writer of the following article, which describes the strange medley of people in West Africa, their castes and tribal customs, has just returned from the Dark Continent.

Theer is a lingering notion that the black folk of West Africa —the area from which the ancestors of black Americans were brought—is one people. Related they doubtless are, as are white or yellow races, but their kinship is a riddle for anthropologists. Meanwhile, despite the levelling processes of white interference, tribal differences remain sharply accentuated. For this reason any unity of black peoples, dreamed of by idealists, both black and white, seems remote.

Living side by side, cherishing misty grievances arising from ancient feuds, tribes remain alienated while the white invaders —who so recently fought among themselves in Africa, bringing destitution to thousands of blacks, as in the Cameroons —vigilant? ly enforce inter-tribal peace. Tribes foster different customs, speak different languages maintain civilisations which are not equally advanced, stress their nationality by tribal markings, scarifications, tattooing, designs painted with dyes upon the flesh. Members of unfriendly tribes do not intermarry, though Moslemised blacks are less finicky when adding to their harems. While women of one clan tie' their handkerchiefs .in a certain, style, those of another effect a different mode, shave their heads or coif their hair in some standardised fashion. Imported beads of calicoes of certain pattern and colours bought by one tribe are often rejected for this reason by another —sometimes a calamity for white traders. And there are differences in physical appearance, in stature. The differences require no diligence to detect as they are latent in each fresh scene.

A “Freetown Creole” from Sierra Leone is a Government clerk in British Gambia, the smallest colony on the West Coast. His ancestors 'were freed slaves, themselves descendants of native Africans once car-, ried off and sold in the West Indies and America—hence the term “Creole.” Like the Americo-Liberians, they were returned to Africa. But the ex-slaves, many, of whom were halfcastes, had already travelled too far along the road toward the individualistic civilisation of their masters. Along the same road plods their posterity, retarded by tropical climate, jungle influences, geographical isolation, and by an absence of consistent guidance.

Although born in Africa the “Creole” feels no kinship with “bush” folk, nor they with him. He knows no tribal affiliations; speaks no dialects, his “mother tongue” being “Creole English” so corrupt, though picturesque, as to be well-nigh unintelligible. Upon this has been grafted school-book English in some elementary school where he wos prepared for clerking by another Creole, little more advanced than he is now, or by white missinaries whose zeal often overtops their pedagogy. Europeanised Africans are quickly detribalised, but a Creole is even more apart.

THE NAKED PEOPLES. Startled wood-creatures, three black women, muscled like men and nude except for brief kirtles of fresh green leaves, look up from a field which they are cultivating and stare with lustrous, astonished eyes at the bi-weekly train, wriggling like a demented thing up a new roadbed between Zaria, the walled city of 85,000 Moslem blacks, find the Jos Plateau. They belong to One of those many tribes known as Hill Pagans, as the Naked Peoples. Long ago, repulsing Moslem slavers, they took refuge upon high peaks, among gigantic boulders tossed up in some convulsion of the earth. Cunningly fitting thatched mud huts into the irregular landscape, they built almost invisible villages, surrounded by successive stockades of live cacti, tree high. Always embattled, they were cut off from traffic with their sophisticated neighbours, whose Orientalised culture came by way of Timbuctoo along the inland trade route. Therefore, they kept their rugged ways and were not tempted to barter tin and iron smelted for their own use for articles of dress. No longer cannibals, transformed by whites into peaceful, if sometimes reluctant, taxpayers, taught the use of currency, they still remain unique. Unlike pagans elsewhere, they have not succumbed either to Moslem robes or “wrap-arounds” (skirts) of imported calico except where influenced by Christian missionaries.

