West African studies

by Mary Henrietta Kingsley

Like the natives of Brass, many of these people have embraced the Christian faith, the Church Missionary Society having placed one of their stations here in 1866, some two years earlier than the Brass Mission was commenced.

Their endeavours have certainly met with considerable success in prevailing upon a large number of the natives to give up many of their Ju-Ju practices; amongst others, the worship of the iguana, an immense lizard, which from time immemorial had been the Bonny man’s titular guardian angel. They not only got them to give up worshipping this saurian, but also, to mark a new departure in their religious ideas, the missionaries prevailed upon the people to organise a general iguana hunt; so, following the old saying of “the better the day, the better the deed,” one Easter Sunday, about the year 1883 or 1884, or about twenty-two years after the establishment of the mission, the bells of the mission church rang out the signal for the wholesale slaughter of these reptiles. To such an extent and with such good will did the people work that day, that by evening time not one was left alive in the town. That day it was everybody’s job to kill these reptiles, but it was nobody’s job to clear away the dead bodies, there being no County Council in Bonny to see to the scavenger work after this animal St. Bartholomew; the consequence was the stench was so great from the decaying bodies that every European predicted a general sickness would be the natural outcome of it all; but no such unlucky event happened, and the natives did not seem to notice the extra strong perfume very much—one of them observing, to a growl about it by a white man, that “it be all same them trade beef you sell we people for chop.”

The Bonny men until late years were steeped in all the most vile practices of Ju-Juism—sacrificing human beings to their various Ju-Jus, and eating all their prisoners captured in war, certain of their Ju-Ju practices demanding an annual human sacrifice. If at this time they happened to be at peace with their neighbours, and consequently without any prisoner to be sacrificed, the Ju-Ju men would disguise themselves in some fantastic dress (some Europeans have said they disguise themselves as leopards; I have never seen this disguise used, and doubt it very much), and prowl about the town and its byeways, seizing for their purpose in preference some stray stranger that might be staying in the town; failing a stranger, some noted bad character belonging to the town in whose fate no one would be greatly interested would be seized upon. To say these practices are completely stamped out would be, perhaps, not quite the truth; but that they are being stamped out I feel convinced, and considering what believers in Ju-Ju these people have been, I think I may say fairly quick.

The common sense of the people is assisting very much, and the women are showing themselves capable of something better than what their former state condemned them to. The final decision to slaughter the iguana some years ago was brought about by them in a great measure on solid common sense grounds, for had not the iguana been their mortal enemy for years by eating their fowls and chickens before their eyes, thus destroying about the only means a woman of the lower class, or one who had ceased to please her lord and master, had of making a little pin money.

The Ju-Ju house of Bonny, once the great show place of the town, has now completely disappeared and its hideous contents are scattered; strange to say, I saw, only a few weeks ago, in the house of a lady in London, one of the sacrificial pots of native earthenware that had done duty for many generations in the Bonny Ju-Ju House.

A description of this Ju-Ju house may be interesting to some of my readers. It was an oblong building of about forty feet long by thirty broad, surrounded by mud walls about eight or ten feet high; one portion over where the altar stood had had sticks arranged, as if the intention had been at some time to roof it over; at the end behind the altar the wall had been built in a semicircle; the altar looked very much like an ordinary kitchen plate rack with the edges of the plate shelves picked out with goat skulls. There were three rows of these, and on the three plate shelves a row of grinning human skulls; under the bottom shelf, and between it and the top of what would be in a kitchen the dresser, were eight uprights garnished with rows of goats’ skulls, the two middle uprights being supplied with a double row; below the top of the dresser, which was garnished with a board painted blue and white, was arranged a kind of drapery of filaments of palm fronds, drawn asunder from the centre, exposing a round hole with a raised rim of clay surrounding it, ostensibly to receive the blood of the victims and libations of palm wine.

To one side, and near the altar, was a kind of roughly made table fixed on four straight legs; upon this was displayed a number of human bones and several skulls; leaning against this table was a frame looking very like a chicken walk on to the table; this also was garnished with horizontal rows of human skulls—here and there were to be seen human skulls lying about; outside the Ju-Ju house, upon a kind of trellis work, were a number of shrivelled portions of human flesh.

Whilst writing about the wholesale slaughter of iguanas I forgot to mention that this was not the first time an animal that was Ju-Ju and held in high veneration had had a general battue arranged for it. The monkey used to hold a place in Bonny equal with the iguana, but for some reason or another it fell from its high estate, and was as ruthlessly slaughtered by its quondam worshippers.

Other Ju-Jus were the shark and the Spirit of the Water, or supposed guardian angel of the Bar. The bull was at one time worshipped, but not of late years; but still fresh beef was Ju-Ju, and twenty years ago no Bonny gentleman would touch it.