THE WITCH DOCTOR
African Medicine mainly from the point of view of the Witch Doctor.
We will now leave the village apothecary and his methods, and turn to
the witch doctor, the consulting physician. He of course knows all about
the therapeutic action of low-grade spirits, such as dwell in herbs and
so on; but he knows more--namely the actions of higher spirits on the
human soul, and the disorders of the human soul into the bargain.
The dogma that rules his practice is that in all cases of disease in
which no blood is showing, the patient is suffering from something wrong
in the soul. In order to lay this dogma fairly before you, I should here
discourse on the nature of spirits unallied to the human soul--non-human
spirits--and the nature of the human spirit itself; but as on the one
hand, I cannot be hasty on such an important group of subjects, and, on
the other, I cannot expect you to be anything else in such a matter, I
forbear, and merely beg to remark that the African does not believe in
anything being soulless, he regards even matter itself as a form of
soul, low, because not lively, a thing other spirit forms use as they
please--practically as the cloth of the spirit that uses it. This
conception is, as far as I know, constant in both Negro and Bantu. I
will therefore here deal only with what the African regards as merely
one class of spirits--an important class truly, but above it there are
at least two more important classes, while beneath it in grade there
are, I think, about eleven, and equal to it, but differing in nature,
several classes--I don't exactly know how many. This class of spirits is
the human soul--the _Kla_ of the true Negro, the _Manu_ of the Bantu.
These human souls are also of different grades, for one sort is believed
to be existent before birth, as well as during life and after death,
while other classes are not. There is more interesting stuff here, but I
am determined to stick to my main point now--the medical. Well, the
number of souls possessed by each individual we call a human being is
usually held to be four--(1) the soul that survives, (2) the soul that
lives in an animal away wild in the bush, (3) the shadow cast by the
body, (4) the soul that acts in dreams. I believe that the more profound
black thinkers hold that these last-named souls are only functions of
the true soul, but from the witch doctor's point of view there are four,
and he acts on this opinion when doctoring the diseases that afflict
these souls of a man.
The dream-soul is the cause of woes unnumbered to our African friend,
and the thing that most frequently converts him into that desirable
state, from a witch doctor's point of view of a patient. It is this way.
The dream-soul is, to put it very mildly, a silly flighty thing. Off it
goes when its owner is taking a nap, and gets so taken up with
sky-larking, fighting, or gossiping with other dream-souls that
sometimes it does not come home to its owner when he is waking up. So,
if any one has to wake a man up great care must always be taken that it
is done softly--softly, namely gradually and quietly, so as to give the
dream-soul time to come home. For if either of the four souls of a man
have their intercommunication broken, the human being possessing them
gets very ill. We will take an example. A man has been suddenly roused
by some cause or other before that dream-soul has had time to get into
quarters. That human being feels very ill, and sends for the Witch
Doctor. The medical man diagnoses the case as one of absence of
dream-soul, instantly claps a cloth over the mouth and nose, and gets
his assistant to hold it there until the patient gets hard on
suffocated; but no matter, it's the proper course of treatment to
pursue. The witch doctor himself gets ready as rapidly as possible
another dream-soul, which if he is a careful medical man, he has brought
with him in a basket. Then the patient is laid on his back and the
cloths removed from the mouth and nose, and the witch doctor holds over
them his hands containing the fresh soul, blowing hard at it so as to
get it well into the patient. If this is successfully accomplished, the
patient recovers. Occasionally, however, this fresh soul slips through
the medical man's fingers, and before you can say "Knife" is on top of
some 100-feet-high or more silk cotton tree, where it chirrups gaily and
distinctly. This is a great nuisance. The patient has to be promptly
covered up again. If the doctor has an assistant with him, that
unfortunate individual has to go up the tree and catch the dream-soul.
If he has no assistant, he has to send his power up the tree after the
truant; doctors who are in full practice have generally passed the time
of life when climbing up trees personally is agreeable. When, however,
the thing has been re-captured and a second attempt to insert it is
about to be made, it is held advisable to get the patient's friends and
relatives to stand round him in a ring and howl lustily, while your
assistant also howling lustily, but in a professional manner, beats a
drum. This prevents the soul from bolting again, and tends to frighten
it into the patient.
