When a palaver is called, the king sits as ruler of the meeting and does most of the talking. He provides food for those who come from a distance.
A king may be blamed if a war he has declared ends disastrously. While a king’s son expects to inherit the title and power, there is no invariable rule of succession; he cannot take the position by force. He must be chosen; but the choice is limited to the members of one family, in which it is hereditary.
If the chosen person be a minor, another is selected (but of the same family) to act as regent. The “incompetency” which could bar a man from kingship, even though in regular succession, would be lack of stamina in his character. The king-elect must make a feast, to which he is to call all the people to eat, drink, and play for twenty days.
There are no higher state forms among the coast tribes, as in civilized lands; no union among tribes; no feudal power nor vassals; no monarchy, nothing absolute; no taxation, no monopoly. Some of the interior tribes formerly had tributes and kingly monopoly of certain products.
VII.Fetich Doctors.
They still exist, but it can scarcely be said that they are a class. They have no organization; they have honor only in their own districts, unless they be called specially to minister in another place. They have power to condemn to death on charge of causing sickness. In their ceremonies they send the people to sing, dance, play, and beat drums, and they spot their bodies with their “medicines.” Any one may choose the profession for himself; fetich doctors demand large pay for their services.
Native King in the Niger Delta.
VIII.Hospitality.
A stranger is entertained hospitably. He is provided with a house and food for two weeks, or as much longer as he may wish to stay. On departing he is given a present. His host and the village headman are bound to protect him from any prosecution while he is their guest, even if he be really guilty.
IX.Judicial System.
Such asystemdoes not exist. Whatever rules there are are handed down as tradition, by word of mouth. There are persons who are familiar with these old sayings, proverbs, examples, and customs, and these are asked to be present in the trial of disputed matters.
1.Courts.In the righting of any wrong the head of the family is to take the first step. If the offenders fail to satisfy him, he appeals to the king, who then calls all the people, rehearses the matter to them, and the majority of their votes is accepted by the king as the decision. The offenders will not dare to resist.
There is no regular court-house. In almost all villages there is a public shed, or “palaver-house,” which is the town-hall, or public reception room. But a council may be held anywhere,—in the king’s house, in the house of one of the litigants, on the beach, or under a large shady tree.
The council is held at any time of day,—not at night. There are no regular advocates; any litigant may state his own case, or have any one else do it for him. There are no fees, except to the king for his summoning of the case. There is sometimes betting on the result; though no stakes are deposited, the bets are paid. There is not much form of court procedure. All the people of a village or district, even women and children, according to the importance of the case, assemble. While women are generally not allowed to argue in the case, yet their shouts of approvalor protest have influence in the decision, and encourage the parties by outspoken sympathy.
If an accused person does not come voluntarily to court, the king’s servants are sent to bring him. In the court the accused does not need to have some one plead for him, he speaks for himself. Accusers speak first, then the accused; the accusers reply, the accused answers; and the king and his aged counsellors decide. Witnesses are called from other places. As there is no writing among untaught tribes, the depositions are by word of mouth.
Formerly the accused was subjected to the poison ordeal; indeed, the accuser also had to take the poison draught as a proof of his sincerity, and that his charge was not a libel. But this custom is no longer practised on the coast.
There is no substitution of any kind, except in rare cases. A guilty person must bear his own punishment in some way.
Oaths are common, and are used freely and voluntarily in the course of the discussion. A man who utters false testimony or bears false witness is expected to be thrust out of the assembly, but it is not always done.
When an oath is required, there is no escape from it; he who refuses to swear is considered guilty. Sometimes, under bravado, he will demand to be given “mbwaye” (the poison test), hoping that his demand will not be complied with. When the test is produced, he may seek to escape it by refusing that particular kind and demanding another not readily obtainable. But his attempt at evasion is generally regarded as a sign of guilt.
In court, parties are not obstinate in their opinion; they ask for and take advice from others.
2.Punishment.If it be capital, the accusers are the executioners. Death is by various modes,—formerly very cruel,e. g., burning, roasting, torturing, amputation by piecemeal; now it is generally by gun, dagger, club, or drowning. For a debt that a creditor is seeking to recover, securities may be accepted. But if the accused then runs away, the person giving the security is tried and punished.
A creditor does not usually attach the property of the debtor, though often, in the interior tribes, a woman is seized as hostage. If a long time elapses in deciding the matter, the debtor may be held as prisoner until the debt is paid. Formerly it was very common for the debtor’s family’s property, or even their persons, to be seized as security; and it still is common for a person of the debtor’s tribe to be caught by the creditor’s tribe, and detained until he is redeemed by his own people.
The king of the prisoner’s tribe is called to help release him. If the king himself become a captive, his people combine to collect goods for the payment, and meanwhile give other persons in his place to secure his immediate release. Sometimes differences are settled in a fight, by a hand-to-hand encounter.
3.Blood Atonement and Fines.Revenge, especially for bloodshed, is everywhere practised. It is a duty belonging first to the “ijawe” (blood-relative), next to the “ikaka” (family), next to the “etomba” (tribe).
The murdered man’s own family take the lead,—in case of a wife, her husband and his family, and the wife’s family; sometimes the whole “ikaka”; finally, the “etomba.”
A master seeks revenge for his slave or other servants. Formerly it was indifferent who was killed in revenge, so that it be some member of the murderer’s tribe. Naturally that tribe sought to retaliate, and the feud was carried back and forth, and would be finally settled only when an equal number had been killed on each side,—a person for a person: a woman for a man, orvice versa; a child for a man or woman, orvice versa. A woman (wife of the man killed) does not take the lead in the revenge; his family must take the lead, her family must join in. They would be despised and cursed if they did not do so. The woman herself does not take part in this killing for revenge.
The avenger of blood may not demit his duty until some member of the other tribe has been killed. If a thief has been killed for his theft, blood may be taken for his death.But when that one other life is taken, the matter is considered settled; it is not carried on as a feud.
For a life taken by accident, a life is not required; but some penalty must be paid,e. g., a woman may be given as a wife. But, practically, in former times it was not admitted that “accidents” occurred; any misfortune was adjudged a fault.
Formerly even the plea of self-defence was not accepted. Even idiotic or otherwise irresponsible persons were held responsible, though sometimes they were ransomed by payment of a woman and goods.
At present blood is not always required, but formerly no money would have been accepted as a sufficient penalty. A man would have been despised for accepting it. There was no way of settlement except by bloodshed,—a life for a life,—except that, for the life of a woman, a woman and goods of a certain amount and kind might be accepted. When a woman was thus given for a murdered one, the living woman must not be old, but one capable of bearing children. Among the acceptable goods were sheep, goats, and pottery.
