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The Ghosts of Samoa
When I lived out in a village in what was then Western Samoa in the late 1960's, we used to talk about spirits and ghost -- aitu, we called them -- often. There was a graveyard filled with old gravestones and plumeria trees not far from the hospital, and we always felt uneasy walking by there in twilight or at night. The graves were those of people who died in the Great Influenze Epidemic early in the twentieth century. In certain seasons of the year, plumeria trees have no leaves, and stand like skeletons twenty or thirty feet high. This made the scene especially eerie. The most common aitu or spirit that people in our village feared was Telesa, who was said to assume the figure of a beautiful woman. Supposedly she would sit by the edge of the river where people went to bathe. She would comb her hair and entice men to her, then cause them either to lapse into insanity or simply to go with her somewhere and disappear forever. She was said to frequent places all over both Samoas, and all over the major islands of each. Another greatly-feared spirit was Nifoloa, a name that conjures up a single large, sharp tooth that this malevolent spirit supposedly bore. Nifoloa was said to bite people and cause hideous infections that would kill. Also, through the actions of Nifoloa, small children would mysteriously be transported as much as fifty feet into the air, where they would be deposited among the branches of banyon trees. There they would be stranded until someone discovered them crying and rescued them. One night we were sitting around on the floor of the fale and drinking cocoa Samoa -- a drink made of the pulverized, toasted beans of the cocoa tree, boiling water, and sugar -- when we heard the most terrible wailing coming from outside the house. A chill ran up and down our spines, we were so afraid. We were certain that some kind of spirit was out there among the sugaracane that bordered part of the house. One of the sons in the family, Tavita, though, wasn't afraid. He got up and walked outside towards the source of the sound. He returned with a small puppy that had gotten its head stuck in a tin can and had been wailing to get out. Something that happened now and then, and not very rarely, was spirit possession. Usually this would happen to a woman. She would suddenly start thrashing about and speaking in a strange voice, not at all hers. When a woman became "possessed" this way, a local spirit healer would be sent for. The voice would allegedly be that of the spirit of a dead relative, and it would accuse someone in the family, often the very woman who was possessed, of some bad act against other family members. After the application of some oils and leaf essences, the spirit would go away, but not before the possessed person told all the details of her or someone else's wrongs. Thus the possessing spirit, angry though it may have been, helped the family achieve the harmony necessary for living in such close quarters. |
Gifts based on photos of Africa, handbags, cups, etc.
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May, 2012
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