Destroying The Body By Beating Up, Or By Cutting Up, Is A Widely Diffused Custom In West Africa In The Case Of Dangerous Souls, And Is Universally Followed With Those That Have Contained Wanderer- Souls, I.E. Those Souls Which Keep Turning Up In The Successive Infants Of A Family.

A child dies, then another child comes to the same father or mother, and that dies, after giving the usual trouble and expense.

A third arrives and if that dies, the worm - the father, I mean - turns, and if he is still desirous of more children, he just breaks one of the legs of the body before throwing it in the bush.

This he thinks will act as a warning to the wanderer-soul and give it to understand that if it will persist in coming into his family, it must settle down there and give up its flighty ways. If a fourth child arrives in the family, "it usually limps," and if it dies, the justly irritated parent cuts its body up carefully into very small pieces, and scatters them, doing away with the soul altogether.

The Kama country people of the lower Ogowe are more superstitious and full of observances than the upper river tribes.

Particularly rich in Fetish are the Ncomi, a Fernan Vaz tribe. I once saw a funeral where they had been called in to do the honours, and M. Jacot told me of an almost precisely similar occurrence that he had met with in one of his many evangelising expeditions from Lembarene.

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