Word: tribalized
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...Leopard Skin. Among the blacks there had sprung up a quasi-religious group called Abako, which Belgian newspapers brushed off as merely a tribal organization. Originally it had been formed by the Bakongo tribe of the south as a sort of protective union against the harder-working and more favored Bangalas. But under the leadership of a slight, timid-looking but steel-willed fanatic named Joseph Kasavubu, 41, it gradually turned its anger upon bigger targets...
...fabled 14th century kingdom of the Congo, combining territories now French, Belgian and Portuguese. After his election as one of Léopoldville's commune burgomasters in 1957, he had himself declared "Supreme Leader" by his followers, and began receiving homage seated on a leopard skin, symbol of tribal supreme power. Meanwhile, the rival Bangalas also began organizing, and the bush telegraph began to echo the nationalist sentiments of the recent All African Peoples Conference in Accra. To make matters worse, the demand for Congolese copper ore hit a slump, and jobless natives swarmed into the city to find...
...stronger tribes. Some time during the last four centuries they must have had terrifying brushes with European frontiersmen. Their demonology is dominated by an ogre named Möul who shows in figurines as a tall, long-legged, wide-eyed person, probably a white man grown into a tribal devil. Having seen enough of Möul and his violent ways, the Xetás retired into the tangled heart of the Serra dos Dourados and managed to hide from the civilized world for several hundred years...
...kindly matron who wants to marry everyone off; the professional matchmaker, with his human goldbricks and his spiel; the absurdly natty, paunchy, rich upstart. As they cluck, strut, brag, fib, fence, they have no great personal identity; they spill over indeed into caricature. But they boast a sort of tribal flesh; their pretenses and deprecations and denials are bequests from a world of hard competition to a world...
Quilled Noses. The centuries have been mostly peaceful ones for the Batonga. They plant and reap two crops a year. The great tribal wars to the southeast between the Mashona and the fierce Matabele were only a distant rumbling. To frustrate Arab slave raiders, the Batonga took a typical way out: their women were ordered to knock out their four upper incisors and insert porcupine quills and twigs through holes bored in their noses. Object: to lessen their attractiveness and, therefore, their value in the slave marts. When the white men arrived and broke the power of the Matabele with...