FETISH AND WITCHCRAFT
Wherein the student having by now got rather involved in things in
general, is constrained to discourse on witchcraft and its position
in West African religious thought, concluding with the conviction
that Fetish is quite clear though the student has not succeeded in
making it so.
Now, here we come to a very interesting question: What is witchcraft in
itself? Conversing freely with the Devil, says Christendom, firmly; and
taking the Devil to mean the Spirit of Evil, I am bound to think
Christendom is in a way scientifically quite right, though the accepted
scientific definition of witchcraft at present is otherwise, and holds
witchcraft to be conversing with Natural Science, which of course I
cannot accept as the Devil. Thus I cannot reconcile the two definitions
should they mean the same thing; and so I am here really in the position
of being at one in opinion with the Roman Catholic missionaries of the
fifteenth century, who, as soon as they laid eyes on my friend the
witch-doctor, recognised him and his goings on as a mass of witchcraft,
and went for the whole affair in an exceeding game way.
But let us take the accepted view, that first propounded by Sir Alfred
Lyall; and I humbly beg it to be clearly understood I am only speaking
of the bearing of that view on Fetish in West Africa. I was of course
fully aware of the accepted view of the innate antagonism between
religion and witchcraft when I published in a deliberately scattered
form some of my observations on Fetish, being no more desirous of giving
a mental lead to white men than to black, but only wistful to find out
what they thought of things as they are. The consequence of this action
of mine has been, I fear, on the whole a rather more muddled feeling in
the white mind regarding Fetish than ever heretofore existed; a feeling
that, if what I said was true, (and in this matter of Fetish information
no one has gainsaid the truth of it), West African religion was more
perplexing than it seemed to be when regarded as a mere degraded brutal
superstition or childish foolishness.
However, one distinguished critic has tackled my Fetish, and gallantly:
the writer in the _Edinburgh Review_. With his remarks on our heresy
regarding the deification of ancestors I have above attempted to deal,
owning he is quite right--we do not believe in deified ancestors. I now
pass on to his other important criticism, and again own he is quite
right, and that "witchcraft and religious rites in West Africa are
originally indistinguishable."[22] This is evidently a serious affair
for West Africa and me, so I must deal with it carefully, and first
quote my critic's words following immediately those just cited. "If this
is correct there can be no doubt that such a confusion of the two ideas
that in their later forms not only stand widely apart, but are always
irreconcilably hostile, denotes the very lowest stage of aboriginal
superstition wherever it prevails, for it has been held that, although
the line between abject fetishism and witchcraft may be difficult to
trace in the elementary stages, yet from the beginning a true
distinction can invariably be recognised. According to this theory, the
witch is more nearly allied with rudimentary science than with
priestcraft, for he relies not upon prayer, worship, or propitiation of
divinities, but upon his own secret knowledge and experience of the
effect producible by certain tricks and mysterious devices upon the
unseen powers, over whom he has obtained a sort of command. Instead of
serving like a priest these powers, he is enabled by his art to make
them serve him, and it is for this reason that his practices very soon
become denounced and detested by the priesthood."
Now there are many interesting points to be considered in West Africa
bearing on the above statement of Sir Alfred Lyall's theory of the
nature of witchcraft,--points which I fancy, if carefully considered,
would force upon us the strange conclusion that, accepting this theory
as a general statement of the nature of witchcraft, there was no
witchcraft whatever in West Africa, nothing having "a true distinction"
in the native mind from religion. You may say there is no religion and
it's all witchcraft, but this is a superficial view to take; you see the
orthodox Christian view of witchcraft contains in it an element not
present in the West African affair; the Christian regards the witch with
hatred as one knowing good, yet choosing evil. The West African has not
this choice in his mind; he has to deal with spirits who are not, any of
them, up to much in the way of virtue viewed from a human standpoint. I
don't say they are all what are called up here devils; a good many of
them are what you might call reasonable, respectable, easy-going sort of
people; some are downright bad; in fact, I don't think it would be
going too far to say that they are all downright bad if they get their
tempers up or take a dislike to a man; there is not one of them
beneficent to the human race at large. Nzambi is the nearest approach to
a beneficent deity I have come across, and I feel she owes much of this
to the confusion she profits by, and the Holy Virgin suffers from, in
the regions under Nkissism; but Nzambi herself is far from morally
perfect and very difficult tempered at times. You need not rely on me in
this matter; take the important statement of Dr. Nassau: "Observe, these
were distinctly prayers, appeals for mercy, agonising protests; but
there was no praise, no love, no thanks, no confession of sin."[23] He
was speaking regarding utterances made down there in the face of great
afflictions and sorrow; and there was no praise, because there was no
love, I fancy; no thanks because what good was done to the human being
was a mere boughten thing he had paid for. No confession of sin, because
the Fetish believer does not hold he lives in a state of sin, but that
it is a thing he can commit now and again if he is fool enough. Sin to
him not being what it is to us, a vile treason against a loving Father,
but a very ill-advised act against powerful, nasty-tempered spirits.
