Behky — The Sierra Leone Cannibals. 55 



emissaries to every town and village, aud they proceeded through the country 

 in state. They wore barbarous costumes composed of leopard-skin with a bell 

 attached to the tail ; they danced, and the principal carried a pole covered with 

 leopard-skin, from which protruded huge metal spikes, and called a Tongora. 

 Each village was taken in turn. On their arrival at a town a space was cleared 

 in the bush for their encampment. With the cut bush they erected two poles, 

 to which they tied a cross-piece and piled all the small bush underneath. 

 They then retired to their camp and made medicine. 



When the village was to be judged, drums were beaten and the people 

 assembled. The head Tongo-player drove his Tongora into the ground, placed 

 medicine on and around it, and then retired into the bush with his two 

 assistants. The people were formed into a line and their names called out, 

 and the three in the bush cast lots. When all the names had been called out, 

 the three Tongo-players came out of the bush and danced, the principal 

 whirling his pole about. While dancing the three would rush up to a 

 suspected person, and if the chief pointed his stick at him, he was instantly 

 seized by the assistants, who passed a circular wooden hoop called a Gagba 

 over his shoulders and led him away ; if he was able to compound for his life, 

 he was allowed to go beggared to the world. The players danced on, 

 frightening some by approaching them ; others were pointed at, but to others 

 the chief player dealt blows with his Tongora, and lucky it was for the man 

 who met a spike and was killed outright. 



Those that were killed or wounded, or could not pay enough to buy their 

 lives from the Gagba, were tied hands and feet, and, if the players were merciful 

 or the man had been able to purchase that form of death, large stones were 

 tied to him and he was drowned. Others were trussed to the horizontal pole 

 and had palm oil poured over them, and then the bush was fired, and, as Chief 

 Bunting Williams put it, " such native prisoner will be put in fire and well 

 burned to ashes." Before the departure of the players the village was 

 burned. 



A Sergeant-Major of the Sierra Leone Police, who was a boy in Sherbro 

 when the Tongo-players last visited it, told us that at some of the villages, 

 when the people saw the Tongora set up and the medicine placed on it, many 

 who were guilty of witchcraft or of leopard murders came forward and con- 

 fessed. At one village eighty persons were taken and burnt, and at another 

 he remembers seeing a pile of human bones and ashes four feet high. 



" Tongo is," says Chief Bunting Williams, " a kind of society intended for 

 good and evil purposes in olden times ; hence a good chief does not permit 

 them to play in his chief dom, because the issue of it is bad ; the playing and 

 dancing is no offence whatever, but the powers that the master of the players 



K.I.A. PROC, VOL. XXX., SECT, C, [8J 



