Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/512

470 given a vapour bath without rites and the ostentatious display of fetish power, the natives would not have regarded him as a nganga, and he would have procured very little business. In order to protect his discovery, and to draw patients, he surrounded it with the hocus-pocus of fetish rites and ceremonies, and thus started a new cult that had its day. It is most probable that ngangas and their fetishes have risen in power, have had wide fame and much popular support, have then fallen into disrepute, and have been abandoned in favour of new ones, and, if the truth were known, as many, if not more, nganga cults have been forgotten as are now remembered.

In the early years of the Baptist Mission on the Congo, the natives had little or no faith in our medicines, because we administered them in a simple and straightforward way. If we had had recourse to trickery we might have made large sums for our Mission, but, although our medical knowledge has been very limited, yet our remedies have so gained in favour that at one station alone, (Wathen), a sum of from £25 to £30 is taken annually for medicines, and natives come long distances to be treated in our hospital.

The ngangas have largely maintained the continuity of native customs, for, when baffled in curing a person, they have frequently put their failure at the door of a broken or slighted country custom; they are largely responsible for crushing any inventive genius the people have shown by putting public calamities,—such as an epidemic of sickness,—to the account of any inventor who might be known at the time; and they have retarded all progress by charging with witchcraft any one who was more skilful in work, or more energetic and shrewd in trading, than his neighbours. The fear of being accused of witchcraft has been so great and continuous that it has hampered and destroyed every attempt at advancement, and nullified every progressive step, and there was little hope of the