206 NOTES ON THE MONBUTTU.

chiefs are expected to appear before them from time to time, when they bring with them presents of girls, cattle, eggs, bark cloth, &c. During the time of their residence at the court, the sovereign is bound to find them in food, which accounts for the great crowd of servants, and especially wives, belonging to each chief, for upon them devolves the cultivation of the fields, Three meals daily are taken in Monbuttu, the hut of each wife furnishing the chief with one dish, contained in a wooden bowl, and floating in palm-oil, the chief himself distributing the food with his own hands. <A chief may not eat in public, but takes his meals in the hut of his favourite wife, who waits upon him, and all that is left after he is satisfied, and has given some to his wife, is buried. As there are hardly any cattle in the country, the meals consist chiefly of vegetables, which nature supplies in great variety. The menw includes roots of all kinds—yams, manioc, of which only the sweet variety grows here (the poisonous kind is common in the A-Zandé country), Helmia, sweet potatoes, sesame, a little eleusine (no durrah, and still less Penicillaria, for which, indeed, there is no word), gourds of various kinds, Colocasias, and a great variety of fruits, but the staple food is always and everywhere the banana, both fresh and dried. If we add to the above game of various kinds, including even monkeys’ flesh (but not the flesh of lions, elephants, or snakes), as also fowls and eggs, all kinds of birds, and, as tit-bits, the fat larvee of insects, the cursine cannot be said to be badly supplied, especially as human flesh has to be added to the bill of fare.

It is a lamentable fact that the practice of cannibalism, though concealed in the neighbourhood of the stations, is at the present day just as widespread as when the Arabs invaded the country, and that hardly any one is buried, and corpses are bartered as before. Men who abstain from human flesh are the exception, just as with the A-Zande, and chiefs like Wando and Yangara owe part of their reputation among their countrymen to this circumstance. Neither do, the Akka despise human flesh ; of this I have repeatedly had proof.

Tobacco, beer, and cola-nuts are the only narcotics or intoxicants with which I became acquainted. ‘The tobacco (tobba,