FOOTNOTES:

Male.Female.SundayQuisiAkosua.MondayKujotAjua.TuesdayQuabinaAbmaba.WednesdayQuakuEkua.ThursdayQuahuAba.FridayKufiEfua.SaturdayQaminaAma.

Those ceremonials called on the Coast “customs” are the things that show off the Fetish-Man at the best in more senses of the word than one. We will take the yam custom. The intentions of these yam customs are twofold—firstly they are a thanksgiving to the fetishes for allowing their people to live to see the new yams, and for the new yams, but they are also institutions to prevent the general public eating the new yam before it’s ready. The idea is, and no doubt rightly, that unripe yams are unwholesome, and the law is that no new yams must be eaten until the yam custom is made. The Fetish-Men settle when the yams are in a fit state to pass into circulation, and then make the custom. It generally occurs at the end of August, but is sometimeskept back until the beginning of September. In Fantee all the inhabitants of the towns assemble under the shade of the grove adjoining the fetish hut, and a sheep and a number of fowls are killed, part of their flesh is mixed with boiled yams and palm-oil, and a portion of this mixture is placed on the heads of the images, and the remainder is thrown about before the fetish hut as a peace-offering to the deities.

At Winnebah, on the Gold Coast, there is an interesting modification in the yam custom. The principal fetish of that place, it is believed, will not be satisfied with a sheep, but he must have a deer brought alive to his temple, and there sacrificed. Accordingly on the appointed day every year when the custom is to be celebrated, almost all the inhabitants except the aged and infirm go into the adjoining country—an open park-like country, studded with clumps of trees. The women and children look on, give good advice, and shriek when necessary, while the men beat the bush with sticks, beat tom-toms, and halloo with all their might. While thus engaged, my correspondent remarks in his staid way, “sometimes a leopard starts forth, but it is usually so frightened with the noise and confusion that it scampers off in one direction as fast as the people run from it in another. When a deer is driven out, the chase begins, the people try to run it down, flinging sticks at its legs. At last it is secured and carried exultingly to the town with shoutings and drummings. On entering the town they are met by the aged people carrying staves, and, having gone in procession round the town, they proceed to the fetish house, where the animal is sacrificed, and partly offered to the fetish, partly eaten by the priests.”

These yam customs are at their fullest in the BeninBights, but you get a custom made for the new yam in all the districts lower down. These customs have long been credited with being stained by human sacrifices. Not altogether unjustly. You can always read human sacrifice for goats and fowls when you are considering a district inhabited by true Negroes, and the occasion is an important one, because in West Africa a human sacrifice is the most persuasive one to the fetishes. It is just with them as with a chief—if you want to get some favour from him you must give him a present. A fowl or a goat or a basket of vegetables, or anything like that is quite enough for most favours, but if you want a big thing, and want it badly, you had better give him a slave, because the slave is alike more intrinsically valuable and also more useful. So far as I know, all human beings sacrificed pass into the service of the fetish they are sacrificed to. They are not merely killed that he may enjoy their blood, but that he may have their assistance. Fetishes have much to do, and an extra pair of hands is to them always acceptable. As for the importance of these harvest customs to the general system of Fetish, I think in West Africa it is small. The goings on, the licentiousness and general jollification that accompany them, upsetting law and order for days, give them a fallacious look of importance; but I think far more really near the heart of the Fetish thought-form is the lonely man who steals at night into the forest to gain from Sasabonsom a charm, and the woman who, on her way back from market, throws down before the fetish houses she passes a scrap of her purchases; compared to the cult of the law-god, well, yam customs are dirty water price, palaver, and insignificant politically.

I have dealt here with Fetish as far as the position of thehuman being is concerned, because this phase may make it more comprehensible to my fellow white men who regard the human being as the main thing in the created universe, but I must beg you to remember that this idea of the importance of the human race is not held by the African. The individual is supremely important to himself, and he values his friends and relations and so on, but abstract affection for humanity at large or belief in the sanctity of the lives of people with whom he is unrelated and unacquainted, the African barely possesses. He is only capable of feeling this abstract affection when under the influence of one of the great revealed religions which place the human being higher in the scale of Creation. This comes from no cruelty of mindper se, but is the result of the hardness of the fight he has to fight against the world; and possessing this view of the equal, if not greater importance of many of the things he sees round him, the African conceives these things also have their fetish—a fetish on the same ground idea, but varying from human fetish. The politics of Mungo mah Lobeh, the mountain, with the rest of nature, he believes to exist. The Alemba rapid has its affairs clearly, but the private matters of these very great people are things the human being had better keep out of; and it is advisable for him to turn his attention to making terms with them and go into their presence with his petition when their own affairs are prosperous, when their tempers are not as it were up over some private ultra-human affair of their own. I well remember the opinions expressed by my companions regarding the folly—mine, of course—of obtruding ourselves on Mungo when that noble mountain was vexed too much, and the opinion expressed by an Efik friend in a tornado that came down on us. Well, there you havethis difference. I instinctively say “us.” She did not think we were objects of interest to the tornado or the forest it was scourging. She took it they had a sort of family row on, and we might get hit with the bits, therefore it was highly unfortunate that we were present at the meeting. Again, it is the same with the surf. The boat-boys see it’s in a nasty temper, they keep out of it, it may be better to-morrow, then it will tolerate them, for it has no real palaver with them individually. Of course you can go and upset the temper of big nature spirits, but when you are not there they have their own affairs.

Hence it comes that we have in Fetish a religion in which its believers do not hold that devotion to religion constitutes Virtue. The ordinary citizen is held to be most virtuous who is least mixed up in religious affairs. He can attain Virtue, the love and honour of his fellow-men, by being a good husband and father, an honest man in trade, a just man in the palaver-house, and he must, for the protection of his interests, that is to say, not only his individual well-being, but the well-being of those dependent on him, go in to a certain extent for religious practices. He must associate with spirits because spirits are in all things and everywhere and over everything; and the good citizen deals with the other spirits as he deals with that class of spirits we call human beings; he does not cheat the big ones of their dues; he spills a portion of his rum to them; he gives them their white calicoes; he treats his slave spirits honourably, and he uses his slave spirits for no bad purpose, and if any great grief falls on him he calls on the great over-lord of gods, mentioning these things. But men are not all private citizens; there are men whose destiny puts them in high places—men who are not only housefathers but who are tribe fathers. They, to protect and further the interests of those under them, must venture greatly and further, and deal with more powerful spirits, as it were, their social equals in spiritdom. These good chiefs in their higher grade dealings preserve the same clean-handed conduct. And besides these there are those men, the Fetish men, who devote their lives to combating evil actions through witches and miscellaneous spirits who prey on mankind. These men have to make themselves important to important spirits. It is risky work for them, for spirits are a risky set to deal with. Up here in London, when I have to deal with a spirit as manifest in the form of an opinion, or any big mind-form incarnate in one man, or in thousands, I often think of an African friend of mine who had troubles, and I think sympathetically, for his brother explained the affair to me. He was an educated man. “You see,” he said, “my brother’s got a strong Ju Ju, but it’s a damned rocky Ju Ju to get on with.”

