While engaged in the transport service of the mission, I was sitting quietly in my tent in Sadi Kiandunga’s town, when without the least warning a volley was fired at less than a hundred yards from my little camp. The men shouted, the women screamed, the wildest commotion ensued. Was it an attack upon the town? What had happened? As a man ran past the tent, I inquired the cause.
‘Oh, nothing,’ he said; ‘it is only a baby born, and everyone is glad and shouting out their joy at the safe birth; they have fired a feu-de-joie: don’t you do so in your country?’
The house where the little stranger had arrived was very small; a fire was burning inside, filling it with strong wood smoke; and as if that were not sufficient discomfort for such a time, the house was literally crammed with women, all shouting vociferously, showing in this well-meaning but mistaken manner their sympathy in the mother’s joy.
The people rise at daybreak, and the fire, which has been kept smouldering all night, is replenished, or, if it has gone out, fire is obtained from another household. The wife clears up the ashes from the hearth, and sweeps out the chips and husks that remain from last night’s supper.
The husband, if a tidy man, sweeps his compound. Negro toilet operations then ensue. A calabash of water is taken behind the house, and filling his mouth with water Ndualu (Dom Alvaro) allows a thin stream to flow over his hands as he carefully washes them, also his face; then cleaning his teeth, he goes to sit in front of his house to comb his hair. The ladies have been bestirring themselves, and a snack of food is ready—a few roast ground-nuts, or a piece of prepared cassava.
The infants are placed in the care of older babies, and the women and girls of the town wend their way to the village spring, where they bathe and gossip until all the calabashes being full they return with the day’s