The Alo man; stories from the Congo

Front matter

C &J

.OIL

FT MEADE GenCol 1

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. The Drum in the Forest 7

II. The String of Beads 17

Chapter I The Drum In The Forest

M POKO the boy and Nkunda the girl were squatting in the firelight just outside their mother’s hut, where they could smell the smells from the cooking pots the women were tending so carefully. Their father, the chief of the tiny village, had gone with his men two days before on a trading journey to one of the great markets. They should have been at home before this.

Mpoko was busy winding a precious piece of brass wire round the handle of his pet hunting spear, and Nkunda was watching him. Each man or boy of the village had his favorite spear with its leaf-shaped iron blade, and the wire on the handle was useful as well as ornamental, for it gave a good grip. Iron is found almost everywhere in Africa, and the native blacksnjiths made not only spear heads but knife blades and little axes. They could not make brass, which is a mixture of copper and zinc, but all traders had brass rods in their stores, and these could be hammered into all sorts of shapes. When these rods were first brought into the country, they were made about thirty inches long; but there was so much demand for smaller pieces to use in trading like small change, that they were now made only six or seven inches in length. Nkunda had a piece of brass wire almost as long as Mpoko’s, but hers was coiled round her slender brown wrist as a bracelet.

In Central Africa, supper time is about six o’clock all the year round. From one season to another, night and day are nearly equal and the time of sunrise and of sunset changes hardly more than fifteen minutes throughout the year. The year begins with the first heavy rain of the wet season, and when the new green shoots come out on the spurge thickets the people know that the new year is at hand.

The evening meal is the most important one of the day, sometimes the only regular meal. Soon after sunrise on this particular day the women, as usual, had picked up their hoes, their baskets, and their babies and had gone out to work on the farms outside the village. They had come back in the middle of the afternoon to begin preparing supper, which was a matter of some hours’ work, because there were so many different things to be done. Grain for bread or mush had to be ground on heavy stone slabs, vegetables must be made ready for cooking, water, fetched from the spring, wood brought, and fires made. Mpoko and Nkunda had helped a little, and they knew where, in a heap of hot ashes, the sweet potatoes from their own corner of the field were baking. There would be boiled fowl and cassava bread, and maybe some stewed fruit.

Besides helping their mothers, the children of the village had their own special work, — to drive in the goats from the fields, — and they had done this before sunset. All the shaggy, bleating little animals were now safe in the pen built of logs and roofed with planks, and Mpoko had seen to it that stakes were set firmly across the entrance to keep them in and keep out wild beasts. Even as the children sat here in the firelight they heard from time to time the hunting call of a leopard or hyena, but no fierce prowling creature of the jungle would come near the fires.

The cooking fires were in the middle of the open space around which the village was built. The village itself was nothing more than a rather irregular circle of huts inside a fence. Mpoko and Nkunda were sitting at the very edge of the great black shadow that closed in the lighted space and, beyond the huts, melted into the deep velvet darkness of the forest. The forest was all around them, and it was full of the noises of the night. The wind was whispering in the great leaves and walking in the tall grasses; the chitter and scamper of some small animal or the call of sleepy birds now and then broke the silence of the night. Under the many rustlings and whisperings there was always to be heard the voice of a mighty river flowing through the wilderness.

The people of the village knew a great deal about this river, but they could not have found it on a map, for they had never seen such a thing. White men call it the Congo. This was the name of a chief who ruled the country near the mouth of the river more than five hundred years ago, before even the first Portuguese explorers came. It was the Portuguese who gave his name to the river. But the Congo has many names in the twenty-five hundred miles of its length. Here in the jungle it has a very long name which means The-great-river-out-ofthe-lake-that-drowns-the-locust-who-tries-to-flyacross. If a person knows, as the Bantu people do, how far a locust can fly without alighting, this name for the great lake is really useful. The whole of the name is Mwerukatamuvudanshi, but nobody used it unless the chiefs were having a formal council, and on the white men’s maps the lake is called Mweru. In other parts of its course the river was called after whatever lakes, mountains, or cataracts there might be in the neighborhood.

Mpoko and Nkunda talked a little about the river as they squatted there in the warm darkness. Mpoko had been promised that he should go fishing when the canoes went downstream to mend a bridge that was shaky, and Nkunda promised to help him make new nets for the fishing. He finished winding the wire round the spear handle and began to polish it with great care.