A wound or a broken limb is paid for in goods. These must come not solely from him who caused the injury; his family, as fellow offenders, must assist in paying.
The man who obtains the woman who is given for a woman killed, retains with her also part of the goods given with her, and part he shares with the family of the murdered one. If, in giving a woman for a murdered one, the offending family is unable to furnish also the required goods, they must sell another of their women in order to obtain those goods. The point is that they must give a womanandgoods;twowomen will not suffice.
The ceremonies in settlement of a blood-feud are as follows: The woman is paid in presence of both parties; then the goods are given, counted, and received. Then both parties retire. In the course of a week the parties receiving the woman and the goods call the other party, and produce a goat and kill it in their presence. It is divided equally, and givenhalf to each party; and the feud is settled, as by a covenant of peace, over the divided goat (Gen. xv. 10). The woman thus given in settlement will be married to some one.
The customs in her marriage are the same as for any other woman. Subsequently those who paid her as a fine may come and ask a portion of goods for her as a wife. Not that they have any claim on her as their daughter; but the man who has married her will give the goods they ask for, under the common belief that, unless he does so, the children born by her will die early, or at least will not come to years of maturity.
All misdeeds and offences, even capital ones, may be condoned by a fine in goods, excepting only the murder of a man. This murderer must forfeit his life. These fines are paid with foreign goods, each offence having its own regulation price as a punishment.
In general, the punishment for an injury is the same, whether the injured one be rich or poor. A man’s “majawe” are held responsible if he refuses to make restitution. If they also refuse, the offended party await a suitable opportunity, and then seize some one and hold him as a hostage until he is redeemed, for the price of the original offence, every mite of it being then exacted.
There is no right of asylum to any offender within the limit of his own tribe. In case of a man visiting, for any reason whatever, in the limits of another tribe one of whose members is a fugitive from justice into the limits of the visitor’s tribe, this visitor may be seized, and his countrymen asked to extradite the criminal staying in their midst.
Corporal punishment is administered publicly, the townspeople being called to witness it, so as to operate on their fears and cause them to dread the doing of deeds which may bring on them such a penalty.
4.Punishable Acts.A person is punishable only for an injury committed intentionally, not by accident.
For damages by cattle, the animal may be killed if the damage be considerable. The injured party may keep andeat the carcass, and the owner cannot recover for it. In this respect animals are treated as human beings, their lives being forfeit; and the owner’s majawe are held responsible along with him.
Punishments are rated according to the degree of the crime, in the order theft, adultery, rape, murder. Insults are not punishable by law; the insulted insults in return. If a fight results, and wounds are made during the fight, no fine is required.
Kidnapping, incest, and abortion are not known.
Under the slight duty owed to kings, treason can scarcely be said to exist. Its equivalent, the betrayal of tribal interests, is publicly rebuked, and a curse laid on the offender. If he be a servant, he is beaten and sent away.
The disturber of the peace of a wedding is expected to express regret, but no calamity will follow because of the disturbance. The offence is not common.
X.Territorial Relations.
The tribes have fixed settlements wherever foreign governments have not taken possession. Each man may choose for a garden a place that has not been already occupied. The land is common property for the tribe. But each ijawe may choose a separate place for itself.
No man of a tribe has any claim on the soil other than is common to any other man of that tribe. He has, however, a claim greater than any stranger.
1.Tenure.Land is held as common property; it is not bought or sold to a fellow-tribeman. It may be bought from the confines of another tribe, and it is sold to foreigners. A hunter is free to go anywhere, even into the territory of an adjacent tribe. If he kills game there, he does not have to divide. Bee trees and honey are free to any one. The sea is free for fishing only to the coast tribes.
Every woman has a separate garden; even the wives of polygamists do not have gardens in common.
Soil is free. A family, however, may settle in a limiteddistrict, and claim it as theirs as long as they live there; or, leaving it temporarily, if they return after a reasonable time, they may still claim it. They temporarily mark their places by trees or stones, as boundary lines. But there is nothing permanent. They prove their right to it by residing on it or making a garden from time to time. But their claim may be lost if the entire family leave it and go elsewhere. Such a place being vacated, and some one else wishing to occupy it, permission may be granted on formal application to the king. But if an occupant has deserted a place, and no one else has applied for it, he can resume it as his even after the lapse of years.
Dwellers on any ground have right to all the trees of fruitage on it,e. g., palm-nuts, and other natural wild edible nuts. Wells are never dug. People depend on springs and streams. Springs are free, even though they be on land claimed by others.
A man assists his wife in the clearing of the forest for a garden plot; but she and her servants attend to the planting, weeding, and other working of the garden itself.
2.Rights in Movables.The tenant dweller on any particular lot of ground owns everything on it, except the ground itself. If a foreigner buy a piece of ground, he may or may not buy the houses, and so forth, according to agreement. The movables on any ground are houses, trees, and any vegetables planted.
XI.Exchange Relations.
There is no coin or metal currency, except among the coast tribes, where foreign governments have introduced it. Foreign trade-goods are everywhere the medium of purchase and exchange. But there is a sort of currency, in the shape of iron spear-heads and other forms resembling miniature hatchets, a certain number of which are given by interior tribes in the purchase of a wife. They are used only for this purpose, and are exchanged by the parties themselves for the foreign goods required in the dowry.
They are manufactured by any village blacksmith from imported iron. They are not received or recognized by white traders.
Formerly cowry shells were used, even by foreign traders, as a currency; and they are still so used in the Sudan. But in all coast tribes purchase and sale are effected by foreign-made calico prints, pottery, cutlery, guns, powder, rum, and a great variety of other goods.
The natural products of the country—ivory, rubber, palm-oil, dyewoods—and many other native unmanufactured articles are exchanged for these goods. The natural products belong to the men. If a woman should find ivory, she cannot sell it; it belongs to her husband to barter it.
Contracts are confirmed in various ways in different tribes. A common mode is to eat and drink together, as a sign that the bargain is closed; and it will not be broken. A contract cannot be broken after the price is agreed upon, even if only a part of the price is paid; the remainder is to be paid in instalments.
If one overreaches another in a trade, he must take back the imperfect article or add to it. This is true, according to native law, among themselves. Any amount of overreaching and deception is practised toward foreigners in a trade, or to members of another tribe; and many foreigners are just as guilty in their dealings with the natives.
