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.
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