FOOTNOTES:[22]July, 1897, p. 221.[23]Travels in West Africa.(Macmillan, 1897, p. 453.)

[22]July, 1897, p. 221.

[23]Travels in West Africa.(Macmillan, 1897, p. 453.)

Mainly from the point of view of the native apothecary, to which is added some account of the sleep disease and the malignant melancholy.

There is, as is in all things West African, a great deal of fetish ceremonial mixed up with West African medical methods. Underlying them throughout there is the fetish form of thought; but it is erroneous to believe that all West African native doctors are witch doctors, because they are not. One of my Efik friends, for example, would no more think of calling in a witch doctor for a simple case of rheumatism than you would think of calling in a curate or a barrister; he would just call in the equivalent to our general practitioner, the abiabok. If he grew worse instead of better, he would then call in his equivalent to our consulting physician, the witch doctor, the abiadiong. But if he started being ill with something exhibiting cerebral symptoms he would have in the witch doctor at once.

This arises from the ground principle of all West African physic. Everything works by spirit on spirit, therefore the spirit of the medicine works on the spirit of the disease. Certain diseases are combatable by certain spirits in certainherbs. Other diseases are caused by spirits not amenable to herb-dwelling spirits; they must be tackled by spirits of a more powerful grade. The witch doctor who belongs to the school of Nkissism will become more profound on this matter still, and will tell you all herbs, indeed everything that comes out of the Earth, have in them some of the power of the Earth, Nkissi nisi; but the general view is the less concrete one—that it is a matter of only certain herbs having power. This I have been told over and over again in various West Coast tongues by various West African physicians, and in it lies the key to their treatment of disease—a key without which many of their methods are incomprehensible, but which shows up most clearly in the methods of the witch doctor himself. In the practice of the general practitioner, or, more properly speaking, the apothecary, it is merely a theory, just as a village chemist here may prescribe blue pill without worrying himself about its therapeutic action from a scientific point of view.

Before I pass on to the great witch doctor, the physician, I must detain you with a brief account of the neglected-by-traveller-because-less-showy African village apothecary, a really worthy person, who exists in every West African district I know of; often, as in the Calabar and Bonny region, a doctor whose practice extends over a fair-sized district, wherein he travels from village to village. If he comes across a case, he sits down and does his best with it, may be for a fortnight or a month at a time, and when he has finished with it and got his fee, off he goes again. Big towns, of course, have a resident apothecary, but I never came across a town that had two apothecaries. It may be professional etiquette, but, though I never like to think evil of the Profession whatever colour its complexion may be, itmay somehow be connected with a knowledge of the properties of herbs, for I observed when at Corisco that an apothecary from the mainland who was over there for a visit shrank from dining with the local medico.

These apothecaries are, as aforesaid, learned in the properties of herbs, and they are the surgeons, in so far as surgery is ventured on. A witch doctor would not dream of performing an operation. Amongst these apothecaries there are lady doctors, who, though a bit dangerous in pharmacy, yet, as they do not venture on surgery, are, on the whole, safer than theirconfrères, for African surgery is heroic.

Many of the apothecaries’ medical methods are fairly sound, however. The Dualla practitioner is truly great on poultices for extracting foreign substances from wounds, such as bits of old iron cooking pot, a very frequent foreign substance for a man to get into him in West Africa, owing to pots being broken up and used as bullets. Almost incredible stories are told by black men and white in Cameroons concerning the efficiency of these poultices; one I heard from a very reliable white authority there of a man who had been shot with bits of iron pot in the thigh. The white doctor extracted several pieces, and declared he had got them all out; but the man went on suffering and could not walk, so finally a country doctor was called in, and he applied his poultice. In a few minutes he removed it, and on its face lay two pieces of iron pot. The white doctor said they had been in the poultice all the time, but he did not carry public opinion with him, for the patient recovered rapidly.

The Negroes do not seem to me to go in for baths in medical treatment quite so much as the Bantu; they holdmore with making many little incisions in the skin round a swollen joint, then encasing it with clay and keeping a carefully tended fire going under it. But the Bantu is given greatly to baths, accompanied by massage, particularly in the treatment of that great West African affliction, rheumatism. The Mpongwe make a bath for the treatment of this disease by digging a suitably sized hole in the ground and putting into it seven herbs—whereof I know the native names only, not the scientific—and in addition in go cardamoms and peppers. Boiling water is then plentifully poured over these, and the patient is laid on and covered with the parboiled green stuff. Next a framework of twigs is placed over him, and he is hastily clayed up to keep the steam in, only his head remaining above ground. In this bath he is sometimes kept a few hours, sometimes a day and a half. He is liable to give the traveller who may happen suddenly on him while under treatment the idea that he is an atrocity; but he is not; and when he is taken out of the bath-poultice he is rubbed and kneaded all over, plenty more hot water being used in the process, this indeed being the palladium of West Coast physic.

The Fjort tribe do not bury their rheumatic patients until they are dead and all their debts paid, but they employ the vapour bath. My friend, Mr. R. E. Dennet, who has for the past eighteen years lived amongst the Fjort, and knows them as no other white man does, and knows also my insatiable thirst for any form of West African information, has kindly sent me some details of Fjort medical methods, which I give in his own words—“The Fjort have names for many diseases; aches are generally described astanta ki tanta; they say the head suffersNtu tanta ki tanta, the chest suffersMtima tanta ki tanta, and so on. Rheumatismthat keeps to the joints of the bones and cripples the sufferer is calledNgoyo, while ordinary rheumatism is calledMacongo. They generally try to cure this disease by giving the sufferers vapour baths. They put the leaves of theNvukainto a pot of boiling water, and place the pot between the legs of the patient, who is made to sit up. They then cover up the patient and the pot with coverings.

“They try to relieve the local pain by spluttering the affected part with chalk, pepper, and logwood, and the leaves of certain plants that have the power of blistering.

“Small-pox they try to cure by smearing the body of the patient over with the pulped leaves of the mzeuzil. Palm oil is also used. These patients are taken to the woods, where a hut is built for them, or not, according to the wealth and desire of their relations. If poor they are often allowed to die of starvation. A kind of long thin worm that creeps about under the eyelid is calledLoyia, and is skilfully extracted by many of the natives by means of a needle or piece of wood cut to a sharp point.

“Blind boils they callFvuma, and they cure them by splintering over them the pulped rootNchechi, mixed with red and white earth. Leprosy they callBoisi, agueChiosi, matter from the earMafina, ruptureSangafulla. But diseases of the lungs, heart, liver, and spleen seem to puzzle the native leeches and many natives die from these terrible ills. Cupping and bleeding, which they do with the hollow horns of the goat and the sharpened horn of a kid, are the remedies usually resorted to.