Loans of trade-goods are constantly made, but the taking of interest therefor is not known. If a borrowed article, such as a canoe, is broken or lost, a new canoe must be given in its place. If the canoe is only injured and had been in want of repair, the borrower, on returning it, must repair it and also pay some goods. One going as surety for goods is held responsible.
Pawning of goods is commonly practised everywhere.
People are generous in making gifts to friends, or donations to the needy; but if a man who has been helped in time of distress subsequently increases in wealth, the one who helped him may demand a return of the original gift.
English Trading-House.—Gabun.
XII.Religion.
Religion is intimately mixed with every one of these aforementioned sociological aspects of family, rights of property, authority, tribal organization, judicial trials, punishments, intertribal relations, and commerce.
Mr. R. E. Dennett, residing in Loango, has made a careful and philosophic investigation into the religious ideas of the Ba-Vili or Fyât nation and adjacent tribes bordering on the Kongo. The result of his research shows that the native tribal government and religious and social life are inseparably united. He claims to have discovered a complex system of “numbers” and “powers” showing the Loango people to be more highly organized politically than are the equatorial tribes, and revealing a very curious co-relation of those “numbers,” governing the physical, rational, and moral natures, with conscience and with God.
Some traces of the “numbers with meanings” are found in Yoruba, where, as described by Mr. Dennett, the division of the months of the year, the names of lower animals typical of the senses, and the powers of earth that speak to us represent religious ideas and relations. They err, therefore, who, as superficial observers, would brush away all these native views as mere superstition. They are more than mere superstition; though indeed very superstitious, they point to God.
The particular exponent of religious worship, the fetich, governs the arrangements of all such relations. It will be discussed as to its origin and the details of its use in the subsequent chapters.
THE IDEA OF GOD—RELIGION
Missionary Paulof Tarsus, in the polite exordium of his great address to the Athenian philosophers on Mars Hill, courteously tells them that he believes them to be a very “religious” people,—indeed, too much so in their broad-church willingness to give room for an altar to the worship of any new immanence of God; and then, with equal courtesy, he tells them that, with all their civilization, with all their eminence in art and philosophy, they were ignorant of the true character of a greater than any deity in their pantheon.
Modern missionaries, also, in studying the beliefs and forms of worship of the heathen nations among whom they dwell, while they may be shocked at the immoralities, cruelties, or absurdities of the special cult they are investigating, have to acknowledge that its followers, in their practice of it, exhibit a devotion, a persistence, and a faithfulness worthy of Christian martyrs. They arevery“religious.” Verily, if the obtaining of heaven and final salvation rested only on sincerity of belief and consistency of practice, the multitudinous followers of the so-called false religions would have an assurance greater than that of many professors of what is known as Christianity, and much of the occupation of the Christian missionary would be gone.
I saymuch; but not all, by any means. For the feeling with which I was impressed on my very first contact with the miseries of the sociology of heathenism, entirely aside from its theology and any question of salvation in a future life, has steadily deepened into the conviction that, even if I were not aChristian, I still ought to, and would, do and bear and suffer whatever God has called or allowed me to suffer or bear or do since 1861 in my proclamation of His gospel, simply for the sake of the elevation of heathen during their present earthly life from the wrongs sanctioned by or growing out of their religion. Distinctly is it true that “Godliness is profitable unto all things,” not only for the life “which is to come,” but also for “the life that now is.” Those in Christian lands who have no sympathy for, or who refuse to take any interest in, what are known as “Foreign Missions,” err egregiously in their failure to recognize the indisputable fact that they themselves are debtors for their possession of protected life, true liberty, and unoppressed pursuit of personal happiness, not to civilization as such, but to the form of religious belief called Christianity, which made that civilization possible. And by just so much as divine law has ordained us each our brother’s keeper, we are bound to share the blessings of the gospel with those whom God has made of one blood with us in the brotherhood of humanity.
A pursuit of this line of thought would lead me into an argument for the duty of foreign missions. That is not the direct object of these pages. True, I pray that, as a result of any reader’s following me in this study of African superstition, his desire will be deepened to give to Africa the pure truth in place of its falsity. But the special object of my pen, in following a certain thread of truth, is to show how degradingly false is that falsity, in its lapse from God, even though I accord it the name of religion.
For my present purpose it is sufficiently accurate to define theology as that department of knowledge which takes cognizance of God,—His being, His character, and His relation to His Cosmos. Whenever any intelligent unit in that Cosmos looks up to Him as something greater than itself, under what Schleiermacher describes as “a sense of infinite dependence,” and utters its need, it has expressed its religion. It may be weak, superstitious, and mixed with untruth; nevertheless, it is religion.
When a study of God and the thoughts concerning Him crystallize into a formula of words expressing a certain belief, it is definitely a creed. When, under a human necessity, a creed clothes itself in certain rites, ceremonies, and formulas of practice, it is a worship. That worship may be fearful in its cruelty or ridiculous in its frivolity; nevertheless, it is a worship. Worship is essential to the vitality of religion; without it religion is simply a theory.
Theology differentiates itself from other departments of knowledge, as to its source and its effects. For instance, in the study of geography, as to its effects, it is comparatively a matter of indifference whether we believe that the earth is flat or globular, like Booker T. Washington’s teacher who in his district school was prepared to teach either, “according to the preference of a majority of his patrons”; or, in astronomy, whether we believe that the sun is the stationary centre of our planetary system, or whether, with the late Rev. John Jasper, we assert that the sun “do move” around our earth.
But in theology it matters enormously for this present life, whether we believe the supreme object of our worship to be Moloch, and infinitely for our future life, whether Jesus be to us the Son of God.
As to the source of theological knowledge, all our other knowledge is evolved, systematized, and developed by patient experiment and investigation. The results of any particular branch of human knowledge are cumulative, and are enlarged and perfected from generation to generation. But the source of our knowledge of God is not in us, any more than our spiritual life had its source in ourselves. It cameab extra. God breathed into the earthly form of Adam the breath of life, and he became a living creature, essentially and radically different from the beasts over which he was given dominion. Knowledge of God was thus an original, donated, component part of us. It grew under revelations made during the angelic communications before the Fall. Revelation was continued by the Logos along thousands ofyears, until that Logos himself became flesh and dwelt among us in visible form in His written word, and by His Comforter, who still reveals to us.
