-^ Anthropology : Social 



and other crimes who will not confess, and whose guilt cannot 

 easily be proved in flagrante delicto^ should submit themselves 

 to an ordeal, the result of which will determine their guilt or 

 innocence. It is scarcely necessary to remind my readers that 

 trial by ordeal lingered even in Caucasian Europe as part of 

 the juridical system, or as a custom having the force of law 

 down to within three or four centuries ago. 



In some parts of Liberia, the west especially, persons 

 accused of crime such as witchcraft or theft will sometimes 

 go through the ordeal of plunging the hand and arm into 

 boiling palm oil. If they come out of this without anything 

 worse than a severe scalding of the skin, they arc innocent — at 

 any rate, public opinion is satisfied with having given them a 

 nasty bout of pain, even if by accident or design the wound 

 is only skin deep. But by hr the most prevalent and favourite 

 ordeal is the drinking of a violent " medicine " or poison, a 

 decoction of the bark of Erythrophlceum guineense. 



This is a fine tall tree of the papilionaceous order (Beans), 

 which grows abundantly in West Africa, and perhaps right 

 across the continent through the well-watered regions of the 

 East. It is apparently only in the bark that the poisonous 

 element resides. The wood of the tree is much used for 

 canoes, and even for the wooden mortars used for pounding 

 corn or manioc. 



The decoction thus obtained is generally known in the 

 pidgin English of the Liberian coast as "sass-wood." This is 

 a corruption of the Anglo-French word "sauce," a term which 

 seems to have been much in use by the seamen of the seventeenth 

 and eighteenth centuries to describe something pungent or spicy 

 either in taste or behaviour. The Kruboy, therefore, may 

 use this word with two meanings : either as a violent purgative 

 measure, or as " cheek," riotous behaviour, etc. 



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