Fetichism in West Africa Part 29

We now felt we were free, though not formally told so. We had made a fearful oath of secrecy. We preferred to remain and a.s.sist in the final order of the house. The doctor and elders now disarticulated the skeleton (for such it was, the man being dead now at least five weeks, and the decomposed flesh having almost all fallen away). The bones were put into the bark box on which stood the image. They were an addition to the contents of the Yaka, or family fetich. Then, at the close of three weeks'

confinement in the house, we emerged in procession, the elders bearing the box and the image on the top, and proceeded to the village street. There the box and image were set; and a joyous dance was started with drum and song, with all the people of the village, male and female. A sheep or goat was killed, and a feast prepared. While the dance was going on, the elders around the box were bowing and praying to the image on their knees. From time to time a man would parade by, lifting his steps high and bowing low, and as suddenly erecting himself and strongly aspirating, "Hah! hah!" And the village was glad, for it felt sure no evil could now come to it. I was safe, and ready, at the next time of danger, to a.s.sist in torturing the next younger set of lads, for was I not a freeman of the family guardian-spirit?

The box and image were stowed away in a back room of the village headman's dwelling, who would often take a plate full of food to it, as a sacrifice, and sometimes an offering of cloth or other goods; and the village felt safe.

Nevertheless, the house was not torn down; it stood empty and unused. But if, even a year later, evil still fell on the village, the elders knew that something about the Malanda had not been rightly performed. And it must all be done over again with the next dead adult male (never a female) and with a new lot of neophytes.

A woman may be subjected to a part of the above ceremonies if she is suspected of witchcraft, or if, on examination, she confess to using black art. To purge her of this evil, and to counteract the consequences of what she may have done, she is taken to the little hut over the end of the tunnel, and some of the above described ceremonies are performed over her; but she is never taken into the house, nor into the presence of the corpse.

XIII. THREE-THINGS CAME BACK TOO LATE.

(The following narrative was told me by a Batanga native Christian woman who, herself less than thirty years of age, is a great-granddaughter of the man one of whose wives was the witch of this story. I bade her, in giving me the account, to speak, not from her present Christian standpoint and her only slight superst.i.tious bias, but from the full heathen view-point. The confusing mixture of singular and plural p.r.o.nouns referring to the witch is an exact reproduction of my informant's words.)

The great-grandfather was a heathen and a polygamist. He had four wives.

One of them was a member of an interior tribe, the Boheba, more heathenish and superst.i.tious than his own Batanga coast tribe. Unknown to him, she was a member of the Witchcraft Society, had power with the spirits, and they with her, attended their secret night meetings, and engaged in their unhallowed orgies.

The husband, though not a member of the society, had acquired some knowledge of witchcraft art, and, though without the power to transform himself, as wizards did, was able to see and know what was being done at distances beyond ordinary human sight.

One night she arose from her bed to go and attend a witchcraft play. She left her physical "house," the fleshly body, lying on the bed, so that no one not in the secret, seeing that body lying there, would think other than it was herself, nor would know that she was gone out. In her going out she willed to emerge as Three-Things, and this triple unit went off to the witchcraft play. The husband happened to see this, and watched her as she disappeared, saw where she went, and, though distant and out of sight, knew what she was doing. So he said to himself, "She is off at her play; I also will do some playing here; she shall know what I have done."

Among the several things of which followers of witchcraft are afraid, and which weaken their power, is cayenne pepper. So this man gathered a large quant.i.ty of pepper-pods from the bushes growing in the behu (kitchen-garden), and bruised them in a mortar to a fine soft pulp. This he smeared thoroughly all over the woman's unconscious body as it lay in her bedroom. He left not the smallest portion of her skin untouched by the pepper,--from her scalp, and in the interstices of her fingers and toes, minutely over her entire body.

Meanwhile, with the woman at her play, the night was pa.s.sing. The witches'

sacred bird, the owl, began its early morning warning hoot. She prepared to return. As she was returning, the first morning c.o.c.k-crow also warned her to hasten, lest daybreak should find her triple unit outside of its fleshly "house." So the three came rushing with the speed of wind back to her village. Her husband was on the watch; he heard this panting sound as of a person breathing rapidly, and felt the impulse of their wind as she reached her hut and came in to re-enter their house.

He saw her approach every possible part of the body, seeking to find even a minute spot that was not barred by the pepper. She searched long and anxiously, but in vain; and in despair they went and hid herself in a wood-pile at the back of one of the village huts, waiting in terror for some possible escape.

