No native of any tribe I have met ever assigned creative powers to his fetishes, or respected them as the representatives of a deity. The fetishes were made yesterday at his bidding and expense by the witch-doctor, and to-morrow, if they fail in their purpose, they will be consigned to the rubbish heap, or left neglected on some shelf in his house. The native lives and moves, so he believes, surrounded by evil spirits which, on account of their own malignant natures or at the instigation of his enemies, are constantly trying to work him harm, and the only means known to him of counteracting the evil, or of appeasing the malignant power, is the medicine man with his powerful fetishes, charms, and ceremonies.
There are two phrases that contain the whole theory and practice of the Congo medicine man’s black and white magic. By the black magic he professes to incite an evil spirit by means of a fetish to inflict a sickness or some other misfortune on an enemy; and by white magic, to appease the evil spirit through the medium of the fetish, so that the sickness or bad luck shall be removed from one’s self or one’s family and friends. The same medicine man uses the same fetish to curse a man with disease, or to cure the man so cursed, hence he often draws fees from both parties.
To curse a person by the aid of a fetish is called loka e nkisi. The fetish is beaten with a stick, informed what it is to do, and then hung up outside the invoker’s house, and the spirit of the fetish flies off to obey its orders. This is the simple modus operandi followed by all the witch-doctors on the Lower Congo, who invoke their fetishes to employ their various powers against the enemies of their clients.
To soothe and appease the spirit of the fetish so that it will remove the curse from working by so conciliating the fetish power, or the spirit the fetish is supposed to control, that it will work for the medicine man’s client and not against him, is called lembola e nkisi (= to soften, tame a fetish), and the ceremony is as varied as there are medicine men, for each branch of the profession has its own special rites to observe.
Now fetishes on the Lower Congo are either images, bundles, or large horns, and these as a rule are owned by the medicine men. Smaller fetishes and charms are made by them for various purposes and sold to the natives. Sometimes a wealthy man will buy a powerful fetish and use its power entirely for himself; at times a poorer man will pay a good fee to a medicine man to borrow his fetish, or the rich man’s fetish for one or two days, so that he may have the entire attention of the spirit it controls. A rich man will sometimes buy a powerful fetish as a speculation, and make a good profit by hiring it out for a fee, and the poorer man will pay the fee, hoping to reap good results to his bodily health or to his prosperity by having the undivided interest of the fetish at his service.
The term fetish comes from the Portuguese word feitiço, and the early navigators of the West African Coast were Portuguese, who carried with them amulets and charms, i.e. feitiços, in the form of crosses, beads, images, etc., that had been blessed by their priests. And when these ancient navigators saw the natives wearing shells filled with some mixture, or displaying on their persons some articles with which they were unwilling to part even for costly gifts, what was more natural for them than to regard such objects as something akin to their own feitiços? And “as they discovered no other traces of religious worship they concluded that this outward show of regard for these feitiços constituted the whole of the negro worship.”[[33]]
[33]. I am indebted to F. Max Müller for much in this paragraph. See Hibbert Lectures, p. 61. 1878.
The native word on the Lower Congo for fetish (nkisi), and among the Boloki (bonganga), means an image, a horn, a shell, a saucepan, etc., and, in fact, anything into which a medicine man has put a part of his “medicine” from his store bundle; and it is not an effective fetish until it has been through the hands of the medicine man and received its power from him. No one witch-doctor makes all the fetishes, but every one has his own speciality, in the making of which he is accounted an expert.
On the Lower Congo the native offers periodic sacrifices to his fetish to keep it in a good humour, otherwise through sulkiness it may refuse to help him; or he returns it to a medicine man to renew its energies when it proves too weak for his purpose; he explodes gunpowder around it to arouse it to proper alertness that it may attend to its owner’s affairs; or he beats it to make it subservient to his wishes, but he never worships it, nor does he ever pay homage to it. Among the Boloki sugar-cane wine is poured over the fetish to render it amenable to its owner’s wishes, and it is threatened if it does not act quickly on its owner’s behalf; and while the Boloki fears his fetish in a way, yet he never worships it.
“About 1872 some natives of Loanda came through the country preaching a crusade against fetishes of all kinds, inducing the natives in town after town to destroy all their fetishes, assuring them that since death and sickness came by the exercise of the black art, which everyone fully believes, if then every fetish were destroyed and no more made there would be no more suffering and death. Far and wide the most strenuous efforts were made to accomplish the destruction of all fetishes to that happy end.”[[34]] In 1909 a man with whom I was conversing told me that he as a child was shaken over the fire during this campaign to destroy any fetishes he had about his person. He well remembered this crusade against fetishes, and said that when the people became ill and died as usual, the originators of it said: “It is because some of the people have not destroyed all their fetishes.”