The Bulu and His Women

THE tribes of our neighborhood in the Southern Kamerun belong to the Bantu race. If, as is supposed at this writing to be the case, the Bantu-speaking tribes occupy the southern half of Africa from the seventh degree north of the equator, our neighborhood is in the northern limit of their present occupancy. They are migratory; their drift has been south and west from the heart of Central Africa. Sir Harry Johnston fixes the approximate date at which the Bantu negro left his primal home as not more than two thousand years ago, and notes that he has overrun in his migrations the forest negro, the Nilotic negro, the Hottentot, and the Bushman.

The Bantu is betrayed entirely by his speech. He has no history except as traced and exhibited in his speech; he has no physical distinction or type — only a typical language, and no cohesion except the cohesion of language.

He has wandered, spear in hand, and the spotted skin of a leopard on his shoulder, not in a horde but in broken companies — through the forests and in the grass countries of Africa — these two thousand years. At the crossings of rivers tribes have divided; clans have divided; even families have divided as the bolder members have dared to make a crossing which the weaker ones have evaded; until to-day there are unnumbered tribes, speaking unnumbered dialects, differentiated by local customs, and governed in minor matters by dissimilar traditions. They see each other through a glass darkly. But the white man is a mighty hunter and has tracked them to many a secret lair by his instinct for the spoken word. By him they, who have no care beyond the tribe, are discerned as a race and are endowed with a history; and this constructive work is based, not upon a written word, or a system of hieroglyphics, but upon a spoken word. None of them but carried in those long wanderings a word — a construction — an idiom — that should betray them, the root of them, to the wise white man.

In our neighborhood there are more than ten tribes; we are speaking of the Bulu, one of the Fang divisions of the Bantu people. These, and all West Coast Bantu tribes, have been preserved until a very recent date from that Arab influence which has so much modified the custom of the Bantu people to the East. Our neighbors exhibit that ‘culture most characteristically African’ which is to be found, Sir Harry Johnston believes, in the forests of the Congo and among the lagoons and estuaries of the Guinea Coast.

The migrations of the Bulu draw near the coast. Other Fang tribes have reached the coast and the ultimate barrier of the sea.

You must not think of our migrations as an agitation — or a definite campaign. There is no sense of encampment in the little brown villages strung on the thread of the forest paths. Only this: ask any aged Bulu where ‘his father bore him,’ and he will say that he was born in a town toward the rising sun, beyond a river so many days’ journey inland, and deserted now, he will tell you. Ask him where he himself lived when he married his first wife, and he will tell you of a clearing deserted now, or occupied by another tribe — a lesser number of days’ journey to the east. Ask of the whereabouts of the young of his clan, and you will find them making clearings along the path toward the sea. Westward and a little south of west drift the Bulu, the tribe of our neighborhood.

The Bulu people are not among the flower of the Bantu. But their language — with its idiom, its irony, its aptness at self-defense, its richness in the expression of sense-perception, — fits the Bulu like their skin. The staccato music of the Bulu tongue is an adequate expression of the Bulu mind. And the man of this neighborhood and of this dialect has a pride in his colloquialisms. Bulu friends of mine have grieved to hear my Bulu corrupted by a journey among the tribes to the north, where the letter g fills the pause of our local elision, and have corrected my accent after a journey among tribes to the south — where the letter k is articulate in the elision decreed by the Bulu. ‘We Bulu,5 they have reproached me, ‘speak the real talk,— don’t spoil it!’ And those who have seen the Word of God redress itself in the Bulu (or, I am thinking, in any dialect of the Bantu) have agreed that it is indeed a ‘real talk,’ not to be lightly spoiled. It is not for nothing that the Bantu negro has conserved in long wanderings the treasure of his unique speech.

And if this negro has been linguistically consistent along so many paths of the grass country and the forest country and the beach, he has been consistent too in his subjection to three great racial ideas: he has everywhere been dominated by the lust of gain, the lust of women, and the yoke of fetish. Gain and women and fetish, — it is the old trilogy of the world, the flesh, and the devil. Naked and unashamed this trio has walked in all the caravans of all the wanderers of these age-old migrations, until this day, when the supreme religious adventures of the Bantu have to do with the impact of the things of God upon the ‘things of goods,’ the ‘things of women,’ and the ‘things of fetish.’