Herein you see lies one difference between the Christian and the Fetish
view,--a fundamental one, that must be borne in mind.
Then in the above-quoted passage you will observe that the dislike to
witchcraft is traced in a measure to the action of priesthoods. This
hatred is undoubted. But witchcraft is as much hated in districts in
West Africa where there are no organised priesthoods as in districts
where there are--in the regions under the Calabar and Mpongwe schools,
for example, where the father of the house is the true priest to the
family, where what looks like a priesthood, but which is a law god-cult
only--the secret society--is the dominant social thing. Now this law
god-cult affair, Purroh, Oru, Egbo, Ukukiwe, etc., etc., call it what
you please, it's all the same thing, is not the organisation that makes
war on witchcraft in West Africa. It deals with it now and then, if it
is brought under its official notice; but it is not necessary that this
should be done; summary methods are used with witches. It just appeals
at once to ordeal, any one can claim it. You can claim it, and
administer it yourself to yourself, if you are the accused party and in
a hurry. A. says to you, "You're a witch." "I'm not," you ejaculate. I
take the bean; down it goes; you're sick or dead long before the
elaborate mechanism of the law society has heard of the affair. Of
course, if you want to make a big palaver and run yourself and your
accuser into a lot of expense you can call in the society; but you
needn't. From this and divers things like it I do not think the hatred
of witchcraft in West Africa at large has anything originally to do with
the priesthood. You will say, but there is the hatred of witchcraft in
West Africa. You have only to shout "_Ifot_" at a man or woman in
Calabar, or "_Ndo tchi_" in Fjort-land, and the whole population, so
good-tempered the moment before, is turned bloodthirsty. Witches are
torn to bits, destroyed in every savage way, when the ordeal has
conclusively proved their guilt--mind you, never before. Granted; but I
believe this to be just a surging up of that form of terror called hate.
I am old enough to remember the dynamite scares up here, and the Jack
the Ripper incidents; then it was only necessary for some one to call
out, "Dynamiter" or "Jack the Ripper" at a fellow-citizen, and up surged
our own people, all same for one with those Africans, only our people,
not being so law-governed, would have shredded the accused without
ordeal, had we not possessed that great factor in the formation of
public virtue, the police, who intervened, carried away the accused to
the ordeal--the police court--where the affair was gone into with
judicial calm. Honestly, I don't believe there is the slightest mystic
revulsion against witchcraft in West Africa; public feeling is always at
bursting-point on witches, their goings-on are a constant danger to
every peaceful citizen's life, family, property, and so on, and when the
general public thinks it's got hold of one of the vermin it goes off
with a bang; but it does not think for one moment that the witch is _per
se_ in himself a thing apart; he is just a bad man too much, who has
gone and taken up with spirits for illegitimate purposes. The mere
keeping of a familiar power, which under Christendom is held so vile a
thing, is not so held in West Africa. Everyone does it; there is not a
man, woman, or child who has not several attached spirits for help and
preservation from danger and disease. It is keeping a spirit for bad
purposes only that is hateful. It is one thing to have dynamite in the
hand of the government or a mining company for reasonable reasons, quite
another to have it in the hands of enemies to society; and such an enemy
is a witch who trains the spirits over which he has got control to
destroy his fellow human beings' lives and properties.
The calling in of ordeal to try the witch before destroying him has many
interesting points. The African, be it granted, is tremendously under
the dominion of law, and it is the law that such trials should take
place before execution; but there is also involved in it another
curious fact, and that is that the spirit of the ordeal is held to be
able to manage and suppress the bad spirits trained by the witch to
destruction. Human beings alone can collar the witch and destroy him in
an exemplary manner, but spiritual aid is required to collar the witch's
devil, or it would get adrift and carry on after its owner's death.
