The Brass man, like his neighbours, had his public Ju-Ju house as well as his private little Ju-Ju chamber, the latter was to be found in any Brass man’s establishment which boasted of more than one room; those who could not afford a separate chamber used to devote a corner of their own room, where might be seen sundry odds and ends bespattered with some yellow clay, and occasionally a white fowl hung by the leg to remain there and die of starvation and drop gradually to pieces as it decomposed.
The public Ju-Ju house at Obulambri was not a very pretentious affair; it consisted of a native hut of wattle and daub, the walls not being carried more than half way up to the eaves, roofed with palm mats; in the centre was an iron staff about five feet high, surrounded by eight bent spear heads; this was called a tokoi, at the foot of it was a hole about three inches in diameter, down which the Ju-Ju priests would pour libations of tombo or palm wine, as a sacrifice to the Ju-Ju. I was informed that this Ju-Ju house was built over the grave of the original founder of Obulambri town. Behind the tokoi, on a kind of altar raised about eighteen inches from the ground, were displayed about a dozen human skulls; at the time I visited it the Ju-Ju man explained to me that the greater part of these had belonged to New Calabar prisoners taken in their last war with those people; besides the skulls were sundry odds and ends of native pottery, as also a few bowls and jugs of European manufacture. What part this pottery played in their devotions I could never get a Ju-Ju man to explain, some of them appeared to have held human blood. Stacked up in one corner were a few human bones, principally thigh and shin bones.
The Brassmen do not often sacrifice human beings to their Ju-Jus, except in time of war, when all prisoners without exception were sacrificed.
Their Ju-Ju snake occasionally secured a small child by crawling unobserved into a house when the elders were absent or asleep. I once was passing through a small fishing village in the St. Nicholas river, when most of the inhabitants were away fishing, and hearing terrible screams went to see what was the cause of the trouble, and found several women wringing their hands and running to and fro in front of a small hut. For several minutes I could not get them to tell me what was the cause of their trouble; at last one of them trembling, with the most abject fear and quite unable to speak, pointed to the door of the hut. I went and looked in, but it was so dark I could see nothing at first, so stepped inside; when, getting accustomed to the semi-darkness, I saw a large python, some ten or twelve feet long, hanging from the ridge pole of the hut immediately over a child about two years old that was calmly sleeping. To snatch up the child and walk out was the work of a moment. I then found that the woman who had pointed to the door of the hut was the mother of the child—her gratitude to me for delivering her child from certain death can be more easily imagined than described. Upon asking why she had not acted as I had done, she replied she dare not have interfered with the snake in the way I had done. I afterwards asked several of the more intelligent natives of Brass if the Ju-Ju law did not allow a mother to save her child in such a case. Some said she was a fool woman, and that she could have taken her child away the moment she saw it in danger; but others said had she done so, she would have been liable to be killed herself or pay a heavy fine to the Ju-Ju priests; and I am inclined to believe the latter version to be correct.[84]
Amongst other curious customs these people make use of the feather ordeal, to find out robbery, witchcraft, and adultery, &c. In this ordeal it rests a great deal with the Ju-Ju man who performs it whether it proves the party guilty or not. This ordeal is performed as follows:—The Ju-Ju man takes a feather from the underpart of a fowl’s wing, making choice of a stronger or weaker one, according to how he intends the ordeal shall demonstrate, then, drawing the tongue of the accused as far out of his mouth as he can, forces the quill of the feather through from the upper side and draws it out by grasping the point of the feather from the under side of the tongue; if the feather is unbroken the accused person is proved guilty, if on the contrary the feather breaks in the attempt to pass it through the tongue it proves the innocence of the person. It may be seen from this description how very easy it was to prove a person innocent, the mere fact of the feather breaking in the attempt to push it through the tongue being sufficient; thus, when suitably approached, the Ju-Ju man could not only prove a person’s innocence, but also save him any inconvenience in eating his mess of foo foo and palaver sauce that evening.
NEW CALABAR
The intervening rivers between the Brass and New Calabar Rivers are the St. Nicholas, the St. Barbara, the St. Bartholomew, and the Sombrero; the influence of the king of New Calabar may be said to commence at the St. Bartholomew River, extending inland to about five or ten miles beyond the town of Bugama. The lower parts of the St. Bartholomew and the numerous creeks, running between that river and New Calabar are mostly inhabited by fishermen and their families, their towns and villages being without exception the most squalid and dirty of any to be found in the Delta. Beyond fishing, the males seem to do little else than sleep; occasionally the men assist their wives and children in making palm-leaf mats, used generally all over the Delta in place of thatch—not a very profitable employment, as the demand varies considerably according to the seasons. After a very rough and boisterous rainy season, the price may be two shillings and sixpence, or its equivalent, for four hundred of these mats, each mat being a little over two feet in length, but falling in bad times to two shillings and sixpence for five to six hundred. A roof made with these mats threefold thick will last for three years.
These people call themselves Calabar men simply because they live within the influence of the Calabarese. In the upper part of these small rivers, about a day’s journey by canoe from the mouth of St. Bartholomew, is the chief town of a small tribe of people called the Billa tribe, connected by marriage with the Bonny men, several of the kings of Bonny having married Billa women. These people are producers in a small way of palm-oil, and though they are located so close to the New Calabar people, prefer to sell their produce to the Bonny men, who send their canoes over to the Billa country to fetch the oil, the latter people not having canoes large enough for carrying the large puncheons which the Bonny men send over to collect their produce in.
The New Calabar men are now split up into three towns called Bugama, where the king lives; Abonema, of which Bob Manuel is the principal chief; and Backana, where the Barboy House reside. Besides they have numerous small towns scattered about in the network of creeks connecting the Calabar River with the Sombrero River. Previous to 1880 these people all dwelt together in one large town on the right bank of the Calabar River, nearly opposite to where the creek, now called the Cawthorne Channel,[85] branches off from the main river.