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All adult males carry arms, and would be held womanish if they were seen unweaponed. These are generally battle-axes, spears cruelly and fantastically jagged, hooked and barbed, and curious leaf-shaped knives of archaic aspect; some of the latter have blades broader than they are long, a shape also preserved by the Mpongwe.
My indispensables were reduced to three loads, and I had four "pull-a-boys," one a Mpongwe, Mwaka alias Captain Merrick, a model sluggard; and Messrs. Smoke, Joe Williams, and Tom Whistle- -Kru-men, called Kru-boys. This is not upon the principle, as some suppose, of the grey-headed post-boy and drummer-boy: all the Kraoh tribes end their names in bo, e.g.
Devoted to trade and become a people of brokers, of go-betweens, of middle-men, the Mpongwe have now acquired an ease and propriety, a polish and urbanity of manner which contrasts strongly with the Kru-men and other tribes, who, despite generations of intercourse with Europeans, are rough and barbarous as their forefathers.
The legs, which are peculiarly neat and well turned, are made by art a fitting set-off to the head. It is the pride of a Mpongwe wife to cover the lower limb between knee and ankle with an armour of metal rings, which are also worn upon the wrists; the custom is not modern, and travellers of the seventeenth century allude to them.
But the same belief also exists amongst the Congoese tribes, and even in the debased races of the Niger. There is but one God. "King Obi. I always understood there were two," &c. The Mpongwe "Mwetye" is a branch of male freemasonry into which women and strangers are never initiated.
Two brass wires are stretched across the upper and lower breadth, and each is provided with a ring or hinge holding four or five strips of wire acting as clappers. The beliefs and superstitions popularly attributed to the Mpongwe are these. M. du Chaillu everywhere confounds Anyambia, or, as he writes the word, "Aniambie," with Inyemba, a witch, to bewitch being "punga inyemba." Mr.
Metamorphosis is a common art amongst Mpongwe magicians: this vulgar materialism, of which Ovid sang, must not be confounded with the poetical Hindu metempsychosis or transmigration of souls which explains empirically certain physiological mysteries. The poison ordeal is a necessary corollary to witchcraft. Mr.
And of late years the people have succeeded in launching large and fast craft built after European models. The favourite pleasures of the Mpongwe are gross and gorging "feeds," drinking and smoking. They recall to mind the old woman who told "Monk Lewis" that if a glass of gin were at one end of the table, and her immortal soul at the other, she would choose the gin.
Yet it is in full vigour amongst their Ibo neighbours to the north-west, and the Duallas of the Camarones River also number it amongst their "country customs." The Mpongwe, as has been said, will not eat a chimpanzee; the Fan devour their dead enemies.
He further assures us, that mulatto girls thus born are not allowed to marry, although there is no such restriction for the males; and elsewhere, he concludes, that never having seen an infant or an adult offspring of mixed blood, abortion is practised as at Delagoa and Old Calabar, where, in 1862, I found only one child of mixed blood. If so, the Mpongwe have changed for the better.
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