Chapter XI: The Witch-Doctor

Nothing surprised Sanders except the ignorance of the average stay-at-home Briton on all matters pertaining to the savage peoples of Africa. Queer things happened in the “black patch”--so the coast officials called Sanders’ territory--miraculous, mysterious things, but Sanders was never surprised. He had dealings with folks who believed in ghosts and personal devils, and he sympathised with them, realising that it is very difficult to ascribe all the evils of life to human agencies.

Sanders was an unquiet man, or so his constituents thought him, and a little mad; this also was the native view. Worst of all, there was no method in his madness.

Other commissioners might be depended upon to arrive after the rains, sending word ahead of their coming. This was a good way--the Isisi, the Ochori, and the N’Gombi people, everlastingly at issue, were agreed upon this--because, with timely warning of the Commissioner’s approach, it was possible to thrust out of sight the ugly evidence of fault, to clean up and make tidy the muddle of folly.

It was bad to step sheepishly forth from your hut into the clear light of the rising sun, with all the dbris of an overnight feast mutely testifying to your discredit, and face the cold, unwavering eyes of a little brown-faced man in immaculate white. The switch he carried in his hand would be smacking his leg suggestively, and there were always four Houssa soldiers in blue and scarlet in the background, immobile, but alert, quick to obey.

Once Sanders came to a N’Gombi village at dawn, when by every known convention he should have been resting in his comfortable bungalow some three hundred miles down river.

Sanders came strolling through the village street just as the sun topped the trees and long shadows ran along the ground before the flood of lemon-coloured light.

The village was silent and deserted, which was a bad sign, and spoke of overnight orgies. Sanders walked on until he came to the big square near the palaver house, and there the black ruin of a dead fire smoked sullenly.

Sanders saw something that made him go raking amongst the embers.

“Pah!” said Sanders, with a wry face.

He sent back to the steamer for the full force of his Houssa guard, then he walked into the chief’s hut and kicked him till he woke.

He came out blinking and shivering, though the morning was warm.

“Telemi, son of O’ari,” said Sanders, “tell me why I should not hang you--man-eater and beast.”

“Lord,” said the chief, “we chopped this man because he was an enemy, stealing into the village at night, and carrying away our goats and our dogs. Besides which, we did not know that you were near by.”

“I can believe that,” said Sanders.

A lo-koli beat the villages to wakefulness, and before a silent assembly the headman of the N’Gombi village was scientifically flogged.

Then Sanders called the elders together and said a few words of cheer and comfort.

“Only hyenas and crocodiles eat their kind,” he said, “also certain fishes.” (There was a general shudder, for amongst the N’Gombi to be likened to a fish is a deadly insult.) “Cannibals I do not like, and they are hated by the King’s Government. Therefore when it comes to my ears--and I have many spies--that you chop man, whether he be enemy or friend, I will come quickly and I will flog sorely; and if it should again happen I will bring with me a rope, and I will find me a tree, and there will be broken huts in this land.”

Again they shuddered at the threat of the broken hut, for it is the custom of the N’Gombi to break down the walls of a dead man’s house to give his spirit free egress.

Sanders carried away with him the chief of the village, with leg-irons at his ankles, and in course of time the prisoner arrived at a little labour colony on the coast, where he worked for five years in company with other indiscreet headmen who were suffering servitude for divers offences.

They called Sanders in the Upper River districts by a long and sonorous name, which may be euphemistically translated as “The man who has a faithless wife,” the little joke of Bosambo, chief of the Ochori, and mightily subtle because Sanders was wedded to his people.

North and south, east and west, he prowled. He travelled by night and by day. Sometimes his steamer would go threshing away up river, and be watched out of sight by the evil-doing little fishing-villages.

“Go you,” said Sarala, who was a little headman of the Akasava, “go you three hours’ journey in your canoe and watch the river for Sandi’s return. And at first sign of his steamer--which you may see if you climb the hill at the river’s bend--come back and warn me, for I desire to follow certain customs of my father in which Sandi has no pleasure.”

He spoke to two of his young men and they departed. That night by the light of a fire, to the accompaniment of dancing and drum-beating, the son of the headman brought his firstborn, ten hours old, squealing noisily, as if with knowledge of the doom ahead, and laid it at his father’s feet.

“People,” said the little chief, “it is a wise saying of all, and has been a wise saying since time began, that the firstborn has a special virtue; so that if we sacrifice him to sundry gods and devils, good luck will follow us in all our doings.”

He said a word to the son, who took a broad-bladed spear and began turning the earth until he had dug a little grave. Into this, alive, the child was laid, his little feet kicking feebly against the loose mould.

“Oh, gods and devils,” invoked the old man, “we shed no blood, that this child may come to you unblemished.”

The son stirred a heap of loose earth with his foot, so that it fell over the baby’s legs; then into the light of the fire stepped Sanders, and the chief’s son fell back.

