The Mpongwe breakfast is eaten by the women in their respective verandahs, with their children and friends; the men also gather together, and prefer the open air.  This feed would not only astonish those who talk about a “free breakfast-table,” with its silly slops and bread-stuffs; it would satisfy a sharp-set Highlander.  In addition to yams and sweet potatoes, plantains, and perhaps rice, there will be cooked mangrove-oysters fresh from the tree, a fry, or an excellent bouillabaisse of fish; succulent palaver sauce, or palm-oil chop; poultry and meat.  The domestic fowl is a favourite; but, curious to say, neither here nor in any part of tropical Africa known to me have the people tamed the only gallinaceous bird which the Black Continent has contributed to civilization.  The Guinea fowl, like the African elephant, remains wild.  We know it to be an old importation in Europe, although there are traditions about its appearing in the fourteenth century, when Moslems sold it to Christians as the “Jerusalem cock,” and Christians to Moslems as the “bird of Meccah.”  It must be the Greek meleagris, so called, says AElian, from the sisters who wept a brother untimely slain; hence the tears upon its plume, suggesting the German Perl-huhn, and its frequent cries, which the Brazilians, who are great in the language of birds, translate Sto fraca, sto fraca, sto fraca (I’m weak).  The Hausa Moslems make the Guinea fowl cry, “Kilkal! kilkal!” (Grammar by the Rev. F. J. Schon, London, Salisbury Square, 1862).  It is curious to compare the difference of ear with which nations hear the cries of animals, and form their onomatopoetic, or “bow-wow” imitations.  For instance, the North Americans express by “whip-poor-will” what the Brazilians call “Joao-corta-pao.”  The Guinea fowl may have been the “Afraa avis;"but that was a dear luxury amongst the Romans, though the Greek meleagris was cheap.  The last crotchet about it is that of an African traveller, who holds it to be the peacock of Solomon’s navies, completely ignoring the absolute certainty which the South-Indian word “Tukkiim” carries with it.

The Mpongwe will not eat ape, on account of its likeness to themselves.  But they greatly enjoy game; the porcupine, the ground-hog (an Echymys), the white flesh of the bush pig (Cricetomys), and the beef of the Nyare (Bos brachyceros); this is the “buffalo” or “bush-cow” of the regions south of Sierra Leone, and the empacassa of the Congo-Portuguese, whose “empacasseirs” or native archers, rural police and auxiliaries “of the second line,” have as “guerra preta” (black militia) won many a victory.  Their numbers in Angola have amounted to 30,000, and they aided in conquest like the Indian Sipahi (sepoy) and the Tupi of the older Brazil.  Now they wear the Tanga or Pagne, a waist cloth falling to the knee, and they are armed with trade muskets and cartridge-boxes fastened to broad belts.  Barbot calls the Nyare a buffalo, and tells us that it was commonly shot at Sandy Point, where in his day elephants also abounded.  Captain Boteler (ii. 379) well describes a specimen, which was killed by Dr. Guland, R.N., as exactly resembling the common cow of England, excepting that its proportions are far more “elegant.”