06 African Adventure (15 page)

Roger slipped out of the tent before Joro finished. He still heard the men laughing as if they would burst their sides. He didn’t like being laughed at.

Before the day was over, he found they were not laughing at him but with him. When any of them passed him, they bowed with new respect and gave him a warm smile.

They were proud of him. Hal was proud of him. His father was proud of him.

He couldn’t understand this, for he had only done what he had to do from one moment to the next. In a way, it had been fun. Now that he thought about it, it was even funny, and he could laugh about it too.

Hal had not forgotten his promise to visit the sick chief.

It was night before he could go. Then he slipped out of ~ the camp and walked up the hill.

The people of the village had already turned in. The doors of the mud huts were shut. The light of a flickering fire inside came from some of the small windows. Other windows were completely dark - the family slept.

Hal moved quietly. There was no reason to disturb anyone - in fact he would rather not. Especially he didn’t want to meet the witchdoctor.

He knew the man hated him intensely. That was natural. The witchdoctor had failed to cure the chief. If Hal succeeded, the people would lose faith in their witchdoctor.

It would be better for the witchdoctor if the chief died. Then he could say:

‘I told you so. I told you the white man’s bad magic would kill him. You should have listened to me.’

Hal stopped at the chief’s door. He listened for voices inside but heard nothing. He pressed open the door, slid inside, and closed the door behind him.

The place was dimly lighted by the wavering flame of a home-made, hippo-fat candle. Most of the room was in darkness. The candle lit the face of the chief, who was sound asleep.

Just what he needs, Hal thought. I won’t disturb him.

He would stay awhile - possibly the chief would wake. Hal retreated into a dark corner and sat down on the mat.

He listened to his patient’s breathing. It was regular and normal. There was no flush on the face, no sweat, no fever, no tossing about. The drugs administered by ‘Doctor’ Hal Hunt had done their good work.

Hal got to thinking about the events of the day. After a long time he found himself getting drowsy. He roused himself and looked at his watch. He had been there an hour. No use waiting longer - the chief might sleep until morning.

Hal was about to rise when he heard a slight sound outside the hut. He listened intently, but there was nothing more. He must have been mistaken. No, there it was again - a slight brushing sound as of a bare foot on the sand.

Then, slowly and silently, the door opened. Someone was edging in, being very careful to make no noise. Perhaps it was one of the chief’s wives with some food. Hal was about to speak, but on second thoughts held his tongue.

The door was closed again as quietly as it had been opened. The figure slowly approached the sleeping chief. As it came out of the dark into the candlelight, Hal recognized the witchdoctor.

Again he was about to speak and again he held his tongue. What was this fellow up to? In his left hand he held a small leather bag, and in his right something sharp.

He stopped and listened. He looked warily around the room.

Then he kneeled on the mat beside the chief. Now Hal could plainly see his face. Why, Hal wondered, does the face of a cruel man look so much worse than the face of a cruel animal?

Still, it was possible the man meant no harm. Perhaps he had come to wake the chief and speak with him or give him some medicine.

The witchdoctor carefully studied the sleeping man. Then, before Hal could realize what was going on, he lightly touched the sharp thing against the chief’s arm.

The chief did not wake. Hal guessed that the sharp thing was a chook. That is a quill of the brush-tailed porcupine, so sharp that it can go through the skin without being felt. It takes the place of the white man’s hypodermic needle.

But why make this tiny puncture in the chiefs skin? What good, or harm, would that do?

The wizard laid down his chook and opened the leather bag. He inserted the tip of his finger and it came out covered with a dark paste. He was about to rub the paste into the hole made by the chook when Hal let loose. ‘What the devil are you up to?’ he shouted. The words were in English but the shout was enough to do two things - wake the patient and freeze the witchdoctor as if he had been suddenly turned to stone.

The chief at once took in the picture - the chook on the mat, the leather bag, the dark smear on the finger-tip, Hal running in out of the shadows.

The witchdoctor leaped to his feet and made for the door. Hal grappled with him, threw him down, and sat on him. Men and women came running.

