SMALL-POX AMONGST THE BA-RONGA. 7OI 



in the meantime a purely imaginary offence ! The more I study 

 the question, the more 1 come to the conclusion that that crime 

 does not really exist. There is no Buloyi, at any rate, in the 

 sense in which Ba-Ronga believe in it. The position may be 

 dift'erent amongst Zulus or Ba-Suto. In a paper sent to South 

 African missionaries, Dr. Loram asserted lately that there are 

 really witches in Zululand. Amongst the Ba-Ronga I deny it. 

 Why? Because the definition of the crime itself proves to any 

 scientific mind that it does not exist. Buloyi, as I explained it in 

 my paper on " The Theory of Witchcraft,"* is a special 

 kind o'f murder accomplished during the night by cer- 

 tain individuals who possess the faculty of unsheath- 

 ing themselves : their " double " gets out of their bodies, 

 flies with large wings through the air to the hut in 

 which their victim is asleep ; they rob his interior organs, and go 

 and eat them together with their baloyi comrades in remote 

 places. The person thus bewitched soon loses his health, gets 

 thin, and finally dies. Notice that the crime is unconscious ; the 

 wizard in his state of consciousness does not know, or knows 

 only very indistinctly, that he is a noyi. The divinatory bones 

 alone have the power to reveal his crimes to the diviner, and 

 through the diviner to him. But the belief in witchcraft is so 

 strong that nobody dares to contradict the verdict of the bones. 

 Owing to the autosuggestion fostered by this universal belief, 

 people may come to the persuasion that they are really guilty of 

 the horrible criine which combines together murder and anthro- 

 pophagy, and when the mysterious Questioner passes through 

 the country, they sincerely confess their presumed offence. One 

 can judge by this fact of the extreme power of superstition on 

 the native mind, and what immense evolution must take place to 

 elevate it to the true and spiritual conception of moral wrong. 



5. The Concluding Rites. 



When the disease has achieved its course, when the pustules 

 have dried up, a day is appointed on which the marginal period 

 will come to an end, and the clan return to its regular life. This 

 return is marked by special rites, which may be called Reintegra- 

 tiun or Purification rites, their aim being evidently to remove 

 the defilement acquired by the disease. 



The main purificatory rite, the one which regularly closes 

 a marginal period, is the smearing of all the huts with a new layer 

 of clay, either mixed with cow's dung or not. The old ground 

 is for ever covered. It is a way of saying: " Behold, the former 

 things are passed away, everything has become new." 



On the morning of that day, every patient must go and 

 wash his body on the road, as if to pour all the filth of the disease 

 on it. 



Moreover, the ashes found in the fire-places inside the huts, 

 the necklaces of mealie grains, the implements used by the people 

 who have been seriously ill, eventually their garments, the ochre 



* Rept. S.A.A.A.8., Kimberley, 230-241 (1906). 



