In which the Voyager complains of the inconveniences arising from
the method of African thought, and discourses on apparitions and
Deities.
However much some of the African's mental attributes get under-
rated, I am sure there are others of them for which he gets more
credit than he deserves. One of these is his imagination. It
strikes the new-comer with awe, and frequently fills him with rage,
when he first meets it; but as he matures and gets used to the
African, he sees the string. For the African fancy is not the
"aerial fancy flying free," mentioned by our poets, but merely the
aerial of the theatre suspended by a wire or cord. The wire that
supports the African's fancy may be a very thin, small fact indeed,
or in some cases merely his incapacity to distinguish between
animate and inanimate objects, which give rise to his idea that
everything is possessed of a soul. Everything has a soul to him,
and to make confusion worse confounded, he usually believes in the
existence of matter apart from its soul. But there is little he
won't believe in, if it comes to that; and I have a feeling of
thankfulness that Buddhism, Theosophy, and above all Atheism, which
chases its tail and proves that nothing can be proved, have not yet
been given the African to believe in.
The African's want of making it clear in his language whether he is
referring to an animate or inanimate thing, has landed me in many a
dilemma, and his foolishness in not having a male and female gender
in his languages amounts to a nuisance. For example, I am a most
ladylike old person and yet get constantly called "Sir." The other
day, circumstances having got beyond my control during the
afternoon, I arrived in the evening in a saturated condition at a
white settlement, and wishing to get accommodation for myself and my
men, I made my way to the factory of a firm from whose
representatives I have always received great and most courteous
help. The agent in charge was not at home, and his steward-boy
said, "Massa live for Mr. B.'s house." "Go tell him I live for come
from," etc., said I, and "I fit for want place for my men." I had
nothing to write on, or with, and I thought the steward-boy could
carry this little message to its destination without dropping any of
it, as Mr. B.'s house was close by; but I was wrong. Off he went,
and soon returned with the note I here give a copy of: -
"DEAR OLD MAN,
"You must be in a deuce of a mess after the tornado. Just help
yourself to a set of my dry things. The shirts are in the bottom
drawer, the trousers are in the box under the bed, and then come
over here to the sing-song. My leg is dickey or I'd come across.--
Yours," etc.
Had there been any smelling salts or sal volatile in this
subdivision of the Ethiopian region, I should have forthwith fainted
on reading this, but I well knew there was not, so I blushed until
the steam from my soaking clothes (for I truly was "in a deuce of a
mess") went up in a cloud and then, just as I was, I went "across"
and appeared before the author of that awful note. When he came
round, he said it had taken seven years' growth out of him, and was
intensely apologetic. I remarked it had very nearly taken thirty
years' growth out of me, and he said the steward-boy had merely
informed him that "White man live for come from X," a place where he
knew there was another factory belonging to his firm, and he
naturally thought it was the agent from X who had come across.
You rarely, indeed I believe never, find an African with a gift for
picturesque descriptions of scenery. The nearest approach to it I
ever got was from my cook when we were on Mungo mah Lobeh. He
proudly boasted he had been on a mountain, up Cameroon River, with a
German officer, and on that mountain, "If you fall down one side you
die, if you fall down other side you die."
Graphic and vivid descriptions of incidents you often get, but it is
not Art. The effect is produced entirely by a bald brutality of
statement, the African having no artistic reticence whatsoever. One
fine touch, however, which does not come in under this class was
told me by my lamented friend Mr. Harris of Calabar. Some years ago
he had out a consignment of Dutch clocks with hanging weights, as is
natural to the Dutch clock. They were immensely popular among the
chiefs, and were soon disposed of save one, which had seen trouble
on the voyage out and lost one of its weights. Mr. Harris, who was
a man of great energy and resource, melted up some metal spoons and
made a new weight and hung it on the clock. The day he finished
this a chief came in, anxious for a Dutch clock, and Mr. Harris
forthwith sold him the repaired one. About a week elapsed, and then
the chief turned up at the factory again with a rueful countenance,
followed by a boy carrying something swathed in a cloth. It was the
clock.
"You do me bad too much, Mr. Harris," said the chief. Mr. Harris
denied this on the spot with the vehemence of injured innocence.
The chief shook his head and spat profusely and sorrowfully.
"You no sabe him clock you done sell me?" said he. "When I look him
clock it no be to-day, it be to morrow." Mr. Harris took the clock
back, to see what was the cause of this strange state of affairs.
Of course it arose from his having been too liberal in the amount of
spoon in the weight, and this being altered, the chief was not
hurried onward to his grave at such a rattling pace; "but," said Mr.
