West African studies Part 11

Macmillan & Co., 1897.

[27] _Angola and the River Congo._ Macmillan. Vol. i., p. 144.

CHAPTER IX

THE WITCH DOCTOR

African Medicine mainly from the point of view of the Witch Doctor.

We will now leave the village apothecary and his methods, and turn to the witch doctor, the consulting physician. He of course knows all about the therapeutic action of low-grade spirits, such as dwell in herbs and so on; but he knows more--namely the actions of higher spirits on the human soul, and the disorders of the human soul into the bargain.

The dogma that rules his practice is that in all cases of disease in which no blood is showing, the patient is suffering from something wrong in the soul. In order to lay this dogma fairly before you, I should here discourse on the nature of spirits unallied to the human soul--non-human spirits--and the nature of the human spirit itself; but as on the one hand, I cannot be hasty on such an important group of subjects, and, on the other, I cannot expect you to be anything else in such a matter, I forbear, and merely beg to remark that the African does not believe in anything being soulless, he regards even matter itself as a form of soul, low, because not lively, a thing other spirit forms use as they please--practically as the cloth of the spirit that uses it. This conception is, as far as I know, constant in both Negro and Bantu. I will therefore here deal only with what the African regards as merely one cla.s.s of spirits--an important cla.s.s truly, but above it there are at least two more important cla.s.ses, while beneath it in grade there are, I think, about eleven, and equal to it, but differing in nature, several cla.s.ses--I don't exactly know how many. This cla.s.s of spirits is the human soul--the _Kla_ of the true Negro, the _Manu_ of the Bantu.

These human souls are also of different grades, for one sort is believed to be existent before birth, as well as during life and after death, while other cla.s.ses are not. There is more interesting stuff here, but I am determined to stick to my main point now--the medical. Well, the number of souls possessed by each individual we call a human being is usually held to be four--(1) the soul that survives, (2) the soul that lives in an animal away wild in the bush, (3) the shadow cast by the body, (4) the soul that acts in dreams. I believe that the more profound black thinkers hold that these last-named souls are only functions of the true soul, but from the witch doctor's point of view there are four, and he acts on this opinion when doctoring the diseases that afflict these souls of a man.

The dream-soul is the cause of woes unnumbered to our African friend, and the thing that most frequently converts him into that desirable state, from a witch doctor's point of view of a patient. It is this way.

The dream-soul is, to put it very mildly, a silly flighty thing. Off it goes when its owner is taking a nap, and gets so taken up with sky-larking, fighting, or gossiping with other dream-souls that sometimes it does not come home to its owner when he is waking up. So, if any one has to wake a man up great care must always be taken that it is done softly--softly, namely gradually and quietly, so as to give the dream-soul time to come home. For if either of the four souls of a man have their intercommunication broken, the human being possessing them gets very ill. We will take an example. A man has been suddenly roused by some cause or other before that dream-soul has had time to get into quarters. That human being feels very ill, and sends for the Witch Doctor. The medical man diagnoses the case as one of absence of dream-soul, instantly claps a cloth over the mouth and nose, and gets his a.s.sistant to hold it there until the patient gets hard on suffocated; but no matter, it's the proper course of treatment to pursue. The witch doctor himself gets ready as rapidly as possible another dream-soul, which if he is a careful medical man, he has brought with him in a basket. Then the patient is laid on his back and the cloths removed from the mouth and nose, and the witch doctor holds over them his hands containing the fresh soul, blowing hard at it so as to get it well into the patient. If this is successfully accomplished, the patient recovers. Occasionally, however, this fresh soul slips through the medical man's fingers, and before you can say "Knife" is on top of some 100-feet-high or more silk cotton tree, where it chirrups gaily and distinctly. This is a great nuisance. The patient has to be promptly covered up again. If the doctor has an a.s.sistant with him, that unfortunate individual has to go up the tree and catch the dream-soul.

If he has no a.s.sistant, he has to send his power up the tree after the truant; doctors who are in full practice have generally pa.s.sed the time of life when climbing up trees personally is agreeable. When, however, the thing has been re-captured and a second attempt to insert it is about to be made, it is held advisable to get the patient's friends and relatives to stand round him in a ring and howl l.u.s.tily, while your a.s.sistant also howling l.u.s.tily, but in a professional manner, beats a drum. This prevents the soul from bolting again, and tends to frighten it into the patient.