“All persons are supposed to have the power to give their enemies these different sicknesses. Amulets, frontlets, bracelets, and waistbands charged with medicines are also used as either charms or cures.

“A woman who was stung by a scorpion went nearly mad, and, rushing into the river, tried to drown herself. I tried my best to calm her and cure her by the application of a few simple remedies, but she kept us awake all night, and we had to hold her down nearly the whole time. I called in a native surgeon to see if he could do anything, and he spluttered some medicine over her, and, placing himself opposite to her, shouted at her and the evil spirit that was in her. She became calmer, and the surgeon left us. As I was afraid of a relapse, I sent the woman to be cured in a town close by. The Princess of the town picked out the sting of the scorpion with a needle, and gave the woman some herbs, which acted as a strong purge, and cured her. As the Nganga bilongo (apothecary) is busy curing the patient, he generally has a white fowl tied to a string fastened to a peg in the ground close to him. I have described this inSeven Years among the Fjort.”

I think this communication of Mr. Dennett’s is of much interest, and I hastily beg to remark that, if you have not got a devoted friend to hold you down all night, call in an apothecary in the morning time, and then hand you over to a Princess—things that are not always handy even in West Africa when you have been stung by a scorpion—things that, on the other hand, are always handy in West Africa—carbonate of soda applied promptly to the affected part will save you from wanting to drown yourself and much other inconvenience. The sting should be extracted regardless of the shedding of blood, carbonate of soda in hot water washed over the place, and then a poultice faced with carbonate of soda put on.

Although I do not say these West African doctors possess any specific for rheumatism, it is an undoubted fact thatthe South-west Coast tribes, with their poultices and vapour baths, are very successful in treating it, more so than the true Negroes, with their clay plaster and baking method. Rheumatism is a disease the Africans seem especially liable to, whatever may be the local climate, whether it be that of the reeking Niger Delta, or the dry delightful climate of Cabinda; moreover, my friends who go whaling tell me the Bermuda negroes also suffer from rheumatism severely, and are “a perfect cuss,” wanting to come and sit in the blood and blubber of fresh-killed whales. Small-pox is a vile scourge to Africa. The common treatment is to smear the body of the patient with the pulped leaves of the mzeuzil palm and with palm oil; but I cannot say the method is successful, save in preventing pitting, which it certainly does. The mortality from this disease, particularly among the South-west Coast tribes, is simply appalling. But it is extremely difficult to make the bush African realise that it is infectious, for he regards it as a curse from a great Nature spirit, sent in consequence of some sin, such as a man marrying within the restricted degree, or something of that kind. Mr. Dennett mentions small-pox patients being sent into the bush with more or less accommodation provided. Mr. Du Chaillu gave Mr. Fraser the idea that the Bakele tribe habitually drove their small-pox sick into the bush and neglected them, which certainly, from my knowledge of the tribe, I must say is not their constant habit by any means. I venture to think that this rough attempt at isolation among the Fjort is a remnant of the influence of the great Portuguese domination of the kingdom of Congo in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, when the Roman Catholic missionaries got hold of the Fjort as no other West African has since been got hold of. Nevertheless the keeping of the sick in huts you will find in almost all districts in places—i.e.round the house of a great doctor. My friend Miss Mary Slessor, of Okÿon, has the bush round her compound fairly studded with little temporary huts, each with a patient in. You see, distinguished doctors everywhere are a little uppish, and so their patients have to come to them. Such doctors are usually specialists, noted for a cure of some particular disease, and often patients will come to such a man from towns and villages a week’s journey or more away, and then build their little shantie near his residence, and remain there while undergoing the cure.

There is a prevalent Coast notion that white men do not catch small-pox from black, but I do not think this is, at any rate, completely true. I was informed when in Loanda that during an epidemic of it amongst the natives, every white man had had a more or less severe touch, and I have known of cases of white men having small-pox in other West Coast places, small-pox they must either have caught from natives or have made themselves, which is improbable. I fancy it is a matter connected with the vaccination state of the white, although there seem to be some diseases prevalent among natives from which whites are immune—the Yaws, for example.

Less terrible in its ravages than small-pox, because it is far more limited in the number of its victims, is leprosy; still you will always find a case or so in a district. You will find the victims outcasts from society, not from a sense of its being an infectious disease, but because it is confounded with another disease, held to be a curse from an aggrieved Nature spirit. There was at Okÿon when I was there a leper who lived in a regular house of his own, nota temporary hospital hut, but a house with a plantation. He led a lonely life, having no wife or family or slave; he was himself a slave, but not called on for service—it was just a lonely life. People would drop in on him and chat, and so on, but he did not live in town. There was also another one there, who had his own people round him, and to whom people would send their slaves, because he was regarded as a good doctor; but he also had his house in the bush, and not in town.

Undoubtedly the diseases that play the greatest continuous havoc with black life in West Africa are small-pox, divers forms of pneumonia, heart-disease, and tetanus, the latter being largely responsible for the terrible mortality among children; but the two West African native diseases most interesting to the European on account of their strangeness, are the malignant melancholy and the sleep sickness, and strangely enough both these diseases seem to have their head centre in one region—the lower Congo. They occur elsewhere, but in this region they are constantly present, and now and again seem to take an epidemic form. Regarding the first-named, I am still collecting information, for I cannot tell whether the malignant melancholy of the lower Congo is one and the same with the hystero-hypochondria, the home-sickness of the true Negro. In the lower Congo I was informed that this malignant melancholy had the native name signifying throwing backwards, from its being the habit of the afflicted to throw themselves backwards into water when they attempted a drowning form of suicide.[24]They do not, however, confine themselves toattempts to drown themselves only, but are equally given to hanging, the constant thing about all their attempts being a lack of enthusiasm about getting the thing definitely done: the patient seems to potter at it, not much caring whether he does successfully hang or drown himself or no, but just keeps on, as if he could not help doing it. This has probably given rise to the native method of treating this disease—namely, holding a meeting of the patient’s responsible relations, who point out elaborately to him the advantages of life over death, and enquire of him his reasons for hankering after the latter. If in spite of these representations he persists in a course of habitual suicide, he is knocked on the head and thrown into the river; for it is a nuisance to have a person about who is continually hanging himself to the house ridge pole and pulling the roof half off, or requiring a course of sensational rescues from drowning.

The sleep disease[25]is also a strange thing. When I first arrived in Africa in 1893 there had just been a dreadful epidemic of it in the Kakongo and lower Congo region, and I saw a good many cases, and became much interested in it, and have ever since been trying to gather further information regarding it.

Dr. Patrick Manson in his important paper[26]states that it has never been known to affect any one who has not at one time or another been resident within this area, andobserves on its distribution that “it seems probable that as our knowledge of Africa extends, this disease will be found endemic here and there throughout the basins of the Senegal, the Niger, the Congo, and their affluents. We have no information of its existence in the districts drained by the Nile and the Zambesi, nor anywhere on the eastern side of the continent.” As far as my own knowledge goes the centres of this disease are the Senegal and the Congo. I never saw a case in the Oil Rivers, nor could I hear of any, though I made every inquiry; the cases I heard of from Lagos and the Oil Rivers were among people who had been down as labourers, &c., to the Congo. What is the reason of this I do not know, but certainly the people of the lower Congo are much given to all kinds of diseases, far more so than those inhabiting the dense forest regions of Congo Français, or the much-abused mangrove swamps of the Niger Delta.

