beach at Corisco Bay. The natives could not make it out at
all. They were irritated about her conduct : “ She no sick,
she no complain, she no nothing, and then she go die one
time.”
The post-mortem showed a burst aneurism. The native
verdict was “ She done witch herself,” i.e., she was a witch
eaten by her own familiar.
The general opinion held by people living near a river is
that the spirit of a witch can take the form of a crocodile to
do its work in ; those who live away from large rivers or in
districts like Congo Français, where crocodiles are not very
savage, hold that the witch takes on the form of a leopard.
Still the crocodile spirit form is believed in in Congo Français,
and to a greater extent in Kacongo, because here
the crocodiles of the .Congo are very ferocious and numerous,
taking as heavy a toll in human life as they do in the delta
of the Niger and the estuaries of the Sierra Leone and
Sherboro’ Rivers.
One witch-doctor I know in Kacongo had a strange professional
method. When, by means of his hand rubbings, &c., he
had got hold of a witch or a bewitched one, he always gave
the unfortunate an emetic and always found several lively
young crocodiles in the consequence, and the stories of the
natives in this region abound in accounts of people who have
been carried off by witch crocodiles, and kept in places underground
for years. I often wonder whether this idea may not
have arisen from the well-known habit of the crocodile of
burying its prey on the bank. Sometimes it will take off a
limb of its victim at once, but frequently it buries the body
whole for a few days before eating it. The body is always
buried if it is left to the crocodile.
I have a most profound respect for the whole medical
profession, but I am bound to confess that the African representatives
of it are a little empirical in their methods of treatment.
The African doctor is not always a witch-doctor in
the bargain, but he is usually. Lady doctors abound. They
are a bit dangerous in pharmacy, but they do not often venture
on surgery, so on the whole they are safer, for African surgery
is heroic. Dr. Nassau cited the worst case of it I know of.
A man had been accidentally shot in the chest by another man
with a gun on the Ogowe. The native doctor who was called
in made a perpendicular incision into the man’s chest, extending
down to the last rib ; he then cut diagonally across, and
actually lifted the wall of the chest, and groped about among
the vitals for the bullet which he successfully extracted.
Patient died. No anaesthetic was employed.
I came across a minor operation. A man had broken the
ulna of the left arm. The native doctor got a piece a very
nice piece— of bamboo, drove it in through the muscles and
integuments from the wrist to the elbow, then encased the
limb in plantain leaves, and bound it round, tightly and neatly,
needless to say with tie-tie. The arm and hand when I saw
it, some six or seven months after the operation, was quite
useless, and was withering away. • :
Many of their methods, however, are better. The Dualla
medicos are truly great on poultices for extracting foreign
substances, such as bits of iron cooking-pot— a very frequent
form of foreign substance in a man out here, owing to their
being generally used as bullets. Almost incredible stories are
told by black and white of the efficacy of these poultices ; one
case I heard from a reliable source of a man who had been
shot with fragments of iron pot in the thigh. The white
doctor extracted several pieces and said he had got all out,
but the man still went on suffering, and could not walk, so,
at his request, a native doctor was called in, and he applied
his poultice. ■ In a few minutes he removed it, and on its face
were two pieces of jagged iron pot. Probably they had been
in the poultice when it was applied, anyhow the patient
recovered rapidly.
B,aths accompanied by massage are much esteemed. The
baths are sometimes of hot water with a few herbs thrown in,
sometimes they are made by digging a hole in the earth and
putting into it a quantity of herbs, and bruised cardamoms,
and peppers. Boiling water is then plentifully poured over
these and the patient is placed in the bath and is covered over
with the parboiled green stuff; a coating of clay is then placed
over all, leaving just the head sticking out. The patient
remains in this bath for a period of a few hours, up to a day