You See,
The Blood Is The Life, And If You See It Come Out, You Know The
Going Of The Thing, As It Were.
If you do not, it is mysterious.
At Okyon, a few days after the blood appeared, a nephew of
The
person whose house it came into was killed while felling a tree in
the forest; a bough struck him and broke his neck, without shedding
a drop of blood, and this bore out the theory, for the blood having
"to go somewhere" came before. In the Bantu case I did not hear of
such a supporting incident happening.
Certain African ideas about blood puzzle me. I was told by a
Batanga friend, a resident white trader, that a short time
previously a man was convicted of theft by the natives of a village
close to him. The hands and feet of the criminal were tied
together, and he was flung into the river. He got himself free, and
swam to the other bank, and went for bush. He was recaptured, and a
stone tied to his neck, and in again he was thrown. The second time
he got free and ashore, and was recaptured, and the chief then, most
regretfully, ordered that he was to be knocked on the head before
being thrown in for a third time. This time palaver set, but the
chief knew that he would die himself, by spitting the blood he had
spilt, from his own lungs, before the year was out. I inquired
about the chief when I passed this place, more than eighteen months
after, and learnt from a native that the chief was dead, and that he
had died in this way. The objection thus was not to shedding blood
in a general way, but to the shedding in the course of judicial
execution. There may be some idea of this kind underlying the
ingenious and awful ways the negroes have of killing thieves, by
tying them to stakes in the rivers, or down on to paths for the
driver ants to kill and eat, but this is only conjecture; I have not
had a chance yet to work this subject up; and getting reliable
information about underlying ideas is very difficult in Africa. The
natives will say "Yes" to any mortal thing, if they think you want
them to; and the variety of their languages is another great
hindrance. Were it not for the prevalence of Kru English or trade
English, investigation would be almost impossible; but, fortunately,
this quaint language is prevalent, and the natives of different
tribes communicate with each other in it, and so round a fire, in
the evening, if you listen to the gossip, you can pick up all sorts
of strange information, and gain strange and often awful lights on
your absent white friends' characters, and your present companions'
religion. For example, the other day I had a set of porters
composed of four Bassa boys, two Wei Weis, one Dualla, and two
Yorubas. None of their languages fitted, so they talked trade
English, and pretty lively talk some of it was, but of that anon.
I cannot close this brief notice of native ideas without mentioning
the secret societies; but to go fully into this branch of the
subject would require volumes, for every tribe has its secret
society. The Poorah of Sierra Leone, the Oru of Lagos, the Egbo of
Calabar, the Isyogo of the Igalwa, the Ukuku of the Benga, the
Okukwe of the M'pongwe, the Ikun of the Bakele, and the Lukuku of
the Bachilangi Baluba, are some of the most powerful secret
societies on the West African Coast.
These secret societies are not essentially religious, their action
is mainly judicial, and their particularly presiding spirit is not a
god or devil in our sense of the word. The ritual differs for each
in its detail, but there are broad lines of agreement between them.
There are societies both for men and for women, but mixed societies
for both sexes are rare. Those that I have mentioned above are all
male, except the Lukuku, and women are utterly forbidden to
participate in the rites or become acquainted with their secrets,
for one of the chief duties of these societies is to keep the women
in order; and besides it is undoubtedly held that women are bad for
certain forms of ju-ju, even when these forms are not directly
connected, as far as I can find out, with the secret society. For
example, the other day a chief up the Mungo River deliberately
destroyed his ju-ju by showing it to his women. It was a great ju-
ju, but expensive to keep up, requiring sacrifices of slaves and
goats, so what with trade being bad, fall in the price of oil and
ivory and so on, he felt he could not afford that ju-ju, and so
destroyed its power, so as to prevent its harming him when he
neglected it.
The general rule with these secret societies is to admit the young
free people at an age of about eight to ten years, the boys entering
the male, the girls the female society. Both societies are rigidly
kept apart. A man who attempts to penetrate the female mysteries
would be as surely killed as a woman who might attempt to
investigate the male mysteries; still I came, in 1893, across an
amusing case which demonstrates the inextinguishable thirst for
knowledge, so long as that knowledge is forbidden, which
characterises our sex.
It was in the district just south of Big Batanga. The male society
had been very hard on the ladies for some time, and one day one
star-like intellect among the latter told her next-door neighbour,
in strict confidence, that she did not believe Ikun was a spirit at
all, but only old So-and-so dressed up in leaves. This rank heresy
spread rapidly, in strict confidence, among the ladies at large, and
they used to assemble together in the house of the foundress of the
theory, secretly of course, because husbands down there are hasty
with the cutlass and the kassengo, and they talked the matter over.
Somehow or other, this came to the ears of the men.
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