faith of ancient Egypt, the earliest system of profane belief known to
man, with its Triad denoting the various phases and powers of nature,
was essentially fetissist; whilst in the Syrian mind dawned at first the
idea of “Melkart,” a god of earth, and his Baalim, angels, viceregents,
or local deities. But generally the history of religions proves that
when man, whether degraded from primal elevation or elevated from primal
degradation, has progressed a step beyond atheism--the spiritual state
of the lowest savagery--he advances to the modification called
Fetissism, the condition of the infant mind of humanity. According to
the late Col. Van Kennedy, “such expressions as the love and fear of
God never occur in the sacred books of the Hindus.” The ancient Persians
were ignicolists, adoring ethereal fire. Confucius owned that he knew
nothing about the gods, and therefore preferred saying as little as
possible upon the subject. Men, still without tradition or training,
confused the Creator with creation, and ventured not to place the burden
of providence upon a single deity. Slaves to the agencies of material
nature, impressed by the splendours of the heavenly bodies, comforted by
fire and light, persuaded by their familiarity with the habits of wild
beasts that the brute creation and the human claimed a mysterious
affinity, humbled by the terrors of elemental war, and benefitted by
hero and sage,--
“Quicquid humus, pelagus, cœlum mirabile gignunt,
Id duxere deos.”
The barbarian worshipped these visible objects not as types, myths,
divine emanations, or personifications of a deity: he adored them for
themselves. The modern theory, the mode in which full-grown man explains
away the follies of his childhood, making the interpretation precede the
fable, fails when tested by experience. The Hindu, and, indeed, the
ignorant Christian, still adore the actual image of man and beast; it is
unreasonable to suppose that they kneel before and worship with heart
and soul its metaphysics; and an attempt to allegorise it, or to deprive
it of its specific virtues, would be considered, as in ancient Greece
and Rome, mere impiety.
By its essence, then, Fetissism is a rude and sensual superstition, the
faith of abject fear, and of infant races that have not risen, and are,
perhaps, incapable of rising to theism--the religion of love and the
belief of the highest types of mankind. But old creeds die hard, and
error, founded upon the instincts and feelings of human nature borrows
the coherence and uniformity of truth. That Fetissism is a belief common
to man in the childhood of his spiritual life, may be proved by the
frequent and extensive remains of the faith which the cretinism of the
Hamitic race has perpetuated amongst them to the present day, still
sprouting like tares even in the fair field of revealed religion. The
dread of ghosts, for instance, which is the mainstay of Fetissism, is
not inculcated in any sacred book, yet the belief is not to be
abolished. Thus the Rakshasa of the Hindus is a disembodied spirit,
doing evil to mankind; and the ghost of the prophet Samuel, raised by
the familiar of the Witch of Endor, was the immortal part of a mortal
being, still connected with earth, and capable of returning to it.
Through the Manes, the Umbra, and the Spectrum of the ancients, the
belief has descended to the moderns, as the household words ghost,
goblin, and bogle, revenant, polter-geist, and spook, Duh, Dusha, and
Dukh attest. Precisely similar to the African ghost-faith is the old
Irish belief in Banshees, Pookas, and other evil entities; the corporeal
frame of the dead forms other bodies, but the spirit hovers in the air,
watching the destiny of friends, haunting houses, killing children,
injuring cattle, and causing disease and destruction. Everywhere, too,
their functions are the same: all are malevolent to the living, and they
are seldom known to do good. The natural horror and fear of death which
may be observed even in the lower animals has caused the dead to be
considered vindictive and destructive.
Some missionaries have detected in the habit, which prevails throughout
Eastern and Western Africa, of burying slaves with the deceased, of
carrying provisions to graves, and of lighting fires on cold nights near
the last resting-places of the departed, a continuation of relations
between the quick and the dead which points to a belief in a future
state of existence. The wish is father to that thought: the doctrine of
the soul, of immortality, belongs to a superior order of mind, to a more
advanced stage of society. The belief, as its operations show, is in
presentity, materialism, not in futurity, spiritualism. According to the
ancients, man is a fourfold being:--
“Bis duo sunt homini, manes, caro, spiritus, umbra:
Quatuor hæc loci bis duo suscipiunt
Terra tegit carnem, tumulum circumvolitat umbra,
Manes Orcus habet, spiritus astra petit.”
Take away the Manes and the astral Spirit, and remains the African
belief in the ειδωλον or Umbra, spiritus, or ghost. When the savage and
the barbarian are asked what has become of the “old people” (their
ancestors), over whose dust and ashes they perform obsequies, these
veritable secularists only smile and reply Wáme-kwisha, “they are
ended.” It proves the inferior organisation of the race. Even the North
American aborigines, a race which Nature apparently disdains to
preserve, decided that man hath a future, since even Indian corn is
vivified and rises again. The East African has created of his fears a
ghost which never attains the perfect form of a soul. This inferior
development has prevented his rising to the social status of the Hindu,
and other anciently civilised races, whom a life wholly wanting in
purpose and occupation drove from the excitement necessary to stimulate
the mind towards a hidden or mysterious future. These wild races seek
otherwise than in their faith a something to emotionise and to agitate
them.