Our Bulu, the man, is first and always a master. The white man does not think of him so, but so does the Bulu and so perhaps does the Bantu in general think of himself. In every tribal relation he is, or he purposes to be, a master. He dresses to the part, beach or bush, and the details of his attire (that vary with time and place) have an intentional and recognized significance. That passer-by, netted in tattoo, braceleted with ivory or with brass, armed with a spear, and followed by a retinue of arrogant young bucks, is in his degree a master. As such he moves, he advertises his function in his posture. Whether he be young and beautiful, or old and fat as headmen often are; whether hung with the traditional leopard-skin or coated in a castoff white man’s uniform; whether he be a lesser headman over an obscure village, or a personage of intertribal fame and great possessions, he speaks and moves as master. And this he is by merit — the merit of wisdom in the things of women, the things of goods, and the things of fetish. I think of major headmen known to me, and some inherited from their fathers, and some crept up as parvenus do, but not one could hold his own among the true Bulu if he were not versed in the triple lore of women and goods and fetish.

And if he dresses the part, so does he build his town to the part. The two parallel rows of huts with the clearing between: these are the houses of the women — the many women owned by the headman, the lesser — how shall I say — flocks or herds, owned by his town-brothers, and the ewe lambs owned by the younger men, or the less successful, or the man whose wives always run away. And at either end of the clearing, across the one and the other opening of the commons, are the palaver houses — the great houses where the men of the village sit, where they eat, where they buy and sell women and ivory — the one with the other. Big towns and little towns, villages of ten houses and great settlements of two hundred, the huts of the Bulu are so disposed; the little bark huts, eight by twenty, or ten by thirty, thatched with leaves, are built in rows with the commons between; and at the entrance of the town the palaver house rises, higher, longer, wider, but built of bark like the little huts, and thatched with leaves. Be sure that the masters sit in the cool brown shade of the palaver houses, with their eyes upon their own. It is for this that the palaver house is so placed in the village.

And if they dress the part of masters, and build to the part, they express the part. Our Bulu is ruthless and cruel, he is dignified and courteous and hospitable, and this because he is a master. The town is his, as headman, or he has, as town-brother of the headman, his portion in authority. An authorized guest will be welcomed, fed, and detained, courteously and with dignity. ‘Before we knew the white man,’ said old Minkoe Ntem to me, ‘ we knew friendship and the things of friendship.’

And in years of contact with many tribes of the beach and the bush I have met with how many of the things of friendship; and with discourtesy I have met but once, and that from a negligible source. I see in my heart old Mbité Kumbale, master of one hundred and eighty women and for unnumbered years headman of his village, sitting of a morning in the brown gloom of his great old palaver house, stripping long ribbons from green reeds, and looking curiously wise, curiously maternal — and like the great god Pan. To the little Bulu pipings of the white woman he lent a courteous ear, speaking of his past when that seemed to please her, and polite to whatever idiosyncrasy of his guest. His long village slept in the morning sun; his able-bodied women were away in their gardens; their old and wise and cruel master was at leisure for the amenities.

For he is a cruel old man. The Bantu men are cruel because they are masters. I am not speaking of cannibalism, although it exists among the Bantu of our neighborhood, in some tribes not at all, in some tribes hardly at all, in other tribes to an appreciable degree — as among the Yebekolo, of whose headmen five were executed by the German government in one year on the ground that they had fostered cannibalism. Of this vice I will not speak at length because, however interesting it is to the white man (and it seems to possess a peculiar fascination), or however dark a shade it has cast upon the Bantu past, — and does still cast upon the Bantu present, — that shadow is in the main upon the past; the vice is a hidden and a vanishing shame. It is quick to disappear among those tribes which come under the observation of the white man. Of all the vices of the negro this most hideous vice least resists its doom, and is a thing remembered with shame long before lesser vices, cruelties, obscenities give way. The cruelties, the vices, the obscenities of the Bantu — there might be a book about these, and there have been books. This paper is an attempt to depict among the Bulu the ‘new things.’

