Page:Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons (IA travelsinwestafr00kingrich).pdf/443

 antiquity, being handed down from generation to generation unaltered for immense periods of time. The child' would be told, for example, that a dangerous spirit lived in the rapids of a river, or lurked in the forest, which it would be advisable for him to keep an eye on, for his own safety. But who would trouble to tell him that a chief of such and such a name once lived there where the Engombie-Gombie trees have been shadowed down again by the great forest? The chief is dead. The village is dead, "palaver done set," so the historical tradition fades out like smoke.

Even the invasion of another tribe, like the Fans, for example, does not affect the religious tradition much. For it is not on the whole a war invasion: they come down in villagefuls among the older tribes, and hear the local spirit-gossip, and take it to their ample bosom, of belief, and pass the traditions on to their children. Meanwhile, the tribe that told them these things has moved West, away from them, because they have got the best bush places cleared and covered with their plantations, and they catch all the fish, and they get all the trade, and they eat respectable people occasionally, and steal from them continually, and they kick up such a noise, and have such perpetual rows among each other, and respectable villages belonging to the older tribe; that the older tribe has the opinion forced upon it, that no decent people can live near those filthy, fearful Fans, and so move nearer in to Lembarene or Libreville.

In addition to this cause of a tribe leaving its old districts, there are others which move tribes completely off earthly districts of any kind altogether: among these are the smallpox, and the sleep disease. The former is most common in Congo Français, where it receives the graphically descriptive name of "the spotted death" among the natives, the latter appears in its worst form in Kacongo and Angola, where whole villages are, at intervals, depopulated by it. The visitations of these maladies, indeed of all maladies in West Africa, take the form of epidemics, and seem periodic. I have collected much material, but not sufficient yet to make deductions from, as to the duration of the periods between the outbreaks. The natives all along the Coast from Calabar to the South will tell you: "It