Dr. Manson says, “The sleeping sickness has been attributed to such things as sunstroke, beriberi, malaria, poison, peculiar foods, such as raw bitter manioc, and diseased grain; it is evident, however, that none of these things explains all the facts.” In regard to this I may say I have often heard it ascribed to the manioc when in Kakongo, the idea being that when manioc was soaked in water surcharged with the poisonous extract, it had a bad effect. Certainly in Kakongo this was frequently the case in many districts where water was comparatively scarce. The pools used for soaking the root in stank, and the prepared root stank, in the peculiar way it can, something like sour paste, with a dash of acetic acid, and thereby the villages stank and the market-places ditto, in a way that could be of no use to any one except a person anxious to findhis homestead in the dark; but Dr. Manson’s suggestion is far more likely to be the correct one. Against it I can only urge that in some districts where I am informed by my medical friends thatFilaria perstansis very prevalent, such as Calabar, the Niger, and the Ogowe, sleeping sickness is not prevalent. Dr. Manson says “the fact that the disease can be acquired only in a comparatively limited area, suggests that the cause is similarly limited; and the fact that the disease may develop years after the endemic area has been quitted, suggests that the cause is of such a nature that it may be carried away from the endemic area and remain latent, as regards its disease-producing qualities for a considerable period; even for years.” He then goes on to say, “Filaria perstans, so far as is known, is limited in its geographical distribution to Western Equatorial Africa—that is to say, it can be acquired there only—and it may continue in active life for many years after its human host has left the country in which alone it can be acquired. We also know that similar entozoa in their wanderings in the tissues by accident of location, or by disease, or injury of their organs, not infrequently give rise to grave lesions in their hosts. I therefore suggest that possiblyFiliaria perstansmay in some way be responsible for the sleeping sickness. I know that this parasite is extremely common in certain sleeping sickness districts, and moreover, I have found it in the blood of a considerable number of cases of this disease—in six out of ten—including that described by Mackenzie. There are many difficulties in the way of establishing this hypothesis, but there is a sufficient inherent probability about it to make it well worth following up.”

The most important statement that I have been able toget regarding it so far, has been one sent me by Mr. R. E. Dennett; who says “The sleeping sickness though prevalent throughout Kakongo and Loango is most common in the north of Loango and the south of Kakongo, that is north of the river Quillou and among the Mussorongo.

“What the cause of the sickness is, it is hard to say, but it is one of those scourges which is ever with us. The natives say any one may get it, that it is not hereditary, and only infectious in certain stages. They avoid thedejectaof affected persons, but they do not force the native to live in the bush as they do a person affected by small-pox.

“Pains in the head chiefly just above the nose are first experienced, and should these continue for a month or so it is to be expected that the disease isMadotchila, or the first stage of the sleeping sickness.

“In the wordMadotchilawe have the idea of a state of being poisoned or bewitched. At this stage the sickness is curable, but as the sick man will never admit that he has the sickness and will suffer excruciating pain rather than complain, and as it is criminal to suggest to the invalid or others that he is suffering from the dreadful disease, it often happens that it gets great hold of the afflicted and from time to time he falls down overcome by drowsiness.

“Then he swells up and has the appearance of one suffering from dropsy, and this stage of the disease is calledMalazi, literally meaning thousands (Kulazi= one thousand, the verbKoulato become great andzithe productive fly.)

“This appears to be the acute stage of the disease and death often occurs within eight days from the beginning of the swelling.

“Then comes the stageNtolotolo, meaning sleep or mock death.

“The next stage is calledTchela nxela nbela, that is the knife cutting stage, referring to the operation of bleeding as part of the cure; and the last stage of the disease is calledNlemba Ngombo.Lembameans to cease. The rites ofLembaare those which refer to the marriage of a woman who swears to die with her husband or rather to cease to live at the same time as he does.Ngombois the name of the native grass cloth in which, before theNleleor cotton cloth of the white man appeared, the dead were wrapped previous to burial. Thus in the nameNlemba Ngombowe have the meaning of marriage to the deathly winding sheet or shroud.

“I remember how poor Sanda (a favourite servant of Mr. Dennett’s, a mussorong boy) was taken sick with pains in his head which I at first mistook for simple headache. As he was of great service to me I kept him in the factory instead of sending him to town (the custom with invalids in Kakongo is that they should go to their town to be doctored). I purged him and gave him strong and continued doses of quinine and he got better; but from time to time he suffered from recurring headache and drowsiness, and on one occasion when I was vexed at finding him asleep and suspecting him of dissipation, was going to punish him, I was informed by another servant that the poor fellow was suffering from the sleeping sickness. I at once sent him to town with sufficient goods to pay his doctor’s bill, and his relations did all in their power to have him properly cured, taking him many miles to visit certain Ngangas famed for the cure of this fell disease.

“He came back to me well and happy. The next yearhowever, the malady returned, and he went to town and gradually wasted away. They told me that sores upon one of his arms had caused him to lose a hand, which he lived to see buried before him. Sanda was of royal blood, so his body was taken across from the north bank to San Antonio or Sonio, on the south bank of the Congo, and there he was buried with his fathers.

“Another sad case was that of a woman who lived in the factory.

“As a child, it appeared afterwards, she had suffered from the disease, and had been cured by the good French doctor then resident in Landana (Dr. Lucan). I knew nothing of this at the time, and put her sickness down to drink, but got a doctor to see her. He could not make out what was the matter, but thought it might possibly be some nervous disease; altogether we were completely puzzled.

“On one occasion during my absence she nearly tortured one of her children to death by stabbing her with a needle. On my return, and when I heard what she had done, I was very angry with her, and turned her out of the factory, and shortly afterwards the poor creature died in the swelling state of the disease.

“Joaõ (a more or less civilised native) tells me that one of his wives was cured of this sleeping sickness. She was living with him in a white man’s factory when she had it, and on one occasion fell upon a demijohn and cut her back open rather seriously—the white man cured her so far as the wound was concerned. A native doctor, a Nganga or Kakamucka, later on cured the sleeping sickness. He first gave her an emetic, then each day he gave her a kind of Turkish bath; that is, having boiled certain herbs in water, he placed her within the boiling decoction under a coveringof cloth, making her perspire freely. Towards nightfall he poured some medicine up her nostrils and into her eyes, so that in the morning when she awoke, her eyes and nose were full of matter; at the same time he cupped and bled her in the locality of the pain in the head. What the medicines were I cannot say, neither will the Nganga tell any one save the man he means shall succeed him in his office.

