West African studies

by Mary Henrietta Kingsley

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, and because 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 superb Prometheus. 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 amenable to 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’s Prometheus. 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. And yet 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 I believe 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, presided over 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.