United States or Guadeloupe ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Baumann thinks they got their information from Porto sources sources the learned Doctor evidently regards as more full of imagination than solid fact, but, as you know, all African travellers are occasionally in the habit of pooh- poohing each other, and I own that I myself have been chiefly in touch with Portos, and that my knowledge of the Bubi language runs to the conventional greeting form: "Ipori?"
On February 28, 1916, the Austrian Government issued a full report on the campaign in Albania which had culminated in that section in the capture of Durazzo: "The Austrian troops have captured Durazzo. During the forenoon one column, under the fire of the Italians, advanced across the northern isthmus to Portos, four miles north of Durazzo.
There is one passage containing a superb description of the rising of the sun in winter; but two of the lines quite puzzled him. In Gascon they are "Quand l'Auroro, fourrado en raoubo de sati, Desparrouillo, san brut, las portos del mati. Some of the words translated into French might seem vulgar, though in Gascon they are beautiful.
If the coffee and cacao thrive on Fernando Po to the same extent that they have already thriven on San Thome there is but little doubt that the Bubis will become extinct; for work on plantations, either for other people, or themselves, they will not, and then the Portos will become the most important class, for they will go in for plantations.
"It may be well for thee, whose business is to get thy living from their sale, to talk thus," replied Master Prout; "but for all that, I relish not these foreign decoctions your Canaries, your Sherries, and your Portos. Their very names have a smack of popery in them. Down with the Pope, and all his inventions to tickle men's palates and damn their souls."
The former regards them with little, if any, more trust than he regards the white men, and his view of the position of the Spanish Governor is that he is chief over the Portos. That he has any headship over Bubis or over the Bubi land Itschulla as he calls Fernando Po he does not imagine possible. Baumann says he was once told by a Bubi: "White men are fish, not men.
I once saw a dance at Fernando Po, but that was among Portos, and it was my old friend the Batuco in all its beauty.
For West Africans their agriculture is of a fairly high description- -the noteworthy point about it, however, is the absence of manioc. Manioc is grown on Fernando Po, but only by the Portos. Their farms are well kept, particularly those in the grass districts by San Carlos Bay. The yams of the Cordillera districts are the best flavoured, but those of the east coast the largest.
"Porto." "Ke Soko?" "Hatsi soko": "Who are you?" "Porto." "What's the news?" "No news." Although these Portos are less interesting to the ethnologist than the philanthropist, they being by-products of his efforts, I must not leave Fernando Po without mentioning them, for on them the trade of the island depends. They are the middlemen between the Bubi and the white trader.
They are not a sea-beach folk, although each village has its beach, which merely means the place to which it brings its trade, these beaches being usually the dwelling places of the so-called Portos, negroes, who act as middle-men between the Bubis and the whites.
Word Of The Day