Affinities or “Bush Souls”

The term “affinity” is in use among educated natives throughout the West Coast to express the mysterious link believed to exist between human beings and the plant or animal into which they are thought, under certain conditions, to have the power of sending forth their souls.

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With regard to West Coast “affinities”, many are thought to be hereditary in families, but at times a babe is born to a house, no member of which has ever before been known to bear the “mark” of any animal, yet the likeness of some such can be clearly discerned upon the new-comer.

The explanation for this was somewhat confusedly given me by a woman, who herself had borne a babe belonging to the baboon totem, although, as she sadly said, no “monkey soul” had ever before been known in her family. ... My informant seemed to hold that the likeness to a baboon, clearly discernible in her son, though in no other member of the family on either side, so far as could be traced, was due to the fact that a “baboon soul” chanced to be awaiting reincarnation in the precincts of the sacred pool at the time when she went down thither to pray for the speedy coming of a babe. Under the term “baboon soul” she included both the ghost of a man who in a former existence had belonged to this totem, and of one who, during a long series of earth-lives, had been in the habit of sending out his soul into the form of a baboon “affinity”, and so, by constant wearing of the were-shape his human body had gradually taken upon itself signs of likeness to its “affinity”.

No very young child can send out its “bush soul”. Only after about the age of ten years does the desire to do so begin to assert itself. Should the “affinity” be hereditary, the parents will be sure to notice signs of restlessness, and will then explain all that is necessary. Otherwise the “Drang” — to use a German word which gives the meaning of the Ibibio expression more nearly than any of our own — grows with the physical growth. First, in dreams, those possessed by animal souls see themselves wandering in were-form, and after awhile the desire to do so at will becomes so strong as to drive boy or girl to seek out someone to whom the secrets are known, in order to learn the rites necessary for the conscious taking on of animal shape. Afterwards they practise sending forth the soul into its were-body with ever increasing success, until they have at length acquired the power to bring this about at will.

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The most ordinary were-forms are those of leopards, crocodiles, snakes and fish. The following story was reported to Mr. Eakin of the Kwa Ibo Mission by one of his schoolboys named Etok Essien of Ikotobo:

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Dorothy Amaury Talbot (d. 1916)

from Woman’s Mysteries of a Primitive People: The Ibibios of Southern Nigeria (1915)


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