Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/491

Rh head, broad stripes of yellow were drawn down the cheeks, bands of red or yellow ran down the arms and across the chest, and spots of blue and other colours were put on promiscuously to fill up, according to no rule other than his own crude taste and the colours available. His dress consisted of the softened skins of wild animals, either whole or in strips, feathers of birds, dried fibres and leaves, ornaments of leopard, crocodile, or rat's teeth, small, tinkling bells, rattling seed pods, and anything else that was unusual and wearable. The effect attained was extremely grotesque, but was to the native the sign of the witch-doctor's power. To inspire the natives with awe and fear this get-up was absolutely necessary, for, if a nganga arrived at the scene of his operations in the ordinary garb of a native, he would be scouted and turned out of the town.

The nganga was the arbiter of life and death, for not only was his selected victim led away to drink the ordeal, but so implicitly did the people believe in him that, when he said that his patient would die, this invariably happened, as the friends began at once to prepare for the burial, and, instead of feeding the patient, they would dig his grave and send to call his relatives to the funeral. The nganga had said he would die, so what was the use of wasting time and good food on him?

The nganga was consulted about a child before birth, at birth, and throughout its childhood and youth, during illness to drive away the evil spirits causing the sickness, after the death of a first wife to cleanse a widower, after death to discover the witch who caused it, and at burial to ensure that the deceased would not return to trouble the family. Even after death and burial the spirit of the deceased can be controlled by the nganga, and destroyed by him if it does not behave itself decently.

The nganga put the native under tabu, and removed it; he made the hunting, trading, and war "medicine"