"It is
difficult," he said, "to get the exact object of the 'Orunda.'
Certainly the prohibited article is not in itself evil, for others
but the inhibited individual may eat or do with it as they please.
Most of the natives blindly follow the custom of their ancestors
without being able to give any raison d'etre, but again, from those
best able to give a reason, you learn the prohibited article is a
sacrifice ordained for the child by its parents and the magic doctor
as a gift to the governing spirit of its life. The thing prohibited
becomes removed from the child's common use, and is made sacred to
the spirit. Any use of it by the child or man would therefore be a
sin, which would bring down the spirit's wrath in the form of
sickness or other evil, which can be atoned for only by expensive
ceremonies or gifts to the magic doctor who intercedes for the
offender."
Anything may be an Orunda or Ibet provided only that it is connected
with food; I have been able to find no definite ground for the
selection of it. The Doctor said, for example, that "once when on a
boat journey, and camped in the forest for the noon-day meal, the
crew of four had no meat. They needed it. I had a chicken but ate
only a portion, and gave the rest to the crew. Three men ate it
with their manioc meal, the fourth would not touch it. It was his
Orunda." "On another journey," said the Doctor, "instead of all my
crew leaving me respectfully alone in the canoe to have my lunch and
going ashore to have theirs, one of them stayed behind in the canoe,
and I found his Orunda was only to eat over water when on a journey
by water." "At another place, a chief at whose village we once
anchored in a small steamer when a glass of rum was given him, had a
piece of cloth held up before his mouth that the people might not
see him drink, which was his Orunda."
I know some ethnologists will think this last case should be classed
under another head, but I think the Doctor is right. He is well
aware of the existence of the other class of prohibitions regarding
chiefs and I have seen plenty of chiefs myself up the Rembwe who
have no objection to take their drinks coram publico, and I have no
doubt this was only an individual Orunda of this particular Rembwe
chief.
Great care is requisite in these matters, because a man may do or
abstain from doing one and the same thing for divers reasons.
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 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 border-line 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 sickens 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,
advises 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 Ebumtup, a sort of second-sighter.
But to 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 realises 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 "finish" for it, as M. Pichault would say, for it is
not an immortal soul.
