Page:Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons (IA travelsinwestafr00kingrich).pdf/466

 country to take this from a traveller. While waiting about for the Lafayette to get ready for sea, i.e., for the water bottles to be refilled, I learn the cause of the weird howls and screams I have heard during the night. A poor maniac who has run from Gaboon to Cape Esterias haunts the rocky narrow beach at night and flies from any one who approaches him to give him food, or offer him shelter. He soon returns and hangs about near the houses again and runs at night along the beach screaming and moaning as he jumps about among the rocks. When I get on to the beach he is sitting playing on a rock, not far off, tearing up a plantain leaf into shreds. I take up some packages of aguma and biscuits, and softly and cautiously make my way towards him, but he just lets me get within a few yards and then is off with a howl, at a pace which, if it holds, must by now have landed him on the shores of Victoria Nyanza. In addition to this fortuitous lunatic, there is at Cape Esterias a local one, quite the biggest black man I have ever seen; he must be little short of seven feet high, and his muscular development is such that he looks very heavily built for his height. They tell me he is a slave who was brought in his youth, like most Benga slaves, from one of the Fernan Vaz tribes, and is quite harmless and hard-working, but quite mad, "some witch has stolen one of his souls." I have seen it stated that insanity is almost unknown among the Africans; I can truly say I have never stayed any time in a district among them without coming across several cases of it. In the Rivers, indeed among all the true negro tribes, it is customary to kill lunatics off. On the South-West Coast insanity usually takes the form of malignant melancholy and they kill themselves off. Amongst the Kacongo and Bas-congo tribes, this suicide is at times almost an epidemnic, and it is there customary when a man shows symptoms of its coming on by hanging himself, without rhyme or reason, about the place or by trying to knock his brains out against a post, for a family conclave to be held. The utter folly of his proceedings are then pointed out to him by his relations, as only relations can point it out, and should he after this still persist in attempting to kill himself, spoiling things, and disturbing people, the job is taken off his hands and his relations