In which the Voyager attempts cautiously to approach the subject of
Fetish, and gives a classification of spirits, and some account of
the Ibet and Orunda.
Having given some account of my personal experiences among an
African tribe in its original state, i.e. in a state uninfluenced by
European ideas and culture, I will make an attempt to give a rough
sketch of the African form of thought and the difficulties of
studying it, because the study of this thing is my chief motive for
going to West Africa. Since 1893 I have been collecting information
in its native state regarding Fetish, and I use the usual terms
fetish and ju-ju because they have among us a certain fixed value--a
conventional value, but a useful one. Neither "fetish" nor "ju-ju"
are native words. Fetish comes from the word the old Portuguese
explorers used to designate the objects they thought the natives
worshipped, and in which they were wise enough to recognise a
certain similarity to their own little images and relics of Saints,
"Feitico." Ju-ju, on the other hand, is French, and comes from the
word for a toy or doll, {286} so it is not so applicable as the
Portuguese name, for the native image is not a doll or toy, and has
far more affinity to the image of a saint, inasmuch as it is not
venerated for itself, or treasured because of its prettiness, but
only because it is the residence, or the occasional haunt, of a
spirit.
Stalking the wild West African idea is one of the most charming
pursuits in the world. Quite apart from the intellectual, it has a
high sporting interest; for its pursuit is as beset with difficulty
and danger as grizzly bear hunting, yet the climate in which you
carry on this pursuit--vile as it is--is warm, which to me is almost
an essential of existence. I beg you to understand that I make no
pretension to a thorough knowledge of Fetish ideas; I am only on the
threshold. "Ich weiss nicht all doch viel ist mir bekannt," as
Faust said--and, like him after he had said it, I have got a lot to
learn.
I do not intend here to weary you with more than a small portion of
even my present knowledge, for I have great collections of facts
that I keep only to compare with those of other hunters of the wild
idea, and which in their present state are valueless to the cabinet
ethnologist. Some of these may be rank lies, some of them mere
individual mind-freaks, others have underlying them some idea I am
not at present in touch with.
The difficulty of gaining a true conception of the savage's real
idea is great and varied. In places on the Coast where there is, or
has been, much missionary influence the trouble is greatest, for in
the first case the natives carefully conceal things they fear will
bring them into derision and contempt, although they still keep them
in their innermost hearts; and in the second case, you have a set of
traditions which are Christian in origin, though frequently altered
almost beyond recognition by being kept for years in the atmosphere
of the African mind. For example, there is this beautiful story now
extant among the Cabindas. God made at first all men black--He
always does in the African story--and then He went across a great
river and called men to follow Him, and the wisest and the bravest
and the best plunged into the great river and crossed it; and the
water washed them white, so they are the ancestors of the white men.
But the others were afraid too much, and said, "No, we are
comfortable here; we have our dances, and our tom-toms, and plenty
to eat--we won't risk it, we'll stay here"; and they remained in the
old place, and from them come the black men. But to this day the
white men come to the bank, on the other side of the river, and call
to the black men, saying, "Come, it is better over here." I fear
there is little doubt that this story is a modified version of some
parable preached to the Cabindas at the time the Capuchins had such
influence among them, before they were driven out of the lower Congo
regions more than a hundred years ago, for political reasons by the
Portuguese.
In the bush--where the people have been little, or not at all, in
contact with European ideas--in some ways the investigation is
easier; yet another set of difficulties confronts you. The
difficulty that seems to occur most easily to people is the
difficulty of the language. The West African languages are not
difficult to pick up; nevertheless, there are an awful quantity of
them and they are at the best most imperfect mediums of
communication. No one who has been on the Coast can fail to
recognise how inferior the native language is to the native's mind
behind it--and the prolixity and repetition he has therefore to
employ to make his thoughts understood.
The great comfort is the wide diffusion of that peculiar language,
"trade English"; it is not only used as a means of
intercommunication between whites and blacks, but between natives
using two distinct languages. On the south-west Coast you find
individuals in villages far from the sea, or a trading station, who
know it, and this is because they have picked it up and employ it in
their dealings with the Coast tribes and travelling traders. It is
by no means an easy language to pick up--it is not a farrago of bad
words and broken phrases, but is a definite structure, has a great
peculiarity in its verb forms, and employs no genders. There is no
grammar of it out yet; and one of the best ways of learning it is to
listen to a seasoned second mate regulating the unloading or
loading, of cargo, over the hatch of the hold. No, my Coast
friends, I have NOT forgotten--but though you did not mean it
helpfully, this was one of the best hints you ever gave me.
Another good way is the careful study of examples which display the
highest style and the most correct diction; so I append the letter
given by Mr. Hutchinson as being about the best bit of trade English
I know.
"To Daddy nah Tampin Office, -
Ha Daddy, do, yah, nah beg you tell dem people for me; make dem
Sally-own pussin know. Do yah. Berrah well.
Ah lib nah Pademba Road--one bwoy lib dah oberside lakah dem two
Docter lib overside you Tampin office. Berrah well.
Dah bwoy head big too much--he say nah Militie Ban--he got one long
long ting so so brass, someting lib dah go flip flap, dem call am
key. Berrah well. Had! Dah bwoy kin blow!--she ah!--na marin,
oh!--nah sun time, oh! nah evenin, oh!--nah middle night, oh!--all
same--no make pussin sleep. Not ebry bit dat, more lib da! One
Boney bwoy lib oberside nah he like blow bugle. When dem two woh-
woh bwoy blow dem ting de nize too much too much.
