 CHAPTER XIII. FETISH. CONTINUED. In which the Voyager discourses on deaths and witchcraft, and with no intentional slur on the medical profession, on medical methods and to burial customs, concluding with sundry observations on twins. It is exceedingly interesting to compare the ideas of the Negroes with those of the Bantu. The mental condition of the lower forms of both races seems very near the other great borderline that separates man from the anthropoid apes. And I believe that if we had the material, or rather if we could understand it, we should find little or no gap existing in mental evolution in this old, undisturbed continent of Africa. Let however these things be as they may. One thing about Negro and Bantu races is very certain, and that is that their lives are dominated by a profound belief in witchcraft and its effects. Among both alike the rule is that death is regarded as a direct consequence of the witchcraft of some malevolent human being acting by means of spirits over which he has by some means or another obtained control. To all rules there are exceptions. Among the Calabar Negroes who are definite in their opinions, I found two classes of exceptions. The first arises from their belief in a bush soul. They believe every man has four souls. A. The soul that survives death. B. The shadow on the path. C. The dream soul. D. The bush soul. This bush soul is always in the form of an animal in the forest, never of a plant. Sometimes when a man sickenes it is because his bush soul is angry at being neglected, and a witch doctor is called in who, having diagnosed this as being the cause of the complaint, devises the administration of some kind of offering to the offended one. When you wander about in the forests of the Calabar region you will frequently see little dwarf huts with these offerings in them. You must not confuse these huts with those of similar construction you are continually seeing in plantations or near roads which refer to quite other affairs. These offerings in the little huts in the forest are placed where your bush soul was last seen. Unfortunately you are compelled to call in a doctor, which is an expense but you cannot see your own bush soul unless you are an ebomptom, a sort of second sider. But return to the bush soul of an ordinary person. If the offering in the hut works well on the bush soul the patient recovers, but if it does not he dies. Diseases arising from derangements in the temper of the bush soul however, even when treated by the most eminent practitioners, are very apt to be intractable, because it never realizes that by injuring you it endangers its own existence. For when its human owner dies the bush soul can no longer find a good place and goes mad, rushing to and fro, if it sees a fire it rushes into it, if it sees a lot of people it rushes among them, until it is killed, and when it is killed it is finished for it, as M. Piccalt would say for it is not an immortal soul. The bush souls of a family are usually the same for a man and for his sons, for a mother and for her daughters. Sometimes however I am told all the children take the mothers, sometimes all take the fathers. They may be almost any kind of animal, sometimes they are leopards, sometimes fish or tortoises and so on. There is another peculiarity about the bush soul, and that is that it is on its account that old people are held in such esteem among the Kalabar tribes. For however bad these old people's personal record may have been, the fact of their longevity demonstrates the possession of powerful and astute bush souls. On the other hand a man may be a quiet respectable citizen, devoted to peace and a whole skin, and yet he may have a sadly flighty, disreputable bush soul which will get itself killed or damaged, and cause him death or continual ill health. There is another way by which a man dies, apart from the action of bush souls or witchcraft. He may have had a bad illness from some cause in his previous life, and when reincarnated part of his disease may get reincarnated with him, and then he will ultimately die of it. There is no medicine of any avail against these reincarnated diseases. The idea of reincarnation is very strong in the Niger Delta tribes. It exists as far as I have been able to find out throughout all Africa, but usually only in scattered cases as it were, but in the Delta most, I think I may say all, human souls of the surviving soul class are regarded as returning to the earth again and undergoing a reincarnation shortly after the du burial of the soul. These two exceptions from the rule of all deaths and sickness being caused by witchcraft are, however, of minor importance. For infinitely the larger proportion of death and sickness is held to arise from witchcraft itself, more particularly among the Bantu. Witchcraft acts in two ways, namely, witching something out of a man or witching something into him. The former method is used by both Negro and Bantu, but is decidedly more common among the Negroes, where the witches are continually setting traps to catch the soul that wanders from the body when a man is sleeping, and when they have caught the soul, they tie it up over the canoe fire, and its owner sickens as the soul shrivels. This is merely a regular line of business, and not an affair of individual hate or revenge. The witch does not care whose dream soul gets into the trap and will restore it on payment. Also witch doctors and men of unblemished professional reputation will keep asylums for lost souls, i.e. souls who have been out wandering and found on their return to their body that their place has been filled up by a sisa, a low class soul I will speak of later. These doctors keep souls and administer them to patients who are short of the article. But there are other witches, either wicked on their own account or hired by people who are moved by some hatred to individuals, and then the trap is carefully set and baited for the soul of the particular man they wish to injure, and concealed in the bait at the bottom of the pot are knives and sharp hooks which tear and damage the soul, either killing it outright or mauling it so that it causes its owner sickness on its return to him. I knew the case of a crew man who for several nights had smelt in his dreams the savoury smell of smoked crawfish seasoned with red peppers. He became anxious and the head man decided some witch had set a trap baited with his dainty for his dream soul, with intent to do him grievous bodily harm, and great trouble was taken for the next few nights to prevent this soul of his from straying abroad. The witchings of things into a man is far the most frequent method among the Bantu, hence the prevalence among them of the post-mortem examination, a practice I never found among the Negroes. The belief in witchcraft is the cause of more African deaths than anything else. It has killed and still kills more men and women than the slave trade. Its only rival is perhaps the smallpox, the grand craw-craw, as the crew man graphically call it. At almost every death a suspicion of witchcraft arises. The witch doctor is called in and proceeds to find out the guilty person, then woe to the unpopular men, the weak women and the slaves, for on some of them will fall the accusation that means ordeal by poison or fire, followed if this point to guilt as from their nature they usually do, by a terrible death. Slow roasting alive, mutilation by degrees before the throat is mercifully cut, tying to stakes at low tide that the high tide may come and drown, and any other death, human ingenuity and hate can devise. The terror in which witchcraft is held is interesting in spite of all its horror. I have seen mild gentle men and women turned by it, in a moment, to incarnate fiends, ready to rend and destroy those who were second before were nearest and dearest to them. Terrible is the fear that falls like a spell upon a village when a big man or big woman is just known to be dead. The very men catch their breaths and grow gray round the lips, and then everyone, particularly those belonging to the household of the deceased, goes in for the most demonstrative exhibition of grief. Long, low howls creep up out of the first silence, those blood-curdling, infinitely melancholy, wailing howls, once heard never to be forgotten. The men tear off their clothes, and wear only the most filthy rags. Women, particularly the widows, take off ornaments and almost all dress. Their faces are painted white with chalk, their heads are shaven, and they sit crouched on the earth in the house, in the attitude of a basement, the hands resting on the shoulders, palms downwards not crossed across the breast, unless they are going into the street. Meanwhile, the witch doctor has been sent for, if he is not already present, and he sets to work in different ways to find out who are the persons guilty of causing the death. Whether the methods vary with the tribe or with the individual witch doctor, I cannot absolutely say, but I think largely with the latter. Among the Benga I saw a witch doctor going round a village ringing a small bell, which was to stop ringing outside the hut of the guilty. Among the Kabindas I saw at different times two witch doctors trying to find witches, one by means of taking on and off the lid of a small basket while he repeated the names of all the people in the village. When the lid refused to come off at the name of a person, that person was doomed. The other Kabinda doctor first tried throwing nuts upon the ground, also repeating names. That method apparently failed. Then he resorted to another, rubbing the