 CHAPTER XV. FETISH. CONTINUED. In which the voyager complains of the inconveniences arising from the method of African thought and discourses on apparitions and deities. However much some of the Africans' mental attributes get underrated, I am sure there are others of them for which he gets more credit than he deserves. One of these is his imagination. It strikes the newcomer with awe, and frequently fills him with rage when he first meets it. But as he matures and gets used to the African he sees the string. For the African fancy is not the aerial fancy flying free mentioned by our poets, but merely the aerial of theatre suspended by a wire or cord. The wire that supports the African's fancy may be a very thin small fact indeed, or in some cases merely his incapacity to distinguish between animate and inanimate objects, which give rise to his idea that everything is possessed of a soul. Everything has a soul to him and to make confusion worse confounded. He usually believes in the existence of matter apart from its soul, but there is little he won't believe in if it comes to that, and I have a feeling of thankfulness that Buddhism, Theosophy and above all atheism which chases its tale and proves that nothing can be proved, have not yet been given the African to believe in. The African's want of making it clear in his language whether he is referring to an animate or inanimate thing has landed me in many a dilemma, and his foolishness in not having a male and female gender in his languages amounts to a nuisance. For example, I am a most ladylike old person and yet get constantly called sir. The other day circumstances having got beyond my control during the afternoon, I arrived in the evening in a saturated condition at a wide settlement and wishing to get accommodation for myself and my men, I made my way to the factory of a firm from whose representatives I have always received great and most courteous help. The agent in charge was not at home and his steward boys said, must I live for Mr. B's house? Go tell him I live for come from, etc., said I, and I have it for one place for my men. I had nothing to write on or with and I thought the steward boy could carry this little message to its destination without dropping any of it as Mr. B's house was close by, but I was wrong. Off he went and soon returned with a note I here give a copy of. Dear old man, you must be in a deuce of a mess after the tornado. Just help yourself to a set of my dry things. The shirts are in the bottom drawer, the trousers are in the box under the bed, and then come over here to the sing song, my leg is dicky or I'd come across, yours, etc. Had there been any smelling salts or salvolatil in the subdivision of the Ethiopian region, I should have forthwith fainted on reading this, but I well knew there was not, so I blushed till the steam for my soaking clothes, for I truly was in a deuce of a mess, went up in a cloud, and then just as I was, I went across and appeared before the author of that awful note. When he came round he said it had taken seven years' growth out of him and was intensely apologetic. I remarked it had very nearly taken thirty years' growth out of me, and he said the steward boy had merely informed him that white men live or come from X, a place where he knew there was another factory belonging to his firm, and he naturally thought it was the agent from X who had come across. You rarely indeed, I believe, never find an African with a gift for picturesque descriptions of scenery. The nearest approach to it I ever got was from my cook when we were on Mongomalube. He proudly boasted, he had been on a mountain up Cameroon River with a German officer and on that mountain. If you fall down one side, you die. If you fall down another side, you die. Graphic and vivid descriptions of incidents you often get, but it is not art. The effect is produced entirely by a bald brutality of statement, the African having no artistic reticence whatsoever. One fine touch, however, which does not come in under this class, was told me by my lamented friend Mr. Harris of Calabar. Some years ago he had out a consignment of Dutch clocks with hanging weights, as is natural to the Dutch clock. They were immensely popular among the chiefs and were soon disposed of Save One, which had seen trouble on the voyage out and lost one of its weights. Mr. Harris, who was a man of great energy and resource, melted up some metal spoons and made a new weight and hung it on the clock. The day he finished this, a chief came in, anxious for a Dutch clock, and Mr. Harris forthwith sold him the repaired one. About a week elapsed, and then the chief turned up at the factory again with a rueful countenance, followed by a boy carrying something swathed in a cloth. It was the clock. You do me bad too much, Mr. Harris, said the chief. Mr. Harris denied this on the spot with the vehemence of injured innocence. The chief shook his head and spat profusely and sorrowfully. You know, sabbathim, clock, you don't sell me, said he. When I look him clock, it no be to-day, it be to-morrow. Mr. Harris took the clock back to see what was the cause of this strange state of affairs. Of course it arose from his having been too liberal in the amount of spoon in the weight, and this being altered the chief was not hurried onward to his grave at such a rattling pace. But, said Mr. Harris, that clock was a flyer to the last. I will not go into the subject of African languages here, but only remark of them that although they are elaborate enough to produce, for their users, nearly every shade of erroneous statement they are not, save perhaps in Pongwei, elaborate enough to enable a native to state his exact thought. Some of them are very dependent on gesture. When I was with the fans, they frequently said, We will go to the file so that we can see what they say. When any question had to be decided after dark, and the inhabitants of Fernanda Poe, the boobies, are quite unable to converse with each other unless they have sufficient light to see the accompanying gestures of the conversation. In all cases I feel sure the African's intelligence is far ahead of his language. The African is usually great at dreams and has them very noisily, but he does not seem to me to attach immense importance to them, certainly not so much as the Indian does. I doubt whether there is much real ground for supposing that from dreams came man's first conception of the spirit world, and I think the origin of man's religious belief lies in man's misfortunes. There can be little doubt that the very earliest human beings found, as their descendants still find their plans frustrated, let them plan ever so wisely and carefully, they must have seen their companions overtaken by death and disaster, arising both from things they could see and from things they could not see. The distinction between these two classes of phenomenize not so definitely recognized by savages or animals, as it is, but the more cultured races of humanity. I doubt whether a savage depends on his five senses alone to teach him what the world is made of any more than a fellow of the royal society does. From this method of viewing nature I feel sure that the general idea arose, which you find in all early cultures, that death was always the consequence of the action of some malignant spirit, and that there is no accidental or natural death, as we call it, and death is, after all, the most impressive attribute of life. If a man were knocked on the head with a club or shot with an arrow, the cause of death is clearly the malignancy of the person using these weapons, and so it is easy to think that a man killed by a fallen tree or by the upsetting of a canoe in the surf or in an eddy in the river is also the victim of some being using these things as weapons. A man having less gain of belief there are more than human actors in life's tragedy. The idea that disease is also a manifestation of some invisible being's wrath and power seem to be natural and easy, and he knows you can get another man for consideration to kill or harm a third party, and so he thinks that. For a consideration you can also get one of these superhuman beings, which we call gods or devils, but which the African regards in another light, to do so. A certain set of men and women then specialize off to study how these spirits can be managed, and so arises a priesthood and the priests or medicine men as they are called in their earliest forms gradually for their own ends elaborate and wrap round their profession with ritual and mystery. The savage is also conscious of another great set of phenomena which he soon learns take no interest in human affairs. The sun which arises and sets, the moon which changes, the tides which come and go, what do they care? Nothing, and what is more sacrifice to them, what you may, you cannot get them to care about you and your affairs, and so the savage turns his attention to those other spirits that do take only too much interest, as is proved by those unexpected catastrophes, and as their actions show these spirits are all malignant, so he deals with them just as he would deal with a bad man whom he was desirous of managing. He flatters and feasts them, he deprives himself of riches to give to them as sacrifices, believing they will relish it all the more because it gives him pain of some sort to give it to them. He holds that they think it will be advisable for them to encourage him to continue the giving by occasionally doing what he asks them. Naturally he never feels sure of them, he sees that you may sacrifice to a god for years, you may wrap him up, or more properly speaking, the object in which he resides, in your only cloth on chilly nights while you shiver yourself, you and your children, and your mother and your sister, and her children may go hungry, that food may rot upon his shrine, and yet in some hour of dire necessity the power will not come and save you because he has been lured away by some richer gifts than yours. You white men will say, why go on believing in him then, but that is an idea that does not enter the African mind. I might just as well say, why do you go on believing in the existence of handsome cabs, because one handsome cab driver malignantly fails to