TRANSFORMATION 201 



to injuries received from wild beasts or other evil 

 influences in the jungle. 1 Among the Ewhe of Togo- 

 land, if a newborn child show a likeness to any of his 

 dead brethren or relations, he is named Dogba or 

 Degboe, meaning "the returner.'' 2 Among some of 

 the Ewhe it is sufficient for a priest to certify which of 

 the deceased members of the family has returned. 3 

 The opinion that a subsequently born child was a 

 previously deceased child who had returned was 

 current among the people of Old Calabar ; 4 and the 

 Ibani, when a first-born son dies and a second is after- 

 wards born, call him Di-ibo, or born again. 5 Nor is 

 the belief, with which we are now concerned confined 

 to the Negroes proper. It is found among the Bantu 

 of West Africa, though some of the latter appear to 

 hold the possibility of re-birth either into the family 

 of the deceased " or into any other family, or even 

 into a beast." 6 



Among many of the Negroes and Bantu of West 

 Africa, however, a human soul is believed to be not a 

 unity but composite. The Tshi-speaking peoples of 

 the Gold Coast and the Ewhe-speaking tribes of the 

 Slave Coast draw a distinction between the ghostly 

 self that continues a man's existence after death in the 

 spirit- world, and his kra or noli, which is capable of 

 being born again in a new human body. In the 



1 Burton, Wanderings, ii. 174. Cf. a Winnebago tale, Journ. 

 Am. F. L. ix. 52. 



2 Globus, Ixxix. 350; Arch. Religionsw. viii. no. 



3 Zeits. /. Ethnol. xxxviii. 42. 



* Burton, Wit and Wisd. 376. 



5 Leonard, 549. As to the general belief in Southern Nigeria 

 that a deceased person is born again into the same family, see Ibid. 

 141, 150, 207. Featherman, Nigritians, 447 Nassau, 237. 



