The duration of the period of seclusion varies somewhat.
San Salvador boys are six months in the wood. Cameroon
boys are twelve months. In most districts the girls are
betrothed in infancy, and they go into the wood or initiatory
hut for a few months before marriage. In this case the time
seems to vary with the circumstances of the individual; not
so with the boys, for whom each tribal society has a duly
appointed course terminating at a duly appointed time; but
sometimes, as among some of the Yoruba tribes, the boy has
to remain under the rule of the presiding elders of the society,
painted white, and wearing only a bit of grass cloth, if he
wears anything, until he has killed a man. Then he is held to
have attained man’s estate by having demonstrated his
courage and also by having secured for himself the soul of
the man he has killed as a spirit slave.
The initiation of boys into a few of the elementary dogmas
of the secret society by no means composes the entire work
of the society. All of them are judicial, and taken on the
whole they do an immense amount of good. The methods
are frequently a little quaint. Rushing about the streets disguised
under masks and drapery, with an imitation tail swinging
behind you, while you lash out at every one you meet with
a whip or cutlass, is not a European way of keeping the peace,
or perhaps I should say maintaining the dignity of the law.
But discipline must be maintained, and this is the West
African way of doing it.
The Egbo of Calabar is a fine type of the secret society.
It is exceedingly well developed in its details, not sketchy like
Yasi, nor so red-handed as Poorah. Unfortunately, however,
I cannot speak with the same amount of knowledge of Egbo
as I could of Poorah.
Egbo has the most grades of initiation, except perhaps
Poorah, and it exercises jurisdiction over all classes of crime
except witchcraft. Any Efifik man who desires to become an
influential person in the tribe must buy himself into as high a
grade of Egbo as he can afford, and these grades are expensive,
¿1,500 or ¿1,000 English being required for the higher steps'
I am informed. But it is worth it to a great trader, as an
influential Efifik necessarily is, for he can call out his own class
of Egbo and send it against those of his debtors who may be
of lower grades, and as the Egbo methods of delivering As
orders to pay up consist in placing Egbo at a man s doorw y.
and until it removes itself from that doorway the man dare
not venture outside his house, it is most successful.
Of course the higher a man is in Egbo rank, the greater
p o w e r and security, for lower grades cannot proceed against
higher ones. Indeed, when a man meets the paraphernalia of
a higher grade of Egbo than that to which he belongs he has
to act as if he were lame, and limp along past it humbly, as if
the sio-ht of it had taken all the strength out of him, and,
needless to remark, higher grade debtors flip their fingers at
lower grade creditors. I R U
After talking so much about the secret society spirits, it may
be as well to say what they are. They are, one and all, a kmd
of a sort of a something that usually (the exception is Ikun)
lives in the bush. Last February I was making my way back
toward Duke Town— late, as usual; I was just by a town on
the Owa River. As I was hurrying onward I heard a terrific
uproar accompanied by drums in the thick bush into which
after a brief interval of open ground, the path turned,
became cautious and alarmed, and hid in some dense bush as
the men making the noise approached. I saw it was some
iu-iu affair. They had a sort of box which they carried on
poles and their dresses were peculiar, and abnormally ample
over the upper part of their body. They were prancing about
in an ecstatic way round the box, which had one end open, beating
their drums and shouting. They were fairly close to me,
but fortunately turned their attention to another bit of undergrowth,
or that evening they would have landed another kind
of thing to what they were after. The bushes they selected
they surrounded, and evidently did their best to induce something
to come out of them and go into their box arrangement.
I was every bit as anxious as they were that they should succeed
and succeed rapidly, for you know there are a nasty iot
of snakes and things in general, not to mention driver ants,
about that Calabar bush, that do not make it at all pleasant
to go sitting about in. However, presently they got this
something into their box and rejoiced exceedingly, and