398 
BRITISH CENTRAL AFRICA 
The colour of the hair on the head and face is invariably black in adults, 
though in extreme childhood the hair of head and body is distinctly brownish, 
even to being a light brown. In the children at birth and for a little time after 
birth the hair on the head and body is nearly straight. The body-hair in 
children is a faintly discernible pale-coloured fluff, apparently a vestige of the 
body-hair which at one period of development, antecedent to expulsion from 
the womb, clothes the human foetus in all races. It seldom lasts on the negro 
child for many weeks after birth. 
On the adult man body-hair is almost always present when not plucked out. 
Amongst many of these negroes there is a dislike to any hair on the body. 
That on the chest, arms and legs is plucked out, and the hair of the arm-pits 
and pubes is shaved, or also plucked out. But in many tribes and individuals 
no check is put on the growth of the body-hair. It is then most abundant 
round the nipples and right across the chest, and down the median line of the 
stomach. There is considerable growth of hair on the pubes, 1 and in the 
arm-pits, on the shins of the legs and, in a lesser degree, on the forearms. I 
do not ever remember to have seen hair growing on a negro’s back, as may 
often be observed on the backs of Europeans and sometimes of the hairier races 
of Asiatics. The negro’s body-hair is usually curled semi-circular in growth, but 
not as tightly curled as the hair on the head. Among these negroes of Central 
Africa, as among almost all the true black negroes, the hair grows evenly over 
the scalp and not in sparse separate tufts as in the Bushman-Hottentots. This 
style of growth, which the French call floconne , is well illustrated in the photo¬ 
graph of a Bushman boy given on p. 53 of this book. 
The ear is ordinarily small, rounded, well shaped, and set far back, close to 
the head, but its original shape is often much 
modified by the various fashions which are 
in vogue for the lengthening of the ear-lobe. 
In some portions of British Central Africa, 
notably among the Angoni-Zulus, the A-lungu, 
and A-mambwe (as amongst the Masai and 
other Eastern African races) a hole is drilled 
in the lobe of the ear, through which a small 
quill or reed is passed. By degrees the hole 
is widened by the introduction of larger sub¬ 
stances till at last the lobe hangs down in a 
hideous loop on to the shoulders. 
As in all true negroes there is a marked 
development of the breasts in the male. 
Pictures and photographs of beardless men 
are often taken for representations of women 
owing to the marked swelling of the breasts, 
and their slightly pendulous nature. Some¬ 
times it has occurred even to myself to ask, 
looking at some youth, “ Is it a man or a 
woman?”—so woman-like would be the well-developed mamma which yet 
seemed inconsistent with the very straight shoulders and small hips. But 
with this exception there is nothing dubious about the manly appearance of the 
1 In Portuguese Guinea, or that portion of Africa which lies between Sierra Leone and the Gambia, 
there is a race which possesses such an extraordinary growth of hair on the pubes, both in the male 
and female, that it hangs down in a thick mat and covers the pudenda. 
AN ANGONI FROM MOMBERA’S COUNTRY 
