It Was Only His Splendid Physique That Kept Him
Alive Until His Arrival At The Mission." The Mercury Goes On
To
quote from the Pall Mall, and I too go on quoting to show that these
things are known and
Acknowledged to have taken place in a colony
like Sierra Leone, which has had unequalled opportunities of
becoming christianised for more than one hundred years, and now has
more than one hundred and thirty places of Christian worship in it.
"Some twenty years ago there was a war between this tribe Taima and
the Paramas. 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. He said
a dog had bit him. 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.
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