All this the husband saw silently. When morning light finally came, he knew that this wife was dead, for her life-spirit had not succeeded in returning to its body within the specified time. It was therefore a dead body. But he said nothing about it to any one, and went off fishing.

As the morning hours were pa.s.sing while he was away and the woman's door of her hut was still closed, his children began to wonder and to say, "What is this? What is the matter? Since morning light our father's wife has not come out into the street." After waiting awhile longer, their anxiety and curiosity overcame them, and they broke in the door. There they saw the woman lying dead. They fled in fear, saying, "What is this that has killed our father's wife?" They went down to the beach to meet him as he returned from fishing, and excitedly told him, "Father, we have found your Boheba wife dead!" The man, to their surprise, did not seem grieved. He simply said, "Let another one of my wives cook for me; I will first eat." Still more to their surprise, he added, "And you, my children, and all people of the village, do not any of you dare even to touch the body. Only, at once, send word to her Boheba relatives to come."

This warning he gave his people, lest any of them should sicken by coming close to the atmosphere that the witch had possibly brought back with her from her play.

By the time he had finished eating, the woman's relatives had arrived.

They were all heavily armed with guns and spears and knives, and were threatening revenge for their sister's death.

The man quietly bade them delay their anger till they had heard what he had to say; and took them to the woman's hut, that they themselves might examine the corpse, leaving to them the chance of contamination.

They examined; they lifted up the body of their sister, and searched closely for any sign of wound or bruise. Finding none, but still angry, they were mystified, and exclaimed, "What then has killed her?" And they seated themselves for a verbal investigation. But the man said, "We will not talk just yet. First stand up, and you shall see for yourselves." As they arose, the man said, "Remove all those sticks in that wood-pile. You will find the woman there." So they pulled away the sticks; and there they found Three-Things. "There!" said the husband, "see the reason why your sister is dead!" At that the relatives were ashamed, and said, "Brother-in-law! we have nothing to say against you, for our eyes see what our sister has done. She has killed herself, and she is worthy to be punished by fire." (Burning was a common mode of execution for the crime of witchcraft.)

In her terror at being unable to get back into her mortal body, the Three-Things, all the while she was hidden in the wood-pile, had shrivelled smaller and smaller until what was left were three deformed crab-shaped beings, a few inches long, with mouths like frogs. These, paralyzed with fear, could not speak, but could only chatter and tremble.

So the relatives seized these Three-Things, and also carried away the body; and, followed by all the people of the village, they burnt it and them on a large rock by the sea.

That rock I pa.s.s very often as I walk on the beach. At high tide it is cut off from the sh.o.r.e a distance of a few yards; at low tide one can walk out to it. It is only a few hundred yards from our Batanga Mission Station.

CHAPTER XVII

FETICH IN FOLK-LORE

The telling of Folk-lore Tales amounts, with the African Negro, almost to a pa.s.sion. By day, both men and women have their manual occupations, or, even if idling, pa.s.s the time in sleep or gossip; but at night, particularly with moonlight, if there be on hand no dances, either of fetich-worship or of mere amus.e.m.e.nt, some story-teller is asked to recite.

All know the tales, but not all can recite them dramatically. The audience never wearies of repet.i.tion. The skilful story-teller in Africa occupies in the community the place filled in civilization by the actor or concert-singer.

This is true all over Africa. In any one region there are certain tales common to all the tribes in that region. But almost every tribe will have tales distinctive to it. It is part of native courtesy to ask a visitor to contribute his local story to the amus.e.m.e.nt of the evening.

Some of these tales are probably of ancient origin, as to their plot and their characters. I am disposed to give the folk-lore of Africa a very ancient origin. Ethnology and philology trace the Bantu stream from the northeast, not by a straight line diagonally to the southwest, but the stream, starting with an infusion of Hamitic (and perhaps Caucasian) blood in the Nubian provinces, flowed south to the Cape, and then, turning on itself, flowed northwestward until it lost itself at the Bight of Benin.

That blood gave to the Bantu features more delicate than those of the northern Guinea Negro.

That stream, as it flowed, carried with it arts, thoughts, plants, and animals from the south of Egypt. The bellows used in every village smithy on the West Coast is the same as is depicted on Egyptian monuments. The great personages mentioned as "kings" are probably semi-deified ancestors, or are even confounded with the Creator. It may not be only a coincidence that the ancient Egyptian word "Ra" exists in west equatorial tribes (contracted from "rera" = my father) with its meaning of "Lord," "Master,"

"Sir." In these tales the name Ra-Mborakinda is used interchangeably with the Divine Name, Ra-Nyambe.

