Nga Mbelenge, one of the chiefs of the district of Leopoldville, Stanley Pool, has told me how it fared with him.
‘I had a town of my own when quite young. You know how the Bayansi sell to the Bakongo, and we act as middlemen, and interpret for them. I pushed business, and many traders came to me because they had so much trouble with the other old chiefs about here. I soon became very rich, married several wives, bought many slaves out of my profits, and my town grew large.
‘The other old chiefs, instead of pushing their trade, grumbled that I got so much. They would say, “Look at young Nga Mbelenge; how rapidly he is growing rich! It seems only yesterday he was a boy, and now to-day look at his town, see how rich he is! No doubt he is selling souls also.” Without any warning or trial, they came down on me suddenly, accused me of witchcraft, and in my own town compelled me to drink the ordeal poison. I vomited, and thus my innocence was established.’ He acknowledged that the whole custom is very wicked. ‘But what am I to do? If I say that I will have no more of it in my town, my people will say that I am myself a witch, and therefore I do not wish further execution for witchcraft. If I try to stop it, I bring it upon myself.’
As a sequel to this, I learned that a fortnight after, another man was killed in his town as a witch.
The question is naturally asked, What is this crime of witchcraft? Those people who do any trading imagine that a witch is able by means of some fell sorcery to possess himself of the spirit of his victim. He can then put the spirit into a tusk of ivory, or among his merchandise, and convey it to the coast, where the white men will buy it. In due course, if not at the time, the ‘witched’ man dies. Then the white man can make him work for him in his country under the sea. They believe that very many of the coast labourers are men thus obtained, and often when they go to trade look anxiously about for dead relatives. Sometimes when we are travelling they look on with wonder and disgust as we open our tinned provisions, ‘calculating’ that that at least must be one of the uses to which we put their dead relatives.
The notion of the land under the sea has its origin in their faculty of observation. They see ships coming in from sea appear, first the mast, then the hull; and thus at a decent distance out, so as not to reveal the trick, we white men emerge from the ocean. Travellers love to enlarge upon the wonders they have seen, and so the story grows, and the people have been brought up in the belief that away under the sea their relatives make cloth, etc., for us white folk.
This is, however, a new idea, comparatively. The old notion still prevails in many parts, that away in some dark forest land departed spirits dwell. The witches, they think, have some interest in sending away their fellows to the spirit land. Perhaps they get pay from the spirits, no one knows or questions why. Who can know a witch’s business but a witch?
Even if a man dies in war, or is taken by a wild beast or crocodile, it is witchcraft. To such an extent is this believed, that people will bathe in streams where crocodiles abound. So long as there are plenty of people together, the cowardly reptiles are not likely to attack. In this way the idea has come about that real crocodiles will not eat men; but if such a thing occurs it is proof positive that either a witch has transformed himself into a crocodile to obtain his victim, or induced the reptile to do it for him. If you ask how, ‘I do not know; I am not a witch.’ At Lukunga, Mr. Ingham, of the Livingstone Mission, shot a huge crocodile which came out at night after his pigs. In the stomach of the reptile were the anklets of a woman, which were at once recognised by the townsfolk. Yet they told me that the crocodile cannot have eaten the woman.
‘But how about those anklets?’
‘Very likely crocodiles have a fancy for such things. You see what a lot of stones he had in his stomach. Perhaps he took off those anklets when he had done as he was told to do.’