THE CURSE OF SNAKES

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 169, 12 April 1930, Page 31

THE CURSE OF SNAKES

WITCH’S BAN ON A WHITE MAN

Strange stories of a witch’s curse are told by Mr. Frank Hives, once a district commissioner in Africa, in “Ju Ju and Justice in Nigeria.” One of Mr. Hives’s most uncanny experiences was that of having “the snake curse” put on him by an old woman who believed him to be responsible for her son’s imprisonment. Snakes of all sizes and varieties followed him wherever he went. He found them in his bed and in his boots. Most of them were poisonous, and one was more than five feet long. The old woman waited for him outside his compound at Obudu and put the snake curse on him in front of his native servants’and the whole village. ? ■ “I might have had her locked up as a crazy person ... but, after a while I could not have given the order, for I felt as though I were being hypnotised, and could only stare blankly at her.” The following afterpoon Mr. Hives found a fat brown snake coiled up. on his bed. His orderly decapitated it with a hatchet.

Within three days fifteen snakes were found and killed, all in places where he was likely to go.

Mr. Hives decided to leave the station. But as soon as he reached his destination he found several basking in the sun on the low mud walls. “Then when I was asleep under my mosquito curtain that night,” says Mr. Hives, “I was disturbed by a ‘flop’ above me. “When I raised my hand it came in contact with something heavy that was making the curtain sag almost down to my face. "Cautiously I touched it again and felt the cold, clammy coils of a snake.” He then decided to return to Obudu and find the old woman who had cursed him.

As soon as he arrived he found a snake on top of his boxes, and Mr. Hives shot himself in the foqt in an attempt to kill it. Mr. Hives produced his false teeth and snapped them in the witch’s,face, declaring in a loud voice that if she did not remove the snake curse, his teeth would haunt her and bite her for the rest of her days. Luckily the witch believed him, and Mr. Hives was never troubled by snakes again.