“The native doctors appear to know when the disease has become incurable and the life of the patient is merely a question of a few days, for once while I was at Chemongoanleo, on the lower Congo I heard the village carpenter hammering nails into planks, and asked my servant what they were doing. ‘Building Buite’s coffin,’ he said. ‘What, is he dead?’ said I. ‘No, but he must die soon,’ he answered. This statement was confirmed by the relations of Buite who came to me for rum as my share towards his funeral expenses. Imagine my feelings when shortly after this Buite, swollen out of all likeness to his former self, crawled along to the shop and asked me for a gallon of rum to help him pay his doctor’s bill.

“A doctor of the Congo Free State began to take an interest in the sickness and asked me to persuade some one suffering from the disease to come and place himself under his care, promising that he would have a place apart made for him at the station, so that he could study the sickness and try to cure the poor fellow. After a good deal of trouble I got him a patient willing to remain with him, but owing to some red tape difficulty as to the supply of food for the sick man this doctor’s good intentions came to nought. A Portuguese doctor here also gave his serious attention to the sleeping sickness, and it was reportedthat he had found a cure for it in some part of a fresh billy-goat. This good man wanted a special hospital to be built for him and a subsidy so that he might devote himself to the task he had undertaken. His Government, however, although its hospitals are far in advance of those of its neighbours on the Coast, could not see its way to erect such a place.”

All I need add to this is that I was informed that the disease when it had once definitely set in ran its fatal course in a year, but that when it came as an epidemic it was more rapidly fatal, sometimes only a matter of a few weeks, and it was this more acute form that was accompanied by wild delirium. Another native informant told me when it was bad it usually lasted only from twenty to forty days.

Monteiro says the sleep disease was unknown south of the Congo until it suddenly attacked the town of Musserra, where he was told by the natives as many as 200 died of it in a few months. This was in 1870, and curious to say it did not spread to the neighbouring towns. Monteiro induced the natives to remove from the old town and the mortality decreased till the disease died out. “There was nothing in the old town to account for this sudden singular epidemic. It was beautifully clean and well-built on high dry ground, surrounded by mandioca plantations, the last place to all appearance to expect such a curious outbreak.”[27]

Monteiro also observes that “there is no cure known for it,” but he is speaking for Angola, and I think this strengthens his statement that it is a comparatively recent importation there. For certainly there are cures, if not known, at any rate believed in, for the sleeping sickness in its own home Kakongo and Loango. There is a great difference in thediseases, flora and fauna, of the north and south banks of the Congo—whether owing to the difficulty of crossing the terrifically rapid and powerful stream of the great river I do not know. Still there was—more in former times than now—much intercourse between the natives of the two banks when the Portuguese discovered the Congo in 1487. The town called now San Antonio was the throne town of the kingdom of Kongo, and had nominally as provinces the two districts Kakongo and Loango, these provinces that are now the head centres of the sleep disease. Yet in the early accounts given of Kongo by the Catholic missionaries, who lived in Kongo among the natives, I have so far found no mention of the sleep disease. It is impossible to believe that Merolla, for example, could have avoided mentioning it if he had seen or heard of it. Merolla’s style of giving information was, like my own, diffuse. Certainly we must remember that these Catholic missionaries were not much in Loango and Kakongo as those provinces had broken almost entirely away from the Kongo throne prior to the Portuguese arrival, so perhaps all we can safely say is that in the 15-17th centuries there was no sleep disease in the districts on the south bank of the Congo, and it was not anything like so notoriously bad in the districts on the north bank.

Before quitting the apothecary part of this affair, I may just remark that if you, being white, of a nervous disposition, and merely in possession of an ordinary amount of medical knowledge, find yourself called in to doctor an African friend or acquaintance, you must be careful about hot poultices. I should say,neverprescribe hot poultices. An esteemed medical friend, since dead, told methat when he first commenced practice in West Africa he said to a civilised native who was looking after his brother—the patient—“Give him a linseed poultice made like this”—demonstration—“and mind he has it hot.” The man came back shortly afterwards to say his brother had been very sick, but was no better, though every bit of the stuff had been swallowed so hot it had burnt his mouth. But swallowing the poultice is a minor danger to its exhibition. Even if you yourself see it put on outside, carefully, exactly where that poultice ought to be, the moment your back is turned the patient feeling hot gets into the most awful draught he can find, or into cold water, and the consequences are inflammation of the lungs and death, and you get the credit of it. The natives themselves you will find are very clever at doctoring in their own way, by no means entirely depending on magic and spells; and you will also find they have a strong predilection for blisters, cupping and bleeding, hot water and emetics; in all their ailments and on the whole it suits them very well. Therefore I pray you add your medical knowledge and your special drugs to theirs and for outside applications stick to blisters in place of hot poultices.

FOOTNOTES:[24]An experienced medical man from West Africa informs me that he considers the Africans very liable to hysterical disease, and he attributes the throwing backwards to the patient’s desire not to spoil his or her face, a thing ladies are especially careful of, and says that turning a lady face downwards on the sand is as efficacious in breaking up the hysterical fit as throwing water over their clothes is with us.[25]Negro lethargy; Maladie du sommeil; Enfermedad del sueno; Nelavane (Oulof); Dadane (Sereres); Toruahebue (Mendi); Ntolo (Fjort).[26]System of Medicine.Volume II. Edited by Dr. Clifford Allbutt. Macmillan & Co., 1897.[27]Angola and the River Congo.Macmillan. Vol. i., p. 144.

[24]An experienced medical man from West Africa informs me that he considers the Africans very liable to hysterical disease, and he attributes the throwing backwards to the patient’s desire not to spoil his or her face, a thing ladies are especially careful of, and says that turning a lady face downwards on the sand is as efficacious in breaking up the hysterical fit as throwing water over their clothes is with us.

[25]Negro lethargy; Maladie du sommeil; Enfermedad del sueno; Nelavane (Oulof); Dadane (Sereres); Toruahebue (Mendi); Ntolo (Fjort).

[26]System of Medicine.Volume II. Edited by Dr. Clifford Allbutt. Macmillan & Co., 1897.

[27]Angola and the River Congo.Macmillan. Vol. i., p. 144.

African Medicine mainly from the point of view of the Witch Doctor.

We will now leave the village apothecary and his methods, and turn to the witch doctor, the consulting physician. He of course knows all about the therapeutic action of low-grade spirits, such as dwell in herbs and so on; but he knows more—namely the actions of higher spirits on the human soul, and the disorders of the human soul into the bargain.

