West African studies

by Mary Henrietta Kingsley

[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 what the 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.