When white man blow dat ting and pussin sleep he kin tap wah make
dem bwoy carn do so? Dem bwoy kin blow ebry day eben Sunday dem kin
blow. When ah yerry dem blow Sunday ah wish dah bugle kin go down
na dem troat or dem kin blow them head-bone inside.
Do nah beg you yah tell all dem people 'bout dah ting wah dem two
bwoy dah blow. Till am Amtrang Boboh hab febah bad. Till am titty
carn sleep nah night. Dah nize go kill me two pickin, oh!
Plabba done. Good by Daddy.
Crashey Jane."
Now for the elementary student we will consider this letter. The
complaint in Crashey Jane's letter is about two boys who are
torturing her morning, noon, and night, Sunday and weekday, by
blowing some "long long brass ting" as well as a bugle, and the way
she dwells on their staying power must bring a sympathetic pang for
that black sister into the heart of many a householder in London who
lives next to a ladies' school, or a family of musical tastes. "One
touch of nature," etc. "Daddy" is not a term of low familiarity but
one of esteem and respect, and the "Tampin Office" is a respectful
appellation for the Office of the "New Era" in which this letter was
once published. "Bwoy head big too much," means that the young man
is swelled with conceit because he is connected with "Militie ban."
"Woh woh" you will find, among all the natives in the Bights, to
mean extremely bad. I think it is native, having some connection
with the root Wo--meaning power, etc.; but Mr. Hutchinson may be
right, and it may mean "a capacity to bring double woe."
"Amtrang Boboh" is not the name of some uncivilised savage, as the
uninitiated may think; far from it. It is Bob Armstrong--upside
down, and slightly altered, and refers to the Hon. Robert Armstrong,
stipendiary magistrate of Sierra Leone, etc.
"Berrah well" is a phrase used whenever the native thinks he has
succeeded in putting his statement well. He sort of turns round and
looks at it, says "Berrah well," in admiration of his own art, and
then proceeds.
"Pickin" are children.
"Boney bwoy" is not a local living skeleton, but a native from Bonny
River.
"Sally own" is Sierra Leone.
"Blow them head-bone inside" means, blow the top off their heads.
I have a collection of trade English letters and documents, for it
is a language that I regard as exceedingly charming, and it really
requires study, as you will see by reading Crashey Jane's epistle
without the aid of a dictionary. It is, moreover, a language that
will take you unexpectedly far in Africa, and if you do not
understand it, land you in some pretty situations. One important
point that you must remember is that the African is logically right
in his answer to such a question as "You have not cleaned this
lamp?"--he says, "Yes, sah"--which means, "yes, I have not cleaned
the lamp." It does not mean a denial to your accusation; he always
uses this form, and it is liable to confuse you at first, as are
many other of the phrases, such as "I look him, I no see him "; this
means "I have been searching for the thing but have not found it";
if he really meant he had looked upon the object but had been unable
to get to it, he would say: "I look him, I no catch him," etc.
The difficulty of the language is, however, far less than the whole
set of difficulties with your own mind. Unless you can make it
pliant enough to follow the African idea step by step, however much
care you may take, you will not bag your game. I heard an account
the other day of a representative of Her Majesty in Africa who went
out for a day's antelope shooting. There were plenty of antelope
about, and he stalked them with great care; but always, just before
he got within shot of the game, they saw something and bolted.
Knowing he and the boy behind him had been making no sound and could
not have been seen, he stalked on, but always with the same result;
until happening to look round, he saw the boy behind him was
supporting the dignity of the Empire at large, and this
representative of it in particular, by steadfastly holding aloft the
consular flag. Well, if you go hunting the African idea with the
flag of your own religion or opinions floating ostentatiously over
you, you will similarly get a very poor bag.
A few hints as to your mental outfit when starting on this sport may
be useful. Before starting for West Africa, burn all your notions
about sun-myths and worship of the elemental forces. My own opinion
is you had better also burn the notion, although it is fashionable,
that human beings got their first notion of the origin of the soul
from dreams.
I went out with my mind full of the deductions of every book on
Ethnology, German or English, that I had read during fifteen years--
and being a good Cambridge person, I was particularly confident that
from Mr. Frazer's book, The Golden Bough, I had got a semi-universal
key to the underlying idea of native custom and belief. But I soon
found this was very far from being the case. His idea is a true key
to a certain quantity of facts, but in West Africa only to a limited
quantity.
I do not say, do not read Ethnology--by all means do so; and above
all things read, until you know it by heart, Primitive Culture, by
Dr. E. B. Tylor, regarding which book I may say that I have never
found a fact that flew in the face of the carefully made, broad-
minded deductions of this greatest of Ethnologists. In addition you
must know your Westermarck on Human Marriage, and your Waitz
Anthropologie, and your Topinard--not that you need expect to go
measuring people's skulls and chests as this last named authority
expects you to do, for no self-respecting person black or white
likes that sort of thing from the hands of an utter stranger, and if
you attempt it you'll get yourself disliked in West Africa. Add to
this the knowledge of all A. B. Ellis's works; Burton's Anatomy of
Melancholy; Pliny's Natural History; and as much of Aristotle as
possible. If you have a good knowledge of the Greek and Latin
classics, I think it would be an immense advantage; an advantage I
do not possess, for my classical knowledge is scrappy, and in place
of it I have a knowledge of Red Indian dogma: a dogma by the way
that seems to me much nearer the African in type than Asiatic forms
of dogma.