flattened palms of his hands against each other. When the palms refused to meet at a name and his hands flew about wildly, he had got his man. The accused person, if he denies the guilt and does not claim the ordeal, is tortured, until he not only acknowledges his guilt, but names his accomplices in the murder, for remember, this witchcraft is murder in the African eyes. If he claims the ordeal as he usually does, he usually has to take a poison drink. Among all the ban two tribes I know this is made from sass wood. Sass equals bad, sass water equals rough water, sass surf equals bad surf, etc. And is a decoction of the freshly pulled bark of a great hardwood forest tree, which has a tall unbranched stem, terminating in a crown of branches bearing small leaves. Among the Kalabar tribes the ordeal drink is of two kinds, one made from the Kalabar bean, the other the great juju drink mbiam, which is used also in taking oaths. In both the sass wood and Kalabar bean drink, the only chance for the accused lies in squaring the witch doctor, so that in the case of the sass wood drink it is allowed to settle before administration, and in the bean that you get a very heavy dose, both arrangements tending to produce the immediate ometic effect indicative of innocence. If this effect does not come on quickly, you die a miserable death, from the effects of the poison interrupted by the means taken to kill you, as soon as it is decided from the absence of violent sickness that you are guilty. The mbiam is not poisonous, nor is its use confined as the use of the bean is entirely to which palaver, but it is the most respected and dreaded of all oaths, and from its decision there is but one appeal. The appeal open to all condemned persons, but rarely made, the appeal to long juju. This long juju means almost certain death, and before it a severe frightening that is worse than negromind than mere physical torture. The mbiam oath formula I was able to secure in the upper districts of the Kalabar. One form of it runs thus, and it is recited before swallowing the drink made of filth and blood. If I have been guilty of this crime, if I have gone and sought the sick ones hurt, if I have sent another to seek the sick ones hurt, if I have employed anyone to make charms or to cook bush, or to put anything in the road, or to touch his cloth, or to touch his yams, or to touch his goats, or to touch his fowl, or to touch his children, if I have prayed for his hurt, if I have thought to hurt him in my heart, if I have any intention to hurt him. If I ever, at any time, to any of these things, recite in full, or employ others to do these things, recite in full, then, mbiam, thou deal with me. This form I gave was foreused when a man was sick, and things were generally going badly with him, for it is not customary in cases of disease to wait until death occurs before making an accusation of witchcraft. In the case of mbiam, being administered after a death this long and complicated oath would be worded to meet the case most carefully, the future intention clauses being omitted. In all cases whenever it is used, the greatest care is taken that the oath be recited in full, oath takers being sadly prone to kiss their thumb as it were, particularly ladies who are taking mbiam for accusations of adultery, in conjunction with the boiling oil or deal. Indeed, so unreliable is this class of offenders, or let us rather say this class of suspected persons that someone usually says the oath for them. From the penalty and inconveniences of these accusations of witchcraft there is but one escape, namely, flight to a sanctuary. There are several sanctuaries in Congo-Français. The great one in the Calabar district is at Oman. Fither mothers of twins, widows, thieves and slaves fly, and if they reach it are safe. But an attempt at flight is a confession of guilt. No one is quite certain the accusation will fall on him or her, and hopes for the best until it is generally too late. Moreover, flying anywhere beyond a day's march is difficult work in West Africa. So the killing goes on, and it is no uncommon thing for ten or more people to be destroyed for one man's sickness or death, and thus over immense tracts of country the death rate exceeds the birth rate. Indeed, some of the smaller tribes have thus been almost wiped out. In the Calabar district I have heard of an entire village taking the bean voluntarily, because another village had accused it and block of witchcraft. Miss Schleser has frequently told me how, during a quarrel, one person has accused another of witchcraft, and the accused has bolted off in a towering rage and swallowed the bean. The witch doctor is not always the cause of people being subjected to the ordeal of torture. In Calabar and the Ocean districts, all the widows of a dead man are subjected to ordeal. They have to go the next night after the death before an assemblage of chiefs and the general surrounding crowd to a cleared space where there is a fire burning. A fowl is tied to the right hand of each widow, and should that fowl fail to cluck at the sight of the fire, the woman is held guilty of having bewitched her dead husband and is dealt with accordingly. Among the Bantu, although the killing among the wives from the accusation of witchcraft is high, some of them being almost certain to fall victims, yet there is not the wholesale slaughter of women and slaves sent down with the soul of the dead that there is among the Negroes. In doubtful cases of death, i.e. in all cases not arising from actual violence, when blood shows in the killing, the Bantu of the south-west coast make post-mortem examinations. Notably common is this practice among the Cameroons and Batanga region tribes. The body is cut open to find in the entrails some sign of the path of the injected witch. I am informed that it is the lung that is most usually eaten by the spirit. If the diseased is a witch doctor, it is thought, as I have mentioned before, that his familiar spirit has eaten him internally, and he is opened with a view of securing and destroying his witch. In 1893 I saw in a village in Kakongo five unpleasant-looking objects stuck on sticks. They were the livers and lungs, and in fact the plucks of which doctors and the inhabitants informed me they were the witches that had been found in them on post-mortems and then been secured. Mrs. Grenfell of the Upper Congo told me in the same year when I had the pleasure of traveling with her from Victoria to Matadi, that a similar practice was in vogue among several of the Upper Congo tribes. Again in 1893 I came across another instance of the post-mortem practice. A woman had dropped down dead on a factory beach at Corisco Bay. The natives could not make it out at all. They were irritated about her conduct. She knows sick, she know complaint, she know nothing and then she go die one time. The post-mortem showed a burst aneurysm. The native verdict was, she done witch herself, i.e. she was a witch eaten by her own familiar. The general opinion held by people living near a river is that the spirit of a witch can take the form of a crocodile to do its work in. Those who live away from large rivers or in districts like Congo Frances, where crocodiles are not very savage, hold that the witch takes on the form of a leopard. Still the crocodile spirit form is believed in, in Congo Frances and to a greater extent in Kakongo, because here the crocodiles of the Congo are very ferocious and numerous, taking as heavy a toll in human life as they do in the Delta of the Niger and the estuaries of the Sierra Leone and Sherborough Rivers. One witch doctor I know in Kakongo had a strange professional method. When by means of his hand-rubbings, etc., he had got hold of a witch or a bewitched one. He always gave the unfortunate an automatic and always found several lively young crocodiles in the consequence and the stories of the natives in this region abound in accounts of people who have been carried off by witch crocodiles and kept in places underground for years. I often wonder whether this idea may not have arisen from the well-known habit of the crocodile of burying its prey on the bank. Sometimes it will take off a limb of its victim at once, but frequently it buries the body whole for a few days before eating it. The body is always buried if it is left to the crocodile. I have a most profound respect for the whole medical profession, but I am bound to confess that the African representatives of it are a little empirical in their methods of treatment. The African doctor is not always a witch doctor in the bargain, but he is, usually. Lady doctors abound. They are a bit dangerous in pharmacy, but they do not often venture on surgery, so on the whole they are safer, for African surgery is heroic. Dr. Nassau cited the worst case of it I know of. A man had been accidentally shot in the chest by another man with a gun on the Ogoway. The native doctor who was called in made a perpendicular incision into the man's chest, extended down to the last rib he then cut diagonally across, and actually lifted the wall of the chest and groped about among the vitals for the bullet which he successfully extracted. Patient died. No anesthetic was employed. I came across a minor operation. A man had broken the ulna of the left arm. The native doctor got a piece, a very nice piece of bamboo, drove it in through the muscles and integuments from the wrist to the elbow, then encased the limb in plantain leaves and bound it round, tidally and neatly, needless to say with tie tie. The arm and hand when I saw it some six or seven months