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In the past divination spoke with its mouth. If you weregoing somewhere, it would say 'throw your spear there. Look! An animalis there, an animal is there.' You would throw your spear kap! kap!And uou would spear the animal. So once upon a time a man went, andhe shot an antelope with an arrow that he had borrowed the arrow froma friend. He went and he shot an antelope with it. Now the antelopeis the goat of our fathers (ancestors) Yes, the antelope is the goatof our Fathers. The antelope ran away and hid. It hid away, lost tosight. But then his friend said to him 'give me back my arrow'. Hesaid he had looked and looked for it, but this antelope it had runoff with the arrow. The friend said to him 'I said, I said, give memy arrow. If you dont give me back my arrow, then things will notgo well with us'. So he went and found the divination spider.
He told the spider what had happened to him, and asked it what hecould do? He was afraid his friend would kill him. He had looked andlooked for the arrow If he had seen it what would he have done butreturn it?
The divination spider said put me in your hat. So he took the spiderand put it up in his hat. They went to the bush then the spider saidtold him lift up a particular clump of grass. The spider said, stophere. Take hold of this grass, then run,and enter the ground.
He took hold of the grass. It said, seize and open it quickly. Hetook hold of it and pulled it open.
He looked, they went in. Then the spider said to him that he shouldn'trun but t go on, go on, and he would see his arrow. For your fatherhas put it up in a tree, like so. He's put it in a banana tree. Theywent on and then the father saw him. He said "ooo What are youdoing?" He said "Something is threatening me back there.""Who showed you the path?" He said "It was the divinationspider" "That spider, Where is it?"
He raised his hat and said "That divination spider, here it is.""You spider, if people have patience you can divine and tell them, but someone who hasn't got patience,you wont speak to anyone with your mouth again."
The Father rose and got down the arrow, having given it to him, heasked him [again on oath? ] why he was there. He said they sent mehere. Then the Father produced a medicine treatment and said to himHere! Come and take the arrow. Go and give it back to your friend.Take this bracelet and put it on your hand. If you put it on, where-everyou are with that thing, women will flock to you! On the day he saidyour friend will ask to borrow it. He will ask you to give him thatbracelet so he can go with it to the dance, so he can dance with it.So he can go with it to the dance beer drink. So he can dance withmany women. The bracelet will stick to his hand.
And so it was. He went back with it. He said to his friend take backyour arrow. He took the arrow and gave it back to that person. Thencame the day of the dance. Came that old bracelet, the bracelet whichfather gave him. They gathered around him.
The bracelet which god had given him, so he could dance. Kiya! Women,women came and danced with him, many many many. His friend saw thisand said to him 'Oho, for you, many women are dancing with you, butfor me over there I've not found a woman, I'm just dancing there,I've not found a woman'. He said 'are you just talking? Or is it notjust talk. If you cant see the place where I'm dancing here its becausethey're crowding around ... All the women are dancing with you'. Cameanother dance day, the beer was ready. The friend said 'take off yourbracelet. Give me that bracelet'. The friend took it, but he hadn'tbeen given it. He entered the dance and it fell out thus: Oh therewere women in front of him, others around him. He was surrounded,packed in tight! He was packed in. His friend sent for him and saidto him 'Give me back my bracelet, then'. 'How?' 'Give me back my bracelet'.He said the place where he found it, he didnt know it, he didnt seeanyone. But his father had told him among the children, that he wouldcome, that he would tell to him to give back his bracelet today, thatday, then, at once. Not tomorrow dawn. That is because he has doneevil to his friend. He looked, they said they'd take the bracelet.The bracelet stuck tight. They grabbed it, they pulled, the braceletstuck tight. They looked, they put his hand on a tree branch. He saidthey must chop it off. They chopped the hand off. Bap! The braceletcame off. He gave it to his friend. His friend said aha. Since thething which you have shown me, since you have cut off your hand thenI ask what's an arrow worth? Since I went, and found our fathers whoare there in the ground, I didn't know. If the divination hadn't spokenI wouldn't have been mistaken. Now you want to kill me. You want tokill yourself. It was thus.
Despite much enquiry into the subject of divination it is notablethat the myth had not been elicited before, and in particular thatthe myth in no wise addresses the question of why or how the divinationspider gains its knowledge. This is presented as a fait accompliin the story. Moreover, there is a clear resonance with the dreamwhich Farnham Rehfisch documented in Warwar in 1953 (Rehfisch, 1969). I quote his account in full. Rehfisch describes the serious illnessand subsequent recovery of a woman who
"afterwards ... began to describe her adventureswhich I shall call a 'dream', though the Mambila would firmlyresist my interpretation and would argue that the events recalledwere in fact true.However, Rehfisch also wrote "The Mambila have no origin myths.Much time was spent enquiring into the origin of the tribe, all tono avail. ...Some of my informants said that comparatively recently,perhaps about a hundred years ago, some of the Mambila groups nowon the plateau had emigrated from the lowlands in what is today theFrench Cameroons. The villages from which they came are were locatednear settlements occupied today by Mambila-speaking peoples."(1972:10). In contemporary Cameroon Mambila say that they come fromthe highlands, on the Mambila Plateau. The last wave of Mambila arrivedon the Tikar Plain in the last half of the C19th (see Zeitlyn n.d.).
She said that she had died and come back to life. The ancestors hadcome to her and offered a choice morsel of chicken cooked in palm-oiland highly spiced with red peppers. Who these ancestors were is notcertain, other than its being known that they must have been her directascendants. Having accepted the food, she died and was taken to theworld of the shades. There she found a village very similar to theone she had left. The Mambila believe that the shades live in villagesmuch like those of the living. Farms surround the settlement as isthe case here on earth. The sick woman, however, found some differences. The shades owned vast quantities of coloured cloth of European manufacture,a commodity which had only recently become desirable to the Mambila. There were many more chickens to be seen, far more than would befound in a village of the living and they had one odd characteristic,namely that all were white. The houses were all in an excellent stateof repair and the settlement looked extremely prosperous. She beganto speak to some of the ancestors, who asked her about her life onearth. When she mentioned that she had left two small children behind,one two years old and the other four, they became very angry. Theyscolded her very severely for abandoning her offspring and they saidit was a mistake to let her die. The next thing she knew, she awokeon her bed."
Rehfisch's conclusion is that the dream was used to claim supernaturalsanction for the wearing of European manufactured cloth, althoughthere is some evidence from early photos16 that it was beingworn before this date.
In his article "A Hundred Years of Change in Kalabari Religion"(1970) Horton argues that it is peripheral, relatively unimportantdeities which were the agents of change in Kalabari religion. Horton'sargument implies that the use of the Mambila dead to legitimate changeas documented by Rehfisch, constitutes an argument for their unimportance.
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