Secret Societies

Secret societies are widespread throughout West Africa and cut across tribal, cultural, and linguistic lines. These organizations regulate the social, educational, and political activities of their members. Their primary role, however, is religious.

Two of the largest secret societies are the Poro (for men) and the Sande (for women). The Poro society, for example, strives “to control the spirits and ensure that their intervention in the affairs of men is beneficial.”—Initiation, 1986.

New members of the Poro are taught spiritual secrets and powers of witchcraft, and ritual scars are carved on their bodies. New members of the Sande also learn spiritistic rituals and typically undergo female genital mutilation, although this practice is being discontinued in some areas.

Other secret societies regulate sexual behavior and use spiritistic remedies to try to cure madness or other ailments. During Sierra Leone’s civil war, one secret society claimed that its members were immune to bullets. They were not.

Members are forbidden to reveal the group’s knowledge and rituals to outsiders. A person who flouts the laws and protocols of a secret society risks death.

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IGNAZ SEMMELWEIS may not be a household name, yet his work has benefited most modern families. Born in Buda (now Budapest), Hungary, he received his medical degree at the University of Vienna in 1844. On taking up his post as assistant to a professor at the First Maternity Clinic of Vienna’s General Hospital in 1846, Semmelweis faced an appalling reality —more than 13 percent of the women giving birth there died from a disease called childbed fever. Various theories as to the cause of this disease had been proposed, yet no one had solved the mystery. All attempts to reduce the mortality rate proved futile. Troubled by the spectacle of numerous mothers suffering a slow, agonizing death, Semmelweis determined to find the cause of the disease and prevent it.

Rielyn Co

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