and horrid descriptions are recorded in the countries across Africa — East, Central, and West. A headman of the Wadoe is buried sitting in a shallow pit, and with the corpse a male and female slave alive, he with a bill-hook in his hand to cut fuel for his lord in the death-world, she seated on a little stool with the dead chief's head in her lap. A chief of Unyamwezi is entombed in a vaulted pit, sitting on a low stool with a bow in his right hand, and provided with a pot of native beer; with him are shut in alive three women slaves, and the ceremony is concluded with a libation of beer on the earth heaped up above them all. The same idea which in Guinea makes it common for the living to send messages by the dying to the dead, is developed in Ashanti and Dahome into a monstrous system of massacre. The King of Dahome must enter Deadland with a ghostly court of hundreds of wives, eunuchs, singers, drummers, and soldiers. Nor is this all. Captain Burton thus describes the yearly 'Customs:' — 'They periodically supply the departed monarch with fresh attendants in the shadowy world. For unhappily these murderous scenes are an expression, lamentably mistaken but perfectly sincere, of the liveliest filial piety.' Even this annual slaughter must be supplemented by almost daily murder: — 'Whatever action, however trivial, is performed by the King, it must dutifully be reported to his sire in the shadowy realm. A victim, almost always a war-captive, is chosen; the message is delivered to him, an intoxicating draught of rum follows it, and he is dispatched to Hades in the best of humours.'[1] In southern districts of Africa, accounts of the same class begin in Congo and Angola with the recorded slaying of the dead man's favourite wives, to live with him in the other world, a practice still in vogue among the Chevas of the Zambesi district, and formerly known among the Maravis; while the funeral sacrifice of attendants with a chief is a
- ↑ Burton, 'Central Afr.' vol. i. p. 124; vol. ii. p. 25; 'Dahome,' vol. ii. p. 18, &c.; 'Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. iii. p. 403; J. L. Wilson, 'W. Afr.' pp. 203, 219, 394. See also H. Rowley, 'Mission to Central Africa,' p. 229.
