FOOTNOTES:

“God of the granite and the rose,Soul of the lily and the bee,The mighty tide of being flowsIn countless channels, Lord, from Thee.It springs to life in grass and flowers,Through every range of Being runs,And from Creation’s mighty towers,Its glory flames in stars and suns”—

and secondly in this statement by Spinoza—“By the help of God, I mean the fixed and unchangeable order of nature, or chain of natural events, for I have said before and shown elsewhere that the universal laws of nature, according to which all things exist and are determined, are only another name for the eternal decrees of God, which always involves eternal truth and necessity, so that to say everything happens according to natural laws, and to say everything is ordained by the decree and ordinance of God, is to say the same thing. Now, since the power in nature is identical with the power of God, by which alone all things happen and are determined, it follows that whatsoever man as a part of nature provides himself with to aid and preserve his existence, or whatsoever nature affords him without his help, is given him solely by the Divine power acting either through human nature or through external circumstances. So whatever human nature can furnish itself with by its own efforts to preserve its existence may be fitly termed the inward aid of God, whereas whatever else accrues to man’s profit from outward causes may be called the external aid of God.”[14]

Now both these utterances are magnificent Fetish, andbecause I accept them as true, I have said I neither believe nor disbelieve in Fetish. I could quote many more passages from acknowledged philosophers, particularly from Goethe. If you want, for example, to understand the position of man in Nature according to Fetish, there is, as far as I know, no clearer statement of it made than is made by Goethe in his superbPrometheus. By all means read it, for you cannot know how things really stand until you do.

This was brought home to me very keenly when I was first out in West Africa. I had made friends with a distinguished witch doctor, or, more correctly speaking, he had made friends with me. I was then living in a deserted house the main charm of which was that it was the house that Mr. H. M. Stanley had lived in while he was waiting for a boat home after his first crossing Africa. This charm had not kept the house tidy, and it was a beetlesome place by day, while after nightfall, if you wanted to see some of the best insect society in Africa, and have regular Walpurgis all round, you had only got to light a lamp; but these things were advantageous to an insect collector like myself, therefore I lodge no complaint against the firm of traders to whom that house belongs. Well, my friend the witch doctor used to call on me, and I apologetically confess I first thought his interest in me arose from material objects. I wronged that man in thought, as I have many others, for one night, about 11 p.m., I heard a pawing at the shutters—my African friends don’t knock. I got up and opened the door, and there he was. I made some observations, which I regret now, about tobacco at that time of night, and he said, “No. You be big man, suppose pusson sick?” I acknowledged the soft impeachment. “Pusson sick too much; pusson live for die. You fit for come?” “Fit,” said I. “Suppose you come,you no fit to talk?” said he. “No fit,” said I, with a shrewd notion it was one of my Portuguese friends who was ill and who did not want a blazing blister on, a thing that was inevitable if you called in the local regular white medical man, so, picking up a medicine-case, I went out into the darkness with my darker friend. After getting outside the closed ground he led the way towards the forest, and I thought it was some one sick at the Roman Catholic mission. On we went down the path that might go there; but when we got to where you turn off for it, he took no heed, but kept on, and then away up over a low hill and down into deeper forest still, I steering by his white cloth. But Africa is an alarming place to walk about in at night, both for a witch doctor who believes in all his local forest devils, and a lady who believes in all the local material ones, so we both got a good deal chipped and frayed and frightened one way and another; but nothing worse happened than our walking up against a python, which had thoughtfully festooned himself across the path, out of the way of ground ants, to sleep off a heavy meal. My eminent friend, in the inky darkness and his hurry to reach his patient, failed to see this, and went fair up against it. I, being close behind, did ditto. Then my leader ducked under the excited festoon and went down the path at headlong speed, with me after him, alike terrified at losing sight of his guiding cloth and at the python, whom we heard going away into the bush with that peculiar-sounding crackle a big snake gives when he is badly hurried.

Finally we reached a small bush village, and on the ground before one of the huts was the patient extended, surrounded by unavailing, wailing women. He was suffering from a disease common in West Africa, but amenableto treatment by European drugs, which I gave to the medical man, who gave them to his patient with proper incantations and a few little things of his own that apparently did not hinder their action. As soon as the patient had got relief, my friend saw me home, and when we got in, I said, Why did you do this, that and the other, as is usual with me, and he sat down, looked far away, and talked for an hour, softly, wordily and gently; and the gist of what that man talked was Goethe’sPrometheus. I recognised it after half an hour, and when he had done, said, “You got that stuff from a white man.” “No, sir,” he said, “that no be white man fash, that be country fash, white man no fit to savee our fash.” “Aren’t they, my friend?” I said; and we parted for the night, I the wiser for it, he the richer.

