Fetichism in West Africa : $b forty years' observation of native customs and superstitionsNassau, Robert Hamill
Philosophy
Fetichism in West Africa : $b forty years' observation of native customs and superstitions
Nassau, Robert Hamill
Ethnology -- Africa, West; Fetishism -- Africa, West
(The following narrative was told me by a Batanga native Christian woman
who, herself less than thirty years of age, is a great-granddaughter of
the man one of whose wives was the witch of this story. I bade her, in
giving me the account, to speak, not from her present Christian standpoint
and her only slight superstitious bias, but from the full heathen
view-point. The confusing mixture of singular and plural pronouns
referring to the witch is an exact reproduction of my informant's words.)
The great-grandfather was a heathen and a polygamist. He had four wives.
One of them was a member of an interior tribe, the Boheba, more heathenish
and superstitious than his own Batanga coast tribe. Unknown to him, she
was a member of the Witchcraft Society, had power with the spirits, and
they with her, attended their secret night meetings, and engaged in their
unhallowed orgies.
The husband, though not a member of the society, had acquired some
knowledge of witchcraft art, and, though without the power to transform
himself, as wizards did, was able to see and know what was being done at
distances beyond ordinary human sight.
One night she arose from her bed to go and attend a witchcraft play. She
left her physical "house," the fleshly body, lying on the bed, so that no
one not in the secret, seeing that body lying there, would think other
than it was herself, nor would know that she was gone out. In her going
out she willed to emerge as Three-Things, and this triple unit went off to
the witchcraft play. The husband happened to see this, and watched her as
she disappeared, saw where she went, and, though distant and out of sight,
knew what she was doing. So he said to himself, "She is off at her play; I
also will do some playing here; she shall know what I have done."
Among the several things of which followers of witchcraft are afraid, and
which weaken their power, is cayenne pepper. So this man gathered a large
quantity of pepper-pods from the bushes growing in the behu
(kitchen-garden), and bruised them in a mortar to a fine soft pulp. This
he smeared thoroughly all over the woman's unconscious body as it lay in
her bedroom. He left not the smallest portion of her skin untouched by the
pepper,--from her scalp, and in the interstices of her fingers and toes,
minutely over her entire body.
Meanwhile, with the woman at her play, the night was passing. The witches'
sacred bird, the owl, began its early morning warning hoot. She prepared
to return. As she was returning, the first morning cock-crow also warned
her to hasten, lest daybreak should find her triple unit outside of its
fleshly "house." So the three came rushing with the speed of wind back to
her village. Her husband was on the watch; he heard this panting sound as
of a person breathing rapidly, and felt the impulse of their wind as she
reached her hut and came in to re-enter their house.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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