sau, the friend of the late Miss Mary H. Kingsley, tells us that for
every person who dies a natural death at least one, and often ten or
more have been executed on an accusation of witchcraft.[47] Andrew
Battel, a native of Essex, who lived in Angola for many years at the end
of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century, informs us
that "in this country none on any account dieth, but they kill another
for him: for they believe they die not their own natural death, but that
some other has bewitched them to death. And all those are brought in by
the friends of the dead whom they suspect; so that there many times come
five hundred men and women to take the drink, made of the foresaid root
_imbando_. They are brought all to the high-street or market-place, and
there the master of the _imbando_ sits with his water, and gives every
one a cup of water by one measure; and they are commanded to walk in a
certain place till they make water, and then they are free. But he that
cannot urine presently falls down, and all the people, great and small,
fall upon him with their knives, and beat and cut him into pieces. But I
think the witch that gives the water is partial, and gives to him whose
death is desired the strongest water, but no man of the bye-standers can
perceive it. This is done in the town of Longo, almost every week
throughout the year."[48] A French official tells us that among the
Neyaux of the Ivory Coast similar beliefs and practices were visibly
depopulating the country, every single natural death causing the death
of four or five persons by the poison ordeal, which consisted in
drinking the decoction of a red bark called by the natives _boduru_. At
the death of a chief fifteen men and women perished in this way. The
French Government had great difficulty in suppressing the ordeal; for
the deluded natives firmly believed in the justice of the test and
therefore submitted to it willingly in the full consciousness of their
innocence.[49] In the neighbourhood of Calabar the poison ordeal, which
here consists in drinking a decoction of a certain bean, the
_Physostigma venenosum_ of botanists, has had similar disastrous
results, as we learn from the testimony of a missionary, the Rev. Hugh
Goldie. He tells us that the people have firm faith in the ordeal and
therefore not only accept it readily but appeal to it, convinced that it
will demonstrate their innocence. A small tribe named Uwet in the
hill-country o