Now, I pray you, do not think I am saying that there is a “wisdom religion” in Fetish, or anything like that, or that Fetish priests are Spinozas and Goethes—far from it. All that it seems to me to be is a perfectly natural view of Nature, and one that, if you take it up with no higher form of mind in you than a shrewd, logical one alone, will, if you carry it out, lead you necessarily to paint a white chalk rim round one eye, eat your captive, use Woka incantations for diseases, and dance and howl all night repeatedly, to the awe of your fellow-believers, and the scandal of Mohammedan gentlemen who have a revealed religion.

Moreover, the mind-form which gets hold of this truth that is in all things, makes a great difference in the form in which the religion works out. For instance, to a superficial observer, it would hardly seem possible that a Persian and a Mahdist were followers of the same religion, or that a Spaniard and an English Broad Churchman were so. Andyet it seems to me that it is only this class of difference that exists between the African, the Brahmanist, and the Shintoist.

Another and more fundamental point to be considered is the influence of physical environment on religions, particularly these Nature religions.

The Semitic mind, which had never been kept quite in its proper place by Natural difficulties, gave to man in the scheme of Creation a pre-eminence that deeply influences Europeans, who have likewise not been kept in their place owing to the environments of the temperate zone. On the other hand, the African race has had about the worst set of conditions possible to bring out the higher powers of man. He has been surrounded by a set of terrific natural phenomena, combined with a good food supply and a warm and equable climate. These things are not enough in themselves to account for his low-culture condition, but they are factors that must be considered. Then, undoubtedly, the nature of the African’s mind is one of the most important points. It may seem a paradox to say of people who are always seeing visions that they are not visionaries; but they are not.

The more you know the African, the more you study his laws and institutions, the more you must recognise that the main characteristic of his intellect is logical, and you see how in all things he uses this absolutely sound but narrow thought-form. He is not a dreamer nor a doubter; everything is real, very real, horribly real to him. It is impossible for me to describe it clearly, but the quality of the African mind is strangely uniform. This may seem strange to those who read accounts of wild and awful ceremonials, or of the African’s terror at white man’s things; but Ibelieve you will find all people experienced in dealing with uncultured Africans will tell you that this alarm and brief wave of curiosity is merely external, for the African knows the moment he has time to think it over, what that white man’s thing really is, namely, either a white man’s Juju or a devil.

It is this power of being able logically to account for everything that is, I believe, at the back of the tremendous permanency of Fetish in Africa, and the cause of many of the relapses into it by Africans converted to other religions; it is also the explanation of the fact that white men who live in districts where death and danger are everyday affairs, under a grim pall of boredom, are liable to believe in Fetish, though ashamed of so doing. For the African, whose mind has been soaked in Fetish during his early most impressionable years, the voice of Fetish is almost irresistible when affliction comes on him. Sudden dangers or terror he can face with his new religion, because he is not quick at thinking. But give him time to think when under the hand of adversity, and the old explanation that answered it all comes back. I know no more distressing thing than to see an African convert brought face to face with that awful thing we are used to, the problem of an omnipotent God and a suffering world. This does not worry the African convert until it hits him personally in grief and misery. When it does, and he turns and calls upon the God he has been taught will listen, pity and answer, his use of what the scoffers at the converted African call “catch phrases” is horribly heartrending to me, for I know how real, terribly real, the whole thing is to him, and I therefore see the temptation to return to those old gods—gods from whom he never expected pity, presidedover by a god that does not care. All that he had to do with them was not to irritate them, to propitiate them, to buy their services when wanted, and, above all, to dodge and avoid them, while he fought it out and managed devils at large. Risky work, but a man is as good as a devil any day if he only takes proper care; and even if any devil should get him unaware—kill him bodily—he has the satisfaction of knowing he will have the power to make it warm for that devil when they meet on the other side.

There is something alluring in this, I think, to any make of human mind, but particularly so to the logical, intensely human one possessed by the West African. Therefore, when wearied and worn out by confronting things that he cannot reconcile, and disappointed by unanswered prayers, he turns back to his old belief entirely, or modifies the religion he has been taught until it fits in with Fetish, and is gradually absorbed by it.