In some obstinate cases of loss of dream-soul, however, the most
experienced medical man will fail to get the fresh soul inserted. It
clings to his fingers, it whisks back into the basket or into his hair
or clothes, and it chirrups dismally, and the patient becomes convulsed.
This is a grave symptom, but the diagnosis is quite clear. The patient
has got a _sisa_ in him, so there is no room for the fresh soul.
Now, a _sisa_ is a dreadful bad thing for a man to have in him, and an
expensive thing to get out. It is the surviving soul of a person who has
not been properly buried--not had his devil made, in fact. And as every
human surviving soul has a certain allotted time of existence in a human
body before it can learn the dark and difficult way down to Srahmandazi,
if by mischance the body gets killed off before the time is up, that
soul, unless properly buried and sent on the way to Srahmandazi, or any
other Hades, under expert instruction given as to the path for the dead,
becomes a _sisa_, and has to hang about for the remaining years of its
term of bodily life.
These _ensisa_ are held to be so wretchedly uncomfortable in this state
that their tempers become perfect wrecks, and they grow utterly
malignant, continually trying to get into a human body, so as to finish
their term more comfortably. Now, a _sisa's_ chief chance of getting
into a body is in whipping in when there is a hole in a man's soul
chamber, from the absence of his own dream-soul. If a _sisa_ were a
quiet, respectable soul that would settle down, it would not matter
much, for the dream-soul it supplants is not of much account. But a
_sisa_ is not. At the best, it would only live out its remaining term,
and then go off the moment that term was up, and most likely kill the
souls it had been sheltering with by bolting at an inconvenient moment.
This was the verdict given on the death of a man I knew who, from what
you would call faintness, fell down in a swamp and was suffocated.
Inconvenient as this is, the far greater danger you are exposed to by
having a _sisa_ in you lies in the chances being 10 to 1 that it is
stained with blood, for, without being hard on these unfortunate
unburied souls, I may remark that respectable souls usually get
respectably buried, and so don't become _ensisa_. This blood which is
upon it the devils that are around smell and go for, as is the nature of
devils; and these devils whip in after the _sisa_ soul into his host in
squads, and the man with such a set inside him is naturally very
ill--convulsions, delirium, high temperature, &c., and the indications
to your true witch doctor are that that _sisa_ must be extracted before
a new dream-soul can be inserted and the man recover.
But getting out a _sisa_ is a most trying operation. Not only does it
necessitate a witch doctor sending in his power to fetch it _vi et
armis_, it also places the medical man in a position of grave
responsibility regarding its disposal when secured. The methods he
employs to meet this may be regarded as akin to those of antiseptic
surgery. All the people in the village, particularly babies and old
people--people whose souls are delicate--must be kept awake during the
operation, and have a piece of cloth over the nose and mouth, and every
one must howl so as to scare the _sisa_ off them, if by mischance it
should escape from the witch doctor. An efficient practitioner, I may
remark, thinks it a great disgrace to allow a _sisa_ to escape from him;
and such an accident would be a grave blow to his practice, for people
would not care to call in a man who was liable to have this occur.
However, our present medical man having got the _sisa_ out, he has still
to deal with the question of its disposal before he can do anything
more. The assistant blows a new dream soul into the patient, and his
women see to him; but the witch doctor just holds on to the _sisa_ like
a bulldog.
Sometimes the disposal of the _sisa_ has been decided on prior to its
extraction. If the patient's family are sufficiently well off, they
agree to pay the doctor enough to enable him to teach the _sisa_ the way
to Hades. Indeed, this is the course respectable medical men always
insist on although it is expensive to the patient's family. But there
are, I regret to say, a good many unprincipled witch doctors about who
will undertake a case cheap.
They will carry off with them the extracted _sisa_ for a small fee, then
shortly afterwards a baby in the village goes off in tetanic
convulsions. No one takes much notice of that, because it's a way babies
have. Soon another baby is born in the same family--polygamy being
prevalent, the event may occur after a short interval--well, after
giving the usual anxiety and expense, that baby goes off in convulsions.