Armed with these instruments of observation, with a little industry
and care you should in the mill of your mind be able to make the
varied tangled rag-bag of facts that you will soon become possessed
of into a paper. And then I advise you to lay the results of your
collection before some great thinker and he will write upon it the
opinion that his greater and clearer vision makes him more fit to
form.
You may say, Why not bring home these things in their raw state?
And bring them home in a raw state you must, for purposes of
reference; but in this state they are of little use to a person
unacquainted with the conditions which surround them in their native
homes. Also very few African stories bear on one subject alone, and
they hardly ever stick to a point. Take this Fernando Po legend.
Winwood Reade (Savage Africa, p. 62) gives it, and he says he heard
it twice. I have heard it, in variants, four times--once on
Fernando Po, once in Calabar and twice in Gaboon. So it is
evidently an old story: -
"The first man called all people to one place. His name was
Raychow. 'Hear this, my people' said he, 'I am going to give a name
to every place, I am King in this River.' One day he came with his
people to the Hole of Wonga Wonga, which is a deep pit in the ground
from which fire comes at night. Men spoke to them from the Hole,
but they could not see them. Raychow said to his son, 'Go down into
the Hole'--and his son went. The son of the King of the Hole came
to him and defied him to a contest of throwing the spear. If he
lost he should be killed, if he won he should go back in safety. He
won--then the son of the King of the Hole said, 'It is strange you
should have won, for I am a spirit. Ask whatever you wish,' and the
King's son asked for a remedy for every disease he could remember;
and the spirit gave him the medicines, and when he had done so, he
said, 'There is one sickness you have forgotten--it is the Krawkraw,
and of that you shall die.'
"A tribe named Ndiva was then strong but now none remain (Winwood
Reade says four remain). They gave Raychow's son a canoe and forty
men, to take him back to his father's town, and when he saw his
father he did not speak. His father said, 'My son, if you are
hungry eat.' He did not answer, and his father said, 'Do you wish
me to kill a goat?' He did not answer; his father said, 'Do you
wish me to give you new wives?' He did not answer. Then his father
said, 'Do you want me to build you a fetish hut?' Then he answered,
'Yes,' and the hut was built, and the medicines he had brought back
from the Hole were put into it.
"'Now,' said the son of King Raychow, 'I go to make Moondah enter
the Orongo' (Gaboon); so he went and dug a canal and when this was
finished all his men were dead. Then he said, 'I will go and kill
river-horse in the Benito.' He killed four, and as he was killing
the fifth, the people descended from the mountains against him. So
he made fetish on his great war-spear and sang
My spear, go kill these people,
Or these people will kill me;
and the spear went and killed the people, except a few who got into
canoes and flew to Fernando Po. Then said their King, 'My people
shall never wear cloth till we have conquered the M'pongwe,' and to
this day the Fernando Poians go naked and hate with a special hatred
the M'pongwe."
Now this is a noble story--there is a lot of fine confused feeding
in it, as the Scotchman said of boiled sheep's head.
You learn from it -
A. The name of the first man, and also that he was filled with a
desire for topographical nomenclature.
B. You hear of the Hole Wonga Wonga, and this is most interesting
because to this day, apart from the story, you are told by the
natives of a hole that emits fire, and Dr. Nassau says it is always
said to be north of Gaboon; but so far no white man has any
knowledge of an active volcano there, although the district is of
volcanic origin. The crater of Fernando Po may be referred to in
the legend because of the king's son being sent home in a canoe; but
I do not think it is, because the Hole is known not to be Fernando
Po, and it has got, according to local tradition, a river running
from it or close to it.
C. The kraw-kraw is a frightfully prevalent disease; no one has a
remedy for it, presumably owing to Raychow's son's forgetfulness.
D. The silence of the son to the questions is remarkable, because
you always find people who have been among spirits lose their power
of asking for what they want, for a time, and can only answer to the
right question.
E. The sudden way in which Raychow's son gets fired with the desire
to turn civil engineer just when he has got a magnificent opening in
life as a doctor is merely the usual flightiness of young men, who
do not see where their true advantages lie--and the conduct of the
men in dying, after digging a canal is normal, and modern
experiences support it, for men who dig canals down in West Africa
die plentifully, be they black, white, or yellow; so you can't help
believing in those men, although it is strange a black man should
have been so enterprising as to go in for canal digging at all.
There is no other case of it extant to my knowledge, and a
remarkable fact is, that the Moondah does so nearly connect, by one
creek, with the Gaboon estuary that you can drag a boat across the
little intervening bit of land.
F. Is a sporting story that turns up a little unexpectedly,
certainly; but the Benito is within easy distance north of the
Moondah, so the geography is all right.