All they could understand at first was that their precious witchdoctor was being sat upon by that meddling stranger. They pulled Hal away and the witchdoctor got to his feet, spluttering with injured dignity. Again he started for the door.

‘Don’t let him go,’ the chief called. ‘Bring him here.’ Men blocked the door. They hesitated to lay hands on the wizard. Some of the more courageous seized him and brought him to the chief’s side.

‘Release my friend,’ commanded the chief. Hal, suddenly free, came to stand beside the witchdoctor.

A hush fell over the crowd. It was like a court with a judge about to pronounce sentence.

‘The man you hold,’ the chief said quietly, ‘was about to end my life. You see this chook. As I slept, he used it upon me. You see its mark on my arm. Force him to show the middle finger of his right hand. You see that dark stain. Search among his claws and feathers and you will find the bag from which it came.’

The bag was found. One of the elders opened it. He picked up a small stick and dipped the end of it into the bag. It came out covered with a black, sticky paste like tar. It was the same as the stuff on the witchdoctor’s finger-tip, the stuff he had been about to rub into the cut on the chief’s arm.

‘You all know what this is,’ said the chief.

‘Except me,’ Hal said. ‘Is it a poison?’

‘It is.’

‘I guessed that it might be - that’s why I stopped him.’

‘You did well,’ the chief said. Tf you had not, my people would now be making ready to bury me.’

‘It acts so fast?’

‘It kills in a few minutes. We use it on our arrowheads. It is made from the sap of the mrichu tree.’

Hal, as a student of animals and plants, knew the tree.

‘I have often seen it,’ he said. ‘We call it the acocanthera. The ground under it is covered with bees and beetles and humming-birds - all dead.’

‘Yes. They drink from the purple flowers of the mrichu and they die of the poison.’

‘How do you make this paste for the arrows?’

‘We boil the bark for many hours. So we get a thick, black syrup. We add to it the venom of snakes, the poison of spiders, and the roo^ of deadly weeds. A live shrew is thrown in and we boil it all again.’

‘How can you tell when it is strong enough to kill?’

‘We make a small cut in a man’s arm near the shoulder and let the blood trickle down the arm. We touch the lower end of this trickle with a little bit of the poison. Its touch makes the blood turn black. The blackness goes up the trickle of blood towards the cut. We wipe it away just before it reaches the cut. If the black climbs slowly or stops, we know the poison is too weak. If it climbs fast we know it is strong.’

The witchdoctor broke out into a torrent of argument.

When he had finished, the chief said to Hal:

‘He says this is not poison, but only good medicine. Very well, we will test it.’

He gave an order to the elder who had opened the bag. The elder took up the chook. In spite of the witchdoctor’s angry protests, the elder made a slight incision in the medicine man’s upper arm, just enough to draw the blood.

A tiny stream of blood ran down the witchdoctor’s arm to the elbow.

The old man touched the blood at the elbow with the end of the paste-smeared stick.

The blood at once turned black. The blackness climbed the arm with amazing speed towards the cut.

The witchdoctor was wrenching and twisting now, trying to get away from the men who held him and crying like a terrified child. The chief spoke to him firmly.

‘I am telling him,’ the chief said to Hal, ‘that he will be a dead man in three minutes unless he makes a full confession. He must admit that he was trying to poison me, and he must say why.’

The blackness had now gone up like a snake half-way to the cut.

The witchdoctor, pale-faced, eyes popping with terror, broke out into a rapid babble. Up went the black snake. Just before it reached the opening through which it would have gone its killing way into the bloodstream, the chief gave a sharp order. The elder wiped the witchdoctor’s arm clean.

‘We have saved his life,’ the chief said, ‘though he does not deserve it. He has made full confession. He was jealous of your power to heal. With all his magic he could not cure me, and then you cured me with a few small white things. The people were laughing at him. He wanted me to die so that he could say your medicine had killed me. For this evil he should be burned. But we of this village are not cruel. He shall live, but he must leave the village and trouble us never again.’

