He lives in the forest, in or under those great silk-cotton trees
around the roots of which the earth is red. This coloured earth
identifies a silk-cotton tree as being the residence of a
Sasabonsum, as its colour is held to arise from the blood it whips
off him as he goes down to his under-world home after a night's
carnage. All silk-cotton trees are suspected because they are held
to be the roosts for Duppies. But the red earth ones are feared
with a great fear, and no one makes a path by them, or a camp near
them at night.
Sasabonsum is a friend of witches. He is of enormous size, and of a
red colour. He wears his hair straight and he waylays unprotected
wayfarers in the forest at night, and in all districts except that
of Apollonia he eats them. Round Apollonia he only sucks their
blood. Natives of this district after meeting him have crawled home
and given an account of his appearance, and then expired.
Ellis says he is believed to be implacable, and when angered can
never be mollified or propitiated, but it is certain that human
victims are constantly sacrificed to him in districts beyond white
control; in districts under it, the equivalent value of a human
sacrifice in sheep and goats is offered to him. In Ashantee he has
priests, and of course human sacrifice. Away among the Dahomeyan
tribes - where he has kept his habits but got another name, and seems
to have crystallised from a class into an individual - the usual way
in which a god develops - he has priests and priestesses, and they
are holy terrors; but among the Tschwi, Sasabonsum is mainly dealt
with by witches, and people desirous of possessing the power of
becoming witches. They derive their power from him in a remarkable
way. I put myself to great personal inconvenience (fever risk,
mosquito certainty, high leopard and snake palaver probability, and
grave personal alarm and apprehension) to verify Colonel Ellis's
account of the methods witches employ in this case, to obtain
ehsuhman and I find his account correct. {363}
The chief use of a suhman is the power it gives its owner to procure
the death of other people, not necessarily his own enemies, for he
will sell charms made by the agency of his suhman to another person
whose nerves have not been equal to facing Sasabonsum on his own
account. He can also provide by its agency other charms, such as
those that protect houses from fire, and things and individuals from
accidents on the road, or in canoes, and the home circle from good-
looking but unprincipled young men, and so on.
