'Mermaids'
"In small, non-Western societies today a more 'archaic' attitude is often still encountered towards that part of the self that is sited on the other side of the fence of civilization, in the wilderness. For the Bakweri of Mount Cameroon, the world of the 'outside' is the world of the mermaids (liengu). This world includes the sea and the primeval forest. The 'outside' is also the realm in which the women of the Bakweri are at home. (...)
All women are outside, but the mermaids are 'more outside' than all the others. If an ordinary woman is possessed by such a spirit being, and this may happen not only to a young girl, but also to an older woman, then she needs to leave the world of culture. She dresses herself in a skirt made of the bark or the roots of the iroko tree, is given a liengu name, and learns the language of the mermaids. After some months, at dusk, she is finally thrown into a deep waterhole by a medicine man or a medicine woman. (...)
The woman has now turned into a mermaid; she lets her hair grow long and matted. She rubs her entire body with a mixture of charcoal and palm oil until she is black from head to foot. She avoids contact with all 'cultural' objects, especially those things made or worked by Europeans or by mens, and instead of the phallic cultivated banana, she eats only the wild fruit shot through with seeds.
As far as the men are concerned, this woman is now definitely 'out'; With other women, she speaks the language of the mermaids, unintelligible to men. She has turned completely wild, and she lives in a strange world, inaccessible to men."
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(in Dreamtime, by H.P Duerr, pp 45-46.)