Suspicion is aroused. Presently yet another baby appears in the family,
keeps all right for a week may be, and then also goes off in
convulsions. Suspicions are confirmed. The worm--the father, I
mean--turns, and he takes the body of that third baby and smashes one of
its leg bones before it is thrown away into the bush; for he knows he
has got a wanderer soul--namely, a _sisa_, which some unprincipled
practitioner has sent into his family. He just breaks the leg so as to
warn the soul he is not a man to be trifled with, and will not have his
family kept in a state of perpetual uproar and expense. It sometimes
happens, however, in spite of this that, when his fourth baby arrives,
that too goes off in convulsions. Thoroughly roused now, paterfamilias
sternly takes a chopper and chops that infant's remains up extremely
small, and it is scattered broadcast. Then he holds he has eliminated
that _sisa_ from his family finally.
I am informed, however, that the fourth baby to arrive in a family
afflicted by a _sisa_ does not usually go off in convulsions, but that
fairly frequently it is born lame, which shows that it is that wanderer
soul back with its damaged leg. It is not treated unkindly but not taken
much care of, and so rarely lives many years--from the fetish point of
view, of course, only those years remaining of its term of bodily life
out of which some witchcraft of man or some vengeance of a god cheated
it.
If I mention the facts that when a man wakes up in the morning feeling
very stiff and with "that tired feeling" you see mentioned in
advertisements in the newspapers, he holds that it arises from his own
dream-soul having been out fighting and got itself bruised; and that if
he wakes up in a fright, he will jump up and fire off his gun, holding
that a pack of rag tag devils have been chasing his soul home and
wishing to scare them off, I think I may leave the complaints of the
dream-soul connected with physic and pass on to those connected with
surgery.
Now, devoted as I am to my West African friends, I am bound in the
interests of Truth to say that many of them are sadly unprincipled.
There are many witches, not witch doctors, remember, who make it a
constant practice to set traps for dream-souls. Witches you will find
from Sierra Leone to Cameroons, but they are extra prevalent on the
Gold Coast and in Calabar.
These traps are usually pots containing something attractive to the
soul, and in this bait are concealed knives or fish-hooks--fish-hooks
when the witch wants to catch the soul to keep, knives when the desire
is just to injure it.
In the case of the lacerated dream-soul, when it returns to its owner,
it makes him feel very unwell; but the symptoms are quite different from
those arising from loss of dream-soul or from a _sisa_.
The reason for catching dream-souls with hooks is usually a low
mercenary one. You see, many patients insist on having their own
dream-soul put back into them--they don't want a substitute from the
doctor's store--so of course the soul has to be bought from the witch
who has got it. Sometimes, however, the witch is the hireling of some
one intent on injuring a particular person and keen on capturing the
soul for this purpose, though too frightened to kill his enemy outright.
So the soul is not only caught and kept, but tortured, hung up over the
canoe fire and so on, and thus, even if the patient has another
dream-soul put in, so long as his original soul is in the hands of a
torturer, he is uncomfortable.
On one occasion, for example, I heard one of the Kru boys who were with
me making more row in his sleep, more resounding slaps and snores and
grunts than even a normal Kru boy does, and, resolving in my mind that
what that young man really required was one of my pet pills, I went to
see him. I found him asleep under a thick blanket and with a
handkerchief tied over his face. It was a hot night, and the man and his
blanket were as wet with sweat as if they had been dragged through a
river. I suggested to head-man that the handkerchief muzzle should come
off, and was informed by him that for several nights previously the man
had dreamt of that savoury dish, crawfish seasoned with red pepper. He
had become anxious, and consulted the head-man, who decided that
undoubtedly some witch was setting a trap for his dream-soul with this
bait, with intent, &c. Care was now being taken to, as it were, keep the
dream-soul at home. I of course did not interfere and the patient
completely recovered.
We will now pass on to diseases arising from disorders in the other
three souls of a man. The immortal or surviving soul is liable to a
disease that its body suffered from during its previous time on earth,
born again with it. Such diseases are quite incurable, and I only
personally know of them in the Calabar and Niger Delta, where
reincarnation is strongly believed in.