Regarding ordeal affairs I will speak when dealing with legal procedure.
Such being the West African view of witchcraft, I venture to think there
are in this world divers reasons for hating witchcraft. There is the
fetish one, that he is an enemy to society; there is the priesthood one,
that he is a sort of quack or rival practitioner--under this head of
priesthood aversion for witchcraft I think we may class the witchcraft
that is merely a hovering about of the old religion which the priesthood
of an imported religion are anxious to stamp out; and there is that
aversion to witchcraft one might call the Protestant aversion, which
arises from the feeling that it is a direct sin against God Himself.
This latter feeling has been the cause of as violent a persecution of
witches, witness the action of King James I. and that of the Quakers in
America, as any West African has ever presented to the world. Throughout
all these things the fact remains, that whether black, white, or yellow,
the witch is a bad man, a murderer in the eyes of Allah as well as those
of humanity.
That all witches act by means of poison alone would be too hasty a thing
to say, because I think we need hardly doubt that the African is almost
as liable to die from a poisonous idea put into his mind as a poisonous
herb put into his food; indeed, I do not know that in West Africa we
need confine ourselves to saying natives alone do this, for white men
sink and die under an idea that breaks their spirit. All the vital
powers are required there to resist the depressing climate. If they are
weakened seriously in any way, death is liable to ensue. The profound
belief in the power of a witch causes a man who knows, say, that either
a nail has been driven into an Nkiss down on the South-West coast, or
the Fangaree drum beaten on him up in the Sierra Leone region, to
collapse under the terror of it, and I own I can see no moral difference
between the guilt of the man or woman who does these things with the
intent to slay a fellow-citizen and that of one who puts bush into his
chop--both mean to kill and do kill, but both methods are good West
African witchcraft. The latter may seem to be an incipient form of
natural science, but it seems to me--I say it humbly--that the West
African incipient scientist is not the local witch, but that highly
respectable gentleman or lady, the village apothecary, the _Nganga
bilongo_ or the _Abiabok_. The means of killing in vogue in West African
witchcraft without the direct employment of poison are highly
interesting, but I think it would serve no good purpose for me to give
even the few I know in detail. There is one interesting point in this
connection. I have said that in order to make a charm efficacious
against a particular person you must have preferably some of his blood
in your possession, or, failing that, some hair or nail clipping;
failing these, some articles belonging intimately to him--a piece of his
loin-cloth, or, under the school of Nkissi, a bit of his iron. This I
believe to hold good for all true fetish charms; but we have in the
Bight of Benin charms which are under the influence of a certain amount
of Mohammedan ideas--for example, the deadly charms of the Kufong
society. This class of charm does not require absolutely a bit of
something nearly connected with the victim, but nevertheless it cannot
act at a great distance, or without the element of personal connection.
Take the Fangaree charm, for example, to be found among the Mendi
people, and all the neighbouring peoples who are liable to go in for
Kufong.