In some obstinate cases of loss of dream-soul, however, the most experienced medical man will fail to get the fresh soul inserted. It clings to his fingers, it whisks back into the basket or into his hair or clothes, and it chirrups dismally, and the patient becomes convulsed.

This is a grave symptom, but the diagnosis is quite clear. The patient has got a _sisa_ in him, so there is no room for the fresh soul.

Now, a _sisa_ is a dreadful bad thing for a man to have in him, and an expensive thing to get out. It is the surviving soul of a person who has not been properly buried--not had his devil made, in fact. And as every human surviving soul has a certain allotted time of existence in a human body before it can learn the dark and difficult way down to Srahmandazi, if by mischance the body gets killed off before the time is up, that soul, unless properly buried and sent on the way to Srahmandazi, or any other Hades, under expert instruction given as to the path for the dead, becomes a _sisa_, and has to hang about for the remaining years of its term of bodily life.

These _ensisa_ are held to be so wretchedly uncomfortable in this state that their tempers become perfect wrecks, and they grow utterly malignant, continually trying to get into a human body, so as to finish their term more comfortably. Now, a _sisa's_ chief chance of getting into a body is in whipping in when there is a hole in a man's soul chamber, from the absence of his own dream-soul. If a _sisa_ were a quiet, respectable soul that would settle down, it would not matter much, for the dream-soul it supplants is not of much account. But a _sisa_ is not. At the best, it would only live out its remaining term, and then go off the moment that term was up, and most likely kill the souls it had been sheltering with by bolting at an inconvenient moment.

This was the verdict given on the death of a man I knew who, from what you would call faintness, fell down in a swamp and was suffocated.

Inconvenient as this is, the far greater danger you are exposed to by having a _sisa_ in you lies in the chances being 10 to 1 that it is stained with blood, for, without being hard on these unfortunate unburied souls, I may remark that respectable souls usually get respectably buried, and so don't become _ensisa_. This blood which is upon it the devils that are around smell and go for, as is the nature of devils; and these devils whip in after the _sisa_ soul into his host in squads, and the man with such a set inside him is naturally very ill--convulsions, delirium, high temperature, &c., and the indications to your true witch doctor are that that _sisa_ must be extracted before a new dream-soul can be inserted and the man recover.

But getting out a _sisa_ is a most trying operation. Not only does it necessitate a witch doctor sending in his power to fetch it _vi et armis_, it also places the medical man in a position of grave responsibility regarding its disposal when secured. The methods he employs to meet this may be regarded as akin to those of antiseptic surgery. All the people in the village, particularly babies and old people--people whose souls are delicate--must be kept awake during the operation, and have a piece of cloth over the nose and mouth, and every one must howl so as to scare the _sisa_ off them, if by mischance it should escape from the witch doctor. An efficient pract.i.tioner, I may remark, thinks it a great disgrace to allow a _sisa_ to escape from him; and such an accident would be a grave blow to his practice, for people would not care to call in a man who was liable to have this occur.

However, our present medical man having got the _sisa_ out, he has still to deal with the question of its disposal before he can do anything more. The a.s.sistant blows a new dream soul into the patient, and his women see to him; but the witch doctor just holds on to the _sisa_ like a bulldog.

Sometimes the disposal of the _sisa_ has been decided on prior to its extraction. If the patient's family are sufficiently well off, they agree to pay the doctor enough to enable him to teach the _sisa_ the way to Hades. Indeed, this is the course respectable medical men always insist on although it is expensive to the patient's family. But there are, I regret to say, a good many unprincipled witch doctors about who will undertake a case cheap.

They will carry off with them the extracted _sisa_ for a small fee, then shortly afterwards a baby in the village goes off in tetanic convulsions. No one takes much notice of that, because it's a way babies have. Soon another baby is born in the same family--polygamy being prevalent, the event may occur after a short interval--well, after giving the usual anxiety and expense, that baby goes off in convulsions.