take you where you want to go, or fails to arrive in time to catch a train you wished to catch. The African fully knows the liability of his fetish to fail, but he equally fully knows its power. One, to me, grandly tragic instance of this I learned at Oppopo. There was a very great fetish doctor there, universally admired and trusted, who lived out on the land at the mouth of the Great River. One day he himself fell sick, and he made juju against the sickness, but it held on, and he grew worse. He made more juju of greater power, but again in vain. And then he made the greatest juju man can make, and it availed not, and he knew he was dying. And so, with his remaining strength, he broke up and dishonored, and destroyed all the fetishes in which the spirits lived, and cast them out into the surf, and died like a man. Then horror came upon the people when they knew he had done this, and they burnt his house and all things belonging to him, and cried upon the spirits not to forsake them, not to lay this one man's deadly sin at their doors. In connection with the gods of West Africa, I may remark that in almost all the series of native tradition there you will find accounts of a time when there was direct intercourse between the gods or spirits that live in the sky and men. That intercourse is always said to have been cut off by some human error, for example. The Fernanda Poe people say that once upon a time there was no trouble or serious disturbance upon earth, because there was a ladder made like the one you got palm knots with, only long, long. And this ladder reached from earth to heaven, so the gods could go up and down it and attend personally to mundane affairs. But one day a cripple boy started to go up the ladder, and he had got a long way up when his mother saw him and went up in pursuit. The gods horrified at the prospect of having boys and women invading heaven through down the ladder and have since left humanity severely alone. The Timnay people, northeast of Sierra Leone, say that in old times God was very friendly with men, and when he thought a man had lived long enough on earth he sent a messenger to him telling him to come up into the sky and stay with him. But once there was a man who, when the messenger of God came, did not want to leave his wives, his slaves, and his riches. And so the messenger had to go back without him. And God was very cross and sent another messenger for him who was called disease, but the man would not come for him either. And so disease sent backward to God that he must have helped to bring the man. And so God sent another messenger whose name was death. And disease and death together got hold of the man and took him to God, and God said in future he would always send these messengers to fetch men. The Fernanda Poe legend may be taken as fairly pure African, but the Timnay I expect is a transmogrified Arabic story, though I do not know of anything like it among Arabic stories. But they are infinite in quantity and there is a certain ring about it I recognize. And these Timnays are much in contact with a Mohammedan, Mandingos, etc. In none of the African stories is there given anything like the importance to dreams that there is given to attempts to account for accidents and death. And surely it must have been more impressive and important to a man to have God his leg or arms snapped off by a crocodile in the river or by a shark in the surf or to have God half-killed or have seen a friend killed by a falling tree in the forest in the daytime than to have experienced the most wonderful of dreams. He sees that however terrific his dream experiences may have been he was not much the worse for them. Not so in the other case. A limb gone or a life gone is more impressive and more necessary to account for. No trace of some worship have I ever found. The firmament is, I believe, always the great indifferent and neglected God, the Nyan Kupon of the T'chiwi and the Anzambe, Anzam, etc. of the Bantu races. The African thinks this God has great power if he would only exert it and when things go very badly with him, when the river rises higher than usual and sweeps away his home and his plantations, when the smallpox stalks through the land and day and night the corpses float down the river past him and he finds them jammed among his canoes that are tied to the beach and choking up his fish traps and then when at last the death whale over its victims goes up night and day from his own village. He will rise up and call upon this great God in a terror maddened by despair that he may hear and restrain the evil workings of these lesser devils but he evidently finds as Pierre Gint says, nai nir hort nikt, eris tav we, goan lik, for there is no organized cult for Anzam. Accounts of apparitions abound in all the west coast districts and although the African holds them all in high horror and terror he does not see anything supernatural in his dupi. It is a horrid thing to happen on but there is nothing strange about it and he is ten thousand times more frightened than puzzled over the affair. He does not want to investigate to see whether there is anything in it. He wants to get clear away and to make juju against it one time. These apparitions have a great variety of form for firstly there are all the true spirits, nature spirits, secondly the spirits of human beings. These human spirits are held to exist before as well as during and after bodily life. Thirdly the spirits of things. Probably the most horrid of class, one is the twoies sassabonsum. Whether sassabonsum is an individual or a class is not quite clear but I believe he is a class of spirits, each individual of which has the same characteristics, the same manner of showing anger, the same personal appearance and the same kind of residence. I am a devoted student of his cult and I am always coming across equivalent forms of him in other tribes as well as the chui and I think he is very early. As the chui have got their religious notions in a most tidy and definite state we will take their version of sassabonsum. He leaves in the forest in or under those great silk cotton trees around the roots of which the earth is red. This colored earth identifies a silk cotton tree as being the residence of a sassabonsum as its color is held to arise from the blood it whips off him as he goes down to his underworld home after a night's carnage. All silk cotton trees are suspected because they are held to be the roosts for duppies but the red earth ones are feared with a great fear and no one makes a path by them or a camp near them at night. Sassabonsum is a friend of witches. He is of enormous size and of a red color. He wears his hair straight and he way lays unprotected wayfarers in the forest at night and in all districts except that of Apollonia he eats them. Round Apollonia he only sucks their blood. Natives of this district after meeting him have crawled home and given an account of his appearance and then expired. Alice says he is believed to be implacable and when angered can never be mollified or propitiated but it is certain that human victims are constantly sacrificed to him in districts beyond white control in districts under it the equivalent value of a human sacrifice in sheep and goats is offered to him. In Ashanti he has priests and of course human sacrifice. Away among the Dahomeyan tribes where he has kept his habits but got another name and seems to have crystallized from a class into an individual the usual way in which a god develops he has priests and priestesses and they are holy terrors but among the chui sassabonsum is mainly dealt with by witches and people desires of possessing the power of becoming witches they derive their power from him in a remarkable way I put myself to a great personal inconvenience fever risk mosquito certainty high leopard and snake palover probability and grave personal alarm and apprehension to verify Colonel Alice's account of the methods witches employing this case to obtain a shuman and I find his account correct the chief use of a summon is the power it gives its owner to procure the death of other people not necessarily his own enemies for he will sell charms made by the agency of his summon to another person whose nerves have not been equal to facing sassabonsum on his own account he can also provide by its agency other charm such as those that protect houses from fire and things and individuals from accidents on the road or in canoes and the home circle from good-looking but unprincipled young men and so on as a rule the person who has a summon keeps the fact pretty quiet for the possession of such an article would lead half the catastrophes in his district from the decease of pigs fowls and babies to fires etc to be accredited to him which would lead to his neighbors making witch palover over him and he would have to undergo poison ordeal and other unpleasantness to clear his character he however always keeps a special day in his summons honor and should he be powerful as a king or big chief he will keep this day openly king kwofi karakari whom we fought with in 1874 used to make a big day for his summon which was kept in a box covered with gold plates and he sacrificed a human victim to it every tuesday with general festivities and dances in its honor i should remark that sassabonsum is married his wife or more properly speaking his female form is called shaman tin she is far less malignant than the male form her name comes from shaman ghost or spirit the termination tin is an abbreviation of sensein tall she is of immense height and white perhaps this idea is derived from the white stem of the silk cotton trees wherein she invariably abides her method of dealing with a solitary wayfarer is no doubt inconvenient to him but it is kinder than her husband's ways for she does not kill and eat him as sassabonsum does but merely detains him some months while she teaches him all about the forest what herbs are good to eat or to cure disease where the game come to drink and what they say to each other and so forth i often wish i knew this lady for the grim grand african forests are like a great library in which so far i can do little more than look at the pictures although i am now busily learning the alphabet of their language