The dogma that rules his practice is that in all cases of disease in which no blood is showing, the patient is suffering from something wrong in the soul. In order to lay this dogma fairly before you, I should here discourse on the nature of spirits unallied to the human soul—non-human spirits—and the nature of the human spirit itself; but as on the one hand, I cannot be hasty on such an important group of subjects, and, on the other, I cannot expect you to be anything else in such a matter, I forbear, and merely beg to remark that the African does not believe in anything being soulless, he regards even matter itself as a form of soul, low, because not lively, a thing other spirit forms use as they please—practically as the cloth of the spirit that uses it. This conception is, as far as I know, constant in both Negro and Bantu. I will therefore heredeal only with what the African regards as merely one class of spirits—an important class truly, but above it there are at least two more important classes, while beneath it in grade there are, I think, about eleven, and equal to it, but differing in nature, several classes—I don’t exactly know how many. This class of spirits is the human soul—theKlaof the true Negro, theManuof the Bantu. These human souls are also of different grades, for one sort is believed to be existent before birth, as well as during life and after death, while other classes are not. There is more interesting stuff here, but I am determined to stick to my main point now—the medical. Well, the number of souls possessed by each individual we call a human being is usually held to be four—(1) the soul that survives, (2) the soul that lives in an animal away wild in the bush, (3) the shadow cast by the body, (4) the soul that acts in dreams. I believe that the more profound black thinkers hold that these last-named souls are only functions of the true soul, but from the witch doctor’s point of view there are four, and he acts on this opinion when doctoring the diseases that afflict these souls of a man.

The dream-soul is the cause of woes unnumbered to our African friend, and the thing that most frequently converts him into that desirable state, from a witch doctor’s point of view of a patient. It is this way. The dream-soul is, to put it very mildly, a silly flighty thing. Off it goes when its owner is taking a nap, and gets so taken up with sky-larking, fighting, or gossiping with other dream-souls that sometimes it does not come home to its owner when he is waking up. So, if any one has to wake a man up great care must always be taken that it is done softly—softly, namely gradually and quietly, so as to give the dream-soultime to come home. For if either of the four souls of a man have their intercommunication broken, the human being possessing them gets very ill. We will take an example. A man has been suddenly roused by some cause or other before that dream-soul has had time to get into quarters. That human being feels very ill, and sends for the Witch Doctor. The medical man diagnoses the case as one of absence of dream-soul, instantly claps a cloth over the mouth and nose, and gets his assistant to hold it there until the patient gets hard on suffocated; but no matter, it’s the proper course of treatment to pursue. The witch doctor himself gets ready as rapidly as possible another dream-soul, which if he is a careful medical man, he has brought with him in a basket. Then the patient is laid on his back and the cloths removed from the mouth and nose, and the witch doctor holds over them his hands containing the fresh soul, blowing hard at it so as to get it well into the patient. If this is successfully accomplished, the patient recovers. Occasionally, however, this fresh soul slips through the medical man’s fingers, and before you can say “Knife” is on top of some 100-feet-high or more silk cotton tree, where it chirrups gaily and distinctly. This is a great nuisance. The patient has to be promptly covered up again. If the doctor has an assistant with him, that unfortunate individual has to go up the tree and catch the dream-soul. If he has no assistant, he has to send his power up the tree after the truant; doctors who are in full practice have generally passed the time of life when climbing up trees personally is agreeable. When, however, the thing has been re-captured and a second attempt to insert it is about to be made, it is held advisable to get the patient’s friends and relatives to stand round him in a ring and howl lustily, while your assistant also howlinglustily, but in a professional manner, beats a drum. This prevents the soul from bolting again, and tends to frighten it into the patient.

In some obstinate cases of loss of dream-soul, however, the most experienced medical man will fail to get the fresh soul inserted. It clings to his fingers, it whisks back into the basket or into his hair or clothes, and it chirrups dismally, and the patient becomes convulsed. This is a grave symptom, but the diagnosis is quite clear. The patient has got asisain him, so there is no room for the fresh soul.

Now, asisais a dreadful bad thing for a man to have in him, and an expensive thing to get out. It is the surviving soul of a person who has not been properly buried—not had his devil made, in fact. And as every human surviving soul has a certain allotted time of existence in a human body before it can learn the dark and difficult way down to Srahmandazi, if by mischance the body gets killed off before the time is up, that soul, unless properly buried and sent on the way to Srahmandazi, or any other Hades, under expert instruction given as to the path for the dead, becomes asisa, and has to hang about for the remaining years of its term of bodily life.

Theseensisaare held to be so wretchedly uncomfortable in this state that their tempers become perfect wrecks, and they grow utterly malignant, continually trying to get into a human body, so as to finish their term more comfortably. Now, asisa’schief chance of getting into a body is in whipping in when there is a hole in a man’s soul chamber, from the absence of his own dream-soul. If asisawere a quiet, respectable soul that would settle down, it would not matter much, for the dream-soul it supplants is not of much account. But asisais not.At the best, it would only live out its remaining term, and then go off the moment that term was up, and most likely kill the souls it had been sheltering with by bolting at an inconvenient moment. This was the verdict given on the death of a man I knew who, from what you would call faintness, fell down in a swamp and was suffocated. Inconvenient as this is, the far greater danger you are exposed to by having asisain you lies in the chances being 10 to 1 that it is stained with blood, for, without being hard on these unfortunate unburied souls, I may remark that respectable souls usually get respectably buried, and so don’t becomeensisa. This blood which is upon it the devils that are around smell and go for, as is the nature of devils; and these devils whip in after thesisasoul into his host in squads, and the man with such a set inside him is naturally very ill—convulsions, delirium, high temperature, &c., and the indications to your true witch doctor are that thatsisamust be extracted before a new dream-soul can be inserted and the man recover.

But getting out asisais a most trying operation. Not only does it necessitate a witch doctor sending in his power to fetch itvi et armis, it also places the medical man in a position of grave responsibility regarding its disposal when secured. The methods he employs to meet this may be regarded as akin to those of antiseptic surgery. All the people in the village, particularly babies and old people—people whose souls are delicate—must be kept awake during the operation, and have a piece of cloth over the nose and mouth, and every one must howl so as to scare thesisaoff them, if by mischance it should escape from the witch doctor. An efficient practitioner, I may remark, thinks it a great disgrace to allow asisato escape from him; andsuch an accident would be a grave blow to his practice, for people would not care to call in a man who was liable to have this occur. However, our present medical man having got thesisaout, he has still to deal with the question of its disposal before he can do anything more. The assistant blows a new dream soul into the patient, and his women see to him; but the witch doctor just holds on to thesisalike a bulldog.

Sometimes the disposal of thesisahas been decided on prior to its extraction. If the patient’s family are sufficiently well off, they agree to pay the doctor enough to enable him to teach thesisathe way to Hades. Indeed, this is the course respectable medical men always insist on although it is expensive to the patient’s family. But there are, I regret to say, a good many unprincipled witch doctors about who will undertake a case cheap.