Suspicion is aroused. Presently yet another baby appears in the family, keeps all right for a week may be, and then also goes off in convulsions. Suspicions are confirmed. The worm--the father, I mean--turns, and he takes the body of that third baby and smashes one of its leg bones before it is thrown away into the bush; for he knows he has got a wanderer soul--namely, a _sisa_, which some unprincipled pract.i.tioner has sent into his family. He just breaks the leg so as to warn the soul he is not a man to be trifled with, and will not have his family kept in a state of perpetual uproar and expense. It sometimes happens, however, in spite of this that, when his fourth baby arrives, that too goes off in convulsions. Thoroughly roused now, paterfamilias sternly takes a chopper and chops that infant's remains up extremely small, and it is scattered broadcast. Then he holds he has eliminated that _sisa_ from his family finally.

I am informed, however, that the fourth baby to arrive in a family afflicted by a _sisa_ does not usually go off in convulsions, but that fairly frequently it is born lame, which shows that it is that wanderer soul back with its damaged leg. It is not treated unkindly but not taken much care of, and so rarely lives many years--from the fetish point of view, of course, only those years remaining of its term of bodily life out of which some witchcraft of man or some vengeance of a G.o.d cheated it.

If I mention the facts that when a man wakes up in the morning feeling very stiff and with "that tired feeling" you see mentioned in advertis.e.m.e.nts in the newspapers, he holds that it arises from his own dream-soul having been out fighting and got itself bruised; and that if he wakes up in a fright, he will jump up and fire off his gun, holding that a pack of rag tag devils have been chasing his soul home and wishing to scare them off, I think I may leave the complaints of the dream-soul connected with physic and pa.s.s on to those connected with surgery.

Now, devoted as I am to my West African friends, I am bound in the interests of Truth to say that many of them are sadly unprincipled.

There are many witches, not witch doctors, remember, who make it a constant practice to set traps for dream-souls. Witches you will find from Sierra Leone to Cameroons, but they are extra prevalent on the Gold Coast and in Calabar.

These traps are usually pots containing something attractive to the soul, and in this bait are concealed knives or fish-hooks--fish-hooks when the witch wants to catch the soul to keep, knives when the desire is just to injure it.

In the case of the lacerated dream-soul, when it returns to its owner, it makes him feel very unwell; but the symptoms are quite different from those arising from loss of dream-soul or from a _sisa_.

The reason for catching dream-souls with hooks is usually a low mercenary one. You see, many patients insist on having their own dream-soul put back into them--they don't want a subst.i.tute from the doctor's store--so of course the soul has to be bought from the witch who has got it. Sometimes, however, the witch is the hireling of some one intent on injuring a particular person and keen on capturing the soul for this purpose, though too frightened to kill his enemy outright.

So the soul is not only caught and kept, but tortured, hung up over the canoe fire and so on, and thus, even if the patient has another dream-soul put in, so long as his original soul is in the hands of a torturer, he is uncomfortable.

On one occasion, for example, I heard one of the Kru boys who were with me making more row in his sleep, more resounding slaps and snores and grunts than even a normal Kru boy does, and, resolving in my mind that what that young man really required was one of my pet pills, I went to see him. I found him asleep under a thick blanket and with a handkerchief tied over his face. It was a hot night, and the man and his blanket were as wet with sweat as if they had been dragged through a river. I suggested to head-man that the handkerchief muzzle should come off, and was informed by him that for several nights previously the man had dreamt of that savoury dish, crawfish seasoned with red pepper. He had become anxious, and consulted the head-man, who decided that undoubtedly some witch was setting a trap for his dream-soul with this bait, with intent, &c. Care was now being taken to, as it were, keep the dream-soul at home. I of course did not interfere and the patient completely recovered.

We will now pa.s.s on to diseases arising from disorders in the other three souls of a man. The immortal or surviving soul is liable to a disease that its body suffered from during its previous time on earth, born again with it. Such diseases are quite incurable, and I only personally know of them in the Calabar and Niger Delta, where reincarnation is strongly believed in.

Then come the diseases that arise from injury to the shadow-soul. It strikes one as strange at first to see men who have been walking, say, through forest or gra.s.s land on a blazing hot morning quite happily, on arrival at a piece of clear ground or a village square, most carefully go round it, not across, and you will soon notice that they only do this at noontime, and learn that they fear losing their shadow. I asked some Bakwiri I once came across who were particularly careful in this matter why they were not anxious about losing their shadows when night came down and they disappeared in the surrounding darkness, and was told that that was all right, because at night all shadows lay down in the shadow of the Great G.o.d, and so got stronger. Had I not seen how strong and long a shadow, be it of man or tree or of the great mountain itself, was in the early morning time? Ah me! I said, the proverb is true that says the turtle can teach the spider. I never thought of that.