Fangaree is the name of a small drum that is beaten by a hammer made of
bamboo. The uses of this drum are wide and various, but it also gives
its name to the charm, because the charm, like the drum, is beaten with
a similar stick. The charm stuff itself is made of a dead man's bone, of
different herbs smoked over a fire and powdered the same day, ants'-hill
earth, and charcoal. This precious mixture is made into a parcel; that
parcel is placed on a frame made of bamboo sticks. On the top of the
charm a small live animal--an insect, I am informed, will do--is secured
by a string passing over it, and the charm is fixed with wooden forks
into the ground on either side. This affair is placed by the murderer
close to a path the victim will pass along, and the murderer sits over
it, waiting for him to come. When he comes, he is allowed to pass just
by, and then his enemy breaks a dry bamboo stick; the noise causes the
victim to turn and look in the direction of the noise--_i.e._ on to the
charm--and then the murderer hits the live animal on it, calling his
victim's name, and the charm is on him. If the animal is struck on the
head, the victim's head is affected, and he has violent fits until "he
dies from breaking his neck" in one of them; if the animal is struck to
tailwards, the victim gets extremely ill, but in this latter case he can
buy off the charm and be cured by a Fangaree man. A similar arrangement
is in working order under some South-West coast murder societies I am
acquainted with. The interesting point, however, is the necessity of
establishing the personal connection between the victim and the charm
by means of making him look on the charm and calling his name. Without
his looking it's no good. Hence it comes that it is held unwise to look
behind when you hear a noise o'night in the bush; indeed, no cautious
person, with sense in his head and strength in his legs, would dream of
doing this unless caught off guard. In connection also with this turning
the face being necessary to the working of the Fangaree charm, there is
another charm that is worked under Kufong, according to several natives
from its region--the hinterland of Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Ivory
Coast--with whom I have associated when we have both been far from our
respective homes away in South-West Africa. It is a charm I have never
met with as indigenous in the South-West or Oil Rivers Fetish, and I
think it has a heavier trace of Mohammedan influence in it than the
Fangaree charm. The way it works is this. A man wants to kill you
without showing blood. Only leopard society men do that, and your enemy,
we will presume, is not a leopard. So he throws his face on you by a
process I need not enter into. You hardly know anything is wrong at
first; by-and-by you notice that every scene that you look on, night or
day, has got that face in it, not a filmy vision of a thing, but quite
material in appearance, only it's in abnormal places for a face to be,
and it is a face only. It may be on the wall, or amongst the roof poles,
or away in a corner of the hut floor; outdoors it is the same--the face
is first always, there just where you can see it. Some of my informants
hold that it keeps coming closer to you as time goes on; but others say
no; it keeps at one distance all the time. This, however, is a minor
point; it is its being there that gets to matter. It is in amongst the
bushes at the side of the path, or in the water of the river, or at the
end of your canoe, or in the oil in the pots, or in the Manchester
cottons in the factory shop. Wherever you look, there it is. In a way
it's unobtrusive, it does not spread itself out, or make a noise, or
change, yet, sooner or later, in every place, you cannot miss seeing it.
At first you think, by changing your environment--going outdoors, coming
in, going on a journey, mixing with your fellow-men, or avoiding
them--you can get rid of the thing; but you find, when you look
round,--a thing you are certain to do when the charm has got its
grip,--for sure that face is there as usual. Now this sort of thing
tells on the toughest in time, and you get sick of life when it has
always got that face mixed up in it, so sick that you try the other
thing--death. This is an ill-advised course, but you do not know in time
that, when you kill yourself, you will find that on the other side, in
the other thing, you will see nothing but that face, that unchanging
silent face you are so sick of. The Kufong man who has thrown his face
at you knows, and when he hears of your suicide he laughs. Naturally you
cannot know, because you are not a Kufong man, or the charm could not be
put on you. What you "can do in this here most awful go," as Mr. Squeers
would say, I am unfortunately not able to tell you. I made many
inquiries from men who know "the face," who had had it happen on people
in their families, and so on, but in answer to my inquiries as to why
the afflicted did not buy it off, what charms there were against it, and
so forth, I was always told it was a big charm, that the man who put it
on lost something of himself by so doing, so it was never put on except
in cases of great hatred that would stick at nothing and would kill;
also that it was of no real use for the victim to kill his charmer,
though that individual, knowing the pleasure so doing would afford his
victim, takes good care to go on a journey, and to keep out of the way
until the charm has worked out in suicide. There is a certain amount of
common sense in this proceeding which is undoubtedly true African, but
there is a sort of imaginative touch which makes me suspect Mohammedan
infusion; anyhow, I leave you to judge for yourself whether,
presupposing you accept the possibility of a man doing such a thing to
you or to any one you love, you think he can be safely ignored, or
whether he is not an enemy to society who had better be found out and
killed--killed in a showy way. Personally I favour the latter course.
There is but one other point in witchcraft in West Africa that I need
now detain you with, and that is why a person killed by witchcraft
suffers more than one who dies of old age, for herein lies another
reason for this hatred of witchcraft. Every human soul in West Africa
throughout all the Fetish schools is held to have a certain proper time
of incarnation in a human body, whether it be one incarnation or endless
series of incarnations; anything that cuts that incarnation period short
inconveniences the soul, to say the least of it. Under Ellis's school,
and I believe throughout all the others, the soul that lives its life in
a body fully through is held happy; it is supposed to have learnt its
full lesson from life, and to know the way down to the shadow-land home
and all sorts of things. Hence also comes the respect for the aged,
common throughout all West Africa. They are the knowing ones. Such an
one was the late Chief Long John of Bonny. Now if this process of
development is checked by witchcraft and the soul is prematurely driven
from the body, it does not know all that it should, and its condition
is therefore miserable. It is, as it were, sent blind, or deaf, or lame
into the spirit-land. This is a thing not only dreaded by individuals
for themselves, but hated for those they love; hence the doer of it is a
hated thing. You must remember that when you get keen hatred you must
allow for keen affection, it is not human to have one without the other.
