“The Mpongwe have plenty of salt in them,” said one of my boat-boys. He was a Fang, and he was speaking of the coast tribe.

“The Mpongwe have plenty of salt,” he repeated. I drew out my note-book and credited the boy with a very interesting and expressive designation of a moral quality. Such an improvement on our word sand! It was not less interesting, however, when I found that he meant it not morally, but literally—that he was speaking not metaphorically, but gastronomically. As a matter of fact, not one of these boat-boys had ever tasted human flesh, and they would have been insulted at the imputation of cannibalism; but it is not long since their fathers emerged from cannibalism, and tradition still distinguishes the flesh of the various surrounding tribes, ascribing a preferable flavour to this or that tribe. It is generally understood that the coast tribes are better flavoured than those of the interior.

The Fang are nearly always referred to as the cannibal Fang; and the casual reader might suppose that they were the worst cannibals in Africa. But the cannibalism of the Fang does not compare, either in extent or hideousness, with that of the Congo tribes, as we shall see.

The Fang is one of the largest and most important of the West African tribes. For many years they have been moving from the far interior towards the coast, burning, killing and even eating their way through the older coast tribes. They have now emerged at many points along the coast, of which Gaboon was probably the first. The tributaries of the Gaboon form a network of waterways, which are also the highways. There are but few bush roads in this part of the jungle and they are of the worst kind; in the wet season mud to the knees alternating with water to the waist, and deeper. Along the rivers and streams the Fang have built their towns. The population of a town varies from fifty to two hundred.

Most of my work was done among the Fang. From Baraka I reached their towns by boat and canoe, in later years by the launch Dorothy.

The Fang are brown, not black in colour, and are several shades lighter than the coast tribes. Their colour is quite to their liking. They regard themselves as far better looking than white people. The men are usually tall, athletic and remarkably well formed, though not as full in the chest as a perfect physique would require. Most of the younger men are fairly good looking. Many of the younger women have pretty faces, but they are not nearly as intelligent looking as the men. Many of the children are beautiful, with sweet faces and lovely eyes.

“They think they are better looking than white people.” And why not? I myself do not so regard them; but I may be wrong. Questions of beauty are decided by reference to some standard in the mind; but whether the standard depends upon custom, and varies with it, is a matter of doubt and dispute. My own judgment, like that of others, was modified as I lived among the black people. Sir Joshua Reynolds advanced the notion, according to Hazlitt, that beauty was entirely dependent on custom. I feel, with Hazlitt himself, that custom, though powerful, is not the only principle of our preference for the appearance of certain objects more than others; that what constitutes beauty is in some way inherent in the object, and that “if custom is a second nature there is another nature which ranks above it.” Hazlitt in his argument contrasts the Greek and the African face, doing injustice, I believe, to the latter. Yet in general one must admit that Hazlitt is right. In the Greek face he finds a conformity to itself, a symmetry of feature with feature and a subtle, involuted harmony of lines, which he says is wholly wanting in the African face. The Greek face is beautiful, “because it is made up of lines corresponding with or melting into each other;” the African face is not so, “because it is made up almost entirely of contradictory lines and sharp angular projections.”

“The general principle of difference between the two heads is this: The forehead of the Greek is square and upright, and, as it were, overhangs the rest of the face, except the nose, which is a continuation of it almost in an even line. In the Negro, or African, the tip of the nose is the most projected part of the face; and from that point the features retreat back, both upwards towards the forehead, and downwards towards the chin. This last form is an approximation to the shape of the head of the animal, as the former bears the strongest stamp of humanity.”

The African physiognomy, he further observes, is made up of jagged, cross-grained lines, starting out in every oblique direction, and in fact appears “splitting in pieces.”

But the African physiognomy is also consistent with itself; its abruptness is uniform. There is regularity in the violence of its changes; and may not this also constitute beauty to an accustomed eye? It is certain that there is in such a face the possibility of an extraordinary expression of grandeur and moral force; and these also are aspects of beauty, as well as the intellectual and affectional elements that constitute the expression of the Greek face. There is a beauty of mountains as well as of meadows.

