FETISH.
Wherein the student of Fetish determines to make things quite clear
this time, with results that any sage knowing the subject and the
student would have safely prophesied; to which is added some
remarks concerning the position of ancestor worship in West Africa.
The final object of all human desire is a knowledge of the nature of
God. The human methods, or religions, employed to gain this object are
divisible into three main classes, inspired--
_Firstly_, the submission to and acceptance of a direct divine message.
_Secondly_, the attempt by human intellectual power to separate the
conception of God from material phenomena, and regard Him as a thing
apart and unconditioned.
_Thirdly_, the attempt to understand Him as manifest in natural
phenomena.
I personally am constrained to follow this last and humblest method, and
accept as its exposition Spinoza's statement of it, "Since without God
nothing can exist or be conceived, it is evident that all natural
phenomena involve and express the conception of God, as far as their
essence and perfection extends. So we have a greater and more perfect
knowledge of God in proportion to our knowledge of natural phenomena.
Conversely (since the knowledge of an effect through a cause is the same
thing as the knowledge of a particular property of a cause), the greater
our knowledge of natural phenomena the more perfect is our knowledge of
the essence of God which is the cause of all things."[10] But I have a
deep respect for all other forms of religion and for all men who truly
believe, for in them clearly there is this one great desire of the
knowledge of the nature of God, and "_Ein guter Mensch in seinem dunkeln
Drange Ist sich des rechten Weges wohl bewuszt._" Nevertheless the most
tolerant human mind is subject to a feeling of irritation over the
methods whereby a fellow-creature strives to attain his end,
particularly if those methods are a sort of heresy to his own, and
therefore it is a most unpleasant thing for any religious-minded person
to speak of a religion unless he either profoundly believes or
disbelieves in it. For, if he does the one, he has the pleasure of
praise; if he does the other, he has the pleasure of war, but the thing
in between these is a thing that gives neither pleasure; it is like
quarrelling with one's own beloved relations. Thus it is with Fetish and
me. I cannot say I either disbelieve or believe in it, for, on the one
hand, I clearly see it is a religion of the third class; but, on the
other, I know that Fetish is a religion that is regarded by my fellow
white men as the embodiment of all that is lowest and vilest in man--not
altogether without cause. Before speaking further on it, however, I must
say what I mean by Fetish, for "the word of late has got ill sorted."
I mean by Fetish the religion of the natives of the Western Coast of
Africa, where they have not been influenced either by Christianity or
Mohammedanism. I sincerely wish there were another name than Fetish
which we could use for it, but the natives have different names for
their own religion in different districts, and I do not know what other
general name I could suggest, for I am sure that the other name
sometimes used in place of Fetish, namely Juju, is, for all the fine
wild sound of it, only a modification of the French word for toy or
doll, _joujou_. The French claim to have visited West Africa in the
fourteenth century, prior to the Portuguese, and whether this claim can
be sustained on historic evidence or no, it is certain that the French
have been on the Coast in considerable numbers since the fifteenth
century, and no doubt have long called the little objects they saw the
natives valuing so strangely _joujou_, just as I have heard many a
Frenchman do down there in my time. Therefore, believing Juju to mean
doll or toy, I do not think it is so true a word as Fetish; and, after
all, West Africa has a prior right to the use of this word Fetish, for
it has grown up out of the word _Feitico_ used by the Portuguese
navigators who rediscovered West Africa with all its wealth and worries
for modern Europe. These worthy voyagers, noticing the veneration paid
by Africans to certain objects, trees, fish, idols, and so on, very
fairly compared these objects with the amulets, talismans, charms, and
little images of saints they themselves used, and called those things
similarly used by the Africans _Feitico_, a word derived from the Latin
_factitius_, in the sense magically artful. Modern French and English
writers have adopted this word from the Portuguese; but it is a modern
word in its present use. It is not in Johnson, and the term _Fetichisme_
was introduced by De Brosses in his remarkable book, _Du Culte des Dieux
fetiches_, 1760; but doubtless, as Professor Tylor points out, it has
obtained a great currency from Comte's use of it to denote a general
theory of primitive religion. Professor Tylor, most unfortunately for us
who are interested in West African religion, confines the use of the
word to one department of his theory of animism only--namely to the
doctrine of spirits embodied in, or attached to, or conveying influence
through certain material objects.[11]
I do not in the least deny Professor Tylor's right to use the word
Fetish[12] in that restricted sense in his general study of comparative
religion. I merely wish to mention that you cannot use it in this
restricted sense, but want the whole of his grand theory of animism
wherewith to describe the religion of the West Africans. For although
there is in that religion a heavy percentage of embodied spirits, there
is also a heavier percentage of unembodied spirits--spirits that have no
embodiment in matter and spirits that only occasionally embody
themselves in matter.
