Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/786

768 are for, we shall generally receive some indefinite answer. They may be "for a dead man," "to kill witches," "battle-charms," or "to keep thieves away." Intelligent negroes will sometimes laugh in making such communications, as if they were ashamed at being caught indulging in silly conceits.

Without going into an elaborate account of African fetiches, it will be enough for our purpose to give a few examples that may illustrate the way some of them have been developed and the purposes to which they are applied. The first figure represents a specimen of the most primitive character that may be very readily imagined to have originated in the way we have indicated. Between two vine-stocks that have been intertwined in double spirals around slender stems is



standing, firmly set in the ground, a knotty stump that has been helped out into the caricature of a face. I found the original of this in a Luba village. Of a similar grade is Fig. 2, a round mass from a termite's nest, about twice the size of a man's head, the porous fungoid substance of which has been set off with carved suggestions of mouth, nose, and eyes. This is a very common ornament of the corners of the manioc-fields. A fetich of a more complicated character is shown in Fig. 3—a little straw hut, about twenty inches high, shaped so as to suggest some fabulous beast. The original, which belonged to an Ovambo village, looked more formidable than the picture. Some dirt was heaped up under the middle of the tent, in which snail-shells, bones, and roots were found when it was stirred with a stick, and which was probably designed to represent the entrails of the creature. I could not get any explanation of the design represented in Fig. 4. We found it one day in a wood in Minungoland—a cross-road large enough for a ten-pin alley, beginning near the regular path, with a kind of a gallows of slender sticks, and ending at a miniature hut about a yard high. Nothing was found in the hut besides an empty pot; but two interlinked straw rings were hanging from the cross-beam of the gallows. When I asked my interpreter Pedro what it was for, he replied that it