 CHAPTER 11. DOWN THE REMBUE. Getting forth how the Voyager descends the Rembue River, with diverse excursions and alarms in the company of a black trader, and returns safely to the coast. Getting away from Agonju seemed as if it would be nearly as difficult as getting to it, but as the quarters were comfortable and the society fairly good I was not anxious. I owned the local scenery was a little too much of the Niger Delta type for perfect beauty, just the long lines of mangrove and the muddy river lounging almost imperceptibly to sea, and nothing else in sight. Mr. Glass, however, did not take things so philosophically. I was on his commercial conscience for I had come in from the bush, and there was money in me. Therefore I was a trade product, a new trade stuff that ought to be worked up and developed, and he found himself unable to do this, for although he had secured the first parcel as it were, and got it successfully stored, yet he could not ship it, and he felt this was a reproach to him. Many were his lamentations that the firm had not provided him with a large sailing canoe, and a suitable crew to deal with this new line of trade. I did my best to comfort him, pointing out that the most enterprising firm could not be expected to provide expensive things like these on the extremely remote chance of ladies arriving per bush at Agonju. In fact, not until the trade in them was well developed. But he refused to see it in this light, and harped upon the subject, wrapped up poor man in a great coat and a muffler because his agu was on him. I next tried to convince Mr. Glass that any canoe would do for me to go down in. No, he said, any canoe will not do. And he explained that when you got down the Remwe to Como Point you were in a rough nasty bit of water, the Gabun, which has a fine confused set of currents from the tidal wash and the streams of the Remwe, and Como Rivers in which it would be improbable that a river canoe could live any time with mentioning. Progress below Como Point by means of mere paddling he considered impossible. There was nothing for it but a big sailing canoe, and there was no big sailing canoe to be had. I think Mr. Glass got a ray of comfort out of the fact that Miser's John Holt's subasient was equally with himself unable to ship me. At this point in the affair there entered a highly dramatic figure. He came onto the scene suddenly and with much uproar in a way that would have made his fortune in a transpontine drama. I shall always regret I have not got that man's portrait, for I cannot do him justice with ink. He dashed up onto the veranda, smote the frail form of Mr. Glass between the shoulders, and flung his own massive one into a chair. His name was Obanjo, but he liked it pronounced Captain Johnson, and his profession was a bush and river trader on his own account. Every movement of the man was theatrical, and he used to look covertly at you every now and then to see if he had produced his impression, which was evidently intended to be that of a reckless, rollicking skipper. There was a, hello, my hearty atmosphere coming off him from the top of his hat to the soles of his feet, like the scent of a flower, but did not require a genius in judging men to see that behind, and under this was a very different sort of man, and if I should ever want to engage in a wild and awful career up a West African river, I shall start on it by engaging Captain Johnson. He struck me as being one of those men, of whom I know five, whom I could rely on, that if one of them and I went into the utter bush together, one of us at least would come out alive, and have made something substantial by the venture, which is a great deal more than I could say, for example of N'Gotha, who was still with me, as he desired to see the glories of Gaboon and by a hanging lamp. Captain Johnson's attire calls for a special comment and admiration. However disconnected the two sides of his character might be, his clothes bore the impress of both of his natures to perfection. He wore, when first we met, a huge sombrero hat, a spotless singlet, and a suit of clean, well-got-up, dungery, and an uncommonly picturesque, powerful figure he cut in them, with his finely moulded, well-knit form and good-looking face, full of expression always, but always with the keen small eyes in it, watching the effect his genial smiles and hearty laugh produced. The eyes were the eyes of a banjo, the rest of the face the property of Captain Johnson. I do not mean to say that they were the eyes of a bad, bold man, but you had not to look twice at them to see they belonged to a man courageous in the African manner, full of energy and resource, keenly intelligent and self-reliant and all that sort of thing. I laughed him and the refined Mr. Glass together to talk over their palaver of shipping me, and they talked at a great length. Finally the price I was to pay a banjo was settled and we proceeded to less important details. It seemed a banjo, when up the river this time, had set about, constructing a new and large trading canoe at one of his homes, in which he was just thinking of taking his goods down to Gabun. Next morning, a banjo with his vessel turned up, and saying farewell to my kind host Mr. Sanga Glass, I departed. She had the makings of a fine vessel in her, though roughly hewn, out of an immense hardwood tree, her lines were good, and her type was that of the big sea canoes of the Bight of Panavia. Very far forward was a pole mast, roughly made, but European in intention and carrying a long gaff. Shrouds and stays it had not, and my impression was that it would be carried away if we dropped in for half a tornado, until I saw our sail, and recognized that that would go to darning cotton instantly if it fell in with even a breeze. It was a bed quilt that had evidently been in the family some years, and although it had been in places carefully patched with pieces of previous sets of the captain's dungarees, in other places where it had not, it gave free passage to the airs of heaven, which I may remark does not make for speed in the boat mounting such canvas. Partly to this sail, partly to the amount of trading affairs we attended to, do I owe the credit of having made a record trip down the Rembe, the slowest white men time on record. Fixed across the stern of the canoe, there was the usual staging made of bamboos flush with a gun well. Now this sort of staging is an exceedingly good idea when it is fully finished. You can stuff no end of things under it, and over it there is erected a hood of palm thatch, giving a very comfortable cabin five or six feet long and about three feet high in the center, and you can curl yourself up in it and, if you please, have a mat hung across the opening. But we had not got so far as that yet on our vessel, only just got the staging fixed in fact, and I assure you a bamboo staging is but a precarious perch when in this stage of formation. I made myself a reclining couch on it in the Roman manner with my various belongings, and was exceeding comfortable until we got nearly out of the Rembe into the Gabun. Then came grand times. Our noble craft had by this time got a good list on her from our collected cargo, ill-stowed. This made my home, the bamboo staging, about as reposeful a place as a slope of a writing desk would be if well polished, and the rough and choppy sea gave our vessel the most peculiar set of motions imaginable. She rolled, which made it precarious for things on the bamboo staging, but still a legitimate motion, natural and foreseeable. In addition to this she had a cataclysmic kick in her that I think the heathenish thing meant to be a pitch, which no mortal being could foresee or provide against, and which projected portable property into the waters of the Gabun over the stern and onto the conglomerate collection in the bottom of the canoe itself, making a banjo repeat, with ferocity and feeling words he had heard years ago when he was boatswain on a steamboat trading on the coast. It was fortunate you will please understand from my future that I have usually been on vessels of the British African or the African lines when voyaging about this West African seaboard, as the owners of these vessels prohibit the use of bad language on board, or goodness only knows what words I might not have remembered and used in the Gabun estuary. We left a gonjo with as much bustle and shouting and general air of brisk seamanship as a banjo could impart to the affair, and the hopeful mind might have expected to reach somewhere important by nightfall. I did not expect that, neither on the other hand did I expect, that after we had gone a mile and only four, as the early ballad would say, that we should pull up and anchor against a small village for the night, but this we did, the captain going ashore to see for cargo and to get some more crew. There were grand times ashore that night, and the captain returned on board about two a.m., with some rubber and pisava and two new hands, whose appearance fitted them to join our vessel for a more villainous looking set than our crew I never laid eye on. One enormously powerful fellow looked the incarnation of the horrid Negro of buccaneer stories, and I admired a banjo for the way he kept them in hand. We had now also acquired a small dugout canoe as tender and a large fishing net. About four a.m. in the moonlight we started to drop down river on the tail of the land breeze, and as I observed a banjo wanted to sleep I offered to steer. After putting me through an examination in practical seamanship and passing me he gladly accepted my offer, handed over the tiller which struck out across my bamboo staging, and went and curled himself up, falling sound asleep among the crew in less time than it takes to ride. On the other nights we spent on this voyage I had no need to offer to steer. He handed over charge to me as a matter of course, and as I prefer night to day in Africa I enjoyed it. Indeed much as I have enjoyed life in Africa I do not think I ever enjoyed it to the full as I did on those nights dropping down the remway. The great black winding river with a pathway in its midst of frosted silver where the moonlight struck it, on each