Congo life and folklore

by John H. Weeks

A PROTECTIVE FETISH.

Large numbers flocked to them, paid their fees--five strings of beads for an adult, and two for a child--confessed their hatred, witchcraft, and evil thoughts, and received from the hands of the new cult of “medicine men” the peanut and palm-wine, and yearningly hoped that sickness had been banished from their district and death destroyed. But again they were quickly undeceived, for disease continued rampant and death entered hut after hut. The “medicine men” reaped a great harvest of beads, swaggered in wealth, and excused the failure of their system by saying “that the people had not confessed all their witchcraft and hatred, and consequently, not being cleansed from all, the old state of things had continued, and people suffered and died as before.”

Thus the people had had their hopes again and again dashed to the ground, and they had been flung back on their old “medicine men” and their fetishes. It has always been a tenet of their religion that sickness and death were and are caused by witchcraft, and the most hated person in all the country is he (or she) who, by the ordeal, is proved to practise witchcraft. Hold their views, and the tenderest heart will hate and kill the witch as mercilessly as they did.

There is no doubt but that the ngangas received bribes to render the ordeal non-effective; that the big men of the town incited the ordinary folk to bring charges of witchcraft against their enemies, or those whom they wanted removed from their path; and the witch-doctors themselves, by the aid of their assistants, fostered and turned suspicion against those who desired to introduce a new and better state of things into the country. Their position and gains depended on killing off all such dangerous people. Hence the ordeal and the charge of witchcraft were often simply acts of murder, according to the customs of the country if you like, but nevertheless murder.

The whole of the morning following the death of Bakula’s mother was spent in decorating the corpse for burial. Beads were twisted round the toes, feet, legs, body, arms, hands, fingers and neck, thus enswathing the whole of the deceased in a casing of glass beads. Fold after fold of trade cloths of different colours and qualities were wound round and round the body until it was nearly twice its original bulk. At sunset the corpse was carried to the grave, just outside the town, and laid to rest with the hum of town life on one side, and the weird, uncanny noises of the eternal bush on the other; but the soul had gone to that mysterious spirit town in the great forest where it would utilize all the cloth and beads in which it had been wrapped.

All through the day women had wailed and chanted mournful dirges, men had fired off guns amid much laughter and many jokes, and Bakula, with tearful eyes, had talked in subdued tones to his slave friend.

He had often, in the days gone by, conversed with his mother about the white man’s palaver concerning God and His great gift of Jesus Christ. He had poured out his heart to her, had instructed her in all that he had learned on the station, and had repeated to her portions of God’s Word.

He now recalled the eagerness with which she had heard the words: “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son”; and, “In My Father’s house are many mansions. I go to prepare a place for you”; and he was hopeful of meeting her, not in the mysterious forest town that had so many terrors for them, and which was simply a repetition of their earthly life and its sorrows, but in the Father’s house where all tears would be wiped away from their eyes, all sin banished from their lives, and all sorrow from their hearts. He grieved not as one without hope.

Not many days after the funeral the witch-finder arrived, dressed in his fantastic garb, his body decorated with gaudy paints and pigments, and his bells tinkling at every movement. A crowd quickly gathered and formed itself into a long oval, up and down the centre of which he danced. The whole town, with few exceptions, regarded Bakula as a witch, and the prancing figure there in the middle knew it. Still, he must give his employers something for their money, so through the whole long hours of the afternoon he gyrated perspiringly, threw his arms and legs about in the most approved fashion, put question after question and elicited such answers as confirmed his opinion that it would be extremely popular and safe to charge this ridiculer of witch-doctors, this scorner of fetishes and charms, this believer in the new religion with the death of his mother--the woman who had just died.

Bakula was present throughout the whole performance. Hour after hour he stood calmly there. As a member of the family he was compelled to be present; but he took no part in answering the crafty questions put by the grotesque figure dancing before him.