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Updated: June 19, 2025
This part of the town, situated in its centre, and covering, perhaps, a space of forty acres, was, I afterwards learned, the habitation of King Banda, his Court, the principal officers of his army and household, and the priests, whose temple, or fetish-house, stood on the opposite side of the square to that occupied by the "palace" of the king.
In some parts of West Africa, when the king dies, a family council is secretly held to determine his successor. He on whom the choice falls is suddenly seized, bound, and thrown into the fetish-house, where he is kept in durance till he consents to accept the crown.
In the meantime the fire had been bountifully replenished with wood and now blazed up fiercely. By its ruddy light I saw the fetish-man retire to the interior of the temple or fetish-house, to appear immediately afterwards with a rude stone hammer in one hand and what looked like four or five large spike-nails in the other.
Matadi's town was situate, as I have said, upon the sloping hillside that constituted the south bank of the river, and consisted of some four or five hundred buildings arranged with tolerable regularity on either side of two broad streets or roads that crossed each other at right angles, their point of intersection being a spacious square, in the centre of which stood a circular structure with a high-peaked, pointed roof of thatch, that Lobo informed me was the fetish-house.
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