Page:Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons (IA travelsinwestafr00kingrich).pdf/520

 enough, and moreover the source of information was intoxicated.

Affiliated to this custom of twin-killing, and having, I suspect, the same underlying idea, is the custom common in Negro and Bantu tribes of throwing away the body of a woman who has died in her confinement without the child being born, burning everything belonging to her, and blotting out her name and memory. The name of such a woman is never mentioned after the catastrophe, and the body is thrown far away into the bush, not near the path, where the bodies of little children are thrown in order that their souls may choose a new mother from the women who pass by.

Funeral customs vary considerably between the Negro and Bantu, and I never yet found among the Bantu those unpleasant death-charms which are in vogue in the Niger Delta. One of these is the custom of the nearest relatives sitting round the body during the time—an awesome long time considering the climate—that elapses before burial under the house floor, the assembled relatives sniffing frequently and powerfully at the body. The young children are brought in and held over it so that they can sniff too.

I was once in a canoe with four men and women and three children, and a corpse came towards us on the current. My companions paddled towards it with enthusiasm and getting it against the side of the canoe, dipped their calabashes into the water round the corpse, and drank calabash after calabash, until they had got their back teeth under water and then they emptied, in that fine swallow-or-choke and hang-the-spilling style of theirs, calabashes of water into the children until the unfortunate infants fairly overflowed.

"Good death-charm," they said to me. "I shouldn't wonder if it were," said I, "paddle away," for I was frightened lest these people, who are, barring their manners and customs, kindly and affectionate, should have the corpse on board and take it home to their families and make a decoction for home consumption, and it was an unpleasant corpse—smallpox and all that sort of thing, you know. I am told this custom occurs in the Niger estuaries and in the Old Calabar regions. I was in Bantu regions, but my companions were not pure Bantu.