Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 3.djvu/438

 tion to Baghirnii in 1871, the Sultan of Wadai is said to have carried off as many as thirty thousand builders, weavers, tailors, and dyers, at the same time forbidding the natives to wear fine robes. Thus the local industries were greatly impaired, and it would be no longer possible to build a brick palace such as that occupied by the Sultan of Massefia. On the other hand, so accustomed are the people to the use of arms that honest labour is despised by the upper classes, while brutal cruelty is held in honour. The last sovereign was proud of the surname Abu-Sekkin ("Father of the knife"), earned by the wholesale butchery of guests to whom he had sworn faith and friendship. Although despising their Kanuri and Wadai neighbours, as inferior in martial valour, the Baghirmi have never succeeded like them in establishing a really powerful state, their political status having mostly been one of more or less disguised vassalage. At present they are tributary to the Sultan of Wadai, from whom their sovereign receives his investiture.

Amongst the polished Baghirmi dwell representatives of all the surrounding races, Kanuri everywhere, Makari in the west, Kukas and Bulalas in the north, Arab agriculturists (Assela, Salamat, Aula-Musa, Shoa and others) also chiefly in the north, Fulahs mainly in the south. The Fulahs visited by Nachtigal called him "cousin," saying that their ancestors had come like him from the shores of the Mediterranean.

The partly or even completely independent peoples in the southern and eastern districts are mostly related to the Baghirmi in speech, while resembling them in physical appearance. They are split up into an infinity of ethnical fragments, each district having its special group, which again becomes broken into fresh subdivisions by every famine, inundation, or slave-hunting incursion. Most of the tribes are distinguished by some special tattoo or other physical mark: the Gaberi of the southern riverain plains by the extraction of an upper and lower incisor; the Saras farther to the south by filing their teeth to a point, like so many of the Nilotic peoples; the Kufus, a branch of the Saras, by piercing the lips for the insertion of little rods round the mouth.

Tree-worship survives amongst the Sorarai, neighbours of the Gaberi, who swear by the bark of a species of acacia. All however believe in a supreme being whose voice is the thunder, and who is enthroned in the clouds. To this god they offer bloody sacrifices of cocks and goats in shrines from which women and children are excluded. The "wise men" interpret to the vulgar the decrees of the deity, reading his will in the blood of the victims, in their last spasms, or the position of the dead bodies. They also denounce the wicked wizards, their rivals in knowledge of the occult science. When a young man dies two wise men take his body, which then drags them, as they say, irresistibly to the hut of the murderer. Then blood is shed for blood, and the property of the "culprit" is shared between the chief and the injured family. Amongst the Saras a tuft of grass or foliage placed upon the magician's head throws him into a divine frenzy, during which he reels, bounds, capers about, staggers as one overcome with drink, falling at last before one of the audience, who is forthwith devoted to death. Amongst the Niyillems, on the right bank of the Shari, young maidens are said to be buried