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.
