44 6 
BRITISH CENTRAL AFRICA 
was quite a large native cemetery, outside the town, each grave being marked by 
a neat little house made of bamboo stakes with a grass roof and with a mound 
over the grave. Each grave was well supplied with little offerings of food which 
had evidently been freshly placed there just before the town was captured. 
Nothing, I was subsequently told, operated more in our favour, or induced the 
natives more readily to sue for peace, than the fact that these graves were 
respected and left undisturbed. On the other hand Makanjira, in the course of 
our warfare, was infuriated by the destruction of his “father’s” tomb. 1 At the 
time we destroyed it we did not realise it was a tomb. We took it for an 
unusually stylish house. The roof of this large mausoleum was entirely covered 
with white calico intended to imitate the white tombs in Muhammadan countries, 
erected over the grave of some saint. At Mponda’s town to the south end 
of Lake Nyasa there was likewise a huge circular tomb with its thatched roof 
covered with white calico. This was partially destroyed during the bombard¬ 
ment. It was the place where the former Mponda had been buried. On enter¬ 
ing the tomb, the roof of which only had been destroyed, we found the grave 
was a huge sarcophagus of hardened clay, very similar in shape to the great 
stone tombs of the middle ages, with earthenware plates embedded in the mud, 
so that at a distance it had rather a fine, coruscating effect from this enamel 
of coarse pottery (which of course was derived from the coast in the course of 
trade). Finding that the building was the burial place of the Mponda who had 
been good to Livingstone, we restored the roof and re-covered it with white 
calico of our own will, and that went so far to conciliate Mponda’s people that 
although their present chief again fell out with us some years later on his people 
did not join him in the rising. 
Amongst all those Nyanja tribes where the custom does not prevail of 
taking up the bones and scattering them in the forest after a certain lapse of 
time, the grave is held sacred. To swear by the grave is a solemn oath. 
Sentiment regarding the place of interment is very prevalent even as regards 
the burial of Europeans. Such explorers as have visited the place where 
Livingstone’s heart lies buried, or the graves of Bishop Mackenzie or other 
missionaries who have died in British Central Africa, have been struck with the 
great care taken of the graves by the natives. 
Reference has been made to the belief that deaths can be caused by 
occult influence, by witchcraft. Except in the vicinity of mission stations 
or such districts as are entirely under the control of European officials this 
belief is widespread, and probably no tribe or section of people is exempted 
from it. 
The witch, or wizard, Mjiti —as opposed to Sinanga , the doctor, the 
medicine man—is the terror of the Central African negro community. And 
in most parts of British Central Africa—especially among the A-nyanja— 
there is a real excuse for this terror in the fact that Mfiti —or Zimftti , as 
the plural is sometimes — are depraved persons with a craving for putrefying 
human flesh. This is no fancy; it is a fact. It is probable that not more 
than one or two centuries have elapsed since the bulk of South Central 
Africans were cannibals, in the cheerful, daylight manner of the Upper Congo, 
where people are killed and eaten for gastronomic pleasure and the act is 
normal and unconcealed. Gradually, however, with the vague influence of 
the Portuguese to the south and the Arabs to the north, the natives became 
1 Not really his father but the chief who preceded him, as amongst the Yao son does not succeed 
father. 
