Iron ore is dug out of the hills, and its manufacture is the staple trade of the southern highlands.Each village has its smelting-house, its charcoal-burners, and blacksmiths.They make good axes, spears, needles, arrowheads, bracelets and anklets, which, considering the entire absence of machinery, are sold at surprisingly low rates; a hoe over two pounds in weight is exchanged for calico of about the value of fourpence.In villages near Lake Shirwa and elsewhere, the inhabitants enter pretty largely into the manufacture of crockery, or pottery, making by hand all sorts of cooking, water, and grain pots, which they ornament with plumbago found in the hills.
Some find employment in weaving neat baskets from split bamboos, and others collect the fibre of the buaze, which grows abundantly on the hills, and make it into fish-nets.These they either use themselves, or exchange with the fishermen on the river or lakes for dried fish and salt.A great deal of native trade is carried on between the villages, by means of barter in tobacco, salt, dried fish, skins, and iron.Many of the men are intelligent-looking, with well-shaped heads, agreeable faces, and high foreheads.We soon learned to forget colour, and we frequently saw countenances resembling those of white people we had known in England, which brought back the looks of forgotten ones vividly before the mind.The men take a good deal of pride in the arrangement of their hair; the varieties of style are endless.One trains his long locks till they take the admired form of the buffalo's horns; others prefer to let their hair hang in a thick coil down their backs, like that animal's tail; while another wears it in twisted cords, which, stiffened by fillets of the inner bark of a tree wound spirally round each curl, radiate from the head in all directions.Some have it hanging all round the shoulders in large masses; others shave it off altogether.Many shave part of it into ornamental figures, in which the fancy of the barber crops out conspicuously.About as many dandies run to seed among the blacks as among the whites.The Man ganja adorn their bodies extravagantly, wearing rings on their fingers and thumbs, besides throatlets, bracelets, and anklets of brass, copper, or iron.But the most wonderful of ornaments, if such it may be called, is the pelele, or upper-lip ring of the women.The middle of the upper lip of the girls is pierced close to the septum of the nose, and a small pin inserted to prevent the puncture closing up.After it has healed, the pin is taken out and a larger one is pressed into its place, and so on successively for weeks, and months, and years.The process of increasing the size of the lip goes on till its capacity becomes so great that a ring of two inches diameter can be introduced with ease.
All the highland women wear the pelele, and it is common on the Upper and Lower Shire.The poorer classes make them of hollow or of solid bamboo, but the wealthier of ivory or tin.The tin pelele is often made in the form of a small dish.The ivory one is not unlike a napkin-ring.No woman ever appears in public without the pelele, except in times of mourning for the dead.It is frightfully ugly to see the upper lip projecting two inches beyond the tip of the nose.
When an old wearer of a hollow bamboo ring smiles, by the action of the muscles of the cheeks, the ring and lip outside it are dragged back and thrown above the eyebrows.The nose is seen through the middle of the ring, amid the exposed teeth show how carefully they have been chipped to look like those of a cat or crocodile.The pelele of an old lady, Chikanda Kadze, a chieftainess, about twenty miles north of Morambala, hung down below her chin, with, of course, a piece of the upper lip around its border.The labial letters cannot be properly pronounced, but the under lip has to do its best for them, against the upper teeth and gum.Tell them it makes them ugly; they had better throw it away; they reply, "Kodi!Really! it is the fashion."How this hideous fashion originated is an enigma.
Can thick lips ever have been thought beautiful, and this mode of artificial enlargement resorted to in consequence?The constant twiddling of the pelele with the tongue by the younger women suggested the irreverent idea that it might have been invented to give safe employment to that little member."Why do the women wear these things?" we inquired of the old chief, Chinsunse.Evidently surprised at such a stupid question, he replied, "For beauty, to be sure!Men have beards and whiskers; women have none; and what kind of creature would a woman be without whiskers, and without the pelele?She would have a mouth like a man, and no beard; ha! ha!ha!"Afterwards on the Rovuma, we found men wearing the pelele, as well as women.An idea suggested itself on seeing the effects of the slight but constant pressure exerted on the upper gum and front teeth, of which our medical brethren will judge the value.In many cases the upper front teeth, instead of the natural curve outwards, which the row presents, had been pressed so as to appear as if the line of alveoli in which they were planted had an inward curve.As this was produced by the slight pressure of the pelele backwards, persons with too prominent teeth might by slight, but long-continued pressure, by some appliance only as elastic as the lip, have the upper gum and teeth depressed, especially in youth, more easily than is usually imagined.The pressure should be applied to the upper gum more than to the teeth.