They will carry off with them the extractedsisafor a small fee, then shortly afterwards a baby in the village goes off in tetanic convulsions. No one takes much notice of that, because it’s a way babies have. Soon another baby is born in the same family—polygamy being prevalent, the event may occur after a short interval—well, after giving the usual anxiety and expense, that baby goes off in convulsions. Suspicion is aroused. Presently yet another baby appears in the family, keeps all right for a week may be, and then also goes off in convulsions. Suspicions are confirmed. The worm—the father, I mean—turns, and he takes the body of that third baby and smashes one of its leg bones before it is thrown away into the bush; for he knows he has got a wanderer soul—namely, asisa, which some unprincipled practitioner has sent into his family. He just breaks the leg so as to warn the soul he isnot a man to be trifled with, and will not have his family kept in a state of perpetual uproar and expense. It sometimes happens, however, in spite of this that, when his fourth baby arrives, that too goes off in convulsions. Thoroughly roused now, paterfamilias sternly takes a chopper and chops that infant’s remains up extremely small, and it is scattered broadcast. Then he holds he has eliminated thatsisafrom his family finally.

I am informed, however, that the fourth baby to arrive in a family afflicted by asisadoes not usually go off in convulsions, but that fairly frequently it is born lame, which shows that it is that wanderer soul back with its damaged leg. It is not treated unkindly but not taken much care of, and so rarely lives many years—from the fetish point of view, of course, only those years remaining of its term of bodily life out of which some witchcraft of man or some vengeance of a god cheated it.

If I mention the facts that when a man wakes up in the morning feeling very stiff and with “that tired feeling” you see mentioned in advertisements in the newspapers, he holds that it arises from his own dream-soul having been out fighting and got itself bruised; and that if he wakes up in a fright, he will jump up and fire off his gun, holding that a pack of rag tag devils have been chasing his soul home and wishing to scare them off, I think I may leave the complaints of the dream-soul connected with physic and pass on to those connected with surgery.

Now, devoted as I am to my West African friends, I am bound in the interests of Truth to say that many of them are sadly unprincipled. There are many witches, not witch doctors, remember, who make it a constant practice to set traps for dream-souls. Witches you will find fromSierra Leone to Cameroons, but they are extra prevalent on the Gold Coast and in Calabar.

These traps are usually pots containing something attractive to the soul, and in this bait are concealed knives or fish-hooks—fish-hooks when the witch wants to catch the soul to keep, knives when the desire is just to injure it.

In the case of the lacerated dream-soul, when it returns to its owner, it makes him feel very unwell; but the symptoms are quite different from those arising from loss of dream-soul or from asisa.

The reason for catching dream-souls with hooks is usually a low mercenary one. You see, many patients insist on having their own dream-soul put back into them—they don’t want a substitute from the doctor’s store—so of course the soul has to be bought from the witch who has got it. Sometimes, however, the witch is the hireling of some one intent on injuring a particular person and keen on capturing the soul for this purpose, though too frightened to kill his enemy outright. So the soul is not only caught and kept, but tortured, hung up over the canoe fire and so on, and thus, even if the patient has another dream-soul put in, so long as his original soul is in the hands of a torturer, he is uncomfortable.

On one occasion, for example, I heard one of the Kru boys who were with me making more row in his sleep, more resounding slaps and snores and grunts than even a normal Kru boy does, and, resolving in my mind that what that young man really required was one of my pet pills, I went to see him. I found him asleep under a thick blanket and with a handkerchief tied over his face. It was a hot night, and the man and his blanket were as wet with sweat as if they had been dragged through a river. I suggestedto head-man that the handkerchief muzzle should come off, and was informed by him that for several nights previously the man had dreamt of that savoury dish, crawfish seasoned with red pepper. He had become anxious, and consulted the head-man, who decided that undoubtedly some witch was setting a trap for his dream-soul with this bait, with intent, &c. Care was now being taken to, as it were, keep the dream-soul at home. I of course did not interfere and the patient completely recovered.

We will now pass on to diseases arising from disorders in the other three souls of a man. The immortal or surviving soul is liable to a disease that its body suffered from during its previous time on earth, born again with it. Such diseases are quite incurable, and I only personally know of them in the Calabar and Niger Delta, where reincarnation is strongly believed in.

Then come the diseases that arise from injury to the shadow-soul. It strikes one as strange at first to see men who have been walking, say, through forest or grass land on a blazing hot morning quite happily, on arrival at a piece of clear ground or a village square, most carefully go round it, not across, and you will soon notice that they only do this at noontime, and learn that they fear losing their shadow. I asked some Bakwiri I once came across who were particularly careful in this matter why they were not anxious about losing their shadows when night came down and they disappeared in the surrounding darkness, and was told that that was all right, because at night all shadows lay down in the shadow of the Great God, and so got stronger. Had I not seen how strong and long a shadow, be it of man or tree or of the great mountain itself, was in the early morning time? Ah me! I said, the proverbis true that says the turtle can teach the spider. I never thought of that.

Murders are sometimes committed by secretly driving a nail or knife into a man’s shadow, and so on; but if the murderer be caught red-handed at it, he or she would be forthwith killed, for all diseases arising from the shadow-soul are incurable. No man’s shadow is like that of his own brother, says the proverb.

Now we come to that very grave class of diseases which arise from disorders of the bush-soul. These diseases are not all incurable, nevertheless they are very intractable and expensive to cure. This bush-soul is, as I have said, resident in some wild animal in the forest. It may be in only an earth pig, or it may be in a leopard, and, quite providentially for the medical profession no layman can see his own soul—it is not as if it were connected with all earth pigs, or all leopards, as the case may be, but it is in one particular earth pig or leopard or other animal—so recourse must be had to medical aid when anything goes wrong with it. It is usually in the temper that the bush-soul suffers. It is liable to get a sort of aggrieved neglected feeling, and want things given it. When you wander about the wild gloomy forests of the Calabar region, you will now and again come across, far away from all human habitation or plantation, tiny huts, under whose shelter lies some offering or its remains. Those are offerings administered by direction of a witch doctor to appease a bush-soul. For not only can a witch doctor see what particular animal a man’s bush-soul is in, but he can also see whereabouts in the forest that animal is. Still, these bush-souls are not easily appeased. The worst of it is that a man may be himself a quiet steady man, careful of his dietand devoted to a whole skin, and yet his bush-soul be a reckless blade, scorning danger, and thereby getting itself shot by some hunter or killed in a trap or pit; and if his bush-soul dies, the man it is connected with dies. Therefore if the hunter who has killed it can be found out—a thing a witch doctor cannot do unless he happens by chance to have had his professional eye on that bush-soul at the time of the catastrophe; because, as it were, at death the bush-soul ceases to exist—that hunter has to pay compensation to the family of the deceased. On the other hand, if the man belonging to the bush-soul dies, the bush-soul animal has to die too. It rushes to and fro in the forest—“can no longer find a good place.” If it sees a fire, it rushes into that; if it sees a lot of hunters, it rushes among them—anyhow, it gets itself killed off.

We will now turn our attention to that other great division of diseases—namely such as are caused only and directly by human agency. Those I have already detained you too long over are caused by spirits acting on their own account, for even in the case of the trapped dream-souls they are held themselves to have shown contributory negligence in getting hooked or cut in traps.

