CHAPTER XV

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WITCHCRAFT.

105. THE POISONED CUP (MWAI.)

The poison so often referred to in connection with native trials is made from the bark of the mwai tree, which grows plentifully throughout the country. The dose is about two gills, and is prepared by a pounder of poison (1). The accused, it is said, has a voice in the selection of the pounder, but so implicitly is the ordeal believed in that the natives think it is of little consequence who “pounds” it; still most tribes seem to have a milder concoction for trivial offences. The drug may be taken by proxy—it may be administered to a dog or a fowl or some animal representing the accused. In this case the animal is tied by a string to the criminal. If it survive, the accused is innocent, if it die, he is guilty. This method of administering the ordeal is more humane, and is allowed in smaller offences. It is much used by the natives that live near the coast. Indeed, the inhabitants of Quilimane believe in the ordeal as implicitly as the tribes of the interior, and although they have been in contact with Europeans for centuries, they were accustomed when called before a Portuguese judge to swear on the mwai instead of the Bible.

106. WITCHCRAFT (USAWI.)

We have now described so many native customs that it is time to set our examination paper that the reader may satisfy himself as to his progress in African lore. We therefore propose the following question, “When a man is killed by a wild beast, do the natives think he died by the hand of God?” If the reader can answer this, he has studied the subject with profit, and he would be able to answer many similar questions. For those who are doubtful we shall submit our own view. In the first place, the question as Christians understand it, is quite unintelligible to the native. We have reason to believe that in the times of his philosophising, the idea of a Supreme Being rises before his mind, but that Being is to him “a God afar off” who takes nothing to do with the ordinary course of events, and from whose hand, therefore, death or misfortune never comes. We must try then to interpret the question as the native does (3), and we are thus led to enquire whether death comes from the hand of the Departed Spirits. Now undoubtedly these spirits have great power. Under their auspices journeys are successful, by their assemblies famine is averted, through their influence death is driven away. Yet it is not so much their business either to cause evil or to prevent it, as to indicate whether evil be coming. The departed spirit may have to answer a question like this, “_If_ Saul come down, and _if_ I remain here, will the men of Keilah deliver me up?” Now by giving a false answer, the spirit may bring about the death of his worshippers. Yet it is not the spirit that kills them—the real cause of all such mischief in this lower world is the Bewitcher. When we remark that the god is quite as much to blame, the natives say, “There is no use of blaming the god. _He did not set the horns._” It is on the Bewitcher therefore that all responsibility lies.

The word “Bewitcher” (msawi) carries with it two ideas—the person so called (1) has power or knowledge sufficient for the practice of occult arts, and (2) is addicted to cannibalism. The second meaning is the more prominent. Let a person eat a morsel of his deceased friend, and though he be the feeblest and dullest-looking creature in the world he is msawi This throws light upon the native view of witchcraft. Witches kill a victim for the purpose of eating him: not only so, but every man that dies even what we call a natural death is really killed by witches. These terrible beings visit their victim when asleep (94) and instil a powerful poison into his ears. They carry out their infernal tricks chiefly by means of horns (misengo.) Of themselves these horns may be harmless, being merely the horns of small buck, and if a bewitcher were to die after burying these weapons, they would have no evil influence. But as a matter of fact, such horns are always dangerous, for the witches hold a council beforehand with regard to killing their victim and sharing his flesh, and although the witch that buries the horns may die, the survivors are able to carry on the plot to its termination.

Hence when any native dies, his friends are certain that he has been slain by witchcraft, and at once call in the witch-detective, who will discover the guilty witches and remove their dangerous horns.

