Page:Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons (IA travelsinwestafr00kingrich).pdf/444

 is when the crabs come up the river," which means when the crayfish come down the rivers; but that is just their artless, unobservant way of putting things. This swarming of the crayfish occurs about every five years, and for days the river-water is crowded with them, so that you can bale them out by basketfuls. This the native does, accompanying his operations with songs and tom-toms, and he then eats any quantity of them; another quantity he smokes and preserves, in what he pleases to regard as a dried state, for sauce making; and the greatest quantity of all he chucks in heaps to fester round his dwelling.

There are plenty more causes of the extinction of tribes besides these—so many in fact, that one gets to wonder that there are any Coast tribes of 100 years old or so left.

Mr. Ibea himself says that there are not now more than 2,000 of his own tribe left, and that those that are now representing it are far inferior, physically, to those he remembers as having seen as old men, when he was a boy.

These Benga were once an exceedingly powerful and proud tribe. Now they have little save their pride left. In old days they were very busy making war on their neighbours, elephant hunting, shipping themselves as crew to whaling vessels, and other people as slaves to slaving vessels, and so on. Great hands at the slave trade were these Benga, and slave-owners are they still; but gone is their glory, and in a few years more the Benga will themselves have gone to join the shades of the tribes that were before them in this land, leaving behind them no sign, not even a flint arrow-head, to show that they ever existed; for their wooden utensils and their iron weapons will rot like rag in the hot moist earth; and then "finish."

Mr. Ibea and I got quite low about this. He agreed it was partially the Benga's own fault; they had of late years taken to bad habits, he said; amongst these to infant marriage. This struck me as strange, for as I have already mentioned, the also dying-out Igalwas have only recently adopted this custom. He says that forty years ago it was quite unknown among the Benga, and that in former days both men and women were frequently over fifteen and twenty before they married. Now the old men buy girl children, both as wives for themselves and