G. The inhabitants of Fernando Po have still an especial hatred for
the M'pongwe, and both they and the M'pongwe have this account of
the one tribe driving the other off the mainland. Then the Bubis
{295}--as the inhabitants on Fernando Po are called, from a
confusion arising in the minds of the sailors calling at Fernando
Po, between their stupidity and their word Babi = stranger, which
they use as a word of greeting--these Bubis are undoubtedly a very
early African race. Their culture, though presenting some
remarkable points, is on the whole exceedingly low. They never wear
clothes unless compelled to, and their language depends so much on
gesture that they cannot talk in it to each other in the dark.
I give this as a sample of African stories. It is far more
connected and keeps to the point in a far more business-like way
than most of them. They are of great interest when you know the
locality and the tribe they come from; but I am sure if you were to
bring home a heap of stories like this, and empty them over any
distinguished ethnologist's head, without ticketing them with the
culture of the tribe they belonged to, the conditions it lives
under, and so forth, you would stun him with the seeming inter-
contradiction of some, and utter pointlessness of the rest, and he
would give up ethnology and hurriedly devote his remaining years to
the attempt to collect a million postage stamps, so as to do
something definite before he died. Remember, you must always have
your original material--carefully noted down at the time of
occurrence--with you, so that you may say in answer to his Why?
Because of this, and this, and this.
However good may be the outfit for your work that you take with you,
you will have, at first, great difficulty in realising that it is
possible for the people you are among really to believe things in
the way they do. And you cannot associate with them long before you
must recognise that these Africans have often a remarkable mental
acuteness and a large share of common sense; that there is nothing
really "child-like" in their form of mind at all. Observe them
further and you will find they are not a flighty-minded, mystical
set of people in the least. They are not dreamers, or poets, and
you will observe, and I hope observe closely--for to my mind this is
the most important difference between their make of mind and our
own--that they are notably deficient in all mechanical arts: they
have never made, unless under white direction and instruction, a
single fourteenth-rate piece of cloth, pottery, a tool or machine,
house, road, bridge, picture or statue; that a written language of
their own construction they none of them possess. A careful study
of the things a man, black or white, fails to do, whether for good
or evil, usually gives you a truer knowledge of the man than the
things he succeeds in doing. When you fully realise this acuteness
on one hand and this mechanical incapacity on the other which exist
in the people you are studying, you can go ahead. Only, I beseech
you, go ahead carefully. When you have found the easy key that
opens the reason underlying a series of facts, as for example,
these: a Benga spits on your hand as a greeting; you see a man who
has been marching regardless through the broiling sun all the
forenoon, with a heavy load, on entering a village and having put
down his load, elaborately steal round in the shelter of the houses,
instead of crossing the street; you come across a tribe that cuts
its dead up into small pieces and scatters them broadcast, and
another tribe that thinks a white man's eye-ball is a most desirable
thing to be possessed of--do not, when you have found this key, drop
your collecting work, and go home with a shriek of "I know all about
Fetish," because you don't, for the key to the above facts will not
open the reason why it is regarded advisable to kill a person who is
making Ikung; or why you should avoid at night a cotton tree that
has red earth at its roots; or why combings of hair and paring of
nails should be taken care of; or why a speck of blood that may fall
from your flesh should be cut out of wood--if it has fallen on that-
-and destroyed, and if it has fallen on the ground stamped and
rubbed into the soil with great care. This set requires another key
entirely.
I must warn you also that your own mind requires protection when you
send it stalking the savage idea through the tangled forests, the
dark caves, the swamps and the fogs of the Ethiopian intellect. The
best protection lies in recognising the untrustworthiness of human
evidence regarding the unseen, and also the seen, when it is viewed
by a person who has in his mind an explanation of the phenomenon
before it occurs. The truth is, the study of natural phenomena
knocks the bottom out of any man's conceit if it is done honestly
and not by selecting only those facts that fit in with his
preconceived or ingrafted notions. And, to my mind, the wisest way
is to get into the state of mind of an old marine engineer who oils
and sees that every screw and bolt of his engines is clean and well
watched, and who loves them as living things, caressing and scolding
them himself, defending them, with stormy language, against the
aspersions of the silly, uninformed outside world, which persists in
regarding them as mere machines, a thing his superior intelligence
and experience knows they are not. Even animistic-minded I got
awfully sat upon the other day in Cameroon by a superior but kindred
spirit, in the form of a First Engineer. I had thoughtlessly
repeated some scandalous gossip against the character of a naphtha
launch in the river. "Stuff!" said he furiously; "she's all right,
and she'd go from June to January if those blithering fools would
let her alone." Of course I apologised.
The religious ideas of the Negroes, i.e. the West Africans in the
district from the Gambia to the Cameroon region, say roughly to the
Rio del Rey (for the Bakwiri appear to have more of the Bantu form
of idea than the negro, although physically they seem nearer the
latter), differ very considerably from the religious ideas of the
Bantu South-West Coast tribes. The Bantu is vague on religious
subjects; he gives one accustomed to the Negro the impression that
he once had the same set of ideas, but has forgotten half of them,
and those that he possesses have not got that hold on him that the
corresponding or super-imposed Christian ideas have over the true
Negro; although he is quite as keen on the subject of witchcraft,
and his witchcraft differs far less from the witchcraft of the Negro
than his religious ideas do.