after the operation was quite useless and was withering away. Many of their methods, however, are better. The duala medicos are truly great on poultices for extracting foreign substances, such as bits of iron cooking pot, a very frequent form of foreign substance in a man out here owing to their being generally used as bullets. Almost incredible stories are told by black and white of the efficacy of these poultices, one case I heard from a reliable source of a man who had been shot with fragments of iron pot in the thigh. The white doctor extracted several pieces and said he had got all out, but the man still went on suffering and could not walk. So at his request, a native doctor was called in and he applied his poultice. In a few minutes he removed it and on its face were two pieces of jagged iron pot. Probably they had been in the poultice when it was applied. Anyhow, the patient recovered rapidly. Baths accompanied by massage are much esteemed. The baths are sometimes of hot water with a few herbs thrown in. Sometimes they are made by digging a hole in the earth and putting into it a quantity of herbs and bruised cardamoms and peppers. Boiling water is then plentifully poured over these and the patient is placed in the bath and is covered over with the parboiled green stuff. A coating of clays then placed overall leaving just the head sticking out. The patient remains in this bath for a period of a few hours up to a day and a half and when taken out is well rubbed and kneaded. This form of bath I saw used by the Empongoi Anigalwas and it is undoubtedly good for many diseases, notably for that curse of the coast, rheumatism which afflicts black and white alike. Rubbing and kneading and hot baths are I think the best native remedies and the plaster of grains of paradise pounded up and mixed with clay and applied to the forehead as a remedy for malarial headache or brow acu is often very useful. But apart from these I have never seen in any of these herbal remedies any trace of a really valuable drug. The Calabar natives are notably behind hand in their medical methods, depending more on juju than the Bantu's. In a case of rheumatism, for example, instead of ordering the hot bath, the local practitioner will woka his patient and extract from the painful part, even when it has not been wounded, pieces of iron pot, millipedes, etc., and in cases of dysentery, bundles of shred of palm leaves. These things he asserts have been by witchcraft inserted into the patient. His conduct can hardly be regarded as professional and moreover as he goes on to diagnose who has witch these things into the patient's anatomy, it is highly dangerous to the patient's friends, relations and neighbors into the bargain. With no intentional slur on the medical profession after this discussion on their methods, I will pass on to the question of dying. Dying in West Africa, particularly in the Niger Delta is made very unpleasant for the native by his friends and relations. When a person is insensible, violent means are taken to recall the spirit to the body. Pepper is forced up the nose and into the eyes. The mouth is propped open with a stick. The shredded fibers of the outside of the oil nut are set alight and held under the nose, and the whole crowd of friends and relations with whom the stifling hot hut is tightly packed yell the dying man's name at the top of their voices in a way that makes them hoarse for days, just as if they were calling to a person lost in the bush or to a person struggling and being torn or lured away from them. Hi, hi, don't you hear come back, come back. See here, this is your place, etc. This custom holds good among both Negroes and Bantu's, but the funeral ceremonies very immensely in fact with every tribe, and form a subject the details of which I will reserve for a separate work on fetish. Among the Okiyon tribes a special care is taken in the case of a woman dying and leaving a child over six months old. The underlying idea is that the spirit of the mother is sure to come back and fetch the child. And in order to pacify her and prevent the child dying, it is brought in and held just in front of the dead body of the mother and then gradually carried away behind her where she cannot see it. And the person holding the child makes it cry out and says, See, your child is here, you are going to have it with you all right. Then the child is hastily smuggled out of the hut, while a bunch of plantains is put in with the body of the woman and bound up with the funeral binding clothes. Very young children they do not attempt to keep but throw them away in the bush alive, as all children are thrown who have not arrived in this world in the way considered orthodox or who cut their teeth in an improper way. Twins are killed among all the Niger Delta tribes and in districts out of English control the mother is killed too, except in Oman, where the sanctuary is. There twin mothers and their children are exiled to an island in the Cross River. They have to remain on the island and if any man goes across and marries one of them he has to remain on the island too. This twin killing is a widely diffused custom among the Negro tribes. There is always a sense of there being something uncanny regarding twins in West Africa and in those tribes where they are not killed, they are regarded as requiring great care to prevent them from dying on their own account. I remember once among the Teshwi trying to amuse a sickly child with an image which was near it and which I thought was its doll. The child regarded me with its great melancholy eyes pittingly as much as to say, a pretty full you are making of yourself. And so I was for I found out that the image was not a doll at all, but an image of the child's dead twin, which was being kept near it as a habitation for the deceased twin soul so that it might not have to wander about and feeling lonely call its companion after it. The terror with which twins are regarded in the Niger Delta is exceedingly strange and real. When I had the honor of being with Miss Slesser at Ocean, the first twins in that district were saved with their mother from emulation owing entirely to Miss Slesser's great influence with the natives and her own unbounded courage and energy. The mother in this case was a slave woman and Ibo, the most expensive and valuable of slaves. She was the property of a big woman who had always treated her, as indeed most slaves are treated in Calabar with great kindness and consideration. But when these two children arrived, all was changed. Immediately she was subjected to torrents of virulent abuse. Her things returned from her. Her English china basins, possessions she valued most highly were smashed. Her clothes returned and she was driven out as an unclean thing. Had it not been for the fear of incurring Miss Slesser's anger she would at this point have been killed with her children and the bodies thrown into the bush. As it was she was hounded out of the village. The rest of her possessions were jammed into an empty gin case and cast to her. No one would touch her as they might not touch to kill. Miss Slesser had heard of the twins's arrival and had started off barefooted and bareheaded at that pace she can go down a bush path. By the time she had gone four miles she met the procession, the woman coming to her and all the rest of the village yelling and howling behind her. On the top of her head was the gin case into which the children had been stuffed. On the top of them the woman's big brass skillet and on the top of that her two market kalabashes. Needless to say on arriving Miss Slesser took charge of affairs relieving the unfortunate weak staggering woman from her load and carrying it herself for no one else would touch it or anything belonging to those awful twin things and they started back together to Miss Slesser's house in the forest clearing saved by that tact which coupled with her courage has given Miss Slesser an influence and a power among the Negroes unmatched in its way by that of any other white. She did not take the twins and their mother down the village path to her own house for though she had done so the people of Okiyon would not have prevented her yet so polluted with the path have been and so dangerous to pass down that they would have been compelled to cut another no light task in that bit of forest I assure you. So Miss Slesser stood waiting in the broiling sun in the hot season's hut while a path was being cut to enable her just to get through to her own grounds. The natives worked away hard knowing that it saved the polluting of a long stretch of market road and when it was finished Miss Slesser went to her own house by it and attended with all kindness promptness and skill to the woman and children. I arrived in the middle of this affair for my first meeting with Miss Slesser and things at Okiyon were rather crowded one way and another that afternoon. All the attention one of the children wanted the boy for there was a boy and a girl was burying for the people who had crammed them into the box had utterly smashed the child's head. The other child was alive and is still a member of that household of rescued children all of whom owe their lives to Miss Slesser. There are among them twins from other districts and delicate children who must have died had they been left in their villages and a very wonderful young lady very plump and very pretty aged about four. Her mother died a few days after her birth so the child was taken and thrown into the bush by the side of the road that led to the market. This was done one market day some distance from