side the ink-black mangrove walls, and above them the band of star and moonlit heavens that the walls of mangrove allowed one to see. Forward rose the form of our sail, idealized from bedsheet dumb to glory, and the little red glow of our cooking fire gave a single note of warm color to the cold light of the moon. Three or four times during the second night while I was steering along by the south bank I found the mangrove wall thinner, and standing up looked through the network of their roots and stems onto what seemed like planes, acres upon acres in extent of polished sliver, more specimens of those awful slime lagoons, one of which before we reached Endorco had so very nearly collected me. I watched them as we leisurely stole past with a sort of fascination. On the second night towards the dawn I had the great joy of seeing Mount Okoneto away to the southwest first showing moonlit and then taking the colors of the dawn before they reached us down below. Ah, me! Give me a West African river and a canoe for sheer good pleasure. Drawbacks, you say? Well, yes, but where are there not drawbacks? The only drawbacks on those at Emboonites were the series of horrid frights I got by staring onto tree shadows and thinking they were mud banks, or trees themselves, so black and solid they seem. I never roused the watch fortunately but got her off the shadow gallantly single-handed every time, and called myself a fool instead of getting called one. My nautical friends carpet me for getting on shadows, but I begged them to consider before they judge me whether they have ever steered at night down a river quite unknown to them an unhandy canoe with a bedsheet sail by the light of the moon. And what with my having a theory of my own regarding the proper way to take a vessel around a corner and what with having to keep the wind in the bedsheet where the bedsheet would hold it, it's a wonder to me I did not cast that vessel away or go and damage Africa. By daylight the Remboe scenery was certainly not so lovely and might be slept through without a pang. It had monotony without having enough of it to amount to grandeur. Every now and again we came to villages, each of which was situated on a heap of clay and sandy soil, presumably the end of a spit of land running out into the mangrove swamp fringing the river. Every village we saw we went alongside and had a chat with and tried to look up cargo in the proper way. One village in particular did we have a lively time at. Obanjo had a wife and home there, likewise a large herd of goats, some of which he was desirous of taking down with us to sell at Gabun. It was a pleasant-looking village with a clean yellow beach which most of the houses faced. But it had ramifications in the interior. I, being very lazy, did not go ashore but watched the pantomime from the bamboo staging. The whole flock of goats enter at right end of stage and tear violently across the scene disappearing at left. Two minutes elapsed. Obanjo and his gallant crew enter at right end of stage, like it like lamp-lighters across front and disappeared left. Fearful pow-wow behind the scenes. Five minutes elapsed. Enter goats at right as before, followed by Obanjo and company as before, and so on the capo. It was more like a fight I once saw between the armies of Macbeth and Macduff than anything I have seen before since. Only our Remboy play was better put on, more supers and noise and all that sort of thing, you know. It was a spirited performance, I assure you, and I, and the inhabitants of the village, not personally interested in goat-catching, assumed the role of audience and cheered it to the echo. We had another cheerful little incident that afternoon. While we were going along softly, as was our want, in the broiling heat, I, wishing I had an umbrella, for sitting on that bamboo stage with no sort of protection from the sun was hot work after the forest shade I had had previously, two small boys in two small canoes shot out from the bank and paddled hard to us and jumped on board. After a few minutes' conversation with Obanjo, one of them carefully sank his canoe, the other just turned his adrift and they joined our crew. I saw they were friends, as indeed nearly all the crew were, but I did not think much of the affair. Our tender, the small canoe, had been sent out as usual with the big black men and another A.B. to fish, it being one of our industries to fish hard all the time with that big net. The fish caught, sometimes a bushel or two at a time, almost all gray mullet, for then brought alongside, split open and cleaned. We then had all round as many of them for supper as we wanted, the rest we hung on strips over our fire, more or less insufficiently smoking them to prevent decomposition, it being Obanjo's intention to sell them when he made his next trip up, the komo, for the latter being less rich in fish than the remboe they would command a good price there. We always had our eye on things like this being, I proudly remark, none of your gilded floating hotel of a ferry boat like those kunard or white star liners are, but just a good trader that was not ashamed to pay and not afraid of work. Well, just after we had leisurely entered a new reach of the river, round the corner after us propelled at a phenomenal pace came our fishing canoe which we had left behind to haul in the net and then rejoin us. The occupants, particularly the big black A.B., were shouting something in terror-stricken accents. What? says Obanjo, springing to his feet. The fan, the fan! shouted the canoemen as they shot towards us like agitated chickens making for their hen. In another moment they were alongside and tumbling over our gun-whale into the bottom of the vessel still crying, the fan, the fan, the fan! Obanjo then by means of energetic questioning externally applied and accompanied by florid language that cast a rose-pink glow smelling of sulfur round us elicited the information that about forty thousand fans armed with knives and guns were coming down the remboe with intent to kill and slay us and might be expected to arrive within the next half-wink. On hearing this the whole of our gallant crew took up masterly recumbent positions in the bottom of our vessel and turned gray around the lips. Obanjo rose to the situation like ten lions, take the rudder, he shouted to me, take her into the middle of the stream and keep the sail full. It occurred to me that perhaps a position underneath the bamboo staging might be more healthy than one on the top of it exposed to every microbe of a bit of old iron and what not in a half that according to native testimony would shortly be frisking through the atmosphere from those fanguns and moreover I had not forgotten having been previously shot in a somewhat similar situation though in better company. However I did not say anything, neither between ourselves did I somehow believe in those fans. So regardless of danger I grasped the helm and sent our gallant craft flying before the breeze down the bosom of the great wild river. That's the proper way to put it but in the interests of science it may be translated into crawling towards the middle. Meanwhile Obanjo performed prodigies of valor all over the place. He triced up the main sail stirred up his faint-hearted crew and got out the sweeps i.e. one old oar and four paddles and with this assistance we solemnly trudged away from danger at a pace that nothing slower than a famed dumb barge going against him could possibly overhaul. Still we did not feel safe and I suggested to Tungota he should rise up and help but he declined stating he was a married man. Obanjo cheering the paddlers with inspiring words sprang with the agility of a leopard onto the bamboo staging aft standing there with his gun ready loaded and cocked to face the coming foe looking like a statue put up to himself at the public expense. The worst of this was however that while Obanjo's face was to the coming foe his back was to the crew and they forthwith commenced to resubside into the bottom of the boat paddles and all. I as second in command on seeing this said a few blood-steering words to them and Obanjo sent a few more of great power at them over his shoulder and so we kept the paddles going. Presently from round the corner shot a fan canoe. It contained a lady in the bows weeping and ringing her hands while another lady sympathetically howling paddled it. Obanjo in lurid language requested to be informed why they were following us. The lady in the bow said, my son, my son, and in a second more three other canoes shot around the corner full of men with guns. Now this looked like business so Obanjo and I looked around to urge our crew to greater exertions and saw to our disgust that the gallant band had successfully subsided into the bottom of the boat while we had been eyeing the foe. Obanjo gave me a recipe for getting the sweeps out again. I did not follow it but got the job done for Obanjo could not take his eye and gone off the leading canoe and the canoes having crept up to within some twenty yards of us poured out their simple tale of woe. It seemed that one of those miscreant boys was a runaway from a fan village. He had been desirous with a usual enterprise of young fans of seeing the great world that he knew lay down at the mouth of the river, i.e. Libreville Gaboon. He had pleaded with his parents for leave to go down and engage in work there, but the sad parents holding the tenderness of his youth unfitted to combat with coast town life and temptation refused this request and so the young rascal had run away without leave and with a canoe and was surmised to have joined the well-known Obanjo. Obanjo owned he had. More armed canoes were coming round the corner and said if the mother would come and fetch her boy she could have him. He for his part would not have dreamed of taking him if he had known his relations disapproved. Every once seemed much relieved except the cause of belly. The fans did not ask about two boys and providentially we gave the lady the right one. He went reluctantly. I feel pretty nearly sure he foresaw more Casingo than fatted calf or him on his return home. When the fan canoes were well back around the