It is often asked whether Christianity or Mohammedanism is to possess Africa—as if the choice of Fate lay between these two things alone. I do not think it is so, at least it is not wise for a mere student to ignore the other thing in the affair, Fetish, which is as it were a sea wherein all things suffer a sea change. For remember it is not Christianity alone that becomes tinged with Fetish, or gets engulfed and dominated by it. Islam, when it strikes the true heart of Africa, the great Forest Belt region, fares little better though it is more recent than Christianity, and though it is preached by men who know the make of the African mind. Islam is in its blüth-period now in all the open parts, even on the desert regions of Africa from its Mediterranean shore to below the Equator, but so far it has beaten up against the Forest Belt like a sea on a sand beach. It hascrossed the Forest Belt by the Lakes, it has penetrated it in channels, but in those channels the waters of Islam are, recent as their inroad there is, brackish.

Therefore I make no pretence at prophesying which of these great revealed religions will ultimately possess Africa; but it is an interesting point to notice what has been the reason of the great power of immediate appeal to the African which they both possess.

The African has a great over-God, and below him lesser spirits, including man; but the African has not in West Africa, nor so far as I have been able to ascertain elsewhere in the whole Continent, a God-man, a thing that directly connects man with the great over-God. This thing appeals to the African when it is presented to him by Christianity and Islam.

It is, I am quite aware, not doctrinally true to say that Islam offers him a God-man, nevertheless in Mohammed practically it does so, and that too in a more easily believable form—by easily I do not mean that it is necessarily true. Moreover it minimises the danger of death in a more definite way, more in keeping with his own desires, and it is more reconcilable with his conscience in the treatment of life as he has to live it. Most of the higher class Africans are traders. Islam gives an easier, clearer line of rectitude to a trader than its great rival in Africa—under African conditions.

There are many who will question whether conscience is a sufficiently large factor in an African mind for us to think of taking it into account, but whether you call it conscience, or religious bent, or fear, the factor is a large one. An African cannot say, as so many Europeans evidently easily can, “Oh, that is all right from a religious point ofview, but one must be practical, you know”; and it is this factor that makes me respect the African deeply and sympathise with him, for I have this same unmanageable hindersome thing in my own mind, which you can call anything you like; I myself call it honour. Now conscience when conditioned by Christianity is an exceedingly difficult thing for a trader to manage satisfactorily to himself. A mass of compromises have to be made with the world, and a man who is always making compromises gets either sick of them or sick of the thing that keeps on nagging at him about them, or he becomes merely gaseous-minded all round. There are some few in all races of men who can think comfortably

“That conscience, like a restive horse,Will stumble if you check his course,But ride him with an easy rein,And rub him down with worldly gain,He’ll carry you through thick and thin,Safe, although dirty, ’till you win,”

but such men are in Africa a very small minority, and so it falls out that most men engaged in trade revert to Fetish, or become lax as Church members, or embrace Islam.

I think, if you will consider the case, you will see that the workability of Islam is one of the chief reasons of its success in Africa. It is, from many African points of view, a most inconvenient religion, with its Rahmadhizan, bound every now and again to come in the height of the dry season; its restrictions on alcoholic drinks and gambling; but, on the whole it is satisfying to the African conscience. Moreover, like Christianity, it lifts man into a position of paramount importance in Creation. He is the thing God made the rest for. I have often heard Africans say, “It does a man good to know God loves him; it makes him proud too much.”Well, at any rate it is pleasanter than Fetish, where man, in company with a host of spirits, is fighting for his own hand, in an arena before the gods, eternally.

We will now turn to the consideration of the status of the human soul in pure Fetish, that is to say in Fetish that is common to all the different schools of West African Fetishism.

What strikes a European when studying it is the lack of gaps between things. To the African there is perhaps no gap between the conception of spirit and matter, animate or inanimate. It is all an affair of grade—not of essential difference in essence. At the head of existence are those beings who can work without using matter, either as a constant associate or as an occasional tool—do it all themselves, as an African would say. Beneath this grade there are many grades of spirits, who occasionally or habitually, as in the case of the human grade, are associated with matter, and at the lower end of the scale is what we call matter, but which I believe the West African regards as the same sort of stuff as the rest, only very low—so low that practically it doesn’t matter; but it is spirits, the things that cause all motion, all difficulties, dangers and calamities, that do matter and must be thought about, for they arerealthings whether “they live for thing” or no.

The African and myself are also in a fine fog about form, but I will spare you that point, for where that thing comes from, often so quickly and silently, and goes, often so quickly and silently, too, under our eyes, everlastingly, that thing on which we all so much depend at every moment of our lives, that thing we are quite as conscious of as light and darkness, heat or cold, yet which makes a thing no heavierin one shape than in another,—is altogether too large a subject to touch on now. Yet, remember it is a most important part of practical Fetish, for on it depends divination and heaps of such like matters, that are parts of both the witch doctor and the Fetish priest’s daily work.

