A Queer people.
--
Chambers' --Journal, discussing a recent book of missionary travels in
Africa, thus alludes to one of the tribes which are found in that
terra incognita:
"But the strangest of all the stories told are of the Dokos, who live among the moist, warm bamboo woods to the south of Caffa and
Susa.
Only four feet high, of a dark olive color, savage and naked, they have neither houses nor temples, neither fire nor human food.
They live only on ants, mice, and serpents, diversified by a few roots and fruits; they let their nails grow long, like talons, the better to dig for ants, and the more easily to tear in pieces their favorite snakes.
They do not marry, but live indiscriminative lives of animals, multiplying very rapidly, and with very little material instinct.
The mother nurses her child for only a short time, accustoming it to eat ants and serpents as soon as possible; and when it can help itself, it wanders away where it will, and the mother thinks no more about it. The
Dokos are invaluable as slaves, and are taken in large numbers.
The slave hunters hold up bright colored clothes as soon as they come to the moist, warm bamboo woods where these human monkeys live, and the poor
Dokos can not resist the attraction offered by such superior people.
They crowd round them, and are taken in thousands.
In slavery they are docile, attached, obedient, with few wants and excellent health. --They have only one fault — a love of ants, mice and serpents, and a habit of speaking to Yer with their heads on the ground, and their heels in the air. Yer is their idea of a superior power, to whom they talk in this comical nature when they are dispirited or angry, or tired of ants and snakes, and longing for unknown food.
The
Dokos seem to come nearest of all people yet discovered to that terrible cousin of humanity — the ape."