corner again we had a fine hunt for the other boy and finally unearthed him from under the bamboo staging. When we got him out he told the same tale. He also was a runway who wanted to see the world and taking the opportunity of the majority of the people of his village being away hunting. He had slipped off one night in a canoe and dropped down river to the village of the boy who had just been reclaimed. The two boys had fraternized and come on the rest of their way together lying, waiting, hidden up a creek for Obanjo. Who they knew was coming down river and having successfully got picked up by him they thought they were safe. But after this affair boy number two judged there was no more safety yet and that his family would be down after him very shortly for he said he was a more valuable and important boy than his late companion but his family wore an uncommon savage set. We felt not the least anxiety to make their acquaintance so clapped heels on our gallant craft and kept the paddles going and as no more fans were inside our crew kept at work bravely. While Obanjo now in a boisterous state of mind and flushed with victory said things to them but the way they had collapsed when those two women in a canoe came round that corner that must have blistered their feelings but they never winced. They laughed at the joke against themselves merrily. The other boy's family we never saw and so took him safely to Gabun where Obanjo got him a good place. Really how much danger there was proportionate to the large amount of fear on our boat I cannot tell you. It never struck me there was any but on the other hand the crew and Obanjo evidently thought it was a bad place and my white face would have been no protection for the fans would not have suspected a white of being on such a canoe and might have fired on us if they had been unduly irritated and not treated by Obanjo with that fine compound of bully and blarney that he is such a master of. Whatever may have been the true nature of the affair however it had one good effect. It got us out of the remboy into the Gabun and although at the time this seemed a doubtful blessing it made for progress. I had by this time mastered the main points of incapability in our craft. A. We could not go against the wind. B. We could not go against the tide. While we were in the remboy there was a state we will designate as C. The tide coming one way the wind another. With this state we could progress backwards if the wind came up against us too strong but seawards if it did not and the tide was running down. If the tide was running up and the wind was coming down then we went seaward softly softly alongside the mangrove bank where the rip of the tide stream is leased. When however we got down off Como Point we met there a state I will designate as D. A fine confused set of marine and fluvial phenomena. Far away to the north the Como and Boquet and two other lesser but considerable streams were with the remboy pouring down their waters in swirling intermingling interclashing currents and up against them to make confusion worse confounded came the tide and the tide of the Gabun is a swift strong thing and irregular and has a rise of eight feet at the springs two and a half at the neeps the wind was lulled to it being evening time in this country it is customary for the wind to blow from the land from eight p.m. until eight a.m. from the south west to the east then comes a lull either an utter dead hot brooding calm or light baffling winds and droughts that breathe a few panting hot breaths into your sails and die then comes the sea breeze up from the south southwest or northwest some days early in the forenoon some days not till two or three o'clock this breeze blows till sundown and then comes another and a hotter calm fortunately for us we arrived off the head of the Gabun estuary in this calm for had we had wind to deal with we should have come to an end there were one or two wandering puffs about the first one of which sickened our counterpane of its ambitious career as a marine sail so it came away from its gaff and spread itself over the crew as much as to say here I've had enough of this sailing I'll be a counterpane again we did a great deal of fine varied spirited navigation details of which however I will not dwell upon because it was successful we made one or two circles taking on water the while and then return into the south bank backwards at that bank we wisely stayed for the night our meeting with the Gabun so far having resulted in wrecking our sail making ingota seasick and me exasperate for from our noble vessel having during the course of it demonstrated for the first time her cataclysmic kicking power I had had a time of it with my belongings on the bamboo stage a basket constructed for catching human souls in given me as a farewell gift by a valued friend a witch doctor and in which I kept the few things in life I really cared for i.e. my brush comb toothbrush and pocket handkerchiefs went over the stern while I was recovering this with my fishing line such was the excellent nature of the thing I am glad to say it floated a black bag with my blouses and such essentials went away to leeward Obanjo recovered that but meanwhile my little portmanteau containing my papers and trade tobacco slid off to leeward and as it also contained geological specimens of the Sierra del Cristal a massive range of mountains it must have hopelessly sunk had it not been for the big black who grabbed it all my bedding six equator cloths given me by mr. Hamilton in opobo river before I came south did get away successfully but were picked up by means of the fishing line wet but safe after this I did not attempt any more roman reclining couch luxuries but stowed all my loose gear under the bamboo staging and spent the night on the top of the stage dozing precariously with my head on my knees when the morning broke looking seaward I saw the welcome forms of conic dambe and pedo ket mini islands away in the distance looking as is there want like two lumps of cloud that have dropped on to the broad kaboon and I felt that I was at last getting near something worth reaching i.e. glass which though still out of sight I knew lay away to the west of those islands on the northern shore of the estuary and if anyone had given me the choice of being in glass within 24 hours from the mouth of the remway or in paris or london in a week I would have chosen glass without a moment's hesitation much as I dislike west coast towns as a general rule there are exceptions and of all exceptions the one I like most is undoubtedly glass kaboon and its charms loomed large on that dank chili morning after a night spent on a bamboo staging in an unfinished native canoe the remway like the komo is said to rise in the Sierra del Cristal it is navigable to a place called esango which is above agonjo just above agonjo it receives an affluent on its southern bank and runs through mountain country where its course is blocked by rapids for anything but small canoes obanjo did not seem to think this mattered as there was not much trade up there and therefore no particular reason why anyone should want to go higher up moreover he said the natives were an exceedingly bad lot but obanjo usually thinks badly of the bush natives in these regions anyhow they are fans and fans are fans he was anxious for me however to start on a trading voyage with him up another river a notorious river in the neighboring Spanish territory the idea was I should buy goods at glass and we should go together and he would buy ivory with them in the interior I anxiously inquired where my profits were to come in obanjo who at all at times suspected me of having trade motives artfully said what for you come across from you say see this country ah I say you come with me I show you plenty country plenty men elephants leopards gorillas oh beauty thing then you say where's my trade I disclaim trade motives in a lordly way then says he you come with me up there I said I'd see about it later on for the present I had seen enough men elephants gorillas and leopards and I preferred to go into wild districts under the french flag to any flag I am still thinking about taking that voyage but I'll not march through Coventry with a crew we had down the remway that's flat as sir John Falstaff says picture to yourselves my friends the charming situation of being upper river surrounded by rapacious savages with a lot of valuable goods in a canoe and with only a crew to defend them possessed of such fighting metal as our crew had demonstrated themselves to be obanjo might be all right would be I dare say but suppose he got shot and you had 18 stone out of him thrown on your hands in addition to your other little worries there is little doubt such an excursion would be rich in incident and highly interesting but I am sure it would be from a commercial point of view a failure trade has a fascination for me and going transversely across the nine mile broad rough gaboon estuary in an unfinished canoe with an inefficient counter pain sale has none but I return duty bound to this unpleasant subject we started very early in the morning we reached the other side entangled in the trailing garments of the night I was thankful during that broiling hot day of one thing and that was that if sister Anne was looking out across the river as was sister Anne's invariable way of spending spare moments sister Anne would never think I was in a canoe that made such audaciously bad tax missed stays got into irons and in general behaved in a way that ought to have lost her captain his certificate just as the night came down however we reached the northern shore of the grand gaboon at dongila just off the mouth of the commo still some eleven miles east of coneg island and further still from glass but on the same side of the river which seemed good work the foreshore here is very rocky so we could not go close alongside but anchored out among the rocks at this place there is a considerable village and a station of the roman catholic mission when we arrived a nun was down on the shore with her school children who were busy catching shellfish and generally merry making obanjo went ashore