Duff Macdonald says, ‘The spirit of every deceased man and woman, with the solitary exception of wizards and witches, becomes an object of religious homage.’ Of course, no one can worship all, and the chief of a village worships his immediate predecessor as the representative of all the people who have lived in the village in past times, and the whole line of his ancestors. In presenting his offering, he will say, ‘“Oh, father, I do not know all your relatives, you know them all, invite them to feast with you.” The offering is not simply for himself, but for himself and all his relatives.’ Sometimes a man approaches his deceased relatives on his own behalf; but, as a rule, it is the chief who prays and sacrifices on behalf of the village. As all the people living there are usually related to the chief, the deceased chief is the one to whom they would naturally pray; but any immigrants from elsewhere would probably pray to their own ancestors on matters connected with their own private concerns, while joining on public occasions in the recognised worship of the village god.
Naturally it is difficult for an outsider to gain any exact information as to religious practices, and, still more, religious beliefs. The Rev. Duff Macdonald, whom we have just quoted, enjoyed almost unequalled advantages, as regards the Yaos—spending three years in their country at a time when it was still virtually untouched by European influences, and being able to acquire a sufficient knowledge of the language to obtain the people’s own account of things at first hand. Great patience and tact, it is needless to say, are necessary for inquiries of this sort; and, even if one knows the language, it is not, as a rule, much use asking direct questions—unless of natives with whom you are fairly well acquainted. Of things which the stranger can see for himself in passing through the villages, the most noticeable are the little spirit-houses already mentioned, where sacrifices are presented from time to time. Sometimes these offerings are seen under trees, either in the village, or away from it—in fact, Mr. Macdonald says that the huts are erected, if there is no tree handy, close to the dead man’s house. (The house itself, as we shall see, is usually either pulled down, or shut up and left to decay.) If the tree is quite outside the village, the site may have been shifted, as often happens; or perhaps the spirit may be one of the ‘old gods of the land.’ This is possibly the case with the tree in the illustration, which is on Ndirande mountain, a few miles from Blantyre, though I am not sure whether this particular tree is close to a village or not. Ndirande, like Sochi, has a spirit of its own; and I suppose this is the reason why the boy who was accompanying me in the ascent of Nambanga (an isolated peak or knob at the northern end of the mountain) showed a sudden reluctance to go on. I thought he was tired, and told him to rest, and I would go on alone; but this seemed equally objectionable, and he was evidently making up his mind to go with me, as the lesser evil, when I decided to avoid the risk of inhumanity by turning back. As I could by no manner of means induce him to explain, I suspected the spirit might have something to do with the matter.
Tree, with Offerings to Spirits
In Mr. Macdonald’s time, the chiefs of the Blantyre and Zomba villages were all Yaos, and their canonised predecessors therefore belonged to the same tribe; but a certain amount of reverence was also paid to ‘the old gods of the land’—i.e. the spirits of dead Nyanja chiefs who haunted the principal mountains, and were specially appealed to for rain. We have already alluded to Kangomba of Sochi. The Rev. H. Rowley, when at Magomero, in 1861, saw Kangomba in the flesh; he was then ‘about forty years of age, had a frank, open countenance and a good head, and was altogether a very manly fellow.’ Apparently he did not live to be old. Mr. Macdonald says: ‘One tradition concerning him is this—When the Wayao were driving the Wanyasa[9] out of the country, Kangomba, a Wanyasa chief, saw that defence was hopeless, and entered a great cave on the mountain-side. Out of this cave he never returned; “he died unconquered in his own land.” The Wayao made the old tribe retire before them, but the chief, Kangomba, kept his place, and the new comers are glad to invoke his aid to this day. Their supplication for rain takes the form Ku Sochi, kwa Kangomba ula jijise, “Oh, Kangomba of Sochi, send us rain!” The Wayao chief, Kapeni, often asks some of the Wanyasa tribe that can trace connection with Kangomba to help him in these offerings and supplications.’
The offerings usually consist of native beer and maize flour (ufa), sometimes also calico, as seen in the illustration. It is torn into strips lest it should be appropriated by some needy and unscrupulous passer-by, or perhaps because each offerer only feels it incumbent on him to present a mere shred as a symbolic gift, since spirits, properly speaking, have no use for calico. Mr. Macdonald quotes the native reasoning on the subject. Spirits intimate their desire for various things—in dreams, or by means of the oracle, and, if their request be at all reasonable, it is granted. But, ‘if a spirit were to come, saying, “I want calico,” his friends would “just say that he was mad,” and would not give it. “Why should he want calico? What would he do with it? There was calico buried with him when he died, and he cannot need more again.”’ Food and tobacco, and even houses, are, it would appear, quite another matter.
Perhaps this opinion as to calico has been modified since the above was written; certainly I have seen at least one tree covered with strips of calico, and that within a mile or two of a mission station. That on the Ndirande tree is a special sacrifice for rain. Usually the stones at the foot of the tree support one or more pots of moa (native beer made of millet), and there is either a little basket of flour, or some is poured in a heap on the ground.
According to Mr. Macdonald, men would often sacrifice to their own particular ancestor, by putting down a little flour inside the hut, at the head of their sleeping-mat. Omens were drawn from the shape of this little heap of flour—whether it fell so as to form a neat cone, or otherwise. Beer, also, was made to furnish omens; it was poured out on the ground, and if it sank in, the god accepted the offering.
The same writer says that ‘when a deceased smoker wants tobacco, his worshippers put it on a plate and set fire to it.’ Matope, the chief of a village near Blantyre, died in 1893. In the following year, the Rev. J. A. Smith (now of Mlanje), happening to be at the village, saw, as he told me, the head-men take out the dead chief’s snuff-box, fill it with snuff, and place his stool in a certain spot, sprinkling snuff all round it. ‘This is done from time to time’ (I quote from my diary) ‘during the first year or two after a death—after this time the spirit ceases to haunt the place.’