Harris, "that clock was a flyer to the last."
But I will not go into the subject of African languages here, but
only remark of them that although they are elaborate enough to
produce, for their users, nearly every shade of erroneous statement,
they are not, save perhaps M'pongwe, elaborate enough to enable a
native to state his exact thought. Some of them are very dependent
on gesture. When I was with the Fans they frequently said, "We will
go to the fire so that we can see what they say," when any question
had to be decided after dark, and the inhabitants of Fernando Po,
the Bubis, are quite unable to converse with each other unless they
have sufficient light to see the accompanying gestures of the
conversation. In all cases I feel sure the African's intelligence
is far ahead of his language.
The African is usually great at dreams, and has them very noisily;
but he does not seem to me to attach immense importance to them,
certainly not so much as the Red Indian does. I doubt whether there
is much real ground for supposing that from dreams came man's first
conception of the spirit world, and I think the origin of man's
religious belief lies in man's misfortunes.
There can be little doubt that the very earliest human beings found,
as their descendants still find, their plans frustrated, let them
plan ever so wisely and carefully; they must have seen their
companions overtaken by death and disaster, arising both from things
they could see and from things they could not see. The distinction
between these two classes of phenomena is not so definitely
recognised by savages or animals as it is by the more cultured races
of humanity. I doubt whether a savage depends on his five senses
alone to teach him what the world is made of, any more than a Fellow
of the Royal Society does. From this method of viewing nature I
feel sure that the general idea arose--which you find in all early
cultures--that death was always the consequence of the action of
some malignant spirit, and that there is no accidental or natural
death, as we call it; and death is, after all, the most impressive
attribute of life.
If a man were knocked on the head with a club, or shot with an
arrow, the cause of death is clearly the malignancy of the person
using these weapons; and so it is easy to think that a man killed by
a fallen tree, or by the upsetting of a canoe in the surf, or in an
eddy in the river, is also the victim of some being using these
things as weapons.
A man having thus gained a belief that there are more than human
actors in life's tragedy, the idea that disease is also a
manifestation of some invisible being's wrath and power seems to me
natural and easy; and he knows you can get another man for a
consideration to kill or harm a third party, and so he thinks that,
for a consideration, you can also get one of these superhuman
beings, which we call gods or devils, but which the African regards
in another light, to do so.
A certain set of men and women then specialise off to study how
these spirits can be managed, and so arises a priesthood; and the
priests, or medicine men as they are called in their earliest forms,
gradually, for their own ends, elaborate and wrap round their
profession with ritual and mystery.
The savage is also conscious of another great set of phenomena
which, he soon learns, take no interest in human affairs. The sun
which rises and sets, the moon which changes, the tides which come
and go: --what do they care? Nothing; and what is more, sacrifice
to them what you may, you cannot get them to care about you and your
affairs, and so the savage turns his attention to those other
spirits that do take only too much interest, as is proved by those
unexpected catastrophes; and, as their actions show, these spirits
are all malignant, so he deals with them just as he would deal with
a bad man whom he was desirous of managing. He flatters and fees
them, he deprives himself of riches to give to them as sacrifices,
believing they will relish it all the more because it gives him pain
of some sort to give it to them. He holds that they think it will
be advisable for them to encourage him to continue the giving by
occasionally doing what he asks them. Naturally he never feels sure
of them; he sees that you may sacrifice to a god for years, you may
wrap him up--or more properly speaking, the object in which he
resides--in your only cloth on chilly nights while you shiver
yourself; you and your children, and your mother, and your sister
and her children, may go hungry that food may rot upon his shrine;
and yet, in some hour of dire necessity, the power will not come and
save you--because he has been lured away by some richer gifts than
yours.
You white men will say, "Why go on believing in him then?" but that
is an idea that does not enter the African mind. I might just as
well say "Why do you go on believing in the existence of hansom
cabs," because one hansom cab driver malignantly fails to take you
where you want to go, or fails to arrive in time to catch a train
you wished to catch.
The African fully knows the liability of his fetish to fail, but he
equally fully knows its power. One, to me, grandly tragic instance
of this I learnt at Opobo. There was a very great Fetish doctor
there, universally admired and trusted, who lived out on the land at
the mouth of the Great River. One day he himself fell sick, and he
made ju-ju against the sickness; but it held on, and he grew worse.