It is our custom to think of the Bantu as childlike: he so speaks of himself to the white man, and to the white man he so seems. His limitations are more obvious than the secret trend of his nature. But the Spirit of God takes account of this element of his power and of his weakness — that he is a master. I think that this is so. In how many palaver houses where the masters sit, their eyes upon the sunstruck street of the village, supreme abnegations are taking place. How many men, great in their tribe, rich in the sleek bodies of women, wise in the dark secrets of their race, have stripped themselves of the things of this world, and an exceedingly precious weight of glory; have bent their necks to the yoke of the Ten Commandments, and by the Spirit call Jesus Lord. I have seen a Bulu headman, a leopard skin hanging from his shoulders, go to do obeisance to a white man who was his governor. And arrogance walked with him upon that enforced journey until timidity — that emanation from the presence of the white man — should strike it down. And I have seen three brothers of this headman, any one of whom might have been his successor, pass the broken bread at the communion service — the servants ‘with one heart’ of a common Lord. The mark of his yoke was upon each of these young men, as upon how many others of their race, who become for his sake poor, and have laid aside their beautiful and terrible arrogance for the garments of humility. Our racial prejudices and the standards of civilization may blind us in this present life to the coming of many masters to the brightness of our Lord’s rising. These poor bodies laced in tattoo, these poor black hands that number the things of the world on their ten fingers, bring a kingly oil in the broken boxes of their abnegation.

‘I am Nkolenden,’ says an old headman to me, ‘once the owner of many women, a glorious person, now a servant of God. I will beat the drum for the service.’ And so on that Sabbath morning he did; a fantastic figure, not ignoble, in a loin-cloth and a brassbuttoned coat cast off by an army officer. Himself he beat the great call drum, his coat-tails flying, hard at work in the familiar frenzy — a figure for the common herd to gape upon. The headmen in our neighborhood have no great possessions; they are among the lesser fry of African headmen, with no more than a local fame. To such an one as Mackay’s Mtesa, or the glorious Khama, or Chaka of the Ngoni, to whose activities in the early part of the nineteeenth century over a million enemies owed their death — to such as these the greatest of our headmen is ‘as the little finger to the thumb.’ But our neighborhood is all their world, and the heart of a headman is a headman’s heart. Nkolenden saw himself a king, and his menial act was between him and God, a symbol and a surrender.

And if the Bantu is master, his woman is slave. She is slave to the Bantu triple obsession of goods and sex and fetish. ‘A girl,’ says the Bulu proverb at her birth, ‘is goods.’ She may be, among certain tribes, the subject of a tentative bargain before she is born. ‘A girl is not known,’ says another proverb, ‘till the day of her dowry.’

Ask of that little nine-year-old, who is not yet tattooed, whose young head is shaved in designs, — the headdress of the little girl, — whose sleek body is belted with beads, tailed with dried grasses, and aproned with leaves, ask of that childish creature, ‘Who is giving goods on you?’ and she will know. How many goats have been given, how many dogs and dog-bells, how many sheets of brass, and whether an ivory.

Or if she is to be given in exchange for another woman, — a wife for her father, or a little girl for her brother who must be set up in the world, — she will know that. The name of her tentative master she will know, who comes to consider his bargain from time to time. There he will sit in the palaver house with her father. There will be long talk of dowry, arguments for more or less.

The little girl comes in out of the sun-smitten street with food that her mother has cooked for her father and his guest, — a peanut porridge steamed in a great leaf, a roll of cassava bread, mashed plaintains. She will put her wooden tray at the feet of her masters. She is a precocious child, born to the language of sex. If the buyer is old she will hate him. She need make no secret of this, she may tell whom she pleases that, having ‘come to her eyes,’ she hates the man who buys her. All but her mother will laugh at the venom of the little tongue, the heavings of the little chest. And the day when her master brings the ivory, or the woman, or the last articles of barter, that day there will be a feast in her father’s town and the songs of marriage. If the little girl weeps — why, so they always do, the hearts of children are thus. And in the evening, when the sun goes down the path to its setting and she moves away in the caravan of her husband’s people, you will not ask which of the children in that caravan is the little bride; you will know because she weeps.

