186 ZAMBEZIAN FLORA 



symptom of becoming a drug in the markets of 

 Hamburg and Marseilles. 



Another important native food stuff is the 

 Manioc or Cassava. Its roots, pounded and washed, 

 are dried and made into an appetising and nutritious 

 flour, whilst that excellent tuber the Sweet Potato 

 is also grown in large quantities. On the outskirts 

 of every village you are certain to find groves of 

 edible bananas, and, close by the huts themselves, 

 luxuriant castor-oil plants {Ricinus communis), at 

 times covered with the seeds from which is ex- 

 pressed in crude form that oil of our childhood 

 days whose memories haunt us still. Many kinds 

 of beans are grown, but especially one which 

 occurs on a low cultivated bush whose odour 

 attracts to it numbers of beetles which may be 

 seen all day long droning in circles round the 

 bunches of pods. A sedulously cultivated growth 

 is the Chillie Pepper bush, whose bright red corns 

 furnish the African with the most important of his 

 few condiments. For cooking he uses the oil of 

 the Sesamum seed, as that of the Meixuera above 

 referred to, and a pleasing relish is imported into 

 his diet by tomatoes, which likewise grow in great 

 profusion. The African's vices, or some of them, 

 are ministered to by the snufF and cigars — he rarely 

 smokes a pipe — concocted from the really excellent 

 tobacco plants cultivated for the purpose, and by 

 the hemp {Datura) which he also smokes from 

 a gourd, and which induces fits of lung-shaking 

 coughing. 



Among the fruits produced for native consump- 

 tion or sale, the most common is the banana of 



