adventures in ancestry (part 2)
so it’s mother’s day weekend and the dna test packet arrived two weeks ago. it will take us six weeks to get the results but i’m going to wrap it up and give it to my mom at tea tomorrow. she’s excited as am i so i’ll be sure to post this after we’ve opened the materials and gone through the contents!
so the tea party was a smashing success and my mother took the packet home to read through the contents. i called her on sunday for the official salutation and she excitedly told me that the swabs were in the mail. twenty rubs in each cheek and that was that. funny i haven’t thought much of it because it’s still so abstract but it will be like christmas all over again when the results arrive!
The Bubi (pronounced Boobie).
Seems this tribe had migrated from the West African mainland to this relatively small (70 km long, 32 km across) island between 3500 and 1500 BC. The Boobies call their island ‘Otcho’. The Portuguese explorer Fernão do Pó discovered (actually according to RAW he ‘stumbled upon it lookin for something else (2)) the island in 1471 and named it ‘Formosa Flora’. Today the island is called Bioko (part of Equatorial Guinea) and as a repressed minority the Boobies are ruled by the Fang (whose sculptures by the way appear as the most remarkable artwork of Africa to me).
“After a death the Boobies of Fernando Po forsake the village in which it occurred” – Herbert Spencer & Jonathan Turner: “The principles of sociology”, 1896.
The Boobies of Fernando Po were some kind of existentialists, as they did not see time as a thread but only saw the isolated instant. They had no perception of past nor intention for future; every thought to them came prefabricated from above. Every day for them was a new life. For them everything was similar; hence they had no arythmetics. To speak they always needed the light of a fire: they needed to see the words, using grimaces and pantomime. The boobies speak using verbal tone; it appears to us they are singing. They can communicate over large distances using instruments imitating the sounds of their language. “They never begin to talk until they have heard the attention signal from the other interlocutor. This is the same as we do in our telephony. After each phrase they give a signal that they have finished, unless it is a generally understood question or proclamation.”