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.
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