‘Some corn had been stolen from the garden of one of Chigunda’s people. The owner complained to the chief, who employed the services of a celebrated medicine-man living near. The people assembled round a large fig-tree, and the magician ... first of all produced two sticks, about four feet long, and about the thickness of an ordinary broom-handle; these, after certain mysterious manipulations and utterings of unintelligible gibberish, he delivered, with much solemnity, to four young men, two being appointed to each stick. Then from his goat-skin bag he brought forth a zebra-tail, which he gave to another young man, and after that a calabash filled with peas, which he delivered to a boy. The medicine-man rolled himself about in hideous fashion and chanted an unearthly incantation; then came the man with the zebra-tail, followed by the boy with the calabash, moving, first of all, slowly round the men with the sticks, but presently quickening their pace and shaking the tail and the calabash over the heads of the stick-holders.... Ere long the spell worked. The men with the sticks were subject to spasmodic twitchings of the arms and legs. These increased rapidly, until they were nearly in convulsions; they foamed at the mouth; their eyes seemed starting from their heads.... According to the Mang’anja notion, it was the sticks that were possessed primarily, the men through them.... The men seemed scarcely able to hold the sticks, which took a rotary motion at first and whirled the holders round and round like mad things. Then headlong they dashed off into the bush, through stubborn grass and thorny shrub, over every obstacle—nothing stopped them; their bodies were torn and bleeding. Round to the gaping assembly again they came, went through a few more rotary motions, and then, rushing along the path at a killing pace, halted not until they fell down, panting and exhausted, in the hut of one of Chigunda’s slave-wives. The woman happened to be at home, and the sticks were rolled to her very feet.’ She, however, vehemently asserted her innocence, and offered to take mwavi to prove it, which she did by proxy, the poison being administered to a fowl. The second oracle reversed the decision of the first, and the defendant was acquitted; but, curiously enough, no one’s faith seems to have been shaken by the contradiction between two infallible ordeals. The Rev. Duff Macdonald alludes to this kind of divination, but very briefly; it seems to be more Nyanja than Yao. He says that the sorcerer ‘occasionally makes men lay hold of a stick which, after a time, begins to move as if endowed with life, and ultimately carries them off bodily and with great speed to the house of the thief.’