so that i may someday read what these pictures mean to not go away with the idea i beg that goddesses as a general rule are better than gods they are not there are stories about them which i could i mean i could not tell you there is one belonging also to the chiwi she lives at mori a village five miles from cape coast she is as is usual with deities human in shape and colossal in size and as is not usual with deities she's covered with hair from head to foot short white hair like a goat her abode is on the path to surf cursed an amabu near the sea beach and her name is ian foie a worshiper of hers has only got to mention the name of a person he wishes dead when passing her abode and ian foie does the rest she is the goddess of all albinos who are said to be more frequent in occurrence around mori than elsewhere ali says that in 1886 when he was there they were one percent of the entire population these albinos are epso facto her priests and priestesses and in old days an albino had only to name anywhere a person ian foie wished for and that person was forthwith killed i think i may safely say that every dangerous place in west africa is regarded as the residence of a god rocks and whirlpools in the rivers swamps no man fit to pass and naturally the surf along the gold coast at every place where you have to land through the surf it fairly swarms with gods a little experience with a sad surf inclines you to think as the dabblers in spiritualism say that there is something in it i will back this west coast surf the kalema as we call it down south against any other malevolent abomination barring only the english climate its ways of dealing with human beings are cunning and deceitful in its most ferocious moods it seizes a boat straightway swamps it and feeds its pet sharks with the boat's occupants if the surf is merely sky larking it lets your boat's nose just smell the sand and then says fachi we're all right this time did you though and drags the boat back again under the incoming wave or snatches it under the stern and gaily throws it upside down over you and yours on the beach variety they say is charming let those who say it and those who believe it just do a course of surf work and i'll warrant they will change their minds there is one thing about the surf that i do not understand and that is why witches always walk stark naked along the beach bite at night and eat sea crabs the while that's such as a confirmed habit of theirs is certain and they tell me that while doing this the witches emit a bright light and also that there is a certain medicine which if you have it with you you can throw over the witch and then he or she will remain blazing until morning time running to and fro crying out wildly in front of the white breaking thundering surf wall and when the dawn comes the fire burns the witch right up leaving only a gray ash and paliver set in this world in the next for that witch a highly esteemed native minister told me when i was at cape coast last that a fortnight before he had been away in the polonia district on mission work one evening he and a friend were walking along the beach and the night was dark so that you could see only the surf it is never too dark to see that it seems to have light in itself they saw a flame coming towards them and after a moment's doubt they knew it was a witch and feeling frightened hid themselves among the bushes that edged the sandy shore as they watched it it came straight on and passed them and they saw it disappear in the distance my informant laughed at himself and very wisely said one has not got to believe those things here one has in a polonia to the surf and its spirits the seaboard dwelling chewies bring women who have had children and widows both after period of eight days from the birth of the child or the death of the husband a widow remains in the house until the spirit has elapsed neglecting her person eating little food and sitting on the bare floor in the attitude of mourning on the gold coast they bury very quickly as they're always telling you usually on the day after death rarely later than the third day even among the natives and the spirit or shra of the dead men is supposed to hang about his wives and his house until the ceremony of purification is carried out this is done needless to say with uproar the relations of each wife go to her house with musical instruments i mean tom-toms and that sort of thing and they take a quantity of mint which grows wild in this country with them this mint they burn some of it in the house the rest they place upon pans of live coals and carry around the widow as she goes in their midst down to the surf her relatives singing aloud to the shra of the departed husband telling him that now he is dead and has done with the lady he must leave her this singing serves to warn all the women who are not relations to get out of the way which of course they always carefully do because if they were to see the widow their own husbands would die within the year when the party has arrived at the shore they strip every rag off the widow and throw it into the surf and a thoughtful female relative having brought a suit of dark blue bathed with her for the occasion the widow is clothed in this and returns home where a suitable festival is held after which she may marry again but if she were to marry before this ceremony the shra of the husband would play the mischief with husband number two or three and so on as the case might be in the inland gold coast districts the widows remain in a state of morning for several months and a selection of them a quantity of slaves and one or two free men are killed to escort the dead men to strama danzee and as well as these and in order to provide him with merchandise to keep up his house and state in the underworld quantities of gold dust rolls of rich velvets silks satins etc are thrown into the grave among the dwellers in kamerun when you are across the bantu borderline velvets etc are buried with a big man or woman but i am told it is only done for the glorification of his living relatives so that the world may say so and so must be rich look what a lot of trade he threw away at that funeral of his wife or his father or his son as the case may be but i doubt whether this is the true explanation if it is i should recommend my german friends if they wish to intervene to introduce the ingan tax into kamerun that would eliminate this custom the chouis hold that there is a definite earthly existence belonging to each soul of a human kind let us say for example a soul has a 30 years bodily existence belonging to it well suppose that soul's body gets killed off at 25 it's remaining five years it has to spend if it is left alone in knocking about its old haunts homes and wives in this state it is called a sisa and is a nuisance it will cause sickness it will throw stones it will pull off roofs and it will play the very mischief with its wives subsequent husbands all because not having reached its full term of life it has not learned its way down the dark and difficult path to suraman da zi the entrance to which is across the valta river to the northeast this knowledge of the path to suraman da zi is a thing that grows gradually on a man's immortal soul the other three souls are not immortal and naturally not having been allowed to complete his life his knowledge is imperfect a man's soul however can be taught the way if necessary in the funeral custom made by his relatives and the priests but in a case of an incomplete life on earth soul as a german would say when it does arrive in the land of insra it is in a weak and feeble state from the difficulties of its journey whereas a soul that has lived out its allotted span of life goes straight way off to suraman da zi as soon as its custom or devil is made and gives its surviving relatives no further trouble still there is great difference of opinion among all the chuis and gaman i have come across on this point and ellis likewise remarks on this difference of opinion some informants say that a soul that has been sent hence before its time although it is exhausted by the hardships it has suffered on its journey down yet recovers health in a month or so while a soul that has run its allotted span on earth is as feeble as a newborn babe on arriving in suraman da zi and takes years to pull round other informants say they have no knowledge of these details and say that all the difference they know of between the souls of men who have been killed and the men who have died is that the former can always come back and that really the safest way of disposing of this class of soul is by suitable spells and incantations to get it to enter into the body of a newborn baby where it can live out the remainder of its life before closing these observations on suraman da zi i will give the best account of that land that i am at present able to someday perhaps i may share the fate of the oxford professor in the wrong paradise and go there myself but so far my information is secondhand it is like this world there are towns and villages rivers mountains bush plantations and markets when the sun rises here it sets in suraman da zi it has its pleasures and its pains not necessarily retributive or rewarding but dim all souls in it grow forward or backward into the prime of life and remain there some informants say others say that each inhabitant remains there at the same age as he was when he quitted the world above this latter view is most like a southwest one the former is possibly only an attempt to make suraman da zi into a heaven in confirmation with christian teaching which it is not any more than it is a hell i have much curious information regarding its flora and fauna a great deal of both is seemingly indigenous and then there are the souls of great human beings the astamanfu and the souls of all the human beings animals and things sent down with them the ghosts do not seem to leave of their interest in mundane affairs for they not only have local palavers but try palavers left over from their earthly existence and when there is an outbreak of sickness in a fancy town or village and several inhabitants die off the opinion is often held that there is a big palaver going on down in shaman da zi and