NATIVE DANCING.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 3351, 18 October 1911, Page 2

NATIVE DANCING.

WEIRD EXHIBITION SEEN BY BRITISH EXPLORERS IN FRENCH GUINEA. Major Powell Cotton has just returned to England after a shooting expedition in Portuguese and French Guinea. Sport was not so good as he had hoped, as almost every Guinea native owns a gun, and spends his leisure moments wandering in the busli seeking for a stray shot. However, the major got a fair number of specimens. As to the objects of his journey, Major Powell Cotton informed Reuter’s representative that since his two expeditions to Uganda and Equitorial Africa he had been most anxious to get some specimens from the west coast for purposes of comparison, and, therefore, decided to visit Guinea. “It- is a curious fact,” he added, “that the types "of animals from the west coast penetrate much .farther into the interior than those from the east, for many which I had collected on the eastern tributaries of the Congo were found to he similar to west coast forms.” Referring to the Folah and its peopeople, the explorer said, though it was nearing the end of the hot weather when he was there', the country was wonderfully green, in striking contrast to all other parts of Africa that he had visited, where, at a similar season, the land would be parched and the grass and trees brown. The two large rivers which water the country should make irrigation of thousands of acres, a comparatively easy matter. Wild rubber, vines, and pal ms are plentiful, while among the crops are cotton, ground nuts and very fine rice. “I witnessed,” he added, “a. curious dance at Kambafuta, a village some distance from Kade, where a number of ladies, accompanied by a band of four drummers, came out to sing to us. In the course of her evolutions the leading ‘danseuse’ pranced close up to where I was only to stop suddenly and throw her head backwards several times with such a violent jerk that it was wonderful the spinal column was uninjured. It was the most curiously painful exhibition in the way of cfancing that I have ever seen in any land.”