They, the chief and the crocodile, are quite
well again now, and I will say this in favour of
That chief, that
nothing on earth would persuade me to believe that he went fooling
about in the Calabar River in his corporeal body, either in his own
skin or a crocodile's.
The introduction of the Fetish Boofima into the country of the
Imperi is an interesting point as it shows that these different
tribes have the same big ju-ju. Similarly, Calabar Egbo can go into
Okyon, and will be respected in some of the New Calabar districts,
but not at Brass, where the secret society is a distinct cult.
Often a neighbouring district will send into Calabar, or Brass,
where the big ju-ju is, and ask to have one sent up into their
district to keep order, but Egbo will occasionally be sent into a
district without that district in the least wanting it; but, as in
the Imperi case, when it is there it is supreme. But say, for
example, you were to send Egbo round from Calabar to Cameroon.
Cameroon might be barely civil to it, but would pay it no homage,
for Cameroon has got no end of a ju-ju of its own. It can rise up
as high as the Peak, 13,760 feet. I never saw the Cameroon ju-ju do
this, but I saw it start up from four feet to quite twelve feet in
the twinkling of an eye, and I was assured that it was only modest
reticence on its part that made it leave the other 13,748 feet out
of the performance.
Doctor Nassau seems to think that the tribal society of the Corisco
regions is identical with the leopard societies. He has had
considerable experience of the workings of the Ukuku, particularly
when he was pioneering in the Benito regions, when it came very near
killing him. He says the name signifies a departed spirit. "It is
a secret society into which all the males are initiated at puberty,
whose procedure may not be seen by females, nor its laws disobeyed
by any one under pain of death, a penalty which is sometimes
commuted to a fine, a heavy fine. Its discussions are uttered as an
oracle from any secluded spot by some man appointed for the purpose.
"On trivial occasions any initiated man may personate Ukuku or issue
commands for the family. On other occasions, as in Shiku, to raise
prices, the society lays its commands on foreign traders."
Some cases of Ukuku proceedings against white traders have come
under my own observation. A friend of mine, a trader in the Batanga
district, in some way incurred the animosity of the society's local
branch. He had, as is usual in the South-West Coast trade several
sub-factories in the bush. He found himself boycotted; no native
came in to his yard to buy or sell at the store, not even to sell
food.
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