He Sees That However Terrific His Dream-
Experiences May Have Been, He Was Not Much The Worse For Them.
Not
so in the other case, a limb gone or a life gone is more impressive,
and more necessary to account for.
No trace of sun-worship have I ever found. The firmament is, I
believe, always the great indifferent and neglected god, the Nyan
Kupon of the Tschwi, and the Anzambe, Nzam, etc., of the Bantu
races. The African thinks this god has great power if he would only
exert it, and when things go very badly with him, when the river
rises higher than usual and sweeps away his home and his
plantations; when the smallpox stalks through the land, and day and
night the corpses float down the river past him, and he finds them
jammed among his canoes that are tied to the beach, and choking up
his fish traps; and then when at last the death-wail over its
victims goes up night and day from his own village, he will rise up
and call upon this great god in a terror maddened by despair, that
he may hear and restrain the evil workings of these lesser devils;
but he evidently finds, as Peer Gynt says, "Nein, er hort nicht. Er
ist taub wie gewohnlich" for there is no organised cult for Anzam.
Accounts of apparitions abound in all the West Coast districts, and
although the African holds them all in high horror and terror, he
does not see anything supernatural in his "Duppy." It is a horrid
thing to happen on, but there is nothing strange about it, and he is
ten thousand times more frightened than puzzled over the affair. He
does not want to "investigate" to see whether there is anything in
it. He wants to get clear away, and make ju-ju against it, "one
time."
These apparitions have a great variety of form, for, firstly, there
are all the true spirits, nature spirits; secondly, the spirits of
human beings - these human spirits are held to exist before as well
as during and after bodily life; thirdly, the spirits of things.
Probably the most horrid of class one is the Tschwi's Sasabonsum.
Whether Sasabonsum is an individual or a class is not quite clear,
but I believe he is a class of spirits, each individual of which has
the same characteristics, the same manner of showing anger, the same
personal appearance, and the same kind of residence. I am a devoted
student of his cult and I am always coming across equivalent forms
of him in other tribes as well as the Tschwi, and I think he is very
early. As the Tschwi have got their religious notions in a most
tidy and definite state, we will take their version of Sasabonsum.
He lives in the forest, in or under those great silk-cotton trees
around the roots of which the earth is red. This coloured earth
identifies a silk-cotton tree as being the residence of a
Sasabonsum, as its colour is held to arise from the blood it whips
off him as he goes down to his under-world home after a night's
carnage. All silk-cotton trees are suspected because they are held
to be the roosts for Duppies. But the red earth ones are feared
with a great fear, and no one makes a path by them, or a camp near
them at night.
Sasabonsum is a friend of witches. He is of enormous size, and of a
red colour. He wears his hair straight and he waylays unprotected
wayfarers in the forest at night, and in all districts except that
of Apollonia he eats them. Round Apollonia he only sucks their
blood. Natives of this district after meeting him have crawled home
and given an account of his appearance, and then expired.
Ellis says he is believed to be implacable, and when angered can
never be mollified or propitiated, but it is certain that human
victims are constantly sacrificed to him in districts beyond white
control; in districts under it, the equivalent value of a human
sacrifice in sheep and goats is offered to him. In Ashantee he has
priests, and of course human sacrifice. Away among the Dahomeyan
tribes - where he has kept his habits but got another name, and seems
to have crystallised from a class into an individual - the usual way
in which a god develops - he has priests and priestesses, and they
are holy terrors; but among the Tschwi, Sasabonsum is mainly dealt
with by witches, and people desirous of possessing the power of
becoming witches. They derive their power from him in a remarkable
way. I put myself to great personal inconvenience (fever risk,
mosquito certainty, high leopard and snake palaver probability, and
grave personal alarm and apprehension) to verify Colonel Ellis's
account of the methods witches employ in this case, to obtain
ehsuhman and I find his account correct. {363}
The chief use of a suhman is the power it gives its owner to procure
the death of other people, not necessarily his own enemies, for he
will sell charms made by the agency of his suhman to another person
whose nerves have not been equal to facing Sasabonsum on his own
account. He can also provide by its agency other charms, such as
those that protect houses from fire, and things and individuals from
accidents on the road, or in canoes, and the home circle from good-
looking but unprincipled young men, and so on.
As a rule the person who has a suhman keeps the fact pretty quiet,
for the possession of such an article would lead half the
catastrophes in his district, from the decease of pigs, fowls, and
babies, to fires, etc., to be accredited to him, which would lead to
his neighbours making "witch palaver" over him, and he would have to
undergo poison-ordeal and other unpleasantness to clear his
character. He, however, always keeps a special day in his suhman's
honour, and should he be powerful, as a king or big chief, he will
keep this day openly.
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