Both sexes have elaborate tribal markings. The men wear narrow strips of leather or of woven grass, with hats of the same material, as well as leggings and gauntlets as protection against venomous serpents. The women’s costumes are no more complicated. Some weal' brief leather aprons, with bunches of grass or leaves, for hats they have leather bonnets, very chic. Their heads, shaven with a crude iron knife or fragment of bottle glass, are barren of any hair. Their leafy kirtles are augmented by necklaces of thongs and beads, by crude iron bracelets. Children wear nothing, and in rain or in sunshine babes are carried in leather slings. This universal absence of clothing is many times offset by coatings of clay, sometimes applied in patterns, or of rust-coloured haematite. The latter is believed by whites to serve as a protection against poisonous insects.

Hill pagans were not always able to find strongholds adjoining fertile land. ’Therefore the communal farms, which have passed from one generation to another, are often from five to twenty miles distant. At daybreak the naked peoples can be seen in long lines, marching single file or riding bareback upon their horses, coming down from the high places, crossing the open country, carrying hand ploughs—these tools, a combination of spade and pitchfork peculiar to them, were formerly forged by native smiths —also spears, bows and arrows for procuring any game, including lizards. Very strong, very straight and very black, they are an imposing and a beautiful sight. Their fineness of physique, the formity of their colouring, results, it is rumoured from consistently putting out of the way the deformed, ailing or half-castes' of.jiny A WILD PAGEANT. Yesterday was Saturday when at sundown young swells race their horses. A display of finery, animals and horsemanship rather than a ’genuine competition this race is. A

wild-spirited pageant, it begins upon the treeless plain close to the “strangers’ village,” the hostel and caravanserai to which veiled Tuaregs and their camels must be gone before the mud-walled city’s gates close at 8 o’clock, leaving Arabs the only visitors welcome within. So obviously irritating to the faithful is the presence of whites within the city of 125,000 blacks, a city which was known for its greatness centuries before white men came, that none may dwell inside except one ex-missionary, who, under the Emir’s patronage, compiles a dictionary of the Hausa language, the trading lingua franca of the hinterlands as “Creole English” is along the coast. Hausa travellers abide in another isolated settlement. Further away, divided according to social castes, live white officials of several classes and white traders. Bordering upon their “suburb” is a settlement of halfEuropeanised, halDChristianised clerks and houseboys with their women folk, vigorous Yorrubas from further south, educated blacks from the Gold Coast, squat people from Old Calabar. Yesterday a bridegroom, accompanied by a cavalcade of friends, rode a white Arabian horse with a streaming tail which swept the ground. His brassstudded, red leather bridle and saddle were made in Kano. Flourishing spears, the young men ran their horses through the city’s gate, clattered along narrow, crooked streets, scattering pedestrians, lines ‘ of prisoners shackled together with iron chains, and beggars, omnipresent in Moslem communities, but unknown to communal life in pagan settlements. The pageant ended when the horses, reined in, reared, throwing the congested market place into confusion. This evening, surounded by friends dressed like himself in fresh garments and caps of imported yellow plush—- , the latest fad —the young man sits upon a rubbish heap outside his father’s walled compound and near one of the many pools blanketed with bright green scum. (The use of wells beyond the crowded city’s walls is urged by whites with no results except the retort, “Kano was first an oasis. Its waters spring from a single source. How, then, is the well better than the pool?”) Later the bridegroom and his friends will feast. Meanwhile they are entertained by two ; pagan Hausa lads who have tufted hah’ and are naked except for fringed skirts of leather, and who, in the custody of a villainous looking couple, have been summoned to perform with hyenas. The woman, middle-aged, solicits gifts of money, while the man, putting the leashes of the hyenas in the lad’s hands, beats upon a drum. Dancing to the tom-tom, the bo£s, whose teeth are orange brown from chewing kola nuts, and whose eyes have a strange fixed stare, drag after them the heavily muzzled beasts. This performance, prolonged, is

pleasing to the bridegroom and his friends, to somebody’s wife, who has contrived to raise herself above the high mud wall so that her mischievous black eyes and her nose, with a coralcoloured stud in one nostril, are visible. Bystanders are pleased, and yet, when host and guests troop out of sight, there is some grumbling. Were the young man as generous as he is rich he would most certainly give one of his father’s goats to be sundered alive before everybody’s eyes by the unmuzzled beasts.