Page:Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons (IA travelsinwestafr00kingrich).pdf/576

 am assured that if you succeed in killing off your relations, unnoticed, up to the proper amount, there is no eternal unpleasantness awaiting you personally as there would be in Europe if you made a deal with the devil. Whether this arises from a lack of moral perception of the iniquity of this sort of thing in the African, or from the difficulty of imagining—with only the African's allowance of imagination—a greater hell than existence in a West African village under native law, I must leave to psychologists.



Tattooing on the West Coast is comparatively rare, and I think I may say never used with decorative intent only. The skin decorations are either paint or cicatrices—in the former case the pattern is not kept always the same by the individual. A peculiar form of it you find in the Rivers, where a pattern is painted on the skin, and then when the paint is dry, a wash is applied which makes the unpainted skin rise up in between the painted pattern. The cicatrices are sometimes tribal marks, but sometimes decorative. They are made by cutting