“Let the king grant war speedily!
Do not let our energies be damped.
Fire cannot pass through water.
The king feeds us;
When we go to war.
Remember this!
“We are clothed and fed by Gezo;
In consequence, our hearts are glad.””
[40] A neighbouring kingdom on the East.
War and slavery engender each other; war leading to slavery, and slavery stimulating to war. And slavery takes three forms, all bad—bad, but one worse than the other two. This is the slavery of the traders. An expedition is undertaken against some neighbouring tribe, weak enough, or unprepared enough, to divest the attack of half its danger. Captives are taken, driven to the coast in groups, shut up in barracoons, and then sold for transportation to the new world. It is this form of slavery that engenders the miseries and atrocities of the middle passage.
The second form is that of simple domestic servitude, wherein the slave, although under constant compulsion, forms a part of his master’s family, and is ensured against removal from his native soil.
The third is like that of the Nexi of ancient Rome, and occurs when a negro, in order to raise a particular sum of money, sells himself as a labourer for a certain period—pawns his body, so to say, or borrows money on himself.
The administration of justice is on the same low level as the other institutions; the punishments being cruel, and the rules of evidence barbarous.[41] Two methods, as may be expected, predominate, the ordeal and the torture. The commonest form of the latter is “what is called tying Guinea-fashion. In this the arms are closely drawn together behind the back, by means of a cord tied tightly round them, about midway between the elbows and shoulders. A piece of wood to act as a rack having been previously introduced, is then used so as to tighten the cord, and so intense is the agony, that one application is generally sufficient to occasion the wretch so tortured to confess to anything that is required of him.”
[41] From the United Service Journal, November, 1850.
Another form consists in “tying the head and hands, in such a way that by turning the body backwards, they may be drawn together by the cords employed. Another is securing the wrist or ankle to a block of wood by an iron staple. By means of a hammer any degree of pressure may thus be applied.”
The chief form of ordeal is, what is called on the Gold Coast, the dhoom test, but which appears and reappears all along the intertropical parts of Western Africa. The dhoom is a kind of wood with poisonous and emetic properties. The innocent man drinks and ejects it: the guilty one drinks and dies. In Old Calabar the seeds of an aquatic legume replace the dhoom wood. Unless emetic, they are poisonous.
Partaking of the nature of the ordeal, as a means of investigation in criminal matters, is the application to priest, sorcerer, medicine-man, or Fetish-man; but as the principles of belief that this practice involves one illustrated in the Zulu group, we only make a passing allusion to it. The notice, too, of the festivals as connected with religion, will similarly stand over.