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. 



