Human Eye-Balls, Particularly Of White Men, I Have Already Said Are
A Great Charm.
Dr. Nassau says he has known graves rifled for them.
This, I fancy, is to secure the "man that lives in your eyes" for
the service of the village, and naturally the white man, being
regarded as a superior being, would be of high value if enlisted
into its service.
A similar idea of the possibility of gaining
possession of the spirit of a dead man obtains among the Negroes,
and the heads of important chiefs in the Calabar districts are
usually cut off from the body on burial and kept secretly for fear
the head, and thereby the spirit, of the dead chief, should be
stolen from the town. If it were stolen it would be not only a
great advantage to its new possessor, but a great danger to the
chief's old town; because he would know all the peculiar ju-ju
relating to it. For each town has a peculiar one, kept exceedingly
secret, in addition to the general ju-jus, and this secret one would
then be in the hands of the new owners of the spirit. It is for
similar reasons that brave General MacCarthy's head was treasured by
the Ashantees, and so on.
Charms are not all worn upon the body, some go to the plantations,
and are hung there, ensuring an unhappy and swift end for the thief
who comes stealing. Some are hung round the bows of the canoe,
others over the doorway of the house, to prevent evil spirits from
coming in - a sort of tame watch-dog spirits.
The entrances to the long street-shaped villages are frequently
closed with a fence of saplings and this sapling fence you will see
hung with fetish charms to prevent evil spirits from entering the
village and sometimes in addition to charms you will see the fence
wreathed with leaves and flowers. Bells are frequently hung on
these fences, but I do not fancy ever for fetish reasons. At
Ndorko, on the Rembwe, there were many guards against spirit
visitors, but the bell, which was carefully hung so that you could
not pass through the gateway without ringing it, was a guard against
thieves and human enemies only.
Frequently a sapling is tied horizontally near the ground across the
entrance. Dr. Nassau could not tell me why, but says it must never
be trodden on. When the smallpox, a dire pestilence in these
regions, is raging, or when there is war, these gateways are
sprinkled with the blood of sacrifices, and for these sacrifices and
for the payments of heavy blood fines, etc., goats and sheep are
kept. They are rarely eaten for ordinary purposes, and these West
Coast Africans have all a perfect horror of the idea of drinking
milk, holding this custom to be a filthy habit, and saying so in
unmitigated language.
The villagers eat the meat of the sacrifice, that having nothing to
do with the sacrifice to the spirits, which is the blood, for the
blood is the life.
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