The Custom Of Keeping The Affair
Open Until The Big Funeral Can Be Made Obtains Also In Cabinda And
Loango,
But there, instead of burying the body in the meantime,
{329} it is placed upon a platform of wood, and
Slow fires kept
going underneath to dry it, a mat roof being usually erected over it
to keep off rain. When sufficiently dried, it is wrapped in clothes
and put into a coffin, until the money to finish the affair is
ready. The Duallas are more tied down; their death-dances must be
celebrated, I am informed, on the third, seventh, and ninth day
after death. On these days the spirit is supposed to be
particularly present in its old home. In all the other cases, I
should remark, the spirit does not leave the home until its devil is
made and if this is delayed too long he naturally becomes fractious.
Among the Congo Francais tribes there are many different kinds of
burial - as the cannibalistic of the Fan. I may remark, however,
that they tell me themselves that it is considered decent to bury a
relative, even if you subsequently dig him up and dispose of the
body to the neighbours. Then there is the earth-burial of the
Igalwas and M'pongwe, and the beating into unrecognisable pulp of
the body which, I am told on good native authority, is the method of
several Upper Ogowe tribes, including the Adoomas. I had no
opportunity of making quiet researches on burial customs when I was
above Njoli, because I was so busy trying to avoid qualifying for a
burial myself; so I am not quite sure whether this method is the
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.
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