CHAPTER VIII

RETREAT LIFE
Society Foods — Ordeals — Relaxations — Lessons — Object and Model — Natural History and Botany — Law and Land Debates — Meaning of Tabu and Fetish — Folklore — Tribal Customs.
The catering for a large number of people living away from the ordinary means of supply is not so great a task in Africa as it would be in some other countries. That may be why only one society in- cludes amongst its officials a Caterer or " Mother of Porridge."
Food may be provided by rich members, as in Idiong and Gelede, by the officials, by the relatives of the novices, or by the novices them- selves. " Old boys " of the schools may make presents of food, and farmers are known to " plough for their society," i.e., set aside the harvest of some field to provision those in the sacred enclosure. If a BuTWA boy is forced by any circumstance to leave before the school closes he is compelled to provide food for the others during the remainder of the term.
SOCIETY FOODS
Special society foods are known. Nkamba has its own potage au gras, and Ogboni boasts a soup that contains from forty-eight to one hundred-and- two herbal ingredients " according to the season
131
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of the year." The Oyeni fotoli is a dish of corn- meal, millet, palm-oil, lalarkabi (shark), beef or goat flesh, boiled in sea-water and suitably seasoned.
There are also society seasonings, aromatic herbs, peppers, alliaceous bulbs, certain barks (Egbo), and bark-snuffs, like that mixed with atcha used by Egugu. The Poro millet dumplings are eaten with " a society ketshup," and the Nkanda novices have their food savoured with a salt that they make themselves, burning aquatic herbs, filter- ing the ashes, and obtaining the crystals by evaporation.
Special drinks are also brewed, mostly beers of banana, honey, maize, millet, palm-wine, sorghum, and raffia of palm.
Food taboos may be enforced on the novices, such as those on ground-nuts, guinea-corn, eggs and pepper by Ampora. Certain fruits are denied them by several societies, and others tabu tobacco, snuff, beer, and vegetables. These disciplines may include the officials. The priests of Oyeni must not take salt in any form save that of sea-water. The Grand Tasso is denied all prepared foods. The Nanam officials must eat their food in darkness.
ORDEALS
One of the lessons learned by the novice in the puberty school is " the strengthening of the will to endure pain and the ability to endure it in silence." It is by means of " ordeals " that the tutors teach this fortitude of body and courage of spirit.
The ordeals may include hunger, thirst, exposure, and eating unsavoury food, often with hands tied behind the back. This last has a religious significance
A CHIBAPOS GfAKDIAX
RETREAT LIFE 133
amongst the West Coast peoples, as it has amongst the Malays. Nkamba girls are driven, grunting like pigs, to the feeding grounds of those animals, where they have to eat olfal from the earth without touch of hand. The first meals of the Ndembo novices are masticated for them (here probably being another suggestion of " new birth ") by the ofhcials, who deposit the well-chewed food " with a liberal supply of saliva " on the head of a drum, from which the novitiate must take it kneeling, and with hands tied behind, " eating it all without scruple and without diffidence."
The fire test is a frequent one. Kufong and other boys have burning brands flourished within touch of face, and many societies compel both boys and girls to leap over or walk through fire. The society just mentioned also makes the lads balance themselves on the sharp edges of hot axes, in a sitting posture or in that of climbing, the latter being an African manifestation of the sword-ladder of the Chinese.
The Masubori youth is sent to the cross- roads at midnight, with orders to stay there no matter what happens. The first to try to frighten him away is an official disguised as a bori, spirit, the next appears to have but one eye and that glowing and blazing like a fire, the next is a warrior who thrusts at the boy with a spear, the next a magician who drops writhing, luminous snakes on him, and so on, until the test is considered com- plete. Many novices find themselves thrust into the midst of men apparently desperately fighting, who show seemingly terrible wounds, and who at one moment act as if in the dissolution of death, and in the next are leaping, threatening and using their weapons as if desirous of killing all within reach.
Nkanda boys are not reckoned worthy until
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they have passed three trials ; lobo^ the creeping through a trench in which hide threatening men grotesquely clad ; ganda, another trench, shaped like a cross, in the exploration of which the boys blunder into vessels of goat's blood, and inadvertently pull other horrors over them ; and mete nkanda, the jumping over and through bushes in which arrows, knives and spears, sharp edges and points every- where, have been fixed.
Noise being a valuable fetish, a deafening clatter is kept up during most of the ordeals, the idea being that amidst it the novices will forget themselves and their pain and discomfort, just as an injured soldier will forget his wounds and continue fighting in the noise and excitement of a battle.