that the spirits are sending up on earth for witnesses subpoenaing them as it were medicine men or priests are called in to find out what particular earthly grievance can be the subject of the ghost palaver and when they have ascertained this they take the evidence of everyone in the town on this affair as it were on commission and transmit the information to the court sitting in shaman da zi this prevents the living being incommodated by personal journeys down below and although the priests have their fee it is cheaper in the end because the witnesses funeral expenses would fall heavier still although far more elaborated and thought out than any other african underworld i have ever come across the chui shaman da zi may be taken as a type of all the african underworlds the bantu's idea of future life is a life spent in much such a place as far as i can make out there is no definite idea of eternity i have even come across cases in which doubt was thrown on the present existence of the creating god but i think this has arisen from attempts having been made to introduce concise conceptions into the african mind conceptions that are quite foreign to its true nature in which alarm and worry it you never get the strange idea of the difference between time and eternity the idea i mean that they are different things in the african that one frequently gets in cultured europeans and as for the human soul the african always believes that still the spirit is whole and life and death but shadows of the soul end of chapter 15 fetish recorded by kende of bahatrek.com chapter 16 of fetish concluded this is a libravox recording all libravox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit libravox.org travels in west africa by mary h kingsley fetish concluded in which the discourse on apparitions is continued with some observations on secret societies both tribal and murder and the kindred subject of leopards apparitions are by no means always of human soul origin all the chiwi and the iwe gods for example have the habit of appearing pretty regularly to their priests and occasionally to the laity likes as a bonsam but it is only to priests that these appearances are harmless or beneficial the effect of sasa bonsam's appearance to the laymen i have cited above and i could give many other examples of the bad effects of those of other gods but we'll only now mention tando the hater the chief god of the northern chiwi the shanties etc he is terribly malicious human in shape and though not quite white is decidedly lighter in complexion then the chief god of the southern chiwi bobovisi his hair is lank and he carries a native sword and wears a long robe his well-selected messengers are those awful driver ants in kran which it is not orthodox to molest in tando's territories he uses as his weapons lightning tempest and disease but the last is the most favorite one there is absolutely no trick too mean or venomous for tando for example he has a way of appearing near a village he has a grudge against in the form of a male child and wanders about crime bitterly until some kind-hearted unsuspecting villager comes and takes him in and feeds him then he develops a contagious disease that clears that village out this form of appearance and subsequent contact is unhappily not rigidly confined to tando but is used by many spirits as a method of collecting arrears in taxes in the way of sacrifices i have found traces of it among banthu gods or spirits and it gives rise to a general hesitation in west africa to take care of waves and strays of unexplained origin other things besides gods and human spirits have the habit of becoming incarnate once i had to sit waiting a long time at an apparently perfectly clear bush path because in front of us a spirit's ghost used to fly across the path about that time in the afternoon and if anyone was struck by it they died a certain spring i know of is haunted by the ghost of a picture many ladies when they have gone alone to feel their pictures in the evening time at this forest spring have noticed a very fine picture standing there ready filled and thinking exchange is no robbery or at any rate they would risk it if it were have left at their own picture and taken the better looking one but always as soon as they have come within sight of the village huts the new picture has crumbled to dust and the water in it been spilled on the ground and the worst of it is when they have returned to fetch their own discarded picture they find it also shattered into pieces there is also another class of apparition of which i've met with two instances one among pure negroes okyon the other among pure bantu kangwei i will give the bantu version of the affair because at okyon the incident had happened a good time before the details were told me and in the bantu case they had happened the previous evening but there was very little difference in the main facts of the case and it was an important thing because in both cases the underlying idea was sacrificial the woman who told me was an exceedingly intelligent shrewd reliable person she had been to the factory with some trade and had got a good price for it and so was an a good temper on her return home in the evening she got out of her canoe and leaving her slave boy to bring up the things walked to her house which was the ordinary house of a prosperous igal one native having two distinct rooms in it and a separate cookhouse close by in a clean sandy yard she trod on some nastiness in the yard and going into the cookhouse found the slave girls round a very small and inefficient fire trying to cook the evening meal she blew them up for not having a proper fire they said the wood was wet and would not burn she said they lied and she would see to them later and she went into the chamber she used for a sleeping apartment and trod on something more on the floor in the dark those good-for-nothing hussies of slaves had not lit her palm oil lamp and mentally forming the pinion that they had been out flirting during her absence and resolving to teach them well the iniquity of such conduct she sat down on her bed into a lot of messy stuff of a clammy damp nature now this fairly roused her for she is a notable housewife who keeps her house and slaves in exceedingly good order so dismissing from her mind the commercial consideration she had intended to gloat over when she came into her room she called ingramina and others in a tone that brought those young ladies on the spot she asked them how they dared forget to light her lamp they said they had not but the lamp in the room must have gone out like the other lamps had after burning dim and spluttering they further said they had not been out but had been sitting around the fire trying to make it burn properly she duly whacked and pulled the ears of all within reach i say within reach for she is not very active weighing i am sure upwards of 18 stone then she went back into her room and got out her beautiful english paraffin lamp which she keeps in a box and taking it into the cookhouse picked up a bit of wood from the hissing spluttering fire and lit it when she picked up the wood she noticed that it was covered with the same sticky abomination she had met before that evening and it smelled of the same faint smell she had noticed as soon as she had reached her house and by now the whole air seemed oppressive with it as soon as the lamp was a light she saw what the stuff was namely blood blood was everywhere the rest of the sticks in the fire had it on them it sizzled at the burning ends and ran off the other in rills there were pools of it about her clean sandy yard her own room was reeking the bed the stools the floor it trickled down the doorpost coagulated on the lintel she herself was smeared with it from the things she had come in contact with in the dark and the slaves seemed to have been sitting in pools of it the things she picked up off the table and shelf left rooms of it behind them there was more in the skillets and the oil in the open pump oil lamps had a film of it floating on the oil investigation showed that the whole of the rest of her house was in a similar mess the good lady gave a complete catalog of the household furniture and its condition which i need not give here the slave girls when the light came were terrified at what they saw and she called in the aristocracy of the village and asked them their opinion on the blood palver they said they could make nothing of it at first but subsequently formed the opinion that it meant something was going to happen and suggest with a kind helpful cheerfulness of relatives and friends that they should not wonder if it were a prophecy of her own death this view irritated the already tried lady and she sent them about their business and started the slaves on house cleaning the blood cleaned up all right when you were about it but kept on turning up in other places and in the one you had just cleaned as soon as you left off and went elsewhere and the morning came and found things in much of the same state until before some time say about ten o'clock when it faded away i cautiously tried to get my stately touchy dowager duchess to explain how it was that there was such a lot of blood and how it was it got into the house she just said it had to go somewhere and refused to give rational explanations as chambers journal does after telling a good ghost story i found afterwards that it was quite decided it was a case of blood come before and at okyan miss slesser told me in regard to the similar case there that this was the opinion held regarding the phenomenon it is always held uncanny in africa if a person dies without shedding blood you see the blood is alive and if you see it come out you know the going of the thing as it were if you do not it is mysterious at okyan a few days after the blood appeared a nephew of the person whose house it came into was killed while felling a tree in the forest a boat struck him and broke his neck without shedding a drop of blood and these bore out the theory for the blood having to go somewhere came before in the bantu case i did not hear of such a supporting incident happening certain african ideas about blood puzzle me i was told by a padanka friend a resident white trader