Then come the diseases that arise from injury to the shadow-soul. It
strikes one as strange at first to see men who have been walking, say,
through forest or grass land on a blazing hot morning quite happily, on
arrival at a piece of clear ground or a village square, most carefully
go round it, not across, and you will soon notice that they only do this
at noontime, and learn that they fear losing their shadow. I asked some
Bakwiri I once came across who were particularly careful in this matter
why they were not anxious about losing their shadows when night came
down and they disappeared in the surrounding darkness, and was told that
that was all right, because at night all shadows lay down in the shadow
of the Great God, and so got stronger. Had I not seen how strong and
long a shadow, be it of man or tree or of the great mountain itself, was
in the early morning time? Ah me! I said, the proverb is true that says
the turtle can teach the spider. I never thought of that.
Murders are sometimes committed by secretly driving a nail or knife into
a man's shadow, and so on; but if the murderer be caught red-handed at
it, he or she would be forthwith killed, for all diseases arising from
the shadow-soul are incurable. No man's shadow is like that of his own
brother, says the proverb.
Now we come to that very grave class of diseases which arise from
disorders of the bush-soul. These diseases are not all incurable,
nevertheless they are very intractable and expensive to cure. This
bush-soul is, as I have said, resident in some wild animal in the
forest. It may be in only an earth pig, or it may be in a leopard, and,
quite providentially for the medical profession no layman can see his
own soul--it is not as if it were connected with all earth pigs, or all
leopards, as the case may be, but it is in one particular earth pig or
leopard or other animal--so recourse must be had to medical aid when
anything goes wrong with it. It is usually in the temper that the
bush-soul suffers. It is liable to get a sort of aggrieved neglected
feeling, and want things given it. When you wander about the wild gloomy
forests of the Calabar region, you will now and again come across, far
away from all human habitation or plantation, tiny huts, under whose
shelter lies some offering or its remains. Those are offerings
administered by direction of a witch doctor to appease a bush-soul. For
not only can a witch doctor see what particular animal a man's bush-soul
is in, but he can also see whereabouts in the forest that animal is.
Still, these bush-souls are not easily appeased. The worst of it is that
a man may be himself a quiet steady man, careful of his diet and
devoted to a whole skin, and yet his bush-soul be a reckless blade,
scorning danger, and thereby getting itself shot by some hunter or
killed in a trap or pit; and if his bush-soul dies, the man it is
connected with dies. Therefore if the hunter who has killed it can be
found out--a thing a witch doctor cannot do unless he happens by chance
to have had his professional eye on that bush-soul at the time of the
catastrophe; because, as it were, at death the bush-soul ceases to
exist--that hunter has to pay compensation to the family of the
deceased. On the other hand, if the man belonging to the bush-soul dies,
the bush-soul animal has to die too. It rushes to and fro in the
forest--"can no longer find a good place." If it sees a fire, it rushes
into that; if it sees a lot of hunters, it rushes among them--anyhow, it
gets itself killed off.
We will now turn our attention to that other great division of
diseases--namely such as are caused only and directly by human agency.
Those I have already detained you too long over are caused by spirits
acting on their own account, for even in the case of the trapped
dream-souls they are held themselves to have shown contributory
negligence in getting hooked or cut in traps.
The others arise from what is called witchcraft. You will often hear it
said that the general idea among savage races is that death always
arises from witchcraft; but I think, from what I have said regarding
diseases arising from bush-souls' bad tempers, from contracting a
_sisa_, from losing the shadow at high noon, and from, it may be, other
causes I have not spoken of, that this generalisation is for West Africa
too sweeping. But undoubtedly sixty per cent of the deaths are believed
to arise from witchcraft. I would put the percentage higher, were it not
for the terrible mortality from tetanus among children, which sometimes
is and sometimes is not put down to witchcraft, and the mortality from
smallpox and the sleep disease down south in Loango and Kakongo, those
diseases not being in any case that I have had personal acquaintance
with imputed to witchcraft at all. Indeed I venture to think that any
disease that takes an epidemic form is regarded as a scourge sent by
some great outraged Nature spirit, not a mere human dabbler in devils. I
have dealt with witchcraft itself elsewhere, therefore now I only speak
regarding it medically; and I think, roughly speaking, not absolutely,
mind you, that the witching something _out_ of a man is the most common
iniquity of witchcraft from Cape Juby to Cameroons, the region of the
true Negro stock; while from Cameroons to Benguella--the limit of my
knowledge to the south on the western side of the continent--the most
common iniquity of witchcraft is witching something into him. As in the
diseases arising from the loss of the dream-soul I have briefly dealt
with the witching something out, I now turn to the witching something
in.
