The father also is dead. My informant and one sister survive. They think the Mbati “medicine” was satisfactory, notwithstanding that the sister believes that their father was secretly poisoned by his cousins, they being jealous of his affluence in wives and children.
The last step in the Mbati rite is the transplanting of some plant. A suitable hole having been dug at one end, or even in the middle of the village street, each person takes a bulb of lily kind, probably a crinum or an amaryllis, such as are common on the rocky edges of streams, and pressing it against their backs and other parts of their body, and with a rhythmic swaying of their bodies plant it in the hole. Thereafter these plants are not destroyed. They are guarded from the village goats by a small enclosure, and should at any time the village remove, the plants are also removed and replanted on the new site. Such plants are seen in almost every village.
CHAPTER XII
THE FETICH—ITS RELATIONS TO DAILY WORK AND OCCUPATIONS AND TO THE NEEDS OF LIFE
In the great emergencies of life, such as plagues, famines, deaths, funerals, and where witchcraft and black art are suspected, the aid or intervention of special fetiches is invoked, as has been described in the Yâkâ and other public ceremonies. The ritual required in such cases is often expensive, as money is needed for the doctor’s fee, for purchase of ingredients and other materials for the “medicine,” and in the entertainment of the assemblage that always gather as participants or spectators.
There is also loss in time, little as the native African values time, and slow as he is in the expedition of any matter. Houses that should be erected and gardens that should be planted are neglected while the rite to be performed is in hand. It may require even a month. During that time either the favorable season for building or planting may have passed, or the work has only partly been completed. The division of the seasons into two rainy (of three months each) and two dry (a short hot and a long cool) make it desirable, as in the temperate zones, for certain work to be done in certain seasons.
But for the needs of life, day by day, with its routine of occupations, whose outgoings and incomings are known and expected, the Bantu fetich worshipper depends on himself and his regular fetich charms, which, indeed, were made either at his request by a doctor (as we would order a suit of clothes from a tailor), or by himself on fetich rule obtained from a doctor; and when paid for, the doctor is no longer needed or considered. The worshipper keeps these amulets and mixed medicines hanging on the wall of his room or hidden in one of his boxes. But he gives them no regular reverence or worship, no sacrifice or prayer, until such times as their services are needed. He knows that the utilized actual spirits (or at least their influence), each in its specific material object, is safely ensconced and is only waiting the needs of its owner to be called into action.
These needs come day by day. Almost daily some one in the village is hunting, warring, trading, love-making, fishing, planting, or journeying.