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Updated: April 30, 2025
Most of the men fish or build canoes, and all the people seem to be constantly trading with each other, selling food or curiosities for mitakos or cloth. We stop for the night at Yonanghe, a Post which has been built by a true native of the Congo, who at one time was the boy of Inspecteur d'Etat, Malfeyt.
Several hymns are sung and then the people pass out, dropping their mitakos into the plate as they do so. In the afternoon, we walk round the village. Mr. Clarke notices a boy with a malformation of one knee and speaks to him. He then explains to me that this is another atrocity, for the boy said he had been shot by the soldiers of the State when an infant.
Having taken an empty bottle for one fish and a piece of cloth for another, he refused more of those articles and demanded either salt or mitakos for his goods. In a short time however, he had disposed of his cargo and paddled contentedly away. The natives are very vain and take much trouble over their personal appearance.
The objection to beads and mitakos, does not apply to salt and cloth, the former being at once consumed, and the latter being worn out in course of time. Nevertheless it is not well to have a currency which is continually being formed only to be destroyed.
On pay day, rolls of brass wire are cut up into mitakos, which become longer the higher one travels up the river, this arrangement having been introduced by Stanley and never altered. Here the mitako is 28 centimetres long and it is worth 5 cents, while at Basoko it is 40 centimetres long and worth 10 cents.
In this prosperous part the heads of the women are already fully adorned with beads and most of their household ornaments also, so they demanded cloth instead. The question of the currency is a very difficult one. There is the danger of flooding the banks of the Congo with mitakos, and the banks of the Ubangi with beads.
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