107. THE WITCH-DETECTIVE (MAVUMBULA).

Although a male detective has appeared in the past history of these tribes, all the witch detectives that I have seen were female. They are in one aspect the most important personages in the country. At present two reside at Lake Chirwa; they belong to the same fraternity, one is called Chipembere (Rhinoceros), and the other Tambala (Cock). Many speak as if the office now belonged entirely to females. A native in ordinary conversation often remarks, “If I have any misfortune I will go to the woman,” and when pronouncing a person guilty, the terrible functionary ends her speech with the words, “Thus saith the woman”. The detective when called to investigate a case of death, appoints a day for the ceremony. She goes with a strong guard of armed men, and although her meetings are frequent, people crowd to them from great distances. Her approach causes as much excitement as a public execution would do in a quiet English town, with this difference, that the assembled multitude cannot tell who will be the victim. At sunrise the drums begin to beat and are heard over the whole country side; about three hours after, all the villages in the district are deserted. Their inhabitants, men, women, and children, are to be seen hurrying to the “witch dance”. On arriving they sit in a circle, and leave a large space in the centre for the “Woman”. She is waited for with breathless anxiety. After a time wild screams are heard, and there rushes before the spectators the maddest-looking person conceivable. A stranger concludes at once that one witch has been captured already and is now driven before the detective. The wretch looks as if she were haunted by all the Furies and Demons of Pagan Mythology. Heir face, breast, and arms are marked with patches of blood-red. Her head is covered, not with short negro wool, but with snaky tresses which hang down her back. Her loins are girt with leopard skins. Her legs are overhung with “rattles,” which sound at every step. In her hand she grasps a scourge of tails, which she waves wildly about her. Her eyes roll and stare in her fierce frenzy. She is evidently surrounded by fiends, which though invisible to others, are dreadful realities to her. With them she maintains a desperate struggle, ever trying to beat them off with her scourge. After wrestling thus she utters shrieks of the most unearthly character, and with a terrible bound dashes into the circle, and we have before us the witch-detective herself. Once in the middle of the crowd, she shouts and rants, sings and dances, eats grass and chews branches for several hours. Of her chants some are common in the district, others in the Walolo language, contains a sound of the letter _r_ that the Yao cannot pronounce. She chaffs them for their awkwardness, and notwithstanding the grave nature of her ceremony, she succeeds in drawing smiles from the multitude. In some of her chants she boasts of her power. “Let the bewitcher become a leopard or a carrion crow yet,” she cries, “there can be no escape.” A large part of the crowd are in a state of terrible suspense. Each person knows that from three to five people will be “detected,” and what if he be among the number? The first time I was at a witch-dance I was not free from concern! The bewitchers, however, will either be relatives of the deceased or persons that have had a quarrel with him.

As the decisive moment arrives, the detective asks the hand of every one in the crowd as she chants the appropriate words:—

“Pasa manja Chipembere (Give Chipembere your hand). Pasa manja Chipembere.” _Response._—“E, e, e, e, e, e, e.”

The instant she touches the hand of a bewitcher she leaps back with a terrible start and utters a wild scream. Another method of detecting is by smelling, and this she brings into use at various stages of the investigation. Soon after feeling the hands of the spectators, she retires from the scene literally drenched with sweat. She has found out the whole secret. But the triumph of her art is not yet fully disclosed, and soon she proceeds to reveal where the witches have hid their horns. Taking a hoe and a pot of water, she marches off for the purpose, followed by hundreds of the crowd whose curiosity is most intense, and who begin to share her savage manner. She goes to the forum, to the stream that supplies the villagers with water, and to their various houses. At a spot where she wishes to dig she pours out water to soften the ground. During her digging, she groans, shrieks, and gesticulates, in the most frantic way. She succeeds in finding the horns most readily. One set she digs up at the stream, “they were placed there to bewitch the water drunk by the deceased”. Another bunch she finds under a tree in the village. She looks up, and pointing to some fading branches at the top, she exclaims, “No wonder that this tree has begun to wither”. Every spectator is dumb with astonishment and terror. No one will dare to touch these horns. It would be fatal to do so. They were buried by the bewitchers, and are the very means by which the deceased was killed. All are greatly relieved when these potent spells are removed by the “Woman,” who will doubtless find them useful on another occasion.

The witch-detective always spends one night at the village where she is employed. She is then permitted to wander about at midnight, under the pretence of going to watch the graves. Should she find any one out of his house at that hour, she catches him and brings forward this suspicious circumstance against him. To be found at night by the witch-detective is one of the most unfortunate things that could happen to any man. Even if he has not been already recommended as a victim, he is certain to be now among the guilty. While the detective goes about at midnight among the houses, she is supposed to be unknown to the witches. Sometimes she begs for food, and the witches, thinking she is one of their own fraternity, give her some human flesh. This hospitality she ungratefully rewards, for the flesh said to be thus procured she produces as evidence against the person that gave it.

Besides horns, the detective may dig up arms, legs, and other portions of human bodies in suspicious places in or near the houses of the witches. The whole process of unearthing is of a nature to satisfy a craving for magic, and if more harmless, would be intensely humorous. There is no saying what the witch-detective may “find,” and she seems as much surprised at her discovery as any of the spectators!