He made more ju-ju of greater power, but again in vain, and then he
made the greatest ju-ju man can make, and it availed nought, and he
knew he was dying; and so, with his remaining strength, he broke up
and dishonoured and destroyed all the Fetishes in which the spirits
lived, and cast them out into the surf and died like a man.
Then horror came upon the people when they knew he had done this,
and they burnt his house and all things belonging to him, and cried
upon the spirits not to forsake them, not to lay this one man's
deadly sin at their doors.
In connection with the gods of West Africa I may remark that in
almost all the series of native tradition there, you will find
accounts of a time when there was direct intercourse between the
gods or spirits that live in the sky, and men. That intercourse is
always said to have been cut off by some human error; for example,
the Fernando Po people say that once upon a time there was no
trouble or serious disturbance upon earth because there was a
ladder, made like the one you get palm-nuts with, "only long, long;"
and this ladder reached from earth to heaven so the gods could go up
and down it and attend personally to mundane affairs. But one day a
cripple boy started to go up the ladder, and he had got a long way
up when his mother saw him, and went up in pursuit. The gods,
horrified at the prospect of having boys and women invading heaven,
threw down the ladder, and have since left humanity severely alone.
The Timneh people, north-east of Sierra Leone, say that in old times
God was very friendly with men, and when He thought a man had lived
long enough on earth, He sent a messenger to him telling him to come
up into the sky, and stay with Him; but once there was a man who,
when the messenger of God came, did not want to leave his wives, his
slaves, and his riches, and so the messenger had to go back without
him; and God was very cross and sent another messenger for him, who
was called Disease, but the man would not come for him either, and
so Disease sent back word to God that he must have help to bring the
man; and so God sent another messenger whose name was Death; and
Disease and Death together got hold of the man, and took him to God;
and God said in future He would always send these messengers to
fetch men.
The Fernando Po legend may be taken as fairly pure African, but the
Timneh, I expect, is a transmogrified Arabic story--though I do not
know of anything like it among Arabic stories; but they are infinite
in quantity, and there is a certain ring about it I recognise, and
these Timnehs are much in contact with the Mohammedan, Mandingoes,
etc. In none of the African stories is there given anything like
the importance to dreams that there is given to attempts to account
for accidents and death; and surely it must have been more
impressive and important to a man to have got his leg or arm snapped
off by a crocodile in the river, or by a shark in the surf, or to
have got half killed, or have seen a friend killed by a falling tree
in the forest in the day time, than to have experienced the most
wonderful of dreams. He sees that however terrific his dream-
experiences may have been, he was not much the worse for them. Not
so in the other case, a limb gone or a life gone is more impressive,
and more necessary to account for.
No trace of sun-worship have I ever found. The firmament is, I
believe, always the great indifferent and neglected god, the Nyan
Kupon of the Tschwi, and the Anzambe, Nzam, etc., of the Bantu
races. The African thinks this god has great power if he would only
exert it, and when things go very badly with him, when the river
rises higher than usual and sweeps away his home and his
plantations; when the smallpox stalks through the land, and day and
night the corpses float down the river past him, and he finds them
jammed among his canoes that are tied to the beach, and choking up
his fish traps; and then when at last the death-wail over its
victims goes up night and day from his own village, he will rise up
and call upon this great god in a terror maddened by despair, that
he may hear and restrain the evil workings of these lesser devils;
but he evidently finds, as Peer Gynt says, "Nein, er hort nicht. Er
ist taub wie gewohnlich" for there is no organised cult for Anzam.
Accounts of apparitions abound in all the West Coast districts, and
although the African holds them all in high horror and terror, he
does not see anything supernatural in his "Duppy." It is a horrid
thing to happen on, but there is nothing strange about it, and he is
ten thousand times more frightened than puzzled over the affair. He
does not want to "investigate" to see whether there is anything in
it. He wants to get clear away, and make ju-ju against it, "one
time."
These apparitions have a great variety of form, for, firstly, there
are all the true spirits, nature spirits; secondly, the spirits of
human beings--these human spirits are held to exist before as well
as during and after bodily life; thirdly, the spirits of things.
Probably the most horrid of class one is the Tschwi's Sasabonsum.
Whether Sasabonsum is an individual or a class is not quite clear,
but I believe he is a class of spirits, each individual of which has
the same characteristics, the same manner of showing anger, the same
personal appearance, and the same kind of residence. I am a devoted
student of his cult and I am always coming across equivalent forms
of him in other tribes as well as the Tschwi, and I think he is very
early. As the Tschwi have got their religious notions in a most
tidy and definite state, we will take their version of Sasabonsum.