That the Africans are affectionate I am fully convinced. This affection
does not lie precisely on the same lines as those of Europeans, I allow.
It is not with them so deeply linked with sex; but the love between
mother and child, man and man, brother and sister, woman and woman, is
deep, true, and pure, and it must be taken into account in observing
their institutions and ideas, particularly as to this witchcraft where
it shows violently and externally in hatred only to the superficial
observer. I well remember gossiping with a black friend in a plantation
in the Calabar district on witchcraft, and he took up a stick and struck
a plant of green maize, breaking the stem of it, saying, "There, like
that is the soul of a man who is witched, it will not ripen now."
We will now turn to the consideration of that class whose business in
life is mainly to guard the community from witchcraft and from
miscellaneous evil spirits acting on their own initiative, the Fetish
Men of West Africa, namely, those men and women who devote their lives
to the cult of West African religion. Such people you find in every West
African district; but their position differs under different schools,
and it is in connection with them that we must recognise the differences
in the various schools, remembering that the form of Fetish makes the
form of Fetish Man, not the Fetish Man the form of Fetish. He may, as it
were, embroider it, complicate it, mystify it, as is the nature of all
specialists in all professions, but primarily he is under it, at any
rate in West Africa, where you find the Fetish man in every district,
but in every district in a different form. For example, look at him
under the Ellis school. Where there are well-defined gods, there your
Fetish Man is quite the priest, devoting himself to the cult of one god
publicly, probably doing a little general practice into the bargain with
other minor spirits. To the laity he of course advertises the god he
serves as the most reliably important one in the neighbourhood; but it
has come under my notice, and you will find under Ellis's, that if the
priest of a god gets personally unwell and finds his own deity
ineffective, he will apply for aid to a professional brother who serves
another god. Below Ellis's school, in the Calabar school, your Fetish
Man is somewhat different; the gods are not so definite or esteemed, and
the Fetish Man is becoming a member of a set of men who deal with gods
in a lump, and have the general management of minor spirits. Below this
school, in the Mpongwe, the Fetish Man is even less specialised as
regards one god; he is here a manager of spirits at large, with the
assistance of a strong spirit with whom he has opened up communication.
Below this school, in that of Nkissi, the Fetish Man becomes more truly
priest-like--he is the Nganga of an Nkiss; but nevertheless his position
is a different one to that of the priest in Ellis's school; here he is
in a better position than in the Mpongwe school, but in an inferior one
to that in Ellis's, where he is not the lone servitor or manager for a
god, but a member of a powerful confraternity. You must bear in mind, of
course, that the Fetish Man is always, from a lay standpoint, a highly
important person; but professionally, I cannot but think, a priest say
of Tando in Ashantee or of Shango in Dahomey, is of a higher grade than
a Nganga to an Nkiss, certainly far higher than a Fetish Man under the
Mpongwe school, where every house father and every village chief does a
lot of his own Fetish without professional assistance. Of course chiefs
and house fathers do a certain amount in all districts--in fact, in West
Africa every man and woman does a certain amount of Fetish for himself;
but where, as in Ellis's school, you get a regular set of priests and
plenty of them, the religion falls into their hands to a greater extent.
I feel that the study of the position of Fetish-Men is deserving of
great attention. I implore the student who may take it up to keep the
Fetish Man for practical purposes distinct from the gentleman who
represents the law god-cult--the secret tribal society. If you persist
in mixing them, you will have in practical politics as fine a mess as if
you mixed up your own Bench of Bishops with the Woolsack. I beg to
contribute to the store of knowledge on this point sundry remarks sent
me on most excellent native authority from the Gold Coast:--
"The inhabitants of Cape Coast must congratulate themselves that they
enjoy the protection of seventy-seven fetishes. Every town (and this
town) has one fetish house or temple, often built in a square or oblong
form of mud or swish, and thatched over, or constructed of sticks or
poles placed in a circular form and thatched. In these temples several
images are generally placed. Every Fetish-Man or priest, moreover, has
his private fetishes in his own house, one of a bird, stones encased by
string, large lumps of cinder from an iron furnace, calabashes, and
bundles of sticks tied together with string. All these are stained with
red ochre and rubbed over with eggs. They are placed on a square
platform and shrouded from the vulgar gaze.
