SLAVES SET FREE. 315 



especially among the birds striking varieties, such as Schizorhis, 

 Irrisor erythrorhynchus (a mad chatterer), and parrots, are very 

 numerous. Among rarer visitors may be mentioned Corythaix 

 leucolopha, which, in small companies of two or three, coo 

 and laugh in the tips of the highest trees. Their red wing 

 feathers are used in the district of Bufi for the discovery 

 of thieves. 



My Monbuttu escort increases from hour to hour, especially 

 since the arrival of Gambari, the chief of the district of Kubbi, 

 which is inhabited by Monbuttu and Zande ; he had been 

 kept a prisoner during two years in the province of the Bahr- 

 el-Ghazal. To-morrow one hundred and five men, women, and 

 children are to be sent to their homes, and numbers are still 

 coming in requesting to be sent home. The Monbuttu, quite 

 contrary to the usual practice among Negroes, are very clannish, 

 and appear to possess a real love for their native country. 

 When I playfully suggested to the girls that they should marry 

 here, they resented the idea quite angrily. The Nyam-Nyam, 

 too, love their relations. I have seen a boy, ten years of 

 age, who came all the way from Dongu to see his brother 

 in prison. The most comical figure in the motley crowd 

 which here surrounded me was Asika, an Akka, about thirty- 

 five years of age, who had been measured by Felkin in Eum- 

 bek, and had now established himself here. He is a noisy 

 fellow, and rather tall (five feet five inches) in comparison 

 with eight other individuals belonging to his tribe whom I 

 measured. 



Gambari and this very wide-awake pigmy told me that the 

 Akka are divided into numerous small tribes, and have no 

 settled abodes. Hunting is their only occupation, and they 

 lead a nomadic life among the Monbuttu and Amadi. Tribes, 

 however, which nomadise in one of these countries do not inter- 

 marry with tribes nomadising in another, and the Akka of the 

 Mabode country, for instance, never mix with those in the 

 country of the Meje. One tribe in the Meje country has a pale 

 yellow complexion. If a company of these wandering people 

 arrive near the residence of a chief, they build small huts for 

 the married people, the unmarried having to be content with 

 simple sheds. They generally establish themselves along the 