He lives in the forest, in or under those great silk-cotton trees
around the roots of which the earth is red. This coloured earth
identifies a silk-cotton tree as being the residence of a
Sasabonsum, as its colour is held to arise from the blood it whips
off him as he goes down to his under-world home after a night's
carnage. All silk-cotton trees are suspected because they are held
to be the roosts for Duppies. But the red earth ones are feared
with a great fear, and no one makes a path by them, or a camp near
them at night.
Sasabonsum is a friend of witches. He is of enormous size, and of a
red colour. He wears his hair straight and he waylays unprotected
wayfarers in the forest at night, and in all districts except that
of Apollonia he eats them. Round Apollonia he only sucks their
blood. Natives of this district after meeting him have crawled home
and given an account of his appearance, and then expired.
Ellis says he is believed to be implacable, and when angered can
never be mollified or propitiated, but it is certain that human
victims are constantly sacrificed to him in districts beyond white
control; in districts under it, the equivalent value of a human
sacrifice in sheep and goats is offered to him. In Ashantee he has
priests, and of course human sacrifice. Away among the Dahomeyan
tribes--where he has kept his habits but got another name, and seems
to have crystallised from a class into an individual--the usual way
in which a god develops--he has priests and priestesses, and they
are holy terrors; but among the Tschwi, Sasabonsum is mainly dealt
with by witches, and people desirous of possessing the power of
becoming witches. They derive their power from him in a remarkable
way. I put myself to great personal inconvenience (fever risk,
mosquito certainty, high leopard and snake palaver probability, and
grave personal alarm and apprehension) to verify Colonel Ellis's
account of the methods witches employ in this case, to obtain
ehsuhman and I find his account correct. {363}
The chief use of a suhman is the power it gives its owner to procure
the death of other people, not necessarily his own enemies, for he
will sell charms made by the agency of his suhman to another person
whose nerves have not been equal to facing Sasabonsum on his own
account. He can also provide by its agency other charms, such as
those that protect houses from fire, and things and individuals from
accidents on the road, or in canoes, and the home circle from good-
looking but unprincipled young men, and so on.
As a rule the person who has a suhman keeps the fact pretty quiet,
for the possession of such an article would lead half the
catastrophes in his district, from the decease of pigs, fowls, and
babies, to fires, etc., to be accredited to him, which would lead to
his neighbours making "witch palaver" over him, and he would have to
undergo poison-ordeal and other unpleasantness to clear his
character. He, however, always keeps a special day in his suhman's
honour, and should he be powerful, as a king or big chief, he will
keep this day openly. King Kwoffi Karri Kari, whom we fought with
in 1874, used to make a big day for his suhman, which was kept in a
box covered with gold plates, and he sacrificed a human victim to it
every Tuesday, with general festivities and dances in its honour.
I should remark that Sasabonsum is married. His wife, or more
properly speaking his female form, is called Shamantin. She is far
less malignant than the male form. Her name comes from Srahman--
ghost or spirit; the termination "tin" is an abbreviation of
sintstin--tall. She is of immense height, and white; perhaps this
idea is derived from the white stem of the silk-cotton trees wherein
she invariably abides. Her method of dealing with the solitary
wayfarer is no doubt inconvenient to him, but it is kinder than her
husband's ways, for she does not kill and eat him, as Sasabonsum
does, but merely detains him some months while she teaches him all
about the forest: what herbs are good to eat, or to cure disease;
where the game come to drink, and what they say to each other, and
so forth. I often wish I knew this lady, for the grim, grand
African forests are like a great library, in which, so far, I can do
little more than look at the pictures, although I am now busily
learning the alphabet of their language, so that I may some day read
what these pictures mean.
Do not go away with the idea, I beg, that goddesses as a general
rule, are better than gods. They are not. There are stories about
them which I could--I mean I could not--tell you. There is one
belonging also to the Tschwi. She lives at Moree, a village five
miles from Cape Coast. She is, as is usual with deities, human in
shape and colossal in size, and as is not usual with deities, she is
covered with hair from head to foot,--short white hair like a goat.
Her abode is on the path to surf-cursed Anamabu near the sea-beach,
and her name is Aynfwa; a worshipper of hers has only got to mention
the name of a person he wishes dead when passing her abode and
Aynfwa does the rest. She is the goddess of all albinoes, who are
said to be more frequent in occurrence round Moree than elsewhere.
Ellis says that in 1886, when he was there, they were 1 per cent. of
the entire population. These albinoes are, ipso facto, her priests
and priestesses, and in old days an albino had only to name anywhere
a person Aynfwa wished for, and that person was forthwith killed.