Murders are sometimes committed by secretly driving a nail or knife into a man's shadow, and so on; but if the murderer be caught red-handed at it, he or she would be forthwith killed, for all diseases arising from the shadow-soul are incurable. No man's shadow is like that of his own brother, says the proverb.

Now we come to that very grave cla.s.s of diseases which arise from disorders of the bush-soul. These diseases are not all incurable, nevertheless they are very intractable and expensive to cure. This bush-soul is, as I have said, resident in some wild animal in the forest. It may be in only an earth pig, or it may be in a leopard, and, quite providentially for the medical profession no layman can see his own soul--it is not as if it were connected with all earth pigs, or all leopards, as the case may be, but it is in one particular earth pig or leopard or other animal--so recourse must be had to medical aid when anything goes wrong with it. It is usually in the temper that the bush-soul suffers. It is liable to get a sort of aggrieved neglected feeling, and want things given it. When you wander about the wild gloomy forests of the Calabar region, you will now and again come across, far away from all human habitation or plantation, tiny huts, under whose shelter lies some offering or its remains. Those are offerings administered by direction of a witch doctor to appease a bush-soul. For not only can a witch doctor see what particular animal a man's bush-soul is in, but he can also see whereabouts in the forest that animal is.

Still, these bush-souls are not easily appeased. The worst of it is that a man may be himself a quiet steady man, careful of his diet and devoted to a whole skin, and yet his bush-soul be a reckless blade, scorning danger, and thereby getting itself shot by some hunter or killed in a trap or pit; and if his bush-soul dies, the man it is connected with dies. Therefore if the hunter who has killed it can be found out--a thing a witch doctor cannot do unless he happens by chance to have had his professional eye on that bush-soul at the time of the catastrophe; because, as it were, at death the bush-soul ceases to exist--that hunter has to pay compensation to the family of the deceased. On the other hand, if the man belonging to the bush-soul dies, the bush-soul animal has to die too. It rushes to and fro in the forest--"can no longer find a good place." If it sees a fire, it rushes into that; if it sees a lot of hunters, it rushes among them--anyhow, it gets itself killed off.

We will now turn our attention to that other great division of diseases--namely such as are caused only and directly by human agency.

Those I have already detained you too long over are caused by spirits acting on their own account, for even in the case of the trapped dream-souls they are held themselves to have shown contributory negligence in getting hooked or cut in traps.

The others arise from what is called witchcraft. You will often hear it said that the general idea among savage races is that death always arises from witchcraft; but I think, from what I have said regarding diseases arising from bush-souls' bad tempers, from contracting a _sisa_, from losing the shadow at high noon, and from, it may be, other causes I have not spoken of, that this generalisation is for West Africa too sweeping. But undoubtedly sixty per cent of the deaths are believed to arise from witchcraft. I would put the percentage higher, were it not for the terrible mortality from teta.n.u.s among children, which sometimes is and sometimes is not put down to witchcraft, and the mortality from smallpox and the sleep disease down south in Loango and Kakongo, those diseases not being in any case that I have had personal acquaintance with imputed to witchcraft at all. Indeed I venture to think that any disease that takes an epidemic form is regarded as a scourge sent by some great outraged Nature spirit, not a mere human dabbler in devils. I have dealt with witchcraft itself elsewhere, therefore now I only speak regarding it medically; and I think, roughly speaking, not absolutely, mind you, that the witching something _out_ of a man is the most common iniquity of witchcraft from Cape Juby to Cameroons, the region of the true Negro stock; while from Cameroons to Benguella--the limit of my knowledge to the south on the western side of the continent--the most common iniquity of witchcraft is witching something into him. As in the diseases arising from the loss of the dream-soul I have briefly dealt with the witching something out, I now turn to the witching something in.

I well remember, in 1893, being then new to and easily alarmed by the West Coast, going into a village in Kakongo one afternoon and seeing several unpleasant-looking objects stuck on poles. Investigation showed they were the lungs, livers, or spleens of human beings; and local information stated that they were the powers of witches--witches that had been killed and, on examination, found to have inside them these things, dangerous to the state and society at large. Wherefrom it was the custom to stick up on poles these things as warnings to the general public not to harbour in their individual interiors things to use against their fellow-creatures. They mutely but firmly said, "See! if you turn witch, your inside will be stuck on a pole."