One of the fundamental doctrines of Fetish is that the connection of a certain spirit with a certain mass of matter, a material object, is not permanent; the African will point out to you a lightning-stricken tree and tell you that its spirit has been killed; he will tell you when the cooking pot has gone to bits that it has lost its spirit; if his weapon fails it is because some one has stolen or made sick its spirit by means of witchcraft. In every action of his daily life he shows you how he lives with a great, powerful spirit world around him. You will see him before starting out to hunt or fight rubbing medicine into his weapons to strengthen the spirits within them, talking to them the while; telling them what care he has taken of them, reminding them of the gifts he has given them, though those gifts were hard for him to give, and begging them in the hour of his dire necessity not to fail him. You will see him bending over the face of a river talking to its spirit with proper incantations, asking it when it meets a man who is an enemy of his to upset his canoe or drown him, or asking it to carry down with it some curse to the village below which has angered him, and in a thousand other ways he shows you what he believes if you will watch him patiently.

It is a very important point in the study of pure Fetish to gain a clear conception of this arrangement of things in grades. As far as I have gone I think I may say fourteen classes of spirits exist in Fetish. Dr. Nassau of Gaboonthinks that the spirits commonly affecting human affairs can be classified fairly completely into six classes.[15]

Regarding the Fetish view of the state and condition of the human soul there are certain ideas that I think I may safely say are common to the various cults of Fetish, both Negro and Bantu, in Western Africa. Firstly, the class of spirits that are human souls always remain human souls. They do not become deified, nor do they sink in grade. I am aware that here I am on dangerous ground so I am speaking carefully.[16]An eminent authority, when criticising my statements,[17]dwelt upon their heterodoxy on this point, saying however, “We may throw out the conjecture that in remote and obscure West Africa men do not reach the necessary pitch of renown for mighty deeds or sanctity that qualifies them in larger countries for elevation after death to high places among recognised divinities.”

This conjecture I quite accept as an explanation of the non-deification of human beings in West Africa, and I think, taken in conjunction with the grade conception, it fairly explains why West Africa has not what undoubtedly other regions of the world have in their religions, deified ancestors.

After having had my attention drawn to the strangeness of this non-deification of ancestors, I did my best to work the subject out in order to see if by any chance I had badly observed it. I consulted the accounts of West African religions given by Labat, Bosman, Bastian andEllis, and to my great pleasure found that the three first said nothing against my statements, and that Sir A. B. Ellis had himself said the same thing in hisEwe Speaking People. Moreover, I sent a circular written on this point to people in West Africa whom I knew had opportunities of knowing the facts as at present existing,—the answers were unanimous with Ellis and myself.

Nevertheless, mind, you will find something that looks like worship of ancestors in West Africa. Only it is no more worship, properly so called, than our own deference to our living, elderly, and influential relations.

In almost all Western African districts (it naturally does not show clearly in those where reincarnation is believed to be the common and immediate lot of all human spirits) is a class of spirits called “the well disposed ones,” and this class is clearly differentiated from “them,” the generic name used for non-human spirits. These “well disposed ones” are ancestors, and they do what they can to benefit their particular village or family, acting in conjunction with the village or family Fetish, who is not a human spirit, nor an ancestor. But the things given to ancestors are gifts, not in the proper sense of the word sacrifices, for the well disposed ones are not gods even of the rank of a Sasabonsum or an Ombuiri.

In an extremely interesting answer to my inquiries that I received from Mr. J. H. Batty, of Cape Coast, who had kindly submitted my questions to a native gentleman well versed in affairs, the statement regarding ancestors is, “The people believe that the spirits of their departed relations exercise a guardian care over them, and they will frequently stand over the graves of their deceased friends andinvoke their spirits to protect them and their children from harm. It is imagined that the spirit lingers about the house some time after death. If the children are ill the illness is ascribed to the spirit of the deceased mother having embraced them. Elderly women are often heard to offer up a kind of prayer to the spirit of a departed parent, begging it either to go to its rest, or to protect the family by keeping off evil spirits, instead of injuring the children or other members of the family by its touch. The ghosts of departed enemies are considered by the people as bad spirits, who have power to injure them.”

