THE PYGMY OR NEGRILLO RACES 



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arrows are deadly because their iron heads are smeared with a 

 poison extracted from the poison-fangs of snakes or prepared from 

 an insect-larva. The poison is mixed with the gum-like secretion 

 from the Euphorbia, a plant allied to the English spurge. The 

 Bushmen also use long-bladed spears, with which they kill the 

 lion and elephant. 



As the tribe is essentially nomadic, its dwellings are of the 

 simplest kind. The only permanent places of residence are caves 

 and rock-shelters. Some sections of the tribe erect small, low, 

 circular huts; but they mainly use open bivouacs and shelters of 

 mats and skins suspended on sticks, under the lee of which they 

 crouch during bad weather. The caves and rock-shelters are 

 adorned with drawings and paintings, which are usually silhouettes, 

 but sometimes accurately drawn in perspective. The subjects are 

 mainly men and animals: as the men are sometimes shown armed 

 with guns, and include red-coated soldiers, some of the drawings 

 date from the present century; others are probably very much 

 earlier. The animals figured are the elephant, rhinoceros, baboon, 

 lion, giraffe, and various kinds of antelope. The drawings are 

 often so accurate that the species delineated can be precisely 

 determined. Thus there are Bushman drawings of the square- 

 nosed rhinoceros in districts where that animal has not been 

 known to occur within historic times. The figures are coloured 

 black, red, brown, or terra-cotta. It has been suggested that 

 these drawings are a kind of picture-writing like that of the 

 North American Indians; it is thought that the Bushmen thus 

 left messages to subsequent visitors to the district. This idea 

 receives a certain measure of support from the fact that many 

 of the pictures are formed of conventional signs, men being repre- 

 sented by pairs of legs or by purely diagrammatic figures. 



As a rule the Bushmen have no domestic animals; some 

 clans in the Kalahari have dogs, and some keep goats; but the 

 Bushmen of other districts will not eat goat-flesh. With this 

 exception the people will eat anything that is edible. Their main 

 food is game. They follow the herds as these migrate with the 

 changes of the rainy season, and kill what they want with their poisoned arrows. Zebra are 

 difficult to stalk; but they are killed by poisoning the pools where they drink with Euphorbia 

 juice. The poison is almost immediately fatal to zebra, though not to men and some other 

 animals. Ostriches are killed by an ingenious use of a stalking-bird. The hunter paints his 

 legs yellow and covers his body with an ostrich-skin; in this disguise he quietly walks up to 

 a flock when it is feeding, which, thus deceived, allows the man to get within arrow-range. 

 When large game fails, the people live on locusts and the bodies and eggs of the white ants. 

 This food-supply is supplemented by wild beans and roots: the latter are dug up with a 

 hardened, pointed stick, weighted by being passed through a hole in a round, heavy stone, 

 fastened near the point. The Bushmen eat putrid meat with impunity. 



The social system of the Bushmen is anarchic in its simplicity. The tribe has no chief or 

 political organisation of any kind. Each group is independent, and is not constituted on even 

 a definite family basis. The family tie, in fact, is extremely loose. It has been said that there 

 are no terms in the Bushman language to distinguish between married and unmarried women. 

 According to some travellers, there is no regular marriage rite or system, the girls being simply 

 adopted as wives by the men when they reach a sufficient age. But at least in some sections 

 of the race there is a definite marriage ceremony, for some time after which a man may not 



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Photo by Richard Buchta. 

 AN AKKA GIRL (FRONT VIEW). 



