62 
AFRICA AND ITS EXPLORATION. 
nortli-west, and the Huallas of the Camarones River 
also number it amongst their “ country customs.” The 
Mpongwe, as has been said, will not eat a chimpanzee ; 
the Fa n devour their dead enemies. 
The Fan character has its ferocious side, or it would 
not be African : prisoners are tortured with all the 
horrible barbarity of that human wild beast which is 
happily being extirpated, the North American Indian ; 
and children may be seen greedily licking the blood 
from the ground. It is a curious ethnological study, 
this peculiar development of destructiveness in the 
African brain. Cruelty seems to be with him a neces- 
sary of life, and all his highest enjoyments are connected 
with causing pain and inflicting death. His religious 
rites — a strong contrast to those of the modern Hindoo 
—are ever causelessly bloody. Take, as an instance, the 
Efik race, or people of Old Calabar, some 6,000 wretched 
remnants of a once powerful tribe. For 200 years they 
have had intercourse with Europeans, who, though 
slavers, would certainly neither enjoy nor encourage 
these profitless horrors ; yet no savages show more 
brutality in torture, more frenzied delight in bloodshed, 
than they do. A few of their pleasant practices are — 
The administration of Esere, or poison-bean ; 
“ Egbo floggings ” of the utmost severity, equalling 
the knout ; 
Substitution of an innocent pauper for a rich criminal ; 
Infanticide of twins ; and 
Yivisepulture. 
And it must be remembered that this tribe has had 
the benefit of a resident mission for the last generation. 
I can hardly believe this abnormal cruelty to be the 
mere result of uncivilization ; it appears to me the effect 
of an arrested development, which leaves to the man all 
the ferocity of the carnivor, the unreflecting cruelty of 
the child. 
The dietary of these “ wild men of the woods ” would 
astonish the starveling sons of civilization. When will 
the poor man realize the fact that his comfort and 
happiness will result not from workhouses and alms- 