Take, for example, the gods of the Ewe and Tshi.[13] There is amongst
them Tando, the native high god of Ashantee. He appears to his
priesthood as a giant, tawny skinned, lank haired, and wearing the
Ashantee robe. But when visiting the laity, on whom he is exceedingly
hard, he comes in pestilence and tempest, or, for more individual
village visitations, as a small and miserable boy, desolate and crying
for help and kindness, which, when given to him, Tando repays by killing
off his benefactors and their fellow-villagers with a certain disease.
This trick, I may remark, is not confined to Tando, for several other
West African gods use it when sacrifices to them are in arrears; and I
am certain it is more at the back of outcast children being neglected
than is either sheer indifference to suffering or cruelty. Because,
fearing the disease, your native will be far more likely to remember he
is in debt to the god and go and pay an instalment, than to take in that
child whom he thinks is the god who has come to punish.
But you have only to look through Ellis's important works, the
"Tshi-speaking, Ewe-speaking, and Yoruba-speaking peoples of the West
Coast of Africa," to find many instances of the gods of Fetish who do
not require a material object to manifest themselves in. And I, while in
West Africa, have often been struck by incidents that have made this
point clear to me. When I have been out with native companions after
nightfall, they pretty nearly always saw an apparition of some sort,
frequently apparitions of different sorts, in our path ahead. Then came
a pause, and after they had seen the apparition vanish, on we went--not
cheerily, however, until we were well past the place where it had been
seen. This place they closely examined, and decided whether it was an
Abambo, or Manu, or whatever name these spirit classes had in their
local language, or whether it was something worse that had been there,
such as a Sasabonsum or Ombuiri.
They knew which it was from the physical condition of the spot. Either
there was nothing there but ordinary path stuff; or there was white ash,
or there was a log or rock, or tree branch, and the reason for the
different emotion with which they regarded this latter was very simple,
for it had been an inferior class spirit, one that their charms and
howled incantations could guard them against. When there was ash, it had
been a witch destroyed by the medicine they had thrown at it, or a
medium class spirit they could get protection from "in town." But if "he
left no ash" the rest of our march was a gloomy one; it was a bad
business, and unless the Fetish authorities in town chose to explain
that it was merely a demand for so much white calico, or a goat, &c.,
some one of our party would certainly get ill.
Well do I remember our greatest terror when out at night on a forest
path. I believe him to have been a Sasabonsum, but he was very widely
distributed--that is to say we dreaded him on the forest paths round
Mungo Mah Lobeh; we confidently expected to meet him round Calabar; and,
to my disgust, for he was a hindrance, when I thought I had got away
from his distribution zone, down in the Ogowe region, coming home one
night with a Fan hunter from Fula to Kangwe, I saw some one coming down
the path towards us, and my friend threw himself into the dense bush
beside the path so as to give the figure a wide berth. It was the old
symptom. You see what we object to in this spirit is that one side of
him is rotting and putrifying, the other sound and healthy, and it all
depends on which side of him you touch whether you see the dawn again or
no. Such being the case, and African bush paths being narrow, this
spirit helps to make evening walks unpopular, for there are places in
every bush path where, if you meet him, you must brush against
him--places where the wet season's rains have made the path a narrow
ditch, with clay incurved walls above your head--places where the path
turns sharply round a corner--places where it runs between rock walls.
Such being the case, the risk of rubbing against his rotting side is
held to be so great that it is best avoided by staying at home in the
village with your wives and families, and playing the tom-tom or the
orchid-fibre-stringed harp, or, if you are a bachelor, sitting in the
village club-house listening to the old ones talking like retired
Colonels. Yet however this may be, I should hesitate to call this
half-rotten individual "a material object." Sometimes we had merry
laughs after these meetings, for he was only So-and-so from the
village--it was not him. Sometimes we had cold chills down the back, for
we lost sight of him; under our eyes he went and he left no ash.
