There Is Also Another Class Of Apparition, Of Which I Have Met With
Two Instances, One Among Pure Negroes (Okyon); The Other Among Pure
Bantu (Kangwe).
I will give the Bantu version of the affair,
because at Okyon the incident had happened a good time before the
details were told me, and in the Bantu case they had happened the
previous evening.
But there was very little difference in the main
facts of the case, and it was an important thing because in both
cases the underlying idea was sacrificial.
The woman who told me was an exceedingly intelligent, shrewd,
reliable person. She had been to the factory with some trade, and
had got a good price for it, and so was in a good temper on her
return home in the evening. She got out of her canoe and leaving
her slave boy to bring up the things, walked to her house, which was
the ordinary house of a prosperous Igalwa native, having two
distinct rooms in it, and a separate cook-house close by in a clean,
sandy yard. She trod on some nastiness in the yard, and going into
the cook-house found the slave girls round a very small and
inefficient fire, trying to cook the evening meal. She blew them up
for not having a proper fire; they said the wood was wet, and would
not burn. She said they lied, and she would see to them later, and
she went into the chamber she used for a sleeping apartment, and
trod on something more on the floor in the dark; those good-for-
nothing hussies of slaves had not lit her palm-oil lamp, and
mentally forming the opinion that they had been out flirting during
her absence, and resolving to teach them well the iniquity of such
conduct, she sat down on her bed into a lot of messy stuff of a
clammy, damp nature. Now this fairly roused her, for she is a
notable housewife, who keeps her house and slaves in exceedingly
good order. So dismissing from her mind the commercial
consideration she had intended to gloat over when she came into her
room, she called Ingremina and others in a tone that brought those
young ladies on the spot. She asked them how they dared forget to
light her lamp; they said they had not, but the lamp in the room
must have gone out like the other lamps had, after burning dim and
spluttering. They further said they had not been out, but had been
sitting round the fire trying to make it burn properly. She duly
whacked and pulled the ears of all within reach. I say within reach
for she is not very active, weighing, I am sure, upwards of eighteen
stone. Then she went back into her room and got out her beautiful
English paraffin lamp, which she keeps in a box, and taking it into
the cook-house, picked up a bit of wood from the hissing,
spluttering fire, and lit it.
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