The god, in the sense we use the word, is in essence the same in all
of the Bantu tribes I have met with on the Coast: a non-interfering
and therefore a negligible quantity. He varies his name: Anzambi,
Anyambi, Nyambi, Nzambi, Anzam, Nyam, Ukuku, Suku, and Nzam, but a
better investigation shows that Nzam of the Fans is practically
identical with Suku south of the Congo in the Bihe country, and so
on.
They regard their god as the creator of man, plants, animals, and
the earth, and they hold that having made them, he takes no further
interest in the affair. But not so the crowd of spirits with which
the universe is peopled, they take only too much interest and the
Bantu wishes they would not and is perpetually saying so in his
prayers, a large percentage whereof amounts to "Go away, we don't
want you." "Come not into this house, this village, or its
plantations." He knows from experience that the spirits pay little
heed to these objurgations, and as they are the people who must be
attended to, he develops a cult whereby they may be managed, used,
and understood. This cult is what we call witchcraft.
As I am not here writing a complete work on Fetish I will leave Nzam
on one side, and turn to the inferior spirits. These are almost all
malevolent; sometimes they can be coaxed into having creditable
feelings, like generosity and gratitude, but you can never trust
them. No, not even if you are yourself a well-established medicine
man. Indeed they are particularly dangerous to medicine men, just
as lions are to lion tamers, and many a professional gentleman in
the full bloom of his practice, gets eaten up by his own particular
familiar which he has to keep in his own inside whenever he has not
sent it off into other people's.
I am indebted to the Reverend Doctor Nassau for a great quantity of
valuable information regarding Bantu religious ideas--information
which no one is so competent to give as he, for no one else knows
the West Coast Bantu tribes with the same thoroughness and sympathy.
He has lived among them since 1851, and is perfectly conversant with
their languages and culture, and he brings to bear upon the study of
them a singularly clear, powerful, and highly-educated intelligence.
I shall therefore carefully ticket the information I have derived
from him, so that it may not be mixed with my own. I may be wrong
in my deductions, but Dr. Nassau's are above suspicion.
He says the origin of these spirits is vague--some of them come into
existence by the authority of Anzam (by which you will understand,
please, the same god I have quoted above as having many names),
others are self-existent--many are distinctly the souls of departed
human beings, "which in the future which is all around them" retain
their human wants and feelings, and the Doctor assures me he has
heard dying people with their last breath threatening to return as
spirits to revenge themselves upon their living enemies. He could
not tell me if there was any duration set upon the existence as
spirits of these human souls, but two Congo Francais natives, of
different tribes, Benga and Igalwa, told me that when a family had
quite died out, after a time its spirits died too. Some, but by no
means all, of these spirits of human origin, as is the case among
the Negro Effiks, undergo reincarnation. The Doctor told me he once
knew a man whose plantations were devastated by an elephant. He
advised that the beast should be shot, but the man said he dare not
because the spirit of his dead father had passed into the elephant.
Their number is infinite and their powers as varied as human
imagination can make them; classifying them is therefore a difficult
work, but Doctor Nassau thinks this may be done fairly completely
into: -
1. Human disembodied spirits--Manu.
2. Vague beings, well described by our word ghosts: Abambo.
3. Beings something like dryads, who resent intrusion into their
territory, on to their rock, past their promontory, or tree. When
passing the residence of one of these beings, the traveller must go
by silently, or with some cabalistic invocation, with bowed or bared
head, and deposit some symbol of an offering or tribute even if it
be only a pebble. You occasionally come across great trees that
have fallen across a path that have quite little heaps of pebbles,
small shells, etc., upon them deposited by previous passers-by.
This class is called Ombwiri.
4. Beings who are the agents in causing sickness, and either aid or
hinder human plans--Mionde.
5. There seems to be, the Doctor says, another class of spirits
somewhat akin to the ancient Lares and Penates, who especially
belong to the household, and descend by inheritance with the family.
In their honour are secretly kept a bundle of finger, or other
bones, nail-clippings, eyes, brains, skulls, particularly the lower
jaws, called in M'pongwe oginga, accumulated from deceased members
of successive generations.
Dr. Nassau says "secretly," and he refers to this custom being
existent in non-cannibal tribes. I saw bundles of this character
among the cannibal Fans, and among the non-cannibal Adooma, openly
hanging up in the thatch of the sleeping apartment.
6. He also says there may be a sixth class, which may, however only
be a function of any of the other classes--namely, those that enter
into any animal body, generally a leopard. Sometimes the spirits of
living human beings do this, and the animal is then guided by human
intelligence, and will exercise its strength for the purposes of its
temporary human possessor. In other cases it is a non-human soul
that enters into the animal, as in the case of Ukuku.
Spirits are not easily classified by their functions because those
of different class may be employed in identical undertakings. Thus
one witch doctor may have, I find, particular influence over one
class of spirit and another over another class; yet they will both
engage to do identical work. But in spite of this I do not see how
you can classify spirits otherwise than by their functions; you
cannot weigh and measure them, and it is only a few that show
themselves in corporeal form.
There are characteristics that all the authorities seem agreed on,
and one is that individual spirits in the same class vary in power:
some are strong of their sort, some weak.
They are all to a certain extent limited in the nature of their
power; there is no one spirit that can do all things; their
efficiency only runs in certain lines of action and all of them are
capable of being influenced, and made subservient to human wishes,
by proper incantations. This latter characteristic is of course to
human advantage, but it has its disadvantages, for you can never
really trust a spirit, even if you have paid a considerable sum to a
most distinguished medicine man to get a powerful one put up in a
ju-ju, or monde, {301} as it is called in several tribes.
