FETISHISM 
51 
barter transactions of the eighteenth century ! Oppo- 
site the mission station a negro has laid out a small 
cocoa plantation, and the fetish which is expected to 
protect it hangs on a tree in a corked bottle. Nowadays 
valuable fetishes are enclosed in tin boxes, so that they 
may not be damaged by termites, from whose ravages a 
wooden box gives no permanent protection. 
There are big fetishes and little ones. A big one 
usually includes a piece of human skull, but it must 
be from the skull of some one who was killed expressly 
to provide the fetish. Last summer at a short distance 
below the station an elderly man was killed in a canoe. 
The murderer was discovered, and it is considered to 
have been proved that he committed the crime in order 
to secure a fetish by means of which he hoped to ensure 
the fulfilment of their contracts by people who owed 
him goods and money ! 
A few weeks later my wife and I took a walk one 
Sunday through the forest to Lake Degele, which is 
about two hours distant. In the village in which we 
took a mid-day rest the people had nothing to eat 
because for several days the women had been afraid 
to go out to the banana field. It had become known 
that several men were prowling about the neighbour, 
hood who wanted to kill some one in order to obtain a 
fetish. The women of Lambarene asserted that these 
men had also been seen near one of our wells, and the 
whole district was in a state of excitement for several 
weeks. 
I am myself the possessor of a fetish. The most 
important objects in it are two fragments of a human 
skull, of a longish oval shape and dyed with some sort 
of red colouring matter ; they seem to me to be from 
