[Lander’s Travels by Robert Huish]@TWC D-Link bookLander’s Travels CHAPTER II 13/25
He was, however, never able to execute this purpose, as he and the company became involved in a quarrel with the merchants, whom he visits with his highest displeasure, representing them as persons alive only to their own immediate interests, and utterly regardless of any of those honourable motives with which all commercial dealings ought to be characterised. Jobson may be said to have been the first Englishman, who enjoyed the opportunity of observing the manners and superstitions peculiar to the interior of Africa, but that must be taken as only within the narrow limits to which the discoveries at that period extended.
He found that the chiefs of the different nations were attended by bands of musicians, to whom he gives the appellation of juddies or fiddlers, and compares them to the Irish rhymsters, or, as we should now compare them, to the Italian improvisatori.
By some other authors they are called jelle, or jillemen; the instruments on which they perform being rudely made of wood, having a sonorous sound, on account of its extreme hardness, and in some instances they exhibit the knowledge of the power of an extended string, by fastening a piece of the gut of an animal across a plane of wood, and beating on it with a stick.
Like the majority of the musicians of the ruder tribes, the excellence of their music depends on the noise which is made, and if it be so obstreperous, as almost to deafen the auditors, the greater is the pleasure which is shown. These wandering minstrels are frequently attended by the Greegree men, or sorcerers, who, on account of the fantastic dress which they wear, form a most motley group; the Greegree men, trying to outvie each other in the hideous and fantastic style of their dress, and the more frightful they make themselves appear, the greater they believe is the effect of their sorcery.
The principal festivals are those of circumcision and of funeral.
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