However it may be, we who have lived long among the Africans, and without the distemper of racial prejudice, do invariably find that our ideas, or our standards, gradually undergo such a change that the African face appears to us in varying degrees of beauty, much as that of the white; beauty which at first we did not see. Even the nose, which bears a striking resemblance to the ace of clubs, at length, with custom, ceases to appear ugly, and seems the absolutely proper nose for the African physiognomy. And they surely have beautiful eyes.

Yet one must admit that it is not eyes, nor noses, nor even faces, but legs, that are most in evidence in African society. I suppose it is because we are not used to seeing those honourable and useful members exposed that they are so conspicuous. Looking at an African crowd, especially when seated on the ground as in a village service or listening to a native “palaver,” with their knees elevated in front of them, there seems to be ten times as many legs as people. Their variety also commands attention. There are long legs and short legs, lean legs and fat legs, straight legs and crooked legs, gnarled legs, knotted legs, brown legs and black legs.

Probably nowhere in the world is life more primitive. How little a man can live on! How much he can do without! An African can be happy with a pot, a pipe and a tom-tom. I have shown some of them a wheel for the first time, making use of a toy, and have explained its use while they wondered. At Vivi, on the Congo, they tell that when they began to build the railroad they unloaded a shipment of wheelbarrows and ordered the workmen to use them in removing the débris. A little later they observed the workmen marching in single file with the loaded wheelbarrows on their heads. They have only the vaguest idea of passing time. They never know their own ages, of course; neither can they understand why anybody should want to know. A man of middle age makes a serious guess that he is ten years old. A French judge in Senegal tells how that a man, brought before him, gave his age as five years—when he had been weaned at least twenty-five.

The Fang when they first come from the interior go almost entirely naked. The men wear a bit of bark-cloth, the women a few leaves, children to the age of nine or ten years wear nothing. But as soon as they come in contact with coast people they all begin to wear imported cloth. A chief soon attains the dignity of a shirt. If they have little use for clothes they are passionately fond of ornamentation. When they first come from the interior they are fairly loaded with beads and brass, the latter made into heavy arm-rings, leg-rings, neck-rings and coiled bracelets which cover the entire forearm. At first they regard clothes also as ornamentation and they think that white people, in comparison with them, are exceedingly vain.

I was holding a service in a Bulu town when a woman entered and immediately engaged the attention of the feminine portion of the audience. On the preceding day she had visited the mission and I had dressed and bandaged an ulcer on her leg. The white bandage had caught her fancy and she removed it that she might keep it clean; and now she came to the service with it round her neck. The women looked at her, drew a long loud breath and nudged their neighbours. It was very plain that in their opinion she was much overdressed. And, strange to say, she impressed me in that same way. At least, compared with the others, she looked as if she might be dressed for a sleigh-ride.

The staple food of the Fang is cassava—that which Stanley calls manioc—which is the root of a shrub, a little like our elder in appearance, from which our tapioca is prepared. They use it however in a much coarser form than tapioca. The root is left macerating in water for several days which has the effect of removing certain poisonous principles. Then it is placed in a wooden trough and beaten into a mass with a wooden pestle. After this it is made into straight slender rolls a foot long, wrapped in plantain leaves, bound around with fibre and boiled. It tastes a little like boiled tapioca. But whereas we are accustomed to eat the tasteless tapioca with cream and sugar, the native has neither of these and thinks himself very fortunate if he has a little salt to season it. Sometimes in travelling I have used it for several days; but I have improved it by frying it in butter. The cassava when properly prepared is evidently wholesome; but one may frequently see it soaking in a dirty, stagnant pool, the same pool that the whole town has used, for that and other purposes, week after week and month after month. No one can imagine the variety of germs that it may soak up during the several days that it lies in such a pool. The native is chronically full of worms. He knows it and attributes most pain to their presence. In declaring that he has a headache he places his hand on his forehead and says: “Worms are biting me.” A little kind teaching in the better preparation of their food would be good missionary employment.