There are punishments meted out for undue display of fear, such as being kept from the fire, compulsory fagging, being " sent to Coventry," having the face tied up to prevent speech, and starva- tion. A particularly severe form of the last is the compelling of the hungry to watch the feasting of the others, as in Ayaka, knowing that not even a grain or crumb will drop for them. A more cruel punishment still is the compulsory eating of " thorn " porridge, a mess of boiled grain thickly studded with ugly thorns. With hands tied behind them the culprits are made to lap this up dog-fashion. Those bleeding mouths trying to satisfy hunger are a pathetic illustration of the rigours of the training known in these puberty schools.
Other ordeals have to do with the taking of the society medicines. The Butwa novices have to drink chibolo, a compound of certain powdered crystals, the parings from the feet of crocodile, elephant, armadillo, tortoise, scorpion, certain herbs, and dog's dung and human excrement, all boiled together. Whilst this is being drunk a song is sung,
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*' Oh, come and drink, ye mother's children, come and drink : if any stay away, he's the child of a slave : let him stay."
An ordeal of quite another type is known in some of the Nigerian societies, the novices being given a secret to keep just before their relatives come to the sacred enclosure to see them. If it is successfully kept six others are imparted, and if these remain undivulged the first secrets of the society are taught.
RELAXATIONS
Fortunately for the youths and maidens con- cerned the whole time of the retreat is not occupied by ordeals.
Ampora bangans (probationers) are taught to act the part of officials and councillors in a masquerade that, like the old-time Feast of the Innocents, de- generates often into a hilarious scramble for the garments of dignity, and a general rough-and-tumble to see who shall wear them.
TiLANG has a special snuff-taking ceremony that provides good fun ; the snuff being sprinkled on hot coals and the boys having to draw the fumes into their nostrils. In more than one school the practical joking has to do with snuff-taking, the dust being mixed with that of red peppers and other pungent stuffs to provide shocks for the unwary and laughter for the others.
The African is a rare mimic, and much of this power is cultivated in the schools. Most of the novices might well be taken for children of that man employed by Emin Pasha who amused the caravan in imitation of his master by asking the names of villages and trees, plants and lakes, mountains, tribes and individuals, and pretending to
136 WEST AFRICAN SECRET SOCIETIES
record the answers in a hand-made notebook by the aid of a discarded pencil-stub.
They make up a story and act it by mute gestures, in a sort of Roman ^antomimi, the chorus in the background chanting a soft narration of the plot or description of the acting ; or in a wild travesty of dramatic effort they turn tragedy into comedy, melodrama into farce, and heroes and villains into clowns and loons. They reproduce tribal fables and legends in dance-dramas, and amateur plays that recall the Atellan farces of Ancient Rome, with all the stock characters complete, the fool, the fat man, the daddy, the sharper, the monsters, the bogeys ; the story being related in improvised dialogue. Ekkpo-Njawhaw has a marionette show, with clay figures ; these being manipulated by members hidden beneath the table that forms the stage.
Dumb charades are popular, and the subjects chosen know no limit, even the after-death spirits not being immune from these caricatures. Young Africa is not at all unlike Young America or Young Europe in making objects of irreverent amusement the things their elders hold sacred.
They become gods doing kindnesses or ordering punishments, ancestral spirits committing absurd- ities, medicine men conducting red-water and other ordeals, kings and queens and chiefs receiving embassies, white travellers becoming lost in the bush, official surveyors madly attempting chastisement of unobservant carriers, commissioners presiding over courts, and missionaries holding a service or dispensing medicine. By aid of some simple domestic utensil they become a household, a calabash dish on their head makes them warriors, or placed else- where converts them into hunchbacks. A stick becomes every weapon known to them. Yet the " properties " are secondary ; it is the play of
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feature and action of body that tells the story. Now they are sycophant, now proud ; here is a girl becoming a very Tarpeia pleading for bracelets and being buried under shields ; and here a boy acts a hairless Silenus bound in floral chains and made drunken to prophesy, or a Tantalus seeking and not finding sustenance, or just a rogue — dis- sipated but braggart. Every joy or sorrow they know or can imagine, every pride and humiliation, every satisfaction and every disappointment they hasten to express ; now swathed in bandages they whine for charity, then, in the joy of the game, forget the intended role and plunge into agile con- tortion, clever acrobatics, and laughable monte- bankery.
The Okonko girls during their nkpu period do no work, and are provided with more food than they can eat. " Some grow grossly fat and heavy, and all exhibit signs of over-feeding, but when on parade they receive honour in proportion to their size, and the fatter they are the more pleased and proud are their future husbands." (The retreat of this society is known as the " wife-making school.")
