The Paramas Sent Some Of Their War Boys To Be Ambushed
In The Intervening Country, The Imperi, But The Imperi Delivered
These War Boys To The Enemy.
In revenge, the Paramas sent the
Fetish Boofima into the Imperi country.
This Fetish had up to that
time been kept active and working by the sacrifice of goats, but the
medicine men of the Paramas who introduced it into the Imperi
country decreed at the same time that human sacrifices would be
required to keep it alive, thereby working their vengeance on the
Imperi by leading them to exterminate themselves in sacrifice to the
Fetish. The country for years has been terrorised by this secret
worship of Boofima and at one time the Imperi started the Tonga
dances, at which the medicine men pointed out the supposed
worshippers of Boofima - the so-called Human Leopards, because when
seizing their victims for sacrifice they covered themselves with
leopard skins, and imitating the roars of the leopard, they sprang
upon their victim, plunging at the same time two three-pronged forks
into each side of the throat. The Government some years ago forbade
the Tonga dances, and are now striving to suppress the human
leopards. There are also human alligators who, disguised as
alligators, swim in the creeks upon the canoes and carry off the
crew. Some of them have been brought for trial but no complete case
has been made out against them!" In comment upon this account,
which is evidently written by some one well versed in the affair, I
will only remark that sometimes, instead of the three-pronged forks,
there are fixed in the paws of the leopard skin sharp-pointed
cutting knives, the skin being made into a sort of glove into which
the hand of the human leopard fits. In one skin I saw down south
this was most ingeniously done. The knives were shaped like the
leopard's claws, curved, sharp-pointed, and with cutting edges
underneath, and I am told the American Mendi Mission, which works in
the Sierra Leone districts, have got a similar skin in their
possession.
The human alligator mentioned, is our old friend the witch
crocodile - the spirit of the man in the crocodile. I never myself
came across a case of a man in his corporeal body swimming about in
a crocodile skin, and I doubt whether any native would chance
himself inside a crocodile skin and swim about in the river among
the genuine articles for fear of their penetrating his disguise
mentally and physically.
In Calabar witch crocodiles are still flourishing. There is an
immense old brute that sporting Vice-Consuls periodically go after,
which is known to contain the spirit of a Duke Town chief who shall
be nameless, because they are getting on at such a pace just round
Duke Town that haply I might be had up for libel. When I was in
Calabar once, a peculiarly energetic officer had hit that crocodile
and the chief was forthwith laid up by a wound in his leg.
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