I do not feel it necessary here to discuss, or even to express an opinion as to the evolution of the physical species. I know, simply because God says so,—and am satisfied with this knowledge,—that “in the beginning God created.” As towhenthat “beginning” was, there may be respectable difference of opinion; for it is only a human opinion that assertswhen. Assertion may have apparently very reliable data; but these data often are like the bits of glass, factors in the geometric figures of a kaleidoscope, whose next turn in scientific discovery dislocates and relocates in an apparently reliable proof of the existence of another figure.
As towhatit was that God created in that beginning, there may be also respectable difference of opinion. Whether, like Minerva, full armed from the head of Jove, Adam sprang into his perfect physical, mental, and moral manhood on the sixth of consecutive days of twenty-four solar hours each; or whether, created a weakling, he slowly grew up to perfect development; or whether life began only in protoplasm, and gradually differentiated itself into the forms of beasts, and finally into that of man,—back of all was a great First Cause that “created” in the “beginning.” It is all a subject fearfully wonderful.
“My substance was not hid from Thee when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in Thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.”
But all such assertion, discussion, and attempt at proof I allow only to what is physical and finite, and is therefore a legitimate subject of assertion on merely physical data; for I do not desire to discuss, beyond simple mention, the Spencerian doctrine of evolution, that materialism which would make thought and soul only successions in a series (even ifthe highest and best) of evoluted developments. To account for the religious nature in man by evolution I regard as a thing that cannot be done. It is a tenable position held by evolutionists such as Dana, Winchell, and the late Professor Le Conte of California, that “at the creation of man the divine fiat asserted itself, and ‘breathed into man the breath of life, and man became a living soul.’ Immortality cannot be evolved out of mortality. If Spencerian evolution is true, either everything is immortal or nothing is immortal; man and vermin in this hypothesis go together.”
Man’s soul came to him direct from God, a part of His own infinite life, in His “image,” and like Him in His holiness. Man’s thoughts of God were holy. The expression of them in words and acts was his practical religion, the visible, audible link that “bound” (ligated) him to God. In this there could be no evolution, unless that, in the many forms and ceremonies used in the expression of religious thought (which ceremonies constitute worship), there could be, and were, variation, change, development, or retrogression.
Therefore I cannot accept the conclusions of those who in their study of ethnology claim to find that the religious beliefs of the world, and even the very idea of a Supreme Being, have been evolved by man himselfab intra. They claim that this evolution has been by primitive man, from low forms of beliefs in spiritual beings, through polytheism and idolatry, up to the conception of monotheism and its belief in the one living God. This process they claim to be able to follow on lines racial and national, under the civilizations of Chaldee, Greek, Roman, Teutonic, and other stocks.
“Until some human being can be found with a conception of spiritual existences without his having received instruction on that point from those who went before him, the claim ... that primitive man ever obtained his spiritual knowledge or his spiritual conceptions from within himself alone, or without an external revelation to him, is an unscientific assumption in the investigation of the origin of religions in the world.”[3]
The rather I find, in my own ethnological observations during these more than forty years in direct contact with aboriginal peoples, that the initial starting-point of man’s knowledge of God was by revelation from Jehovah himself. This knowledge was to be conserved by man’s conscience, God’s implanted witness,—a witness that can be coerced into silence, that may be nursed into forgetfulness, that may be perverted by abuse, that may be covered up by superimposed falsities, that may be discolored by the blackness of foul degradation, but which can never be utterly destroyed; which on occasions, like the Titans, arouses itself with volcanic force; which at God’s final bar is to be His sufficient proof for the verities and responsibilities of at least natural religion (“natural” religion, a recognition of certain attributes of God as revealed in the works of nature). This knowledge of God, a treasure hid in earthen vessels, rightly used and cherished, was to grow and develop under subsequent divine revelation, so that man might become more and more like his divine original; or, if abused, neglected, or perverted, it would carry him even farther away from God.
“Not alone those who insist on the belief that there was a gradual development of the race from a barbarous beginning, but also those who believe that man started on a higher plane, and in his degradation retained vestiges of God’s original revelation to him, are finding profit in the study of primitive myths, and of aboriginal rites and ceremonies all the world over.”[4]
I do not impeach the sincerity of those students of primitive thought who teach that man in his religious beliefs has reached his present monotheism by progressive growths from polytheism, or that he has attained his present conception of the very existence of a Supreme Being by a gradual emergence from a state of ignorance in which even the idea of such a being did not exist; but I do discount thecompetency of many of the witnesses on whose testimony they base their conclusions.
Whatever may be proved in a complete investigation by science into the arcana of nature,—of archæology and other channels of research,—a reverent comparison of these results of finite intelligence will find them not inconsistent with the statements of God’s infinite Word. Indeed, that Word was not written to make any definite statement on astronomy or geology, or any other human science. The only science of the Bible is that of man’s relation to his divine Father; its only history a history of redemption, as promised to Eve and her seed, the Jewish nation, and as fulfilled in the Lion of the Tribe of Judah. Apparent conflicts of the Bible with science are not always real; too often a claim is set up, based on a single observation, perhaps hastily made, and not verified by a comparison of the variable factors in that observation.
I suppose that it is true that in the theology of even the worst forms of religion there is more or less truth, and almost equally true that in the theology of the best forms there may be somewhat of superstition. This is so because, as I believe, all religions had but one source, and that a pure one. From it have grown perversions varying in their proportion of truth and error.
In this study of the African theologic ideas I shall endeavor to separate these two—the false and the true—into two divisions: First, Beliefs in God more or less true, which have had their birth in tradition of some divine revelation, which find at least faint echoes in human conscience, and which among exalted nations would be formulated into confessions, creeds, and articles of faith. Second, Animism or beliefs in vague spiritual beings, which, being almost pure superstitions, cannot, from their very nature, be accurately formulated, they being the outgrowth of every individual’s imagination, and varying with all the variances of time, place, and human thought.
Eliminating from any theology its superstitious element,we shall find the highest and truest religion. But if you eliminate from the theology of the Bantu African its superstition, you will have very little left; for, among the religions of the world, it comes nearest to being purely a superstition. So nearly is this true that travellers and other superficial observers and theorists have asserted that the religious beliefs of some degraded tribes weresimplysuperstitions, destitute of reference to any superior being.
I can readily see how the reports of some travellers—even of those who had no prejudice against the Negro, the precepts of the Bible, or missionary work—could be made in apparent sincerity, when they state that native Africans have confessed of themselves that they had no idea of God’s existence; also, their belief that some pygmy and other tribes were too destitute of intelligence to possess that idea,—that it either must be given themab extraby the possessors of a superior civilization, or must be developed by themselves as they rise in civilization.