that a short time previously a man was convicted of theft by the natives of a village close to him vans and feet of the criminal were tied together and he was flung into the river he got himself free and swam to the other bank and went for bush he was recaptured in a stone tied to his neck and in again he was thrown the second time he got free and ashore and was recaptured and the chief then most regretfully ordered that he was to be knocked on the head before being thrown in for a third time this time palver set but the chief knew that he would die himself by spitting the blood he had spilled from his own lungs before the year was out i inquired about the chief when i passed this place more than 18 months after and learned from a native that the chief was dead and that he had died in this way the objection thus was not to shedding blood in a general way but to the shedding in the course of judicial execution there may be some idea of this kind underlying the ingenious and often ways the negroes have of killing thieves by tying them to stakes in the rivers or down onto paths for the driver ants to kill and eat but this is only conjecture i have not had a chance yet to work this subject up and getting reliable information about underlying ideas is very difficult in africa the natives will say yes to any mortal thing if they think you want them to and the variety of their languages is another great hindrance worried not for the prevalence of crew english or trade english investigation would be almost impossible but fortunately this quaint language is prevalent and the natives of different tribes communicate with each other in it and so round of fire in the evening if you listen to the gossip you can pick up all sorts of strange information and gain strange and often awful lights on your absent white friends's characters and your present companions as religion for example the other day i had a set of porters composed of four baza boys two wayways one duala and two yorubas none of their language is fitted so they talk trade english and pretty lively talk some of it was but of that and on i cannot close this brief notice of native ideas without mentioning the secret societies but to go fully into this branch of the subject would require volumes for every tribe has its secret society the pura of Sierra Leone the oroo of legos the igbo of calabar the shiogo of the galwa the okuku of the benga the okukue of the empongue the ikun of the bakele and the lukuku of the bachilangi baluva are some of the most powerful secret societies of the west african coast these secret societies are not essentially religious their action is mainly judicial and their particularly presiding spirit is not a god or a devil in our sense of the word the ritual differs for each in its detail but there are broad lines of agreement between them there are societies both for men and for women but mixed societies for both sexes are rare those that i have mentioned above are all male except the lukuku and women are utterly forbidden to participate in the rites or become acquainted with their secrets for one of the chief duties of these societies is to keep the women in order and besides it is undoubtedly held that women are bad for certain forms of juju even when these forms are not directly connected as far as i can find out with this secret society for example the other day a chief up the bongo river deliberately destroyed his juju by showing it to his women it was a great juju but expensive to keep up requiring sacrifices of slaves and goats so what with trade being bad fall in the price of oil and ivory and so on he felt he could not afford that juju and so destroyed its power so as to prevent its harming him when he neglected it the general rule with these secret societies is to admit the young free people at an age of about eight to ten years the boys entering the male the girls the female society both societies are rigidly kept apart a man who attempts to penetrate the female mysteries would be as surely killed as a woman who might attempt to investigate the male mysteries still i came in 1893 across an amusing case which demonstrates the inextinguishable thirst for knowledge so long as that knowledge is forbidden which characterizes our sex it was in the district just south of big batanga the male society had been very hard on the ladies for some time and one day one star-like intellect among the latter told her next-door neighbor in strict confidence that she did not believe ikun was a spirit at all but only old so-and-so dressed up in leaves this rank heresy spread rapidly in strict confidence among the ladies at large and they used to assemble together in the house of the founders of the theory secretly of course because husbands down there are hasty with a cutlass and the casango and they talk the matter over somehow or other this came to the ears of the men whether the ladies got too emancipated and winked when ikun was mentioned or asked how mr so-and-so was this morning in a pointed way after an ikun manifestation i do not know some people told me this was so but others who i fear were right considered the acknowledged slowness of men in putting two and two together and the treachery of women towards each other said that a woman had told a man that she had heard some of the other women were going on in this heretical way anyhow the men knew and were much alarmed skepticism had spread by now to such an extent that nothing short of burning or drowning all the women could stamp it out and reintroduce the proper sense of all into the female side of society and after a good deal of consideration the men saw for men are undoubtedly more gifted in foresight than our sex that it was no particular use for introducing this awe if there was no female half of society to be impressed by it it was a brain-spraining problem for the men all round for it is clear society cannot be kept together without some superhuman aid to help to keep the feminine portion of it within bounds grave councils were held and it was decided that the woman at whose house these reasonable meetings were held should be sent away early one morning on a trading mission to the nearest factory a job she readily undertook and while the other women were away in the plantation or at the spring certain men entered her house secretly and dug a big chamber out in the floor of the hut and one of them dressed as a coon and provided with refreshments for the day got into this chamber and the whole affair was covered over carefully and the floor resended that afternoon there was a big manifestation of a coon he came in the most terrible form his howls were awful and he finally went dancing away into the bush as the night came down the ladies had just taken the common sense precaution of removing all goats sheep fowl etc into enclosed premises for like all his kind he seizes and holds any property he may come across in the street but there was evidently no emotional thrill in the female mind regarding him and when the leading lady returned home in the evening the other lady strolled into their leader's hut to hear about what new cotton prints beads and things mr blank had got at his factory but the last steamer from europe an interesting kindred subjects bearing on mr blank when they had thrashed these matters out the conversation turned onto religion and what fools those men had been making of themselves all the afternoon with their ecune no sooner was his name uttered than a venomous howl terminating any squills of rage and impatience came from the ground beneath them they stared at each other for one second and then feeling that something was tearing its way up through the floor they left for the interior of africa with one accord ecune gave chase as soon as he got free but what was being half stifled and a bit cramped in the legs and much encumbered with his vegetable decorations the ladies got clear away and no arrests were made but society was saved skepticism became in the twinkling of an eye a thing of the past and although no names were taken the men observed that certain ladies were particularly anxious and regardless of expense in buying immunity from ecune and they fancied that these ladies were probably in that hut and that particular evening but they took no further action against them save making ecune particularly expensive there ought to be a moral to an improving tale of this order i know but the only one i can think of just now is that it takes a priest to get around a woman and i always feel inclined to jump onto the table myself when i think of those poor dear creatures sitting on the floor and feeling that awful thing clapper clawing its way up right under them tattooing on the west coast is comparatively rare and i think i may say never used with decorative intent only the skin decorations are either paint or cicatrices in the former case the pattern is not kept always the same by the individual a peculiar form of it you find in the rivers where a pattern is painted on the skin and then when the paint is dry a wash is applied which makes the unpainted skin rise up in between the painted pattern the cicatris are sometimes tribal marks but sometimes decorative they are made by cutting the skin and then placing in the wound the fluff of the silk cotton tree the great points of agreement between all these west african secret societies lies in the methods of initiation the boy if he belongs to a tribe that goes in for tattooing is tattooed and is handed over to instructors in society's secrets and formula he lives with other boys of his tribe undergoing initiation usually under the rule of several instructors and for the space of one year he lives always in the forest and is naked and smeared with clay the boys are exercised so as to become inured to hardship in some districts they make raids so as to perfect themselves in this useful accomplishment they always take a new name and are supposed by the initiation process to become new beings in the magic wood and on their return to their village at the end of their course they pretend to have entirely forgotten their life before they entered the wood but this pretence is not kept up beyond the period of festivities given to welcome them home they all learn to