I think I may safely say that every dangerous place in West Africa
is regarded as the residence of a god--rocks and whirlpools in the
rivers--swamps "no man fit to pass"--and naturally, the surf. Along
the Gold Coast, at every place where you have to land through the
surf, it fairly swarms with gods. A little experience with the said
surf inclines you to think, as the dabblers in spiritualism say
"that there is something in it." I will back this West Coast surf--
"the Calemma," as we call it down South, against any other
malevolent abomination, barring only the English climate. Its ways
of dealing with human beings are cunning and deceitful. In its most
ferocious moods it seizes a boat, straightway swamps it, and feeds
its pet sharks with the boat's occupants. If the surf is merely
sky-larking it lets your boat's nose just smell the sand, and then
says "Thought you were all right this time, did you though," and
drags the boat back again under the incoming wave, or catches it
under the stern and gaily throws it upside down over you and yours
on the beach. Variety, they say, is charming. Let those who say
it, and those who believe it, just do a course of surf-work, and
I'll warrant they will change their minds.
There is one thing about the surf that I do not understand, and that
is why witches always walk stark naked along the beach by it at
night, and eat sea crabs the while. That such is a confirmed habit
of theirs is certain; and they tell me that while doing this the
witches emit a bright light, and also that there is a certain
medicine, which, if you have it with you, you can throw over the
witch, and then he, or she, will remain blazing until morning time,
running to and fro, crying out wildly, in front of the white,
breaking, thundering surf wall, and when the dawn comes the fire
burns the witch right up, leaving only a grey ash--and palaver set
in this world and the next for that witch.
A highly-esteemed native minister told me when I was at Cape Coast
last, that a fortnight before, he had been away in the Apollonia
district on mission work. One evening he and a friend were walking
along the beach and the night was dark, so that you could see only
the surf. It is never too dark to see that, it seems to have light
in itself. They saw a flame coming towards them, and after a
moment's doubt they knew it was a witch, and feeling frightened, hid
themselves among the bushes that edge the sandy shore. As they
watched, it came straight on and passed them, and they saw it
disappear in the distance. My informant laughed at himself, and
very wisely said, "One has not got to believe those things here, one
has in Apollonia."
To the surf and its spirits the sea-board-dwelling Tschwis bring
women who have had children and widows, both after a period of eight
days from the birth of the child, or the death of the husband.
A widow remains in the house until this period has elapsed,
neglecting her person, eating little food, and sitting on the bare
floor in the attitude of mourning. On the Gold Coast they bury very
quickly, as they are always telling you, usually on the day after
death, rarely later than the third day, even among the natives; and
the spirit, or Srah, of the dead man is supposed to hang about his
wives and his house until the ceremony of purification is carried
out. This is done, needless to say, with uproar. The relations of
each wife go to her house with musical instruments--I mean tom-toms
and that sort of thing--and they take a quantity of mint, which
grows wild in this country, with them. This mint they burn, some of
it in the house, the rest they place upon pans of live coals and
carry round the widow as she goes in their midst down to the surf,
her relatives singing aloud to the Srah of the departed husband,
telling him that now he is dead and has done with the lady he must
leave her. This singing serves to warn all the women who are not
relations to get out of the way, which of course they always
carefully do, because if they were to see the widow their own
husbands would die within the year.
When the party has arrived at the shore, they strip every rag off
the widow, and throw it into the surf; and a thoughtful female
relative having brought a suit of dark blue baft with her for the
occasion, the widow is clothed in this and returns home, where a
suitable festival is held, after which she may marry again; but if
she were to marry before this ceremony, the Srah of the husband
would play the mischief with husband number two or three, and so on,
as the case might be.
In the inland Gold Coast districts the widows remain in a state of
mourning for several months, and a selection of them, a quantity of
slaves, and one or two free men are killed to escort the dead man to
Srahmandazi; and as well as these, and in order to provide him with
merchandise to keep up his house and state in the under-world,
quantities of gold dust, rolls of rich velvets, silks, satins, etc.,
are thrown into the grave.
Among the dwellers in Cameroon, when you are across the Bantu
border-line, velvets, etc., are buried with a big man or woman; but
I am told it is only done for the glorification of his living
relatives, so that the world may say, "So and so must be rich, look
what a lot of trade he threw away at that funeral of his wife," or
his father, or his son, as the case may be; but I doubt whether this
is the true explanation. If it is, I should recommend my German
friends, if they wish to intervene, to introduce the income tax into
Cameroon--that would eliminate this custom.
