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.
LADY OF OBAMBO, OGOWE, SHOWING CICATRISATION.
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
the skin and then placing in the wound the fluff of the silk
T h e 'g r e a t point of agreement b e t w e e n all these West
African secret societies lies in the methods of
The boy if he belongs to a tribe that goes in for tattooing,
g S a n d is handed over ,o f e S *
secrets and formula:. He lives, with the other boys oi his
tribe undergoing initiation, usually under the r^ ° ^
instructors, and for the space of one year He
in the forest, and is naked and smeared with clay.
The boys are exercised so as to become mure
ship ; in sonie districts, they make raids so as to perfect themselves
in this useful accomplishment. They always take a new
name, and are supposed by the initiation process
new beings in the magic wood, and on their return
village at the end of their course, they pretend to have entirely
forgotten their life before they entered the wood ; but this pretence
is not kept up beyond the period of festivities given to
welcome them home. They all learn, to a certain extent a new
language, a secret language only understood by the initiated.
The same removal from home and instruction from initiated
members is also observed with the girls. However m their
case it is not always a forest-grove they are secluded^m,
sometimes it is done in huts. Among the Gram Coast tribes,
however, the girls go into a magic wood until they are marne .
Should they have to leave the wood for any tempo ral reason,
they must smear themselves with white clay. A simiar
custom holds good in Okyon, Calabar district, where, should a
girl have to leave the fattening-house, she must be covered wi
white clay. I believe this fattening-house custom in Calabar
is not only for fattening up the women to improve their
appearance, but an initiatory custom as well, although ttie
main intention is now, undoubtedly, fattening, and the girl is
constantly fed with fat-producing f o o d s , s u c h as fou-fou soaked
in palm oil. I am told, but I think wrongly, that the white
clay with which a Calabar girT is kept covered while in
the fattening-house, putting on an extra coating o 1
ihould she come outside, is to assist in the fattening process