STRANGE SIGHTS IN AFRICA.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXI, Issue 44, 6 October 1911, Page 2

STRANGE SIGHTS IN AFRICA.

Dr. Karl Kumm, the African missionary and explorer, who is visiting Australia, lias been recounting some of his strange experiences to Sydney audiences. The story of his last gi'oat journey, from the Niger to the Nue, is a wonderfully interesting one. He left West Africa by way of the Niger, and travelled up tiio Benue, the eastern tributory of the Niger, which is navigable in the rainy season for 900 miles. From the Upper Benue lie crossed to the Shari River, which runs into Lake Chad, followed the Shari to Fort Archampault, and went on to the Gazelle River Province, in the Anglo-Egyptian Soudan, 1500 miles south-east of Khartoum. From Chat point he returned to civilisation by the Nile. The journey was expected to last four years, but Dr. Kumm was enabled by what he describes “ a remarkable combination of circumstances” to accomplish his great task in fifteen months. 1 The explorer took 250 natives with him, but no white companion, and he traversed territory where no white man had been before. Ho obtained collections of wonderful butterflies, heads of wild beasts, and skins, many of which he has sent to the British Museum. Among the specimens was a strange giraffe possessing three horns and a crocodile which is striped like a zebra. Dr. Kumm says that the most wonderful sight he saw was afforded by the people of the Sara-Kabba tribe, whose

women have faces with beaks like birds. In their infancy the girls of the tribe‘have • pieces of wood stuck into their Tips'to force them outward. As the lips grow out, large pieces of wood are pressed' in until the lips aro decorated with plates measuring from three inches to six inches in diameter. The women arc unable to speak distinctly, and Dr .Kumm asked a chief whether it was to beautify the women or to silence them that the curious disfigurement was practised. Ho was told that the object of the practice was to protect the women against Mohammedan slave raiders, who would kidnap them if their natural beauty was apparent. It certainly seems heroic of the Sara-Kabba women to purchase safety at the price of silence,