The East African’s Credenda--it has not arrived at the rank of a system,
this vague and misty dawning of a creed--are based upon two main
articles. The first is demonology, or, rather, the existence of Koma,
the spectra of the dead; the second is Uchawi, witchcraft or black
magic, a corollary to the principal theorem. Few, and only the tribes
adjacent to the maritime regions, have derived from El Islam a faint
conception of the one Supreme. There is no trace in this country of the
ancient and modern animal-worship of Egypt and India, though travellers
have asserted that vestiges of it exist amongst the kindred race of
Kafirs. The African has no more of Sabæism than what belongs to the
instinct of man: he has a reverence for the sun and moon, the latter is
for evident reasons in higher esteem, but he totally ignores
star-worship. If questioned concerning his daily bread, he will point
with a devotional aspect towards the light of day; and if asked what
caused the death of his brother, will reply Jua, or Rimwe, the sun. He
has not, like the Kafir, a holiday at the epoch of new moon: like the
Moslem, however, on first seeing it, he raises and claps his hands in
token of obeisance. The Mzimo, or Fetiss hut, is the first germ of a
temple, and the idea is probably derived from the Kurban of the Arabs.
It is found throughout the country, especially in Uzaramo, Unyamwezi,
and Karagwah. It is in the shape of a dwarf house, one or two feet high,
with a thatched roof, but without walls. Upon the ground, or suspended
from the roof, are handfuls of grain and small pots full of beer, placed
there to propitiate the ghosts, and to defend the crops from injury.
A prey to base passions and melancholy godless fears, the Fetissist,
who peoples with malevolent beings the invisible world, animates
material nature with evil influences. The rites of his dark and deadly
superstition are all intended to avert evils from himself, by
transferring them to others: hence the witchcraft and magic which flow
naturally from the system of demonology. Men rarely die without the wife
or children, the kindred or slaves, being accused of having compassed
their destruction by “throwing the glamour over them;” and, as has been
explained, the trial and the conviction are of the most arbitrary
nature. Yet witchcraft is practised by thousands with the firmest
convictions in their own powers; and though frightful tortures await the
wizard and the witch who have been condemned for the destruction of
chief or elder, the vindictiveness of the negro drives him readily to
the malevolent practices of sorcery. As has happened in Europe and
elsewhere, in the presence of torture and the instant advance of death,
the sorcerer and sorceress will not only confess, but even boast of and
believe in, their own criminality. “Verily I slew such a one!--I brought
about the disease of such another!”--these are their demented vaunts,
the offspring of mental imbecility, stimulated by traditional
hallucination.
In this state of spiritual death there is, as may be imagined, but
little of the fire of fanaticism: polemics are as unknown as politics to
them; their succedaneum for a god is not a jealous god. But upon the
subjects of religious belief and revelation all men are equal: Davus
becomes Œdipus, the fool is as the sage. What the “I” believes, that the
“Thou” must acknowledge, under the pains and penalties of offending
Self-esteem. Whilst the African’s faith is weakly catholic, he will not
admit that other men are wiser on this point than himself. Yet he will
fast like a Moslem, because doing something seems to raise him in the
scale of creation. His mind, involved in the trammels of his
superstition, and enchained by custom, is apparently incapable of
receiving the impressions of El Islam. His Fetissism, unspiritualised by
the philosophic Pantheism and Polytheism of Europe and Asia, has
hitherto unfitted him for that belief which was readily accepted by the
more Semitic maritime races, the Somal, the Wasawahili, and the Wamrima.
To a certain extent, also, it has been the policy of the Arab to avoid
proselytising, which would lead to comparative equality: for sordid
lucre the Moslem has left the souls of these Kafirs to eternal
perdition. According to most doctors of the saving faith, an ardent
proselytiser might convert by the sword whole tribes, though he might
not succeed with individuals, who cannot break through the ties of
society. The “Mombas Mission,” however, relying upon the powers of
persuasion, unequivocally failed, and pronounced their flock to be “not
behind the greatest infidels and scoffers of Europe: they blaspheme, in
fact, like children.” With characteristic want of veneration they would
say, “Your Lord is a bad master, for he does not cure his servants.”