But it is true that a doubt can be raised against the antiquity of some of the tales, in which are introduced words, _e. g._, "cannon," "pistol,"

articles not known to the African until comparatively modern times. And in the case of a few, such as No. V., the origin is in all probability modern. In No. V. the reader at once turns in thought to "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves." There the internal evidence is positive, either that the story was heard long ago from Arabs (or perhaps within the last hundred years from some foreigner), or there may have been an original African story, to which modern narrators have attached incidents of Ali Baba which they have overheard within the last fifty years from some white trader or educated Sierra-Leonian.

But it would not necessarily condemn a tale's claim to antiquity that it had in it modern words. Such words as "gun," "pistol," "stairway,"

"canvas," and others may be interpolations. It was probably true long ago, as is now the case, that narrators added to or changed words uttered by the characters. Where in the plot some modern weapon is named, long ago it was perhaps a spear, club, or bow and arrow. When Dutch and Portuguese built their forts on the African sh.o.r.e three hundred years ago, some bright narrator could readily have varied the evening's performance by introducing a cannon into the story. Such variations necessarily grew; for the native languages were not crystallized into written ones until the days of the modern missionary.

In recitation great lat.i.tude is allowed as to the time occupied. Brevity is not desired. A story whose outline could be told in ten minutes may be spread over two hours by a vivid use of the speaker's imagination in a minute description of details. A great deal of repet.i.tion (after the manner of "This is the house that Jack built") is employed, that would be wearisome to a civilized audience, but is intensely enjoyed by the African, _e. g._, where the plot calls for the doing of an act for several days in succession, we would say simply, "And the next day he did the same." But the native lover of folk-lore will repeat the same details in the same words for the second and third and even fourth day. In my reporting I have omitted this repet.i.tion.

I have purposely used some native idioms in order to retain local color.

African narrators use very short sentences. Africans in many respects are grown-up children. One of their daily recognized idioms finds its exact parallel in the speech of our own children. Listen to a civilized child's animated account of some act. They repeat. The native does so constantly.

He is not satisfied, in telling the narrative of a journey, by saying curtly, "I went." His form is, "I went, went, there, there," etc. His dramatic acting keeps up the interest of the audience in the twice-told tale.

I. QUEEN NGWE-NKONDE AND HER MANJA.

A king, by name Ra-Mborakinda, had many wives, but he had no children at all. He was dissatisfied, and was always saying that he wanted children.

So he went to a certain great wizard, named Ra-Marange, to get help for his trouble.

Whenever any one went on any business to Ra-Marange, before he had time to tell the wizard what he wanted, Ra-Marange would say, "Have you come to have something wonderful done?" On the visitor saying, "Yes," Ra-Marange, as the first step in his preparations and to obtain all needed power, would jump into fire or do some other astonishing act.

So, this day, he sprang into the fire, and came out unharmed and strong.

Then he told Ra-Mborakinda to tell his story of what he had come for.

The king said, "Other people have children, but I have none. Make me a medicine that shall cause my women to bear children." Ra-Marange replied, "Yes, I will fix you the medicine; and after I have made the mixture, you must require all of your women to eat of it." So the wizard fixed the medicine, and the king took it with him and went home.

His queen's name was Ngwe-nkonde; and among his lesser wives and concubines were two quite young women who were friends, one of whom lived with the queen in her hut as her little manja, or handmaid.

As soon as Ra-Mborakinda arrived, he announced his possession of the medicine, and ordered all his women to come and eat of it. But Ngwe-nkonde was jealous of her young maid, and did not wish her to become a mother.

So, early in the morning, she purposely sent the manja away to their mpindi (plantation hut) on a made-up errand, so that she might not be present at the feast.

At the appointed hour the king spread out the medicine, and called the women to come. They each came with a piece of plantain leaf as a plate, and a.s.sembled to eat, and Ramborakinda divided out the medicine among them. Then the other of the two young women remembered her friend the manja, and observed that she was absent. So she quickly tore off a piece of her plantain leaf, and divided on it a part of her own share of the medicine, and hid it by her, to keep it for the manja, so that she could have it on her return from the mpindi. In the afternoon, when the manja returned, her friend gave her the portion of the medicine, and she ate it.