a certain extent a new language a secret language only understood by the initiated the same removal from home and instruction from initiated members is also observed with the girls however in their case it is not always a forest grove they are secluded sometimes it is done in huts among the grain coast tribes however the girls go into a magic wood until they are married should they have to leave the wood for any temporary reason they must smear themselves with white clay a similar custom holds good in okion calabar district where should a girl have to leave the fattening house she must be covered with white clay i believe this fattening house custom in calabar is not only for fattening up the women to improve their appearance but an initiatory custom as well although the main intention is now undoubtedly fattening and the girl is constantly fed with fat producing foods such as fufu soaked in palm oil i am told but i think wrongly that the white clay with which a calabar girl is kept covered while in the fattening house putting on an extra coating of it should she come outside is to assist in the fattening process by preventing perspiration the duration of the period of seclusion varies somewhat san salvador boys are six months in the wood kamarun boys are 12 months in most districts the girls are betrothed in infancy and they go into the wood or initiatory hut for a few months before marriage in this case the time seems to vary with the circumstance of the individual not so with the boys for whom each tribal society has a duly appointed course terminating at a duly appointed time but sometimes as among some of the yoruba tribes the boy has to remain under the rule of the presiding elders of the society painted white and wearing only a bit of grass cloth if he wears anything until he has killed a man then he is held to have attained man's estate by having demonstrated his courage and also by having secured for himself the soul of the man he has killed as a spirit slave the initiation of boys into a few of the elementary dogmas of the secret society by no means composes the entire work of the society all of them are judicial and taken on the whole they do an immense amount of good the methods are frequently a little quaint brushing about the streets disguised under masks and drapery with an imitation tail swinging behind you while you lash out at everyone you meet with a whip or cutlass is not a european way of keeping the peace or perhaps i should say maintaining the dignity of the law but discipline must be maintained and this is the west african way of doing it the igbo of kalabar is a fine type of the secret society it is exceedingly well developed in its details not sketchy like his yogo nor so red-handed as pura unfortunately however i cannot speak with the same amount of knowledge of igbo as i could of pura igbo has the most grades of initiation except perhaps pura and it exercises jurisdiction over all classes of crime except witchcraft any epic man who desires to become an influential person in the tribe must by himself into as high a grade of igbo as he can afford and these grades are expensive one thousand five hundred pounds or one thousand pounds english being required for the higher steps i'm informed but it is worth it to a great trader as an influential epic necessarily is for he can call out his own class of igbo and send it against those of his debtors who may be of lower grades and as the igbo methods of delivering its orders to pay up consistent placing agbo at a man's doorway and until it removes itself from that doorway the man dare not venture outside his house it is most successful of course the higher a man is in agbo rank the greater his power and security for lower grades cannot proceed against higher ones indeed when a man meets the paraphernalia of a higher grade of agbo than that to which he belongs he has to act as if he were lame and limp along past it humbly as if the sight of it had taken all the strength out of him and needless to remark higher grade debtors flip their fingers at lower grade creditors after talking so much about the secret society spirits it may be as well to say what they are they are one and all a kind of a sort of a something that usually the exception is icun lives in the bush last february i was making my way back towards duke town late as usual i was just by a town on the quay river as i was hurrying onward i heard a terrific uproar accompanied by drums in the thick bush into which after a brief interval of open ground the path turned i became curious and alarmed and hid in some dense bush as the men making the noise approached i saw it was some juju affair they had a sort of box which they carried on poles and their dresses were peculiar and abnormally ample over the upper part of their body they were prancing about in an ecstatic way around the box which had one end open beating their drums and shouting they were fairly close to me but fortunately turned their attention to another bit of undergrowth or that evening they would have landed another kind of thing to what they were after the bushes they selected they surrounded and evidently did their best to induce something to come out of them and go into their box arrangement i was every bit as anxious as they were that they should succeed and succeed rapidly for you know there are a nasty lot of snakes and things in general not to mention driver ants about that calabar bush that do not make it at all pleasant to go sitting about in however presently they got this something into their box and rejoiced exceedingly and departed staggering under the weight i gave them a good start and then made the best of my way home and all that night duke town howled and sang and thumped its tom-toms increasingly for i was told egg boy had come into the town egg boy is very coy even for his secret society spirit and seems to loathe publicity but when he is ensconced in this arc he utters sententious observations on the subject of current politics and his word is law the voice that comes out of the arc is very strange and unlike a human voice i heard it shortly after egg boy had been secured i expect from what i saw that there was some person in that arc all the time but i do not know it is more than i can do to understand my juju details at present let alone explain them on rational lines i hear that there is a tribe on the slave coast who have been proved to keep a small child in the drum that is the residence of their chief spirit and that when the child grows too large to go in it it is killed and another one that has in the meantime been trained by the priests takes the place of the dead one until it in its turn grows too big and is killed and so on i expect that the killing of the children is not sacrificial but arises entirely from the fact that as x kings are dangerous to the body politic therefore still more dangerous would x gods be very little is known by outsiders regarding egg boy compared to what there must be to be known owing to a want of interest or to a sense of inability on the part of most white people to make head or tail out of what seems to them a horrid pagan practice or a farrogo of nonsense it is still a great power although its officials in duke or craig town are no longer allowed to go chopping and whipping promiscuous like because the console general has a prejudice against this sort of thing and the ethic is learning that it is nearly as unhealthy to go against his console general as against his juju so i do not believe you will ever get the truth about it in duke town or creek town if you want to get hold of the underlying idea of these societies you must go round out of the way corners where the natives are not yet afraid of being laughed at or punished of the southwest coast secret societies the okuku seems the most powerful the shugo belonging to those indolent igalwas and in bonway is now a little more than a play you pretty frequently come upon is shugo dances just around liberville you will see stretched across the little street in a cluster of houses a line from which branches are suspended making a sort of screen the women and children keep one side of the screen the men dancing on the other side to the peculiar monotonous shugo tune pura i have spoken of elsewhere i believe that these secret societies are always distinct from the leopard societies i have pretty nearly enough evidence to prove that it is so in some districts but not in all so far my evidence only goes to prove the distinction of the two among the negroes not among the bantu and in all classes you will find some men belonging to both some men in fact go in for all the societies in their district but not all the men and in all districts if you look close you will find several societies apart from the regular youth initiating one these other societies are practically murder societies and their practices usually include cannibalism which is not an essential part of the rights of the great tribal societies is shugo or egbo in the calabar district i was informed by natives that there was a society of which the last entered member has to provide for the entertainment of the other members the body of a relative of his own and sacrificial cannibalism is always breaking out or perhaps i should say being discovered by the white authorities in the niger delta there was the great outburst of it at brass in 1895 and the one chronicled in the liverpool mercury for august 13th 1895 as occurring at serra leon this account is worth quoting it describes the hanging by the authorities of three murderers and states the incidents which took place in the impedy country behind freetown one of the chief murderers was a man named joey who had formerly been a sunday school teacher in serra leon he pleaded in extenuation of his offense that he had been compelled to join the society the others said they committed the murders in order to obtain certain parts of the body for juju purposes the leg the hand the heart etc the mercury goes on to give a statement of the reverend father bomby of the roman catholic mission he said he was at brome to where the saint joseph mission has a station when a man was brought down from the impedy country in a boat the poor fellow was in a dreadful state