Then very far away in the forest they heard the tapping of a drum.

The sound of a drum in the African jungle always means something. It may mean a village dance; it may mean news; it may mean sudden danger. It is not like any other noise in the forest.

On the other side of the mountain, the great towering mass of stone beyond the forest, was the country of Tswki, the Snake, who was not friendly to the river villages. When he was getting ready to make war, whichever village heard of it first, warned the others. Messengers were not needed to take the warning, for the sound of the drum could be heard over lake and marsh, through tangles of wild jungle where a man would have to cut his way at every step. The drum was made of wood, covered with oxhide stretched tight, or with the skin of a large snake or lizard.

The children had been the first to hear the tapping, because they were nearest to the ground, but in a minute all the others, old and young, heard it too, and listened. They stopped whatever they were doing and stood as still as trees, and listened, and listened.

Then through the blackness of the forest, far away, there sounded singing, and Mpoko and Nkunda were not afraid any more. This was not one of Tswki’s war parties that was coming; it was their own men, singing all together to forget their weariness on the last miles of the trail. A Central African carrier will travel with a load of sixty pounds from fifteen to thirty miles a day. And this is not walking on a level road; the carriers go through a wilderness without anything like a road, the trail often only a few inches wide. They may have to climb steep hills, scramble over boulders, or force their way through matted grasses ten and twelve feet high. There are no pack animals. Everything is carried on men’s backs, and during most of the year the mercury is at about eighty in the shade. When the men sing toward the end of a journey, it is likely to be a sign that they are very tired indeed. Often they beat time with their sticks on their loads. But now they surely had a drum, and somebody was playing it.

At last Mpoko, listening very closely, caught a line or two of the song, and he jumped up, whirling his spear round his head and shouting, “The Alo Man! The Alo Man!” Then Nkunda, too, sprang up and began to dance and whirl round and round, clapping her hands and singing, “The Alo Man! The Alo Man is coming!”

Every one was glad. The Alo Man, the wandering story teller who went from place to place telling stories and making songs, came only once in a very long time. When he did come, he told the most interesting and exciting stories that any one in the village had ever heard. He knew old stories and new ones, and it was hard to say which were the finest. No one could make the people see pictures in their minds as he could. No one knew so many wise sayings and amusing riddles. No one had seen so many wonderful and interesting things among the people of so many different tribes. Even when some one could remember and tell over again the stories that the Alo Man had told, they did not sound as they did when he told them himself.

Even the dogs knew that something was going to happen and began to bark excitedly, and the slaty-blue, speckled guinea hens half woke and ruffled their feathers and gave hoarse croaks of surprise. The beat of the drum and the singing voices grew louder and louder, until the people waiting in the firelight caught the tune and joined in the song, keeping time with the clapping of their hands curved like cymbals.

Then there was a blaze of torches in the forest, the dogs burst into a wild chorus of yelping and baying, and out of the dark they came, the whole company of them. Every man was keeping step to the splendid new song that the Alo Man led. Each one marched into the open circle of firelight, flung down his pack, and began to tell the news to his own family and ask for something to eat as soon as it could possibly be had.

They were all glad — the whole village — to see the Alo Man, and he was just as glad to see them. His white teeth flashed and his eyes shone as he greeted one old friend after another, and asked and answered questions as fast as his tongue would go. Cooking pots were hustled off the fire and good things ladled out, and soon the feasting and laughter and story-telling and singing of the Alo Man’s visit had fairly begun.

Chapter II The String Of Beads

T HERE was great chattering in the village over the unloading of the packs with the various wares brought from the market. The marketing arrangements of wild Africa are very curious. There are four days in a Congo week, — Konzo, Nkenge, Nsona, and Nkandu, — and on at least one of the four days a market is held somewhere near every important village. All markets held on Konzo are called Konzo markets, those held on Nkenge are called Nkenge markets, and so on. Each of the four kinds of markets is in a different place, but there is one of the four within five miles of every town. In the village where Mpoko and Nkunda lived, the people had to go four miles to the Konzo market, nine to the Nkenge market, sixteen to the Nsona and twenty to the Nkandu, but this last market was quite near the next village downstream.

