Head-hunters, black, white, and brown

by Alfred C. Haddon

Fig. 6. Ziai Neur Zogo.

A Therapeutic Shrine.

The zogo, which was one object of our walk, was called Ziai Neur, that is, “the girl of the south-west,” but why this was her name I could not discover. The zogo consisted of two images, male and female, roughly carved out of vesicular lava. When a man has a “bad sick” they take the fluid of a green coconut and wet the image with it, and the patient gets well. After Wilkin had photographed them, I tried to purchase them from a man named Billy who had been working in a garden close by, and came to see what we were about. Billy refused to part with them. Pasi quietly told me that as this garden belonged to Billy’s wife and not to him, I should deal with the lady directly, and consequently Billy had nothing to do with it. The next day Pasi communicated with her, and the woman was willing to let me have the zogo; but the man was obdurate, and they had a quarrel over it. Eventually I had to forego the transaction, as it did not answer my purpose to have any unfriendly feeling springing up with regard to ourselves or our work.

Most of the shrines we visited on this and other occasions looked at first sight like confused masses of shells and stones. The preliminary business was to cut down overhanging branches, creepers, and the undergrowth generally, then to clear away the dead leaves and other rubbish. When this was done a certain amount of order became apparent. Occasionally a few stones required to be placed upright, or broken ones put together. The best view for the photograph had to be carefully chosen, and further clearing of the foliage was generally necessary; sometimes branches of trees a little way off had to be lopped if they cast distracting shadows. Usually little twigs, leaves, or tiny plants had to be removed from the ground or from between the stones and shells, so as not to unnecessarily complicate the picture.

As a rule it is worth while to find out the best time of day to photograph any particular object; usually, however, these shrines were so placed that the time of day made very little difference.

Very rarely did I turn a carved stone round so as to bring out its carving more effectively; occasionally I shifted shells a little, so as to make them show up better, but only when these originally had no definite position. Attention to small details such as these are necessary to produce intelligible photographs, but care must be exercised not to overdo it or in any way to modify the object or shrine.

When all was ready the photograph was taken generally by Wilkin; and we sat down, and a native told me the “storia” connected with it. This I wrote down as nearly as I could in his own words, or at all events with some phrases verbatim. It was most interesting to hear these yarns on the spot, told by natives who believed in them. In some cases we have brought away the chief stone so that it can be exhibited in the museum along with a photograph of it in situ. We could not always buy the stone, as sometimes the natives were not willing to part with it, and never did we take anything without permission or without full payment.

We crossed the island and came out in the bay named Sauriad, which is mentioned in the chief legend of these islands as being where Malu fled after he had been entrapped on the sand spit. At one spot, named Orme, there is the important U zogo, or coconut shrine. Only old men officiated here; they rubbed themselves with the fluid from a coconut, and this made the palms productive. The zogo now consists of a few large clam shells on some rocks. One large kaper tree had a great Fusus stuck into it, round which the bark had partially grown; under a smaller zom tree were two large blocks of stone, on which were one or two giant clam shells. I do not know if there was anything further. We visited two other zogos, but there was nothing of interest about them or anything worth photographing.

The most satisfactory translation of the word zogo is “holy” or “sacred”; or a holy or sacred spot such as an oracle or a shrine for magical rites; or a potent object or charm. As in all primitive religions, holiness is not an ethical idea; indeed, as Robertson Smith points out in his Religion of the Semites, “at the Canaanite shrines the name of ‘holy’ was specially appropriated to a class of degraded wretches devoted to the most shameful practices of a corrupt religion.” Zogo does not mean “tabooed” or “prohibited,” as the Miriam word for that idea is gelar.

When walking along a sand beach at the western end of the island we saw, close in shore, very dense shoals of small fish, locally called tup. At one spot two small sharks were preying on them, and wherever a shark swam there was a band of clear water, and the yellow sand could be seen beneath; elsewhere the water was solidly black with fish. It reminded me of a certain town and gown row in my undergraduate days, when the market-place was a dense mass of men, mainly undergraduates, but wherever the proctors moved there was always a clear space around them.