The method of making these charms is much the same among Bantu and
Negroes: I have elsewhere described the Gold Coast method, so here
confine myself to the Bantu. This similarity of procedure naturally
arises from the same underlying idea existing in the two races.
You call in the medicine man, the "oganga," as he is commonly called
in Congo Francais tribes. After a variety of ceremonies and
processes, the spirit is induced to localise itself in some object
subject to the will of the possessor. The things most frequently
used are antelopes' horns, the large snail-shells, and large
nutshells, according to Doctor Nassau. Among the Fan I found the
most frequent charm-case was in the shape of a little sausage, made
very neatly of pineapple fibre, the contents being the residence of
the spirit or power, and the outside coloured red to flatter and
please him--for spirits always like red because it is like blood.
The substance put inside charms is all manner of nastiness, usually
on the sea coast having a high percentage of fowl dung.
The nature of the substance depends on the spirit it is intended to
be attractive to--attractive enough to induce it to leave its
present abode and come and reside in the charm.
In addition to this attractive substance I find there are other
materials inserted which have relation towards the work the spirit
will be wanted to do for its owner. For example, charms made either
to influence a person to be well disposed towards the owner, or the
still larger class made with intent to work evil on other human
beings against whom the owner has a grudge, must have in them some
portion of the person to be dealt with--his hair, blood, nail-
parings, etc.--or, failing that, his or her most intimate belonging,
something that has got his smell in--a piece of his old waist-cloth
for example.
This ability to obtain power over people by means of their blood,
hair, nails, etc., is universally diffused; you will find it down in
Devon, and away in far Cathay, and the Chinese, I am told, have in
some parts of their empire little ovens to burn their nail- and
hair-clippings in. The fear of these latter belongings falling into
the hands of evilly-disposed persons is ever present to the West
Africans. The Igalwa and other tribes will allow no one but a
trusted friend to do their hair, and bits of nails and hair are
carefully burnt or thrown away into a river; and blood, even that
from a small cut or a fit of nose-bleeding, is most carefully
covered up and stamped out if it has fallen on the earth. The
underlying idea regarding blood is of course the old one that the
blood is the life.
The life in Africa means a spirit, hence the liberated blood is the
liberated spirit, and liberated spirits are always whipping into
people who do not want them.
Charms are made for every occupation and desire in life--loving,
hating, buying, selling, fishing, planting, travelling, hunting,
etc., and although they are usually in the form of things filled
with a mixture in which the spirit nestles, yet there are other
kinds; for example, a great love charm is made of the water the
lover has washed in, and this, mingled with the drink of the loved
one, is held to soften the hardest heart.
Some kinds of charms, such as those to prevent your getting drowned,
shot, seen by elephants, etc., are worn on a bracelet or necklace.
A new-born child starts with a health-knot tied round the wrist,
neck, or loins, and throughout the rest of its life its collection
of charms goes on increasing. This collection does not, however,
attain inconvenient dimensions, owing to the failure of some of the
charms to work.
That is the worst of charms and prayers. The thing you wish of them
may, and frequently does, happen in a strikingly direct way, but
other times it does not. In Africa this is held to arise from the
bad character of the spirits; their gross ingratitude and
fickleness. You may have taken every care of a spirit for years,
given it food and other offerings that you wanted for yourself,
wrapped it up in your cloth on chilly nights and gone cold, put it
in the only dry spot in the canoe, and so on, and yet after all
this, the wretched thing will be capable of being got at by your
rival or enemy and lured away, leaving you only the case it once
lived in.
Finding, we will say, that you have been upset and half-drowned, and
your canoe-load of goods lost three times in a week, that your
paddles are always breaking, and the amount of snags in the river
and so on is abnormal, you judge that your canoe-charm has stopped.
Then you go to the medicine man who supplied you with it and
complain. He says it was a perfectly good charm when he sold it you
and he never had any complaints before, but he will investigate the
affair; when he has done so, he either says the spirit has been
lured away from the home he prepared for it by incantations and
presents from other people, or that he finds the spirit is dead; it
has been killed by a more powerful spirit of its class, which is in
the pay of some enemy of yours. In all cases the little thing you
kept the spirit in is no use now, and only fit to sell to a white
man as "a big curio!" and the sooner you let him have sufficient
money to procure you a fresh and still more powerful spirit--
necessarily more expensive--the safer it will be for you,
particularly as your misfortunes distinctly point to some one being
desirous of your death. You of course grumble, but seeing the thing
in his light you pay up, and the medicine man goes busily to work
with incantations, dances, looking into mirrors or basins of still
water, and concoctions of messes to make you a new protecting charm.
Human eye-balls, particularly of white men, I have already said are
a great charm. Dr. Nassau says he has known graves rifled for them.