Some of these markets were noted for certain goods. Mpoko’s mother could always depend on pigs being on sale at the Nkenge market, and whoever had a pig to sell would be likely to take it there. At the Konzo market, four miles away, were good pots, calabashes, and saucepans, some of which were made by women in their village, for one of the old grandmothers was rather famous for her pottery. Other markets were known for palm wine, iron work, oil, or some other specialty, and besides these things cassava roots, peanuts, kwanga (native bread), palm oil, beans and other vegetables, grains and fowls were generally sold in all markets.

Besides these markets, larger markets were held occasionally, from one to another of which the traders traveled with things not made in the country. Besides the brass rods, blue beads were sometimes used as a kind of money, a farthing string of a hundred beads being passed from hand to hand; or it might be used to buy food in small quantities, ten or fifteen blue beads three eighths of an inch long and about a quarter of an inch thick being used as small change.

A great deal of produce was simply swapped from one person to another. A man might gather a quantity of some produce like tobacco, rubber, raffia, palm oil, or grain, at one market and another, and take it finally to the great market to exchange for beads, brass, calico, or whatever else he found there. Salt is so rare in some parts of Africa that it is used for money, and a man will work as a porter so many days for so many bags of salt. When the people make salt on the shores of an inland lake, they have to gather the salty sand and wash it out in pots specially made, with little holes in the bottom into which the salt water runs; then the water is dried away over slow fires and the salt scraped off the sides of the kettle. It takes less time and labor to earn salt ready made than to make it in this way. Salt is also made from grass ashes.

The packs of the village men had in them not only salt, but many pieces of gay-colored cloth, beads, and wire. Nkunda felt that hers was the best share of all, when her mother called her to have hung round her neck a string of bright red coral beads. No other little girl had a string half so pretty, Nkunda thought. The more she fingered the little, smooth, scarlet drops of her necklace, the more she admired them.

Seeing her delight, the Alo Man grinned and showed all his white teeth.

“Perhaps they will bring you luck,” he said, “as the youngest sister’s beads did in the story.”

Of course, after that, every one wanted to hear the story.

The Alo Man settled himself cross-legged on a mat, all the listeners squatted down within easy hearing distance, and he began the story of the String of Beads.

I often am reminded [he said] of the three sisters who lived in a land many days’ journey from here. Each of them had a string of beads, but the youngest sister, her beads were of red coral, and the others, their beads were only common cowrie shells. Naturally, they hated her, and one day when they had all been bathing in the river, the older sisters hid their beads in the sand.

“See,” said the eldest sister as the youngest sister came out of the water, “we have thrown our beads into the river, where there is a strong water-goblin who will give us back twice as many. Throw your own beads into the river and then you will have two strings of coral beads, and two is always better than one.”

“Except when you have a lame foot,” said the other sister, giggling.

The youngest sister believed what they said, and threw her beads into the river, and they went down, down, down to the bottom of the deepest pool and did not come up again.

Then the two elder sisters laughed and took their own beads and hung them round their necks, and filled their water jars and went home.

“How foolish I was,” said the youngest sister, sadly. “I wonder if the river would not give them back to me if I should ask very politely? ”

She began to walk along the bank, saying, “ Water, water, please give me back my beads, my pretty beads!” And the water answered, “Go down the stream! Go down the stream!”

[The Alo Man made his voice sound exactly like the gurgle and splash of the ripples.]

She went on a little way and asked the river again to give back her beads. And again the river answered, “Go down the stream! Go down the stream!”

The youngest sister went along the river bank until she could no longer see the village. She had never been so far away from it before. At last she came to a place where the river leaped over a great cliff. Under the waterfall was a hut with an old woman sitting at the door. She was bent and wrinkled and very, very ugly, and she looked up as the youngest sister looked down at her from the bank.

“Do not laugh at me!” said the old woman. “I am ugly now, but once I was beautiful as you are.”

“I am not laughing at you, good mother,” said the youngest sister. “I should like to do something to help you.”

“You are very kind, my child,” said the old woman. “Will you be so good as to bind up my wounds and give me water to drink?”

The youngest sister took a strip of her garment and bound up the old woman’s wounds and fed and comforted her as if she had been the old woman’s own daughter. Scarcely had she done this when the old woman caught her by the arm. “My child,” she said, “you have come to a place where a terrible giant lives.

Every one who comes down the river is in danger of falling into his hands. But do not be afraid; he shall not hurt you. Hark! there he comes now, like a great wind that brings the rain.”