_Midnight Feasts._

Any witch may join in eating a person that has been killed by the agency of others; indeed, most of the witches in the country are believed to come to a great feast when one of their number has robbed the grave of its prey. Here is a description of such midnight feasts translated from the very words of a native:—“They cook the body at night, when everyone is asleep, in a pot with water and salt. They eat it with their porridge as a relish in the same way as they would eat a fowl. They go and bury the bones. They take the head and singe off the hair, and go to the stream and wash it with water and take out the brains and cook them. They disembowel the body and eat all the entrails after washing them at the stream.” If a body is kept in a house until putrefaction has done its work, “the witches are cheated of their meat”. This is one reason why the body of a person of rank is kept in the house for a long time after death. The witch-detective, or rather the mwai, kills only the person who bewitched the deceased and those that consented to his death beforehand. Those that partook of the feast are not so guilty, but they generally come with a present to the detective and justify themselves by saying, “We only followed the meat”. One of the exploits of witches, according to Kapeni, is to make milk come down a straw in the inside of a house. We mention this because it resembles witch-stories in other lands. When witches are caught by the detective, no one will speak to them. Generally they are some helpless creatures whom a relative wishes out of the way. They must soon drink the mwai, which is certain to prove fatal to some of them. The credit of the witch-detective would suffer if they all survived.

_Death by mwai._

The person that dies by mwai, whether the crime be theft, adultery, murder, or witchcraft, is denied the ordinary funeral rights. The body is either cast into a cave, or hung on a tree for the vultures. No coffin (34) is allowed, and the ordinary grave-cloth is denied. Much of the effects of the deceased goes to paying the prosecutor, who has a large account with the witch-detective. It may, however, be the prosecutor himself that succeeds to the bewitcher’s inheritance. This whole superstition casts a dark shadow over the closing days of the poor native. If we pass over slaves (who may be killed to escort their master) and young children, we do not hesitate to say that in many districts one half of the natives are killed by mwai. On every occasion of what we call natural death, there is at once an investigation by the witch-detective, and the result is that at least one individual dies.

Towards the last year of my own residence in Africa there occurred ten deaths of persons that I was well acquainted with. Of these, four died by violence, three by natural causes, and three by mwai. Of the three that died by natural causes two were living with the English, and their friends were not allowed to be avenged on any bewitcher, so that we believe that the proportion of deaths by mwai is really larger. We have sometimes wondered that the chiefs did not check the operations of the sorcerer, but the following from Lady Barker will throw much light on their position. A Kafir chief said, “You ask me to put down the witch-doctors, but you forget the circumstances of my country. You Englishmen have gaols, policemen and soldiers; I have none of these things, and if I were to prohibit ‘smelling out’ there would be no check whatever upon the criminal classes.”

On first finding myself face to face with the above agency of heathenism, I began to reason against it. In my first efforts I took very strong ground, not only denying that witchcraft was possible, but asserting that I did not believe in cannibalism. I even ventured to argue that when these tribes spoke of “eating each other” they “did not and could not mean” that a man literally ate his fellows. But it is a dangerous thing to give a native lessons in his own language, and I was soon convinced that they “did not and could not mean” anything else. But they were generally very fair in controversy. They were unanimous in rejecting my views about cannibalism—“was not human flesh as sweet to the bewitcher as monkeys, beetles and caterpillars were to other people?” But they were willing to admit that the detective while prowling about at midnight might busy herself in burying horns, and they laughed heartily when I volunteered to unearth as many horns as they wanted if they allowed me the same privilege. I am not without hope that the deception may soon come to an end, for the little boys and girls that lived with us used latterly to get up a mock witch-dance for their own amusement, and they acted on hints most willingly given by the “white man,” and implying that the witch-detective buried the horns herself.

_Divination._

The following method of divining as described by Mr. Buchanan may conclude this chapter:—

“A common custom amongst the Machinga is divination (kupenda). Few will venture to go a distance of ten miles without first assuring themselves that no danger is to befall them on the way. Men going from Zomba to Blantyre seldom forget to try the ‘Chipendo’ before starting. One mode of divining is by means of the root of a small bush. This root is about the thickness of a pencil, and three bits of it about two inches long are usually employed. Most men carry these lots or roots with them when on a journey, and carefully preserve them when at home. A man wishing to know whether he may proceed in safety takes these bits of root and lays them carefully on the ground, placing the third above the other two. He then declares his intention of going to a certain place, and asks whether there is any hindrance. After retiring a few paces he returns to take his answer from the position in which the roots are now lying. If they have remained as he placed them his journey is to be prosperous, but if they have been separated it is to be unsuccessful, and he will not set out. Or the diviner may use only two roots—a method often resorted to by a traveller who comes to cross roads. He places his knife in a horizontal position, and lays the two roots against the blade. The traveller then stands pointing to one of the roads and says ‘Shall I take this one?’ and if the roots remain still fixed he takes it, but if they fall to the ground he chooses the other path. In the event of a man being without a knife he may use the palm of his hand or the side of a tree.

“Another and more complicated method consists in boiling the roots and mixing the entrails of an adder with the water.”

This use of the entrails is suggestive in an ethnological point of view.

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