76 UNDER THE AFRICAN SUN 



curious fact remains that if their husbands were to part with 

 them to some one else, they would passively accept the chan^^e. 



^lumia dresses in European fashion, and shrewd traders 

 have got a good deal of valuable ivory out of this vain but 

 stingy chief, by offering him cheap and showy articles of dress. 

 On one of my journeys he paid me a visit in his state robes, 

 his latest brand-new purchase. It was a long bright-coloured 

 dressing-gown ! Probably he thought such gorgeous apparel 

 must be something particularly grand and imposing, perhaps 

 the very latest fashion from Europe. 



Mumia is a tall lean man ; he and many of his subjects have 

 rather long and prominent front teeth. Though he himself 

 wears European clothing, his subjects all go more or less naked. 

 I witnessed a native dance held in his village in honour of twins 

 having been born. Females of every age, from the old grey- 

 haired great-grandmother down to the tiny mite of three years 

 old, joined in this dance which, from a European point of view, 

 was anything but decent. Two tall women, clothed in coloured 

 cotton cloth, on joining in the dance threw off their garments 

 and danced vigorously in the same primitive condition as the 

 other nude dancers. 1 was told these two were sisters of 

 Mumia. 



Among the Kavirondo the women are even greater smokers 

 than the men. The national pipe has a black clumsy clay bowl 

 and a long reed stem. Aged couples seem to require the 

 soothing solace of a quiet smoke more frequently than younger 

 folks. 



One day I was called by Mumia to attend his favourite wife. 

 Mumia was then building a new village, consisting of a number 

 of huts surrounding a large inner circular space. I wanted to 

 know in which hut the patient lay, and asked Mumia which was 

 his hut ; he replied all of them were his, as all contained his 

 wives and attendants. The village was his dwelling, the wealthy 

 African's many-roomed palace. When he brought me to where 

 the sufferer lay ill, it was so dark inside the hut that I had to 

 light a lantern. The woman lay absolutely nude on the bare 

 mud floor. When I had attended to the patient, ]\Iumia pro- 

 vided me with a gourd-bowl of water, a towel, and some soap. 

 The savage and the civilised were thus strangely combined. 

 What little value Mumia sets on a wife or two, more or less, 

 would appear from what a civilian at the station told me. 