When an early convert died, the Wanyika at once decided that there is no
Saviour, as he does not prevent the decease of a friend. The sentiment
generally elicited by a discourse upon the subject of the existence of a
Deity is a desire to see him, in order to revenge upon him the deaths of
relatives, friends, and cattle.[17]
[17] That the Western African negro resembles in this point his
negroid brother, the following extract from an amusing and truthful
little volume, entitled “Trade and Travels in the Gulf of Guinea and
Western Africa” (London: Simpkin and Marshall, 1851), will prove:--
Always anxious,--says Mr. J. Smith, the author,--to get any of them
(the Western Africans) to talk about God and religion, I said, “What
have you been doing King Pepple?”
“All the same as you do,--I tank God.”
“For what?”
“Every good ting God sends me.”
“Have you seen God?”
“Chi! no;--suppose man see God, he must die one minute.” (He would die
in a moment.)
“When you die won’t you see God?”
With great warmth, “I know no savvy. (I don’t know.) How should I
know? Never mind. I no want to hear more for that palaver.” (I want no
more talk on that subject.)
“What way?” (Why?)
“It no be your business, you come here for trade palaver.”
I knew--resumes Mr. Smith--it would be of no use pursuing the subject
at that time, so I was silent, and it dropped for the moment.
In speaking of him dying, I had touched a very tender and disagreeable
chord, for he looked very savage and sulky, and I saw by the rapid
changes in his countenance that he was the subject of some intense
internal emotion. At length he broke out, using most violent
gesticulations, and exhibiting a most inhuman expression of
countenance, “Suppose God was here, I must kill him, one minute!”
“You what? you kill God?” followed I, quite taken aback, and almost
breathless with the novel and diabolical notion; “You kill God? why,
you talk all some fool” (like a fool); “you cannot kill God; and
suppose it possible that God could die, everything would cease to
exist. He is the Spirit of the universe. But he can kill you.”
“I know I cannot kill him; but suppose I could kill him, I would.”
“Where does God live?”
“For top.”
“How?” He pointed to the zenith.
“And suppose you could, why would you kill him?”
“Because he makes men to die.”
“Why, my friend,” in a conciliatory manner, “you would not wish to
live for ever, would you?”
“Yes, I want to stand” (remain for ever).
“But you will be old by and by, and if you live long enough, will
become very infirm, like that old man,” pointing to a man very old for
an African and thin, and lame, and almost blind, who had come into the
court during the foregoing conversation, to ask for some favour (I
wonder he had not been destroyed),--“and like him you will become
lame, and deaf, and blind, and will be able to take no pleasure; would
it not be better, then, for you to die when this takes place, and you
are in pain and trouble, and so make room for your son, as your father
did for you?”
“No, it would not; I want to stand all same I stand now.”
“But supposing you should go to a place of happiness after death
and----”
“I no savvy nothing about that, I know that I now live, and have too
many wives, and niggers (slaves), and canoes,” (he did not mean what
he said, in saying he had too many wives, &c., it is their way of
expressing a great number,) “and that I am king, and plenty of ships
come to my country. I know no other ting, and I want to stand.”
I offered a reply, but he would hear no more, and so the conversation
on that subject ceased; and we proceeded to discuss one not much more
agreeable to him--the payment of a very considerable debt which he
owed me.
Fetissism supplies an abundance of professionally holy men. The “Mfumo”
is translated by the Arabs Bassar, a seer or clairvoyant. The Mchawi is
the Sahhar, magician, or adept in the black art. Amongst the Wazegura
and the Wasagara is the Mgonezi, a word Arabised into Rammal or
Geomantist. He practises the Miramoro, or divination and prediction of
fray and famine, death and disease, by the relative position of small
sticks, like spilikins, cast at random on the ground. The “rain-maker,”
or “rain-doctor” of the Cape, common throughout these tribes, and
extending far north of the equator, is called in East Africa Mganga, in
the plural Waganga: the Arabs term him Tabib, doctor or physician.
The Mganga, in the central regions termed Mfumo, may be considered as
the rude beginning of a sacerdotal order. These drones, who swarm
throughout the land, are of both sexes: the women, however, generally
confine themselves to the medical part of the profession. The calling is
hereditary, the eldest or the cleverest son begins his neoteric
education at an early age, and succeeds to his father’s functions. There
is little mystery in the craft, and the magicians of Unyamwezi have not
refused to initiate some of the Arabs. The power of the Mganga is great:
he is treated as a sultan, whose word is law, and as a giver of life and
death. He is addressed by a kingly title, and is permitted to wear the
chieftain’s badge, made of the base of a conical shell. He is also known
by a number of small greasy and blackened gourds, filled with physic and
magic, hanging round his waist, and by a little more of the usual
grime--sanctity and dirt being connected in Africa as elsewhere. These
men are sent for from village to village, and receive as obventions and
spiritual fees sheep and goats, cattle and provisions. Their persons,
however, are not sacred, and for criminal acts they are punished like
other malefactors. The greatest danger to them is an excess of fame. A
celebrated magician rarely, if ever, dies a natural death: too much is
expected from him, and a severer disappointment leads to consequences
more violent than usual. The Arabs deride their pretensions, comparing
them depreciatingly to the workers of Simiya, or conjuration, in their
own country. They remark that the wizard can never produce rain in the
dry, or avert it in the wet season. The many, however, who, to use a
West African phrase, have “become black” from a long residence in the
country, acquire a sneaking belief in the Waganga, and fear of their
powers. The well-educated classes in Zanzibar consult these heathen, as
the credulous of other Eastern countries go to the astrologer and
geomantist, and in Europe to the clairvoyant and the tireuse de cartes.