I may remark that in many districts of the South-West coast and middle Congo it is customary when a person dies in an unexplainable way, namely without shedding blood, to hold a post-mortem. In some cases the post-mortem discloses the path of the witch through the victim--usually, I am informed, the injected witch feeds on the victim's lungs--in other cases the post-mortem discloses the witch power itself, demonstrating that the deceased was a keeper of witch power, or, as we should say, a witch.

Once when I was at Batanga a woman dropped down on the beach and died.

The usual post-mortem was held, and local feeling ran high. "She no complain, she no say nothing, and then she go die one time." The post-mortem disclosed what I think you would term a ruptured aneurism of the aorta, but the local verdict was "she done witch herself"--namely that she was a witch, who had been eaten by her own power, therefore there were great rejoicings over her death.

This dire catastrophe is, however, liable to overtake legitimate medical men. All reasonable people in every clime allow a certain lat.i.tude to doctors. They are supposed to know things other people need not, and to do things, like dissections and such, that other people should not, and no one thinks any the worse of them. This is the case with the African physician, whom we roughly call the witch doctor, but whose full t.i.tle is the combatant of the evils worked by witches and devils on human souls and human property. This medical man has, from the exigencies of his profession, to keep in his own inside a power, and a good strong one at that, which he can employ in his practice by sending it into patients to fetch out other witch powers, _sisas_, or any miscellaneous kind of devil that may have got into them. His position is totally different from that of the layman. He is known to possess a witch power, and the knowledge of how to employ it; but instead of this making him an object of aversion to his fellow-men, it secures for him esteem and honour, and the more terrifically powerful his power is known to be, the more respect he gains; for suppose you were taken ill by a real bad devil, you would prefer a medical man whose power was at least up to that devil's fighting weight.

Nevertheless his having to keep the dangerous devil in his own inside exposes the witch doctor to grave personal danger, for if, from a particularly healthy season, or some notorious quack coming into his district, his practice falls off, and his power is thereby not kept fed, that unfortunate man is liable to be attacked by it. This was given me as the cause of the death of a great doctor in the Chiloango district, and I heard the same thing from the Ncomi district, so it is clear that many eminent men are cut off in the midst of their professional career in this way.

As for what this power is like in its corporal form, I can only say that it is evidently various. One witch doctor I know just to the north of Loango always made it a practice to give his patients a brisk emetic as soon as he was called in, and he always found young crocodiles in the consequences. I remember seeing him in one case secure six lively young crocodiles that had apparently been very recently hatched. These were witch powers. Again, I was informed of a witch who was killed near the Bungo River having had found inside him a thing like a lizard, but with wings like a bat. The most peculiar form of witch power I have heard of as being found inside a patient was on the Ogowe from two native friends, both of them very intelligent, reliable men, one of them a Bible reader. They said that about two years previously a relation of theirs had been badly witched. A doctor had been called in, who administered an emetic, and there appeared upon the scene a strange little animal that grew with visible rapidity. An hour after its coming to light it crawled and got out of the basin, and finally it flew away.

It had bat's wings and a body and tail like a lizard. This catawampus, my informant held, had been witched into the man when it was "small, small"--namely, very small. It might, they thought, have been given to their relation in some food or drink by an enemy, but for sure, if it had not been disturbed by that emetic, it would have grown up inside the man and have eaten its way out through his vitals.

From the whole of the above statements I think I have shown you that if as a witch doctor you are called in to a patient who is ill, but who is not showing blood anywhere, your diagnosis will be that he has got some sort or another of devil the matter with him, and that the first indication is to find out who put that devil in, because, in the majority of cases, until you know this you can't get it out; the second is to get it out; the third is to prevent its getting adrift, and into some one else.

I have only briefly sketched the ideas and methods of witch doctors in West Africa, in so far as treatment is concerned. The infinite variety of methods employed in detecting who has been the witch in a given case; the infinite variety of incantations and so on, I have no s.p.a.ce to dwell on here, and will conclude by giving you a general sketch of the career of a witch doctor.

We will start with the medical student stage. Now, every West African tribe has a secret society--two, in fact, one for men and one for women.