This, I fancy, is to secure the "man that lives in your eyes" for
the service of the village, and naturally the white man, being
regarded as a superior being, would be of high value if enlisted
into its service. A similar idea of the possibility of gaining
possession of the spirit of a dead man obtains among the Negroes,
and the heads of important chiefs in the Calabar districts are
usually cut off from the body on burial and kept secretly for fear
the head, and thereby the spirit, of the dead chief, should be
stolen from the town. If it were stolen it would be not only a
great advantage to its new possessor, but a great danger to the
chief's old town; because he would know all the peculiar ju-ju
relating to it. For each town has a peculiar one, kept exceedingly
secret, in addition to the general ju-jus, and this secret one would
then be in the hands of the new owners of the spirit. It is for
similar reasons that brave General MacCarthy's head was treasured by
the Ashantees, and so on.
Charms are not all worn upon the body, some go to the plantations,
and are hung there, ensuring an unhappy and swift end for the thief
who comes stealing. Some are hung round the bows of the canoe,
others over the doorway of the house, to prevent evil spirits from
coming in--a sort of tame watch-dog spirits.
The entrances to the long street-shaped villages are frequently
closed with a fence of saplings and this sapling fence you will see
hung with fetish charms to prevent evil spirits from entering the
village and sometimes in addition to charms you will see the fence
wreathed with leaves and flowers. Bells are frequently hung on
these fences, but I do not fancy ever for fetish reasons. At
Ndorko, on the Rembwe, there were many guards against spirit
visitors, but the bell, which was carefully hung so that you could
not pass through the gateway without ringing it, was a guard against
thieves and human enemies only.
Frequently a sapling is tied horizontally near the ground across the
entrance. Dr. Nassau could not tell me why, but says it must never
be trodden on. When the smallpox, a dire pestilence in these
regions, is raging, or when there is war, these gateways are
sprinkled with the blood of sacrifices, and for these sacrifices and
for the payments of heavy blood fines, etc., goats and sheep are
kept. They are rarely eaten for ordinary purposes, and these West
Coast Africans have all a perfect horror of the idea of drinking
milk, holding this custom to be a filthy habit, and saying so in
unmitigated language.
The villagers eat the meat of the sacrifice, that having nothing to
do with the sacrifice to the spirits, which is the blood, for the
blood is the life. {306}
Beside the few spirits that the Bantu regards himself as having got
under control in his charms, he has to worship the uncontrolled army
of the air. This he does by sacrifice and incantation.
The sacrifice is the usual killing of something valuable as an
offering to the spirits. The value of the offering in these S.W.
Coast regions has certainly a regular relationship to the value of
the favour required of the spirits. Some favours are worth a dish
of plantains, some a fowl, some a goat and some a human being,
though human sacrifice is very rare in Congo Francais, the killing
of people being nine times in ten a witchcraft palaver.
Dr. Nassau, however, says that "the intention of the giver ennobles
the gift," the spirit being supposed, in some vague way, to be
gratified by the recognition of itself, and even sometimes pleased
with the homage of the mere simulacrum of a gift. I believe the
only class of spirits that have this convenient idea are the
Imbwiri; thus the stones heaped by passers-by on the foot of some
great tree, or rock, or the leaf cast from a passing canoe towards a
promontory on the river, etc., although intrinsically valueless and
useless to the Ombwiri nevertheless gratify him. It is a sort of
bow or taking off one's hat to him. Some gifts, the Doctor says,
are supposed to be actually utilised by the spirit.
In some part of the long single street of most villages there is
built a low hut in which charms are hung, and by which grows a
consecrated plant, a lily, a euphorbia, or a fig. In some tribes a
rudely carved figure, generally female, is set up as an idol before
which offerings are laid. I saw at Egaja two figures about 2 feet 6
inches high, in the house placed at my disposal. They were left in
it during my occupation, save that the rolls of cloth (their power)
which were round their necks, were removed by the owner chief; of
the significance of these rolls I will speak elsewhere.
Incantations may be divided into two classes, supplications
analogous to our idea of prayers, and certain cabalistic words and
phrases. The supplications are addresses to the higher spirits.
Some are made even to Anzam himself, but the spirit of the new moon
is that most commonly addressed to keep the lower spirits from
molesting.
Dr. Nassau gave me many instances out of the wealth of his
knowledge. One night when he was stopping at a village, he saw
standing out in the open street a venerable chief who addressed the
spirits of the air and begged them, "Come ye not into my town;" he
then recounted his good deeds, praising himself as good, just,
honest, kind to his neighbours, and so on. I must remark that this
man had not been in touch with Europeans, so his ideal of goodness
was the native one--which you will find everywhere among the most
remote West Coast natives. He urged these things as a reason why no
evil should befall him, and closed with an impassioned appeal to the
spirits to stay away. At another time, in another village, when a
man's son had been wounded and a bleeding artery which the Doctor
had closed had broken out again and the haemorrhage seemed likely to
prove fatal, the father rushed out into the street wildly
gesticulating towards the sky, saying, "Go away, go away, go away,
ye spirits, why do you come to kill my son?" In another case a
woman rushed into the street, alternately objurgating and pleading
with the spirits, who, she said, were vexing her child which had
convulsions. "Observe," said the Doctor in his impressive way,
"these were distinctly prayers, appeals for mercy, agonising
protests, but there was no praise, no love, no thanks, no confession
of sin." I said, considering the underlying idea, I did not see how
that could be, thinking of the thing as they did, and the Doctor and
I had one of our little disagreements. I shall always feel grateful
to him for his great toleration of me, but I am sure this arose from
his feeling that I saw there was an underlying idea in the minds of
the people he loved well enough to lay down his life for in the hope
of benefiting and ennobling them, and that I did not, as many do,
set them down as idiotic brutes, glorying in an aimless cruelty that
would be a disgrace to a devil.
