733. Jungle food.—What do these black people eat? They have the same nourish ment that we have, but they get it from food that is different. They eat cake made from• cornmeal or cassava meal (Fig. 551). palm oil, smoked flesh of game, bananas, and vegetables, such as tomatoes and cucumbers.
734. The forest garden.—The natives are farmers and also hunters. On a piece of well-chosen land, down a forest path, is the village garden. Every two or three years the people make a new clearing to get new soil. When all the good garden sites have been used, they move the village. When the natives want to make a new garden, they chop down the trees with the machete, and at the end of• the dry season they burn all the trees they can. They use the ashes as fertilizer for corn, beans, peanuts, cucumbers, tomatoes, bananas, the yam (a kind of sweet potato), and the manioc or cassava (Figs. 551, 553). The up-springing bushes must be kept chopped down or they will overwhelm the crops. Villagers usually take turns watching the garden by night and day to keep the elephants and wild hogs away. The elephant is a terror to the African farmer because it will go ten or twenty miles in a night to eat up a garden. These people do not use beasts of burden as helpers in farming. Their crops are grown by hand labor. Their only tools are simple hoes, knives, and axes.
735. Jungle camping parties.—Sometimes the natives make camps in the forest and hunt. One way to hunt is to make a pit which is carefully covered with leaves. A fence is then built, so that animals wandering through the forest follow the fence, walk over the pits and fall in. After the men kill the game and cut it up (at which they are very expert), the women smoke the meat, which they take back to the village. It serves as flavoring for dishes of corn-meal mush.
These people are very fond of fishing. In the dry season, when the streams are low, they go out and camp by distant streams to fish for a week or two.
736. The oil palm.—A palm tree that yields three grades of oil grows throughout the length of the coast forests and far into the interior. In some places there are forests where these trees are only five or six yards apart.
For ages, the natives have used palm oil. When the white man began to buy it, he merely encouraged an old industry. The
native oil-gatherer walks up the tree with the aid of a rope (Fig. 539). With his machete he cuts off the bunches of fruit which grow at the top of the tree. Each bunch weighs twenty or thirty pounds, and a good tree should yield one hundred pounds of fruit. The fruit, which is red in color, and yields about fifty or sixty per cent of oil, is carried on the heads of all the family back to the "factory" of the native. The factory consists of an iron pot and a section of a log hqllowed out to a depth of two or three feet. The members of the family pick the fruits from the bunch and put them into the pot to boil. A small part of the oil rises to the surface. This oil which first comes out is good to eat. Much oil still remains in the pulp of the fruit, and can only be obtained after the fruit has been put into the hollow log, beaten to a pulp with sticks, and again boiled. The oil from the boiled pulp is soap oil. It is skimmed off and put into big casks holding twelve hundred pounds. To get the casks of oil to market the natives roll them along the forest trail to a boat landing or to a railroad. Have you seen advertisements of soap made of palm and olive oil? When the oil has been extracted from the fruit, the seeds are laid out in the sun to dry. When the kernels rattle inside the hard shell, the women crack the seeds between two stones and pick out the kernels. Palm ker nels are an important export from the forest region. It takes about a million kernels to weigh a ton. In one year Africa sent three hundred thousand tons of palm kernels to England. This means that African women and girls do a great deal of work with very poor tools.
When crushed in European mills the ker nels yield an oil used for margarine (Sec.442), and a meal or cake that is used for cattle feed, very much as cottonseed meal or wheat bran is used.
737. A land of future trade.—The West African coast between the northern desert, Sahara, and the southern desert, Kalahari, is divided into twenty colonies or states. Nineteen of them are ruled by Europeans; one, Liberia, is under the protection of the United States, because it was set apart in 1847 as a place to which negro slaves, freed in the United States, might go.