I well remember, in 1893, being then new to and easily alarmed by the
West Coast, going into a village in Kakongo one afternoon and seeing
several unpleasant-looking objects stuck on poles. Investigation showed
they were the lungs, livers, or spleens of human beings; and local
information stated that they were the powers of witches--witches that
had been killed and, on examination, found to have inside them these
things, dangerous to the state and society at large. Wherefrom it was
the custom to stick up on poles these things as warnings to the general
public not to harbour in their individual interiors things to use
against their fellow-creatures. They mutely but firmly said, "See! if
you turn witch, your inside will be stuck on a pole."
I may remark that in many districts of the South-West coast and middle
Congo it is customary when a person dies in an unexplainable way, namely
without shedding blood, to hold a post-mortem. In some cases the
post-mortem discloses the path of the witch through the victim--usually,
I am informed, the injected witch feeds on the victim's lungs--in other
cases the post-mortem discloses the witch power itself, demonstrating
that the deceased was a keeper of witch power, or, as we should say, a
witch.
Once when I was at Batanga a woman dropped down on the beach and died.
The usual post-mortem was held, and local feeling ran high. "She no
complain, she no say nothing, and then she go die one time." The
post-mortem disclosed what I think you would term a ruptured aneurism of
the aorta, but the local verdict was "she done witch herself"--namely
that she was a witch, who had been eaten by her own power, therefore
there were great rejoicings over her death.
This dire catastrophe is, however, liable to overtake legitimate medical
men. All reasonable people in every clime allow a certain latitude to
doctors. They are supposed to know things other people need not, and to
do things, like dissections and such, that other people should not, and
no one thinks any the worse of them. This is the case with the African
physician, whom we roughly call the witch doctor, but whose full title
is the combatant of the evils worked by witches and devils on human
souls and human property. This medical man has, from the exigencies of
his profession, to keep in his own inside a power, and a good strong one
at that, which he can employ in his practice by sending it into
patients to fetch out other witch powers, _sisas_, or any miscellaneous
kind of devil that may have got into them. His position is totally
different from that of the layman. He is known to possess a witch power,
and the knowledge of how to employ it; but instead of this making him an
object of aversion to his fellow-men, it secures for him esteem and
honour, and the more terrifically powerful his power is known to be, the
more respect he gains; for suppose you were taken ill by a real bad
devil, you would prefer a medical man whose power was at least up to
that devil's fighting weight.
Nevertheless his having to keep the dangerous devil in his own inside
exposes the witch doctor to grave personal danger, for if, from a
particularly healthy season, or some notorious quack coming into his
district, his practice falls off, and his power is thereby not kept fed,
that unfortunate man is liable to be attacked by it. This was given me
as the cause of the death of a great doctor in the Chiloango district,
and I heard the same thing from the Ncomi district, so it is clear that
many eminent men are cut off in the midst of their professional career
in this way.
As for what this power is like in its corporal form, I can only say that
it is evidently various. One witch doctor I know just to the north of
Loango always made it a practice to give his patients a brisk emetic as
soon as he was called in, and he always found young crocodiles in the
consequences. I remember seeing him in one case secure six lively young
crocodiles that had apparently been very recently hatched. These were
witch powers. Again, I was informed of a witch who was killed near the
Bungo River having had found inside him a thing like a lizard, but with
wings like a bat. The most peculiar form of witch power I have heard of
as being found inside a patient was on the Ogowe from two native
friends, both of them very intelligent, reliable men, one of them a
Bible reader. They said that about two years previously a relation of
theirs had been badly witched. A doctor had been called in, who
administered an emetic, and there appeared upon the scene a strange
little animal that grew with visible rapidity. An hour after its coming
to light it crawled and got out of the basin, and finally it flew away.
It had bat's wings and a body and tail like a lizard. This catawampus,
my informant held, had been witched into the man when it was "small,
small"--namely, very small. It might, they thought, have been given to
their relation in some food or drink by an enemy, but for sure, if it
had not been disturbed by that emetic, it would have grown up inside the
man and have eaten its way out through his vitals.