Besides cassava, they have plantains, bananas, sweet potatoes, corn, groundnuts and a few other foods that are less common. None of these food products are indigenous. Most of them, including even cassava, it is said, were introduced by the Portuguese, at intervals within the last three hundred years. Meat is not regarded as a necessity, although there is a chronic hunger for it, to which some have attributed their practice of cannibalism. In most towns there are a few goats and sheep and chickens; but they are reserved for feasts and festive occasions. They hunt and trap all the wild animals of the forest and are not averse to eating any of them, including snakes, even in an advanced stage of decomposition. On the lower Gaboon they have abundance of fish, which they catch with various baskets, nets, and seines. There are certain insects, grubs and caterpillars which they also eat. One day a boy reported to me that the natives of a near-by town had found a bee-tree, and they wished to know whether I would buy the honey. Buy it? I should think so! I could scarcely wait for it. They brought it at length; but instead of smoking the bees out, they had smoked them in; they offered me a great mass of honey and grubs and dead bees.

They do not eat eggs; neither do they ever drink milk or use it in any form and our use of it is somewhat disgusting to them. A friend once offered milk to a Kru-boy just to try him, and he replied contemptuously: “Milk be fit only for piccaninny; I no be piccaninny.”

They have seen white men milk the goat, which always requires a number of natives to hold the animal. And once when Mr. Gault of Batanga was explaining to a group of natives about the cow, which gives the milk that we import in tins, describing her size and her great horns, one of the natives suddenly turning to the others exclaimed: “Say, he is lying. How could they hold her?” Since that time most of them have seen cattle.

The Fang wife prepares the food for her husband and sets it in the palaver-house, or public-house of the town, where he eats with the other men. She does not eat with them. There is no regular time in the day for eating; and when they have begun to eat there is no regular time for stopping. The quantity of food is the only limit. On a journey they can go without food a very long time, far surpassing the endurance of the white man. And they are often compelled to travel with empty stomachs from their habit of eating all their food the first day. But afterwards they will make up for this abstinence, however prolonged. Indeed, it is by their gluttony, rather than in other ways, that they first exhibit their degradation to the white man. I have said that the children were usually pretty; but sometimes they are dreadfully misshapen by a distended stomach. The last mail brought me a charming picture of a little three-year-old missionary boy of Gaboon, prodding the stomach of a native child with his finger, and with eyes of wonder, asking: “Is dat your tummy?”

One of their first efforts, after coming in contact with the white man, is an attempt to acquire the noble art of eating with a spoon. But in the first practice of it if they forget themselves for a moment they are very likely to put the hand to the mouth in the old way and drive the spoon round to the ear. Considering their ignorance they are surprisingly cleanly in their persons and their habits. After eating they invariably rinse their mouths with water and they regularly brush their teeth. For the latter purpose they commonly use a brush of soft wood with transverse ridges. They are very particular about this. Often a carrier in the bush will carry his brush along with him. Sometimes it is the sum-total of his personal effects. Everybody knows that the African has beautiful teeth. But in some tribes, and even among the Fang of the far interior, they often file the front teeth to a point, thinking to add to their beauty, but in fact adding greatly to their ugliness.

I have said that the Fang are cannibals. But this loathsome custom is not as common among them as travellers have generally reported. I doubt whether the Fang eat any but their enemies—captives taken in war. And their chronic meat-hunger is not the only reason for eating their enemies. It is done as an insult to the enemy, the most deadly insult that can be offered, and means that the war will be fought to a finish, or at least until the other side has eaten one of the enemy. But the practice of cannibalism in war is intimately related to fetishism. It is believed that after eating one of the enemy, the latter can do them no harm. Their bullets will glance harmlessly off their bodies, or will even go through them without hurting, if indeed they hit them at all. Cannibalism affords them the strongest possible fetish protection.

The cannibalism of the Upper Congo tribes is much worse than this and is almost indescribable. Some of them eat their own dead. Sir Harry Johnston tells us that the Basoko tribe bury none but their chiefs. Others, who would not eat their own dead, exchange them for the dead of a neighbouring clan.