In her husband’s town they will be dancing the marriage dances, they will be singing the songs of marriage. Her husband’s kin will be singing little songs of mocking: —

So sing the husband’s kin. And the bride’s mother sings too, little conventional petitions that the child be adequately fed, that the tender child be spared — little phrases of maternal solicitude: —

So sings the mother, and the child’s kinfolk before they leave her in the care of strange women; and the little girl stands bewildered at the heart of the circling dances.

Or if it be her father’s pleasure to delay the delivery of the goods, do not think that the girl is bred in innocence under her mother’s roof. She was not born to the possession of her body; this is hired out to her father’s material advantage among young bucks — prospective purchasers, men who bring wealth to the town. Not her father only, and her elder brother, may thus make profit of her person, but her husband will do so, in the times of the great clearings when a new town is to be built, or a great garden planted — she will then serve as hire to strong young men. Through her use a successful hunter may be attached to her husband’s service, and she, if she is desirable, may be a token of hospitality to an honored guest. By way of being security she may be lodged with her husband’s creditors. How many women wear out weary years in this friendless bondage! Or, not having borne children to her husband, she may be sent on a visit to the town of his tribal brother.

But her children, born of whatever connection, belong not to herself, nor necessarily to their father, but to the man who owns her. To her own father, or other male guardian, if born before marriage, and to her husband if born after marriage. As she is not born to the possession of her body, so she is not born to the possession of her children. Women who have been sold from marriage to marriage may leave little children at every station of that aimless wandering. Thus the slave is branded on the heart.

And it is by way of the heart that the woman is slave to fetish. By her body she is slave to goods, and alas, by the consent of her body, to sex. But by her heart — the pangs of it, its maternal pangs, its hunger for permanent affections, its need to cast anchor in some certain good — by that she is slave to fetish. To keep her husband’s love, what love-potions! To ease her jealousies, what evil charms! To safeguard her little one, what plaitings of grass anklets and bracelets, what desperate hopes tied up in little amulets, in little things of magic! And if she die — this slave to fetish — they will tie a belt of bells about her baby’s middle, and the sound of these bells will continually drive away that maternal spirit — still a slave.

To such as these in a very definite sense Christ is a liberator. It is not for nothing that, of the women who have come under my hand, many have fastened with a peculiar tenacity on the verses that say for them, ‘He has made the captive free’; ‘The truth has made you free.’

This African woman has a bald knowledge of her enslaved state. She is violent, undisciplined; her tongue is a fire and a sword; she is unmoral, unreliable; but she is humble-minded. In the Biblical sense this violent creature, caught in a net of tattoo, bridled and belted with beads, collared and braceleted with brass, this woman — so harnessed in barbarous ornament — is meek and poor in spirit. She is poor in the most conscious and the most pitiable sense. Christ’s act of redemption has a tangible and obvious application to herself. I have seen the first words of the Gospel arrest a young Ntum woman so abruptly that you would have said a hand had been laid upon her, and back of her harness of tattoo and of beads her woman face, so soft and mutable, was stricken to the most profound, the most personal attention. That being, enslaved to goods and sex and fetish, received with what astonishment in that word of the Word of God, her first intimation that there is any escape from the prison of material circumstance! Until she heard that word she was never at any time conscious of a self which could not be bought and sold. Until then she had never conceived of a personal possession of any sort, however humble; and how far she had been from any ‘ self ’-possession! Never before had her self been addressed. And in the moment of that Divine address there was a pause in her universe; the things of the body were smitten to a perceptible arrest. She had been grinding meal; her hand, with the upper stone, lay idle on the nether stone; her eyes were fixed; in all her hut nothing stirred while that Ntum woman experienced the obscure shock of her first spiritual summons.

To an extraordinary degree there is among the Bulu a solidarity of sex. ‘God created all people of two tribes,’ the women tell me, ‘the tribe of man and the tribe of woman.’ The things of one tribe are hidden from the other tribe. There is ‘a wisdom of men and a wisdom of women,’ though the wisdom of women is a small matter, a matter to laugh at among men. And women, for all they have a housewifely and maternal contempt for men, yet are humble before them, ashamed before them of their age-old accumulation of wisdom, not displaying before them their little treasure of verity garnered from their labors and their loves and their sorrows, ‘since the birth of men.’ ‘I am as stupid as a hen,’ is the common feminine self-analysis.

