IN CENTRAL AFRICA AND ELSEWHERE. 



161 



in the C.I.D. at Scotland Yard to come to Africa as a missionary, 

 and had been in the country nearly thirty years, so I think he 

 may be relied on. I proposed our sallying out one night to view 

 the ceremony. He assured me it would be perfectly useless to 

 try, as everything would be stopped before we could get within 

 sight of the fire. The diviners will not and confessedly cannot 

 carry on their business in the presence of Christians. There must 

 be, as in modern seances, a favourable atmosphere. The 

 following incident will illustrate this. 



If a witch-doctor dies, only his fellow-practitioners may bury 

 him. None else may touch the body. All witch-doctors within 

 reach are summoned. They divine as to where the burial should 

 take place. My friend once happened to arrive in a village just 

 after the death of a witch-doctor, when seven or eight of his 

 colleagues were scouring the village, furiously divining, to find 

 the destined grave, but the presence of the missionary seemed 

 to paralyze them. " Kachitava, kachi'ava,'' was the cry 

 raised on all sides (" It is in vain "), and it was plainly intimated 

 to him that he was a marplot. It will be remembered, perhaps, 

 that when the Welsh mediums Thomas gave their spiritist 

 demonstration in London last year, which proved such a fiasco, 

 they had previously objected to one of the Committee of Experts 

 as unsympathetic. He had, it appeared, been very successful 

 in exposing fraudulent manifestations, and so was on the index. 



If the public fetiches are voluntarily burnt by the local native 

 authorities, it is a long step towards breaking the superstition. 

 I never saw this done, but I once witnessed the burning of the 

 fetiches of a noted witch-doctor, and also of a native chief. 

 The former had been for years an opponent of the missionaries. 

 Her husband had been publicly baptized the Sunday before, and 

 this had so impressed her that the next Saturday she came up 

 to the Mission Station and said she wanted to " follow the Words 

 of God," as the native expression is. On the following day a 

 special service was held at which she, with her own hands, 

 burnt her valued fetiches in a bonfire, in the courtyard, ending 

 with the little bells she used for convening her adepts to her 

 seances. I wondered how they would fare in the fire. 



The chief was another case. He lived further north, at a place 

 called Ndalla, to the west of Lake Tanganyika. He welcomed us 

 quite warmly. I noticed he was festooned with great necklaces 

 of blue beads (these for ornament) and had fetiches round every 

 limb. I asked him to explain their virtues. The one round his 



M 



