Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 8, 1897.djvu/170

 146 The Fetish View of the Human Soul.

tion that his time had come would not have been enter- tained.

There is still one other cause of bodily death that I must mention, because it is another of the cases which no one is put to death for, and it is so commonly said that at every death in West Africa innocent people are slain. This case is that of a witch being killed by his, or her, own familiar spirit. It is held that a person who has the power of be- witching others has in his possession, under his control, a non-human spirit, and this non-human spirit is, in the case of witches, of a malevolent class. This spirit, among the true Negro Tschwi, is kept in a suhman, a thing you will find most accurately described by the late Sir A. B. Ellis in his Tshi-speaking peoples, p. 98, sqq. I have reason to be- lieve that among the true Negroes this malevolent spirit is kept in an external home as a general rule ; still it has so close an inter-communion with the other souls of its owner, that if they get weakened it can injure them so as to cause his death. Among all the Bantu tribes I know, this spirit is kept in the witch's own inside ; and it is held that it is liable to kill him, if he keeps it unemployed, unfed, too long. You will hear — when someone has been injured who does not seem to have merited injury in any particular way, someone who has not given any other person reason to hate him, or when a series of minor accidents and a run of ill- luck comes to a village — "Ah! someone is feeding his witch- power ; " and means are, of course, taken to find out who that someone is, and to put an end to him. There is no doubt that the African method of investigating crime does entail the destruction of many innocent lives ; but by no means half the people killed for witchcraft are punished unjustly. Many of the persons accused by the witchdoctor — the curer of the actions of malevolent spirits — are punished justly enough. And although his methods seem to most Europeans such that must almost necessarily lead to false accusations, they are not really so ; for behind the taking on and off of