It was useless, even inconsistent, to plead for mercy; I retired heartsick. I was morally certain the old woman had died a natural death. Yet this poor slave woman had had murder in her heart, and had tried to make her murderous thought effective. She was, before God, guilty. She had confessed herself, before man’s bar, guilty. (Well for the thousands of us who know ourselves guilty in thought, that we are not to be held by our fellow-sinners as guilty in act!) I knew that she was really innocent, but I could not prove it. She was taken to sea in a boat, and decapitated; her remains were thrown into the sea.
On another occasion, a year later, also on Corisco Island, a certain heathen headman of a village, Osongo, had died. A female slave who was suspected had fled. Her flight was regarded as proof positive of her guilt. Our mission premises had always been accorded by the native chiefs the right of sanctuary. A refugee for any offence could not be seized on our premises till we saw just reason for “extraditing” him. This slave woman had hidden herself in our jungle-thicket adjoining a forest; just where I did not know. Two freemen—my personal employees, good Christians—knew, and secretly at night with my connivance fed her. My school-girls also learned of it. Such a secret is difficult to hide. One of the girls, a niece of Osongo, revealed it to another of my workmen, Matoku, a slave also of Osongo, and a professed Christian. He, with the traitorous cowardice that makes many slaves informers on each other as a means of enhancing their own safety with their masters, revealed it to Ajai, Osongo’s brother. Ajai, with a retinue of servants, came to visit me in my study. He, with a wily talk about the sadness of his brother’s death, detained me, while the servants broke into the mission premises, and, led by Matoku, captured the woman, faint with her days and nights of exposure. I discharged Matoku from my employ, and dismissed the niece from school. But the heathen regarded these punishments as slight; they had obtained their object. My attempts to plead with Ajai for the woman’s life were met with undisguised admission of his fixed purpose to kill her. With a family as prominent on the island and as wedded to heathenism as was Osongo’s, and in face of the current that set against the woman, the influences I was able to employ, and which had at other times resulted in saving some lives accused of witchcraft, proved ineffectual. I was privately told that she was to be put into a boat and carried out to sea so as to prevent any interference I might possibly attempt. With a spy-glass I saw a native boat shoot rapidly out from beyond a point of land half a mile distant. The rowers rested on their oars when they reached deep water. She was seized; her head held over the gunwale, her throat cut, and her lifeless body cast into the sea.
She had a son, a stout lad. Ajai, fearing that he might live to avenge his mother’s death, had ordered him also to be killed as an accomplice with her in the bewitching of Osongo. The tragedy that was being enacted on the beach behind the point of land from which had issued the boat I did not see; but I was told that the lad was seized, his hands and limbs tied to a stake, where he was slowly burned to death. A crowd sat on the beach jeering him, and amused themselves by tying little packets of gunpowder to different parts of his body, enjoying the sight of his struggles as the packets exploded in succession.
Undeniably there is much jugglery and conscious deception on the part of the magic doctors. How much they really believe in what they say or do no one has been able to discover; they assert that they are under supernatural influences, and have power given from supernatural sources. Rarely are any of this priest class converted to Christianity. A few have professed conversion, and have made a general acknowledgment of sinfulness; but they did not like to talk about their divinations; they called them “foolishness.” But evidently there was something about those divinations of which they seemed ashamed and which they wished to forget. Only one have I met who would talk on the subject, and she believed she had been under satanic influence,—not simply as all wicked thoughts are satanic in their character and inspiration, but that she had actually been under satanic possession, and was given by the devil more than mere human power. Certainly, if there is in civilized jugglery, fortune-telling, clairvoyance, divining, spirit-rappings, theosophy, et id omne genus, nothing more than sleight of hand, alert observation of facial expression, and mind-reading, the African conjurer almost equals the civilized professional. The native magician does and tells some wonderful things. In one of my congregations an educated woman, a widow, who had only one child, a son grown to young manhood, had subsequently lived in succession with four other men, three of whom were white, who had either died or deserted her; and she supposed herself past child-bearing. She contracted a secret marriage with a white gentleman, but of it positively nothing was known or even suspected by any one. She confessed to me that one day, being a visitor in a distant place where she was not known, she, out of mere curiosity, hired a magician to divine her future. He looked into his magic mirror, and, among many other things which he could shrewdly have guessed in a quick study of her character as revealed in her looks, manner, and language, surprised her by describing a white man (whom he had never seen) who, he asserted, was deeply attached to her, and by whom she would become the mother of two children. She suppressed her surprise, and told him that though married four times, she had borne no child in eighteen years. He nevertheless asserted, “I see them in your womb.”
Within five years from that time she did have two untimely births by her white husband. She told me in her confession that he knew nothing of them, they being miscarriages. She had suppressed from him the fact of her pregnancy. When subsequently she united with the church, she made these revelations only to me as her pastor, to save herself from public rebuke.
At another time a woman in Gabun became very anxious about a brother of hers who was trading on the Ogowe River, at a place at least three hundred miles distant; no news had come of him. Evil news always flies fast and is always spread publicly. She went to a magician. Divining, he said, “Your brother is dead.” “But where? What? When did he die?” “Only recently. I see his body lying bleeding.” And he described the wounds, the locality on the river, the time, and other details of a country where he had never been. Two months later news did come, and it agreed in time, place, and circumstances with the divination.
Such things occur in civilized lands. They are accounted for without any reference to, or belief in, demoniac or even supernatural causes or influences. We call such recondite knowledge telepathy, and leave it for psychologists to study its character and application. It has no religious significance or use. The most devout Christian may believe in it or be subject to its operation. Other cases of telepathy in Africa I have been told of, that had no fetich nor any divination of magic doctor connected with them; but the natives attributed them to some unknown spirit-influence.
An outcome of the witchcraft of fetichism, demonolatry, though not necessarily identical with demoniacal possession, intimately associates itself with it as a part of its development. For the Negro belief in such possession there is good basis. The Bible recognizes the possibility of human beings in their free agency making pacts with the devil, in virtue of which he was allowed, under divine administration, to share with them some of his supernatural power as prince of the power of darkness, and god of this world. Such pacts were condemned by Jehovah as unholy. Those who made them were called witches and wizards; such transgressors were directed to be destroyed. “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”[55] (a command that does not necessarily prove that the professed diabolical compact was always a real one. The mere professing to have satanic companionship and aid was an offence heinous to Jehovah’s theocratic government of his people.)
But the witch of Endor[56] certainly was a reality; she did “bring up” real departed spirits; perhaps only on that one occasion, and then only by direct divine and not satanic power and will, and for a divine object. She herself seems to have been surprised[57] at the real success of divinations which formerly may have been, in her hands, only deceptions.
My native heathen chiefs have good precedent for their witchcraft executions. New England history cannot wipe out the fact of the Salem witchcraft trials.