Sure enough, the wind began to blow, and the rain poured, and the lightning flashed, and it grew very cold. The old woman hid the youngest sister behind a wall.

Then the giant came to the bank of the river.

“Some one has come to the hut,” said he, in a great roaring voice. “ I am hungry. Bring her out and let me have her for my supper.”

“But you must have your sleep first,” said the old woman.

“Yes,” said the giant, “it is true; I am very weary.”

Then the giant lay down and went to sleep.

When he was sound asleep the old woman led the youngest sister out from behind the wall, and hung round her neck a string of beads more beautiful than any she had ever seen, and put rings of gold on her arms and on her ankles. Around her waist she hung a kirtle of the softest and finest kidskin, with copper fringe, and over her shoulders she threw a silver jackal skin. In her hand she placed a magic stone.

“When you reach the river bank,” said the old woman, “press the stone to your lips. Then throw it over your shoulder, and it will return to me.”

The youngest sister did as the old woman told her, and very soon she reached the place where she lived with her two sisters. They looked with the greatest surprise at her beautiful dress and ornaments and asked where she had found them. When she told them an old woman had given them to her, they said, without waiting to hear the story, “We too will go to the old woman,” and throwing their beads into the river they ran along the banks, calling to the waters to return them.

After so long a time they came to the hut where the old woman sat. The giant was no longer there, and the old woman was sitting crouched in the doorway as before.

“Do not laugh at me,” said the old woman. “I am ugly now, but once I was young and beautiful as you are.”

The two sisters laughed at this, and ridiculed the old woman, and called her all the jeering names they could think of.

“Will you not bind up my wounds and give me water to drink?” asked the old woman.

But the sisters said that they had never heard of such impudence.

“Where are the bracelets and beads you have to give away?” asked the elder sister.

“Where are your mantles and kirtles with fringe?” asked the younger. “We come for these, not to waste our time on you. We must make haste and go home.”

“Indeed, I think you must,” said the old woman, “for this place is the home of a giant who comes in the form of wind and rain, and I hear him coming now!”

Then the hut sank under the waters, and the maidens found themselves standing on the bank without even their own beads to deck themselves with. That very moment they heard the wind and the rain sweeping through the trees, and they turned and ran as fast as their feet would carry them, back to their own village, while the wind and the rain howled behind them and the giant pelted them with stones.

All the people laughed and shouted over the ill fortune of the two sellish sisters. Nkunda, where she lay curled up at her mother’s side, fingered her beads and wondered if the youngest sister’s beads from beneath the waterfall could have been any prettier than these. In the part where the giant came in, the story sent delightful shivers down all their backs, lor they could every one remember storms in which the great wind had shaken the trees like an invisible giant and the rain had come pelting down like stones. Sometimes, after a storm, the path of the wind through the forest looked like the track of a huge giant who had gone walking up and down, twisting olf boughs and rooting up trees merely to show what he could do. During one of these storms the temperature often falls from thirty to forty degrees in half an hour.

Nkunda had seen a silvery jackal skin and a copper-fringed robe among her mother’s treasures, but one thing in the story puzzled her. “Mother,” she said softly, “what is gold?”

The Alo Man heard her and smiled. “Have you never seen gold?” he asked.

The children shook their heads. Gold was not found in that part of the country.

Then the Alo Man explained that in the streams of other parts of the country the people found lumps of a shining yellow metal softer and more beautiful than iron, for which the traders would pay much cloth and many brass rods. When the headman heard what they were talking about, he showed the children a little bright round bangle on his arm, and told them that that was gold. It was really, though no one there knew it, a half-sovereign lost by some trader, or perhaps given in mistake for a sixpence, which is exactly the same size. The headman had kept it, first because of its beauty, and then because a trader had told him that it was worth as much as ten pounds of rubber, or more than a hundred pounds of palm kernels, or a load of palm oil, or about thirty-five pounds of coffee. Nkunda thought that the little piece of gold was rather like a magic stone.

Chapter III The Leopard And The Dog

O N the third night of the Alo Man’s stay in the village there was a great disturbance out near the goat pen. The frightened bleating of the goats was almost drowned by the barking and growling of dogs, and the angry snarl of some fierce animal.

