Word: bushongo
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Belgian officials were hard pressed to stop the fighting. For one thing, they were already busy with another kind of savagery among the nearby Bushongo tribesmen. Now that there was talk of independence, the Bushongos were reviving the forbidden ritual custom of tschipapa, or trial by poison. Tschipapa, the traditional Bushongo method of dealing with witches, is a deadly kind of liquid roulette in which entire villages line up to drink from cups carefully arranged to bring death to those infected with evil spirits...
Four Drinks. When a Bushongo family is beset by unusual hardship-perhaos a sick child, or bad crops-the head of the family calls in a diviner who, clutching the patient's hand, calls off the names of possible witches who might be responsible for the curse. If at the mention of a name the family head jerks his head, the diviner has a suspect. The local misheke then produces a poison from the powdered bark of the ihumi tree and, gathering all the villagers to drink, spikes the suspect's cup with his lethal potion. After four...
...case in point was the handsomely carved mirror of a Bushongo sorcerer, equipped with what seemed to be a quite unfunctional shutter. Actually, the shutter was as important as a camera's; the sorcerer thought that by closing it he could trap the reflections and therefore the very souls of unwary lookers...
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