The boys of Dus are taken journeys through the country whilst being taught tribal traditions and folklore.
Games are played ; battledore and shuttlecock with rapphia missiles, and the game of the thirty- two holes containing counters of shells, berries or beads that is known by many names, but is played under the same rules all over the continent. They " follow the leader " with rare patience and perseverance, being praised or blamed as they achieve success or suffer failure. They play their own version of " prisoner's base," all the while singing at the top of their voices. They have a game like that of the English " We are the Rovers," and another like
138 WEST AFRICAN SECRET SOCIETIES
" Hare and Hounds," in which they chase their tutors as did the Spartan boys their agetes on the opening day of the Carnea. They play robbers, boatmen, fishermen, barbers, pilgrims, wise men, warriors, hunters, imitate animals from the stately elephant to the chattering monkey and from the somnolent hippopotamus to the vital, elusive snake, and march round the enclosure as mock serenaders, raising " melody " on improvised instruments.
Above all, they dance and sing. Dancing is in their blood. The common salutation is not " How do you do ? " but " What do you dance ? " Ampora, Ayaka, Bundu, Ekkpe, Ikung, and other novices, are taught their duties and responsibilities in songs, most of them chanted in the society language.
LESSONS
The boys are encouraged to become proficient in boxing, wrestling and other athletic exercises, in shooting (with weapons from bows and arrows to modern rifles) and in hunting and other food-provid- ing pursuits. The girls are guided in decorum, the law of hospitality, the meaning of birth and marriage, the decencies, the principles of behaviour (including warnings against loud-voiced disputations) and the responsibilities caused by death of relative and friend.
The mallams of Musubori teach reading and writing, and give memory tests. The murshids of BoRi lead their boys through a course of in- struction and discipline bearing a striking resemblance to that of the Gnostics with its seven archon-guarded gates. It is known as the tariqa, a path that has many maqamdt and ''aqdbdt, hard and rugged places diffi-
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cult to overcome, but ends in the possession of manliness and wisdom. They of Mahammah- Jamboh meet in frequent session to examine the novices and give advice as to future conduct and choice of profession. In these sessions, as in the Jemaa of the Berbers, the Head of the society- grants private interviews to the lads, in which he exhorts them to bravery and industry, stimulating them by the memory of their ancestors, and giving them a sense of security by enlarging upon the power of the fellowship into which they have been admitted.
Object and model lessons are given in house- building, cattle- tending, gardening and general agriculture, in mat-weaving, wood-carving, metal- working, in natural history and botany, in the making of nets, pots and charms, and in the stringing of beads and the composition of bead- work.
House building used to be one of the greatest activities of the puberty schools but, like everything else on the Coast, the hand of " progress " is now evident in the sacred enclosure, its erections being the work of professional builders and artists instead of that of the officials.
Mat-making is usual, most novices having to make the sleeping and food mats used in retreat. Andomba make palm-shingles for the roofing of houses, the " tiles " being the great fronds doubled and redoubled, and interwoven to a twelve-by-eight inches size. The money gained by their sale is divided amongst the workers. There is also the weaving of various rapphias into hats and pro- cessional finery.
Wood-carving is taught. Nkanda boys make the large combs they wear, some of them being of excellent workmanship and design. Ampora boys are also notable wood-workers. In some of
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the Lower Niger society schools the novices are taught to carve roots and stems into images and dolls. The society staves are often cut and orna- mented during the retreats.
The making of the dolls is an industry of both wood-carving and bead-work. Yassi, also Mori and
Masubori, girls make them from wood, and dress and tend them much in the same way as do their European sisters. These jou-jou (as the Mandingo correctly name them) are not often made with limbs. And they are hardly ever seen outside the enclosures.
Metal working is infrequent
in other than the societies
founded by blacksmiths' septs,
as Ayaka, but HuMoi and
Ikung teach this craft.
Natural history is not so well taught in the West
as in the Bantu societies of the East, but lessons
are given in an elementary way. They include
toxicology.
Botany is taught, in Nkamba by journeys for the selection of natural foods, and in its male school, Nkimba, by learning lists of herbs and their uses, whether edible, medicinal or poisonous, and what are the antidotes to the last. Sande gives a leaf and sends the girls out to find the tree or shrub from which it has been taken. In this the making of snuffs may be mentioned. Many novices are taught how to select the bark, and pre- pare, boil, dry, and fan it in obedience to rules established by age-long precedent.