in the tender and the holy sister kindly asked me by him to come ashore and spend the night but I was dead tired and felt quite unfit for polite society after the long broiling hot day and getting soaked by water that had washed on board we lay off dongila all night because of the tide I lay off everything dongila canoe and all a little after midnight obanjo and almost all the crew stayed on shore for that night and I rolled myself up in an equator cloth and went sound and happily asleep on the bamboo staging leaving the canoe pitching slightly about midnight some change in the tide or original sin in the canoe caused her to softly swing round a bit and the next news was that I was in the water I had long expected this to happen so was not surprised but highly disgusted and climbed on board needless to say streaming so in the darkness of the night I got my portmanteau from the hold and thoroughly tidied up the next morning we were off early coasting along to glass and safely arriving there I attempted to look as unconcerned as possible and vaguely hoped mr. Hudson would be down in Libreville for I was nervous about meeting him knowing that since he had carefully deposited me in safe hands with mm jackpot with many injunctions to be careful that there were many incidents in my career that would not meet with his approval vain hope he was on the pier he did not approve he had heard of most of my goings on this however in no way detracts from my great obligation to mr. Hudson but adds another item to the great debt of gratitude I owe him for had it not been for him I should never have seen the interior of this beautiful region of the Ogoway I tried to explain to him how much I had enjoyed myself and how I realized I owed it all to him but he persisted in his opinion that my intentions and ambitions were suicidal and took me out in suing Sunday as it were on a string end of chapter 11 down the remway read by a candy of bar trek dot com chapter 12 fetish of travels in west africa this is a liver vox recording all liver vox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit liver vox dot org travels in west africa by mary age kingsley chapter 12 fetish in which the voyager attempts cautiously to approach the subject of fetish and gives a classification of spirits and some account of the ebet and orunda having given some account of my personal experiences among an african tribe in its original state i.e. in a state uninfluenced by european ideas and culture I will make an attempt to give a rough sketch of the african form of thought and the difficulties of studying it because the study of this thing is my chief motive for going to west africa since 1893 I have been collecting information in its native state regarding fetish and I use the usual terms fetish and juju because they have among us a certain fixed value a conventional value but a useful one neither fetish nor juju are native words fetish comes from the word the old portuguese explorers used to designate the objects they thought the natives worshiped and in which they were wise enough to recognize a certain similarity to their own little images and relics of saints fetiko juju on the other hand is french and comes from the word for a toy or doll so it is not so applicable as the portuguese name for the native image is not a doll or toy and has far more affinity to the image of a saint in as much as it is not venerated for itself or treasured because of its prettiness but only because it is the residence or the occasional haunt of a spirit stalking the wild west african idea is one of the most charming pursuits in the world quite apart from the intellectual it has a high sporting interest for its pursuit is as beset with difficulty and danger as grizzly bear hunting yet the climate in which you carry on this pursuit while as it is is warm which to me is almost an essential of existence i beg you to understand that i make no pretension to a thorough knowledge of fetish ideas i am only on the threshold iqvis night all doc fail is mere pekant as fost said and like him after he had said it i have got a lot to learn i do not intend here to weary you with more than a small portion of even my present knowledge for i have great collections of facts that i keep only to compare with those of other hunters of the wild idea and which in their present state are valueless to the cabinet ethnologist some of these maybe rank lies some of them mere individual mind freaks others have underlying them some idea i am not at present in touch with the difficulty of gaining a true conception of the savages real idea is great and varied in places on the coast where there is or has been much missionary influence the trouble is greatest for in the first case the natives carefully conceal things they fear will bring them into derision and contempt although they still keep them in their innermost hearts and in the second case you have a set of traditions which are christian in origin though frequently altered almost beyond recognition by being kept for years in the atmosphere of the african mind for example there is this beautiful story now extant among the cabindas god made at first all men black he always does in the african story and then he went across a great river and called men to follow him and the wisest and bravest in the best plunged into the great river and crossed it and the water washed them white so they are the ancestors of the white men but the others were afraid too much and said no we are comfortable here we have our dances and our tom-toms and plenty to eat we won't risk it we'll stay here and they remained in the old place and from them came the black men but to this day the white men come to the bank on the other side of the river and called the black men saying come it is better over here i fear there is little doubt that this story is a modified version of some parable preached to the cabindas at the time the capuchins had such influence among them before they were driven out of the lower congo regions more than a hundred years ago for political reasons by the portuguese in the bush where the people have been little or not at all in contact with european ideas in some ways the investigation is easier yet another set of difficulties confronts you the difficulty that seems to occur most easily to people is the difficulty of the language the west african languages are not difficult to pick up nevertheless there are an awful quantity of them and they are at the best most imperfect mediums of communication no one who has been on the coast can fail to recognize how inferior the native language is to the native's mind behind it and the prolixity and repetition he has therefore to employ to make his thoughts understood the great comfort is the wide diffusion of that peculiar language trade english it is not only used as a means of intercommunication between whites and blacks but between natives using two distinct languages on the southwest coast you find individuals in villages far from the sea or a trading station who know it and this is because they have picked it up and employed in their dealings with the coast tribes and traveling traders it is by no means an easy language to pick up it is not a far ago of bad words and broken phrases but is a definite structure has a great peculiarity in its verb forms and employs no genders there is no grammar of it out yet and one of the best ways of learning it is to listen to a seasoned second mate regulating the unloading or loading of cargo over the hatch of the hold know my coast friends i have not forgotten but though you did not mean it helpfully this was one of the best hints you ever gave me another good ways the careful study of examples which display the highest style and the most correct diction so i append the letter given by mr hutchinson as being about the best bit of trade english i know i live not by them baroad one boy lived the other side like a dem to dr live over side your tampon office better well the boy had picked too much he sent a military ban he got one long long thing so surprised something lived that got flipped up them column key better well had the boy can blow shea no matter no no sometimes or not even you know no middle night or all same no make person sleep not every bit that more live that one bunny boy live over side now he like blow bugle when them to war war boy blow them think they need it too much too much when white man blow that thing and person sleep he can tough one make them boy can do so then boy can blow every day even son that them can blow when i are in them blows on the i wish the bugle can go down at them throat or them can blow them head bone inside do not beg you you tell all them people about that thing what them to boy that blow tell them i'm trying bobo have feva bad that until he can't sleep tonight that nisiko kill me to pick no lava don't goodbye daddy crashy jane now for the elementary student we will consider this letter the complaint in crashy jane's letter is about two boys who are torturing her morning noon and night sunday and weekday by blowing some long long brass thing as well as a bugle and the way she dwells on their staying power must bring a sympathetic pang for that black sister into the heart of many a householder in london who lives next to a lady's school or a family of musical tastes one touch of nature etc daddy is not a term of low familiarity but one of esteem and respect and the tampin office is a respectful appellation for the office of the new era in which this letter was once published boy had big too much means that the young man is swelled with conceit because he is connected with military ban who you will find among all the natives in the bites to mean extremely bad i think it is native having some connection with the root who meaning power etc but mr hushinson may be right and it may mean a capacity to bring double whoa i'm trying bobo is not the name of some uncivilized savage as the uninitiated may think far from it it is bob armstrong upside down and slightly altered and refers to the honorary robert armstrong stipendery magistrate of seara leon etc betta well is a phrase used whenever the native thinks he has