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Updated: June 5, 2025
G. The inhabitants of Fernando Po have still an especial hatred for the M'pongwe, and both they and the M'pongwe have this account of the one tribe driving the other off the mainland.
There is one other very important point in M'pongwe Fetish; and that is that the souls of men exist before birth as well as after death. The malevolent minor spirits are capable of being born with, what we will call, a man's soul, as well as going in with the man's soul during sleep.
The M'pongwe and Igalwa have a peculiar funeral custom, but it is not confined in its operation to widows, all the near relatives sharing in it. The mourning relations are seated on the floor of the house, and some friend Dr. Nassau told me he was called in in this capacity comes in and "lifts them up," bringing to them a small present, a factor of which is always a piece of soap.
These M'pongwe and Igalwa boat songs are all very pretty, and have very elaborate tunes in a minor key. I do not believe there are any old words to them; I have tried hard to find out about them, but I believe the tunes, which are of a limited number and quite distinct from each other, are very old.
The Isyogo belonging to those indolent Igalwas, and M'pongwe is now little more than a play. You pretty frequently come upon Isyogo dances just round Libreville. You will see stretched across the little street in a cluster of houses, a line from which branches are suspended, making a sort of screen.
Glass I found an exceedingly neat, well-educated M'pongwe gentleman in irreproachable English garments, and with irreproachable, but slightly floreate, English language. We started talking trade, with my band in the middle of the street; making a patch of uproar in the moonlit surrounding silence.
It is true that up the Niger and about Benin and Axim you get polished stone celts, but these are regarded as weird affairs, thunderbolts and suitable only for grinding up and making into medicine; there is no trace in the traditions of these places, as far as I have been able to find, of any time at which stone implements were in common use, and certainly the M'pongwe have not been a very long time on the coast, for their coming is still remembered in their traditions.
When we reach Arevooma, I find it is a very prettily situated town, on the left-hand bank of the river clean and well kept, and composed of houses built on the Igalwa and M'pongwe plan with walls of split bamboo and a palm thatch roof. I own I did not much care for these Ajumbas on starting, but they are evidently going to be kind and pleasant companions.
They are often full of variety and beauty, particularly those of the M'pongwe and Igalwa, of which I will speak later. The dances I have no personal knowledge of, but there is nothing in Baumann's description to make one think they are distinct in themselves from the mainland dances.
The Igalwa or M'pongwe trader arrives with the goods he has received from the white trader, and there are great rejoicing and much uproar as his chests and bundles and demijohns are brought up from the canoe. And presently, after a great deal of talk, the goods are opened.
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