380 THE LAND OF THE LION 
be helped and saved. His belief in witchcraft creates the 
very thing that he dreads There are witch doctors whose 
influence for evil is appalling. Taking advantage of the 
power that ignorance is too ready to give them, they are 
often wholesale poisoners. They will force their enemies, 
or the men whose herds or possessions they covet, to sub- 
mit to some tribal ordeal and since all ordeal arrangements 
are in their hands, those whom they wish to destroy die 
by poison or by the infliction of a tribal penalty. ‘Thus 
their powers increase, as do their possessions, until the day 
arrives when native patience reaches its limit, and the 
witch doctor has to have a dose of his own medicine forced 
upon him; his thatch hut is set on fire at night while spears 
guard the door, or he or she is pegged down, under a raw 
cow-hide, early one morning, on the hard-trodden earth, in 
front of the native village. If the rain, promised by his 
witchcraft, comes, the hide will not tighten and he can 
escape with life, but if no rain comes, the equatorial sun 
soon does its work, and the miserable being — male or 
female — underneath, is baked and suffocated to death.* 
Among some of the tribes, notably the Kikuyu, there 
can be no doubt that witch doctors are often wholesale 
poisoners. Among others, the verdict delivered by those 
best informed will be at least one of ‘“‘non-proven.” But 
the whole subject of witchcraft and its evils is one with 
which the white man finds it most difficult to acquaint him- 
self. His intrusion, however well intended and even 
necessary, is resented. He has but inadequate means of 
reaching the facts, and when, as has occurred lately, the 
cumbrous and most ill-adapted legal machinery of British 
East Africa is put in motion against those natives who rise 
in protest against the intolerable evil of the witch doctor, 
I cannot but believe that more harm than good is done. 
The criminal code of India is the legal instrument of 
* Two w tches were thus executed by the natives when I was in Kikuyu country, in the winter of 1908, 
weoetil 
