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man comes to his house to kill him or any of his people by witchcraft, he may himself be killed. And so he extinguishes the second firebrand. Lastly, he lays some Gardenia fruit on the ground, closes his eyes, and squashes the fruit with his foot.

It will be observed that these rites are based mainly on the principle of sympathetic magic. He closes his eyes in order that the witch visitor may be rendered blind, and he squashes the fruit in order that the witch may be reduced to pulp. Having completed these rites he erects over the spot a piece of palm cut to a point, and striped with charcoal and red earth.

The Ngub Sho symbol is also used as a means of swearing innocence of any charge. For example, if a man is accused of having practised witchcraft he will offer to swear his innocence on his accuser's Ngub Sho. He gives a piece of his wearing apparel [82]to his accuser, who places it over the head of a chicken, and then cuts off the chicken's head. During this operation he grips in his left hand a piece of the sacred bark and grass. If the headless chicken, after jumping about for a second, falls with its right leg in the air, the accused is considered guiltless; but if it falls with the left leg in the air, he is considered guilty; and if he does not make atonement for his crime it is believed that he will sicken and die within a week. The test is not, however, considered infallible, for it was stated that if a guiltless man manifested undue anger during the test the chicken might fall with its left leg in the air. Moreover, if nothing happened within a week to a man who had been adjudged guilty, then it was assumed that there had been some flaw in the test, and that he had proved his innocence.

One who had been accused by another usually seeks an early opportunity of retaliating on his accuser. If he loses any small article he goes to a diviner, and by means of a small bribe obtains [83] a pronouncement that his former accuser had stolen the article. The latter has then to swear his innocence on the former's Ngub Sho. In due course the two men may agree to become friends by drinking simultaneously from a calabash of beer. It may be noted that there are two methods of divination, (a) by watching the action of a land crab, or (b) by rubbing the hands together. The former method has been described in my monograph on the Jukun. Under the second method an

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