Take again Mbuiri of the Mpongwe, who comes in the form usually of a
man; or Nkala, who comes as a crab; or the great Nzambi of the
Fjort--they leave no ash--and so on. This subject of apparition-forms is
a very interesting one, and requires more investigation. For such gods
as Nzambi Mpungu do not appear to human beings on earth at all, except
in tempest and pestilence. The great gods next in order leave no ash.
The witch, if he or she be destroyed, does leave ash, and the ordinary
middle and lower class spirits leave the thing they have been in, so
unaltered by their use of it that no one but a witch doctor can tell
whether or no it has been possessed by a spirit.
You see therefore Fetish is in a way complex and cannot be got into
"worship of a material object." There is no worship in West Africa of a
material not so possessed, for material objects are regarded as in
themselves so low down in the scale of things that nothing of the human
grade would dream of worshipping them. Moreover, apart from these
apparitions, I do not think you can accurately use the word Fetish in
its restricted sense to include the visions seen by witch-doctors, or
incantations made of words possessing power in themselves, and yet these
things are part and parcel of Fetish. In fact, not being a comparative
ethnologist, but a student of West African religion, I wish to goodness
those comparative ethnologists would get another word of their own,
instead of using our own old West Coast one.
It is, however, far easier to state what Fetish is not, than to state
what it is. Although a Darwinian to the core, I doubt if evolution in a
neat and tidy perpendicular line, with Fetish at the bottom and
Christianity at the top, represents the true state of things. It seems
to me--I have no authority to fortify my position with, so it is only
me--that things are otherwise in this matter. That there are lines of
development in religious ideas, and that no form of religious idea is a
thing restricted to one race, I will grant; but if you will make a
scientific use of your imagination, most carefully on the lines laid
down for that exercise by Professor Tyndall, I think you would see that
the higher form of the Fetish idea is Brahmanism; and that the highest
possible form it could attain to is shown by two passages in the works
of absolutely white people to have already been reached,--first in that
passage from a poem by an author, whose name I have never known, though
I have known the lines these five-and-twenty years--
"God of the granite and the rose,
Soul of the lily and the bee,
The mighty tide of being flows
In countless channels, Lord, from Thee.
It springs to life in grass and flowers,
Through every range of Being runs,
And from Creation's mighty towers,
Its glory flames in stars and suns"--
and secondly in this statement by Spinoza--"By the help of God, I mean
the fixed and unchangeable order of nature, or chain of natural events,
for I have said before and shown elsewhere that the universal laws of
nature, according to which all things exist and are determined, are only
another name for the eternal decrees of God, which always involves
eternal truth and necessity, so that to say everything happens according
to natural laws, and to say everything is ordained by the decree and
ordinance of God, is to say the same thing. Now, since the power in
nature is identical with the power of God, by which alone all things
happen and are determined, it follows that whatsoever man as a part of
nature provides himself with to aid and preserve his existence, or
whatsoever nature affords him without his help, is given him solely by
the Divine power acting either through human nature or through external
circumstances. So whatever human nature can furnish itself with by its
own efforts to preserve its existence may be fitly termed the inward aid
of God, whereas whatever else accrues to man's profit from outward
causes may be called the external aid of God."[14]
Now both these utterances are magnificent Fetish, and because I accept
them as true, I have said I neither believe nor disbelieve in Fetish. I
could quote many more passages from acknowledged philosophers,
particularly from Goethe. If you want, for example, to understand the
position of man in Nature according to Fetish, there is, as far as I
know, no clearer statement of it made than is made by Goethe in his
superb _Prometheus_. By all means read it, for you cannot know how
things really stand until you do.
