NATIVE SHOPPING 
431 
CH. XV] 
diate attendants—had a chance of obtaining the few 
little comforts and luxuries—tea, sugar, or tobacco, 
for instance—which meant so much to them. Usually 
Kermit would take them to the store himself, for they 
were less wily than the Indian trader, and, moreover, in 
the excitement of shopping occasionally purchased some¬ 
thing for which they really had no use. Kermit would 
march his tail of followers into the store, give them 
time to look round, and then make the first purchase 
for the man who had least coming to him; this to avoid 
heartburnings, as the man was invariably too much 
interested in what he had received to scrutinize closely 
what the others were getting. The purchase might be 
an article of clothing or a knife, but usually took the 
form of tobacco, sugar, and tea ; in tobacco the man 
was offered his choice between quality and quantity— 
that is, either a moderate quantity of good cigarettes or 
a large amount of trade tobacco. Funny little Juma 
Yohari, for instance, one of Kermit’s gun-bearers, 
usually went in for quality, whereas his colleague 
Kassitura preferred quantity. Juma was a Zanzibari, 
a wiry, merry little grig of a man, loyal, hard-working, 
fearless; Kassitura a huge Basoga negro, of guileless 
honesty and good faith, incapable of neglecting his duty. 
Juma was rather the wit of the gun-bearers’ mess, and 
Kassitura the musician, having a little native harp, on 
which for hours at a time he would strum queer little 
melancholy tunes, to which he hummed an accompani¬ 
ment in undertone. 
All the natives we met, and the men in our employ, 
were fond of singing, sometimes simply improvised 
chants, sometimes sentences of three or four words 
repeated over and over again. The Uganda porters 
who were with us after we left Kampalla did not sing 