In connection with this fear of the ancestor’s ghost hurting members of its own family, particularly children, I may remark it has several times been carefully explained to me that this “touching” comes not from malevolence, but from loneliness and the desire to have their company. A sentimental but inconvenient desire that the living human cannot give in to perpetually, though big men will accede to their ancestor’s desire for society by killing off people who may serve or cheer him. This desire for companionship is of course immensely greater in the spirit that is not definitely settled in the society of spiritdom, and it is therefore more dangerous to its own belongings, in fact to all living society, while it is hanging about the other side of the grave, but this side of Hades. Thus I well remember a delicious row that arose primarily out of trade matters, but which caused one family to yell at another family divers remarks, ending up with the accusation, “You good-for-nothing illegitimate offspring of house lizards, you don’t bury your ditto ditto dead relations, but leave them knocking about anyhow, a curse to Calabar.” Naturally therefore the spirit of a dead enemy is feared because it would touch for the purpose ofgetting spirit slaves; therefore it follows that powerful ancestors are valued when they are on the other side, for they can keep off the dead enemies. A great chief’s spirit is a thoroughly useful thing for a village to keep going, and in good order, for it conquered those who are among the dead with it, and can keep them under, keep them from aiding their people in the fights between its living relations and itself and them, with its slave spirit army. I ought to say that it is customary for the living to send the dead out ahead of the army, to bear the brunt in the first attack.

Ancestor-esteem you will find at its highest pitch in West Africa under the school of Fetish that rules the Tshi and Ewe peoples. Ellis gives you a full description of it for Ashanti and Dahomey.[18]The next district going down coast is the Yoruba one; but Yoruba has been so long under the influence of Mahometanism that its Fetish, judging from Ellis’s statement in hisYoruba Speaking People, is deeply tinged with it. I have no personal acquaintance with Yorubaland, but have no hesitation for myself in accepting his statements from the accuracy I have found them, by personal experience with Tshi and Ewe people, to possess. Below Yoruba comes a district, the Oil Rivers, where, alas, Ellis did not penetrate, and where no ethnologist, unless you will graciously extend the term to me, has ever cautiously worked.

In this district you have a school where reincarnation is strongly believed in, a different school of Fetish to that of Tshi and Ewe, a class of human ghosts called the well-disposed ones. And these are ancestors undoubtedly. They do not show up clearly in those districts where reincarnation is believed to be the common lot of all human souls. Nevertheless, they are clear enough even there, as I will presently attempt to explain.

These ancestor spirits have things given to them for their consolation and support, and in return they do what they can to benefit and guard their own villages and families. Nevertheless, the things given to the well-disposed ones are not as things sacrificed to gods. Nor are the well-disposed ones gods, even of the grade of a Sasabonsum or an Ombuiri. It is a low down thing to dig up your father—i.e., open his grave and take away the things in it that have been given him. It will get you cut by respectable people, and rude people when there is a market-place row on will mention it freely; but it won’t bring on a devastating outbreak of small-pox in the whole district.

FOOTNOTES:[10]Of the Divine Law,Tractatus Theologico Politicus, Spinoza.[11]Primitive Culture, E. B. Tylor, p. 144.[12]Professor Tylor kindly allowed me to place this statement before him, and he says that as the word Fetish, with the sense of the use of bones, claws, stones, and such objects as receptacles of spiritual influences, has had nearly two centuries of established usage, it would not be easy to set it aside, and he advises me to use the term West African religion, or in some way make my meaning clear without expecting to upset the established nomenclature of comparative ethnology.[13]This word is pronounced by the natives and by people knowing them, Cheuwe, as Ellis undoubtedly knew, but presumably he spelt it Tshi to please the authorities.[14]The Vocation of the Hebrews, Spinoza.[15]SeeTravels in West Africa, by M. H. Kingsley. Macmillan & Co. 1897.[16]For further details seeTravels in West Africa, p. 444.[17]“Origins and Interpretations of Primitive Religions.”Edinburgh Review, July, 1897, p. 219.[18]The Tshi Speaking, Ewe Speaking and Yoruba Speaking People of West Africa.—A. B. Ellis.

[10]Of the Divine Law,Tractatus Theologico Politicus, Spinoza.

[11]Primitive Culture, E. B. Tylor, p. 144.

[12]Professor Tylor kindly allowed me to place this statement before him, and he says that as the word Fetish, with the sense of the use of bones, claws, stones, and such objects as receptacles of spiritual influences, has had nearly two centuries of established usage, it would not be easy to set it aside, and he advises me to use the term West African religion, or in some way make my meaning clear without expecting to upset the established nomenclature of comparative ethnology.

[13]This word is pronounced by the natives and by people knowing them, Cheuwe, as Ellis undoubtedly knew, but presumably he spelt it Tshi to please the authorities.