The others arise from what is called witchcraft. You will often hear it said that the general idea among savage races is that death always arises from witchcraft; but I think, from what I have said regarding diseases arising from bush-souls’ bad tempers, from contracting asisa, from losing the shadow at high noon, and from, it may be, other causes I have not spoken of, that this generalisation is for West Africa too sweeping. But undoubtedly sixty per cent of the deaths are believed to arise from witchcraft. I would put the percentage higher, were it not for the terriblemortality from tetanus among children, which sometimes is and sometimes is not put down to witchcraft, and the mortality from smallpox and the sleep disease down south in Loango and Kakongo, those diseases not being in any case that I have had personal acquaintance with imputed to witchcraft at all. Indeed I venture to think that any disease that takes an epidemic form is regarded as a scourge sent by some great outraged Nature spirit, not a mere human dabbler in devils. I have dealt with witchcraft itself elsewhere, therefore now I only speak regarding it medically; and I think, roughly speaking, not absolutely, mind you, that the witching somethingoutof a man is the most common iniquity of witchcraft from Cape Juby to Cameroons, the region of the true Negro stock; while from Cameroons to Benguella—the limit of my knowledge to the south on the western side of the continent—the most common iniquity of witchcraft is witching something into him. As in the diseases arising from the loss of the dream-soul I have briefly dealt with the witching something out, I now turn to the witching something in.

I well remember, in 1893, being then new to and easily alarmed by the West Coast, going into a village in Kakongo one afternoon and seeing several unpleasant-looking objects stuck on poles. Investigation showed they were the lungs, livers, or spleens of human beings; and local information stated that they were the powers of witches—witches that had been killed and, on examination, found to have inside them these things, dangerous to the state and society at large. Wherefrom it was the custom to stick up on poles these things as warnings to the general public not to harbour in their individual interiors things to use against their fellow-creatures. They mutely but firmly said,“See! if you turn witch, your inside will be stuck on a pole.”

I may remark that in many districts of the South-West coast and middle Congo it is customary when a person dies in an unexplainable way, namely without shedding blood, to hold a post-mortem. In some cases the post-mortem discloses the path of the witch through the victim—usually, I am informed, the injected witch feeds on the victim’s lungs—in other cases the post-mortem discloses the witch power itself, demonstrating that the deceased was a keeper of witch power, or, as we should say, a witch.

Once when I was at Batanga a woman dropped down on the beach and died. The usual post-mortem was held, and local feeling ran high. “She no complain, she no say nothing, and then she go die one time.” The post-mortem disclosed what I think you would term a ruptured aneurism of the aorta, but the local verdict was “she done witch herself”—namely that she was a witch, who had been eaten by her own power, therefore there were great rejoicings over her death.

This dire catastrophe is, however, liable to overtake legitimate medical men. All reasonable people in every clime allow a certain latitude to doctors. They are supposed to know things other people need not, and to do things, like dissections and such, that other people should not, and no one thinks any the worse of them. This is the case with the African physician, whom we roughly call the witch doctor, but whose full title is the combatant of the evils worked by witches and devils on human souls and human property. This medical man has, from the exigencies of his profession, to keep in his own inside a power, and a good strong one at that, which he can employ in hispractice by sending it into patients to fetch out other witch powers,sisas, or any miscellaneous kind of devil that may have got into them. His position is totally different from that of the layman. He is known to possess a witch power, and the knowledge of how to employ it; but instead of this making him an object of aversion to his fellow-men, it secures for him esteem and honour, and the more terrifically powerful his power is known to be, the more respect he gains; for suppose you were taken ill by a real bad devil, you would prefer a medical man whose power was at least up to that devil’s fighting weight.

Nevertheless his having to keep the dangerous devil in his own inside exposes the witch doctor to grave personal danger, for if, from a particularly healthy season, or some notorious quack coming into his district, his practice falls off, and his power is thereby not kept fed, that unfortunate man is liable to be attacked by it. This was given me as the cause of the death of a great doctor in the Chiloango district, and I heard the same thing from the Ncomi district, so it is clear that many eminent men are cut off in the midst of their professional career in this way.

As for what this power is like in its corporal form, I can only say that it is evidently various. One witch doctor I know just to the north of Loango always made it a practice to give his patients a brisk emetic as soon as he was called in, and he always found young crocodiles in the consequences. I remember seeing him in one case secure six lively young crocodiles that had apparently been very recently hatched. These were witch powers. Again, I was informed of a witch who was killed near the Bungo River having had found inside him a thing like a lizard, but with wings like a bat. The most peculiar form of witch power I have heard of as beingfound inside a patient was on the Ogowe from two native friends, both of them very intelligent, reliable men, one of them a Bible reader. They said that about two years previously a relation of theirs had been badly witched. A doctor had been called in, who administered an emetic, and there appeared upon the scene a strange little animal that grew with visible rapidity. An hour after its coming to light it crawled and got out of the basin, and finally it flew away. It had bat’s wings and a body and tail like a lizard. This catawampus, my informant held, had been witched into the man when it was “small, small”—namely, very small. It might, they thought, have been given to their relation in some food or drink by an enemy, but for sure, if it had not been disturbed by that emetic, it would have grown up inside the man and have eaten its way out through his vitals.

From the whole of the above statements I think I have shown you that if as a witch doctor you are called in to a patient who is ill, but who is not showing blood anywhere, your diagnosis will be that he has got some sort or another of devil the matter with him, and that the first indication is to find out who put that devil in, because, in the majority of cases, until you know this you can’t get it out; the second is to get it out; the third is to prevent its getting adrift, and into some one else.

I have only briefly sketched the ideas and methods of witch doctors in West Africa, in so far as treatment is concerned. The infinite variety of methods employed in detecting who has been the witch in a given case; the infinite variety of incantations and so on, I have no space to dwell on here, and will conclude by giving you a general sketch of the career of a witch doctor.

We will start with the medical student stage. Now, every West African tribe has a secret society—two, in fact, one for men and one for women. Every free man has to pass through the secret society of his tribe. If during this education the Elders of this society discover that a boy is what is called in Calabar anebumtup—a person who can see spirits—the elders of the society advise that he should be brought up to the medical profession. Their advice is generally taken, and the boy is apprenticed as it were to a witch doctor, who requires a good fee with him. This done, he proceeds with his studies, learns the difference between the dream-soul basket and the onesisasare kept in—a mistake between the two would be on a par with mistaking oxalic acid for Epsom salts. He is then taught how to howl in a professional way, and, by watching his professor, picks up his bedside manner. If he can acquire a showy way of having imitation epileptic fits, so much the better. In fact, as a medical student, you have to learn pretty well as much there as here. You must know the dispositions, the financial position, little scandals, &c., of the inhabitants of the whole district, for these things are of undoubted use in divination and the finding of witches, and in addition you must be able skilfully to dispense charms, and know what babies say before their own mothers can. Then some day your professor and instructor dies, his own professional power eats him, or he tackles a disease-causing spirit that is one too many for him, and on you descend his paraphernalia and his practice.

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