The Ba­jun dis­trict con­sists of Port Durn­ford, the sub-dis­trict of Arnoleh [Anooleh], and a se­ries of small is­lands ad­ja­cent to the coast. The na­tives in­clude the Ba­jun, the Boni, and the Gala tribes.

 

The Ba­jun are a race quite dis­tinct from the So­mali, and they have their own lan­guage and cus­toms. Their lo­cal name is Wa-Tikuu. They ob­tain a liv­ing by fish­ing and ma­rine trad­ing. They claim to be de­scended from Per­sian set­tlers; this is cor­rob­o­rated by the ex­is­tence in their dis­trict of ru­ined stone houses of dis­tinctly Per­sian ar­chi­tec­ture, and also by their light com­plex­ion and reg­u­lar fea­tures.

The Boni tribe for­merly lived in the Gur­reh [Garre] coun­try on the bor­ders of Abyssinia, where their sole oc­cu­pa­tion was that of hunt­ing. Grad­u­ally they spread south­ward un­til they reached that part of Juba­land then in­hab­ited by the Gala, who are lo­cally termed the Wur­day. With this tribe they made an agree­ment that they should be al­lowed to live and hunt in the dis­tricts of Af­madu and Deshek Wama, un­der con­di­tion that one tusk of every ele­phant killed should be handed to the Gala.
Juba­land Wa-gosha vil­lage

When the So­mali and the Gala be­gan fight­ing the Boni were neu­tral, but when the for­mer proved vic­to­ri­ous the Boni re­tired into the thick bush, where for two years they lived on game. Sub­se­quently they made with the Ogaden So­mali a sim­i­lar arrange­ment to that which they had for­merly made with the Gala, and this arrange­ment is still car­ried out. They now have set­tle­ments in Arnoleh [Anooleh] and the hin­ter­land of Port Durn­ford. In physique they are in no re­spect like ne­groes. Op­pressed and per­se­cuted by the young So­mali, they have be­come ex­tremely timid and shy of strangers. If a trav­eller ap­proaches one of their vil­lages, the whole pop­u­la­tion takes refuge in the thorn bush, where it is quite im­pos­si­ble to track them. Their weapons are bows with poi­soned ar­rows. This poi­son they ob­tain from a scarce tree called Wabaiyu, which is a species of Eu­phor­bia. Of late years this tribe has be­gun to col­lect the wild rub­ber around Arnoleh [Anooleh] and to barter it with the Ba­jun in ex­change for cloth. In hunt­ing they have re­mark­able skill, and their knowl­edge of the bush is won­der­ful. When wa­ter fails them in the bush they watch the birds, and when they see the birds sit­ting on yak trees in any num­bers, their ex­pe­ri­ence tells them that wa­ter will prob­a­bly be found in the hol­lows of some of the trees.

These yak trees have thick stunted trunks in which large cav­i­ties are of­ten to be found. The branches of the trees spring from the cir­cle of liv­ing wood round the cav­i­ties.

The mar­riage cus­toms of the Boni are very sim­ple. When a young man wants a wife he goes hunt­ing un­til he kills an ele­phant, of which the one tusk is for his So­mali su­pe­rior and the other he ex­changes for cloth. The cloth is given to the girl`s fa­ther, and if it is suf­fi­cient in quan­tity she be­comes his wife.

In in­tel­li­gence the Boni are su­pe­rior to the Ba­jun, but not equal to the Gala or the So­mali. Their lan­guage, which is at pre­sent un­writ­ten, some­what re­sem­bles that of the So­mali, yet the dif­fer­ence is too great for mu­tual un­der­stand­ing.

It is note­wor­thy that a small set­tle­ment of Boni, liv­ing on the banks of the Juba, have be­gun to cul­ti­vate maize. It is dif­fi­cult to es­ti­mate the num­ber of Boni now liv­ing in Juba­land, but prob­a­bly they do not ex­ceed a thou­sand. This in­ter­est­ing tribe, who may pos­si­bly be the abo­rig­ines of the coun­try, are rapidly de­creas­ing in num­bers, and in a few years will prob­a­bly be ex­tinct or merged among the So­mali, whose mis­sion­ar­ies are busily em­ployed in con­vert­ing them from Pa­gan­ism to Mo­hammedanism.