the Okiyon town. This particular market is held every ninth day and on the succeeding market day some women from the village by the side of Miss Slesser's house happened to pass along the path and heard the child feebly crying. They came into Miss Slesser's yard in the evening and sat chatting over the day shopping etc and casually mentioned in the way of conversation that they had heard the child crying and that it was rather remarkable it should be still alive. Needless to say Miss Slesser was off and had that wave home. It was truly in an awful state but just alive. In a marvelous way it had been left by leopards and snakes with which this bit of forest abounds and more marvelous still the driver ants had not scented it. Other ants had considerably eaten into it one way and another nose eyes etc were swarming with them and flies the cartilage of the nose and part of the upper lip had been absolutely eaten into but in spite of this she is now one of the prettiest black children I have ever seen which is saying a good deal for negro children are very pretty with their round faces their large mouths not yet coarsened by heavy lips their beautifully shaped flat little ears and their immense melancholy deer like eyes and above these charms they possess that of being fairly quiet. This child is not an object of terror like the twin children it was just thrown away because no one would be bothered to rear it but when Miss Slesser had had all the trouble of it the natives had no objection to pet and play with it calling it the child of wonder because of its survival. With a twin baby it was very different they would not touch it and only approached it after some days and then only when it was held by Miss Slesser or me. If either of us wanted to do or get something and we handed over the bundle to one of the house children to hold there was a stampede of men and women off the veranda out of the yard and over the fence if need be that was exceedingly comic but most convincing as to the reality of the terror and horror in which they held a thing even its own mother could not be trusted with the child she would have killed it she never betrayed the slightest desire to have it with her and after a few days nursing and feeding up she was anxious to go back to her mistress who being an enlightened woman was willing to have her if she came without the child the main horror is undoubtedly of the child the mother being killed more as a punishment for having been so intimately mixed up in bringing the curse danger and horror into the village than for anything else the woman went back by the road that had been cut for her coming and would have to live for the rest of her life and outcast and for a long time in a state of isolation in a hut of her own into which no one would enter neither would anyone eat or drink with her nor partake of the food or water she had cooked or fetched she would lead the life of a leper working in the plantation by day and going into her lonely hut at night shunned and cursed i tried to find out whether there was any set period for this quarantine and all i could arrive at was that if and a very considerable if a man were to marry her and she were subsequently to present a society an acceptable infant she would be to a certain extent socially rehabilitated but she would also be a woman with a past a thing the african to his credit be it said has no taste for the woman's own lamentations were pathetic she would sit for hours singing or rather mourning out a kind of dirge over herself yesterday i was a woman now i am a horror a thing all people run from yesterday they would eat with me now they spit on me yesterday they would talk to me with a sweet mouth now they greet me only with curses and execrations they have smashed my basin they have torn my clothes and so on and so on there was no complaint against the people for doing these things only a bitter sense of injury against some superhuman power that had sent this withering curse of twins down on her she knew not why she's saying i have not done this i have not done that and highly interesting information regarding the moral standpoint a good deal of it was i have tried to find out the reason of this widely diffused custom which is the cause of such a pitiful waste of life for in addition to the mother and children being killed it often leads to other people totally unconcerned in the affair being killed by the relatives of the sufferer on the suspicion of having caused the calamity by witchcraft and until one gets hold of the underlying idea and can destroy that the custom will be hard to stamp out in a district like the great niger delta but i have never been able to hunt it down though i am sure it is there and a very quaint idea it undoubtedly is the usual answer is it was the custom of our fathers but that always and only means we don't intend to tell funeral customs vary considerably between the negro and bantu and i never yet found among the bantu those unpleasant death charms which are in vogue in the niger delta the calabar people when the consular eyes off them bury under the house in the case of a great chief the head is cut off and buried with great secrecy somewhere else for reasons i have already stated the body is buried a few days after death but the really important part of the funeral is the burying of the spirit and this is the thing that causes all the west africans negro and bantu alike great worry trouble and expense for the spirit no matter what its late owner may have been is malevolent all native made spirits are the family have to get together a considerable amount of wealth to carry out this burial of the spirit so between the body burying and the spirit burying a considerable time usually elapses maybe a year maybe more the custom of keeping their fair open until the big funeral can be made obtains also in kabinda and loango but there instead of burying the body in the meantime it is placed upon a platform of wood and slow fires kept going underneath to dry it a mat roof being usually erected over it to keep off rain once sufficiently dried it is wrapped in cloths and put into a coffin until the money to finish the affair is ready the dualas are more tied down their death dances must be celebrated i am informed on the third seventh and ninth day after death on these days the spirit is supposed to be particularly present in its old home in all the other cases i should remark the spirit does not leave the home until it's devil is made and if this is delayed too long he naturally becomes fractious among the congo frances tribes there are many different kinds of burial as the cannibalistic of the fan i may remark however that they tell me themselves that it is considered decent to bury a relative even if you subsequently dig him up and dispose of the body to the neighbors then there is the earth burial of the igalwas and impongue and the beating into unrecognizable pulp of the body which i am told on good native authority is the method of several upper ogoe tribes including the adumas i had no opportunity of making quiet researches on burial customs when i was above njoli because i was so busy trying to avoid qualifying for a burial myself so i am not quite sure whether this method is the general one among these little known tribes as i am told by native traders who have it among them that it is or whether it is reserved for the bodies of people believed to have been possessed of dangerous souls destroying the body by beating up or by cutting up is a widely diffused custom in west africa in the case of dangerous souls and is universally followed with those that have contained wanderer souls i.e those souls which keep turning up in the successive infants of a family a child dies then another child comes to the same father or mother and that dies after giving the usual trouble and expense a third arrives and if that dies the worm the father i mean turns and if he is still desirous of more children he just breaks one of the legs of the body before throwing it in the bush this he thinks will act as a warning to the wanderer soul and give it to understand that if it will persist in coming into his family it must settle down there and give up its flight he weighs if a fourth child arrives in the family it usually limps and if it dies the justly irritated parent cuts its body up carefully into very small pieces and scatters them doing away with the soul altogether the kama country people of the lower ogoe are more superstitious and full of observances in the upper river tribes particularly rich in fetish arden komi a fernan vas tribe i once saw a funeral where they had been called in to do the honors and em jakot told me of an almost precisely similar occurrence that he had met within one of his many evangelizing expeditions from limbarani i will give his version because of his very superior knowledge of the language he was staying in a fan town where one of the chiefs had just died the other chief there are usually two in a fan town decided that his deceased confrere should have due honor paid him and resolved to do the thing handsomely the fans openly owned to not understanding thoroughly about death and life and the immortality of the soul and things of that sort and so the chief called in the in komi who are specialists in these subjects to make the funeral customs em jakot said the chief made a speech to the effect that the fans did not know about these things but their neighbors the in komi were known to be well versed in them and the proper things to do so he had called them in to pay honor to the dead chief then the