"The fetishes are regarded as spiritual intelligent beings who make the
remarkable objects of nature their residence or enter occasionally into
the images and other artificial representations which have been duly
consecrated by certain ceremonies. It is the belief of this people that
the fetishes not unfrequently render themselves visible to mortals. Thus
the great fetish of the rock on which Cape Coast Castle stands is said
to come forth at night in human form, but of superhuman size, and to
proceed through the town dressed in white to chase away evil spirits.
"In all the countries along the Coast (Gold) the regular fetish day is
Tuesday. The fishermen would expect that, were they to go out on that
day, it would spoil their fishing.
"The priest's office may in some cases be hereditary, but it is not
uniformly so, for the children of Fetish-Men sometimes refuse to devote
themselves to the pursuits of their parents and engage in other
occupations. Any one may enter the office after suitable training, and
parents who desire that their children may be instructed in its
mysteries place them with a Fetish-Man, who receives a premium for each.
The order of Fetish-Men is further augmented by persons who declare that
the fetish has suddenly seized on them. A series of convulsive and
unnatural bodily distortions establish their claim. Application is made
to the fetish for counsel and aid in every domestic and public
emergency. When persons find occasion to consult a private Fetish-Man,
they take a present of gold-dust and rum and proceed to his house. He
receives the presents, and either puts a little of the rum on the head
of every image or pours a small quantity on the ground before the
platform as an offering to the whole pantheon; then, taking a brass pan
with water in it, he sits down with the pan between him and the
fetishes, and his inquirers also seat themselves to await the result.
Having made these preparatory arrangements, looking earnestly into the
water, he begins to snap his fingers, and addressing the fetish, extols
his power, telling him that the people have arrived to consult him, and
requesting him to come and give the desired answer. After a time the
fetish-man is wrought up into a state of fury. He shakes violently and
foams at the mouth; this is to intimate that the fetish was come home
and that he himself is no longer the speaker, but the fetish, who uses
his mouth and speaks by him. He now growls like a tiger and asks the
people if they have brought rum, requiring them at the same time to
present it to him. He drinks, and then inquires for what purpose they
have sent for him. If a relative is ill, they reply that such a member
of their family is sick and they have tried all the means they could
devise to restore him, but without success, and they, knowing he is a
great fetish, have come to ask his aid, and beg him to teach them what
they should do. He then speaks kindly to them, expresses a hope that he
shall be able to help them, and says, "I go to see." It is imagined that
the fetish then quits the priest, and, after a silence of a few minutes,
he is supposed to return, and gives his response to the inquirers.
"In cases of great difficulty the oracle at Abrah is the last resort of
the Fantees. This notable oracle is always consulted at night. They find
a large fire made upon the ground, and the presents they have brought
they place in the hands of the priests who are in attendance. They are
then directed to elevate their presents above their heads and to fix
their eyes steadfastly upon the ground, for should they look up, the
fetish, it is said, would inflict blindness on them for their
sacrilegious gaze. After a time the oracle gives a response in a shrill,
small voice intended to convey the idea that it proceeds from an
unearthly source, and the inquirers, having obtained the end of their
visit, then depart.
"In cases of bodily affliction the fetish orders medical preparations
for the patient. If the malady of the patient does not appear to yield
to such applications, the fetish is again consulted, and in some cases,
as a further expedient, the priest takes a fowl and ties it to a stick,
by which operation it is barbarously squeezed to death. The stick is
then placed in the path leading to the house for the purpose of
deterring evil spirits from approaching it. When the patient is a rich
man, several sheep are sacrificed, and he is fetished until the last
moment arrives amidst the howls of a number of old Fetish Women, who
continue to besmear with eggs and other medicine the walls and doorposts
of his house and everything that is around him until he has ceased to
breathe."
