Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 3.djvu/483

 THE FANS. 897 who become undisputed masters wherever they present themselves. In the districts known to the whites their numbers are estimated at two hundred thousand, and since the middle of the century they are said to have increased threefold both by constant immigration and by the natural excess of births over the mortality. The future of French influence in this region depends mainly on the relations that may be established between the whites and these formidable invaders, all other peoples being divided into a multitude of detached groups incapable of any serious resistance. The Fans, that is to say, "Men," are known by many other names, such as Pahuin, Pa-Mue, Mpangwe (not to be confounded with Mpongwe), Pan we, Fanwe, and within French territory they form two distinct groups, the Ma-Kima of the Upper Ogoway and the Ma-Zuna about the Gaboon, speaking different dialects and waging a deadly warfare against one another. According to some authors the Fans are sprung from those Jaggas, who in the seventeenth century overran the kingdom of Congo, and the vocabularies collected by Wilson, Lenz, and Zoller prove that their language is also of Bantu stock, more alKed to the Benga than to the Mpongwe, but spoken with a very guttural pronunciation. Anthropo- logists now generally believe that they belong to the same family as the Niam-Mams cf the Upper Welle region, from whom they are now separated by an intervening space of 900 miles, also probably inhabited by kindred populations. Both present the same general physical appearance, complexion, stature, features, and attitude ; both file the incisors to a point, dress the hair in the same way, use bark coverings, and vegetable dyes for painting the body. The chiefs also wear leopard skins, and use the same iron dart — a weapon with several points that tears the flesh. Blue glass trinkets and cowries are prized as ornaments by both nations, who also breed hounds of the same species. Lastly both are decided cannibals, employing the word nia in the same sense of "to eat," so that the Fans would seem to be the western division of the great Niam-Niam race. They are of lighter complexion and less wholly hair than the Ogoway coast tribes, which has caused some ethnologists to regard them as of non-Negro stock. The men, whose only occupation is fighting and hunting, are generally tall and slim, but very muscular, with haughty bearing and defiant look, very different from the obsequious downcast glance of the Gaboon Negroes. The women, who perform all the household and agricultural work, soon acquire heavy ungainly figures. But the characteristic trait of both sexes is the bulging frontal bone, forming a semicircular protuberance above the superciliary arches. The young men and women delight in personal ornaments of all sorts, adding cosmetics to tatooing, intertwining the hair with pearls, foliage, and feathers, encircling neck and waist with strings of cowries and china buttons, loading the calves with copper rings, like those in use among the natives of East Africa. Some of the women are as bedizened as any fetish, and so overladen with ornaments as to render locomotion ahnost impossible. But when they have to mourn the death of a chief or of a near relative they must put everything aside, and appear abroad either naked or clothed only with foliage and bedaubed with yellow or greenish ochre, which gives them a very cadaverous appearance.