A fresh and still more powerful spirit -
necessarily more expensive - the safer it will be for you,
particularly as your misfortunes distinctly point to some one being
desirous of your death. You of course grumble, but seeing the thing
in his light you pay up, and the medicine man goes busily to work
with incantations, dances, looking into mirrors or basins of still
water, and concoctions of messes to make you a new protecting charm.
Human eye-balls, particularly of white men, I have already said are
a great charm. Dr. Nassau says he has known graves rifled for them.
This, I fancy, is to secure the "man that lives in your eyes" for
the service of the village, and naturally the white man, being
regarded as a superior being, would be of high value if enlisted
into its service. A similar idea of the possibility of gaining
possession of the spirit of a dead man obtains among the Negroes,
and the heads of important chiefs in the Calabar districts are
usually cut off from the body on burial and kept secretly for fear
the head, and thereby the spirit, of the dead chief, should be
stolen from the town. If it were stolen it would be not only a
great advantage to its new possessor, but a great danger to the
chief's old town; because he would know all the peculiar ju-ju
relating to it. For each town has a peculiar one, kept exceedingly
secret, in addition to the general ju-jus, and this secret one would
then be in the hands of the new owners of the spirit. It is for
similar reasons that brave General MacCarthy's head was treasured by
the Ashantees, and so on.
Charms are not all worn upon the body, some go to the plantations,
and are hung there, ensuring an unhappy and swift end for the thief
who comes stealing. Some are hung round the bows of the canoe,
others over the doorway of the house, to prevent evil spirits from
coming in - a sort of tame watch-dog spirits.
The entrances to the long street-shaped villages are frequently
closed with a fence of saplings and this sapling fence you will see
hung with fetish charms to prevent evil spirits from entering the
village and sometimes in addition to charms you will see the fence
wreathed with leaves and flowers. Bells are frequently hung on
these fences, but I do not fancy ever for fetish reasons. At
Ndorko, on the Rembwe, there were many guards against spirit
visitors, but the bell, which was carefully hung so that you could
not pass through the gateway without ringing it, was a guard against
thieves and human enemies only.
Frequently a sapling is tied horizontally near the ground across the
entrance. Dr. Nassau could not tell me why, but says it must never
be trodden on. When the smallpox, a dire pestilence in these
regions, is raging, or when there is war, these gateways are
sprinkled with the blood of sacrifices, and for these sacrifices and
for the payments of heavy blood fines, etc., goats and sheep are
kept. They are rarely eaten for ordinary purposes, and these West
Coast Africans have all a perfect horror of the idea of drinking
milk, holding this custom to be a filthy habit, and saying so in
unmitigated language.
The villagers eat the meat of the sacrifice, that having nothing to
do with the sacrifice to the spirits, which is the blood, for the
blood is the life. {306}
Beside the few spirits that the Bantu regards himself as having got
under control in his charms, he has to worship the uncontrolled army
of the air. This he does by sacrifice and incantation.
The sacrifice is the usual killing of something valuable as an
offering to the spirits. The value of the offering in these S.W.
Coast regions has certainly a regular relationship to the value of
the favour required of the spirits. Some favours are worth a dish
of plantains, some a fowl, some a goat and some a human being,
though human sacrifice is very rare in Congo Francais, the killing
of people being nine times in ten a witchcraft palaver.
Dr. Nassau, however, says that "the intention of the giver ennobles
the gift," the spirit being supposed, in some vague way, to be
gratified by the recognition of itself, and even sometimes pleased
with the homage of the mere simulacrum of a gift. I believe the
only class of spirits that have this convenient idea are the
Imbwiri; thus the stones heaped by passers-by on the foot of some
great tree, or rock, or the leaf cast from a passing canoe towards a
promontory on the river, etc., although intrinsically valueless and
useless to the Ombwiri nevertheless gratify him. It is a sort of
bow or taking off one's hat to him. Some gifts, the Doctor says,
are supposed to be actually utilised by the spirit.
In some part of the long single street of most villages there is
built a low hut in which charms are hung, and by which grows a
consecrated plant, a lily, a euphorbia, or a fig. In some tribes a
rudely carved figure, generally female, is set up as an idol before
which offerings are laid. I saw at Egaja two figures about 2 feet 6
inches high, in the house placed at my disposal. They were left in
it during my occupation, save that the rolls of cloth (their power)
which were round their necks, were removed by the owner chief; of
the significance of these rolls I will speak elsewhere.
Incantations may be divided into two classes, supplications
analogous to our idea of prayers, and certain cabalistic words and
phrases.
