ABSTRACT
It WAS impossible to learn how often they resorted to the poison ordeal, ipome, or how many people it killed. 1 Lele said they frequently used it and that many succumbed. Verdicts of ipome figure in histories of blood compensation, but not very often and not always as convictions. It was forbidden by law in 1924, and by 1950 the institution seemed to have disappeared from Lele life. It was said to be still administered in secret in the border areas of Lele country. I was not able to identify the tree whose bark was used in the potion. One diviner showed me a small piece of bark, which he said he kept to test his private suspicions. A few scrapings in a man's drink, he said, would cause him to vomit if he was innocent, and to die if guilty of sorcery. Ipome could not lie. It was God's medicine (nengu), and above any question. The same old man had had to pay blood compensation for a death attributed to his own mother, who had succumbed in the ordeal. He shrugged his shoulders laconically on the subject of her guilt: ‘If people kill, they must die. Ipome is God's thing, it cannot deceive us.’
