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THE EXPLOITS PERFORMED BY THE AFRICAN OBEAHMAN KONGO BROWN


 
 
About this enigmatic man, the expert in African magic, Miad Hoyora Korahon, recounted the following:
 
« About sixty years ago, there were brought to the estate of L___ among other new slaves, two men who were distinguished from the rest by reason of their light brown color, and straight hair. They are also described as having had unusually large heads, prominent noses, and long arms. These peculiarities are inherited to some extent by the descendants of one of them, some of whom I have seen. I have no doubt that these men were Moors, as these descendants’ physical characteristics go to show.
 
Some six months after their arrival, one of the brothers disappeared, bodily, and completely. The other, who meanwhile had ‘married’ a black woman, accounted for his brother’s disappearance by saying he had ‘flown away back to Africa, and that he would have done so too, had he not eaten something that prevented him doing so’ (my informants say, salt.) He —the remaining brother— became known as ‘Kongo Brown’ and was one of the most highly accomplished professors of Obeah ever known here.
 
 
On one occasion Mr. Kongo Brown gave a party at his house, and for the entertainment of his guests, said he would show them something. He first sent out to his garden, and had a plantain ‘sucker’ about eighteen inches long brought in. He then dug a hole in the clay floor of his house, in a corner; and therein planted the said plantain sucker, which was then covered with a sheet. Then he stood up and waved his hands over it, and talked to it in a tongue not understood by his guests. Next, he had fetched into the centre of the floor a washing tub, which was filled with fresh water brought in buckets from a spring close by. This done, he produced a walking sticky a piece of twine about two feet long, and a fish-hook.
 
These he put together, and asking the company to sit round the tub, saying he was going to fish. After waving his hands, and saying some unknown words over the tub, he began, and to the great wonderment of the company fished out of that tub of fresh water over a dozen large sized and living “snappers,” and “groupers,” (which are two kinds of sea fish). These he made over to certain members of the company, and told them to go out to his kitchen and cook the fish for him. When the fishing was over (and it took about two hours), he again turned his attention to the plantain-sucker in the corner.
 
Being uncovered it was observed to have grown under the sheet, and was now about four feet high. Again putting the sheet over it, he held his hands above it for some time, occasionally muttering some words in the unknown tongue, and between times talking to the company. Finally, calling for a knife to cut this bunch of plantains, the sheet was taken off, and there stood a full grown plantain tree, bearing a large and well developed bunch of green — ripe plantains. These were duly cut, and also sent to be cooked.
 
My informants in this case are two old men, who were among the guests on this occasion and helped to consume these victuals. One of them remarked that ‘although there was plenty of fish for all hands, there was only that one bunch of plantains,’ and he thinks Kongo Brown must have put some Obeah into them to make them go round, ‘as all hands had a plenty.’
 
One of the old men was also present on an occasion when Kongo Brown, having committed some offence, was tied up to be flogged. Brown took the matter very coolly, and told the manager he had better not flog him in case the flogging hurt the wrong person. However the flogging proceeded, and about three lashes had been given, at which Brown only laughed, when piercing shrieks were heard from the great ‘House’ (Manager’s residence) which was close by: upon this the operation was suspended, and it was ascertained that the shrieks were uttered by the manager’s wife in the house, on whose back it seems those three lashes had simultaneously fallen.
 
Brown got off the rest of that flogging, and it appears that the manager’s wife who suffered, was in some way the cause of the punishment being administered.
Another feat accredited to Brown was this:
 
L___ is a sugar estate, and it happened that towards the end of our crop season there were about 100 hogsheads (of 1 ton each) of ‘cured’ sugar in the ‘curing house’; when information came one afternoon that a vessel to take the sugar on board had arrived in the shipping bay, which is about two miles from the ‘Works’ of that estate, down a very rough and precipitous road.
 
Preparations at once commenced for carting down the sugar next day. However, Brown went to the manager and asked him what he would get if he could get that sugar conveyed down to the bay by daylight next morning.
 
The manager laughed at him, and finally offered to bet him something it would not be done. Next morning the hundred hogsheads of sugar were found down at that bay, but how it got there, no one but Kongo Brown seemed to know, and he does not appear to have been much given to revelation. Carting it down, would have occupied the estate’s cattle for fully a week.
 
 
These four feats of Kongo Brown are well known to all the black men in this locality, and my two old informants, —apart, and at different times— merely corroborated what I had already frequently heard.
 
No other Obeahman I have yet heard of here, is credited with performances of such a high grade, and it does not seem that the powers such as appear to have been involved, pertain at all to the ordinary practitioner.
 
The fishing feat is one that has been heard of before in other parts of the world, while the plantain growing is a replica of the most scientific, from an occult point of view, — way of performing the ‘Indian mangoe trick’: and the one bunch of plantains proving a plenty for a housefull of black men, — to any one who knows what the average black man appetite is like, — savors very strongly of ‘reduplication.’
 
If the ‘Kodak’ camera had been invented in those days, I very much doubt its power to explain these ‘tricks’ as hypnotism. The story of the flogging possibly might be explained from a hypnotic point of view, but under the circumstances there is scarcely any room to suspect that, while the action of the process of ‘repercussion’ is distinctly suggested.
 
The removal of the 100 tons of sugar to a distance of about two miles in a single night, is a feat which recalls the legendary one of how the great Michael Scot got the peak of the Eildore hill in Scotland split into three in a single night, and the sugar was most probably removed by the same kind of ‘deil,’ i. e., elemental force.
 
_ _ _ _
 
 
Altogether Mr. Kongo Brown seems to have been in possession of considerable ‘powers,’ and it is not easy to imagine how in such case he became a slave, or remained one ; instead of —for instance— flying away homo to Africa, as ‘his brother’ is reputed to have done. At any rate it is not likely that the eating of salt prevented him doing so, although that may have been suggested by him, to cover the real cause.
 
Taking them as a whole, the details of these stories are not the style of thing the black man brain is given to invent or concoct, and I can scarcely avoid believing in their verity: and in sequence thereof that Kongo Brown was a real Moorish Initiate, who in some unexplained manner had contrived to get very much out of his latitude.
 
Further, although these stories date back more than half a century, the knowledge that produced the feats by no means seems to be extinct at the present time in the West Indies, as I have heard of other events, which parallel these, as having happened within the last decade»
(Theosophist, April 1891, p.412-415)
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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