However, In Their Case, It Is Not
Always A Forest-Grove They Are Secluded In, Sometimes It Is Done In
Huts.
Among the Grain Coast tribes however, the girls go into a
magic wood until they are married.
Should they have to leave the
wood for any temporary reason, they must smear themselves with white
clay. A similar custom holds good in Okyon, Calabar district,
where, should a girl have to leave the fattening-house, she must be
covered with white clay. I believe this fattening-house custom in
Calabar is not only for fattening up the women to improve their
appearance, but an initiatory custom as well, although the main
intention is now, undoubtedly, fattening, and the girl is constantly
fed with fat-producing foods, such as fou-fou soaked in palm oil. I
am told, but I think wrongly, that the white clay with which a
Calabar girl is kept covered while in the fattening-house, putting
on an extra coating of it should she come outside, is to assist in
the fattening process by preventing perspiration.
The duration of the period of seclusion varies somewhat. San
Salvador boys are six months in the wood. Cameroon boys are twelve
months. In most districts the girls are betrothed in infancy, and
they go into the wood or initiatory hut for a few months before
marriage. In this case the time seems to vary with the
circumstances of the individual; not so with the boys, for whom each
tribal society has a duly appointed course terminating at a duly
appointed time; but sometimes, as among some of the Yoruba tribes,
the boy has to remain under the rule of the presiding elders of the
society, painted white, and wearing only a bit of grass cloth, if he
wears anything, until he has killed a man. Then he is held to have
attained man's estate by having demonstrated his courage and also by
having secured for himself the soul of the man he has killed as a
spirit slave.
The initiation of boys into a few of the elementary dogmas of the
secret society by no means composes the entire work of the society.
All of them are judicial, and taken on the whole they do an immense
amount of good. The methods are frequently a little quaint.
Rushing about the streets disguised under masks and drapery, with an
imitation tail swinging behind you, while you lash out at every one
you meet with a whip or cutlass, is not a European way of keeping
the peace, or perhaps I should say maintaining the dignity of the
Law. But discipline must be maintained, and this is the West
African way of doing it.
The Egbo of Calabar is a fine type of the secret society. It is
exceedingly well developed in its details, not sketchy like Isyogo,
nor so red-handed as Poorah. Unfortunately, however, I cannot speak
with the same amount of knowledge of Egbo as I could of Poorah.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 262 of 371
Words from 137337 to 137836
of 194943
