N o i e n f T ’ - 'T Wd WeiS’ ° ne Du- l^ a n d two Yorubas.
and l r r an^uaSes fitted, so they talked trade English,
nd pretty lively talk some of it was, but of that anon.
tion;03” ^ 4 d °Sethls brief notice ° f native ideas without men-
ng the secret societies; but to go fully into this branch of
be subject would require volumes, for every tribe has its
secret s o c e ^ The Pcorah o f Sierra Leone. ,he O™ of
nf th°SM g ° ,Calabarj the Yasi of the Igalwa, the Ukuku
2 ? ^ P°ngWS Ikun ° f the Bakele> and the Lukuku of
he Bachilangi, Baluba, are some of the most powerful secret
societies on the West African Coast.
Jhese secret societies are not essentially religious, their
ion is main y judicial, and their particularly presiding spirit
is not a god or devil in our sense of the word. The ritual
differs for each in its detail, but there are broad lines of agreement
between them. There are societies both for men and for
women, but no mixed societies for both sexes. Those that I
have mentioned above are all male, and women are utterly
forbidden to participate in the rites or become acquainted
with heir secrets, for one of the chief duties of these societies
is to keep the women in order ; and besides this reason it is
undoubtedly held that women are bad for certain forms of
ju-ju, even when these forms are not directly connected, as far
a s 1 can find out, with the secret society. For example the
other day a chief up the Mungo River deliberately destroyed
his ju-ju by showing it to his women. It was a great ju-ju
but expensive to keep up, requiring sacrifices of slaves and"
goats, so what with trade being bad, fall in the price of oil and
ivory and so on, he felt he could not afford that ju-ju, and so
destroyed its power, so as to prevent its harming him when he
neglected it. Probably the destructive action of women
is not only the idea of their inferiority— for had inferiority
been the point, that chief would have laid his ju-ju with dogs
or pigs— but arises from the undoubted fact that women
are notably deficient in real reverence for authority, as is
demonstrated by the way they continually treat that of their
husbands.
The general rule with these secret societies is to admit the
young free people at an age of about eight to ten years, the
boys entering the male, the girls the female society. Both
societies are rigidly kept apart. A man who attempts to penetrate
the female mysteries would be as surely killed as a woman
who might attempt to investigate the male mysteries ; still I
came, in 1893, across an amusing case which demonstrates the
inextinguishable thirst for knowledge, so long as that knowledge
is forbidden, which characterises our sex. Alas ! had only this
Forschungschwarmerei filled us for other classes of knowledge,
we might have been the discoverers of the electric telegraph,
and a thing or so more of that order.
It was in the district just south of Big Batanga. The male
society had been very hard on the ladies for some time, and
one day one star-like intellect among the latter told her next-
door neighbour, in strict confidence, that she did not believe
Ikun was a spirit at all, but only old So-and-so dressed up in
leaves. This rank heresy spread rapidly, in strict confidence,,
among the ladies at large, and they used to assemble together
in the house of the foundress of the theory, secretly of course,,
because husbands down there are hasty with the cutlass and
the kassengo, and they talked the matter over. Somehow or
other, this came to the ears of the men. Whether the ladies-
got too emancipated and winked when Ikun was mentioned,
or asked how Mr. So-and-so was this morning, in a pointed
way, after an Ikun manifestation, I do not know; some people-
told me this was so, but others, who, I fear, were right, considering
the acknowledged slowness of men in putting two-
and two together, and the treachery of women towards
each other, said that a woman had told a man that she had
heard Some of the other women were going on in this
heretical way. Anyhow, the men knew, and were much
alarmed; scepticism had spread by now to such an extent
that nothing short of burning or drowning all the women
could stamp it out and reintroduce the proper sense of awe
into the female side of society, and after a good deal of consideration
the men saw, for men are undoubtedly more gifted
in foresight than our sex, that it was no particular use reintroducing
this awe if there was no female half of society to
be impressed by it. It was a brain-spraining problem for the
men all round, for it is clear society cannot be kept together