[14]The Vocation of the Hebrews, Spinoza.

[15]SeeTravels in West Africa, by M. H. Kingsley. Macmillan & Co. 1897.

[16]For further details seeTravels in West Africa, p. 444.

[17]“Origins and Interpretations of Primitive Religions.”Edinburgh Review, July, 1897, p. 219.

[18]The Tshi Speaking, Ewe Speaking and Yoruba Speaking People of West Africa.—A. B. Ellis.

Wherein the student, thinking things may be made clearer if it be perceived that there are divers schools of Fetish, discourses on the schools of West African religious thought.

As I have had occasion to refer to schools of Fetish, and as that is a term of my own, I must explain why I use it, and what I mean by it, in so far as I am able. When travelling from district to district you cannot fail to be struck by the difference in character of the native religion you are studying. My own range on the West Coast is from Sierra Leone to Loanda; and here and there in places such as the Oil Rivers, the Ogowe, and the Lower Congo, I have gone inland into the heart of what I knew to be particularly rich districts for an ethnologist. I make no pretence to a thorough knowledge of African Fetish in all its schools, but I feel sure no wandering student of the subject in Western Africa can avoid recognising the existence of at least four distinct forms of development of the Fetish idea. They have, every one of them, the underlying idea I have attempted to sketch as pure Fetish when speaking of the position of the human soul; and yet they differ. And I believe much of the confusion which is supposed to exist in African religious ideas is a confusiononly existing in the minds of cabinet ethnologists from a want of recognition of the fact of the existence of these schools.

ToListFantee Natives of the Gold Coast[To face page 137.Fantee Natives of the Gold Coast.

[To face page 137.

For example, suppose you take a few facts from Ellis and a few from Bastian and mix, and call the mixture West African religion, you do much the same sort of thing as if you took bits from Mr. Spurgeon’s works, and from those of some eminent Jesuit and of a sound Greek churchman, and mixed them and labelled it European religion. The bits would be all right in themselves, but the mixture would be a quaint affair.

As far as my present knowledge of the matter goes, I should state that there were four main schools of West African Fetish: (1) the Tshi and Ewe school, Ellis’ school; (2) the Calabar school; (3) the Mpongwe school; (4) Nkissism or the Fjort school. Subdivisions of these schools can easily be made, but I only make the divisions on the different main objects of worship, or more properly speaking, the thing each school especially endeavours to secure for man. The Tshi and Ewe school is mainly concerned with the preservation of life; the Calabar school with attempting to enable the soul successfully to pass through death; the Mpongwe school with the attainment of material prosperity; while the school of Nkissi is mainly concerned with the worship of the mystery of the power of Earth—Nkissi-nsi. You will find these divers things worshipped, or, rather, I would say cultivated, in all the schools of Fetish, but in certain schools certain ideas are predominant. Look at Srahmantin of the Tshi people, and at Nzambi of the Fjort. Both these ladies know where the animals go to drink, what they say to each other, where their towns are, and what not; also they both know whatthe forest says to the wind and the rain, and all the forests’ own small talk in the bargain, and, therefore, also the inner nature of all these things; and both, like other ladies, I have heard prefer gentlemen’s society. Women they have a tendency to be hard on, but either Srahmantin or Nzambi think nothing of taking up a man’s time, making him neglect his business or his family affairs, or both together, by keeping him in the bush for a month or so at a time, teaching him things about medicines, and finally sending him back into town in so addlepated a condition that for months he hardly knows who he exactly is. When he comes round, however, if he has any sense, he sets up in business as a medical man; sometimes, however, he just remains merely crackey. Such a man was my esteemed Kefalla.

But look how different under different schools is the position of Srahmantin and Nzambi. Srahmantin is only propitiated by doctors and hunters; by all respectable, busy, family men forced to go through forests, she is simply dreaded, while Nzambi, the great Princess, entirely dominates the whole school of Nkissism.

From what cause or what series of causes the predominance of these different things has come, I do not know, unless it be from different natural environment and different race. It is certainly not a mere tribal affair, for there are many different tribes under each school. For example, I do not think you need make more than a subdivision between the Tshi, the Ga or Ogi and the Ewe peoples’ Fetish, nor more than a subdivision between those of the Eboes and the Ibbibios, or those of the Fjort and Mussurongoes; but we want more information before it would be quite safe to dogmatise.

It is impossible in the present state of our knowledge to give exact geographical limits of the different schools of Fetish, and I therefore only sketch their geographical distribution in Western Africa, from Sierra Leone to Loanda, hoping thereby to incite further research.