in komi started and carried on their weird complicated death dance the fans sat and stood around watching them in a ring for a long time but to a rational common sense shrewd unimaginative set of people like the fans just standing hour after hour gazing on a dance you do not understand and which consists of a wriggle in a stamp or wriggle in a stamp in a solemn walk or prance round and round to the accompaniment of a monotonous phrase from Tony Tom Tom and a monotonous melancholy chant uttered in a minor key interspersed every few moments with an emphatic howl produces a feeling of boredom therefore the fans softly stole away and went to bed which disgusted the in komi and there was a row in the dance i saw the same thing happened only when the in komi saw the audience getting thin they complained and said that they were doing this dance in honor of the fans chief in a neighborly way and the very least the fans could do as they couldn't dance themselves was to sit still and admire people who could the fan chief in my village quite saw it and went and had the fans who had gone home early turned up and made them come and see the performance some more this they did for a time and then stole off again or slept in their seats and the in komi were highly disgusted at those brutes of fans whom they regarded they said in their way as philistines of an utterly obtuse and degraded type the in komi themselves put the body into coffins a barrel is the usual one but gun cases are two trade boxes the ends knocked out and the cases fitted together is another frequent form of coffin used by them these coffins are not buried but are put into special places in the forest along the banks of the ogowe you will notice here and there long stretches of uninhabited bush these are not all mere stretches of swamp forest if you land on some of these and go in a little way you will find the forest full of mounds or rather heaps because they have no mold over them made of branches of trees and leaves underneath each of these heaps there are the remains of a body one very evil looking place so used i found when i was on the carcola river dr. nasau tells me they are the usual burying grounds abbey of the ajumbas end of chapter 13 fetish continued read by gehinde of bahatrak.com chapter 14 fetish continued of travels in west africa this is a libervox recording all libervox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit libervox.org travels in west africa by mary h kingsley chapter 14 fetish continued in which the voyager discourses on the legal methods of natives of this country the ideas governing forms of burial of their manner of mourning for their dead and the condition of the african soul in the underworld great as are the incidental miseries and dangers surrounding death to all the people in the village in which a death occurs undoubtedly those who suffer most are the widows of a chief or free man the uniform custom among both negroes and bantu is that those who escape execution on the charge of having which the husband to death shall remain in a state of filth and abasement not even removing vermin from themselves until after the soul burial is complete the soul of the dead man being regarded as hanging about them and liable to be injured therefore also to the end of preventing his soul from getting damaged they are confined to their huts this latter restriction is not rigidly enforced but is held theoretically to be the correct thing they maintain the attitude of grief and abasement sitting on the ground eating but little food and that of a course kind in calabar their legal rights over property such as slaves are meanwhile considerably in abeyance and they are put to great expense during the time the spirit is awaiting burial they have to keep watch two at a time in the hut where the body is buried keeping lights burning and they have to pay out of their separate estate for the entertainment of all the friends of the deceased who come to pay him compliment and if he has been an important man a big man the whole district will come not in a squadron but just when it suits them exactly as if they were calling on a live friend fast it often happens that even a big woman is bankrupt by the expense i will not go into the legal bearings of the case here for they are intricate and to a great extent only interesting to a student of negro law the ban two women occupy a far inferior position in regard to the rights of property to that held by the negro women the disposal of wives after the death of the husband among them bonway and igalba is a subject full of interest but it is like most of their law very complicated the brothers of the deceased are supposed to take them the younger brother may not marry the elder brother's widows but the elder brothers may marry those of the younger brother should any of the women object to the arrangement they may leave the family i own that the ground principle of african law practically is the simple plan that they should take who have the power and they should keep who can and this tells particularly against women and children who have not got living powerful relations of their own unless the children of a man are grown up and sufficiently powerful on their own account they have little chance of sharing in the distribution of his estate but in spite of this abuse of power there is among negroes and ban twos a definite and acknowledged law to which an appeal can be made by persons of all classes provided they have the werewithal to set the machinery of it in motion the difficulty the children and widows have in sharing in the distribution of the estate of the father and husband arises i fancy in the principle of the husband's brothers being the true air which has sunk into a fossilized state near the trading stations in the face of the white culture the reason for this inheritance of goods passing from the man to his brother by the same mother has no doubt for one of its origins the recognition of the fact that the brother by the same mother must be a near relation whereas in spite of the strict laws against adultery the relationship to you of the children born of your wives is not so certain nevertheless this is one of the obvious and easy explanations for things it is well to exercise great care before accepting for you must always remember that the african mind does not run on identical lines with a european what may be self-evident to you is not so to him and vice versa i have heard many african metaphysicians complain that white men make great jumps in their thought course and do not follow an idea step by step you soon become conscious of the careful way a negro follows his idea certain customs of his you can by the exercise of great patients trace back in a perfectly smooth line from their source in some natural phenomenon others of course you cannot the traces of the intervening steps of the idea having been lost owing partly to the veneration in which old customs are held which causes them to regard the fact that their fathers had this fashion as reason enough for their having it and above all to the total absence of all but oral tradition but so great of faith have i in the lack of inventive power in the african that i feel sure all their customs had with a material that has slipped down into the great swamp of time could be traced back either as i have said to some natural phenomenon or to the thing being advisable for reasons of utility the uncertainty in the parentage of offspring may seem to be such a utilitarian underlying principle but on the other hand it does not sufficiently explain the varied forms of the law of inheritance for in some tribes the eldest or most influential son does succeed his father's wealth in other places you have the peculiar custom of the chief slave inheriting i think from these things that the underlying idea in inheritance of property is the desire to keep the wealth of the house i.e a state together and if it were allowed to pass into the hands of weak people like women and young children this would not be done another strong argument against the theory that it arises from the doubtful relationship of the son is that certain juju always go to the son of the chief wife if he is old enough at the time of the father's death even in those tribes where the wealth goes elsewhere certain tribes acknowledge the right of the women and children to share in the dead man's wealth given that these are legally married wives or the children of legally married wives it is so in cameroons for example an esteemed friend of mine who helps to manage things for the fatherland down there was trying a palaver the other day with a patience peculiar to him and that intelligent and elaborate care i should think only a mind trained on the methods of german metaphysicians could impart into that most wearisome of proceedings wherein everyone says the same thing over 14 different times at least with a similar voice and gesture the only variation being in the statements regarding the important points and the facts of the case these varying with each individual this palaver was made by a son claiming to inherit part of his father's property at last the astonishment and of course the horror of the learned judge the defendant the wicked uncle pleaded through the interpreter this man cannot inherit his father's property because his parents marry for love there is no encouragement to foolishness of this kind in cameroon where legal marriage consists in purchase in bonnie river and in opobo the inheritance of the house is settled primarily by a vote of the free men of the house when