On these problems light is thrown by a successor of Mr. Spencer's authority, Mr. Duff Macdonald, in the Blantyre Mission. This gentleman, the Rev. David Clement Scott, has published 'A Cyclopaedic Dictionary of the Mang'anja Language in British Central Africa.'[13] Looking at ancestral spirits first, we find Mzimu, 'spirits of the departed, supposed to come in dreams.' Though abiding in the spirit world, they also haunt thickets, they inspire Mlauli, prophets, and make them rave and utter predictions. Offerings are made to them. Here is a prayer: 'Watch over me, my ancestor, who died long ago; tell the great spirit at the head of my race from whom my mother came.' There are little hut-temples, and the chief directs the sacrifices of food, or of animals. There are religious pilgrimages, with sacrifice, to mountains. God, like men in this region, has various names, as Chiuta, 'God in space and the rainbow sign across;' Mpambe, 'God Almighty' (or rather 'pre-excellent'); Mlezi, 'God the Sustainer,' and Mulungu, 'God who is spirit.' Mulungu = God, 'not spirits or fetish.' 'You can't put the plural, as God is One,' say the natives. 'There are no idols called gods, and spirits are spirits of people who have died, not gods.' Idols are Zitunzi-zitunzi. 'Spirits are supposed to be with Mulungu.' God made the world and man. Our author says 'when the chief or people sacrifice it is to God,' but he also says that they sacrifice to ancestral spirits. There is some confusion of ideas here: Mr. Macdonald says nothing of sacrifice to Mtanga.
Mr. Scott does not seem to know more about the Mysteries than Mr. Macdonald, and his article on Mulungu does not much enlighten us. Does Mulungu, as Creative God, receive sacrifice, or not?[14] Mr. Scott gives no instance of this, under Nsembe (sacrifice), where ancestors, or hill-dwelling ghosts of chiefs, are offered food; yet, as we have seen, under Mulungu, he avers that the chiefs and people do sacrifice to God. He appears to be confusing the Creator with spirits, and no reliance can be placed on this part of his evidence. 'At the back of all this' (sacrifice to spirits) 'there is God.' If I understand Mr. Scott, sacrifices are really made only to spirits, but he is trying to argue that, after all, the theistic conception is at the back of the animistic practice, thus importing his theory into his facts. His theory would, really, be in a better way, if sacrifice is not offered to the Creator, but this had not occurred to Mr. Scott.
It is plain, in any case, that the religion of the Africans in the Blantyre region has an element not easily to be derived from ancestral spirit-worship, an element not observed by Mr. Spencer.
Nobody who has followed the examples already adduced will be amazed by what Waitz calls the 'surprising result' of recent inquiries among the great negro race. Among the branches where foreign influence is least to be suspected, we discover, behind their more conspicuous fetishisms and superstitions, something which we cannot exactly call Monotheism, yet which tends in that direction.[15] Waitz quotes Wilson for the fact that, their fetishism apart, they adore a Supreme Being as the Creator: and do not honour him with sacrifice.
The remarks of Waitz may be cited in full:
'The religion of the negro may be considered by some as a particularly rude form of polytheism and may be branded with the special name of fetishism. It would follow, from a minute examination of it, that—apart from the extravagant and fantastic traits, which are rooted in the character of the negro, and which radiate therefrom over all his creations—in comparison with the religions of other savages it is neither very specially differentiated nor very specially crude in form.
'But this opinion can be held to be quite true only while we look at the outside of the negro's religion, or estimate its significance from arbitrary pre-suppositions, as is specially the case with Ad. Wuttke.
'By a deeper insight, which of late several scientific investigators have succeeded in attaining, we reach, rather, the surprising conclusion that several of the negro races—on whom we cannot as yet prove, and can hardly conjecture, the influence of a more civilised people—in the embodying of their religious conceptions are further advanced than almost all other savages, so far that, even if we do not call them monotheists, we may still think of them as standing on the boundary of monotheism, seeing that their religion is also mixed with a great mass of rude superstition which, in turn, among other peoples, seems to overrun completely the purer religious conceptions.'
This conclusion as to an element of pure faith in negro religion would not have surprised Waitz, had recent evidence as to the same creed among lower savages lain before him as he worked.
This volume of his book was composed in 1860. In 1872 he had become well aware of the belief in a good Maker among the Australian natives, and of the absence among them of ancestor worship.[16]