This was brought home to me very keenly when I was first out in West
Africa. I had made friends with a distinguished witch doctor, or, more
correctly speaking, he had made friends with me. I was then living in a
deserted house the main charm of which was that it was the house that
Mr. H. M. Stanley had lived in while he was waiting for a boat home
after his first crossing Africa. This charm had not kept the house tidy,
and it was a beetlesome place by day, while after nightfall, if you
wanted to see some of the best insect society in Africa, and have
regular Walpurgis all round, you had only got to light a lamp; but these
things were advantageous to an insect collector like myself, therefore I
lodge no complaint against the firm of traders to whom that house
belongs. Well, my friend the witch doctor used to call on me, and I
apologetically confess I first thought his interest in me arose from
material objects. I wronged that man in thought, as I have many others,
for one night, about 11 p.m., I heard a pawing at the shutters--my
African friends don't knock. I got up and opened the door, and there he
was. I made some observations, which I regret now, about tobacco at that
time of night, and he said, "No. You be big man, suppose pusson sick?" I
acknowledged the soft impeachment. "Pusson sick too much; pusson live
for die. You fit for come?" "Fit," said I. "Suppose you come, you no
fit to talk?" said he. "No fit," said I, with a shrewd notion it was one
of my Portuguese friends who was ill and who did not want a blazing
blister on, a thing that was inevitable if you called in the local
regular white medical man, so, picking up a medicine-case, I went out
into the darkness with my darker friend. After getting outside the
closed ground he led the way towards the forest, and I thought it was
some one sick at the Roman Catholic mission. On we went down the path
that might go there; but when we got to where you turn off for it, he
took no heed, but kept on, and then away up over a low hill and down
into deeper forest still, I steering by his white cloth. But Africa is
an alarming place to walk about in at night, both for a witch doctor who
believes in all his local forest devils, and a lady who believes in all
the local material ones, so we both got a good deal chipped and frayed
and frightened one way and another; but nothing worse happened than our
walking up against a python, which had thoughtfully festooned himself
across the path, out of the way of ground ants, to sleep off a heavy
meal. My eminent friend, in the inky darkness and his hurry to reach his
patient, failed to see this, and went fair up against it. I, being close
behind, did ditto. Then my leader ducked under the excited festoon and
went down the path at headlong speed, with me after him, alike terrified
at losing sight of his guiding cloth and at the python, whom we heard
going away into the bush with that peculiar-sounding crackle a big snake
gives when he is badly hurried.
Finally we reached a small bush village, and on the ground before one of
the huts was the patient extended, surrounded by unavailing, wailing
women. He was suffering from a disease common in West Africa, but
amenable to treatment by European drugs, which I gave to the medical
man, who gave them to his patient with proper incantations and a few
little things of his own that apparently did not hinder their action. As
soon as the patient had got relief, my friend saw me home, and when we
got in, I said, Why did you do this, that and the other, as is usual
with me, and he sat down, looked far away, and talked for an hour,
softly, wordily and gently; and the gist of what that man talked was
Goethe's _Prometheus_. I recognised it after half an hour, and when he
had done, said, "You got that stuff from a white man." "No, sir," he
said, "that no be white man fash, that be country fash, white man no fit
to savee our fash." "Aren't they, my friend?" I said; and we parted for
the night, I the wiser for it, he the richer.
Now, I pray you, do not think I am saying that there is a "wisdom
religion" in Fetish, or anything like that, or that Fetish priests are
Spinozas and Goethes--far from it. All that it seems to me to be is a
perfectly natural view of Nature, and one that, if you take it up with
no higher form of mind in you than a shrewd, logical one alone, will, if
you carry it out, lead you necessarily to paint a white chalk rim round
one eye, eat your captive, use Woka incantations for diseases, and dance
and howl all night repeatedly, to the awe of your fellow-believers, and
the scandal of Mohammedan gentlemen who have a revealed religion.
Moreover, the mind-form which gets hold of this truth that is in all
things, makes a great difference in the form in which the religion works
out. For instance, to a superficial observer, it would hardly seem
possible that a Persian and a Mahdist were followers of the same
religion, or that a Spaniard and an English Broad Churchman were so.
And yet it seems to me that it is only this class of difference that
exists between the African, the Brahmanist, and the Shintoist.
Another and more fundamental point to be considered is the influence of
physical environment on religions, particularly these Nature religions.
