General one among these little-known tribes, as I am told by native
traders, who have it among them that it is - or whether it is
reserved for the bodies of people believed to have been possessed of
dangerous souls.
Destroying the body by beating up, or by cutting up, is a widely
diffused custom in West Africa in the case of dangerous souls, and
is universally followed with those that have contained wanderer-
souls, i.e. those souls which keep turning up in the successive
infants of a family. A child dies, then another child comes to the
same father or mother, and that dies, after giving the usual trouble
and expense. A third arrives and if that dies, the worm - the
father, I mean - turns, and if he is still desirous of more children,
he just breaks one of the legs of the body before throwing it in the
bush.
This he thinks will act as a warning to the wanderer-soul and give
it to understand that if it will persist in coming into his family,
it must settle down there and give up its flighty ways. If a fourth
child arrives in the family, "it usually limps," and if it dies, the
justly irritated parent cuts its body up carefully into very small
pieces, and scatters them, doing away with the soul altogether.
The Kama country people of the lower Ogowe are more superstitious
and full of observances than the upper river tribes.
Particularly rich in Fetish are the Ncomi, a Fernan Vaz tribe. I
once saw a funeral where they had been called in to do the honours,
and M. Jacot told me of an almost precisely similar occurrence that
he had met with in one of his many evangelising expeditions from
Lembarene. I will give his version because of his very superior
knowledge of the language.
He was staying in a Fan town where one of the chiefs had just died.
The other chief (there are usually two in a Fan town) decided that
his deceased confrere should have due honour paid him, and resolved
to do the thing handsomely.
The Fans openly own to not understanding thoroughly about death and
life and the immortality of the soul, and things of that sort, and
so the chief called in the Ncomi, who are specialists in these
subjects, to make the funeral customs.
M. Jacot said the chief made a speech to the effect that the Fans
did not know about these things, but their neighbours, the Ncomi,
were known to be well versed in them and the proper things to do, so
he had called them in to pay honour to the dead chief. Then the
Ncomi started and carried on their weird, complicated death-dance.
The Fans sat and stood round watching them in a ring for a long
time, but to a rational, common-sense, shrewd, unimaginative set of
people like the Fans, just standing hour after hour gazing on a
dance you do not understand, and which consists of a wriggle and a
stamp, a wriggle and a stamp, in a solemn walk, or prance, round and
round, to the accompaniment of a monotonous phrase thumped on a tom-
tom and a monotonous, melancholy chant, uttered in a minor key
interspersed every few minutes with an emphatic howl, produces a
feeling of boredom, therefore the Fans softly stole away and went to
bed, which disgusted the Ncomi, and there was a row. In the dance I
saw the same thing happened, only when the Ncomi saw the audience
getting thin they complained and said that they were doing this
dance in honour of the Fans' chief, in a neighbourly way, and the
very least the Fans could do, as they couldn't dance themselves, was
to sit still and admire people who could. The Fan chief in my
village quite saw it, and went and had the Fans who had gone home
early turned up and made them come and see the performance some
more; this they did for a time, and then stole off again, or slept
in their seats, and the Ncomi were highly disgusted at those brutes
of Fans, whom they regarded, they said in their way, as Philistines
of an utterly obtuse and degraded type.
The Ncomi themselves put the body into coffins. A barrel is the
usual one, but gun-cases or two trade boxes, the ends knocked out
and the cases fitted together, is another frequent form of coffin
used by them. These coffins are not buried, but are put into
special places in the forest.
Along the bank of the Ogowe you will notice here and there long
stretches of uninhabited bush. These are not all mere stretches of
swamp forest. If you land on some of these and go in a little way
you will find the forest full of mounds - or rather heaps, because
they have no mould over them - made of branches of trees and leaves;
underneath each of these heaps there are the remains of a body. One
very evil-looking place so used I found when I was on the Karkola
river. Dr. Nassau tells me they are the usual burying grounds (Abe)
of the Ajumbas.
CHAPTER XIV. FETISH - (continued).
In which the Voyager discourses on the legal methods of natives of
this country, the ideas governing forms of burial, of their manner
of mourning for their dead, and the condition of the African soul in
the under-world.
Great as are the incidental miseries and dangers surrounding death
to all the people in the village in which a death occurs,
undoubtedly those who suffer most are the widows of a chief or free
man.
The uniform custom among both Negroes and Bantus is that those who
escape execution on the charge of having witched the husband to
death, shall remain in a state of filth and abasement, not even
removing vermin from themselves, until after the soul-burial is
complete - the soul of the dead man being regarded as hanging about
them and liable to be injured.