the chief dies their choice has to be ratified by the other chiefs of houses but in bonnie and opobo the white traders have had immense influence for a long time so one cannot now find out how far this custom is purely native in idea among the fans the uncle is as i have before said an important person although the father has more rights than among the galwa and here i came across a peculiar custom regarding widows m jacot cited to me a similar case or so one of which i must remark was in an ajumba town the widows were inside the dead husband's hut as usual the fan huts are stoutly built of sheets of flattened bark firmly secured together with bark rope and thatched they never build them in any other way except when they are in the bush rubber collecting or elephant hunting when they make them of the branches of trees well round the bark hut with the windows inside there was erected a hut made of branches and when this was nearly completed the fans commenced pulling down the inner bark hut and finally cleared it right out thatch and all and the materials of which it had been made were burnt i was struck with the performance because the fans though surrounded by intensely superstitious tribes are remarkably free from superstition themselves taking little or no interest in speculative matters except to get charms to make them invisible to elephants to keep their feet in the path to enable them to see things in the forest and practical things of that sort and these charms they frequently gave me to assist and guard me in my wanderings the empongue and galwa have a peculiar funeral custom but it is not confined in its operation to widows all the near relatives sharing in it the morning relations are seated on the floor of the house and some friend dr nasao told me he was called in in this capacity comes in and lifts them up bringing to them a small present a factor of which is always a piece of soap this custom is now getting into the survival form in lepreville and glass nowadays the relatives do not thus sit unwashed and unkept keenly requiring the soap among the bush a galwa i am told the soap is much wanted it is not only the widows that remain either theoretically or practically unwashed all the mourners do the ebibios seem to me to wear the deepest crepe in the form of accumulated dirt and all the african tribes i have met have peculiar forms of hair cutting shaving the entire head not shaving it at all shaving half of it etc when in mourning the period of the duration of wearing mourning is i believe in all west coast tribes that which elapses between the death and the burial of the soul i believe a more thorough knowledge would show us that there is among the ban too also a fixed time for the lingering of the soul on earth after death but we have not got sufficient evidence on the point yet the only thing we know is that it is not proper for the widow to remarry while her husband's soul is still in her vicinity among the calabar tribes the burial of his spirit liberates the woman among the techui she requires special ceremonies on her own account in togo land among the iwe people i know the period is between five and six weeks during which time the widow remains in the hut armed with a good stout stick as a precaution against the ghost of her husband so as to ward off attacks should he be ill-tempered after these six weeks the widow can come out of the hut but as his ghost has not permanently gone hence and is apt to revisit the neighborhood for the next six months she has to be taken care of during this period then after certain ceremonies she's free to marry again so i conclude the period of mourning in all tribes is that period during which the soul remains round its old possessions whether these tribes have a definite soul burial or devil making or not the idea is connected with the underworld to which the ghost goes are exceedingly interesting the negroes and bantu's are at one on these subjects in one particular only and that is that no marriages take place there the techui say that this underworld sraman dazi is just the same as this world in all other particulars say that it is dimmer a veritable shadow land where men have not the joys of life but only the shadow of the joy hence says the techui proverb one day in this world is worth a year in sraman dazi the techui's with their usual definiteness in this sort of detail know all about their sraman dazi its entrance is just east of the middle volta and the way down is difficult to follow and when the sun sets on this world it rises on sraman dazi the bantu's are vague on this important and interesting point the benga for example although holding the absence of marriage there do not take steps to meet the cases that techui's do and kill a supply of wives to take down with them this reason for killing wives at a funeral is another instance that however strange and cruel a custom may be here in west africa however much it may at first appear to be the flower of a rootless superstition you will find on close investigation that it has some root in a religious idea and a common sense element the common sense element in the killing of wives and slaves among both the techui and the kalabar tribes consists in the fact that it discourages poisoning a kalabar chief elaborately explained to me that the rigorous putting down of killing at funerals that was being carried on by the government not only landed a man in the next world as a wretched pauper but added an additional chance to his going there prematurely for his wives and slaves no longer restrained by the prospect of being killed at his death and sent off with him wood on very slight aggravation put bush in his chop it is sad to think of this thorn being added to the rose leaves of a west coast chief's life as there are 99.9 percent of thorns in it already i came across a similar case on the gold coast when a chief complained to me of the way the government were preserving vermin in the shape of witches in the districts under its surveillance you were no longer allowed to destroy them as of old and therefore the vermin were destroying the game for said he the witches here live almost entirely on the blood they suck from children at night they used in old days to do this fruitively and do so now where native custom is unchecked but in districts where the government says that witchcraft is utter nonsense and killing its proficient utter murder which will be dealt with accordingly the witch flourishes exceedingly and black males the fathers and mothers of families threatening that if they are not bought off they will have their child's blood and if they are not paid the child dies away gradually poison again most likely i often think it must be the common sense element in fetish customs that enables them to survive in the strange way they do in the minds of africans who have been long under european influence and education in witching for example every intelligent native knows there is a lot of poison in the affair but the explanation he gives you will not usually display this knowledge and it was not until i found the wide diffusion of the idea of the advisability of administering an ometic to the bewitched person that i began to suspect my black friends of sound judgment the good jude twist will tell you all things act by means of their life which means their power their spirit dr nasau tells me the efficacy of drugs is held to depend on their benevolent spirits which on being put into the body drive away the malevolent disease causing spirits a lucasites versus pathogenic bacteria sort of influence i suppose on this same idea also depends the custom of the appeal to ordeal the working of which is supposed to be spiritual nevertheless the intelligent native believing all the time in this factor squares the common sense factor by bribing the witch doctor who makes the ordeal drink the feeling regarding the importance of funeral observances is quite greek in its intensity given a duly educated african i am sure that he would grasp the true inwardness of the antigone far and away better than any european now living can a pathetic story which bears on this feeling was told me some time ago by miss slesser when she was stationed at creek town an old blind slave woman was found in the bush and brought into the mission she was in a deplorable state utterly neglected and starving her feet torn by thorns and full of jiggers and so on every care was taken of her and she soon revived and began to crawl about but her whole mind was set on one thing with a passion that had made her alike indifferent to her past sufferings and to her present advantages what she wanted was a bit only a little bit of white cloth now i may remark white cloth is anathema to the missions for it is used for juju offerings and a rule has to be made against it's being given to the unconverted or the missionary becomes an accessory before the fact to pagan practices so white cloth the old woman was told she could not have she had been given plenty of garments for her own use and that was enough the old woman however kept on pleading and saying the spirit of her dead mistress kept coming to her asking and crying for white cloth and white cloth she must get for her and so at last finding it was not to be got at the mission station she stole away one day unobserved and wandered off into the bush from which she never again reappeared doubtless falling a victim to the many leopards that haunted hereabouts to provide a proper burial for the dead relation is the great duty of a negro's life its only rival in his mind is the desire to avoid having