succeeded in putting his statement well he sort of turns around and looks at it says better well in admiration of his own art and then proceeds pickin our children bonnie boy is not a local living skeleton but a native from bonnie river Sally own is seara leon blow them head bone inside means blow the top off their heads i have a collection of trade english letters and documents for it is a language that i regard as exceedingly charming and it really requires study as you will see by reading crashy jane's epistle without the aid of a dictionary it is moreover a language that will take you unexpectedly far in africa and if you do not understand it land you in some pretty situations one important point that you must remember is that the african is logically right in his answer to such a question as you have not cleaned this lamp he says yes sir which means yes i have not cleaned the lamp it does not mean a denial to your accusation he always uses this form and it is liable to confuse you at first as are many other the phrases such as i look him i know see him this means i have been searching for the thing but have not found it if he really meant he had looked upon the object but had been unable to get to it he would say i look him i know catch him etc the difficulty of the language is however far less in the whole set of difficulties with your own mind unless you can make it pliant enough to follow the african idea step by step however much care you may take you will not bag your game i heard an account the other day of a representative of her majesty in africa who went out for a day's antelope shooting there were plenty of antelope about and he stalked them with great care but always just before he got within shot of the game they saw something and bolted knowing he and the boy behind him had been making no sound and could not have been seen he stalked on but always with the same result until happening to look around he saw the boy behind him was supporting the dignity of the empire at large and this representative of it in particular by steadfastly holding aloft the consular flag well if you go hunting the african idea with a flag of your own religion or opinions floating ostentatiously over you you will similarly get a very poor bag a few hints as to your mental outfit when starting on this sport may be useful before starting for west africa burn all your notions about sun myths and worship of the elemental forces my own opinion is you had better also burn the notion although it is fashionable that human beings got their first notion of the origin of the soul from dreams i went out with my mind full of the deductions of every book on ethnology german or english that i had read during 15 years and being a good cambridge person i was particularly confident that from mr frazier's book the golden bow i had got i say my universal key to the underlying idea of native custom and belief but i soon found this was very far from being the case his idea is a true key to a certain quantity of facts but in west africa only to a limited quantity i do not say do not read ethnology by all means do so and above all things read until you know it by heart primitive culture by dr eb tyler regarding which book i may say that i have never found a fact that flew in the face of the carefully made broad-minded deductions of his greatest ethnologists in addition you must know your western mark on human marriage and your weights anthropology and your top in art not that you need expect to go measuring people's skulls and chests as this last named authority expects you to do for no self-respecting person black or white likes that sort of thing from the hands of an utter stranger and if you attempt it you'll get yourself disliked in west africa add to this the knowledge of all a b ellis's works Burton's anatomy of melancholy pliny's natural history and as much of Aristotle as possible if you have a good knowledge of the greek and latin classics i think it would be an immense advantage an advantage i do not possess for my classical knowledge is scrappy and in place of it i have a knowledge of red indian dogma a dogma by the way that seems to me much nearer the african in type than asiatic forms of dogma armed with these instruments of observation with a little industry and care you should in the middle of your mind be able to make the varied tangled rag bag of facts that you will soon become possessed of into a paper and then i advise you to lay the results of your collection before some great thinker and he will write upon it the opinion that his greater and clearer vision makes him more fit to form you may say why not bring home these things in their raw state and bring them home in a raw state you must for purposes of reference but in this state they are of little use to a person unacquainted with the conditions which surround them in their native homes also very few african stories bear on one subject alone and they hardly ever stick to a point take this fernanda po legend winwood reed savage africa page 62 gives it and he says he heard it twice i have heard it in variants four times once on fernanda po once in calabar and twice in gaboon so it is evidently an old story the first man called all people to one place his name was reichau here this my people said he i am going to give a name to every place i am king in this river one day he came with his people to the whole of wonga wonga which is a deep pit in the ground from which fire comes at night men spoke to them from the hole but they could not see them reichau said his son go down into the hole his son went the son of the king of the whole came to him and defied him to a contest of throwing the spear if he lost he should be killed if he won he should go back in safety he won then the son of the king of the whole said it is strange you should have won for i am a spirit ask whatever you wish and the king's son asked for a remedy for every disease he could remember and the spirit gave him the medicines and when he had done so he said there is one sickness you have forgotten it is the crow-crow and of that you shall die a tribe named indiva was then strong but now none remain winwood reed says four remain they gave reichau's son a canoe and forty men to take him back to his father's town and when he saw his father he did not speak his father said my son if you're hungry eat he did not answer and his father said do you wish me to kill a goat he did not answer his father said do you wish me to give you new wives he did not answer then his father said do you want me to build you a fetish hut then he answered yes and the hut was built and the medicines he had brought back from the hole were put into it now said the son of king reichau i go to make mundan enter the orongo gabun so he went and dug a canal and when this was finished all his men were dead then he said i will go and kill river horse in the benito he killed four and as he was killing the fifth the people descended from the mountains against him so he made fetish on his great war spear and saying my spear go kill these people or these people will kill me and the spear went and kill the people except a few who got into canoes and flew to fernanda pole then said their king my people shall never wear cloth till we have conquered in bongwei and to this day the fernanda poins go naked and hate to a special hatred the impongwei now this is a noble story there is a lot of fine confused feeding in it as a scotchman said of boiled sheep's head you learn from it a the name of the first man and also that he was filled with a desire for topographical nomenclature b you hear of the whole wonga wonga and this is most interesting because to this day apart from the story you are told by the natives of a hole that emits fire and dr nasao says it is always said to be north of gabun but so far no white man has any knowledge of an active volcano there although the district is of volcanic origin the crater of fernanda po may be referred to in the legend because of the king's son being sent home in a canoe but i do not think it is because the hole is known not to be fernanda po and it has got according to local tradition a river running from it or close to it c the kraukrao is a frightfully prevalent disease no one has a remedy for it presumably owing to rei chao's son's forgetfulness d the silence of the son to the questions is remarkable because you always find people who have been among spirits lose their power of asking for what they want for a time and can only answer to the right question e the sudden way in which rei chao's son gets fired with the desire to turn civil engineer just when he has got a magnificent opening in life as a doctor is merely the usual flightiness of young men who do not see where their true advantages lie and the conduct of the men in dying after digging a canal is normal and modern experiences support it for men who dig canals down in west africa dive plentifully be they black wide or yellow so you can't help believing in those men although it is strange a black man should have been so enterprising as to go in for canal digging at all there is no other case of it extent to my knowledge and a remarkable fact is that the moonda does so nearly connect by one creek with a gaboon estuary that you can drag a boat across the little intervening bit of land f is a sporting story that turns up a little unexpectedly certainly but the benito is within easy distance north of the moonda so the geography is all right g the inhabitants of fernando poe have all any special hatred for the impongue and both they and the impongue have this account of the one tribe driving the other off the mainland then the boobies as the inhabitants on fernando poe are called from a confusion arising in the minds of the sailors calling at fernando poe between their stupidity and their word bobby stranger which they use as a word of greeting these boobies are undoubtedly a very early african race their culture though presenting some remarkable points is on the whole exceedingly low they never wear clothes unless compelled to and their language depends so much on gesture that they cannot talk in it to each other in the dark i give this as