The sentence was carried out at once. The would-be murderer was allowed to collect a few of his personal belongings and was sent out into the night. Hal returned to camp.

He did not sleep well, for he had an uneasy feeling that this was not quite the end of the story. If he understood the evil gleam he had last seen in the witchdoctor’s eyes, the Hunt family and Hal in particular could expect more trouble, soon.

The night was dark, and the witchdoctor’s journey through country where a lion, elephant or buffalo might be lurking behind any bush was not too pleasant.

At every step his bitterness and his passion for revenge grew. He would show that white magician and his brother and father that it was dangerous to get in the way of a clever witchdoctor.

He was not aimlessly wandering about. He knew exactly where he was going and what he was going to do. After some five miles of winding trail he saw lights shining between the tree-trunks of a patch of woodland.

He stopped at the edge of the woods. The sound of voices told him that many men were gathered in conference beneath the trees.

He knew who these men were. He was one of them. But no one may walk into a meeting of the Leopard Society unannounced. If he should try it, he would get a poisoned arrow in his chest before he could come out of the shadows.

The witchdoctor made the peculiar cry of the leopard. It was a good imitation. The leopard has a number of ways of expressing himself. He can growl, and he can roar, and he can scream. But usually he saws wood, just as the witchdoctor did now.

It sounded quite like a coarse saw going through a log.

After each ‘saw’ the breath was noisily drawn in. So every time there was a double sound. It was something like ‘Saw-ah! Saw-ah! Saw-ah! Saw-ah!’

Immediately the talking stopped. Then someone came swinging a lantern. He held the light up to the witchdoctor’s face.

‘Ah, it is you, great one. We are honoured that you have come.’

He led the way back to the lighted circle. The witchdoctor took his place on slightly higher ground with the leaders. A leopard costume was brought to him and he put it on.

Here was a strange sight - twenty men all clothed in leopard skins, masks over their heads, curved iron spikes like leopards’ claws projecting from their fingers, leopard pads strapped to their feet so that wherever they went they would leave the track of a leopard.

It seemed like a fevered dream. But the Leopard Society is no figment of the imagination. It is to be found throughout Central and West Africa. The police have forced it back into the hills, but there it still exists. Different branches of it go under different names, the Idiong Society, the Ekpe Leopards, and so on. Within three years, in one small area of West Africa, 196 men, women, and children were murdered by the leopard-men.

Why? The reasons vary from place to place. Sometimes the purpose is to punish a village that has become too rich and powerful. Sometimes the killing is prompted by hate of the white man. Often the human leopards kill other humans just to get the heart, the eyeballs, the tongue, the ears or some other members which are supposed to have magic powers as medicine or charms. Make no mistake about it - most Africans are kind and good. Every year more of them go to school. Every year some of the old superstitions die. But there is a long way yet to go. Think of it - when the Congo became independent of Belgium, this great African nation, eighty-eight times as big as Belgium itself, had only sixteen university graduates.

There are still millions of Africans who have never spent one day in school. Without education, they still believe strange things - that a leopard-man can turn into a leopard, that the heart of a strong man will make you strong if you eat it, and that no white man can be trusted.

One of the leaders spoke.

‘Chief among us is the friend who has just come. Let him speak that we may obey.’

The witchdoctor rose. Here was a man whom even the leopard-men feared, for he could work dark and dangerous magic. They listened to him in respectful silence.

There is one among you,’ he began, ‘who has not kept \m pledge. He solemnly promised to kill and has not killed. His name is Joro. I call upon him to stand.’

Joro slowly got to his feet. Dressed as a leopard-man, he looked quite different from the Joro of the Hunt camp. Besides the leopard skin on his back and the steel slaws on his hands, his chest was spotted with strange colours and his face painted to make him look more like the savage beast he was supposed to represent. But now he hung his head like a guilty schoolboy.

‘A week ago,’ the witchdoctor said, ‘You, Joro performed a sacred ritual and made a pledge. What was that pledge?’