Regarding the cabalistic words and phrases, things which had long
given me great trouble to get any comprehension of, the Doctor gave
me great help. He says some of these phrases and words are coined
by the person himself, others are archaisms handed down from
ancestors and believed to possess an efficacy, though their actual
meaning is forgotten. He says they are used at any time as defence
from evil, when a person is startled, sneezes, or stumbles. Among
these I think I ought to class that peculiar form of friendly
farewell or greeting which the Doctor poetically calls a "blown
blessing" and the natives Ibata. I thought the three times it was
given to me that it was just spitting on the hand. Practically it
is so, but the Doctor says the spitting is accidental, a by-product
I suppose. The method consists in taking the right hand in both
yours, turning it palm upwards, bending your head low over it, and
saying with great energy and a violent propulsion of the breath,
Ibata.
Idols are comparatively rare in Congo Francais, but where they are
used the people have the same idea about them as the true Negroes
have, namely, that they are things which spirits reside in, or
haunt, but not in their corporeal nature adorable. The resident
spirit in them and in the charms and plants, which are also regarded
as residences of spirits, has to be placated with offerings of food
and other sacrifices. You will see in the Fetish huts above
mentioned dishes of plantain and fish left till they rot. Dr.
Nassau says the life or essence of the food only is eaten by the
spirit, the form of the vegetable or flesh being left to be removed
when its life is gone out.
In cases of emergency a fowl with its blood is laid at the door of
the Fetish hut, or when pestilence is expected, or an attack by
enemies, or a great man or woman is very ill, goats and sheep are
sacrificed and the blood put in the Fetish hut as well as on the
gateways of the village. These sacrifices among the Fan are made
with a very peculiar-shaped knife, a fine specimen of which I
secured by the kindness of Captain Davies; it is shaped like the
head of a hornbill and is quite unlike the knives in common use
among the tribes, which are either long, leaf-shaped blades
sharpened along both edges, or broad, trowel-shaped, almost
triangular daggers. All Fan knives are fine weapons, superior to
the knives of all other Coast tribes I have met with, but the
sacrifice knife is distinctly peculiar. I found to my great
interest the same superstition in Congo Francais that I met with
first in the Oil Rivers. Its meaning I am unable to fully account
for, but I believe it to be a form of sacrifice. In Calabar each
individual has a certain forbidden thing or things. These things
are either forms of food, or the method of eating. In Calabar this
prohibition is called Ibet, and when, in consequence of the
influence of white culture, a man gives up his Ibet, he is regarded
by good sound ju-juists as leading an irregular and dissipated life,
and even the unintentional breaking of the Ibet is regarded as very
dangerous. Special days are set apart by each individual; on these
days he eats only the smallest quantity and plainest quality of
food. No one must eat with him, nor any dog, fowl, etc., feed off
the crumbs, nor any one watch him while eating. I suspect on this
day the Ibet is eaten, but I have not verified this, only getting,
from an untrustworthy source, a statement that supported it.
Dr. Nassau told me that among Congo Francais tribes certain rites
are performed for children during infancy or youth, in which a
prohibition is laid upon the child as regards the eating of some
particular article of food, or the doing of certain acts. "It is
difficult," he said, "to get the exact object of the 'Orunda.'
Certainly the prohibited article is not in itself evil, for others
but the inhibited individual may eat or do with it as they please.
Most of the natives blindly follow the custom of their ancestors
without being able to give any raison d'etre, but again, from those
best able to give a reason, you learn the prohibited article is a
sacrifice ordained for the child by its parents and the magic doctor
as a gift to the governing spirit of its life. The thing prohibited
becomes removed from the child's common use, and is made sacred to
the spirit. Any use of it by the child or man would therefore be a
sin, which would bring down the spirit's wrath in the form of
sickness or other evil, which can be atoned for only by expensive
ceremonies or gifts to the magic doctor who intercedes for the
offender."
Anything may be an Orunda or Ibet provided only that it is connected
with food; I have been able to find no definite ground for the
selection of it. The Doctor said, for example, that "once when on a
boat journey, and camped in the forest for the noon-day meal, the
crew of four had no meat. They needed it. I had a chicken but ate
only a portion, and gave the rest to the crew. Three men ate it
with their manioc meal, the fourth would not touch it. It was his
Orunda." "On another journey," said the Doctor, "instead of all my
crew leaving me respectfully alone in the canoe to have my lunch and
going ashore to have theirs, one of them stayed behind in the canoe,
and I found his Orunda was only to eat over water when on a journey
by water." "At another place, a chief at whose village we once
anchored in a small steamer when a glass of rum was given him, had a
piece of cloth held up before his mouth that the people might not
see him drink, which was his Orunda."
I know some ethnologists will think this last case should be classed
under another head, but I think the Doctor is right. He is well
aware of the existence of the other class of prohibitions regarding
chiefs and I have seen plenty of chiefs myself up the Rembwe who
have no objection to take their drinks coram publico, and I have no
doubt this was only an individual Orunda of this particular Rembwe
chief.
Great care is requisite in these matters, because a man may do or
abstain from doing one and the same thing for divers reasons.