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.
