Travels in West Africa eBook

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.