File:Five years in the Sudan (1911) (14594074489).jpg

Identifier: fiveyearsinsudan00foth (find matches)
Title: Five years in the Sudan
Year: 1911 (1910s)
Authors: Fothergill, Edward
Subjects: Sudan -- Description and travel
Publisher: New York : D. Appleton
Contributing Library: University of California Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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espect he was quite the most en-lightened of the illiterate Sudanese that I came across,but even he was not impervious to the alluring charmof superstition. I had shot a crocodile, and the boy came and beggedme to give him the four claws of the reptile. Thiswas before the men had brought it on board fromthe bank on which it lay dead, and in making hisrequest the lad added that should it prove to be afemale he should not require the claws, but only if itwere a full-grown male. I cross-questioned him as tothe reason why he was so keen on acquiring them,and bit by bit I got at the truth of the story. Hehad recently been married, and was living in thehopes of becoming a father at no very distant date,and he wished to obtain the claws in order to attachthem to the wrists and ankles of his wife before thechild was born. Were this done, and suitable in-cantations pronounced, the boy, should it proveto be a man child, would be born with both thestrength and the cunning of the crocodile. Some-
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SUPERSTITIONS AND CUSTOMS 265 times, he assured me with the greatest faith, whenthe charm had acted the most successfully, the boywould be born with webbed hands, something similarto the foot of a crocodile. He was rather inclinedto be hurt at the manner in which I received his news,and hastened to inform me that he could bring mea dozen children with webbed hands from his ownvillage in order to prove the truth of his assertion.I expressed a great desire to meet them, but thoughon several subsequent occasions I reminded him ofthis offer, luck was never in his way, and the particularchildren were always away in some distant part ofthe Sudan when he visited his village ! Again, on a later occasion, he told me with all thesimplicity of a great and unquestioning belief, ofthe wonderful things which had happened to a smallboy, a cousin of his. There was no superstition in thistale, and I give it simply as an instance of the re-markable credulity of his race. In some parts of the Sudan the

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