a sample of african stories it is far more connected and keeps to the point in a far more business-like way than most of them they are of great interest when you know the locality and the tribe they come from but i am sure if you were to bring home a heap of stories like this and empty them over any distinguished ethnologists head without ticketing them with the culture the tribe they belong to the conditions it lives under and so forth you would stun him with a seeming inter contradiction of some and utter pointlessness of the rest and he would give up ethnology and hurriedly devote his remaining years to the attempt to collect a million postage stamps so as to do something definite before he died remember you must always have your original material carefully noted down at the time of occurrence with you so that you may say an answer to his why because of this and this and this however good may be the outfit for your work that you take with you you will have at first great difficulty in realizing that it is possible for the people you are among really to believe things in the way they do and you cannot associate with them long before you must recognize that these africans have often a remarkable mental acuteness and a large share of common sense that there is nothing really childlike in their form of mind at all observe them further and you will find they are not a flighty minded mystical set of people in the least they are not dreamers or poets and you will observe and i hope observe closely for to my mind this is the most important difference between their make of mind and our own that they are notably deficient in all mechanical arts they have never made unless under white direction and instruction a single 14th rate piece of cloth pottery a tool or machine house road bridge picture or statue that a written language of their own construction they none of them possess a careful study of the things a man black or white fails to do whether for good or evil usually gives you a truer knowledge of the man than the things he succeeds in doing when you fully realize this acuteness on one hand and this mechanical incapacity on the other which exist in the people you are studying you can go ahead only i beseech you go ahead carefully when you have found the easy key that opens the reason underlying a series of facts as for example these a benga spits on your hand as a greeting you see a man who has been marching regardless through the broiling sun all the forenoon with a heavy load on entering a village and having put down his load elaborately steal around in the shelter of the houses instead of crossing the street you come across a tribe that cuts its dead up into small pieces and scatters them broadcast and another tribe that thinks a white man's eyeball is a most desirable thing to be possessed of do not when you have found this key drop your collecting work and go home with a shriek of i know all about fetish because you don't for the key to the above facts will not open the reason why it is regarded advisable to kill a person who is making a kum or why you should avoid at night a cotton tree that has red earth at its roots or why comings of hair and pairing of nails should be taken care of or why a speck of blood that may fall from your flesh should be cut out of wood if it has fallen on that and destroyed and if it has fallen on the ground stamped and rubbed into the soil with great care this set requires another key entirely i must warn you also that your own mind requires protection when you send it stalking the savage idea through the tangled forests the dark caves the swamps and the fogs of the ethiopian intellect the best protection lies in recognizing the untrustworthiness of human evidence regarding the unseen and also the scene when it is viewed by a person who has in his mind an explanation of the phenomenon before it occurs the truth is the study of natural phenomena knocks the bottom out of any man's conceit if it is done honestly and not by selecting only those facts that fit in with his preconceived or in grafted notions and to my mind the wisest thing is to get into the state of mind of an old marine engineer who oils and sees that every screw and bolt of his engines is clean and well watched and who loves them as living things caressing and scolding them himself defending them with stormy language against the aspersions of the silly uninformed outside world which persists in regarding them as mere machines a thing his superior intelligence and experience knows they are not if an animistic minded i got awfully sat upon the other day in kamerun by a superior but kindred spirit in the form of a first engineer i had thoughtlessly repeated some scandalous gossip against the character of a naff the launch in the river stuff said he furiously she's all right and she'd go from june to january if those blithering fools would let her alone of course i apologized the religious ideas of the negroes i.e. the west africans in the district from the gambia to the kamerun region say roughly to the rio del rey for the bakwiri appear to have more of the bantu form of idea than the negro although physically they seem nearer the latter differ very considerably from the religious ideas of the bantu southwest coast tribes the bantu is vague on religious subjects he gives one accustomed to the negro the impression that he once had the same set of ideas but has forgotten half of them and those that he possesses have not got that hold on him that the corresponding or superimposed christian ideas have over the true negro although he is quite as keen on the subject of witchcraft and his witchcraft differs far less from the witchcraft of the negro than his religious ideas do the god in the sense we use the word is in essence the same in all of the bantu tribes i have met with on the coast a non-interfering and therefore a negligible quantity he varies his name but a better investigation shows that in some of the funds is practically identical with suku south of the congo in the bhi country and so on they regard their god as the creator of men plants and animals and the earth and they hold that having made them he takes no further interest in the affair but not so the crowd of spirits with which the universe is peopled they take only too much interest and the bantu wishes they would not and he's perpetually saying so in his prayers a large percentage were of amounts to go away we don't want you come not into this house this village or its plantations he knows from experience that the spirits pay little heed to these obturations and as they are the people who must be attended to he develops a cult whereby they may be managed used and understood this cult is what we call witchcraft as i am not here writing a complete work on fetish i will leave in some on one side and turn to the inferior spirits these are almost all malevolent sometimes they can be coaxed into having creditable feelings like generosity and gratitude but you can never trust them no not even if you are yourself a well-established medicine man indeed they are particularly dangerous to medicine men just as lions are to lion tamers and many a professional gentleman in the full bloom of his practice gets eaten up by his own particular familiar which he has to keep in his own inside whenever he has not sent it off into other peoples i am indebted to the reverend doctor in a cell for a great quantity of valuable information regarding bantu religious ideas information which no one is so competent to give as he for no one else knows the west coast bantu tribes with the same thoroughness and sympathy he has lived among them since 1851 and is perfectly conversant with their languages and culture and it brings to bear upon the study of them a singularly clear powerful and highly educated intelligence i shall therefore carefully ticket the information i have derived from him so that it may not be mixed with my own i may be wrong in my deductions but dr nasaus are above suspicion he says the origin of these spirits is vague some of them come into existence by the authority of unsum by which you will understand please the same god i have quoted above as having many names others are self-existent many are distinctly the souls of departed human beings which in the future which is all around them retain their human wants and feelings and the doctor assures me he has heard dying people with their last breath threatening to return his spirits to revenge themselves upon their living enemies he could not tell me if there was any duration set upon the existence as spirits of these human souls but to congo francés natives of different tribes benga anigalwa told me that when a family had quite died out after a time its spirits died too some but by no means all of these spirits of human origin as is the case among the negro ethics undergo reincarnation the doctor told me he once knew a man whose plantations were devastated by an elephant he advised that the beast should be shot but the man said he dare not because the spirit of his dead father had passed into the elephant their number is infinite and their powers as varied as human imagination can make them classifying them is therefore a difficult work but dr. nasao thinks this may be done fairly completely into one human disembodied spirits manu two vague beings well described by our word ghosts a bamboo three beings something like dryets who resent intrusion into their territory onto their rock past their promontory or tree when passing the residents of one of these beings the traveler must go by silently or with some cabalistic invocation with bowed or bared head and deposit some symbol of an offering or tribute even if it be only a pebble you occasionally come across great trees that have fallen across the path that have quite little heaps of pebbles small shells etc upon them deposited by previous passers by this class is called omburi four beings who are the agents in causing sickness and either aid or hinder human plans me on day five there seems to be the doctor says another class of spirits somewhat akin to the ancient laris and penatus who especially belong to the household and descend by inheritance