Note 69 — Chapter XVII · ACHIEVEMENT

We cannot help thinking that Dr. Weule must be mistaken in supposing this game to be borrowed from a European source. The late Commander Cameron, at Kasongo in 1874, saw a slave of the Arab, Juma Merikani, “exhibiting tricks ... with a piece of heavy, hard wood shaped like an hour-glass, and two sticks each a foot in length. Taking a stick in each hand, he could make the wood rotate rapidly and run backwards and forwards ... between the sticks, on a piece of string attached to their ends; then, by a peculiar jerk, he would send the wood flying up into the air, higher than a cricket-ball could be thrown, and catching it on the string, would again set it rolling” (Across Africa, II, 91). At this time, diabolo, of course, was quite unknown in Europe, though it had been a fashionable game in the early part of last century. A writer in the Bulletin de la Société Belge des Etudes Coloniales (December, 1908), in a notice of Dr. Weule’s book, after quoting the above passage from Cameron, refers to a description of the game (under the name of Le Diable), from a work entitled Les Amusements de la Campagne (Paris, 1826). It was believed to have originated in China.—[Tr.]