The Semitic mind, which had never been kept quite in its proper place by
Natural difficulties, gave to man in the scheme of Creation a
pre-eminence that deeply influences Europeans, who have likewise not
been kept in their place owing to the environments of the temperate
zone. On the other hand, the African race has had about the worst set of
conditions possible to bring out the higher powers of man. He has been
surrounded by a set of terrific natural phenomena, combined with a good
food supply and a warm and equable climate. These things are not enough
in themselves to account for his low-culture condition, but they are
factors that must be considered. Then, undoubtedly, the nature of the
African's mind is one of the most important points. It may seem a
paradox to say of people who are always seeing visions that they are not
visionaries; but they are not.
The more you know the African, the more you study his laws and
institutions, the more you must recognise that the main characteristic
of his intellect is logical, and you see how in all things he uses this
absolutely sound but narrow thought-form. He is not a dreamer nor a
doubter; everything is real, very real, horribly real to him. It is
impossible for me to describe it clearly, but the quality of the African
mind is strangely uniform. This may seem strange to those who read
accounts of wild and awful ceremonials, or of the African's terror at
white man's things; but I believe you will find all people experienced
in dealing with uncultured Africans will tell you that this alarm and
brief wave of curiosity is merely external, for the African knows the
moment he has time to think it over, what that white man's thing really
is, namely, either a white man's Juju or a devil.
It is this power of being able logically to account for everything that
is, I believe, at the back of the tremendous permanency of Fetish in
Africa, and the cause of many of the relapses into it by Africans
converted to other religions; it is also the explanation of the fact
that white men who live in districts where death and danger are everyday
affairs, under a grim pall of boredom, are liable to believe in Fetish,
though ashamed of so doing. For the African, whose mind has been soaked
in Fetish during his early most impressionable years, the voice of
Fetish is almost irresistible when affliction comes on him. Sudden
dangers or terror he can face with his new religion, because he is not
quick at thinking. But give him time to think when under the hand of
adversity, and the old explanation that answered it all comes back. I
know no more distressing thing than to see an African convert brought
face to face with that awful thing we are used to, the problem of an
omnipotent God and a suffering world. This does not worry the African
convert until it hits him personally in grief and misery. When it does,
and he turns and calls upon the God he has been taught will listen, pity
and answer, his use of what the scoffers at the converted African call
"catch phrases" is horribly heartrending to me, for I know how real,
terribly real, the whole thing is to him, and I therefore see the
temptation to return to those old gods--gods from whom he never expected
pity, presided over by a god that does not care. All that he had to do
with them was not to irritate them, to propitiate them, to buy their
services when wanted, and, above all, to dodge and avoid them, while he
fought it out and managed devils at large. Risky work, but a man is as
good as a devil any day if he only takes proper care; and even if any
devil should get him unaware--kill him bodily--he has the satisfaction
of knowing he will have the power to make it warm for that devil when
they meet on the other side.
There is something alluring in this, I think, to any make of human mind,
but particularly so to the logical, intensely human one possessed by the
West African. Therefore, when wearied and worn out by confronting things
that he cannot reconcile, and disappointed by unanswered prayers, he
turns back to his old belief entirely, or modifies the religion he has
been taught until it fits in with Fetish, and is gradually absorbed by
it.
It is often asked whether Christianity or Mohammedanism is to possess
Africa--as if the choice of Fate lay between these two things alone. I
do not think it is so, at least it is not wise for a mere student to
ignore the other thing in the affair, Fetish, which is as it were a sea
wherein all things suffer a sea change. For remember it is not
Christianity alone that becomes tinged with Fetish, or gets engulfed and
dominated by it. Islam, when it strikes the true heart of Africa, the
great Forest Belt region, fares little better though it is more recent
than Christianity, and though it is preached by men who know the make of
the African mind. Islam is in its blueth-period now in all the open
parts, even on the desert regions of Africa from its Mediterranean shore
to below the Equator, but so far it has beaten up against the Forest
Belt like a sea on a sand beach. It has crossed the Forest Belt by the
Lakes, it has penetrated it in channels, but in those channels the
waters of Islam are, recent as their inroad there is, brackish.
Therefore I make no pretence at prophesying which of these great
revealed religions will ultimately possess Africa; but it is an
interesting point to notice what has been the reason of the great power
of immediate appeal to the African which they both possess.
