Anything may be an Orunda or Ibet provided only that
it is connected with food; I have been able to find
no definite ground for the selection of it.
The Doctor said, for example, that “once when
on a boat journey, and camped in the forest for the
noon-day meal, the crew of four had no meat.
They needed it. I had a chicken but ate only
a portion, and gave the rest to the crew. Three
men ate it with their manioc meal, the fourth would
not touch it. It was his Orunda.”
“On another journey,” said the Doctor,
“instead of all my crew leaving me respectfully
alone in the canoe to have my lunch and going ashore
to have theirs, one of them stayed behind in the canoe,
and I found his Orunda was only to eat over water when
on a journey by water.” “At another
place, a chief at whose village we once anchored in
a small steamer when a glass of rum was given him,
had a piece of cloth held up before his mouth that
the people might not see him drink, which was his
Orunda.”
I know some ethnologists will think this last case
should be classed under another head, but I think
the Doctor is right. He is well aware of the
existence of the other class of prohibitions regarding
chiefs and I have seen plenty of chiefs myself up the
Rembwe who have no objection to take their drinks
coram publico, and I have no doubt this was only an
individual Orunda of this particular Rembwe chief.
Great care is requisite in these matters, because
a man may do or abstain from doing one and the same
thing for divers reasons.
CHAPTER XIII. FETISH—(continued).
In which the Voyager discourses on deaths and witchcraft,
and, with no intentional slur on the medical profession,
on medical methods and burial customs, concluding
with sundry observations on twins.
It is exceedingly interesting to compare the ideas
of the Negroes with those of the Bantu. The
mental condition of the lower forms of both races
seems very near the other great border-line that separates
man from the anthropoid apes, and I believe that if
we had the material, or rather if we could understand
it, we should find little or no gap existing in mental
evolution in this old, undisturbed continent of Africa.
Let, however, these things be as they may, one thing
about Negro and Bantu races is very certain, and that
is that their lives are dominated by a profound belief
in witchcraft and its effects.
Among both alike the rule is that death is regarded
as a direct consequence of the witchcraft of some
malevolent human being, acting by means of spirits,
over which he has, by some means or another, obtained
control.
To all rules there are exceptions. Among the
Calabar negroes, who are definite in their opinions,
I found two classes of exceptions. The first
arises from their belief in a bush-soul. They
believe every man has four souls: a, the soul
that survives death; b, the shadow on the path; c,
the dream-soul; d, the bush-soul.