A peculiar shame attaches to the performance of a woman’s work by a man; the division of labor is determined by the most rigid custom. None but women grind meal, none but men sew the strips of beaten bark-cloth into squares. And about every handicraft of the tribes there is the law of sex, and the understood element of nobility or ignobility. ‘Am I a woman that I should bring in food from the garden? I will starve first.’

And if in the things of labor the customs of sex are very strong, they are much stronger in the matter of fetish. Woe to those who are ignorant in these matters — who confuse the food, the acts, the liberties, which are the privilege of men, with the food and the acts and the liberties which are the forbidden things for women! It is a very literal instance of the one man’s meat and the other’s poison. I have seen a young Christian woman almost faint away when she came to this crucial question: ‘Do you believe that God created men and women equal?’ Back of her stood her Christian husband. She turned her face about until she met his eye; there she received the grave command of his gaze; her arm went up slowly in sign of assent. It was with great timidity that she stepped off into that nobler thought of herself as woman.

‘All people are of two tribes,’ I am told; and yet again I am told, ‘Every man a son of man.’ This is the proverbial expression of an understood common humanity. Man and woman, master and slave — every person is a son of man, born to a common lot. Over human foible and error is cast the cloak of this proverb. Sorrow is commiserated in these words. And most this is true in the things of custom and in the things of fear.

To the things of custom the man as well as the woman is slave. ‘We Bulu, we do so.’ ‘It is our custom.’ ‘Who would question the things to which we are born?’ ‘From the birth of men we have done thus, not otherwise.’ So much for the iron bond of the things of custom.

There is a common enslavement to the things of fear: ‘Every man a son of man’ is true in the things of fear. In these dim forests every son of man is born to fear. Temporal and material fears he does indeed suffer, but these minor fears are as ‘the little finger to the thumb’ in comparison with the major fears that are not material fears. Here is the sum of his terrors: fear of other-worldly things as they impinge upon the sunny open of this life, and fear of the unknown adventure ‘beyond death.’ The white man cannot see how thick they gather about his haunted brother, these ‘millions of strange shadows’ that tend upon him. We who are born to a singular freedom in the natural world — what can we know of the relentless pressure upon the human heart of the crowded world of the animist? To him the rocks of this world, its rivers, its forests, all the structure of it and all its ornaments, are not sufficient to afford lodging for the spirit tenants. These inhabit and overflow all material accommodation. These pack the world; and there is a Bulu proverb which says, ‘A shadow never falls but a spirit stands.’ There are housed spirits and nomad spirits; spirits that are content with their lodging in a fallen tree, in a rock, easy to be propitiated with little offerings of leaves, of shells, of seeds; and there are spirits of an untiring malevolence: wanderers, going to and fro seeking whom they may devour in subtle spirit fashion, open to suggestion from evil men, servants of your enemy, fathers to inhuman cruelties implanted in the human mind, princes in the realms of fear. ‘Go,’ say these spirits; and alas, the son of man — he goeth! ‘Come!’ and he cometh! How can the white man know of these things; and knowing in part, how can he tell other white men?

I will tell you of Ndongo Mbé’s father and his exile. Ndongo Mbé’s father, says Ndongo Mbé, was named Mabalé. And when Ndongo Mbé was little, no bigger than your wrist, Mabalé was caught by a strange sickness, so that he was near death. In those days there was a wise man, a ‘witch doctor,’ in our neighborhood, — himself he is dead now, but in those days he still breathed, — and the brothers of Mabalé sent for him to come and heal Mabalé. This thing he certainly did, he healed him. And he healed him by a taboo, a very strong taboo. Mabalé recovered from his sickness, but he was ‘tied’ by the medicine man to this thing: that he must never see a grandchild of his. That he must certainly never do. And so it was that, when Ndongo Mbé began to be a young man, the heart of Mabalé was hung up; he feared very much lest he see a grandchild — who knew? And that thing would be death. So he took leave of the people of his own house, and of the village where he was headman, — yes, and even of his tribe, — and alone he went away by the paths that go toward the rising of the sun. Alone he went away, to the unfriendly tribes that build their towns far back that way. And in one of those strange towns he built a house for himself. Sometimes one of the men of our neighborhood, going that way to hunt an ivory, has seen Mabalé. He has asked the news of his town and of his family; he has asked news of his grandchildren. All night he and his tribesmen have talked, and in the morning they have parted. But this thing always happened — that Mabalé was quick, after such a visit, to go away from that town. He said in his heart, ‘Lest my townspeople, knowing this path, show the way to a grandchild of mine.’ Until at last he died in a town far away on the paths to the rising of the sun. And when a passer-by from that strange country told Ndongo of that death in exile, there was a peculiar sorrow in the hearts of that family. The wife of Mabalé turned to the wall and wept. The children and the grandchildren greatly desired to look upon the grave of their father, but they might not, for the many days’ journey.

