426 
BRITISH CENTRAL AFRICA 
The principal, almost the only, agricultural implement known is the hoe. A 
sickle may be used for cutting grass, and a wooden rake may possibly be 
employed in very tidy and prosperous communities for smoothing the seed 
beds ; but the hoe fulfils nearly all the purposes of plough (the plough is quite 
unknown), harrow, spade, pick, fork, and drill. Nowadays the hoes are chiefly 
made of iron, but in some of the wilder, remoter, more mountainous tracts long 
hoes are made of hard wood. In Tropical Africa one is inclined to believe that 
an age of wood was either antecedent to or parallel with an age of stone, and 
certainly preceded the age of copper and iron. Not a few native weapons and 
implements of iron at the present day still have their wooden prototypes 
lingering alongside. Some ceremony is always observed by the natives at the 
commencement of the hoeing season, and often at or after harvest. The 
household fire is extinguished and relit by making fire afresh; dances of 
various kinds are indulged in. , 
The order of crops is usually this:—As soon as the first rains have fallen 
and the ground is moist, pumpkins and maize are sown ; then gourds and 
cucumbers, millet (Mchewere), sorghum (Mapira) and Eleusine (Maere); French 
beans, large beans, small beans, peas, Dhol, 1 ground nuts, cassava, sweet 
potatoes and rice. The pumpkins ripen first; then the maize, the cucumbers 
and gourds. The millet, sorghum, Eleusine , and rice are not harvested till June 
or July. Then follows much beer making (with the grain) and consequent 
drunkenness. The maize is eaten green—raw, boiled or roasted—but the bulk 
of it is saved till it ripens and it is then consumed in the form of “ pop corn ” 
or flour. In certain favoured localities maize is grown in rotation all the year 
round. In the dry season it is planted in damp hollows, on river islands, and 
on land by the river banks, which is thoroughly moist. Many other crops can 
in this way be raised during the dry season and but for inherent laziness the 
negro of British Central Africa need never be in want of perpetual supplies 
of food. 
The following are the cereals and plants grown for food or for other 
purposes by the natives of this part of Africa. (In industrious or specially 
favoured districts all these things may be grown ; but among a lazy people 
or where the soil is poor and the water supply defective the list may be much 
reduced.) :— 
CEREALS. 
Sorghum.' 2 (Latin : Sorghum vulgare. Common native name “ Mapira.”) 
Maize. Introduced by the Portuguese into Zambezia circa 1570. 
Rice. Introduced by Portuguese and Arabs. The inferior red rice comes 
from the Zambezi; the good white rice is of Arab introduction. 
Millet. (Latin: Pennisetum typhoideum Native name in Chinyanja: 
“ Mchewere,”) probably introduced by the Portuguese. 
Eleusine. (Latin: Eleusine coracanai) Native name : “Maere.” 
Wheat. Introduced by the Portuguese into the Zambezi Valley ; and by 
the Europeans into Nyasaland and the Arabs to Tanganyika. Except 
in the Zambezi Valley scarcely grown at all by the natives. 
Of beans there are no less than nine kinds cultivated. One kind is the 
Indian “ Dhol ” ( Cajanus indicus ), another is almost spherical, slightly flattened, 
a dark brown with a white streak round the rim ; a third is very large— 
1 Dhol is a small pease much grown in India. 
2 The Durrlia of the Sudan. There are nearly nine varieties grown in British Central Africa. 
