3-053-568 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The Gold Coast and Ashantee War: Ju-Ju House, 1873. 'The Ju-ju house or chapel at Bonny...was a wattle-and-dab shed, oblong in form, and thirty or forty feet in length. At the upper end was a kind of altar, with a canopy or eaves of mat, and with a concave recess at the back. Across the front, underneath the roof, were arranged in two rows, impaled together, a number of fleshless human skulls. Some of these were painted, or otherwise decorated; one had a black imitation beard, which was doubtless a copy from life. Between the two rows of human skulls was a line of goats' heads, also streaked with red and white. An old bar shot, used probably as a club to fell the victims, hung in a corner. Near the ground was fixed a horizontal board, or shelf, which was striped like the relics above. A sweep of loose thatch below this, like a fringe or valance, covered the base of the altar; but left an open space in the middle, where a round hole or basin, with a raised rim of clay, was made to receive libations and the blood of victims. There were spare rows of skulls, and others separate, upon stakes planted against the walls about the room'. From "Illustrated London News", 1873.