Not only does the African depart from life under the care of
Fetish-Men--and, as my valued correspondent ungallantly remarks, "old
fetish-women"--but he is met, as it were, by them on his arrival. My
correspondent says "as soon as the child is born the Fetish-Man binds
certain fetish preparations round his limbs, using at the same time a
form of incantation or prayer. This is done to fortify the infant
against all kinds of evil. On the eighth day after the birth, the father
of the child, accompanied by a number of friends, proceeds to the house
of the mother. If he be a rich man, he takes with him a gallon of ardent
spirits to be used on the festive occasion. On arriving at the house,
the friends form a circle round the father, who delivers a kind of
address in which he acknowledges the kindness of the gods for giving him
the child, and calls upon those present also to thank the fetishes on
his account; then, taking the child in his arms, he squirts upon it a
little spirit from his mouth, pronouncing the name by which it is to be
called. A second name which the child usually takes is that of the day
of the week on which it is born. The following are the names of the days
in the Fanti language, varied in their orthography according to the sex
of the child:--
Male. Female.
Sunday Quisi Akosua.
Monday Kujot Ajua.
Tuesday Quabina Abmaba.
Wednesday Quaku Ekua.
Thursday Quahu Aba.
Friday Kufi Efua.
Saturday Qamina Ama.
Those ceremonials called on the Coast "customs" are the things that show
off the Fetish-Man at the best in more senses of the word than one. We
will take the yam custom. The intentions of these yam customs are
twofold--firstly they are a thanksgiving to the fetishes for allowing
their people to live to see the new yams, and for the new yams, but they
are also institutions to prevent the general public eating the new yam
before it's ready. The idea is, and no doubt rightly, that unripe yams
are unwholesome, and the law is that no new yams must be eaten until the
yam custom is made. The Fetish-Men settle when the yams are in a fit
state to pass into circulation, and then make the custom. It generally
occurs at the end of August, but is sometimes kept back until the
beginning of September. In Fantee all the inhabitants of the towns
assemble under the shade of the grove adjoining the fetish hut, and a
sheep and a number of fowls are killed, part of their flesh is mixed
with boiled yams and palm-oil, and a portion of this mixture is placed
on the heads of the images, and the remainder is thrown about before the
fetish hut as a peace-offering to the deities.
At Winnebah, on the Gold Coast, there is an interesting modification in
the yam custom. The principal fetish of that place, it is believed, will
not be satisfied with a sheep, but he must have a deer brought alive to
his temple, and there sacrificed. Accordingly on the appointed day every
year when the custom is to be celebrated, almost all the inhabitants
except the aged and infirm go into the adjoining country--an open
park-like country, studded with clumps of trees. The women and children
look on, give good advice, and shriek when necessary, while the men beat
the bush with sticks, beat tom-toms, and halloo with all their might.
While thus engaged, my correspondent remarks in his staid way,
"sometimes a leopard starts forth, but it is usually so frightened with
the noise and confusion that it scampers off in one direction as fast as
the people run from it in another. When a deer is driven out, the chase
begins, the people try to run it down, flinging sticks at its legs. At
last it is secured and carried exultingly to the town with shoutings and
drummings. On entering the town they are met by the aged people carrying
staves, and, having gone in procession round the town, they proceed to
the fetish house, where the animal is sacrificed, and partly offered to
the fetish, partly eaten by the priests."
These yam customs are at their fullest in the Benin Bights, but you get
a custom made for the new yam in all the districts lower down. These
customs have long been credited with being stained by human sacrifices.
Not altogether unjustly. You can always read human sacrifice for goats
and fowls when you are considering a district inhabited by true Negroes,
and the occasion is an important one, because in West Africa a human
sacrifice is the most persuasive one to the fetishes. It is just with
them as with a chief--if you want to get some favour from him you must
give him a present. A fowl or a goat or a basket of vegetables, or
anything like that is quite enough for most favours, but if you want a
big thing, and want it badly, you had better give him a slave, because
the slave is alike more intrinsically valuable and also more useful. So
far as I know, all human beings sacrificed pass into the service of the
fetish they are sacrificed to. They are not merely killed that he may
enjoy their blood, but that he may have their assistance. Fetishes have
much to do, and an extra pair of hands is to them always acceptable. As
for the importance of these harvest customs to the general system of
Fetish, I think in West Africa it is small. The goings on, the
licentiousness and general jollification that accompany them, upsetting
law and order for days, give them a fallacious look of importance; but I
think far more really near the heart of the Fetish thought-form is the
lonely man who steals at night into the forest to gain from Sasabonsom a
charm, and the woman who, on her way back from market, throws down
before the fetish houses she passes a scrap of her purchases; compared
to the cult of the law-god, well, yam customs are dirty water price,
palaver, and insignificant politically.