Sierra Leone and its adjacent districts have not been studied by an ethnologist. We have only scattered information regarding the religion there; and unfortunately the observations we have on it mainly bear on the operations of the secret societies, which in these regions have attained to much power, and are usually though erroneously grouped under the name of Poorah. Poorah, like all secret societies, is intensely interesting, for it is the manifestation of the law form of Fetish; but secret societies are pure Fetish, and common to all districts. All that we can gather from the scattered observations on the rest of the Fetish in this region is that it is allied to the Fetish school of the Tshi-speaking people.

Next to this unobserved district, we come to the well-observed districts of the Tshi, Ewe, and Yoruba-speaking people—Ellis’s region.

It may seem unwise for me to attempt to group these three together and call them one school, because from this one district we have two distinct cults of Fetish in the West Indies, Voudou and Obeah (Tchanga and Wanga). Voudou itself is divided into two sects, the white and the red—the first, a comparatively harmless one, requiring only the sacrifice of, at the most, a white cock or a white goat, whereas the red cult only uses the human sacrifice—the goat without horns. Obeah, on the other hand, kills only by poison—does not show the blood at all. And there is another important difference between Voudou and Obeah,and that is that Voudou requires for the celebration of its rites a priestess and a priest. Obeah can be worked by either alone, and is not tied to the presence of the snake. Both these cults have sprung from slaves imported from Ellis’s district, Obeah from slaves bought at Koromantin mainly, and Voudou from those bought at Dahomey. Nevertheless, it seems to me these good people have differentiated their religion in the West Indies considerably; for example, in Obeah the spider (anansi) has a position given it equal to that of the snake in Voudou. Now the spider is all very well in West Africa; round him there has grown a series of most amusing stories, always to be told through the nose, and while you crawl about; but to put him on a plane with the snake in Dahomey is absurd; his equivalent there is the turtle, also a focus for many tales, only more improper tales, and not half so amusing.

The true importance and status of the snake in Dahomey is a thing hard to fix. Personally I believe it to be merely a case of especial development of a local ju-ju. We all know what the snake signifies, and instances of its attaining a local eminence occur elsewhere. At Creek Town, in Calabar, and Brass River it is more than respected. It is an accidental result of some bit of history we have lost, like the worship of the crocodile at Dixcove and in the Lower Congo. Whereas it is clear that the general respect, amounting to seeming worship, of the leopard is another affair altogether, for the leopard is the great thing in all West African forests, and forests and surf are the great things in Western Africa—the lines of perpetual danger to the life of man.

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But there is a remarkable point that you cannot fail to notice in the Fetish of these three divisions of true NegroFetish studied by Ellis, namely, that what is one god in Yoruba you get as several gods exercising one particular function in Dahomey, as hundreds of gods on the Gold Coast. Moreover, all these gods in all these districts have regular priests and priestesses in dozens, while below Yoruba regular priests and priestesses are rare. There the officials of the law societies abound, and there are Fetish men, but these are different people to the priests of Bohorwissi and Tando.

I do not know Yoruba land personally, but have had many opportunities of inquiring regarding its Fetish from educated and uneducated natives of that country whom I have met down Coast as traders and artisans. Therefore, having found nothing to militate against Ellis’s statements, I accept them for Yoruba as for Dahomey and the Gold Coast; and my great regret is that his careful researches did not extend down into the district below Yoruba—the district I class under the Calabar school—more particularly so because the districts he worked at are all districts where there has been a great and long-continued infusion of both European and Mohammedan forms of thought, owing to the four-hundred-year-old European intercourse on the seaboard, and the even older and greater Mohammedan influence from the Western Soudan; whereas below these districts you come to a region of pure Negro Fetish that has undergone but little infusion of alien thought.