and was brought to the station for medical treatment he said he was working on his farm when he was suddenly pounced upon from behind a number of sharp instruments were driven into the back of his neck he presented a fearful sight having wounds all over his body supposed to have been inflicted by the claws of the leopard but in reality they were stabs from sharp pointed knives the native who was a powerfully built man called out on his cries attracting the attention of his relations the leopards made off the poor fellow died at brome to from the injuries it was only his splendid physique that kept him alive until his arrival at the mission the mercury goes on to quote from the pal mal and i too go on quoting to show that these things are known and acknowledged to have taken place in a colony like sara leon which has had unequaled opportunities of becoming christianized for more than 100 years and now has more than 130 places of christian worship in it some 20 years ago there was a war between this tribe taima and the paramas the paramas sent some of their war boys to be ambushed in the intervening country the impedy but the impedy delivered these war boys to the enemy in revenge the paramas sent the fetish bufima into the impedy country this fetish had up to that time been kept active and working by the sacrifice of goats but the medicine men of the paramas who introduced it into the impedy country decreed at the same time that human sacrifices would be required to keep it alive thereby working their vengeance on the impedy by leading them to exterminate themselves in a sacrifice to the fetish the country for years had been terrorized by this secret worship of bufima and at one time the impedy started the tonga dances at which the medicine men pointed out the supposed worshipers of bufima the so-called human leopards because when ceasing their victims for sacrifice they covered themselves with leopard skins and imitating the roars of the leopard they sprang upon their victim plunging at the same time two three pronged forks into each side of the throat the government some years ago forbade the tonga dances and are now striving to suppress the human leopards there are also human alligators who disguised as alligators swim in the creeks upon the canoes and carry off the crew some of them have been brought for trial but no complete case has been made out against them in comment upon this account which is evidently written by someone well versed in the affair I will only remark that sometimes instead of the three pronged forks there are fixed in the paws of the leopard skin sharp pointed cutting knives the skin being made into a sort of glove into which the hand of the human leopard fits in one skin I saw down south this was most ingeniously done the knives were shaped like the leopards claws curved sharp pointed and with cutting edges underneath and I'm told the American men's mission which works in the Sierra Leone districts have got a similar skin in their possession the human alligator mentioned is our old friend the witch crocodile the spirit of the man in the crocodile I never myself came across a case of a man in his corporeal body swimming about in a crocodile skin and I doubt whether any native would chance himself inside a crocodile skin and swim about in the river among the genuine articles for fear of their penetrating his disguise mentally and physically in Calabar which crocodiles are still flourishing there is an immense old brute that sporting vice consuls periodically go after which is known to contain the spirit of a Duke town sheath who shall be nameless because they are getting on at such a pace just around Duke town that happily I might be had up for libel when I was in Calabar once a peculiarly energetic officer had hit that crocodile and the chief was forthwith laid up by a wound in his leg he said a dog had bit him they the chief and the crocodile are quite well again now and I will say this in favor of that chief that nothing on earth would persuade me to believe that he went fooling about in the Calabar river and his corporeal body either in his own skin or a crocodile's the introduction of the fetish poofy mind to the country of the impiti is an interesting point as it shows that these different tribes have the same big juju similarly Calabar egg bull can go into opion and will be respected in some of the new Calabar districts but not at brass where the secret society is a distinct cult often a neighboring district will send into Calabar or brass where the big juju is and ask to have one sent up into their district to keep order but egg ball will occasionally be sent into a district without that district in the least wanting it but as in the impiti case when it is there it is supreme but say for example you were to send egg ball around from Calabar to Cameroon Cameroon might be barely civil to it but would pay no homage for Cameroon has got no end of a juju of its own it can rise up as high as the peak thirteen thousand seven hundred and sixty feet i never saw the Cameroon juju do this but i saw it start up from four feet to quite tough feet in the twinkling of an eye and i was assured that it was only modest reticence on its part that made it leave the other thirteen thousand seven hundred and forty eight feet out of the performance Dr. Nassau seems to think that the tribal society of the Corisco regions is identical with the Leopard societies he has had considerable experience of the workings of the Okuku particularly when he was pioneering in the Benito regions when it came very near killing him he says the name signifies a departed spirit it is a secret society into which all the males are initiated at puberty whose procedure may not be seen by females nor its laws disobeyed by anyone under pain of death a penalty which is sometimes commuted to a fine a heavy fine its discussions are uttered as an oracle from any secluded spot by some men appointed for the purpose on trivial occasions any initiated man may personate Okuku or issue commands for the family on other occasions as in shiku to raise prices the society lays its commands on foreign traders some cases of Okuku's proceedings against white traders have come under my own observation a friend of mine a trader in the Batanga district in some way incurred the animosity of the society's local branch he had as is usual in the southwest coast trade several sub factories in the bush he found himself boycotted no native came into his yard to buy or sell the store not even to sell food he took no notice and awaited developments one evening when he was sitting on his veranda smoking and reading he thought he heard someone singing softly under the house this like most european buildings hereabouts being elevated just above the earth he was attracted to the song and listened it was evidently one of the native singing not one of his own crew boys and so knowing the language and having nothing else particular to do he attended to the affair it was the same thing song softly over and over again so softly that he could hardly make out the words but at last catching his native name among them he listened more intently than ever down at a not hole in the wooden floor the song was they are going to attack your factory at tomorrow they're going to attack your factory at tomorrow over and over again until it ceased and then he thought he saw something darker than the darkness around it creep across the yard and disappear in the bush very early in the morning he with his crew boys and some guns went and established themselves in that threatened factory in force the ukuku society turned up in the evening and recanided the situation and finding there was more in it than they had expected withdrew in the course of the next 24 hours he succeeded in talking the palover successfully with them he never knew who his singing friend was but suspected it was a man whom he had known to be grateful for some kindness he had done him indeed there were and are many natives who have caused to be grateful to him for he is deservedly popular among his local tribes but the man who sang to him that night deserves much honor for he did it at a terrific risk sometimes representatives of the ukuku fraternity from several tribes meet together and discuss intertribal difficulties thereby avoiding war doctor nasau distinctly says that the band two region leopard society is identical with and he says that although the leopards are not very numerous here they are very daring made so by immunity from punishment by men the superstition is that on any man who kills a leopard will fall a curse or evil disease curable only by runeously expensive process of three weeks duration under the direction of so the natives allow the greatest depredations and ravages until their sheep goats and dogs are swept away and are roused to self-defense only when a human being becomes the victim of the daring beast with this superstition is united another similar to the werewolf of germany there's a belief in the power of human metamorphosis into a leopard a person so metamorphosed is called who vengua at one time in benito an intense excitement prevailed in the community doors and shutters were rattled at the dead of night marks of leopard claws were scratched on doorposts then tracks lay on every path women and children in lonely places saw their flitting forms or in the dusk were knocked down by their spring or heard their growl in the thickets it is difficult to decide in many of these reports whether it is a real leopard or only an uvingua to native fears they're practically the same we were certain this time the uvingua was a thief disguised in leopard skin as theft is always heard of about such times when i was in gabun in september 1895 there was great uvingua excitement in a district just across the other side of the estuary mainly at a village that endured the spacious and resounding name of rompo cembo from a celebrated chief and all these phenomena were rife there again when i was in a village of the calabar there were 14 goats and five slaves killed in eight days by leopards the genuine things i am sure in this case but here as down south there was a strong objection to proceed against the leopard and no action was being