The difficulty about the testimony of these witnesses in this matter is that, being passers-by in time, they were unable—by reason of lack of ability to converse fluently, or absence of a reliable interpreter, or of being out of touch with native mode of thought or speech—to make their questionings intelligible.
On the heathen side, also, the obsequious natives, unaccustomed to analytic thought, will answer vaguely on the spur of the moment, and often as far as possible in the line of what they suppose will best please the questioner. All native statements must be discounted, must be sifted.
I am aware that some missionaries are quoted as having said or written that the people among whom they were laboring “had no idea of God.” Even Robert Moffat is reported to have held this opinion. If so, it must have been in the earlier days of his ministry, under his first shock at the depth of native degradation, before he had become fluent in the native language, and before he hadfound out all the secrets of that difficult problem, an African’s native thought. Such an unqualified phrase could be uttered by a missionary in an hour of depression, in the presence of some great demonstration of heathen wickedness, and in an effort to describe how very far the heathen was from God. That the heathen had nocorrectidea of God is often true.
Arnot, who among modern African missionaries has lived most closely and intimately with the rudest tribes in their veriest hovels, writes:[5]“Man is a very fragile being, and he is fully conscious that he requires supernatural or divine aid. Apart from the distinct revelation given by God in the first chapter of Romans, there is much to prove that the heathen African is a man to whom the living God has aforetime revealed himself. But he had sought after things of his own imagination and things of darkness to satisfy those convictions and fears which lurk in his breast, and which have not been planted there by the Evil One, but by God. Refusing to acknowledge God,[6]they have become haters of God.[7]The preaching of the gospel to them, however, is not a mere beating of the air; there is a peg in the wall upon which something can be hung and remain. Often a few young men have received the message with laughter and ridicule, but I have afterwards heard them discuss my words amongst themselves very gravely. I heard one man say to a neighbor, ‘Monare’s words pierce the heart.’ Another remarked that the story of Christ’s death was very beautiful, but that he knew it was not meant for him; he was a ‘makala’ (slave), and such a sacrifice was only for white men and princes.”
Lionel Declè,[8]who certainly is not prejudiced toward missionaries or the Negro, writes of the Barotse tribe in South Africa and their worship of ancestors: “They believe in a Supreme Being, Niambe, who is supposed to come and take away the spiritual part of the dead.” Thisname “Niambe,” for the Deity, is almost exactly the same as “Anyambe,” in Benga, two thousand miles distant.
Illustrative of traveller Declè’s haste or inexactitude in the use of language, he apparently contradicts himself on page 153, in speaking of a tribe, the Matabele, adjacent to the Barotse: “The idea of a Supreme Being is utterly foreign, and cannot be appreciated by the native mind. They have a vague idea of a number of evil spirits always ready to do harm, and chief among these are the spirits of their ancestors; but they do not pray to them to ask for their help if they wish to enter on any undertaking. They merely offer sacrifices to appease them when some evil has befallen the family.”
Perhaps he and other cursory travellers, in making such hasty assertions, mean that the native has no idea of the true character of God; in that they would be correct.
The accounts which some travellers have given of tribes without religion I either set down to misunderstanding, or consider them to be insufficient to invalidate the assertion that religion is a universal feature of savage life.
However degraded, every people have a religion. But they are children, babes in the woods, lost in the forest of ignorance, dense and more morally malarious than Stanley’s forest of Urĕga. In their helplessness, under a feeling of their “infinite dependence,” they cry out in the night of their orphanage, “Help us, O Paia Njambe!” Their forefathers wandered so far from him that only a name is left by which to describe the All-Father, whose true character has been utterly forgotten,—so forgotten that they rarely worship him, but have given such honor and reverence as they do render literally to the supposed spiritual residents in stocks and stones. “Lo! this only have I found, that God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions.”
Offering in the following pages a formulation of African superstitious beliefs and practice, I premise that I have gathered them from a very large number of native witnesses,very few of whom presented to me all the same ideas. Any one else, inquiring of other natives in other places, would not find, as held by every one of them, all that I have recorded; but parts of all these separate ideas will be found held by separate individuals everywhere.
After more than forty years’ residence among these tribes, fluently using their language, conversant with their customs, dwelling intimately in their huts, associating with them in the varied relations of teacher, pastor, friend, master, fellow-traveller, and guest, and, in my special office as missionary, searching after their religious thought (and therefore being allowed a deeper entrance into the arcana of their soul than would be accorded to a passing explorer), I am able unhesitatingly to say that among all the multitude of degraded ones with whom I have met, I have seen or heard of none whose religious thought was only a superstition.
Standing in the village street, surrounded by a company whom their chief has courteously summoned at my request, when I say to him, “I have come to speak to your people,” I do not need to begin by telling them that there is a God. Looking on that motley assemblage of villagers,—the bold, gaunt cannibal with his armament of gun, spear, and dagger; the artisan with rude adze in hand, or hands soiled at the antique bellows of the village smithy; women who have hasted from their kitchen fire with hands white with the manioc dough or still grasping the partly scaled fish; and children checked in their play with tiny bow and arrow or startled from their dusty street pursuit of dog or goat,—I have yet to be asked, “Who is God?”
Under the slightly varying form of Anyambe, Anyambie, Njambi, Nzambi, Anzam, Nyam, or, in other parts, Ukuku, Suku, and so forth, they know of a Being superior to themselves, of whom they themselves inform me that he is theMakerandFather. The divine and human relations of these two names at once give me ground on which to stand in beginning my address.
If suddenly they should be asked the flat question, “Doyou know Anyambe?” they would probably tell any white visitor, trader, traveller, or even missionary, under a feeling of their general ignorance and the white man’s superior knowledge, “No! What doweknow? You are white people and are spirits; you come from Njambi’s town, and know all about him!” (This will help to explain, what is probably true, that some natives have sometimes made the thoughtless admission that they “know nothing about a God.”) I reply, “No, I am not a spirit; and, while I do indeed know about Anyambe,Idid not call him by that name. It’s your own word. Where did you get it?” “Our forefathers told us that name. Njambi is the One-who-made-us. He is our Father.” Pursuing the conversation, they will interestedly and voluntarily say, “He made these trees, that mountain, this river, these goats and chickens, and us people.”
