Note 56 — INDEX
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Footnote 56:
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In like manner the Baganda generally ascribed natural deaths either to sorcery or to the action of a ghost; but when they could not account for a person's death in either of these ways they said that Walumbe, the God of Death, had taken him. This last explanation approaches to an admission of natural death, though it is still mythical in form. The Baganda usually attributed any illness of the king to ghosts, because no man would dare to practise magic on him. A much-dreaded ghost was that of a man's sister; she was thought to vent her spite on his sons and daughters by visiting them with sickness. When she proved implacable, a medicine-man was employed to catch her ghost in a gourd or a pot and throw it away on waste land or drown it in a river. See Rev. J. Roscoe, The Baganda (London, 1911), pp. 98, 100, 101 sq., 286 sq., 315 sq.