taken save making the goat house is stronger in okion when a leopard is killed its body treated with great respect and brought into the killer's village messages are then sent to the neighboring villages and they send representatives to the village and the gall bladder is most carefully removed from the leopard and burnt quorum publico each person whipping their hands down their arms to disavow any guilt in the affair this burning of the gall however is not juju it is done merely to destroy it and to demonstrate to all men that it is destroyed because it is believed to be a deadly poison and if any is found in a man's possession the punishment is death unless he is a great chief a few of these are allowed to keep leopards gall in their possession john bailey tells me that if a great chief commits a great crime and is adjudged by a conclave of his fellow chiefs to die it is not considered right he should die in a common way and he is given leopards gall a precisely similar idea regarding the poisonous quality of crocodiles gall holds good down the south the juju parts of the leopard are the whiskers you cannot get a skin from a native with them on and gay reckless young hunters wear them stuck in their hair and swagger tremendously while the elders shake their heads and keep a keen eye on their subsequent conduct i must say the african leopard is an audacious animal although it is ungrateful of me to say a word against him after the way he has let me off personally and i will speak of his extreme beauty as compensation for my ingratitude i really think taken as a whole he is the most lovely animal i have ever seen only seeing him in the one way you can gain a full idea of his beauty namely in his native forest is not an unmixed joy to a person like myself of a nervous disposition i may remark that my nervousness regarding the big game of africa is of a rather peculiar kind i can confidently say i am not afraid of any wild animal until i see it and then well i will yield to nobody in terror fortunately as i say my terror is a special variety fortunately because no one can manage their own terror you can suppress alarm excitement fear fright and all those small fry emotions but the real terror is as dependent on the inner make of you as the color of your eyes or the shape of your nose and when terror ascends its throne in my mind i become paternaturally artful and intelligent to an extent utterly foreign to my true nature and save in the case of close quarters with bad big animals a feeling of rage against some unknown person that such things as leopards elephants crocodiles etc should be allowed out loose in that disgracefully dangerous way i do not think much about it at the time whenever i have come across an awful animal in the forest and i know it has seen me i take Jerome's advice and instead of relying on the power of the human eye rely upon that of the human leg and effect a masterly retreat in the face of the enemy if i know it has not seen me i sink in my tracks and keep an eye on it hoping that it will go away soon thus i once came upon a leopard i had got caught in a tornado in a dense forest the massive mighty trees were waving like a wheat field in an autumn gale in england and i dare say a field mouse in a wheat field in a gale would have heard much the same uproar the tornado shrieked like 10 000 vengeful demons the great trees creaked and groaned and strained against it and their bush rope cables groaned and smacked like whips and ever in a non a thundering crash with snaps like pistol shots told that they and their mighty tree had strained and struggled in vain the fierce rain came in a roar tearing to shreds the leaves and blossoms and deluging everything i was making bad weather of it and climbing up over a lot of rocks out of a gully bottom where i had been half drowned in a stream and on getting my head to the level of a block of rock i observed right in front of my eyes broadside on maybe a yard off certainly not more a big leopard he was crouching on the ground with his magnificent head thrown back and his eyes shut his four paws were spread out in front of him and he lashed the ground with his tail and i grieved to say in face of that awful danger i don't mean me but the tornado that depraved creatures swore softly but repeatedly and profoundly i did not get all these facts up in one glance for no sooner did i see him then i ducked under the rocks and remembered thankfully that leopards are said to have no power of smell but i heard his observation on the weather and the flip flap of his tail on the ground every now and then i cautiously took a look at him with one eye round a rock edge and he remained in the same position my feelings tell me he remained there twelve months but my calmer judgment puts the time down at twenty minutes and at last when taking another cautious peep i saw he was gone at the time i wished i knew exactly where but i did not care about that detail now for i saw no more of him he had moved off in one of those weird lulls which you get in a tornado when for a few seconds the wild herd of hurrying winds seem to have lost themselves and wander around crying and wailing like lost souls until their common rage seizes them again and they rush back to their work of destruction it was an immense pleasure to have seen the great creature like that he was so evidently enraged and so baffled by the uproar and dazzled by the floods of lightning that swept down into the deepest recesses of the forest showing at one second every detail of twig leaf branch and stone around you and then leaving you in a sort of swirling dark until the next flash came this and the great conglomerate roar of the wind rain and thunder was enough to bewilder any living thing i have never heard a leopard intentionally i am habitually kind to animals and besides i do not think it is lady like to go shooting things with a gun twice however i have been in collision with them on one occasion a big leopard had attacked a dog who with her family was occupying a broken down hut next to mine the dog was a half breed borehound and a savage brute on her own account i being roused by the uproar rushed out into the feeble moonlight thinking she was having one of her habitual turnips with the other dogs and i saw a whirling mass of animal matter within a yard of me i fired two mushroom shaped native stools in rapid succession into the brown of it and the meeting broke up into a leopard and a dog the leopard crouched i think to spring on me i can see its great beautiful lambant eyes still and i seized an earthen water cooler and flung it straight at them it was a noble shot it burst on the leopards head like a shell and the leopard went for bush one time twenty minutes after people began to drop in cautiously and inquire if anything was the matter and i civilly asked them to go and ask the leopard in the bush but they firmly refused we found the dog had got her shoulder slit open as if by a blow from a cutlass and the leopard had evidently seized the dog by the scruff of her neck but owing to the loose folds of skin no bones were broken and she got round all right after much ointment for me which she paid me for with several bites do not mistake this for a sporting adventure i no more thought it was a leopard than that it was a lotus when i joined the fight my other leopard was also after a dog leopards always come after dogs because once upon a time the leopard and the dog were great friends and the leopard went out one day and left her welps in charge of the dog and the dog went out flirting and a snake came and killed the welp so there is ill feeling to this day between the two for the benefit of sporting readers whose interest may have been excited by the mention of big game i may remark that the largest leopard skin i ever measured myself was tail included nine feet seven inches it was a dried skin and every man who saw it said it was the largest skin he had ever seen except one that he had seen somewhere else the largest crocodile i ever measured was 22 feet three inches the largest gorilla five feet seven inches i am assured by the missionaries in calabar that there was a python brought into creek town in the reverend mr goldie's time that extended the whole length of the creek town mission house faranda and despair the python must have been over 40 feet i have not a shadow of doubt it was stay at home people will always discredit great measurements but experienced pushmen do not and after all if it amuses the stay at home's to do so by all means let them they have dull lives of it and it don't hurt you for you know how exceedingly difficult it is to preserve really big things to bring home and how half the time they fall into the hands of people who would not bother their heads to preserve them in a rotting climate like west africa the largest python skin i ever measured was a damaged one which was 26 feet there is an immense one hung in front of a house in san paul de luanda which you can go and measure yourself with comparative safety any day in which is i think over 20 feet i never measured this one the common run of pythons is 10 to 15 feet or rather i should say this is about the sized one you find with painful frequency in your chicken house of the lubucus secret society i can speak with no personal knowledge i had a great deal of curious information regarding it from a ba kele woman who had her information second hand but it bears out what captain latrobe bateman says about it in his most excellent book the first descent of the casai george philip 1889 and to his account in note jay of the appendix i beg to refer the ethnologist my information also went to show what he calls a dark inference as to its true nature a nature not universally common by any means to the african tribal secret society in addition to the secret society and the leopard society there are in the delta some jujus held only by a few great chiefs the one in bonnie has a complete language to itself and there is one in duke town so powerful that should you desire the death of any person you have only to go and name him before it these jujus are very swift and sure i would rather drink than fight with any of them yes far end of chapter 16 fetish concluded read by kehinde of