That typical conversation I have had hundreds of times, under an immense variety of circumstances, with the most varied audiences, and before extremes of ignorance, savagery, and uncivilization, utterly barring out the admission of a probability that the tribe, audience, or individual in question had obtained a previous knowledge of the name by hearsay from adjacent more enlightened tribes. For thenameof that Great Being was everywhere and in every tribe before any of them had become enlightened; varied in form in each tribe by the dialectic difference belonging to their own, and not imported from others,—for, where tribes are hundreds of miles apart or their dialects greatly differ, the variation in the name is great,e. g., “Suku,” of the Bihe country, south of the Kongo River and in the interior back of Angola, and “Nzam” of the cannibal Fang, north of the equator.
But while it is therefore undeniable that a knowledge of this Great Being exists among the natives, and that the belief is held that he is a superior and even a supreme being, that supremacy is not so great as what we ascribe to Jehovah. Nevertheless, I believe that the knowledge of theirAnzam or Anyambe has come down—clouded though it be and fearfully obscured and marred, but still a revelation—from Jehovah Himself. Most of the same virtues which we in our enlightened Christianity commend, and many of the vices which we denounce, they respectively commend and denounce. No one of them praises to me theft or falsehood or murder. They speak of certain virtues as “good,” and of other things which are “bad,” though, just as do the depraved of Christian lands, they follow the vices they condemn. True, certain evils they do defend,e. g.(as did some of our New England ancestors) witchcraft executions, justifying them as judicial acts; and polygamy, considering it (as our civilized Mormons) a desirable social institution (but, unlike the Mormons, not claiming for it the sanction of religion); and slavery, regarded (as only a generation ago in the United States) as necessary for a certain kind of property. But theft, falsehood, and some other sins, when committed by others, their own consciences condemn,—closely covered up and blunted as those consciences may be,—thus witnessing with and for God.
While all this is true, their knowledge of God is almost simply a theory. It is an accepted belief, but it does not often influence their life. “God is not in all their thought.” In practice they give Him no worship. God is simply “counted out.”
Resuming my street-preaching conversation: Immediately after the admission by the audience of their knowledge of Anzam as the Creator and Father, I say, “Why then do you not obey this Father’s commands, who tells you to do so and so? Why do you disobey his prohibitions, who forbids you to do so and so? Why do you not worship him?” Promptly they reply: “Yes, he made us; but, having made us, he abandoned us, does not care for us; he is far from us. Why should we care for him? He does not help nor harm us. It is the spirits who can harm us whom we fear and worship, and for whom we care.”
Another witness on this subject is the Rev. Dr. J. L.Wilson.[9]Speaking of Africa and its Negro inhabitants, he says: “The belief in one great Supreme Being is universal. Nor is this idea held imperfectly or obscurely developed in their minds. The impression is so deeply engraved upon their moral and mental nature that any system of atheism strikes them as too absurd and preposterous to require a denial. Everything which transpires in the natural world beyond the power of man or of spirits, who are supposed to occupy a place somewhat higher than man, is at once and spontaneously ascribed to the agency of God. All the tribes in the country with which the writer has become acquainted (and they are not few) have a name for God; and many of them have two or more, significant of His character as a Maker, Preserver, and Benefactor. (In the Grebo country Nyiswa is the common name for God; but He is sometimes called Geyi, indicative of His character as Maker. In Ashanti He has two names:viz., Yankumpon, which signifies ‘My Great Friend,’ and Yemi, ‘My Maker.’) The people, however, have no correct idea of the character or attributes of the Deity. Destitute of (a written) revelation, and without any other means of forming a correct conception of His moral nature, they naturally reason up from their own natures, and, in consequence, think of Him as a being like themselves.
“Nor have they any correct notion of the control which God exercises over the affairs of the world. The prevailing notion seems to be that God, after having made the world and filled it with inhabitants, retired to some remote corner of the universe, and has allowed the affairs of the world to come under the control of evil spirits; and hence the only religious worship that is ever performed is directed to these spirits, the object of which is to court their favor, or ward off the evil effects of their displeasure.
“On some rare occasions, as at the ratification of an important treaty, or when a man is condemned to drink the ‘red-water ordeal,’ the name of God is solemnly invoked; and, what is worthy of note, is invokedthree timeswith markedprecision. Whether this involves the idea of a Trinity we shall not pretend to decide; but the fact itself is worthy of record. Many of the tribes speak of the ‘Son of God.’ The Grebos call him ‘Greh,’ and the Amina people, according to Pritchard, call him ‘Sankombum.’”
The following testimony I gather from conversations with the late Rev. Ibia j‘Ikĕngĕ, a native minister and member of the Presbytery of Corisco, who himself was born in heathenism. He stated:
That his forefathers believed in many inferior agencies who are under the control of a Superior Being; that they were therefore primitive monotheists. Under great emergencies they looked beyond the lower beings, and asked help of that Superior; before doing so, they prayed to him, imploring him as Father to help;
That the people of this country believed God made the world and everything in it; but he did not know whether they had had any ideas about creation from dust of the ground or in God’s likeness;
That they believed in the existence, in the first times, of a great man, who had simply to speak, and all things were made by the word of his power. As to man’s creation, a legend states it thus: Two eggs fell from on high. On striking the ground and breaking, one became a man and the other a woman. (Apparently there is no memory of any legend indicating the name, character, or work of the Holy Spirit.)
That there is a legend of a great chief of a village who always warned people not to eat of the fruit of a certain tree. Finally, he himself ate of it and died;
That there was no legend, but, among a few persons, a vague tradition of a once happy period, and of a coming time of good; but he knew of nothing corresponding to the story of Cain and Abel;
That there is a fable that a woman brought to the people of her village the fruit of a forbidden tree. In order to hide it she swallowed it; and she became possessed of an evil spirit, which was the beginning of witchcraft;That there was some tradition of a Deluge (he was not aware of any about the Dispersion at the Tower of Babel);
That all men believed they were sinners, but that they knew of no remedy for sin;
That sacrifices are made constantly, their object being to appease the spirits and avert their anger;
That many of the tribes are, and probably all, before they emerged on the seacoast, were cannibal (of the origin of cannibalism he did not know, but he was certain it had no religious idea associated with it[10]);
That there was a legend that a “Son” of God, by name Ilongo ja Anyambe, was to come and deliver mankind from trouble and give them happiness; but as he had not as yet come, the heathen were no longer expecting him;
That there was a division of time, six months, making an “upuma,” oryear, and a rest day, which came two days after the new moon, and was called Buhwa bwa Mandanda,—it was a day for dancing and feasting;
That the dead were usually buried; but persons held in superstitious reverence, as twins, Udinge, etc., were not buried, but left at the foot of a ceiba, or silk-cotton tree, or other sacred tree;
That burial-places are regarded with a mixed feeling of reverence and awe;
That the immortality of the soul is believed in, but that there is no tradition of the resurrection of the body;
That they believe God gave law to mankind, and that, for those who keep this law, there is reserved in the future a “good place,” and for the bad a “bad place,” but no definite ideas about what that “good” or that “bad” will be, or as to the locality of those places;
That they believe in a distinction of spirits,—that some aredemons, as in the old days of demoniacal possession, this distinction following the Jewish idea of diaboloi and daimonai.
