Читать книгу Great Zimbabwe, Mashonaland, Rhodesia. An account of two years' examination work in 1902-4 on behalf of the government of Rhodesia онлайн

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From two to five players sit on each side. Each of the partners on either side appears to have an equal right of moving the counters. The two lines of holes near each set of partners is not intruded upon by the counters of the opponents, but opponents clutch up the counters of the opposite side when such counters have no counter either in the hole behind or in front, and this snatching up of counters is governed by rules which in some moves closely resemble those of chess, while double counters in a hole are as influential as kings in draughts.

Some of the moves strongly remind one of “fox and geese,” each side moving in turn, and later in the game, when the holes are full of counters, each side chases the other along parallel lines of holes to the end of the set. This chasing is a cause of great excitement, and is concluded in a perfect babel of shouting, each player as he moves a counter in the chase calling out in-da! and when the final hole is reached, ga!

Always while in camp there is a perpetual shouting of in-da! in-da! in-da! followed by the triumphant shout of ga! The subject of heated discussion during the game is as to the amount of cheating the other side has effected, and the tumult caused by the discussion of this topic, especially with an extraordinarily talkative people like the Makalangas, can only be but partially imagined. The perpetual in-da! in-da! in-da!—ga! trespasses into one’s dreamland. After a week of this never-ceasing in-da! the sets of holes were ordered to be removed to a more reasonable distance from the hut door; still, one cannot even now escape this perpetual and monotonous din. Yet in all their excited disputations they have never once got beyond mere words. The picaninnies sometimes join in at the larger sets, but a prompter always assists them.