From the whole of the above statements I think I have shown you that if
as a witch doctor you are called in to a patient who is ill, but who is
not showing blood anywhere, your diagnosis will be that he has got some
sort or another of devil the matter with him, and that the first
indication is to find out who put that devil in, because, in the
majority of cases, until you know this you can't get it out; the second
is to get it out; the third is to prevent its getting adrift, and into
some one else.
I have only briefly sketched the ideas and methods of witch doctors in
West Africa, in so far as treatment is concerned. The infinite variety
of methods employed in detecting who has been the witch in a given case;
the infinite variety of incantations and so on, I have no space to dwell
on here, and will conclude by giving you a general sketch of the career
of a witch doctor.
We will start with the medical student stage. Now, every West African
tribe has a secret society--two, in fact, one for men and one for women.
Every free man has to pass through the secret society of his tribe. If
during this education the Elders of this society discover that a boy is
what is called in Calabar an _ebumtup_--a person who can see
spirits--the elders of the society advise that he should be brought up
to the medical profession. Their advice is generally taken, and the boy
is apprenticed as it were to a witch doctor, who requires a good fee
with him. This done, he proceeds with his studies, learns the difference
between the dream-soul basket and the one _sisas_ are kept in--a mistake
between the two would be on a par with mistaking oxalic acid for Epsom
salts. He is then taught how to howl in a professional way, and, by
watching his professor, picks up his bedside manner. If he can acquire a
showy way of having imitation epileptic fits, so much the better. In
fact, as a medical student, you have to learn pretty well as much there
as here. You must know the dispositions, the financial position, little
scandals, &c., of the inhabitants of the whole district, for these
things are of undoubted use in divination and the finding of witches,
and in addition you must be able skilfully to dispense charms, and know
what babies say before their own mothers can. Then some day your
professor and instructor dies, his own professional power eats him, or
he tackles a disease-causing spirit that is one too many for him, and on
you descend his paraphernalia and his practice.
It is usual for a witch doctor to acquire for his power a member of one
of the higher grade spirit classes--he does not acquire a human
soul--and his successor usually, I think, takes the same spirit, or, at
any rate, a member of the same class. This does not altogether limit
you as a successor to a certain line of practice, but, as no one spirit
can do all things, it tends to make you a specialist. I know a district
where, if any one wanted a canoe charm, they went to one medical man; if
a charm to keep thieves off their plantation, to another.
This brings us to the practice itself, and it may be divided into two
divisions. First, prophylactic methods, namely, making charms to protect
your patient's wives, children, goats, plantations, canoes, &c. from
damage, houses from fire, &c., &c., and to protect the patient himself
from wild animals and all danger by land or water. This is a very paying
part, but full of anxiety. For example, put yourself in the place of a
Mpangwe medical friend of mine. You have with much trouble got a really
valuable spirit to come into a paste made of blood and divers things,
and having made it into a sausage form, and done it round with fibre
wonderfully neatly, you have painted it red outside to please the
spirits--because spirits like red, they think it's blood. Well, in a
week or so the man you administered it to comes back and says "that
thing's no good." His paddle has broken more often than before he had
the thing. The amount of rocks, and floating trees, to say nothing of
snags, is, he should say, about double the normal, whereby he has lost a
whole canoe load of European goods, and, in short, he doesn't think much
of you as a charm maker. Then he expectorates and sulks offensively. You
take the charm, and tell him it was a perfectly good one when you gave
it him, and you never had any complaints before, but you will see what
has gone wrong with it. Investigation shows you that the spirit is
either dead or absent. In the first case it has been killed by a
stronger spirit of its own class; in the second, lured away by bribery.
Now this clearly points to your patient's having a dangerous and
powerful enemy, and you point it out to him and advise him to have a
fresh and more powerful charm--necessarily more expensive--with as
little delay as possible. He grumbles, but, realising the danger, pays
up, and you make him another. The old one can be thrown away, like an
empty pill-box.
The other part of your practice--the clinical--consists in combating
those witches who are always up to something--sucking blood of young
children, putting fearful wild fowl into people to eat up their most
valued viscera, or stealing souls o' nights, blighting crops, &c.