So much for a life wrecked by fear. This story is one of a thousand and is chosen for its lack of gross detail — its freedom from the element of physical torture so common to the Bantu dramas of fear, and so degrading to the ears of a white man.

And of fear of things beyond death I will tell you that here, too, every man is a son of man. ‘Death,’say the Bulu, ‘does not pity beauty.’ ‘You till the ground,’ they say, ‘that will cover you.’ ‘There is no limit to death,’ they say. And many black men have told me, ‘My father died, and when he was near death he said, “ Put my spear in my hand, for the path before me is unknown, and it is a bad path.” ’ Look, I pray you, with compassion upon this black man who must venture upon such adventures so equipped! And when you come upon the dead man’s little clay pipe and the rusting head of his spear laid out under the sun and the rain at the limit of the village, understand a little why it is that his exiled spirit, so unequipped for the hardships of the way, must return to familiar places and to serviceable things.

For he has a spirit. In his world — overpopulated with spirits — the son of man has his portion. He is conscious of his dual life. There are for him ‘the things of the body,’ and ‘the things of the spirit.’ Pain is a thing of the body; grief is a thing of the spirit. The body dies and the spirit survives.

There is a thrilling Bulu word, the word ‘Énying.’ It is the word for life, and on the lips of the natural Bulu there is an immemorial thrilling phrase, ‘I desire life.’ For our Bulu conceives himself as a vessel for the fluid manifestations of life. He is filled, or he is emptied, of life; as the hart panteth after the water-brooks, so panteth our Bulu after ‘life.’ This is his problem — how to acquire ‘énying,’ or life; how to appropriate a share, or, if may be, a double share, in that precious commodity which he conceives as an element, immanent and manageable if one but knew the secret! For his little vessel — the vessel of his body, with its content of life — is without protection, without, let us say, a lid. His treasure is in a violable vessel. There is more life and there is less; there are thieves of life, and acts of theft; spirit thieves and mortal thieves. There is a flux of the precious essence. Mabalé on his wanderings was doing all that man could do against a threatened division, to ‘ hold body and soul together.’

This soul, — this ultimate human portion of the element of life, — what is its substance?

These things are obscure. Elmsie says that among the Ngoni they say, ‘His shadow is still present,’ meaning that, though on the point of death, the man’s spirit is still with him. The wisest Bulu woman I ever knew told me that she was born in the town of Moonda, where they certainly said that this thing on the wall that followed a man’s body — the shadow of him — was the man. For certainly his flesh was not the man. And in their ignorance they thought, why not the shadow?

All students of the Bantu people are familiar with this solution of the ultimate human problem. Many other Bulu have offered me, timidly, the theory that the spirit of man and his shadow were — perhaps, who knew — one substance. And I was once in a house of mourning where one of the young widows sitting among the ashes took courage from desperation to show me the root of a consuming fear: she had three shadows! The cross lights in that little hut cast a shadow of that terror-stricken child of man on three walls. What were her thoughts of that possession? I cannot say. ‘The heart,’ say the Bulu, ‘goes to hide in the dark.’ Only of Christ it is said, ‘He did not hunt a man to give Him news of men, because Himself He knew the things that are in the heart of man.’ And to that thrilling Bulu cry, — ‘ I desire life,’ — Christ alone answers, ‘I have come to give you life and to give it more abundantly!’

[Miss Mackenzie’s second article will deal with the Bulu and the Ten Commandments.]