POLYTHEISM—IDOLATRY
Civilizationand religion do not necessarily move with equal pace. Whatever is really best in the ethics of civilization is derived from religion. If civilization falls backward, religion probably has already weakened or will also fall. The converse is not necessarily true. Religion may halt or even retrograde, while civilization steps on brilliantly, as it did in Greece with her Parthenon, and in Rome the while that religion added to the number of idols in the pantheon. Egypt, too, had her men learned in astronomy, who built splendid palaces and hundred-pillared Thebes the while they were worshipping Osiris. The dwellers before the Deluge had carried their civilization to a knowledge of arts now lost, while their wickedness and utter wanderings from God’s worship caused the earth to cry out for a cleansing Flood.
Whatever therefore may be true in the history of civilization—whether man was gifted,ab initio, with a large measure of useful knowledge which he had simply easily to put into practice; or whether, as a savage, primitive man had slowly and painfully to find out under pressure the use of fire, clothing, weapons of defence and offence, tools, and other necessary articles and arts—is not important here to be discussed. From whatever point of vantage, high or low, Adam’s sons started, we know that they had at least tools for agriculture[11]and for the building of houses;[12]and that a fewgenerations later, their knowledge of arts had grown from those which aided in the acquisition of the bare necessaries of life into the aesthetics of music and metallic ornamentation.[13]
But religion did not wait that length of time for its growth. To the original pair in Eden, Jehovah had given a knowledge of Himself. They felt His character, they were told His will; and when they had disobeyed that will, they were given a promise of salvation, and were instructed in certain given rites of worship,e. g., offerings and sacrifice. They knew[14]the significance of atoning blood, and the difference between a simple thank-offering and a sin-offering. All this knowledge of religion was not a possession which man had attained by slow degrees. He started with it in full possession, while yet he was clothed only in the skins of beasts,[15]and before he knew how to make musical instruments or to fashion brass and iron. His religion was in advance of his civilization. Subsequently his civilization pushed ahead.
What were the gradual steps before the Deluge, in the divergence of man’s worship of God, is not difficult to imagine if we look at the history of the Chaldees, of the Hittites, and of the Jews themselves. Subsequent to the Deluge, from the grateful sacrifice of the seventh animal by Noah, to Abraham’s typical offering of Isaac, it is not a very far cry to the butchery of Jephthah’s daughter or the immolations to Moloch. A well-intended Ed[16]may readily become a schismatic Mecca. An altar of Dan is soon furnished with its golden calf.
With this as a starting-point,viz., that the knowledge of himself was directly imparted to man by Jehovah, and that certain forms of worship were originally directed and sanctioned by Him, I wish in subsequent pages to follow that line of light through the labyrinths of man’s wandering from monotheism into polytheism, idolatry, and even into crass fetichism.
Abstract faith is difficult. It is so much easier to believe what we see, to have faith assisted by sight. Even such faith is not without its blessing, but “blessed are they that havenot seen, and yet have believed.”[17]Memory is assisted by visible signs; whence the art of writing,—in its usefulness so far beyond the Indian’s wampum belts. Merely oral law is apt to be forgotten, or its requisitions and prohibitions become hazy.
As the years passed by, and nations, after the dispersion from the tower on the plain of Shinar, diverged more and more, not only in speech and writing but also in customs, their religious thought began to vary from the simple standard of Adam and Noah. Between those small beginnings of variation and the gulf-like depth of the fetich, there are three successive steps.
First, retaining the name of and belief in and worship of Jehovah, mankind added something else. They associated with Jehovah certain natural objects. This, it is readily conceivable, they could do without feeling that they were dishonoring Him. They could not see Him; in their expression of their wants in prayer they were speaking into vague space and heard no audible response. The strain on simple unassisted faith was heavy. The senses asked for something on which they could lean. Very reasonable, therefore, it was for the pious thought, in speaking to the Great Invisible, to associate closely with His name the great natural objects in which His character was revealed or illustrated the,—sun, shining in strength and beneficently giving life to plants and the comfort of its warmth to all creation; the moon, benefiting in a similar though less prominent way; the sky, from which spake the thunder; the mountain, towering in its solemn majesty; the sea, spread out in its inscrutable immensity. All these illustrating some of Jehovah’s attributes,—His power, goodness, infinity,—without impropriety associated themselves in man’s thought of God, were named along with His name, and were looked upon with some of the same reverence which was accorded to Him. In all this there was no conscious departure from the worship of the one living and true God. The position to which these great natural objects were graduallyelevated relatively to God, in the thought of the worshipper, was not as yet blasphemous, or in any intentional way derogatory to Him. But the evil in this elevation of nature into prominence with God was that there was no limit to the number of objects or the degree of their elevation. From the dignified use of sun, moon, sky, and sea, by unconscious degradations animals became the objects of worship—the bull, the serpent, and the cat (each illustrative of some attribute), and thence finally objects that were frivolous, ridiculous, or disgusting, which nevertheless were each the exponent of some principle. Even the indecencies of Phallic worship had found their dignified beginning in an attempt to honor the great principle of life in nature’s procreative processes.
But there came a time, in the multiplying of the objects illustrative of God’s attributes, when they, by their very numbers, minimized divine dignity. Their constant, visible, tangible presence to the senses began not simply passively to represent God, but actively to personify Him, and Jehovah was subdivided. He was still the great God; but these others were given not only a name, but a personality which shadowed Him and dishonored Him, by admitting them to fellowship with Him, and regarding Him as no longer alone the great I Am. Though supreme, His supremacy was not exclusive; it was comparative. He was over others, who also were gods, with whom He shared His power, and to whom was to be given somewhat of His worship. He was not indeed denied, but He was dishonored. He became only one of the many gods along with Baal and Ashtaroth. But the worship of Him was not abandoned. He was worshipped along with these others, as One among many. And finally polytheism had become the belief of the world, except of the many scattered small communities which, with their priests of the Most High God, like Melchisedek and Job, held the true light from extinction. “Jehovah” became a name for the Deity of a nation; each nation, while reverencing its own god, not denying power to that of another nation. Man’s little thought was trying to localize the Deity in its own small tribal limits.
