Trust a spirit, even if you have paid a considerable sum to a
most distinguished medicine man to get a powerful one put up in a
ju-ju, or monde, {301} as it is called in several tribes.
The method of making these charms is much the same among Bantu and
Negroes: I have elsewhere described the Gold Coast method, so here
confine myself to the Bantu. This similarity of procedure naturally
arises from the same underlying idea existing in the two races.
You call in the medicine man, the "oganga," as he is commonly called
in Congo Francais tribes. After a variety of ceremonies and
processes, the spirit is induced to localise itself in some object
subject to the will of the possessor. The things most frequently
used are antelopes' horns, the large snail-shells, and large
nutshells, according to Doctor Nassau. Among the Fan I found the
most frequent charm-case was in the shape of a little sausage, made
very neatly of pineapple fibre, the contents being the residence of
the spirit or power, and the outside coloured red to flatter and
please him - for spirits always like red because it is like blood.
The substance put inside charms is all manner of nastiness, usually
on the sea coast having a high percentage of fowl dung.
The nature of the substance depends on the spirit it is intended to
be attractive to - attractive enough to induce it to leave its
present abode and come and reside in the charm.
In addition to this attractive substance I find there are other
materials inserted which have relation towards the work the spirit
will be wanted to do for its owner. For example, charms made either
to influence a person to be well disposed towards the owner, or the
still larger class made with intent to work evil on other human
beings against whom the owner has a grudge, must have in them some
portion of the person to be dealt with - his hair, blood, nail-
parings, etc. - or, failing that, his or her most intimate belonging,
something that has got his smell in - a piece of his old waist-cloth
for example.
This ability to obtain power over people by means of their blood,
hair, nails, etc., is universally diffused; you will find it down in
Devon, and away in far Cathay, and the Chinese, I am told, have in
some parts of their empire little ovens to burn their nail- and
hair-clippings in. The fear of these latter belongings falling into
the hands of evilly-disposed persons is ever present to the West
Africans. The Igalwa and other tribes will allow no one but a
trusted friend to do their hair, and bits of nails and hair are
carefully burnt or thrown away into a river; and blood, even that
from a small cut or a fit of nose-bleeding, is most carefully
covered up and stamped out if it has fallen on the earth. The
underlying idea regarding blood is of course the old one that the
blood is the life.
The life in Africa means a spirit, hence the liberated blood is the
liberated spirit, and liberated spirits are always whipping into
people who do not want them.
Charms are made for every occupation and desire in life - loving,
hating, buying, selling, fishing, planting, travelling, hunting,
etc., and although they are usually in the form of things filled
with a mixture in which the spirit nestles, yet there are other
kinds; for example, a great love charm is made of the water the
lover has washed in, and this, mingled with the drink of the loved
one, is held to soften the hardest heart.
Some kinds of charms, such as those to prevent your getting drowned,
shot, seen by elephants, etc., are worn on a bracelet or necklace.
A new-born child starts with a health-knot tied round the wrist,
neck, or loins, and throughout the rest of its life its collection
of charms goes on increasing. This collection does not, however,
attain inconvenient dimensions, owing to the failure of some of the
charms to work.
That is the worst of charms and prayers. The thing you wish of them
may, and frequently does, happen in a strikingly direct way, but
other times it does not. In Africa this is held to arise from the
bad character of the spirits; their gross ingratitude and
fickleness. You may have taken every care of a spirit for years,
given it food and other offerings that you wanted for yourself,
wrapped it up in your cloth on chilly nights and gone cold, put it
in the only dry spot in the canoe, and so on, and yet after all
this, the wretched thing will be capable of being got at by your
rival or enemy and lured away, leaving you only the case it once
lived in.
Finding, we will say, that you have been upset and half-drowned, and
your canoe-load of goods lost three times in a week, that your
paddles are always breaking, and the amount of snags in the river
and so on is abnormal, you judge that your canoe-charm has stopped.
Then you go to the medicine man who supplied you with it and
complain. He says it was a perfectly good charm when he sold it you
and he never had any complaints before, but he will investigate the
affair; when he has done so, he either says the spirit has been
lured away from the home he prepared for it by incantations and
presents from other people, or that he finds the spirit is dead; it
has been killed by a more powerful spirit of its class, which is in
the pay of some enemy of yours.
