TRANSFORMATION 235 



dead, who bring sickness, and assigned this reason 

 for wishing to kill white men." The Bari of the 

 White Nile thought the first white people they saw 

 were departed spirits thus come back ; and the same 

 theory is entertained both by Negroes and Bantu along 

 the coast of West Africa. In 1861 a missionary was 

 recognised by a native of Corisco Island in the Gulf 

 of Guinea as his brother, who had died at such a time 

 and had gone to White Man's Land. A chief on 

 the island of Fernando Po who died in 1 898 announced 

 that he would reappear in the person of a ship- 

 captain. A short time after his death a European 

 geologist went to study the rocks of the valley where 

 the chief had dwelt, and was taken for an embodiment 

 of the deceased coming to look once more upon his 

 lands. 1 Among the Bavili of French Congo it is 

 apparently held that the dead man does not necessarily 

 return white. Mr. Dennett relates the case of a 

 woman whom he knew, who had died and was buried. 

 " When she rose from the dead she found herself 

 a slave and married to a white man in Boma. She lived 

 with him until he went to Europe, when he freed her." 

 After various adventures she succeeded in getting 



1 Tylor, op. cit. 5 ; Howitt, I.e. ; /. A. I. xvi. 342 ; Mathews, 

 Ethnol. Notes, 147; Journ. Am. F. L. ix. 200; Curr, i. 339; 

 Nassau, 57 ; Mgr. Armengo Coll, Anthropos^ ii. 390. In one 

 Australian case the natives of the Brisbane district, in spite of his 

 denials, recognised in a runaway convict named Baker a deceased 

 member of the tribe, and, we are told, " allotted to him as his own 

 property the portion of land that had belonged to " the deceased 

 (Lang, Queensland, 336). As the natives have strictly speaking no 

 property in land, this can mean no more than that they assigned 

 him exclusive hunting rights. But even so it is convincing proof of 

 the strength of their belief. See as to the belief in North Queensland, 

 Roth, Bull. v. ss. 63, 64. 



