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The introduction of the Fetish Boofima into the country of the Imperi is an interesting point as it shows that these different tribes have the same big ju-ju. Similarly, Calabar Egbo can go into Okyon, and will be respected in some of the New Calabar districts, but not at Brass, where the secret society is a distinct cult.
The witch-doctor is not always the cause of people being subjected to the ordeal or torture. In Calabar and the Okyon districts all the widows of a dead man are subjected to ordeal. They have to go the next night after the death, before an assemblage of chiefs and the general surrounding crowd, to a cleared space where there is a fire burning.
Among the Okyon tribes especial care is taken in the case of a woman dying and leaving a child over six months old.
I will give the Bantu version of the affair, because at Okyon the incident had happened a good time before the details were told me, and in the Bantu case they had happened the previous evening. But there was very little difference in the main facts of the case, and it was an important thing because in both cases the underlying idea was sacrificial.
In Okyon, when a leopard is killed, its body is treated with great respect and brought into the killer's village. Messages are then sent to the neighbouring villages, and they send representatives to the village and the gall-bladder is most carefully removed from the leopard and burnt coram publico, each person whipping their hands down their arms to disavow any guilt in the affair.
I arrived in the middle of this affair for my first meeting with Miss Slessor, and things at Okyon were rather crowded, one way and another, that afternoon. All the attention one of the children wanted the boy, for there was a boy and a girl was burying, for the people who had crammed them into the box had utterly smashed the child's head.
She did not take the twins and their mother down the village path to her own house, for though had she done so the people of Okyon would not have prevented her, yet so polluted would the path have been, and so dangerous to pass down, that they would have been compelled to cut another, no light task in that bit of forest, I assure you.
Her mother died a few days after her birth, so the child was taken and thrown into the bush, by the side of the road that led to the market. This was done one market- day some distance from the Okyon town.
I found afterwards that it was quite decided it was a case of "blood come before," and at Okyon, Miss Slessor told me, in regard to the similar case there, that this was the opinion held regarding the phenomenon. It is always held uncanny in Africa if a person dies without shedding blood. You see, the blood is the life, and if you see it come out, you know the going of the thing, as it were.
The terror with which twins are regarded in the Niger Delta is exceedingly strange and real. When I had the honour of being with Miss Slessor at Okyon, the first twins in that district were saved with their mother from immolation owing entirely to Miss Slessor's great influence with the natives and her own unbounded courage and energy.