"Emollit mores nec sinit esse feros."

The negroes of Loanda struck me as unusually ill-favoured; short,
"stumpy," and very dark, or tinged with unclean yellow. Lepers
and hideous cripples thrust their sores and stumps in the face of
charity. There was no local colouring compared with the
carregadores, or coolies, from the northeast, whose thrum-mop
heads and single monkey skins for fig-leaves, spoke of the wold
and the wild. The body-dress of both sexes is the tanga, pagne,
or waist-cloth, unless the men can afford trousers and ragged
shirts, and the women a "veo preto," or dingy black sheet,
ungracefully worn, like the graceful sari of Hindostan, over the
bright foulard which confines the wool. "It is mighty ridiculous
to observe," says the old missionary, "that the women, contrary
to the custom of all other nations, buy and sell, and do all
things which the men ought to do, whilst their husbands stay at
home and spin or weave cotton, or busy themselves in such other
effeminate actions." This is not wholly true in '63. The
"munengana,"or machila-man, is active in offering his light cane
palanquin, and he chaffs the "mean white" who is compelled to
walk, bitterly as did the sedan-chairmen of Bath before the days
of Beau Nash. Of course the Quitandeira, or market-woman, holds
her own. The rest of the street population seems to consist of
negro "infantry" and black Portuguese pigs, gaunt and long-
legged. The favourite passe-temps is to lie prone in sun or
shade, chattering and smoking the cachimbo, a heavy clay pipe,
with peculiar stem--"to sleep supine," say the Arabs, "is the
position of saints; on the dexter side, of kings; on the
sinister, of learned men; and on the belly, of devils."