The poor victim believes his innocence will be established, and fearfully, but still generally willingly, he drinks the poisonous draught. His stomach may reject the noxious compound. If he vomits, the man is declared innocent, and the witch-doctor loses his fee—indeed, in some parts is heavily fined for a false charge. More often, if he has not avoided the risk by referring the death to some charm, or to some person recently dead, he does his work too surely. His victim staggers and falls. With a wild yell the bystanders rush at him and beat him to death; shoot him, burn or bury him alive, throw him over a precipice, or in some way finish the terrible work, with a savage ferocity equal to their deep sense of the enormity of the crime with which he is charged.
One could gather hundreds of terrible stories of the like kind with much variety of detail; but the same principle runs through all. We heard of a case where, on the Nganga making his declaration, the witch-man went into his house close by, fetched his gun, and shot the witch-doctor dead on the spot. He had to pay twenty slaves to the friends of the Nganga; but no one ventured further to trouble that witch.
Sometimes, and in some places, the witch-doctor is called in in case of sickness only, and witches are killed to stay the sickness; and again at the death of the person, sometimes even in the case of a baby. A serious accident—as drowning, a fall from a palm-tree, or the death of a chief—is considered the work of several witches; one alone could not accomplish such a thing. Six men of the Vivi towns were drowned through the upsetting of a canoe in the rapids, and three witches were found for each man; eighteen victims had to suffer for the death of those six men—twenty-four deaths in all.
Even when the victim vomits, and should be free, they sometimes find an excuse to finish the work.
‘But why,’ you ask, ‘did you kill Mpanzu? What did he do to the man who died? Did any one see him do it?’
‘Oh, Mundele! why do you ask such questions? Did not Nganga-a-ngombo ascertain by his witch-charms? Did he not tell us how he did it? And when he took the ordeal and swooned, was not his guilt proved? Why, we should all say that any one who dared to question such a decision must be himself a witch!’
‘But what does a witch do—how does he do it?’
‘How do I know? I am not a witch. Why, if we did not kill our witches we should all die in no time! What would check them?’
You cannot get much further than this with young people or common folk, all except the dictum of the Nganga ex cathedrâ. Indeed, many of them have been accused, and have been fortunate enough to reject the poison. Those who may escape by vomiting the draught are generally confirmed in the truthfulness of the ordeal that established their innocence.
However, I have never discussed the matter privately with an intelligent native who did not acknowledge the wickedness and deplore the custom. The fear of being dubbed a witch compels generosity, and here lies the strength of the custom.