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Her diet is restricted to vegetables and beer. Among the Baganda, in like manner, no menstruous woman might drink milk or come into contact with any milk-vessel; and she might not touch anything that belonged to her husband, nor sit on his mat, nor cook his food.
For a like reason, probably, the Baganda imagine that a woman who does not menstruate exerts a malign influence on gardens and makes them barren if she works in them. For not being herself fertilized by a spirit, how can she fertilize the garden?
When the late explorer Sir Henry Stanley told me of the emotional grip which Christianity had over the Baganda tribes, and read me their letters, which were exactly like medieval letters in their literal faith and everpresent piety, I said "Can these men handle a rifle?" To which Stanley replied with some scorn "Of course they can, as well as any white man."
Many of the people spend most of their time hunting in the forests for food and skins. The Different Tribes The people of the Congo are all dark-skinned Africans of the same race as the Baganda, except two tribes which are quite different. These other people are called the Pigmies, which means they are very small. None of the Congo people have made a kingdom of their own like the Baganda.
Sometimes in case of sickness the malady is transferred to an effigy as a preliminary to passing it on to a human being. Thus among the Baganda the medicine-man would sometimes make a model of his patient in clay; then a relative of the sick man would rub the image over the sufferer's body and either bury it in the road \??\ it in the grass by the wayside.
A third boy had been captured from a tribe in the north, and his skin was of a much lighter brown than that of the Baganda boys. This light-skinned captured slave was named Lugalama.
Some of the Baganda fish in the lake, and when they go on journeys it is often quicker to travel by boat on the lake. Many Africans can only make boats out of rough tree-trunks with the inside scooped out, but the Baganda had learnt to build long, narrow boats with high carved wooden ends. These canoes shot through the water very swiftly, as twenty or thirty men paddled together in each boat.
None of the houses last more than three or four years; but these people do not want their houses to stand for many years, because they are not like the Baganda who chose a country and stay there always. The Congo tribes move their villages after a few years and live somewhere else. So villages are always shifting, and nothing they make is wanted to last long.
The air was almost cloyingly sweet with a perfume like sage-brush honey. Our first task was to set our boys to work clearing a space; the grass was so high and rank that mere trampling had little effect on it. The Baganda, Sabakaki, we had been compelled to leave with the ox team. So our twenty-seven had become twenty-six. Next morning C. and I started out very early with one gunbearer.
On the contrary, a couple who have given proof of extraordinary fertility by becoming the parents of twins are believed by the Baganda to be endowed with a corresponding power of increasing the fruitfulness of the plantain-trees, which furnish them with their staple food.
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