Philistia worshipped its Dagon, but it feared and made trespass offerings to Jehovah of the Ark of Israel’s Covenant.[18]
Nebuchadnezzar, startled by a vision of a Son of God in the flame of his fiery furnace, in an hour of repentance could decree that the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego should not be spoken against.[19]This was the second step in religion’s retrograde movement. The personified natural objects were actually worshipped. No longer considered simply asrepresentativesof God, they were actually given a part of God’s place, and were worshipped as God. The prayer was not, “Jehovah, hear us, for the sake of Baal, through whom we plead!” nor “O Baal, present our petition to Jehovah!” but, flatly and directly, “O Baal, hear us!”
Having reached in their religious thought this position of a belief in many gods, it was a natural and logical result that worship was to be rendered to them all. The sacrifices that had been offered to Jehovah alone were divided for service to other gods. But it was the same religious sentiment, in both monotheist and polytheist, that prompted the rendering of prayer, sacrifice, and other service. The same sense of an “infinite dependence” that had led arms of weak faith to lay hold for help on that which was nearest and most obvious, operated with the heathen who had wandered from God, in his petition to his many gods, just as it had operated originally with the worshipper of the true God. The sentiment was right, the principle was good; only, its application was wrong,—sometimes fearfully wrong. Man’s religious nature is a force. There are other forces in nature that belong to other domains than religion. They are good forces if well applied; they become engines of destruction if misapplied or applied in excess.
In all history no misapplied force has wrought more fearful evil than the religious. It made holy even the atrocities of the Inquisition; it ordained a Te Deum for the massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day.
Similarly mankind found not only justification but proprietyin the human sacrifices to Moloch, and in the holocausts of the Aztec civilization. If in giving a gift of thanks, tribute, admiration, or fear to a human friend, ruler, or employer, we choose that which is good and best in our own eyes, so as to win the favor of the being to whom it is given, much more would we strive to please the god in whose power lies our life, health, and prosperity. It was a logical result, therefore, in choosing for sacrifice on great emergencies, to select the best-beloved child. Moloch would be pleased and propitiated by such a valuable gift. The more that the human love was renounced in the agony of the parents’ view of their child’s dying struggle, the more favorable would be the response to the worshipper. Under this misapplied religious force an Iphigenia is logical, and the Hindu infant cast to Gunga’s wave a fitting offering in the agonized mother’s eyes. But how fearfully mistaken! The religion that recognizes and directs such abuse is a “false religion,” as compared with Christianity; not in the sense that it has nothing good in it, but in the falsity of the objects of its worship and in the cruelty of the rites employed in that worship. In the genera of the sciences there is only one species of religion, but that one species has many varieties. In this sense Calvin is correct if, in speaking of the “immense welter of errors” in which the whole world outside of Christianity is immersed, “he regards his own religion as the true one and all the others were false.” The function of a comparative study of religions is to point out the connecting line of truth running through the mass of error. Back of all the cruelty and error and falsity in polytheism lie the proper sense of need, the natural feeling of helplessness in the great emergencies of life, and the commendable desire to honor the Being known under different names as Jehovah, Moloch, Jupiter, Allah, Budh, Brahm, Odin, or Anyambe; to which Being His children all over the world looked up as the All-Father. But thedescensus Avernifrom the One living and true God soon multiplied gods, dividing among many the attributes that had been centred in the One, and finally carried man’sreligious thought so far from God that only His name was retained, while the trust which had belonged to Him alone was scattered over a multitude of objects that were not even dignified with the name “gods.” Worship of ancestors was established. Great human benefactors, heroic human beings, were deified and canonized. The whole air of the world became peopled with spiritual influences; literally “stocks and stones” became animated with demons of varying power and disposition; and fetichism erected itself as a kind of religion.
I see nothing to justify the theory of Menzies[20]that primitive man or the untutored African of to-day, in worshipping a tree, a snake, or an idol, originally worshipped those very objects themselves, and that the suggestion that they represented, or were even the dwelling-place of, some spiritual Being is an after-thought up to which he has grown in the lapse of the ages. The rather I see every reason to believe that the thought of the Being or Beings as an object of worship has come down by tradition and from direct original revelation of Jehovah Himself. The assumption of a visible, tangible object to represent or personify that Being is the after-thought that human ingenuity has added. The civilized Romanist claims that he does not worship the actual sign of the cross, but the Christ who was crucified on it; similarly, the Dahomian, in his worship of a snake.
Rev. J. L. Wilson, D.D.,[21]says of the condition of Dahomy fifty years ago, that in Africa “there is no place where there is more intense heathenism; and to mention no other feature in their superstitious practices, the worship of snakes at this place [Whydah] fully illustrates this remark. A house in the middle of the town is provided for the exclusive use of these reptiles, and they may be seen here at any time in very great numbers. They are fed, and more care is taken of them than of the human inhabitants of the place. If they are seen straying away, they must be brought back; and at the sight of them the people prostrate themselves on theground and do them all possible reverence. To kill or injure one of them is to incur the penalty of death. On certain occasions they are taken out by the priests or doctors, and paraded about the streets, the bearers allowing them to coil themselves around their arms, necks, and bodies. They are also employed to detect persons who have been guilty of witchcraft. If, in the hands of the priest, they bite the suspected person, it is sure evidence of his guilt; and no doubt the serpent is trained to do the will of his keeper in all such cases. Images, usually called ‘gregrees,’ of the most uncouth shape and form, may be seen in all parts of the town, and are worshipped by all classes of persons. Perhaps there is no place in Africa where idolatry is more openly practised, or where the people have sunk into deeper pagan darkness.”
Also, of the people on the southwest coast at Loango: “The people of Loango are more addicted to idol worship than any other people on the whole coast. They have a great many carved images which they set up in their fetich houses and in their private dwellings, and which they worship; but whether these images represent their forefathers, as is the case among the Mpongwe (at Gabun), is not certainly known.”[22]
Having thus followed the religious thought of mankind in its divagation from monotheistic worship of the true God, down through polytheism and idolatrous sacrifices, to the worship of ancestors, we have reached a third stage, where the worship of God is not only divided between Him and other objects, but, a step beyond, God Himself is quietly disregarded, and the worship due Him is transferred to a multitude of spiritual agencies under His power, but uncontrolled by it.