Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/228

 194 Customs of the Lower Congo People.

There is the stockade to build, and the planks and dyes for the gateway have to be paid for by some one. The nganga must also have subordinate ngangas or assistants to help him in looking after the initiated and to see that none escape, etc. I think the following are among some of the possible advantages to the nganga, the albino, and the assistants from instituting a ndembo. The friends and relatives take good supplies of food to those belonging to them who have "died ndembo." The nganga and his helpers have the pick of the food for themselves, as they are the only ones allowed outside the vela, where the food is deposited. They have free quarters as long as the ndembo lasts, which may be six months or three years. The surplus food is sold on the market, and they share the money. Any uninitiated persons caught near the stockade or on the bye-paths of the forest are fined heavily. Any novices who repeatedly try to escape are sold as slaves, and very probably others who have not tried to escape are sold to enrich the nganga and his friends. It is very easy to say the matombola have taken such persons. Then, again, as the novices feign death very often on the market places, they have on their best cloths and their orna- ments when they enter the ndembo, and, as they live in nakedness in the vela, and are supplied with new cloths by their friends when the time comes for their "resurrection," their cloths and ornaments become the perquisites of the nganga and his accomplices. Lastly, all those who have been under the nganga in the ndembo become most probably his clients, and call for his aid whenever they are sick, etc., after leaving the vela, so that he rears for himself a future profitable business connection.

" Ndembo, under the spell of which they had passed, is considered to be a powerful fetish ; twisted roots and singular distortions of plant life are the symbol of ndembo — hunchback, club-foot, and other malformations, are