a burial of his own but in a good negro this passion will go under before the other and he will risk his very life to do it he may know surely and well that killing slaves and women at a dead brother's grave means hanging for him when their big console knows of it but in the delta he will do it on the coast leeward and winward he will spend every penny he possesses and on top if need be go and pawn himself his wives or his children into slavery to give a deceased relation a proper funeral this killing at funerals i used to think would be more easily done away with in the delta then among the tatsui tribes but a little more knowledge of the delta's idea about the future life showed me i was wrong among the tatsui the slaves and women killed are to form for the dead a retinue and riches were with to start life in sramandasi yuboni atse of the uchi where there are markets and towns and all things is on this earth and so the tatsui would have little difficulty in replacing human beings at funerals with gold dust cloth and other forms of riches and this is already done in districts under wide influence but in the delta there is no underworld to live in the souls shortly after reaching the underworld being forwarded back to this in new babies and the wealth that is sent down with the man serves as an indication as to what class of baby the soul is to be repacked and sent up in as wealth in the delta consists of women and slaves i do not believe the underworld gods of the niger would understand the status of a chief who arrived before them let us say with 10 punchians of palm oil and 400 yams of crimson figured velvet they would say oh very good as far as it goes but where is your real estate the chances are you are only a trade slave boy and have stolen these things and in consequence of this killing at funerals will be accustomed exceedingly difficult to stamp out in these regions try and imagine yourself how abhorrent it must be to send down a dear and honored relative to the danger of his being returned to this world shortly as a slave there is no doubt a certain idea among the negroes some souls may get a rise in status on their next incarnation you often hear a woman saying she will be a man next time a slave he will be a free man and so on but how or why some souls obtain promotion i have not yet sufficient evidence to show i think a little more investigation will place this important point in my possession i once said to a calabar man but surely it would be easy for a man's friends to cheat they could send down a chief's out through the man though he was only a small man here no said he the other souls would tell on him and then he would get sent up as a dog or some beast as a punishment my first conception of the prevalence of the incarnation idea was also gained from a delta negro i said why in the world do you throw away in the bush the bodies of your dead slaves where i have been they tie a string to the leg of a dead slave and when they bury him bring the string to the top and fix it to a peg with the owner's name on and then when the owner dies he has that slave again down below they'd be full men said he and he went on to explain that the ghost of that slave would be almost immediately back on earth again growing up ready to work for someone else and would not wait for its last owner's soul down below and out of the luxuriant jungle of information that followed i gathered that no man's soul dally is below long and also that a soul returning to a family a thing insured by certain juju's was identified the new babies as they arrive in the family are shown a selection of small articles belonging to deceased members whose souls are still absent the thing the child catches hold of identifies him why his uncle john see he knows his own pipe or that's cousin emma see she knows her market calabash and so on i remember discoursing with a very charming french official on the difficulty of eradicating fetish customs why not take the native in the rear mademoiselle said he and convert the native gods i explained that his ingenious plan was not feasible because you cannot convert gods even educating gods is hopeless work all races of men through countless ages have been attempting to make their peculiar deities understand how they are wanted to work and what they are wanted to do and the result is anything but encouraging as i have dwelt on the repellent view of negro funeral custom i must injustice to them cite their better view there is a custom that i missed much ongoing south of calabar for it is a pretty one outside the villages in the calabar districts by the side of the most frequented roads you will see erections of bows i do not think these are intended for huts but for beds for they are very likely the calabar type of bed only made in wood instead of clay over them a roof of mats is put to furnish a protection against rain these shelters graves or fetish huts they are wrongly called by europeans are made by driving four longish stout poles into the ground while at the height of about three feet or so four more poles are tied so as to make a skeleton platform which is filled in with with these and main flat another set of five poles is tied above and these the roof is affixed on the platform is placed the bedding belonging to the deceased the undercloth counter pain etc and at the head are laid the pillows bolster shaped and stuffed with cotton tree fluff or shredded palm leaves and covered with some gaily colored cotton cloth in every case i have seen and the amount to hundreds for you cannot take an hour's walk even from dupe town without coming upon a dozen or so of these erections the pillows are placed so that the person lying on the bed would look towards the village on the roof and on the bed and underneath it on the ground are placed the household utensils that belonged to the deceased the calabashes the basins the spoons cut out of wood and the bottom iron ones as we should say in davin and on the stakes are hung the other little possessions there is one i know of made for the ghost of a poor girl who died onto the stakes of which are hung the dolls and the little pin cushions etc are given her by a kind missionary food is set out at these places and spirit poured over them from time to time and sometimes though not often pieces of new cloth are laid on them most of the things are deliberately damaged before they are put on the home for the spirit i do not think this is to prevent them from being stolen because all are not damaged sufficiently to make them useless there was a beautifully made spoon with a burnt-in pattern on one of these places when i left calabar to go south and on my return six months after it was still there on another there was a very handsome pair of market calabashes also much decorated that were only just chipped and in better repair than many in use in calabar markets and i make no doubt the spoon and they are still lying rotting among the debris of the pillows etc these places are only attended to during the time the spirit is awaiting burial as they are regarded merely as a resting place for it while it is awaiting this ceremony the body is not buried near them i may remark in spite however of the care that is taken to bury spirits a considerable percentage from various causes poverty of the relations the deceased being a stranger in the land accidental death in some unknown part of the forest or the surf remain unburied and hang about to the common danger of the village they may choose to haunt many devices are resorted to to purify the villages from these spirits one which wasn't used in creek town calabar to within a few years ago and which i am informed is still customary in some interior villages was very ingenious and believed to work well by those who employed it in the houses were set up in bakim large grotesque images carved of wood and hung about with cloth strips and kyu goss every november in creek town i was told by some authorities it was every second november there was a sort of festival held offerings of food and spirits were placed before these images a band of people accompanied by the rest of the population used to make a thorough round of the town up and down each street and round every house dancing singing screaming and tomtomming in fact making all the noise they knew how to and a calabar epic is very gifted in the power of making noise after this had been done for what was regarded as a sufficient time the images were taken out of the houses the crowd still making a terrific row and were then thrown into the river and the town was regarded as being cleared of spirits the rationale of the affair is this the wandering spirits are attracted by the images and take shelter among their rags like earwigs or something of that kind the charivary is to drive any of the spirits who might be away from their shelters back into them the shouting of the mob is to keep the spirits from venturing out again while they are being carried to the river the throwing of the images rags and all into the river is to destroy the spirits or at least send them elsewhere they did not go and pour boiling water on their earwig traps as wicked white men do but they meant the same thing and when this was over they made and set up new images for fresh spirits who might come into the town and these were kept intended as before until the next indok ceremony came around it is owing to the spiritual view which the african takes of existence at large that ceremonial observances form the greater part of even his common law procedure there is both among the negro and bantu a recognized