Among Congo cannibals

by John H. Weeks

“Have you done anything?” i.e. Have you broken a covenant and so come under a curse? is the next question, but the man takes no notice.

“Are you bewitched?” or, “Are you bewitching anybody?” To these questions no answer is given.

“Have you a spirit (bwete)?” The patient jerks and twitches his body, beats his arms, and sways more vigorously, and thus it is known that the sufferer is possessed by a certain kind of spirit.

The next thing is to discover whether the spirit is that of debility, sleeping-sickness, etc., and that point being decided by the jerking of the patient’s body as the questions are put to him, the medicine man proceeds to make the necessary charms and put the man under the proper taboos. The whole of this ceremony of diagnosing a patient’s case is called mobalu.

There are modifications of this ceremony in which only rattles are used, and not drums, and many women sing and shake rattles round the patient, who lies in the middle of the ring, well anointed with oil; or there may be only a few present, and the drum is beaten and the patient taken inside a mat enclosure with the medicine man, but the principle is the same.

The following are some of the remedies employed: Kuta is to heal quickly the cuts of a badly wounded man by placing him on a shelf and lighting a fire under him, so that the smoke enters the wounds. Ngele are leaves for drawing boils and abscesses to a head. Moteba leaves are boiled and rubbed on a person suffering from sleeping-sickness. Longele = a brass rod; some medicine is tied to a brass rod, and it is then worn to strengthen the arm or the leg—some wear it for rheumatism. Makulu matuki leaves are good for sores and wounds, and the juice of the leaves is dropped into sore eyes to heal them; and some eat the leaves to induce pregnancy. Makalala are small sticks of powerful “medicine” for soothing the violently mad. There is a word, yengola, which means to kill or drown a person who is too ill to recover.

Cupping (nyunya) is often practised. Sometimes it is simple bleeding by snicking the part affected, and at other times it is cupping proper with horn and suction. The part to be benefited is cut with a knife, and the large bottom end of a horn, which has a hole at the small upper end, is put over the cuts. The operator puts a pill of clay or soft wax into his mouth, sucks at the hole, and with his tongue puts the wax pellet over it. This he repeats until the air in the horn is exhausted, and then the blood will run freely from the cuts.

The clyster (called njango) is used for relieving pains in the stomach. A calabash is filled with water in which some herbs have been boiled. The patient lies on his stomach and a reed is inserted, and the liquid in the calabash is poured into the reed; but sometimes they use a calabash with a very long neck, and this is inserted, and the liquid allowed to gravitate into the bowels.

Ligatures are tied—one above and the other below the wound—for a snake-bite, some bitter plant (bololo) is given to the bitten person to chew. A medicine man also “scrapes the wound to remove the teeth left by the snake.” There are persons, and even families, who handle snakes with impunity, and these are supposed to possess snake medicine. Such a person is called if the patient is suffering severely from a snake’s bite, and on his arrival he and the bitten person clasp each other’s right wrist, and the snake-man will beat the other’s arm to drive the poison (ngenge) from him into himself. I have never heard of a death from a snake-bite, but I have seen nervous people very much scared after being bitten by a snake.

There is another mode of curing a sick person called bowa. The patient lies on his back and the medicine man, taking a saucepan of boiling water, kneels by the side of his patient. He shakes some leaves over him, dips his hand into the water, rubs the stomach of the sick one, and in a short time shows a palm nut, as having come from the patient. This performance is repeated again and again, and each time a palm nut, or a stone, or a piece of iron is shown as coming from the patient, and is taken as evidence that the sickness is being expelled.