The African has a great over-God, and below him lesser spirits,
including man; but the African has not in West Africa, nor so far as I
have been able to ascertain elsewhere in the whole Continent, a God-man,
a thing that directly connects man with the great over-God. This thing
appeals to the African when it is presented to him by Christianity and
Islam.
It is, I am quite aware, not doctrinally true to say that Islam offers
him a God-man, nevertheless in Mohammed practically it does so, and that
too in a more easily believable form--by easily I do not mean that it is
necessarily true. Moreover it minimises the danger of death in a more
definite way, more in keeping with his own desires, and it is more
reconcilable with his conscience in the treatment of life as he has to
live it. Most of the higher class Africans are traders. Islam gives an
easier, clearer line of rectitude to a trader than its great rival in
Africa--under African conditions.
There are many who will question whether conscience is a sufficiently
large factor in an African mind for us to think of taking it into
account, but whether you call it conscience, or religious bent, or fear,
the factor is a large one. An African cannot say, as so many Europeans
evidently easily can, "Oh, that is all right from a religious point of
view, but one must be practical, you know"; and it is this factor that
makes me respect the African deeply and sympathise with him, for I have
this same unmanageable hindersome thing in my own mind, which you can
call anything you like; I myself call it honour. Now conscience when
conditioned by Christianity is an exceedingly difficult thing for a
trader to manage satisfactorily to himself. A mass of compromises have
to be made with the world, and a man who is always making compromises
gets either sick of them or sick of the thing that keeps on nagging at
him about them, or he becomes merely gaseous-minded all round. There are
some few in all races of men who can think comfortably
"That conscience, like a restive horse,
Will stumble if you check his course,
But ride him with an easy rein,
And rub him down with worldly gain,
He'll carry you through thick and thin,
Safe, although dirty, 'till you win,"
but such men are in Africa a very small minority, and so it falls out
that most men engaged in trade revert to Fetish, or become lax as Church
members, or embrace Islam.
I think, if you will consider the case, you will see that the
workability of Islam is one of the chief reasons of its success in
Africa. It is, from many African points of view, a most inconvenient
religion, with its Rahmadhizan, bound every now and again to come in the
height of the dry season; its restrictions on alcoholic drinks and
gambling; but, on the whole it is satisfying to the African conscience.
Moreover, like Christianity, it lifts man into a position of paramount
importance in Creation. He is the thing God made the rest for. I have
often heard Africans say, "It does a man good to know God loves him; it
makes him proud too much." Well, at any rate it is pleasanter than
Fetish, where man, in company with a host of spirits, is fighting for
his own hand, in an arena before the gods, eternally.
We will now turn to the consideration of the status of the human soul in
pure Fetish, that is to say in Fetish that is common to all the
different schools of West African Fetishism.
What strikes a European when studying it is the lack of gaps between
things. To the African there is perhaps no gap between the conception of
spirit and matter, animate or inanimate. It is all an affair of
grade--not of essential difference in essence. At the head of existence
are those beings who can work without using matter, either as a constant
associate or as an occasional tool--do it all themselves, as an African
would say. Beneath this grade there are many grades of spirits, who
occasionally or habitually, as in the case of the human grade, are
associated with matter, and at the lower end of the scale is what we
call matter, but which I believe the West African regards as the same
sort of stuff as the rest, only very low--so low that practically it
doesn't matter; but it is spirits, the things that cause all motion, all
difficulties, dangers and calamities, that do matter and must be thought
about, for they are _real_ things whether "they live for thing" or no.
The African and myself are also in a fine fog about form, but I will
spare you that point, for where that thing comes from, often so quickly
and silently, and goes, often so quickly and silently, too, under our
eyes, everlastingly, that thing on which we all so much depend at every
moment of our lives, that thing we are quite as conscious of as light
and darkness, heat or cold, yet which makes a thing no heavier in one
shape than in another,--is altogether too large a subject to touch on
now. Yet, remember it is a most important part of practical Fetish, for
on it depends divination and heaps of such like matters, that are parts
of both the witch doctor and the Fetish priest's daily work.
