The different instruments with which he works in the
shaping of human destiny bear his name when in his
employ. When acting by means of water, he is
O Mbuiri Aningo; when in the weather, O Mbuiri Ngali;
when in the forests, O Mbuiri Ibaka; when in the form
of a dwarf, O Mbuiri Akoa, and so on.
The great difference between O Mbuiri and the lesser
spirits is this: —the lesser spirits
cannot incarnate themselves except through extraneous
things; O Mbuiri can, he can become visible without
anything beyond his own will to do so. The other
spirits must be in something to become visible.
This is an extremely delicate piece of Fetish which
it took me weeks to work out. I think I may
say another thing about O Mbuiri, though I say it
carefully, and that is, that among the M’pongwe
and the tribe who are the parent tribe of the M’pongwe—the
now rapidly dying out Ajumba, and their allied tribe
the Igalwa—O Mbuiri is a distinct entity,
while among the neighbouring tribes he is a class,
i.e. there are hundreds of O Mbuiri or Ibwiri,
one for every remarkable place or thing, such as rock,
tree, or forest thicket, and for every dangerous place
in a river. Had I not observed a similar state
of affairs regarding Sasabonsum, a totally different
kind of spirit on the Windward coast, I should have
had even greater trouble than I had, in finding a
key to what seemed at first a mass of conflicting
details regarding this important spirit O Mbuiri.
There is one other very important point in M’pongwe
Fetish; and that is that the souls of men exist before
birth as well as after death. This is indeed,
as far as I have been able to find out, a doctrine
universally held by the West African tribes, but among
the M’pongwe there is this modification in it,
which agrees strangely well with the idea I found
regarding reincarnated diseases, existent among the
Okyon tribes (pure negroes). The malevolent minor
spirits are capable of being born with, what we will
call, a man’s soul, as well as going in with
the man’s soul during sleep. For example,
an Olaga may be born with a man and that man will
thereby be born mad; he may at any period of his life,
given certain conditions, become possessed by an evil
spirit, Onlogho Abambo, Injembe, Nkandada, and become
mad, or ill; but if he is born mad, or sickly, one
of the evil spirits such as an Olaga or an Obambo,
the soul of a man that has not been buried properly,
has been born with him.
The rest of the M’pongwe Fetish is on broad
lines common to other tribes, so I relegate it to
the general collection of notes on Fetish. M’pongwe
jurisprudence is founded on the same ideas as those
on which West African jurisprudence at large is founded,
but it is so elaborated that it would be desecration
to sketch it. It requires a massive monograph.
CHAPTER VII. ON THE WAY FROM KANGWE TO LAKE NCOVI.
In which the voyager goes for bush again and wanders
into a new lake and a new river.
