The Fetish Folk of West Africa Author:Robert H. Milligan Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE WISE ONES AT Gaboon, in the French Congo, one sees all the successive stages in the process of civilization. First, there is the savage, whose whole appar... more »el is a little palm-oil and a bit of calico half the size of a pocket-handkerchief; then there is the man who wears "two fathoms" of cloth wound about him gracefully and falling below his knees; next, there is the man who wears this same robe with a shirt; then the man who discards the native robe and wears a shirt :uui trousers, but with the shirt always outside the trousers; and, last of all, the gentleman who wears his shirt inside his trousers. These several classes are somewhat distinct. One does not classify the man with a taste for simplicity who wears a rice-sack with holes for his head and arms ; nor the untutored dude who wears a pink Mother Hubbard or a lady's undergarment. These freakish modes represent attempts to hasten the process of civilization and to pass prematurely from one of the above classes to another. In general, the distinction of culotte and sansculotte indicates the difference between the Mpongwo—the old coast tribe—and the Fang—the interior tribe, who have only reached the coast in recent years. The Mpongwe is the most civilized of all the tribes south of the Calabar Eiver. Many of them, besides wearing trousers, live in deck-Juntses, that is, houses with wooden floors. The first floor ever seen by the natives was the deck of an English ship ; hence the name deck-house. It was alsofrom contact with English sailors that the native learned to speak of a " fathom " of cloth. The Mpongwe are the proudest people of West Africa. An African woman is never allowed to marry into an inferior tribe; although the men may do so. And since the Mpongwe have no social equals among the adjacent tribes, it fo...« less