If Either Of Us Wanted To Do Or Get
Something, And We Handed Over The Bundle To One Of The
House
children to hold, there was a stampede of men and women off the
verandah, out of the yard, and
Over the fence, if need be, that was
exceedingly comic, but most convincing as to the reality of the
terror and horror in which they held the thing. Even its own mother
could not be trusted with the child; she would have killed it. She
never betrayed the slightest desire to have it with her, and after a
few days' nursing and feeding up she was anxious to go back to her
mistress, who, being an enlightened woman, was willing to have her
if she came without the child.
The main horror is undoubtedly of the child, the mother being killed
more as a punishment for having been so intimately mixed up in
bringing the curse, danger, and horror into the village than for
anything else.
The woman went back by the road that had been cut for her coming,
and would have to live for the rest of her life an outcast, and for
a long time in a state of isolation, in a hut of her own into which
no one would enter, neither would any one eat or drink with her, nor
partake of the food or water she had cooked or fetched. She would
lead the life of a leper, working in the plantation by day, and
going into her lonely hut at night, shunned and cursed. I tried to
find out whether there was any set period for this quarantine, and
all I could arrive at was that if - and a very considerable if - a man
were to marry her and she were subsequently to present to Society an
acceptable infant, she would be to a certain extent socially
rehabilitated, but she would always be a woman with a past - a thing
the African, to his credit be it said, has no taste for.
The woman's own lamentations were pathetic. She would sit for hours
singing or rather mourning out a kind of dirge over herself:
"Yesterday I was a woman, now I am a horror, a thing all people run
from. Yesterday they would eat with me, now they spit on me.
Yesterday they would talk to me with a sweet mouth, now they greet
me only with curses and execrations. They have smashed my basin,
they have torn my clothes," and so on, and so on. There was no
complaint against the people for doing these things, only a bitter
sense of injury against some superhuman power that had sent this
withering curse of twins down on her. She knew not why; she sang "I
have not done this, I have not done that" - and highly interesting
information regarding the moral standpoint a good deal of it was. I
have tried to find out the reason of this widely diffused custom
which is the cause of such a pitiful waste of life; for in addition
to the mother and children being killed it often leads to other
people, totally unconcerned in the affair, being killed by the
relatives of the sufferer on the suspicion of having caused the
calamity by witchcraft, and until one gets hold of the underlying
idea, and can destroy that, the custom will be hard to stamp out in
a district like the great Niger Delta. But I have never been able
to hunt it down, though I am sure it is there, and a very quaint
idea it undoubtedly is. The usual answer is, "It was the custom of
our fathers," but that always and only means, "We don't intend to
tell."
Funeral customs vary considerably between the Negro and Bantu, and I
never yet found among the Bantu those unpleasant death charms which
are in vogue in the Niger Delta.
The Calabar people, when the Consular eye is off them, bury under
the house. In the case of a great chief the head is cut off and
buried with great secrecy somewhere else, for reasons I have already
stated. The body is buried a few days after death, but the really
important part of the funeral is the burying of the spirit, and this
is the thing that causes all the West Africans, Negro and Bantu
alike, great worry, trouble, and expense. For the spirit, no matter
what its late owner may have been, is malevolent - all native-made
spirits are. The family have to get together a considerable amount
of wealth to carry out this burial of the spirit, so between the
body-burying and the spirit-burying a considerable time usually
elapses; maybe a year, maybe more. The custom of keeping the affair
open until the big funeral can be made obtains also in Cabinda and
Loango, but there, instead of burying the body in the meantime,
{329} it is placed upon a platform of wood, and slow fires kept
going underneath to dry it, a mat roof being usually erected over it
to keep off rain. When sufficiently dried, it is wrapped in clothes
and put into a coffin, until the money to finish the affair is
ready. The Duallas are more tied down; their death-dances must be
celebrated, I am informed, on the third, seventh, and ninth day
after death. On these days the spirit is supposed to be
particularly present in its old home. In all the other cases, I
should remark, the spirit does not leave the home until its devil is
made and if this is delayed too long he naturally becomes fractious.
Among the Congo Francais tribes there are many different kinds of
burial - as the cannibalistic of the Fan. I may remark, however,
that they tell me themselves that it is considered decent to bury a
relative, even if you subsequently dig him up and dispose of the
body to the neighbours. Then there is the earth-burial of the
Igalwas and M'pongwe, and the beating into unrecognisable pulp of
the body which, I am told on good native authority, is the method of
several Upper Ogowe tribes, including the Adoomas.
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