with the family in their honor are secretly kept a bundle of finger or other bones nail clippings eyes brains skulls particularly the lower jaws called in in accumulated from deceased members of successive generations dr. nasao says secretly and he refers to this custom being existent in non cannibal tribes i saw bundles of this character among the cannibal fans and among the non cannibal aduma openly hanging up in the thatch of the sleeping apartment six he also says there may be a sixth class which may however only be a function of any of the other classes namely those that enter into any animal body generally a leopard sometimes the spirits of living human beings do this and the animal is then guided by human intelligence and will exercise its strength for the purposes of its temporary human possessor in other cases it is a non-human soul that enters into the animal as in the case of okuku spirits are not easily classified by their functions because those of different class may be employed in identical undertakings thus one which doctor may have i find particular influence over one class of spirit and another over another class yet they will both engage to do identical work but in spite of this i do not see how you can classify spirits otherwise than by their functions you cannot weigh and measure them and it is only a few that show themselves in corporal form there are characteristics that all the authorities seem agreed on and one is that individual spirits in the same class vary in power some are strong of their sort some weak they are all to a certain extent limited in the nature of their power there is no one spirit that can do all things their efficiency only runs in certain lines of action and all of them are capable of being influenced and made subservient to human wishes by proper incantations this letter characteristics is of course to human advantage but it has its disadvantages for you can never really trust a spirit even if you have paid a considerable sum to a most distinguished medicine man to get a powerful one put up in a juju or monday as it is called in several tribes the method of making these charms is much the same among bantu and negroes i have elsewhere described the gold coast method so here can find myself to the bantu this similarity of procedure naturally arises from the same underlying idea existing in the two races you call in the medicine man the ogonga as he is commonly called in kongofran says tribes after a variety of ceremonies and processes the spirit is induced to localize itself in some object subject to the will of the possessor the things most frequently used are antelopes horns the large snail shells and large nutshells according to dr nasau among the fan i found the most frequent charm case was in the shape of a little sausage made very neatly of pineapple fiber the contents being the residence of the spirit or power and the outside colored red to flatter and please him for spirits always like red because it is like blood the substance put inside charms is all manner of nastiness usually on the seacoast having a high percentage of foul dung the nature of the substance depends on the spirit it is intended to be attractive to attractive enough to induce it to leave its present abode and come and reside in the charm in addition to this attractive substance i find that there are other materials inserted which have relation towards the work the spirit will be wanted to do for its owner for example charms made either to influence a person to be well disposed towards the owner or the still larger class made with intent to work evil on another human beings against whom the owner has a grudge must have in them some portion of the person to be dealt with his hair blood nail pairings etc or failing that his or her most intimate belonging something that has got his smell in a piece of his old waist cloth for example this ability to obtain power over people by means of their blood hair nails etc is universally diffused you will find it down in divan and away in far kathai and the chinese i am told have in some parts of their empire little ovens to burn their nail and hair clippings in the fear of these latter belongings falling into the hands of evilly disposed persons is ever present to the west africans the igalua and other tribes will allow no one but a trusted friend to do their hair and bits of nails and hair are carefully burnt or thrown away into a river and blood even that from a small cut or a fit of nose bleeding is most carefully covered up and stamped out if it has fallen on the earth the underlying idea regarding blood is of course the old one that the blood is alive the life in africa means a spirit hence the liberated blood is the liberated spirit and liberated spirits are always whipping into people who do not want them charms are made for every occupation and desire in life loving hating buying selling fishing planting traveling hunting etc and although they are usually in the form of things filled with a mixture in which the spirit nestles yet there are other kinds for example a great love charm is made of the water the lover has washed in and this mingled with a drink of the loved one is held to soften the hardest heart some kinds of charm such as those to prevent you're getting drowned shot seen by elephants etc are worn on a bracelet or necklace a newborn child starts with a health knot tied around the wrist neck or loins and throughout the rest of its life its collection of charms goes on increasing this collection does not however attain inconvenient dimensions owing to the failure of some of the charms to work that is the worst of charms and prayers the thing you may wish of them may and frequently does happen in a strikingly direct way but other times it does not in africa this is held to arise from the bad character of the spirits they're gross in gratitude and fickleness you may have taken every care of a spirit for years given it food and other offerings that you wanted for yourself wrapped it up in your cloth on chilly nights and gone cold put it in the only dry spot in the canoe and so on and yet after all this the wretched thing will be capable of being got at by your rival or enemy and lured away leaving you only the case it once lived in finding we will say that you have been upset and half drowned and your canoe load of goods lost three times in a week that your paddles are always breaking and the amount of snacks in the river and so on is abnormal you judge that your canoe charm has stopped then you go to the medicine man who supplied you with it and complain he says it was a perfectly good charm when he sold it you and he never had any complaints before but he will investigate the affair when he has done so he either says a spirit has been lured away from the home he prepared for it by incantations and presents from other people or that he finds a spirit is dead it has been killed by a more powerful spirit of its class which is in the pay of some enemy of yours in all cases the little thing you kept the spirit in is no use now and only fit to sell to a white man as a big curio and the sooner you let him have sufficient money to procure you a fresh and still more powerful spirit necessarily more expensive the safe it will be for you particularly as your misfortunes distinctly point to someone being desirous of your death you of course grumble but seeing them thing in his light you pay up and the medicine man goes busily to work within cantations dances looking into mirrors or basins of still water and concoctions of messes to make you a new protecting charm human eyeballs particularly of white men i have already said are a great charm dr. nassau says he has known graves rifled for them this i fancies to secure the man that lives in your eyes for the service of the village and naturally the white man being regarded as a superior being would be of high value if enlisted into its service a similar idea of the possibility of gaining possession of the spirit of a dead man obtains among the negroes and the heads of important chiefs in the calabar districts are usually cut off from the body on burial and kept secretly for fear the head and thereby the spirit of the dead chief should be stolen from the town if it were stolen it would be not only a great advantage to its new possessor but a great danger to the chief's old town because he would know all the peculiar juju relating to it for each town has a peculiar one kept exceedingly secret in addition to the general juju and the secret one would then be in the hands of the new owners of the spirit it is for similar reasons that brave general mccarthy's head was treasured by the ashantis and so on charms are not all worn upon the body some go to the plantations and are hung there ensuring an unhappy and swift end for the thief who comes stealing some are hung around the boughs of the canoe others over the doorway of the house to prevent evil spirits from coming in a sort of tame watchdog spirits the entrances to the long straight shaped villages are frequently closed with a fence of saplings and this sapling fence you will see hung with fetish charms to prevent evil spirits from entering the village and sometimes in addition to charms you will see the fence wreathed with leaves and flowers bells are frequently hung on these fences but i do not fancy ever for fetish reasons at endorco on the remboy there were many guards against spirit visitors but the bell which was carefully hung so that you could not pass through the gateway without ringing it was a guard against thieves and human enemies only frequently a sapling is tied horizontally near the ground across the entrance dr. nasao could not tell me why but says it must never be trodden on when the smallpox a dire pestilence in these regions is raging or when there is war these gateways are sprinkled with the blood of sacrifices and for these sacrifices and for the payments of heavy blood fines etc goats and sheep are kept they are rarely eaten for ordinary purposes and these west coast africans have all a perfect horror of the idea of drinking milk holding this custom to be a filthy habit and saying so in unmitigated language the