This
Palaver Was Made By A Son Claiming To Inherit Part Of His Father's
Property; At Last, To The Astonishment,
And, of course, the horror,
of the learned judge, the defendant, the wicked uncle, pleaded
through the interpreter, "This man
Cannot inherit his father's
property, because his parents married for love." There is no
encouragement to foolishness of this kind in Cameroon, where legal
marriage consists in purchase.
In Bonny River and in Opobo the inheritance of "the house" is
settled primarily by a vote of the free men of the house; when the
chief dies, their choice has to be ratified by the other chiefs of
houses; but in Bonny and Opobo the white traders have had immense
influence for a long time, so one cannot now find out how far this
custom is purely native in idea.
Among the Fans the uncle is, as I have before said, an important
person although the father has more rights than among the Igalwa,
and here I came across a peculiar custom regarding widows. M. Jacot
cited to me a similar case or so, one of which I must remark was in
an Ajumba town. The widows were inside the dead husband's hut, as
usual; the Fan huts are stoutly built of sheets of flattened bark,
firmly secured together with bark rope, and thatched - they never
build them in any other way except when they are in the bush rubber-
collecting or elephant-hunting, when they make them of the branches
of trees. Well, round the bark hut, with the widows inside, there
was erected a hut made of branches, and when this was nearly
completed, the Fans commenced pulling down the inner bark hut, and
finally cleared it right out, thatch and all, and the materials of
which it had been made were burnt. I was struck with the
performance because the Fans, though surrounded by intensely
superstitious tribes, are remarkably free from superstition {338}
themselves, taking little or no interest in speculative matters,
except to get charms to make them invisible to elephants, to keep
their feet in the path, to enable them to see things in the forest,
and practical things of that sort, and these charms they frequently
gave me to assist and guard me in my wanderings.
The M'pongwe and Igalwa have a peculiar funeral custom, but it is
not confined in its operation to widows, all the near relatives
sharing in it. The mourning relations are seated on the floor of
the house, and some friend - Dr. Nassau told me he was called in in
this capacity - comes in and "lifts them up," bringing to them a
small present, a factor of which is always a piece of soap. This
custom is now getting into the survival form in Libreville and
Glass. Nowadays the relatives do not thus sit, unwashed and
unkempt, keenly requiring the soap. Among the bush Igalwa, I am
told, the soap is much wanted.
It is not only the widows that remain, either theoretically or
practically unwashed; all the mourners do. The Ibibios seem to me
to wear the deepest crape in the form of accumulated dirt, and all
the African tribes I have met have peculiar forms of hair cutting -
shaving the entire head, not shaving it at all, shaving half of it,
etc. - when in mourning. The period of the duration of wearing
mourning is, I believe, in all West Coast tribes that which elapses
between the death and the burial of the soul. I believe a more
thorough knowledge would show us that there is among the Bantu also
a fixed time for the lingering of the soul on earth after death, but
we have not got sufficient evidence on the point yet. The only
thing we know is that it is not proper for the widow to re-marry
while her husband's soul is still in her vicinity.
Among the Calabar tribes the burial of his spirit liberates the
woman. Among the Tschwi she requires special ceremonies on her own
account. In Togoland, among the Ewe people, I know the period is
between five and six weeks, during which time the widow remains in
the hut, armed with a good stout stick, as a precaution against the
ghost of her husband, so as to ward off attacks should he be ill-
tempered. After these six weeks the widow can come out of the hut,
but as his ghost has not permanently gone hence, and is apt to
revisit the neighbourhood for the next six months, she has to be
taken care of during this period. Then, after certain ceremonies,
she is free to marry again. So I conclude the period of mourning,
in all tribes, is that period during which the soul remains round
its old possessions, whether these tribes have a definite soul-
burial or devil-making or not.
The ideas connected with the under-world to which the ghost goes are
exceedingly interesting. The Negroes and Bantus are at one on these
subjects in one particular only, and that is that no marriages take
place there. The Tschwis say that this under-world, Srahmandazi, is
just the same as this world in all other particulars, save that it
is dimmer, a veritable shadow-land where men have not the joys of
life, but only the shadow of the joy. Hence, says the Tschwi
proverb, "One day in this world is worth a year in Srahmandazi."
The Tschwis, with their usual definiteness in this sort of detail,
know all about their Srahmandazi. Its entrance is just east of the
middle Volta, and the way down is difficult to follow, and when the
sun sets on this world it rises on Srahmandazi. The Bantus are
vague on this important and interesting point. The Benga, for
example, although holding the absence of marriage there, do not take
steps to meet the case as the Tschwis do, and kill a supply of wives
to take down with them. This reason for killing wives at a funeral
is another instance that, however strange and cruel a custom may be
here in West Africa, however much it may at first appear to be the
flower of a rootless superstition, you will find on close
investigation that it has some root in a religious idea, and a
common-sense element.
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