Giving kola

I’m reading Tim Kelsall’s Culture Under Cross-Examination: International Justice and the Special Court for Sierra Leone.  It’s fantastic.  I will post a full review soon, but below is an excerpt I loved, found in one of the footnotes.  (For those of you planning to read the book–don’t skip the footnotes.)

This excerpt is from chapter 6, on how a culture of secrecy made the Special Court’s work extremely challenging.  As an aside, Kelsall discusses a visit with ritual practitioners in Sierra Leone.

I took the opportunity of photographing some of these objects, and when it came to the final one, I was surprised to observe some lines of interference on the viewing screen of my digital camera.  I took a few pictures but the lines steadily multiplied until the screen turned white, then black, before the camera ceased to function completely.  My informants explained to me that this was because of the hesitation I had shown in ‘giving kola’ (a small monetary fee) to the swear.  About a mile’s distance from the village, the camera began to work again.  Uploading the photos to my computer, I was interested to find that the lines of interference are dimly visible, raked across the picture of this particular swear.