I
once saw a funeral where they had been called in to do the honours,
and M. Jacot told me of an almost precisely similar occurrence that
he had met with in one of his many evangelising expeditions from
Lembarene. I will give his version because of his very superior
knowledge of the language.
He was staying in a Fan town where one of the chiefs had just died.
The other chief (there are usually two in a Fan town) decided that
his deceased confrere should have due honour paid him, and resolved
to do the thing handsomely.
The Fans openly own to not understanding thoroughly about death and
life and the immortality of the soul, and things of that sort, and
so the chief called in the Ncomi, who are specialists in these
subjects, to make the funeral customs.
M. Jacot said the chief made a speech to the effect that the Fans
did not know about these things, but their neighbours, the Ncomi,
were known to be well versed in them and the proper things to do, so
he had called them in to pay honour to the dead chief. Then the
Ncomi started and carried on their weird, complicated death-dance.
The Fans sat and stood round watching them in a ring for a long
time, but to a rational, common-sense, shrewd, unimaginative set of
people like the Fans, just standing hour after hour gazing on a
dance you do not understand, and which consists of a wriggle and a
stamp, a wriggle and a stamp, in a solemn walk, or prance, round and
round, to the accompaniment of a monotonous phrase thumped on a tom-
tom and a monotonous, melancholy chant, uttered in a minor key
interspersed every few minutes with an emphatic howl, produces a
feeling of boredom, therefore the Fans softly stole away and went to
bed, which disgusted the Ncomi, and there was a row. In the dance I
saw the same thing happened, only when the Ncomi saw the audience
getting thin they complained and said that they were doing this
dance in honour of the Fans' chief, in a neighbourly way, and the
very least the Fans could do, as they couldn't dance themselves, was
to sit still and admire people who could. The Fan chief in my
village quite saw it, and went and had the Fans who had gone home
early turned up and made them come and see the performance some
more; this they did for a time, and then stole off again, or slept
in their seats, and the Ncomi were highly disgusted at those brutes
of Fans, whom they regarded, they said in their way, as Philistines
of an utterly obtuse and degraded type.
The Ncomi themselves put the body into coffins. A barrel is the
usual one, but gun-cases or two trade boxes, the ends knocked out
and the cases fitted together, is another frequent form of coffin
used by them.
