Travels of an Arab merchant in Soudan (the Black Kingdoms of Central Africa)Tūnisī, Muḥammad ibn ʻUmar
History
Travels of an Arab merchant in Soudan (the Black Kingdoms of Central Africa)
Tūnisī, Muḥammad ibn ʻUmar
Darfur (Sudan) -- Description and travel; Wadai (Sultanate) -- Description and travel
Many people in Darfur gain their living by hunting. They are
divided into two classes, and are generally workers in iron. They
rarely appear in the villages, and form a caste apart, called
Darmoudy. They are people without faith and without law, and it
is dangerous to meet them in bye-places. The other Forians never
seek to ally themselves to them by marriage. The first class hunts
quadrupeds, as the gazelle, the wild ox, the elephant, the buffalo,
the hyæna, the lion, the rhinoceros, &c. They dig pits, in which
they place stakes, and cover them with slight roofings of branches
and earth. When they catch an elephant, they take the ivory and the
skin; the latter is used to make bucklers and kurbashes. Sometimes
the Darmoudies use fixed lassoes to catch their prey; at other
times lances and javelins.
The second class of hunters devotes itself entirely to
bird-catching. They seek principally the hoberah, a kind of bustard,
which they catch with a worm and a line, like a fish. Small birds
are taken by nets, to which they are attracted by millet-seeds. If
a Darmoudy catches paroquets, or parrots, he pulls out the feathers
of their wings and takes them home alive in a basket to sell.
There are some Darmoudies who go into the mountains to hunt various
kinds of monkeys. The gun is never used either on this or on any
other occasion. Some rich people keep a slave always employed in
hunting; and I once tried to procure one who was clever, but did
not succeed. The giraffe and the ostrich are hunted principally by
the Bedawin Arabs, who run them down on horseback.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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