She Would
Lead The Life Of A Leper, Working In The Plantation By Day, And
Going Into Her Lonely Hut At Night, Shunned And Cursed.
I tried to
find out whether there was any set period for this quarantine, and
all I could arrive
At was that if - and a very considerable if - a man
were to marry her and she were subsequently to present to Society an
acceptable infant, she would be to a certain extent socially
rehabilitated, but she would always be a woman with a past - a thing
the African, to his credit be it said, has no taste for.
The woman's own lamentations were pathetic. She would sit for hours
singing or rather mourning out a kind of dirge over herself:
"Yesterday I was a woman, now I am a horror, a thing all people run
from. Yesterday they would eat with me, now they spit on me.
Yesterday they would talk to me with a sweet mouth, now they greet
me only with curses and execrations. They have smashed my basin,
they have torn my clothes," and so on, and so on. There was no
complaint against the people for doing these things, only a bitter
sense of injury against some superhuman power that had sent this
withering curse of twins down on her. She knew not why; she sang "I
have not done this, I have not done that" - and highly interesting
information regarding the moral standpoint a good deal of it was. I
have tried to find out the reason of this widely diffused custom
which is the cause of such a pitiful waste of life; for in addition
to the mother and children being killed it often leads to other
people, totally unconcerned in the affair, being killed by the
relatives of the sufferer on the suspicion of having caused the
calamity by witchcraft, and until one gets hold of the underlying
idea, and can destroy that, the custom will be hard to stamp out in
a district like the great Niger Delta.
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