THE NATIVES OF UHIA AND RUANDA. 161 
themselves on a journey by throwing two or three 
beans, husks and all, into their mouths. Several of 
these Wahia traders were seen — sturdy, very black, 
middle - sized men, with bare, unshaven heads and 
beards. Their dress was a cow -skin, having the leg 
parts neatly rounded off, of a saffron yellow, and 
friezed inside, knotted over the right shoulder, and 
hanging to the middle of the thigh. This dress is 
sometimes worn with the hair outside : above it they 
generally wore a brick - coloured bark - cloth, well 
greased. Their ornaments were a sheep or goat's horn, 
tied jauntily with a strip of leather round their bare 
heads, and a few solid rings, crow-quill thickness, 
worn round the ankles. Their arms were differently 
shaped, as was their dress, from those of any race we 
had met with. The spear-shaft was six feet long, and 
the spear was heart-shaped, or like the ace of spades. 
Jumah, a coast-trader, called them a bad, unsafe set of 
people, probably because they were rivals in his busi- 
ness. He also abused the Ruanda people, because 
they refused to allow any coast-men into their king- 
dom, which, he said, was even more populous than 
Uganda. The specimens seen by us were merely men 
from its borders, who had come with produce by water 
in three days from the west. They were tall, lean 
men, with the shortest loin-cover of skin I ever saw; of 
the same pattern as, but even smaller than, those worn 
by the natives of Usui. The above native gentleman, 
Jumah, had travelled a great deal, had sailed on Vic- 
toria Nyanza, had attempted the ascent of Kilimanjaro, 
had made great friends with the king of Uganda, and 
said he could converse in at least ten different Afri- 
can languages. I begged to differ with him as to their 
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