Sanders was smoking a thin cigar, and he smoked for fully a minute without saying a word, and a minute was a very long time. Then he stepped to the grave, stooped, and lifted the baby up awkwardly, for he was more used to handling men than babes, gave it a little shake to clear it of earth, and handed it to a woman.

“Take the child to its mother,” he said, “and tell her to send it to me alive in the morning, otherwise she had best find a new husband.”

Then he turned to the old chief and his son.

“Old man,” he said, “how many years have you to live?”

“Master,” said the old man, “that is for you to say.”

Sanders scratched his chin reflectively, and the old man watched him with fear in his eyes.

“You will go to Bosambo, chief of the Ochori, telling him I have sent you, and you shall till his garden, and carry his water until you die,” said Sanders.

“I am so old that that will be soon,” said the old man.

“If you were younger it would be sooner,” said Sanders. “As for your son, we will wait until the morning.”

The Houssas in the background marched the younger man to the camp Sanders had formed down river--the boat that had passed had been intended to deceive a chief under suspicion--and in the morning, when the news came that the child was dead--whether from shock, or injury, or exposure, Sanders did not trouble to inquire--the son of the chief was hanged.

I tell these stories of Sanders of the River, that you may grasp the type of man he was and learn something of the work he had to do. If he was quick to punish, he acted in accordance with the spirit of the people he governed, for they had no memory; and yesterday, with its faults, its errors and its teachings, was a very long time ago, and a man resents an unjust punishment for a crime he has forgotten.

It is possible to make a bad mistake, but Sanders never made one, though he was near to doing so once.

Sanders was explaining his point of view in regard to natives to Professor Sir George Carsley, when that eminent scientist arrived unexpectedly at headquarters, having been sent out by the British Government to study tropical disease at first hand.

Sir George was a man of some age, with a face of exceptional pallor and a beard that was snowy white.

“There was a newspaper man who said I treated my people like dogs,” said Sanders slowly, for he was speaking in English, a language that was seldom called for. “I believe I do. That is to say, I treat them as if they were real good dogs, not to be petted one minute and kicked the next; not to be encouraged to lie on the drawing-room mat one day, and the next cuffed away from the dining-room hearthrug.”

Sir George made no answer. He was a silent man, who had had some experience on the coast, and had lived for years in the solitude of a Central African province, studying the habits of the malarial mosquito.

Sanders was never a great conversationalist, and the three days the professor spent at headquarters were deadly dull ones for the Commissioner.

On one subject alone did the professor grow talkative.

“I want to study the witch-doctor,” he said. “I think there is no appointment in the world that would give me a greater sense of power than my appointment by a native people to that post.”

Sanders thought the scientist was joking, but the other returned to the subject again and again, gravely, earnestly, and persistently, and for his entertainment Sanders recited all the stories he had ever heard of witch-doctors and their tribe.

“But you don’t expect to learn anything from these people?” said Sanders, half in joke.

“On the contrary,” said the professor, seriously; “I anticipate making valuable scientific discoveries through my intercourse with them.”

“Then you’re a silly old ass,” said Sanders; but he said it to himself.

The pale professor left him at the end of the fourth day, and beyond an official notification that he had established himself on the border, no further news came of the scientist for six months, until one evening came the news that the pale-faced old man had been drowned by the upsetting of a canoe. He had gone out on a solitary excursion, taking with him some scientific apparatus, and nothing more was heard of him until his birch-bark canoe was discovered, bottom up, floating on the river.

No trace of Sir George was found, and in the course of time Sanders collected the dead man’s belongings and forwarded them to England.

There were two remarkable facts about this tragedy, the first being that Sanders found no evidence either in papers or diaries, of the results of any scientific research work performed by the professor other than a small note-book. The second was, that in his little book the scientist had carefully recorded the stories Sanders had told him of witch doctors.

(Sanders recognised at least one story which he had himself invented on the spur of the moment for the professor’s entertainment.)

Six more or less peaceful months passed, and then began the series of events which make up the story of the Devil Man.

It began on the Little River.

There was a woman of the Isisi people who hated her husband, though he was very good to her, building her a hut and placing an older wife to wait upon her. He gave her many presents, including a great neck-ring of brass, weighing pounds, that made her the most envied woman on the Isisi River. But her hatred for her husband was unquenched; and one morning she came out from her hut, looking dazed and frightened, and began in a quavering voice to sing the Song of the Dead, mechanically pouring little handfuls of dust on her head, and the villagers went in, to find the man stark and staring, with a twisted grin on his dead face and the pains of hell in his eyes.

In the course of two days they burned the husband in the Middle River; and as the canoe bearing the body swept out of sight round a bend of the river, the woman stepped into the water and laved the dust from her grimy body and stripped the green leaves of mourning from her waist.

Then she walked back to the village with a light step, for the man she hated best was dead and there was an end to it.

Four days later came Sanders, a grim little man, with a thin, brown face and hair inclined to redness.