In Calabar and the Okyon districts all
the widows of a dead man are subjected to ordeal.
They have to go the next night after the death, before an assemblage
of chiefs and the general surrounding crowd, to a cleared space
where there is a fire burning. A fowl is tied to the right hand of
each widow, and should that fowl fail to cluck at the sight of the
fire the woman is held guilty of having bewitched her dead husband
and is dealt with accordingly.
Among the Bantu, although the killing among the wives from the
accusation of witchcraft is high, some of them being almost certain
to fall victims, yet there is not the wholesale slaughter of women
and slaves sent down with the soul of the dead that there is among
the Negroes.
In doubtful cases of death, i.e. in all cases not arising from
actual violence, when blood shows in the killing, the Bantu of the
S.W. Coast make post-mortem examinations. Notably common is this
practice among the Cameroons and Batanga region tribes. The body is
cut open to find in the entrails some sign of the path of the
injected witch.
I am informed that it is the lung that is most usually eaten by the
spirit. If the deceased is a witch-doctor it is thought, as I have
mentioned before, that his familiar spirit has eaten him internally,
and he is opened with a view of securing and destroying his witch.
In 1893 I saw in a village in Kacongo five unpleasant-looking
objects stuck on sticks. They were the livers and lungs, and in
fact the plucks, of witch-doctors, and the inhabitants informed me
they were the witches that had been found in them on post-mortems
and then been secured.
Mrs. Grenfell, of the Upper Congo, told me in the same year, when I
had the pleasure of travelling with her from Victoria to Matadi,
that a similar practice was in vogue among several of the Upper
Congo tribes.
Again in 1893 I came across another instance of the post-mortem
practice. A woman had dropped down dead on a factory beach at
Corisco Bay. The natives could not make it out at all. They were
irritated about her conduct: "She no sick, she no complain, she no
nothing, and then she go die one time."
The post-mortem showed a burst aneurism. The native verdict was
"She done witch herself," i.e. she was a witch eaten by her own
familiar.
The general opinion held by people living near a river is that the
spirit of a witch can take the form of a crocodile to do its work
in; those who live away from large rivers or in districts like Congo
Francais, where crocodiles are not very savage, hold that the witch
takes on the form of a leopard. Still the crocodile spirit form is
believed in in Congo Francais, and to a greater extent in Kacongo,
because here the crocodiles of the Congo are very ferocious and
numerous, taking as heavy a toll in human life as they do in the
delta of the Niger and the estuaries of the Sierra Leone and
Sherboro' Rivers.
One witch-doctor I know in Kacongo had a strange professional
method. When, by means of his hand rubbings, etc., he had got hold
of a witch or a bewitched one, he always gave the unfortunate an
emetic and always found several lively young crocodiles in the
consequence, and the stories of the natives in this region abound in
accounts of people who have been carried off by witch crocodiles,
and kept in places underground for years. I often wonder whether
this idea may not have arisen from the well-known habit of the
crocodile of burying its prey on the bank. Sometimes it will take
off a limb of its victim at once, but frequently it buries the body
whole for a few days before eating it. The body is always buried if
it is left to the crocodile.
I have a most profound respect for the whole medical profession, but
I am bound to confess that the African representatives of it are a
little empirical in their methods of treatment. The African doctor
is not always a witch-doctor in the bargain, but he is usually.
Lady doctors abound. They are a bit dangerous in pharmacy, but they
do not often venture on surgery, so on the whole they are safer, for
African surgery is heroic. Dr. Nassau cited the worst case of it I
know of. A man had been accidentally shot in the chest by another
man with a gun on the Ogowe. The native doctor who was called in
made a perpendicular incision into the man's chest, extending down
to the last rib; he then cut diagonally across, and actually lifted
the wall of the chest, and groped about among the vitals for the
bullet which he successfully extracted. Patient died. No
anaesthetic was employed.
I came across a minor operation. A man had broken the ulna of the
left arm. The native doctor got a piece - a very nice piece - of
bamboo, drove it in through the muscles and integuments from the
wrist to the elbow, then encased the limb in plantain leaves, and
bound it round, tightly and neatly, needless to say with tie-tie.
The arm and hand when I saw it, some six or seven months after the
operation, was quite useless, and was withering away.
Many of their methods, however, are better. The Dualla medicos are
truly great on poultices for extracting foreign substances, such as
bits of iron cooking-pot - a very frequent form of foreign substance
in a man out here, owing to their being generally used as bullets.
Almost incredible stories are told by black and white of the
efficacy of these poultices; one case I heard from a reliable source
of a man who had been shot with fragments of iron pot in the thigh.
The white doctor extracted several pieces and said he had got all
out, but the man still went on suffering, and could not walk, so, at
his request, a native doctor was called in, and he applied his
poultice.