One of the fundamental doctrines of Fetish is that the connection of a
certain spirit with a certain mass of matter, a material object, is not
permanent; the African will point out to you a lightning-stricken tree
and tell you that its spirit has been killed; he will tell you when the
cooking pot has gone to bits that it has lost its spirit; if his weapon
fails it is because some one has stolen or made sick its spirit by means
of witchcraft. In every action of his daily life he shows you how he
lives with a great, powerful spirit world around him. You will see him
before starting out to hunt or fight rubbing medicine into his weapons
to strengthen the spirits within them, talking to them the while;
telling them what care he has taken of them, reminding them of the gifts
he has given them, though those gifts were hard for him to give, and
begging them in the hour of his dire necessity not to fail him. You will
see him bending over the face of a river talking to its spirit with
proper incantations, asking it when it meets a man who is an enemy of
his to upset his canoe or drown him, or asking it to carry down with it
some curse to the village below which has angered him, and in a thousand
other ways he shows you what he believes if you will watch him
patiently.
It is a very important point in the study of pure Fetish to gain a clear
conception of this arrangement of things in grades. As far as I have
gone I think I may say fourteen classes of spirits exist in Fetish. Dr.
Nassau of Gaboon thinks that the spirits commonly affecting human
affairs can be classified fairly completely into six classes.[15]
Regarding the Fetish view of the state and condition of the human soul
there are certain ideas that I think I may safely say are common to the
various cults of Fetish, both Negro and Bantu, in Western Africa.
Firstly, the class of spirits that are human souls always remain human
souls. They do not become deified, nor do they sink in grade. I am aware
that here I am on dangerous ground so I am speaking carefully.[16] An
eminent authority, when criticising my statements,[17] dwelt upon their
heterodoxy on this point, saying however, "We may throw out the
conjecture that in remote and obscure West Africa men do not reach the
necessary pitch of renown for mighty deeds or sanctity that qualifies
them in larger countries for elevation after death to high places among
recognised divinities."
This conjecture I quite accept as an explanation of the non-deification
of human beings in West Africa, and I think, taken in conjunction with
the grade conception, it fairly explains why West Africa has not what
undoubtedly other regions of the world have in their religions, deified
ancestors.
After having had my attention drawn to the strangeness of this
non-deification of ancestors, I did my best to work the subject out in
order to see if by any chance I had badly observed it. I consulted the
accounts of West African religions given by Labat, Bosman, Bastian and
Ellis, and to my great pleasure found that the three first said nothing
against my statements, and that Sir A. B. Ellis had himself said the
same thing in his _Ewe Speaking People_. Moreover, I sent a circular
written on this point to people in West Africa whom I knew had
opportunities of knowing the facts as at present existing,--the answers
were unanimous with Ellis and myself.
Nevertheless, mind, you will find something that looks like worship of
ancestors in West Africa. Only it is no more worship, properly so
called, than our own deference to our living, elderly, and influential
relations.
In almost all Western African districts (it naturally does not show
clearly in those where reincarnation is believed to be the common and
immediate lot of all human spirits) is a class of spirits called "the
well disposed ones," and this class is clearly differentiated from
"them," the generic name used for non-human spirits. These "well
disposed ones" are ancestors, and they do what they can to benefit their
particular village or family, acting in conjunction with the village or
family Fetish, who is not a human spirit, nor an ancestor. But the
things given to ancestors are gifts, not in the proper sense of the word
sacrifices, for the well disposed ones are not gods even of the rank of
a Sasabonsum or an Ombuiri.
In an extremely interesting answer to my inquiries that I received from
Mr. J. H. Batty, of Cape Coast, who had kindly submitted my questions to
a native gentleman well versed in affairs, the statement regarding
ancestors is, "The people believe that the spirits of their departed
relations exercise a guardian care over them, and they will frequently
stand over the graves of their deceased friends and invoke their
spirits to protect them and their children from harm. It is imagined
that the spirit lingers about the house some time after death. If the
children are ill the illness is ascribed to the spirit of the deceased
mother having embraced them. Elderly women are often heard to offer up a
kind of prayer to the spirit of a departed parent, begging it either to
go to its rest, or to protect the family by keeping off evil spirits,
instead of injuring the children or other members of the family by its
touch. The ghosts of departed enemies are considered by the people as
bad spirits, who have power to injure them."