code of law founded on principles of true but merciless justice it is not often employed because of the difficulty and the danger to the individual who appeals to it sure that individual beyond backed by power but nevertheless the code exists the african is particularly hard on theft he by no means compounds for since he is inclined to by damning those he has no mind to for theft is a thing he revels in persons are tried for theft on circumstantial evidence direct testimony and ordeal laws relating to mortgage are practically the same among negroes and bantu and europeans torts are not recognized unless the following case from cameroon points to a vague realization of them a let his canoe out to be in good order so that b could go up river and fetch down some trade b did not go himself but let's see who was not his slave but another free man who also wanted to go up for trade have the canoe on the understanding that in payment for the loan of the said canoe c should bring down b's trade a was not told about this arrangement at all b says a was only a was so blind drunk at the time he did not understand well up river c goes in the canoe and fetches up on a floating stump in the river and saves a hole you could put your head in in the bow of the said canoe c returns it to be in this condition b returns it to a in this condition a sues b before native chief saying he lent his canoe to be on the understanding always implied in african loans that it was to be returned in the same state as when lent fair wear and tar alone accepted b tries first to get c to pay for the canoe and for the rent of the canoe on top is a compensation for the delay in bringing down his b's trade c calls b the illegitimate offspring of a greenhouse lizard and pleads further that the floating log was a force majeure an act of god and denies liability on all counts b then pleads this as his own defense in the case of a and b authority cited in support of this view he also pleads he is not liable because c is a free man and not his slave the case went on for a week the judge was drunk for five days and his attempt to get his head clear the decision finally was that b was to pay a for compensation b versus c is still pending the laws against adultery are theoretically exceedingly severe the punishment is death and this is sometimes carried out the other day king bell in cameroon flogged one of his wives to death and the german government have deposed and deported him for you cannot do that sort of thing with impunity within a stone's throw of a government headquarters but as a general rule all along the coast the death penalty for murder or adultery is commuted to a fine or you can send a substitute to be killed for you if you are rich this is frequently done because it is cheaper if you have a city slave to give him to be killed in your stead then to pay a fine which is often enormous the adultery itself is often only a matter of laying your hand even in self-defense from a varago on a woman or brushing against her in the path these accusations of adultery are next to which craft the great social danger to the west coast native and they are often made merely for motives of extortion or spite and without an atom of truth in them it is customary for a chief to put his wives frequently to ordeal on this point and this is almost always done after there has been a big devil-making or a dance which his family have been gracing with their presence the usual method of applying the ordeal is by boiling palm oil a pot is nearly filled with the oil which is brought to the boil over a fire when it is seething the woman to be tried is brought out in front of it she first dips her hands into water and then has administered to her the mbm oath saying or having said for her that long elaborate formula in a form adjusted to meet the case then she plunges her hand into the boiling oil for an instant and shakes the oil off with all possible rapidity and the next woman comes forward and goes through the same performance and so on next day the hands of the women are examined and those found blistered are adjudged guilty and punished in order to escape heavy punishment the woman will accuse some man of having hustled against her or sat down on a bench beside her and so on and the accused man has to pay up if he does not in the calabar district egbo will come and eat the adultery and there won't be much of that man's earthly goods left sometimes the accusation is volunteered by the woman and frequently the husband and wife conspire together and cook up a case against a man for the sake of getting the damages there is nothing that ensures a man an unblemished character in west africa say the possession of sufficient power to make it risky work for people to cast slurs on it the ownership of children is a great source of palaver the law among negroes and bantu's is that the children of a free woman belong to her in the case of tribes believing in the high importance of uncles considerable powers are vested in that relative while in other tribes certain powers are vested in the father the children of slave wives are the only children the father has absolute power over if he is the legal owner of the slave woman if as is frequently the cause a free man marries a slave woman who belongs to another man all her children are the absolute property of her owner not her husband and the owner of the woman can take them and sell them or do whatsoever he chooses with them unless the free man father redeems them as he usually does although the woman may still remain the absolute property of the owner recalled by him at any time this law is the cause of the most brain spraining palavers that come before the white authorities there is naturally no statute of limitations in west africa because the african does not care a row of pins about time the wily a will let his slave woman live with b without claiming the redemption fees as they become due letting them stand over as it were at compound interest all the male as well as the female children of the first generation are a's property and all the female children of these children are his property even unto the second and third generation and away into eternity a may die before he puts in his claim in which case the ownership passes on into the hands of his heir or assignees who may foreclose it once on entering into their heritage or may again let things accumulate for their errors anyhow sooner or later the foreclosure comes and then there is trouble x y z etc free men have married some of the original a's slave women's descendants they have either bought them right out or kept on conscientiously redeeming children of theirs as they arrived of course a or his heirs contend that x y z etc have been wasting time and money by so doing because the people x y z have paid the money to had no legal title to the women of course x y z contend that their particular woman or her ancestors was duly redeemed from the legal owner remember there is no documentary evidence available and squads of equally reliable and oldest inhabitants are swearing hard all both ways just realize this and that your government says whenever native law is not bloodstained it must be supported and you may be able to realize the giddy mazes of a native palaver which if you conscientiously attempt to follow with a determination that justice shall be duly administered will for certain lay you low with an attack of fever the law of ownership is not all in favor of the owner masters being responsible for damage done by their slaves and this law falls very heavily and expensively on the owner of a bad slave indeed when one lives out here and sees the surrounding conditions of this state of culture the conviction grows on you that morally speaking the african is far from being the brutal fiend he is often painted a creature that loves cruelty and blood for their own sake the african does not and though his culture does not contain our institutions lunatic asylums prisons work houses hospitals etc he has to deal with the same classes of people who require these things so with them he deals by means of his equivalent institutions slavery the lash and death you have just as much right to my logical friend to call the west coast chief hard names for his habit of using brass bars heads of tobacco and so on in place of six penny pieces as you have to abuse him for clubbing and inveterate thief it's deplorably low of him i own but by what alternative plan of government his can be replaced i do not quite see under existing conditions in religious affairs the affairs which lead him into the majority of his iniquities his real sin consists in believing too much in his witchcraft the sin is the same toleration means indifference i believe among all men the african is not indifferent on the subject of witchcraft and i do not see how one can expect him to be put yourself in his place and imagine you have got hold of a man or woman who has been placing a live crocodile or a catawampus of some kind into your own or evalued relatives or fellow townsmen's inside so that it may eat up valuable viscera and cause you or your friend's suffering and death how would you feel a little like lynching your captive i fancy i confess that the more i know of the west coast africans the more i like them i own i think them fools of the first water for their power of believing in things but i fancy i have analogous feelings towards even my fellow countrymen when they go and violently believe in something that i cannot quite swallow end of chapter 14 fetish continued read by gehende of bahatrack.com