I have dealt here with Fetish as far as the position of the human being
is concerned, because this phase may make it more comprehensible to my
fellow white men who regard the human being as the main thing in the
created universe, but I must beg you to remember that this idea of the
importance of the human race is not held by the African. The individual
is supremely important to himself, and he values his friends and
relations and so on, but abstract affection for humanity at large or
belief in the sanctity of the lives of people with whom he is unrelated
and unacquainted, the African barely possesses. He is only capable of
feeling this abstract affection when under the influence of one of the
great revealed religions which place the human being higher in the scale
of Creation. This comes from no cruelty of mind _per se_, but is the
result of the hardness of the fight he has to fight against the world;
and possessing this view of the equal, if not greater importance of many
of the things he sees round him, the African conceives these things also
have their fetish--a fetish on the same ground idea, but varying from
human fetish. The politics of Mungo mah Lobeh, the mountain, with the
rest of nature, he believes to exist. The Alemba rapid has its affairs
clearly, but the private matters of these very great people are things
the human being had better keep out of; and it is advisable for him to
turn his attention to making terms with them and go into their presence
with his petition when their own affairs are prosperous, when their
tempers are not as it were up over some private ultra-human affair of
their own. I well remember the opinions expressed by my companions
regarding the folly--mine, of course--of obtruding ourselves on Mungo
when that noble mountain was vexed too much, and the opinion expressed
by an Efik friend in a tornado that came down on us. Well, there you
have this difference. I instinctively say "us." She did not think we
were objects of interest to the tornado or the forest it was scourging.
She took it they had a sort of family row on, and we might get hit with
the bits, therefore it was highly unfortunate that we were present at
the meeting. Again, it is the same with the surf. The boat-boys see it's
in a nasty temper, they keep out of it, it may be better to-morrow, then
it will tolerate them, for it has no real palaver with them
individually. Of course you can go and upset the temper of big nature
spirits, but when you are not there they have their own affairs.
Hence it comes that we have in Fetish a religion in which its believers
do not hold that devotion to religion constitutes Virtue. The ordinary
citizen is held to be most virtuous who is least mixed up in religious
affairs. He can attain Virtue, the love and honour of his fellow-men, by
being a good husband and father, an honest man in trade, a just man in
the palaver-house, and he must, for the protection of his interests,
that is to say, not only his individual well-being, but the well-being
of those dependent on him, go in to a certain extent for religious
practices. He must associate with spirits because spirits are in all
things and everywhere and over everything; and the good citizen deals
with the other spirits as he deals with that class of spirits we call
human beings; he does not cheat the big ones of their dues; he spills a
portion of his rum to them; he gives them their white calicoes; he
treats his slave spirits honourably, and he uses his slave spirits for
no bad purpose, and if any great grief falls on him he calls on the
great over-lord of gods, mentioning these things. But men are not all
private citizens; there are men whose destiny puts them in high
places--men who are not only house fathers but who are tribe fathers.
They, to protect and further the interests of those under them, must
venture greatly and further, and deal with more powerful spirits, as it
were, their social equals in spiritdom. These good chiefs in their
higher grade dealings preserve the same clean-handed conduct. And
besides these there are those men, the Fetish men, who devote their
lives to combating evil actions through witches and miscellaneous
spirits who prey on mankind. These men have to make themselves important
to important spirits. It is risky work for them, for spirits are a risky
set to deal with. Up here in London, when I have to deal with a spirit
as manifest in the form of an opinion, or any big mind-form incarnate in
one man, or in thousands, I often think of an African friend of mine who
had troubles, and I think sympathetically, for his brother explained the
affair to me. He was an educated man. "You see," he said, "my brother's
got a strong Ju Ju, but it's a damned rocky Ju Ju to get on with."
FOOTNOTES:
[22] July, 1897, p. 221.
[23] _Travels in West Africa._ (Macmillan, 1897, p. 453.)