Bkrry — The Sierra Leone Cannibals. 27 



and devour its tiesh, but here in Jenne it is regarded as sacred, and to kill it 

 to commit sacrilege. They venerate the iguanas because their forefathers 

 did so; and this carries our memories back to the banks of the Nile, where the 

 crocodile was dear to the priests of Thebes and Crocodilopolis. In Sierra 

 Leone the cry of the iguana is said to be that of a devil or spirit. 



Of other Egyptian customs there are many traces amongst the Songhoi 

 and other African peoples. Some of the Songhoi kings married their own 

 sisters, and Ali the Conqueror was embalmed. 



In the valley of the Nile we find the magical bird with outspread wings 

 raised on a pedestal for protective purposes above towns or groves ; and 

 towards the end of the seventeenth century Barbot, a slave-trader, mentions 

 copper birds as spreading their wings above all the best houses in Benin ; 

 and Ibn Batuta, in describing the ceremonies of the court of Malli in the 

 fourteenth century, mentions a golden bird as perched on the king's umbrella. 



Doves, everywhere the symbol of the Great Mother, were the oracular 

 birds of the temple of Amnion, and are known in West Africa as " birds of 

 Jenne," where to this day nests and food are arranged for them in the houses, 

 and they are never by any chance put upon the spit. 



To this day Jenne is a city of the Pharaohs ; its houses, built of bricks, 

 long, flat, and rounded at the ends like those of ancient Egypt, display the 

 pyramidal form and fiat roof, plastered within and without, similar to those 

 of the valley of the Nile, and the pylon gives a motive for the decoration of 

 the doors and fronts of the houses ; and the large dwellings and great buildings 

 are supported by single buttresses or groups of buttresses of pylonic form. 



It is to Egypt, by way of the valley of the Nile, that we would naturally 

 look for the earliest information concerning the land of the blacks ; 

 and it is to Egypt, and through Egypt and Arabia, that the Songhois 

 themselves trace their oldest traditions. According to the Tarik-e-Sudan 

 the ancestors of the Songhois came from Yemen to a town in Misr named 

 Kokia. Deserting Kokia to escape the Arab invaders, they marched up the 

 Nile to Meroe. 



Speech points the route taken by the emigrants after leaving Meroe. 

 Keeping along the south of the Libyan Desert, " a language similar to that of 

 the Songhois is spoken at Agades," says M. Dubois; " and the people bordering 

 the desert between Lake Chad and the Niger are also Songhoi." Turnjng 

 round the north of Lake Chad, the migration headed for the Niger, which it 

 struck south of Gao, where a town was founded after that which had been left 

 behind. The Tarik mentions a town named Kokia still existing in the 

 sixteenth century, south of Gao, the capital. These migrations, M. Dubois 

 thinks, must have begun towards the middle of the -seventh century, for Jenne, 