Gbangbani enforces the collection of speci- mens of all the local woods, berries, fruits, barks, herbs, flowers, and seeds.
Retreat Dolls.
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Various forms of gardening and agriculture are made lessons in the schools, and several of the societies assist their young members afterwards in the purchase and cultivation of farms.
Law and Land Debates are held. In them the legal code is explained, both native and engrafted laws ; a very complicated and voluminous subject that requires a great deal of explanation, as all those working on the West Coast know. Poro, Egbo and other societies, concerning the land question, teach that there can be no individual ownership of the soil ; that all land within the tribal boundary whether cultivated or pasturage, waste, forest or town lots, belongs to the community as a whole, and to them in perpetuity and not to the heirs of the present occupiers ; that the individual acquires certain rights by reason of cultivation work, but no right of proprietorship as that word is interpreted outside Africa ; that no man, not even a chief, can alienate the land ; none can sell it, and that money received for any such trans- action is blood-money gained by the betrayal of the people.
Meaning of Tabu and Fetish. They are instructed in the meaning of taboos ; why there should be close seasons for certain oil-bearing and fruiting trees, and for certain beasts, birds and fish ; why, too, they should not use certain fields or rivers, roads, villages or houses, or why they should have commerce with certain people, and why they should restrain certain human actions and desires.
Many of these restrictions may be due to, or be aggravated by, what are commonly called super- stitions, such as the custom of restricting, or wholly ruling out, the use of certain words, especially names, as known to Bori, whose women will never call their husbands by their names lest harm come from
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the use, and as known to Poro, whose members refrain from mentioning the name of a mother-in- law; but all are not so. Many are decidedly good in a utilitarian sense.
They have a direct bearing on the health of the people. For instance, in the old days eating was a discipline rather than an enjoyment. Every mouth- ful had a moral purpose. To be fleet one had to eat the body of a fleet animal. To be strong one had to eat an animal of strength. To be brave one had to dine off the heart of a courageous foe, whether man or lion. And so on. But those days are passing. The people now eat because it is natural and pleasant so to do, and therefore are liable to overeat. Hence the tabu on certain foods. The native doctors say, '' Don't eat such and such," the tabu including foods being indulged in to the danger of health. Or they say to an ailing person " Don't go on such- and-such a path," knowing that along that path the offending fruits or vegetables are most easily procured, and the patient by obeying the tabu is probably cured of indigestion or scurvy, or some other disagreeable complaint. Also, by putting places out of bounds the patient may gain what he or she really needs, rest, the confinement to the village, the compound or the house, thus using a simple and sensible way of regaining health and strength. Many societies have stayed the spread of contagious diseases by pronouncing all touching of a dead body ceremonially unclean for a fortnight or three weeks, and by enforcing upon all the mourners ceremonial washings and medicine- takings.
There is also a significant moral element in their teaching concerning the use of fetishes. Their dogma is that these vindicate the right and the true. " Fetishes will never work for the guilty party," they say. The Nkimba phrase is, " Nkisi kuma
\ Hl'NDU TUTOR (.>F Fll TV VICARS AGO.
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kadilanga " (that which is fetish will never injure or in any way operate against an innocent person, or, to make it a shorter sentence, a fetish will never justify wrong). An illustration of this is seen in the use of the fetish leaves placed about a farm or a house for the detection of thieves. These are said to blow to pieces and utterly destroy the thief ; but the owner of the farm or the house will walk upon them without a qualm, whilst the thief will walk long miles to avoid them. Moreover, should the owner make a mistake and set his fetish against one who is not guilty, or if he attempts to use it spitefully, the fetish force invoked will not only not attack the innocent, but will turn and smite the owner w^ith the evils he has sought unjustly to induce in the guiltless.
Tabu and fetish may be " symbols of hope mis- placed and misdirected," as some aver, but where a rag blessed by a society priest will keep a scoundrel from making a raid on virtue, where an image borrowed from a society house will frustrate the designs of a sharper, where a twig from a sacred tree will keep out a burglar, where a charm containing medicine compounded by an official will ward off the highwayman, where an injunction will make for sanitation and good health, and where any heathen law will help a man to approach and keep any law of the unknown God, there is an element of good the usefulness of which is undeniable both as a factor in the upward trend of the Negro race and as a ground of appeal in directing the race to nobler, truer, and better things.
The i breaking of native law leads to the inflic- tion [of jnative punishment, and both still have a more salutary effect upon the native than those brought into the land by white men. The con- sciousness of having broken a fetish law has driven many Africans to despair, whilst imprison-
144 WEST AFRICAN SECRET SOCIETIES
ment in government jails leaves them happy and triumphant.