villagers eat the meat of the sacrifice that have nothing to do with the sacrifice to the spirits which is the blood for the blood is the life beside the few spirits that the bantu regards himself as having got under control in his charms he has to worship the uncontrolled army of the air these he does by sacrifice and incantation the sacrifice is the usual killing of something valuable as an offering to the spirits the value of the offering in these southwest coast regions has certainly a regular relationship to the value of the favor required of the spirits some favors are worth a dish of plantains some a fowl some a goat and some a human being though human sacrifice is very rare in kongofran says the killing of people being nine times in ten a witchcraft palaver dr nasao however says that the intention of the giver ennobles the gift the spirit being supposed in some vague way to be gratified by the recognition of itself and even sometimes pleased with the homage of the mere simulacrum of a gift i believe the only class of spirits that have this convenient idea are the imburi thus the stones heaped by passers by on the foot of some great tree or rock or the leaf cast from a passing canoe towards a promontory on the river etc although intrinsically valueless and useless to the omburi nevertheless gratify him it is a sort of bow or taking off one's hat to him some gifts the doctor says are supposed to be actually utilized by the spirit in some part of the long single street of most villages there is built a low hut in which charms are hung and by which grows a consecrated plant a lily a euphorbia or a fig in some tribes a rudely carved figure generally female is set up as an idol before which offerings are laid i saw at egaja two figures about two feet six inches high in the house placed at my disposal they were left in it during my occupation save that the rolls of cloth their power which were around their necks were removed by the owner chief of the significance of these roles i will speak elsewhere incantations may be divided into two classes supplications analogous to our idea of prayers and certain cabalistic words and phrases the supplications are addresses to the higher spirits some are made even to unsum himself for the spirit of the new moon is that most commonly addressed to keep the lower spirits from molesting dr. nasau gave me many instances out of the wealth of his knowledge one night when he was stopping at a village he saw standing out in the open street a venerable chief who addressed the spirits of the air and begged them come he not into my town he then recounted his good deeds praising himself as good just honest kind to his neighbors and so on i must remark that this man had not been in touch with europeans so his ideal of goodness was the native one which you will find everywhere among the most remote west coast natives he urged these things as a reason why no evil should befall him enclosed with an impassioned appeal to the spirits to stay away at another time in another village when a man's son had been wounded and a bleeding artery which the doctor had closed had broken out again and the hemorrhage seemed likely to prove fatal the father rushed out into the street wildly gestulating towards the sky saying go away go away go away you spirits why do you come to kill my son in another case a woman rushed into the street alternately obligating and pleading the spirits who she said were vexing her child which had convulsions observe said the doctor in his impressive way these were distinctly prayers appeals for mercy agonizing protests but there was no praise no love no thanks no confession of sin i said considering the underlying idea i did not see how that could be thinking of the thing as they did and the doctor and i had one of our little disagreements i shall always feel grateful to him for his great toleration of me but i am sure this arose from his feeling that i saw there was an underlying idea in the minds of the people he loved well enough to lay down his life for in the hope of benefiting and ennobling them and that i did not as many do set them down as idiotic brutes gloring in an aimless cruelty that would be a disgrace to a devil regarding the cabalistic words and phrases things which had long given me great trouble to get any comprehension of the doctor gave me great help he says some of these phrases and words are coined by the person himself others are archisms handed down from ancestors and believed to possess an efficacy though their actual meaning is forgotten he says they are used at any time as defense from evil when a person is startled sneezes or stumbles among these i think i ought to class that peculiar form of friendly farewell or greeting which the doctor poetically calls a blown blessing and the natives ebata i thought the three times it was given to me that it was just spitting on the hand practically it is so but the doctor says the spitting is accidental a byproduct i suppose the method consists in taking the right hand in both yours turning it palm upwards bending your head low over it and saying with great energy and a violent propulsion of the breath ebata idols are comparatively rare in congo francés but where they are used the people have the same idea about them as the true negroes have namely that they are things which spirits reside in or hunt but not in their corporeal nature adorable the resident spirit in them and in the charms and plants which are also regarded as residences of spirits has to be placated with offerings of food and other sacrifices you will see in the fetish huts above mentioned dishes of plantain and fish left till they rot dr. nasau says the life or essence of the food only is eaten by the spirit the form of the vegetable or flesh being left to be removed when its life is gone out in cases of emergency a foul with its blood is laid at the door of the fetish hut or when pestilence is expected or an attack by enemies or a great man or woman is very ill goats and sheep are sacrificed and the blood put in the fetish hut as well as on the gateways of the village these sacrifices among the fan are made with a very peculiar shaped knife a fine specimen of which i secured by the kindness of captain davis it is shaped like the head of a hornbill and is quite unlike the knives in common use among the tribes which are either long leaf shaped blades sharpened along both edges or broad trowel shaped almost triangular daggers all fan knives are fine weapons superior to the knives of all other coast tribes i have met with but the sacrifice knife is distinctly peculiar i found to my great interest the same superstition in congo francés that i met with first in the oil rivers it's meaning i am unable to fully account for but i believe it to be a form of sacrifice in calabar each individual has a certain forbidden thing or things these things are either forms of food or the method of eating in calabar these prohibition is called ibet and when in consequence of the influence of white culture a man gives up his ibet he is regarded by good sound juju as leading an irregular anticipated life and even the unintentional breaking of the ibet is regarded as very dangerous special days are set apart by each individual on these days he eats only the smallest quantity and plainest quality of food no one must eat with him nor any dog fowl etc feed off the crumbs nor anyone watch him while eating i suspect on this day the ibet is eaten but i have not verified this only getting from an untrustworthy source a statement that supported it doctor nasao told me that among congo francés tribes certain rights are performed for children during infancy or youth in which a prohibition is laid upon the child as regards the eating of some particular article of food or the doing of certain acts it is difficult he said to get the exact object of the oranda certainly the prohibited article is not in itself evil for others but the inhibited individual may eat or do with it as they please most of the natives blindly follow the custom of their ancestors without being able to give any raison d'etre but again from these best able to give a reason you learn the prohibited article is a sacrifice ordained for the child by its parents and the magic doctor as a gift to the governing spirit of its life the thing prohibited becomes removed from the child's common use and he's made sacred to the spirit any use of it by the child or man would therefore be a sin which would bring down the spirit's wrath in the form of sickness or other evil which can be atoned for only by expensive ceremonies or gifts to the magic doctor who intercedes for the offender anything may be an oranda or ibet provided only that it is connected with food i have been able to find no definite ground for the selection of it the doctor said for example that once went on a boat journey and camped in the forest for the noonday meal the crew four had no meat they needed it i had a chicken but ate only a portion and gave the rest to the crew three men ate it with their maniac meal the fourth would not touch it it was his oranda on another journey said the doctor instead of all my crew leaving me respectfully alone in the canoe to have my lunch and going ashore to have theirs one of them stayed behind in the canoe and i found his oranda was only to eat over water when on a journey by water at another place a chief at whose village we once anchored in a small steamer when a glass of room was given him had a piece of cloth held up before his mouth that the people might not see him drink which was his oranda i know some ethnologists will think this last case should be classed under another head but i think the doctor is right he is well aware of the existence of the other class of prohibitions regarding chiefs and i have seen plenty of chiefs myself of the remboy who have no objection to take their drinks coran publicly and i have no doubt this was only an individual oranda of this particular remboy chief great care is requested in these matters because a man may do or abstain from doing one and the same thing for diverse reasons end of chapter 12 fetish 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