In one point this proceeding is wise: the wizard rarely wants wits; and
whatever he has heard secretly or openly will inevitably appear in the
course of his divination.
It must not be supposed, however, that the Mganga is purely an impostor.
To deceive others thoroughly a man must first deceive himself, otherwise
he will be detected by the least discerning. This is the simple secret
of so many notable successes, achieved in the most unpromising causes by
self-reliance and enthusiasm, the parents of energy and consistence.
These barbarians are more often sinned against by their own fears and
fooleries of faith, than sinners against their fellow-men by fraud and
falsehood.
The office of Uganga includes many duties. The same man is a physician
by natural and supernatural means, a mystagogue or medicine-man, a
detector of sorcery, by means of the Judicium Dei or ordeal, a
rain-maker, a conjuror, an augur, and a prophet.
As a rule, all diseases, from a boil to marasmus senilis, are attributed
by the Fetissist to P’hepo, Hubub, or Afflatus. The three words are
synonymous. P’hepo, in Kisawahili, is the plural form of upepo (a
zephyr), used singularly to signify a high wind, a whirlwind (“devil”),
and an evil ghost, generally of a Moslem. Hubub, the Arabic translation,
means literally the blowing of wind, and metaphorically “possession.”
The African phrase for a man possessed is “ana p’hepo,” “he has a
devil.” The Mganga is expected to heal the patient by expelling the
possession. Like the evil spirit in the days of Saul, the unwelcome
visitant must be charmed away by sweet music; the drums cause
excitement, and violent exercise expels the ghost, as saltation
nullifies in Italy the venom of the tarantula. The principal remedies
are drumming, dancing, and drinking, till the auspicious moment arrives.
The ghost is then enticed from the body of the possessed into some
inanimate article, which he will condescend to inhabit. This,
technically called a Keti, or stool, may be a certain kind of bead, two
or more bits of wood bound together by a strip of snake’s skin, a lion’s
or a leopard’s claw, and other similar articles, worn round the head,
the arm, the wrist, or the ankle. Paper is still considered great
medicine by the Wasukuma and other tribes, who will barter valuable
goods for a little bit: the great desideratum of the charm, in fact,
appears to be its rarity, or the difficulty of obtaining it. Hence also
the habit of driving nails into and hanging rags upon trees. The
vegetable itself is not worshipped, as some Europeans who call it the
“Devil’s tree” have supposed: it is merely the place for the laying of
ghosts, where by appending the Keti most acceptable to the spectrum, he
will be bound over to keep the peace with man. Several accidents in the
town of Zanzibar have confirmed even the higher orders in their lurking
superstition. Mr. Peters, an English merchant, annoyed by the slaves who
came in numbers to hammer nails and to hang iron hoops and rags upon a
“Devil’s tree” in his courtyard, ordered it to be cut down, to the
horror of all the black beholders, of whom no one would lay an axe to
it. Within six months five persons died in that house--Mr. Peters, his
two clerks, his cooper, and his ship’s carpenter. This superstition will
remind the traveller of the Indian Pipul (Ficus religiosa), in which
fiends are supposed to roost, and suggest to the Orientalist an
explanation of the mysterious Moslem practices common from Western
Africa to the farthest East. The hanging of rags upon trees by pilgrims
and travellers is probably a relic of Arab Fetissism, derived in the
days of ignorance from their congeners in East Africa. The custom has
spread far and wide: even the Irish peasantry have been in the habit of
suspending to the trees and bushes near their “holy wells” rags,
halters, and spancels, in token of gratitude for their recovery, or that
of their cattle.
There are other mystical means of restoring the sick to health; one
specimen will suffice. Several little sticks, like matches, are daubed
with ochre, and marks are made with them upon the patient’s body. A
charm is chanted, the possessed one responds, and at the end of every
stave an evil spirit flies from him, the signal being a stick cast by
the Mganga upon the ground. Some unfortunates have as many as a dozen
haunting ghosts, each of which has his own periapt: the Mganga demands a
distinct honorarium for the several expulsions. Wherever danger is, fear
will be; wherever fear is, charms and spells, exorcisms and talismans of
portentous powers will be in demand; and wherever supernaturalisms are
in requisition, men will be found, for a consideration, to supply them.