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The banzas of Congo-land show the constitution of native society, which, as in Syria, and indeed in most barbarous and semi- barbarous places, is drawn together less by reciprocal wants than by the ties of blood. Here families cannot disperse, and thus each hamlet is a single house, with its patriarch for president and judge.
There is no novelty in the Mpongwe funeral rites; the same system prevails from the Oil Rivers to Congo-land, and extends even to the wild races of the interior.
The Nganga of Congo-land, the Mganga of the Wasawahili and the Uganga of the Gaboon, exactly corresponds with M. Michelet's Sorciere of the Middle Ages, "physicienne," that is doctor for the people and poisoner; we cannot, however, apply in Africa the adage of Louis XIII.'s day, "To one wizard ten thousand witches."
According to Fathers Carli and Merolla, Pope Alexander VII. sent twelve to fifteen Capuchins and apostolic missioners, who baptized the King and Queen of Congo and the Count of Sonho. Between A.D. 1490 and 1690 were the palmy days of Christianity in Congo-land, and for two centuries it was more or less the state religion.
The ant-nests were those of Yoruba and the Mendi country; not the tall, steepled edifices built by the termites with yellow clay, as in Eastern Africa, but an eruption of blue-black, hard-dried mud and mucus, resembling the miniature pagodas, policeman's lanterns, mushrooms, or umbrellas one or two feet high, here single, there double, common in Ashanti and Congo-land.
According to Lopez de Lima, who seems to endorse the saying, "Si cum Jesuitis, non cum Jesu itis," they worried one captain- general to death, and they attempted to found in Congo-land another Uruguay or Paraguay.
The Tákwá settlement, a line of bamboo and swish huts well built enough, lies, like a hamlet in Congo-land, along the winding road. It is bare of trees, but here and there a shaft yawns before the doors. M. Dahse makes the population before 1879 to have been 6,000 souls, and in 1881 about 3,000.
It was a repetition of the up march, except that all were bent upon rushing home, like asses to their stables; none of those poses, or regular halts on the line of march, as practised by well- trained voyageurs, are known to Congo-land. There was some reason for the hurry, and travellers in these regions will do well to remember it, or they may starve with abundance around them.
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