Fetichism in West Africa

by Robert Hamill Nassau

The box and image were stowed away in a back room of the village headman’s dwelling, who would often take a plate full of food to it, as a sacrifice, and sometimes an offering of cloth or other goods; and the village felt safe.

Nevertheless, the house was not torn down; it stood empty and unused. But if, even a year later, evil still fell on the village, the elders knew that something about the Malanda had not been rightly performed. And it must all be done over again with the next dead adult male (never a female) and with a new lot of neophytes.

A woman may be subjected to a part of the above ceremonies if she is suspected of witchcraft, or if, on examination, she confess to using black art. To purge her of this evil, and to counteract the consequences of what she may have done, she is taken to the little hut over the end of the tunnel, and some of the above described ceremonies are performed over her; but she is never taken into the house, nor into the presence of the corpse.

XIII. Three-Things Came Back too Late.

(The following narrative was told me by a Batanga native Christian woman who, herself less than thirty years of age, is a great-granddaughter of the man one of whose wives was the witch of this story. I bade her, in giving me the account, to speak, not from her present Christian standpoint and her only slight superstitious bias, but from the full heathen view-point. The confusing mixture of singular and plural pronouns referring to the witch is an exact reproduction of my informant’s words.)

The great-grandfather was a heathen and a polygamist. He had four wives. One of them was a member of an interior tribe, the Boheba, more heathenish and superstitious than his own Batanga coast tribe. Unknown to him, she was a member of the Witchcraft Society, had power with the spirits, and they with her, attended their secret night meetings, and engaged in their unhallowed orgies.

The husband, though not a member of the society, had acquired some knowledge of witchcraft art, and, though without the power to transform himself, as wizards did, was able to see and know what was being done at distances beyond ordinary human sight.

One night she arose from her bed to go and attend a witchcraft play. She left her physical “house,” the fleshly body, lying on the bed, so that no one not in the secret, seeing that body lying there, would think other than it was herself, nor would know that she was gone out. In her going out she willed to emerge as Three-Things, and this triple unit went off to the witchcraft play. The husband happened to see this, and watched her as she disappeared, saw where she went, and, though distant and out of sight, knew what she was doing. So he said to himself, “She is off at her play; I also will do some playing here; she shall know what I have done.”

Among the several things of which followers of witchcraft are afraid, and which weaken their power, is cayenne pepper. So this man gathered a large quantity of pepper-pods from the bushes growing in the behu (kitchen-garden), and bruised them in a mortar to a fine soft pulp. This he smeared thoroughly all over the woman’s unconscious body as it lay in her bedroom. He left not the smallest portion of her skin untouched by the pepper,—from her scalp, and in the interstices of her fingers and toes, minutely over her entire body.

Meanwhile, with the woman at her play, the night was passing. The witches’ sacred bird, the owl, began its early morning warning hoot. She prepared to return. As she was returning, the first morning cock-crow also warned her to hasten, lest daybreak should find her triple unit outside of its fleshly “house.” So the three came rushing with the speed of wind back to her village. Her husband was on the watch; he heard this panting sound as of a person breathing rapidly, and felt the impulse of their wind as she reached her hut and came in to re-enter their house.