Folklore, that one touch of nature that makes the whole world kin, is taught in these schools. Only the Muhammedan tutors have printed or written records to aid their teaching, but those Pagan have developed remembrance into an art. They can recite complete and lengthy " books " of tribal history and biography. Their saga-songs, lilted to tunes that are the original plantation melodies, embrace the history of centuries. A single poem of the Bakuba people, for instance, celebrates the lives of no less than one hundred and twenty- four kings.
The Moasidi of Nkanda might be called the Poet Laureate of his people (Bushongo), and several societies have officers who act as Conservators of tribal legends. These recite the records with or without accompanying music, their efforts often, like those of the Arab reciters in the coffee-shops of Cairo, lasting many hours, any lapse of memory being tided over by ready imagination. Katahwira men and their affiliated women will recite for a whole day without break long screeds of doggerel and free verse. Memory tests are made compulsory in many of the schools, and the youths and maidens are helped to remember by aid of proverb-dialogues and word-games.
Traditions are told concerning the introduction of such things as fire, domestic animals, cooked meals, sowing and reaping, service of drugs, and the use of the hoe, the axe and the gun.
Here is a Batanga story, told in the Malanda school, of the introduction to them of the use of tobacco. " Lusana Lumumbala went away ; so long was he away that people forgot the time, but they did not forget Lusana : was he away five years or ten, who shall say ? he returned : he told his
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travels : he took from the folds of his dress an instrument : great was the wonder at sight of it : he took also a herb : none before had seen it, for like the instrument it was not of this land : Lusana put the herb into the instrument : he put the instru- ment into his mouth, put coal thereto, and made smoke and drank it : the people cried, what has Lusana done, for he eats fire and drinks smoke ? he answered, it is a magic plant : they ask, does it taste good ? it is good, he said : it is the best magic I have learned on my travels : all men should know this plant, especially those who have anger in their hearts, those who quarrel, those who take up knives to kill their neighbours : those who know this plant do not have anger, they do not quarrel, they do not kill : they say, do not these who offend us come from the same sort of womb as we, therefore, let us not slay, let us punish : one drinking of this herb will make them say that, and two will cause them to say, in our punishment we will not hurt over- much, and those who drink deeply will say, why hurt at all with blows when speech is so much better : then they drink again, and think out heavy words to say : they drink again of the wisdom of this herb, and know that words are at best womanly things : they can be sweet and they can be bitter, but those sweet are best : thus spoke Lusana, with whom his brother, being envious, desired to quarrel : saying, come my brother, sit here m the shade, here is the herb and here is the pipe, enjoy yourself : I will run down a chicken and will buy palm-wine, for this day we hold festival together. The words of Lusana Lumumbala are ended."
They tell stories of the creation of the world, the birth of man and his mating with woman, the cause of the difference between black and white and why white rules and black serves. Long before the
K
146 WEST AFRICAN SECRET SOCIETIES
Pagans knew that there were such things as Jewish and Islamic scriptures, and long before Bible and Koran were translated into any African speech, they were telling stories of the Garden of Eden, the slaying of Abel by Cain, the Flood, the Flight from Egypt, and the Translation of Elijah, and they still tell these stories as their fathers told them. Other stories are told in these schools, also older than the Christian invasion of the West Coast, of historical figures who became or attempted to become the saviours of their people; beautiful figures, according to the telling, and strangely like the sublimest figure of all, that of Jesus of Palestine.
They repeat fables like those of Aesop, Reynard the Fox, Beauty and the Beast, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, and like those known to Uncle Remus, with the spider and the tortoise and the elephant acting in the Brer Rabbit hero-way, helped by the clever squirrel, the wise parrot and the benevolent owl against the greedy baboon, the clumsy hyena and the cruel leopard. Stories of beasts thinking and talking as clearly as men are frequent, as are those of beautiful maidens being wooed and won by animal and spirit lovers, animals after the order of the wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus who protect and help and fight for human beings, men and women changed into beast form until the spell is broken by some good and brave influence, and strange guidance-giving eagles and challenging, red cocks, like those of Ygdrasil the world-tree of Odin, which awaken the gods from sleep, put demons of darkness to flight, and herald the dawn of a new- made world for the work and play of the sons of men.
So great is the wealth of traditional stories in West Africa that in one of its larger states, Nigeria, the legends are in groups, and each group is reputed
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to contain sixteen hundred and eighty connected stories.
Tribal Customs are explained, taught and enforced in the schools, especially those having to do with birth and death.