Page:West African Studies.djvu/221

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
vii
THE FANGAREE AND OTHER CHARMS
165

ing the personal connection between the victim and the charm by means of making him look on the charm and calling his name. Without his looking it's no good. Hence it comes that it is held unwise to look behind when you hear a noise o'night in the bush; indeed, no cautious person, with sense in his head and strength in his legs, would dream of doing this unless caught off guard. In connection also with this turning the face being necessary to the working of the Fangaree charm, there is another charm that is worked under Kufong, according to several natives from its region—the hinterland of Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Ivory Coast with whom I have associated when we have both been far from our respective homes away in South-West Africa. It is a charm I have never met with as indigenous in the South-West or Oil Rivers Fetish, and I think it has a heavier trace of Mohammedan influence in it than the Fangaree charm. The way it works is this. A man wants to kill you without showing blood. Only leopard society men do that, and your enemy, we will presume, is not a leopard. So he throws his face on you by a process I need not enter into. You hardly know anything is wrong at first; by-and-by you notice that every scene that you look on, night or day, has got that face in it, not a filmy vision of a thing, but quite material in appearance, only it's in abnormal places for a face to be, and it is a face only. It may be on the wall, or amongst the roof poles, or away in a corner of the hut floor; outdoors it is the same—the face is first always, there just where you can see it. Some of my informants hold that it keeps coming closer to you as time goes on; but others say no; it keeps at one distance all the time. This, however, is a minor point; it is its being there that gets to matter. It is