Some of the hunters caught up their spears and ran to see what the matter was, and Mpoko, catching up his own little spear, raced after them, for he could hear the furious barking of his own dog in the pack. Even the baby brother, who could only just stand on his feet, lifted his head and listened, saying, “Mfwa! Mfwa!” Mpoko’s dog was one of the family; he had played with the children ever since he was a little yellow-brown flop-eared puppy.

But the trouble was soon over. Before any one had had time to ask many questions, the hunters came back in triumph with the body of a big, fierce leopard. He had leaped upon the roof of the goat pen and tried to break in, but the dogs had found it out at once. They had set up such a baying and yelping that the robber was frightened, and he was trying to get away when the hunters arrived with their spears. They tied his paws together and slung him over a pole carried on their shoulders, and tomorrow he would be taken about to all the villages and exhibited. And the chief would have the skin.

Mpoko was very proud to be able to tell his sister that he had seen the leopard killed, and that his dog had been in the very thick of the fight. Moreover, he was sure that when he flung his own spear at the leopard it had gone through the skin somewhere., even if he could not point out the exact place.

“Mfwa! Mfwa!” said the baby, with his fat fists waving at the dog, and all the dogs strutted about, very proud of their night’s work.

“I wonder why dogs hate a leopard so,” said Nkunda, as the excitement quieted down.

“My dog belongs to me, and he knows the leopard is my enemy,” said Mpoko.

“Cats and dogs hate each other too, and the cat is not my enemy,” said Nkunda, trying to coax her pet cat down from the branch of a tree where she crouched, hissing at the dogs.

“Cats and dogs always hate each other,” said Mpoko, and he seemed to think that that was reason enough.

“There is a good reason why the dog and the leopard do not like each other,” said the Alo

Man. Then he told the story of the Leopard and the Dog.

I often tell of the time when all the animals lived in a country by themselves, and the mother of leopards had two fine young cubs in her cave in the forest. As they grew older, she knew she must go out to find food for them, and she was afraid that if she left them alone, they would be stolen from her.

She began to look about among the animals to find some one to take care of her cubs while she went hunting.

“What will you give me to come and take care of your cubs?” asked the Hyena.

“I will give you a good home in my cave and plenty of food,” said the Leopard.

“He-yah! he-yah! he-yah!” laughed the Hyena, in a loud, harsh voice that almost frightened the Leopard herself.

“Your voice is too loud,” she said. “You would make such a noise that my cubs would be frightened to death.”

The Hyena laughed again louder than before and went away to tell how he had scared the Leopard with his laughing.

“What will you give me to take care of your cubs?” called the Owl up in the tree top.

“I will give you a good home in my cave and plenty of food,” said the Leopard.

“Hoo! hoo! hoo-oo!” hooted the Owl, glaring down at the Leopard with great round eyes that almost frightened the Leopard herself.

“Your eyes are too large and bright,” said the Leopard. “My cubs would be frightened out of their wits when you stared at them.”

The Owl hooted even louder than before and flew away to tell all the animals how he had frightened the Leopard by staring at her.

“What will you give me to take care of your cubs?” asked the Snake from the tall grass.

“I will give you a good home in my cave and plenty of food,” said the Leopard.

“Tsz! tsz! tsz!” hissed the Snake, so loudly that the Leopard jumped and was almost frightened at the noise.

“I do not want you to take care of my cubs,”

said the Leopard. “If they heard you hiss like that, they would be frightened to death.''

The Snake hissed again louder than before, and slid away through the tall grass to tell all the other animals how he had startled the Leopard by hissing at her.

“What will you give me to take care of your cubs?” asked the Dog.

“I will give you a good home in my cave and plenty of food,” said the Leopard.

“Mfwa! Mfwa!” barked the Dog, wagging his tail as hard as he could, and grinning so that every one of his white teeth showed. The Leopard looked at him and was pleased.

[Here the Alo Man, who had imitated the voice of each animal in the story, barked so well that all the dogs barked and whined, and came to rub their heads against his legs. Everybody laughed, and it really seemed as if the dogs understood the story as well as any one.]

The Leopard went to her cave, with the Dog trotting after her and sniffing at her tracks. She gave him a good supper of rabbit bones, and when she told him how to take care of the cubs he listened very carefully.

The next day the Leopard went out to hunt, and the Dog stayed in the cave and did exactly as he had been told. After a while the Leopard came back, dragging a fine Antelope.