This vicious taste often becomes a mania with the African, an obsession, like the ungovernable appetite for rum, until he thinks of man chiefly as food to satisfy this craving. Among such tribes raids are made on their neighbours for the express purpose of cannibalism. Sir Harry Johnston speaks of the son of a celebrated chief who once exclaimed: “Ah! I wish I could eat everybody on earth!” and also of a Bangala chief who ate his seven wives in succession, inviting his friends and close associates to the feast. It is more than possible that these lowest forms of cannibalism are due to the demoralization incident to the slave-raids of the Arabs. The Arabs were succeeded by the Belgians; but some of those who are best qualified to judge think that the régime of the Belgians has been worse than that of the Arabs.

Among tribes to whom such forms of cannibalism would be revolting, there are probably individual inhuman ghouls, who exhume the bodies of the dead in the night and eat them. And it may be from this fact that witches are always accused of eating people.

If it be true, then, throughout the entire Fang tribe, that they eat only their enemies it will be seen that their cannibalism is very different in extent and even in loathsomeness from that of some other tribes. It is a fact, however, that the cannibal tribes are not necessarily lower than the others, but may be quite as gentle and tractable and quite as capable. And from this some have argued that, after all, our horror of cannibalism is purely conventional, due to custom and training; and that there is no essential difference between eating human flesh and that of the lower animals, except in imagination. But the readiness with which whole tribes renounce the custom, become ashamed of it, and contract the white man’s abhorrence for it, confirms the belief that it is never legitimate and must always be regarded as a vice. In such matters imagination may be closer to our moral natures than we know.

A certain town on the Gaboon named Alum—when I left Africa I knew personally most of the men, women and children of the town—is populated by one of the most intractable clans of the Fang. Though peculiarly fierce in war, they are otherwise gentle and courteous. The venerable chief I regarded as a particular friend. He had a long beard—somewhat rare among the Fang and highly esteemed. It was braided tightly and tied on the end with a string as venerable as the beard itself. The braid was not for fashion or beauty. It was intended to prevent the possible loss of stray hairs that might fall into the hands of an enemy and be used as a powerful fetish against him. Upon my leaving the town at the conclusion of a visit it was in accord with custom for him to express his personal regard for me by taking my hand in his and spitting in it. In order to appreciate this beautiful custom one must regard it spiritually—if he can. It is called “blowing a blessing.” The blessing is blown with the breath and the spitting is a trivial accessory.

It was when these people first migrated from the interior bush that the following incident occurred—which was told to me by Sonia of Gaboon who knew all the persons concerned. A certain man’s wife having several times eloped with a man of another town and having caused the husband much trouble and humiliation, he at last became so enraged that instead of seeking to procure her return he determined upon a bloody revenge. With several companions he immediately started in a canoe for the town where her father and mother lived, arriving before they had heard the news of their daughter’s latest elopement. At some distance from the town they left the canoe and entered the forest. All the others of the party hid themselves near the path while the man himself went on to the town and professed to have come just to make his mother-in-law a friendly visit. Addressing her as Mother, he told her that he had killed a bush-pig in the forest and that he had come to ask her to go with him to get some of it before he should take it home. The woman, without doubting, followed him along the path.

After a while she said: “Son, it is far and I am old.”

He told her that it was only a short distance ahead; so she went on.

Soon again she exclaimed: “Ah, son, it is very far and I am old.”

He replied that it was now very near, thus enticing her far from town.

At last he exclaimed: “Mother, here it is!”

At his word the party in ambush sprang upon her and with their swords killed her. They then cut from her body one entire leg, which they took to their town and ate. He had avenged his injured dignity and had removed his shame. He had no longer any reason to feel ashamed!

He sent a brief message to the unfaithful wife: “Stay where you are; the palaver is finished.”

