Page:Journal of American Folklore vol. 12.djvu/222

 2 1 o Journal of American Folk-Lore.

are punished with severity. The members are said to speak also a dialect of their own, which is kept secret from the females ; another stratagem by which the men seek to keep the females in awe and subjection.

Mungo Park and other explorers noticed the use of this ragamuffin accoutrement in most towns along the Gambia River, and always for the drastical purpose aforementioned ; indeed, the men, decked with this scarecrow dress, were dealing out with whips and clubs the most unmitigated and brutal kind of "justice " against women either guilty or suspected of guilt, always amid the acclamations of the "mob power." No doubt this singular society acts as a sort of police against wrong-doers, but none can define the arbitrary princi- ples which prompt them to action.

At the mouth of the Congo River, in the Loango country, there is a society organized chiefly for the purpose of producing rain-show- ers, and whose masquerading pageants belong to the most burlesque things to be seen anywhere. These "Sindungo" dress in feathers, palm-leaves, and reeds, and look like monsters. One purpose for which they may be hired is that of collecting outstanding debts, and, since they ever remain unknown on account of their strange raiment, it may well be imagined that in their exactions they are not always moderate.

It is one of the privileges of the Mumbo Jumbo league above mentioned to watch the young people at the time of the circumci- sion solemnities, which in Bambuk (Senegambia) last forty days. No person of either sex is allowed to marry before passing that "ordeal." Then boys and girls are kept under a severe moral or ascetic control, but when the " act " is over, none will interfere even with the grossest licentiousness of the jeunesse doree. They leave their villages, roam in the fields, get food and drinks wherever they call for them, but are not allowed to enter lodges unless invited to do so.

It is the task of the " police agents " of the Mumbo Jumbo to keep the youngsters of both sexes separate during these forty days ; and so they tie, as badges of their office, straw and leaves around their bodies, take whips in hand, hide their faces behind masks, and line their bodies with clay.

Masked men in Africa always provide themselves with the instru- ment called bullroarer, and with sticks, twigs, or wands called spirit- piles, and intended to be run into the ground, bearing on their upper end an image recalling a dead man's spirit. No woman is ever allowed to be present at a bullroarer-pageant. Dangerous spirits are banished by the jugglers into a limb of a tree, and, when this is done, the bough is cut off, and, with the spirit in it, planted in the centre of the village.

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