Therefore you see the witch doctor's life is not an idle one; he has not
merely to humbug the public and pocket the fees--or I should say "bag,"
pockets being rare in this region--but he works very hard, and has his
anxieties just like a white medical man. The souls that get away from
him are a great worry. The death of every patient is a danger to a
certain extent, because the patient's soul will be vicious to him until
it is buried. But I must say I profoundly admire our West African witch
doctors for their theory of _sisas_ as an explanation of their not
always being able to insert a new soul into a patient, for by this
theory they save themselves somewhat, and do not entail on themselves
the treatment their brother medicos have to go through on the Nass River
in British Columbia. According to Mr. Fraser, in that benighted Nass
River district those native American doctors hold it possible that a
doctor may swallow a patient's soul by mistake. This is their theory to
account for the strange phenomenon of a patient getting worse instead of
better when a doctor has been called in, and so the unfortunate doctor
who has had this accident occur is made to stand over his patient while
another medical man thrusts his fingers in his throat, another kneads
him in the abdomen, and a third medical brother slaps him on the back.
All the doctors present have to go through the same ordeal, and if the
missing soul does not turn up, the party of doctors go to the head
doctor's house to see if by chance he has got it in his box. All the
things are taken out of the box, and if the soul is not there, the head
doctor, the President of the College of Physicians, the Sir Somebody
Something of the district, is held by his heels with his learned head in
a hole in the floor, while the other doctors wash his hair. The water
used is then taken and poured over the patient's head.
I told this story to all the African witch doctors I knew. I fear, that
being hazy in geography, they think it is the practice of the English
medical profession; but, anyhow every one of them regarded the doctors
of the Nass River as a set of superstitious savages, and imbeciles at
that. Of course a medical man had to see to souls, but to go about in
squads, administer rough emetics to themselves, instead of to the
patients, and as for that head washing--well, people can be fool too
much! None of them showed the slightest signs of adopting the British
Columbia method, none of them showed even any signs of adopting my
suggestion that they should go and teach those benighted brothers of
theirs the theory of _insisa_.
If you ask me frankly whether I think these African witch doctors
believe in themselves, I think I must say, Yes; or perhaps it would be
safer to say they believe in the theory they work by, for of that there
can be very little doubt. I do not fancy they ever claim invincible
power over disease; they do their best according to their lights. It
would be difficult to see why they should doubt their own methods,
because, remember, all their patients do not die; the majority recover.
I am not putting this recovery down to their soul-treatment method, but
to the village apothecary, who has usually been doctoring the patient
with drugs before the so-called witch doctor is called in. Of course the
apothecary does not get the credit of the cure in this case, but I fancy
he deserves it. Another point to be remembered is that the Africans on
the West Coast, at any rate, are far more liable than white men to many
strange nervous disorders, especially to delirium, which often occurs in
a comparatively slight illness. Why I do not pretend to understand; but
I think in these nervous cases the bedside manners of a witch
doctor--though strongly resembling that of the physician who attended
the immortal Why Why's mother--may yet be really useful.
As to the evil these witch doctors do in the matter of getting people
killed for bewitching it is difficult to speak justly. I fancy that, on
the whole, they do more good than harm, for remember witchcraft in these
districts is no parlour game; in the eyes of Allah as well as man it is
murder, for most of it is poison. Most witchcraft charms I know of among
people who have not been in contact with Mohammedanism have always had
that element of mixing something with the food or drink--even in that
common, true Negro form of killing by witchcraft, putting medicine in
the path, there is a poisoned spike as well as charm stuff. There can be
no doubt that the witch doctor's methods of finding out who has poisoned
a person are effective, and that the knowledge in the public mind of
this detective power keeps down poisoning to a great extent. Of the
safeguards against unjust accusation I will speak when treating of law.
As to their using hypnotism, I suppose they do use something of the sort
at times. West Indians, with whom I was always anxious to talk on the
differences and agreements between Vodou and Obeah and their parent West
African religion, certainly, in their description of what they called
Wanga--and translated as Glamour--seemed to point to this; but for
myself, save in the case of blood coming before, one case of which I
witnessed, I have seen nothing beyond an enormously elaborated common
sense. I dare not call it sound, because it is based on and developed
out of animism, and of that and our white elaborated view I am not the
judge, remembering you go the one way, I the other--which is the best,
God knows.