The Tschwis hold that there is a definite earthly existence
belonging to each soul of a human kind. Let us say, for example, a
soul has a thirty years' bodily existence belonging to it. Well,
suppose that soul's body gets killed off at twenty-five, its
remaining five years it has to spend, if it is left alone, in
knocking about its old haunts, homes, and wives. In this state it
is called a Sisa, and is a nuisance. It will cause sickness. It
will throw stones. It will pull off roofs, and it will play the
very mischief with its wives' subsequent husbands, all because, not
having reached its full term of life, it has not learnt its way down
the dark and difficult path to Srahmandazi, the entrance to which is
across the Volta River to the N.E. This knowledge of the path to
Srahmandazi is a thing that grows gradually on a man's immortal soul
(the other three souls are not immortal), and naturally not having
been allowed to complete his life, his knowledge is imperfect. A
man's soul, however, can be taught the way, if necessary, in the
funeral "custom" made by his relatives and the priests; but in a
case of an incompletelifeonearthsoul, as a German would say, when it
does arrive in the land of Insrah (pl.) it is in a weak and feeble
state from the difficulties of its journey, whereas a soul that has
lived out its allotted span of life goes straightway off to
Srahmandazi as soon as its "custom" or "devil" is made and gives its
surviving relatives no further trouble. Still there is great
difference of opinion among all the Tschwis and Ga men I have come
across on this point, and Ellis likewise remarks on this difference
of opinion. Some informants say that a soul that has been sent
hence before its time, although it is exhausted by the hardships it
has suffered on its journey down, yet recovers health in a month or
so; while a soul that has run its allotted span on earth is as
feeble as a new-born babe on arriving in Srahmandazi, and takes
years to pull round. Other informants say they have no knowledge of
these details, and state that all the difference they know of
between the souls of men who have been killed and the men who have
died, is that the former can always come back, and that really the
safest way of disposing of this class of soul is, by suitable spells
and incantations, to get it to enter into the body of a new-born
baby, where it can live out the remainder of its life.
Before closing these observations on Srahmandazi I will give the
best account of that land that I am at present able to. Some day
perhaps I may share the fate of the Oxford Professor in In the Wrong
Paradise and go there myself, but so far my information is second-
hand.
It is like this world. There are towns and villages, rivers,
mountains, bush, plantations, and markets. When the sun rises here
it sets in Srahmandazi. It has its pleasures and its pains, not
necessarily retributive or rewarding, but dim. All souls in it grow
forward or backward into the prime of life and remain there, some
informants say; others say that each inhabitant remains there at the
same age as he was when he quitted the world above. This latter
view is most like the South West one. The former is possibly only
an attempt to make Srahmandazi into a heaven in conformation with
Christian teaching, which it is not, any more than it is a hell.
I have much curious information regarding its flora and fauna. A
great deal of both is seemingly indigenous, and then there are the
souls of great human beings, the Asrahmanfw, and the souls of all
the human beings, animals, and things sent down with them. The
ghosts do not seem to leave off their interest in mundane affairs,
for they not only have local palavers, but try palavers left over
from their earthly existence; and when there is an outbreak of
sickness in a Fantee town or village, and several inhabitants die
off, the opinion is often held that there is a big palaver going on
down in Srahmandazi and that the spirits are sending up on earth for
witnesses, subpoenaing them as it were. Medicine men or priests are
called in to find out what particular earthly grievance can be the
subject of the ghost palaver, and when they have ascertained this,
they take the evidence of every one in the town on this affair, as
it were on commission, and transmit the information to the court
sitting in Srahmandazi. This prevents the living being incommoded
by personal journeys down below, and although the priests have their
fee, it is cheaper in the end, because the witnesses' funeral
expenses would fall heavier still.
Although far more elaborated and thought out than any other African
underworld I have ever come across, the Tschwi Srahmandazi may be
taken as a type of all the African underworlds. The Bantu's idea of
a future life is a life spent in much such a place. As far as I can
make out there is no definite idea of eternity. I have even come
across cases in which doubt was thrown on the present existence of
the Creating God, but I think this has arisen from attempts having
been made to introduce concise conceptions into the African mind,
conceptions that are quite foreign to its true nature and which
alarm and worry it. You never get the strange idea of the
difference between time and eternity--the idea I mean, that they are
different things--in the African that one frequently gets in
cultured Europeans; and as for the human soul, the African always
believes "that still the spirit is whole, and life and death but
shadows of the soul."