Tome found from the Ju-Ju House of NY:
AFRICA’S DARK SECTS (ENGLISH)
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION
Green cloth over paperboard, 6” by 8 ¼”; 328 pages, with the title stamped on the spine. Though the date of publication is listed as being only four years previous (1921), this book is in very poor condition. The spine is broken, the back cover is cracked, and multiple pages are dog-eared. There are also some marginal notes in pencil.
The author is given as one Nigel Blackwell; no publisher is listed. The end paper inside the cover bears a bookplate indicating it belongs to Harvard University’s Widener Library.
CONTENTS AFTER QUICK SKIMMING:
This book collects the papers of Nigel Blackwell, a minor self-funded African explorer. No attempt seems to have been made to organize Blackwell’s work (there is no index for example) and the topics vary widely. The focus of the work is on African cults and esoteric religious practices—the more gruesome or vile the better. Cannibalism and bestiality are some of the more comparatively tame practices discussed.
The author treats the blasphemous religious claims of the various African tribesmen he discusses with an undue and unexpected degree of credence. Regions discussed include East Africa (the Kenya Crown colony and German East Africa in particular), the Belgian Congo, and West Africa (especially the Niger River basin).
QUOTES:
Beyond the reach of the great Abrahamic faiths, Africa retains the primal truths of human society and religion; society is as raw and unformed as the landscape. The Gods are known by their old names and not prettied up by hymns and incense. It is here in this great continent of the Id that Man may truly know himself. That Man, as a whole, is so brutal and untamed at his heart, only shocks the unlettered or those blinded by the false trapping of the prison we have built for ourselves in our so-called civilization.
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The cult, named in whispers by the natives ‘The Bloody Tongue,’ is supposedly based far in the interior, but has followers in Mombassa, Nairobi, and even Muslim Zanzibar. Their idols are human shaped though surmounted with a long red trunk instead of a head, and it is rumoured that more than one missionary has discovered that when the whites leave, the natives swap a head topped by a crown of thorns for one with a bloody ‘tongue’.
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The sorcerer would then rend flesh from his own body, usually the arm, and spit the bloody offering into the mouth of the body supposed to be raised. A great chanting would be then undertaken by both sorcerer and his audience. The words are not in the native Yoruban. I have attempted to capture them phonetically:
“Hu ning lui mugluwal naf wugah nagal atzu tuti yok sog tok foo takun. Atzu tuti fu takun! Hu ning lui. (Compare viz. Waite and Zimmerman)”