We will start with the medical student stage. Now, every West African tribe has a secret society—two, in fact, one for men and one for women. Every free man has to pass through the secret society of his tribe. If during this education the Elders of this society discover that a boy is what is called in Calabar an ebumtup—a person who can see spirits—the elders of the society advise that he should be brought up to the medical profession. Their advice is generally taken, and the boy is apprenticed as it were to a witch doctor, who requires a good fee with him. This done, he proceeds with his studies, learns the difference between the dream-soul basket and the one sisas are kept in—a mistake between the two would be on a par with mistaking oxalic acid for Epsom salts. He is then taught how to howl in a professional way, and, by watching his professor, picks up his bedside manner. If he can acquire a showy way of having imitation epileptic fits, so much the better. In fact, as a medical student, you have to learn pretty well as much there as here. You must know the dispositions, the financial position, little scandals, &c., of the inhabitants of the whole district, for these things are of undoubted use in divination and the finding of witches, and in addition you must be able skilfully to dispense charms, and know what babies say before their own mothers can. Then some day your professor and instructor dies, his own professional power eats him, or he tackles a disease-causing spirit that is one too many for him, and on you descend his paraphernalia and his practice.
It is usual for a witch doctor to acquire for his power a member of one of the higher grade spirit classes—he does not acquire a human soul—and his successor usually, I think, takes the same spirit, or, at any rate, a member of the same class. This does not altogether limit you as a successor to a certain line of practice, but, as no one spirit can do all things, it tends to make you a specialist. I know a district where, if any one wanted a canoe charm, they went to one medical man; if a charm to keep thieves off their plantation, to another.
This brings us to the practice itself, and it may be divided into two divisions. First, prophylactic methods, namely, making charms to protect your patient’s wives, children, goats, plantations, canoes, &c. from damage, houses from fire, &c., &c., and to protect the patient himself from wild animals and all danger by land or water. This is a very paying part, but full of anxiety. For example, put yourself in the place of a Mpangwe medical friend of mine. You have with much trouble got a really valuable spirit to come into a paste made of blood and divers things, and having made it into a sausage form, and done it round with fibre wonderfully neatly, you have painted it red outside to please the spirits—because spirits like red, they think it’s blood. Well, in a week or so the man you administered it to comes back and says “that thing’s no good.” His paddle has broken more often than before he had the thing. The amount of rocks, and floating trees, to say nothing of snags, is, he should say, about double the normal, whereby he has lost a whole canoe load of European goods, and, in short, he doesn’t think much of you as a charm maker. Then he expectorates and sulks offensively. You take the charm, and tell him it was a perfectly good one when you gave it him, and you never had any complaints before, but you will see what has gone wrong with it. Investigation shows you that the spirit is either dead or absent. In the first case it has been killed by a stronger spirit of its own class; in the second, lured away by bribery. Now this clearly points to your patient’s having a dangerous and powerful enemy, and you point it out to him and advise him to have a fresh and more powerful charm—necessarily more expensive—with as little delay as possible. He grumbles, but, realising the danger, pays up, and you make him another. The old one can be thrown away, like an empty pill-box.
The other part of your practice—the clinical—consists in combating those witches who are always up to something—sucking blood of young children, putting fearful wild fowl into people to eat up their most valued viscera, or stealing souls o’ nights, blighting crops, &c.
Therefore you see the witch doctor’s life is not an idle one; he has not merely to humbug the public and pocket the fees—or I should say “bag,” pockets being rare in this region—but he works very hard, and has his anxieties just like a white medical man. The souls that get away from him are a great worry. The death of every patient is a danger to a certain extent, because the patient’s soul will be vicious to him until it is buried. But I must say I profoundly admire our West African witch doctors for their theory of sisas as an explanation of their not always being able to insert a new soul into a patient, for by this theory they save themselves somewhat, and do not entail on themselves the treatment their brother medicos have to go through on the Nass River in British Columbia. According to Mr. Fraser, in that benighted Nass River district those native American doctors hold it possible that a doctor may swallow a patient’s soul by mistake. This is their theory to account for the strange phenomenon of a patient getting worse instead of better when a doctor has been called in, and so the unfortunate doctor who has had this accident occur is made to stand over his patient while another medical man thrusts his fingers in his throat, another kneads him in the abdomen, and a third medical brother slaps him on the back. All the doctors present have to go through the same ordeal, and if the missing soul does not turn up, the party of doctors go to the head doctor’s house to see if by chance he has got it in his box. All the things are taken out of the box, and if the soul is not there, the head doctor, the President of the College of Physicians, the Sir Somebody Something of the district, is held by his heels with his learned head in a hole in the floor, while the other doctors wash his hair. The water used is then taken and poured over the patient’s head.
I told this story to all the African witch doctors I knew. I fear, that being hazy in geography, they think it is the practice of the English medical profession; but, anyhow every one of them regarded the doctors of the Nass River as a set of superstitious savages, and imbeciles at that. Of course a medical man had to see to souls, but to go about in squads, administer rough emetics to themselves, instead of to the patients, and as for that head washing—well, people can be fool too much! None of them showed the slightest signs of adopting the British Columbia method, none of them showed even any signs of adopting my suggestion that they should go and teach those benighted brothers of theirs the theory of insisa.
If you ask me frankly whether I think these African witch doctors believe in themselves, I think I must say, Yes; or perhaps it would be safer to say they believe in the theory they work by, for of that there can be very little doubt. I do not fancy they ever claim invincible power over disease; they do their best according to their lights. It would be difficult to see why they should doubt their own methods, because, remember, all their patients do not die; the majority recover. I am not putting this recovery down to their soul-treatment method, but to the village apothecary, who has usually been doctoring the patient with drugs before the so-called witch doctor is called in. Of course the apothecary does not get the credit of the cure in this case, but I fancy he deserves it. Another point to be remembered is that the Africans on the West Coast, at any rate, are far more liable than white men to many strange nervous disorders, especially to delirium, which often occurs in a comparatively slight illness. Why I do not pretend to understand; but I think in these nervous cases the bedside manners of a witch doctor—though strongly resembling that of the physician who attended the immortal Why Why’s mother—may yet be really useful.
As to the evil these witch doctors do in the matter of getting people killed for bewitching it is difficult to speak justly. I fancy that, on the whole, they do more good than harm, for remember witchcraft in these districts is no parlour game; in the eyes of Allah as well as man it is murder, for most of it is poison. Most witchcraft charms I know of among people who have not been in contact with Mohammedanism have always had that element of mixing something with the food or drink—even in that common, true Negro form of killing by witchcraft, putting medicine in the path, there is a poisoned spike as well as charm stuff. There can be no doubt that the witch doctor’s methods of finding out who has poisoned a person are effective, and that the knowledge in the public mind of this detective power keeps down poisoning to a great extent. Of the safeguards against unjust accusation I will speak when treating of law.
As to their using hypnotism, I suppose they do use something of the sort at times. West Indians, with whom I was always anxious to talk on the differences and agreements between Vodou and Obeah and their parent West African religion, certainly, in their description of what they called Wanga—and translated as Glamour—seemed to point to this; but for myself, save in the case of blood coming before, one case of which I witnessed, I have seen nothing beyond an enormously elaborated common sense. I dare not call it sound, because it is based on and developed out of animism, and of that and our white elaborated view I am not the judge, remembering you go the one way, I the other—which is the best, God knows.