Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 254, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 October 1915 — ARE WORSHIPERS OF BIRDS [ARTICLE]

ARE WORSHIPERS OF BIRDS

Strange Discoveries Among, African Tribes Reported by English Explorer. Mr. P. Amaury Talbot, a district commissioner in southern Nigeria, and his wife have just made a remarkable journey of over 4,300 miles in the Eket district, a country of rivers and creeks, many unexplored, with a population of a quarter of a million Ibibios. In an Interview with Reuter’s representative, Mr. Talbot says he found customs and ceremonies which appear to have come down unchanged from the days of the Pharaohs. In some parts the dead are roughly, mummified, while underground burial chambers are to be found planned like those of ancient Egypt. He found also traces of bird worship and witnessed at bird dance never before seen by Europeans.

Most of the towns have their sacred pools, inhabited by good or evil spirits, to which in the past countless human victims were sacrificed. On two of these holy waters —the Lake of Life and the neighboring Pool of Hatred and Death—Mr. Talbot and Mr. Eckin of the Kwa Ibo mission are the first and only existing white men to have set eyes. Mr. Talbot, referring to the hard task of the administration in dealing with secret societies, which at certain times of the year still seek to offer ( human sacrifices, said: “Towards the end of September such an attempt was made by a group of towns in a distant part of the district, never before visited by Europeans. My attention was first draws, to this particular society, which bear* the' dreaded name of ‘Ekkpo Njawhaw* (Ghosts—the Destroyers) by ai poor woman who brought some fragments of charred bone, which she asserted was all that was left to her of an only brother, who had fallen a victim of the vengeance of one of the chiefs of the society. "The people as a whole are perhaps the most bloodthirsty of all Africa. For months no day passed without man or woman running in covered with blood, and often horribly mutilated, to claim the protection of the commissioner.”