Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/54

40 Bidi would have had to drink the ordeal, but the slain man was a slave, and no free man or chief takes the ordeal on account of a slave, just as in the old duelling days no so-called gentleman would fight a duel with one who was not considered a gentleman.

Some months after the fighting was over Tulante's nephew, Nlemvo, returned to San Salvador from England. The King of San Salvador treated him well, but said that, on account of Tulante's complaint and attitude Nlemvo could not proceed to his uncle's town until the uncle had paid him a girl slave and 5000 strings of blue beads. In the meantime Tulante had died, so that his brother, who had succeeded him, had to pay the slave, and Nlemvo paid the 5000 strings of beads.

Mad people are treated as follows:—The patient is well tied with ropes and taken to the nganga carrying a lighted stick and a fowl on his head. The nganga takes five small branches from five different trees; he dips them in water and repeatedly strikes the patient with them, saying,—"Nkwiya vaika muna yandi" (Evil spirit come out of him). He then takes the lighted stick from the insane person's head and plunges it in water, and as the fire goes out so the bad spirit goes out of the man. The nganga cuts off the head of the fowl, and hangs the headless fowl on a stick just outside the town by the road-side. This is a sacrifice to propitiate the evil spirit that has just been driven out, and to keep it from again entering the man. Thereupon the nganga cuts the ropes and hands the madman over to his family. If a madman "runs amok" his family are told, and, if they do not fetch him and properly look after him, he is killed. In the old days it was usual to kill speedily a hopelessly insane person.

When a man wants the love of a certain woman, he goes to the "ngang' a mbumba" (mbumba meaning secret, mystery, or magic), who takes a little bit of a fowl's claw, a piece of a shrub called "kintumba," a bit of