Every free man has to pa.s.s through the secret society of his tribe. If during this education the Elders of this society discover that a boy is what is called in Calabar an _eb.u.mtup_--a person who can see spirits--the elders of the society advise that he should be brought up to the medical profession. Their advice is generally taken, and the boy is apprenticed as it were to a witch doctor, who requires a good fee with him. This done, he proceeds with his studies, learns the difference between the dream-soul basket and the one _sisas_ are kept in--a mistake between the two would be on a par with mistaking oxalic acid for Epsom salts. He is then taught how to howl in a professional way, and, by watching his professor, picks up his bedside manner. If he can acquire a showy way of having imitation epileptic fits, so much the better. In fact, as a medical student, you have to learn pretty well as much there as here. You must know the dispositions, the financial position, little scandals, &c., of the inhabitants of the whole district, for these things are of undoubted use in divination and the finding of witches, and in addition you must be able skilfully to dispense charms, and know what babies say before their own mothers can. Then some day your professor and instructor dies, his own professional power eats him, or he tackles a disease-causing spirit that is one too many for him, and on you descend his paraphernalia and his practice.

It is usual for a witch doctor to acquire for his power a member of one of the higher grade spirit cla.s.ses--he does not acquire a human soul--and his successor usually, I think, takes the same spirit, or, at any rate, a member of the same cla.s.s. This does not altogether limit you as a successor to a certain line of practice, but, as no one spirit can do all things, it tends to make you a specialist. I know a district where, if any one wanted a canoe charm, they went to one medical man; if a charm to keep thieves off their plantation, to another.

This brings us to the practice itself, and it may be divided into two divisions. First, prophylactic methods, namely, making charms to protect your patient's wives, children, goats, plantations, canoes, &c. from damage, houses from fire, &c., &c., and to protect the patient himself from wild animals and all danger by land or water. This is a very paying part, but full of anxiety. For example, put yourself in the place of a Mpangwe medical friend of mine. You have with much trouble got a really valuable spirit to come into a paste made of blood and divers things, and having made it into a sausage form, and done it round with fibre wonderfully neatly, you have painted it red outside to please the spirits--because spirits like red, they think it's blood. Well, in a week or so the man you administered it to comes back and says "that thing's no good." His paddle has broken more often than before he had the thing. The amount of rocks, and floating trees, to say nothing of snags, is, he should say, about double the normal, whereby he has lost a whole canoe load of European goods, and, in short, he doesn't think much of you as a charm maker. Then he expectorates and sulks offensively. You take the charm, and tell him it was a perfectly good one when you gave it him, and you never had any complaints before, but you will see what has gone wrong with it. Investigation shows you that the spirit is either dead or absent. In the first case it has been killed by a stronger spirit of its own cla.s.s; in the second, lured away by bribery.

Now this clearly points to your patient's having a dangerous and powerful enemy, and you point it out to him and advise him to have a fresh and more powerful charm--necessarily more expensive--with as little delay as possible. He grumbles, but, realising the danger, pays up, and you make him another. The old one can be thrown away, like an empty pill-box.

The other part of your practice--the clinical--consists in combating those witches who are always up to something--sucking blood of young children, putting fearful wild fowl into people to eat up their most valued viscera, or stealing souls o' nights, blighting crops, &c.

Therefore you see the witch doctor's life is not an idle one; he has not merely to humbug the public and pocket the fees--or I should say "bag,"

pockets being rare in this region--but he works very hard, and has his anxieties just like a white medical man. The souls that get away from him are a great worry. The death of every patient is a danger to a certain extent, because the patient's soul will be vicious to him until it is buried. But I must say I profoundly admire our West African witch doctors for their theory of _sisas_ as an explanation of their not always being able to insert a new soul into a patient, for by this theory they save themselves somewhat, and do not entail on themselves the treatment their brother medicos have to go through on the Na.s.s River in British Columbia. According to Mr. Fraser, in that benighted Na.s.s River district those native American doctors hold it possible that a doctor may swallow a patient's soul by mistake. This is their theory to account for the strange phenomenon of a patient getting worse instead of better when a doctor has been called in, and so the unfortunate doctor who has had this accident occur is made to stand over his patient while another medical man thrusts his fingers in his throat, another kneads him in the abdomen, and a third medical brother slaps him on the back.