TERROR MAGIC IN EAST AFRICA.

Manawatu Herald, Volume LI, Issue 4433, 29 March 1930, Page 1

TERROR MAGIC IN EAST AFRICA.

MYSTERIOUS DEA THS EXPLAINED.

Many mysterious deaths in East Africa, in Tanganyika Territory, have at last, 'been traced. They are due to a secret society of medicine men and witch-doctors, who call themselves Baswezi, or “They-who-are-irresistible’’ (says the Literary Digest). A sanguinary qualification for membership in this black brotherhood, we learn from a contributor in the Empire Review (London), is that the tribesman candidate shall murder, by poison or spell, at least two of his blood relatives. Of another such cult, exposed in Northern .Kenya, we read:

,“A game scout on safari in the Eendillc country, investigating reports of giraffe poaching, noted that many young Eendillc men wore small elephant tusks attached to thongs of hide. His first suspicion was that the Rcndille were trapping elephant bull calves for their meat and hide. Closer investigation, however, showed that the tusks which the young Rendille wore were not newly shot, but had been handed down from father to son for generations, and were part of a grotesque regalia of fetish worship. On nights of the new moon, medicine men of the secret clan, the unholy priests of the fetish, resort to wild secret haunts in the forest, where, to the moan of drums and the howl of pipes, they call up their devotees among the young men and women of tin? tribe. Fantastic rites in Which black goats are suffocated to propitiate the spirits of the dead and invoke the powers of the 'black man’s other world are performed while the fetish worshippers dance round the sacred lire, lashing themselves into a frenzy of fanaticism. •‘The fetish tusks are then laved in the smoke and pressed by the cancers upon their foreheads, while the medicine men pray to their gods. Wild debaucheries of meat casting and pombe drinking bring this ig-rbtesquie r t ita to a. climax of indescribable abandon. Recently three inoffensive natives who were trekking from one kraal to another and were unfortunate enough to blunder into the black circle of fetish ritual were brutally beaten and later waylaid on a bush-trail to their homes and massacred in cold blood.”