Whether or no to place Benin with Yoruba or with Calabar is a problem. There is, no doubt, a very close connection between it and Yoruba. There is also no doubt that Benin was in touch, even as late as the seventeenth century, with some kingdom of the higher culture away in the interior. It may have been Abyssinia, or it may havebeen one of the cultured states that the chaos produced by the Mohammedan invasion of the Soudan destroyed. In our present state of knowledge we can only conjecture, I venture to think, idly, until we know more. The only thing that is certain is that Benin was influenced as is shown by its art development. Benin practically broke up long before Ashantee or Dahomey, for, as Proyart[19]remarks, “many small kingdoms or native states which at the present day share Africa among them were originally provinces dependent on other kingdoms, the particular governors of which usurped the sovereignty.” Benin’s north-western provinces seem to have done this, possibly with the assistance of the Mohammedanised people who came down to the seaboard seeking the advantages of white trade; and Benin became isolated in its forest swamps, cut off from the stimulating influence of successful wars, and out of touch with the expanding influence of commerce, and devoted its attention too much to Fetish matters to be healthy for itself or any one who fell in with it. It is an interesting point in this connection to observe that we do not find in the accounts given by the earlier voyagers to Benin city anything like the enormous sacrifice of human life described by visitors to it of our own time. Other districts round Calabar, Bonny, Opobo, and so on, have human sacrifice as well, but they show no signs of being under Benin in trade matters, in which Benin used to be very strict when it had the chance. In fact, whatever respect they had for Benin was a sentimental one, such as the King of Kongo has, and does not take the practical form of paying taxes.

The extent of the direct influence of Benin away into the forest belt to the east and south I do not think at any time was great. Benin was respected because it was regarded as possessing a big Fetish and great riches. In recent years it was regarded by people discontented with white men as their great hope, from its power to resist these being greater than their own. Nevertheless, the adjacent kingdom of Owarie (Warri), even in the sixteenth century, was an independent kingdom. So different was its Fetish from that of Benin that Warri had not then, and has not to this day, human sacrifice in its religious observances, only judicial and funeral killings.

Considering how very easily Africans superficially adopt the religious ideas of alien people with whom they have commercial intercourse, we must presume that the people who imported the art of working in metals into Benin also imported some of their religion. The relics of religion, alien to Fetish, that show in Benin Fetish are undoubtedly Christian. Whether these relics are entirely those of the Portuguese Roman Catholic missions, or are not also relics of some earlier Christian intercourse with Western Soudan Christianised states existing prior to the Mohammedan invasion of Northern Africa, is again a matter on which we require more information. But just as I believe some of the metal articles found in Benin to be things made in Birmingham, some to be old Portuguese, some to be native castings, copies of things imported from that unknown inland state, and some to be the original inland state articles themselves, so do I believe the relics of Christianity in the Fetish to be varied in origin, all alike suffering absorption by the native Fetish.

There is no doubt that up to the last twenty years thethree great Fetish kings in Western Africa were those of Ashantee, Dahomey, and Benin. Each of these kings was alike believed by the whole of the people to have great Fetish power in his own locality. In the time of which we have no historical record—prior to the visits of the first white voyagers in the fifteenth century—there is traditional record of the King of Benin fighting with his cousin of Dahomey. Possibly Dahomey beat him badly; anyhow something went seriously wrong with Benin as a territorial kingdom, before its discovery by modern Europe.

I now turn to the Fetish of the Oil Rivers which I have called the Calabar school. The predominance of the belief there in reincarnation seems to me sufficient to separate it from the Gold Coast and Dahomey Fetish. Funeral customs, important in all Negro Fetish, become in the Calabar school exceedingly so. A certain amount of care anywhere is necessary to successfully establish the human soul after death, for the human soul strongly objects to leaving material pleasures and associations and going to, at best, an uninteresting under-world; but when you have not only got to send the soul down, but to bring it back into the human form again, and not any human form at that, but one of its own social status and family, the thing becomes more complicated still; and to do it so engrosses human attention, and so absorbs human wealth, that you do not find under the Calabar school a multitude of priest-served gods as you do in Dahomey and on the Gold Coast. Mind you, so far as I could make out while in the Calabar districts myself, the equivalents of those same gods, were quite believed in; but they were neglected in a way that would have caused them in Dahomey, where they have been taught to fancy themselves to wreck the place. Not onlyis care taken to send a soul down, but means are taken to see whether or no it has duly returned; for keeping a valuable soul, like that of a great Fetish proficient who could manage outside spirits, or that of a good trader, is a matter of vital importance to the prosperity of the Houses, so when such a soul has left the House in consequence of some sad accident or another, or some vile witchcraft, the babies that arrive to the House are closely watched. Assortments of articles belonging to deceased members of the house are presented to it, and then, according to the one it picks out, it is decided who that baby really is—See, Uncle so-and-so knows his own pipe, &c.—and I have often heard a mother reproaching a child for some fault say, “Oh, we made a big mistake when we thought you were so-and-so.” I must say I think the absence of the idea of the deification of ancestors in West Africa shows up particularly strongly in the Calabar school, for herein you see so clearly that the dead do not pass into a higher, happier state—that the soul separate from the body is only a part of that thing we call a human being, and in West Africa the whole is greater than a part, even in this matter.

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