I must say that this incident is not fairly representative of the African savage. Not that it exaggerates his brutality, when he is enraged; but there is in it an element of treachery which is oriental rather than African. He does not usually conceal his anger, but hastens to express it in passionate words. And when one has succeeded in allaying his passion and soothing his feelings, and he has again smiled and sworn friendship, one may reckon assuredly that the palaver is ended and that the smile does not conceal malice nor intent of revenge. He is passionate but not vindictive, cruel but not treacherous.

A few years have made such changes that the Fang of the Gaboon, instead of boasting of cannibalism, would indignantly deny it. In the interior they still practice it as an insult to the enemy. But on the Gaboon they insult the enemy by charging it against them.

“The African,” says Booker T. Washington, “lives like a child, in the realm of emotion and feeling.” And a white man among Africans lives much in that same realm. His experience is largely a succession of contrasting emotions. Sick with disgust and hopelessness, when brought into contact with such loathsome features of degradation as we have been considering, he consigns the whole black race to perdition, and anon some pathetic circumstance reveals a wealth of moral possibilities, which touches the heart and makes him ashamed; some unconscious action of real friendship and confidence in the white man, it may be; some expression of the profound affection on the part of a savage towards his mother and children; or some rude work of art which he displays with pride, something upon which he has expended astonishing labour for beauty’s sake alone—crude enough, to be sure, but giving “thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.” He has a shapely stool which he cuts out of a solid block of light mahogany, with only one tool, a rude adz of his own making. He has absolutely no knowledge of joinery, so he cuts it out of the solid block, expending upon it an amount of patient labour of which he is usually considered incapable. He also pyrographs it with artistic decorations. Why all this labour when the solid block itself is quite as serviceable, and far more stable? He has an inward sense of beauty to which he must make it conform, an ideal which commands him and which he strives to execute. The brass handle of his sword he decorates by ingenious and not unskillful repoussé designs. The mats that the women weave are decorated with patterns in colours, requiring care and skill in their making.

The curiosity of those who have not seen a white man before, or are not used to seeing him, is unbounded and at first attaches to everything that he possesses. Magic is their easy explanation of everything they do not understand. A match (until they become accustomed to it) will scatter a crowd as quickly as a Gatling gun. It is the supernatural of which they are most afraid; as with us, those who believe in ghosts are more afraid of them than the worst of living enemies.

Nothing of ours is more wonderful or more desired than the looking-glass. Yet they are not always conceited in regard to their appearance. One poor interior woman, seeing her face in the looking-glass for the first time, sank to the ground with a little cry, and said: “I did not think I was so ugly.”

Their wonder is not always directed as we would expect. It is not the greatest achievement that excites the greatest wonder. One day, after my return to America, in company with a friend I was passing one of the greatest buildings of Chicago, when the friend said: “What would your Africans think of such a building?”

“My Africans,” I replied (pointing to a man on the corner with a tin monkey climbing a string), “would be so entirely occupied with that tin monkey climbing a string that you could not get them to look at the building.”

In the invention of the monkey they would have some comprehension of the difficulties to be overcome, while not knowing how it had been accomplished; hence the mystery. But in the case of the great building they have no present knowledge which would enable them in any measure to realize the difficulties, or the principles involved. The African wonders most at those things which bear some relation to his present knowledge. For wonder is not exactly an expression of ignorance, as it has been called, but rather an expression of imperfect knowledge.

All things in our possession of which they did not know the use were regarded as fetishes. I wore glasses when studying. One day at Efulen I came out of the house with the glasses on. A group of women were standing in front of the house; and several of them, seeing me look at them through the glasses, fell flat on the ground; whereupon I discovered that they supposed my glasses were a fetish by which I might (as one of them said) turn them into monkeys. They supposed that we were “spirits,” and so they called us. Looking at my black shoes one of them exclaimed: “The spirit’s hands and face are white, but his feet are black, and I suppose the rest of his body is black.”

Another said: “The spirit has feet, but he has no toes.”

Another said: “What an ugly colour! But he would be a beauty if he were black.”

Dear reader: Were you ever an object of curiosity? Of course you have been on some single occasion—for a passing moment, or even a whole evening. But I mean day after day, and all the time, for an indefinite period. If so, you have my profound sympathy.