Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 17, 1906.djvu/522

486 is a small fowls' run with access from the hut. The better houses have the fowls' house plastered outside. The doorway of the hut is, like that of all other Bantu huts, low. It is closed with a door of solid timber, or of reeds. There are no interior props in the hut. The hearth is in the middle of the hut, enclosed with a raised rim of mud or termites' earth, hard and smooth like the floor, about two inches high. On the right side looking from the door is a place where implements, etc. are stored, marked off with a similar rim, forming an arc and joining the side of the hut at its two ends. This rim, we were informed, was used as a pillow. From its centre, a little way towards the centre of the hearth, a branch rim runs, the end of which, conveniently near to the fire, is made into a circle used as a stand for a pot. This figure will make the description clearer.



The women lie in the inner part of the hut beyond the fire; the men on the side of the fire nearer the door. Grain is stored in circular grain-stores, made of wattle-work, plastered with mud and raised from the ground on a scaffold, or frame-work of wood. We saw women building some of these. Others were standing hard by, completed and probably in use.

The women are elaborately scarred over the body and on the face; and many of them wear in the upper lip a labret called imanda. I bought one of these, made of the central whorl of a marine gasteropod shell, probably a conus, ground smooth, about 51 mm. long and 14 mm. in diameter. They are worn standing out straight in front. Both men and women wear a number of brass wire bangles. The Manyika do not circumcise.