In connection with this fear of the ancestor's ghost hurting members of
its own family, particularly children, I may remark it has several times
been carefully explained to me that this "touching" comes not from
malevolence, but from loneliness and the desire to have their company. A
sentimental but inconvenient desire that the living human cannot give in
to perpetually, though big men will accede to their ancestor's desire
for society by killing off people who may serve or cheer him. This
desire for companionship is of course immensely greater in the spirit
that is not definitely settled in the society of spiritdom, and it is
therefore more dangerous to its own belongings, in fact to all living
society, while it is hanging about the other side of the grave, but this
side of Hades. Thus I well remember a delicious row that arose primarily
out of trade matters, but which caused one family to yell at another
family divers remarks, ending up with the accusation, "You
good-for-nothing illegitimate offspring of house lizards, you don't bury
your ditto ditto dead relations, but leave them knocking about anyhow, a
curse to Calabar." Naturally therefore the spirit of a dead enemy is
feared because it would touch for the purpose of getting spirit slaves;
therefore it follows that powerful ancestors are valued when they are on
the other side, for they can keep off the dead enemies. A great chief's
spirit is a thoroughly useful thing for a village to keep going, and in
good order, for it conquered those who are among the dead with it, and
can keep them under, keep them from aiding their people in the fights
between its living relations and itself and them, with its slave spirit
army. I ought to say that it is customary for the living to send the
dead out ahead of the army, to bear the brunt in the first attack.
Ancestor-esteem you will find at its highest pitch in West Africa under
the school of Fetish that rules the Tshi and Ewe peoples. Ellis gives
you a full description of it for Ashanti and Dahomey.[18] The next
district going down coast is the Yoruba one; but Yoruba has been so long
under the influence of Mahometanism that its Fetish, judging from
Ellis's statement in his _Yoruba Speaking People_, is deeply tinged with
it. I have no personal acquaintance with Yorubaland, but have no
hesitation for myself in accepting his statements from the accuracy I
have found them, by personal experience with Tshi and Ewe people, to
possess. Below Yoruba comes a district, the Oil Rivers, where, alas,
Ellis did not penetrate, and where no ethnologist, unless you will
graciously extend the term to me, has ever cautiously worked.
In this district you have a school where reincarnation is strongly
believed in, a different school of Fetish to that of Tshi and Ewe, a
class of human ghosts called the well-disposed ones. And these are
ancestors undoubtedly. They do not show up clearly in those districts
where reincarnation is believed to be the common lot of all human
souls. Nevertheless, they are clear enough even there, as I will
presently attempt to explain.
These ancestor spirits have things given to them for their consolation
and support, and in return they do what they can to benefit and guard
their own villages and families. Nevertheless, the things given to the
well-disposed ones are not as things sacrificed to gods. Nor are the
well-disposed ones gods, even of the grade of a Sasabonsum or an
Ombuiri. It is a low down thing to dig up your father--i.e., open his
grave and take away the things in it that have been given him. It will
get you cut by respectable people, and rude people when there is a
market-place row on will mention it freely; but it won't bring on a
devastating outbreak of small-pox in the whole district.
FOOTNOTES:
[10] Of the Divine Law, _Tractatus Theologico Politicus_, Spinoza.
[11] _Primitive Culture_, E. B. Tylor, p. 144.
[12] Professor Tylor kindly allowed me to place this statement before
him, and he says that as the word Fetish, with the sense of the use
of bones, claws, stones, and such objects as receptacles of spiritual
influences, has had nearly two centuries of established usage, it
would not be easy to set it aside, and he advises me to use the term
West African religion, or in some way make my meaning clear without
expecting to upset the established nomenclature of comparative
ethnology.
[13] This word is pronounced by the natives and by people knowing them,
Cheuwe, as Ellis undoubtedly knew, but presumably he spelt it Tshi to
please the authorities.
[14] _The Vocation of the Hebrews_, Spinoza.
[15] See _Travels in West Africa_, by M. H. Kingsley. Macmillan & Co.
1897.
[16] For further details see _Travels in West Africa_, p. 444.
[17] "Origins and Interpretations of Primitive Religions." _Edinburgh
Review_, July, 1897, p. 219.
[18] _The Tshi Speaking, Ewe Speaking and Yoruba Speaking People of
West Africa._--A. B. Ellis.