Chap. XVI. THE VILLAGE IDOL. 313 



bye. Nothing pleases these people so much as these 

 parting presents, as they are unexpected. 



This evening I went to see the village idol, or 

 mbiiiti (the patron saint as it may be called), and to 

 witness a great ceremony in the mbniti-house. As 

 with the Aviia and other tribes, the idol was a mon- 

 strous and indecent representation of a female figure 

 in wood ; I had remarked that the further I travelled 

 towards the interior, the coarser these wooden idols 

 were, and the more roughly they were sculptured. 

 This idol was kept at the end of a long, narrow, and 

 low hut, forty or fifty feet long and ten feet broad, 

 and was painted in red, white, and black colours. 

 When I entered the hut, it was full of Ashango 

 people, ranged in order on each side, with lighted 

 torches stuck in the ground before them. Amongst 

 them were conspicuous two mbuiti men, or, as they 

 might be called, priests, dressed in cloth of vegetable 

 fibre, with their skins painted grotesquely in various 

 colours, one side of the face red, the other white, and 

 in the middle of the breast a broad yellow stripe ; 

 the circuit of the eyes was also daubed with paint ; 

 these colours are made by boiling various kinds of 

 wood, and mixing the decoction with clay. The rest 

 of the Ashangos were also streaked and daubed with 

 various colours, and by the light of their torches 

 they looked like a troop of devils assembled in the 

 lower regions to celebrate some diabolical rite ; around 

 their legs were bound white leaves from the heart of 

 the palm-tree ; some wore feathers, others had leaves 

 twisted in the shape of horns behind their ears, and 

 all had a bundle of palm-leaves in their hands. 



