It may seem unwise for me to attempt to group these three together and call them one school, because from this one district we have two distinct cults of Fetish in the West Indies, Voudou and Obeah (Tchanga and Wanga). Voudou itself is divided into two sects, the white and the red—the first, a comparatively harmless one, requiring only the sacrifice of, at the most, a white cock or a white goat, whereas the red cult only uses the human sacrifice—the goat without horns. Obeah, on the other hand, kills only by poison—does not show the blood at all. And there is another important difference between Voudou and Obeah, and that is that Voudou requires for the celebration of its rites a priestess and a priest. Obeah can be worked by either alone, and is not tied to the presence of the snake. Both these cults have sprung from slaves imported from Ellis’s district, Obeah from slaves bought at Koromantin mainly, and Voudou from those bought at Dahomey. Nevertheless, it seems to me these good people have differentiated their religion in the West Indies considerably; for example, in Obeah the spider (anansi) has a position given it equal to that of the snake in Voudou. Now the spider is all very well in West Africa; round him there has grown a series of most amusing stories, always to be told through the nose, and while you crawl about; but to put him on a plane with the snake in Dahomey is absurd; his equivalent there is the turtle, also a focus for many tales, only more improper tales, and not half so amusing.
The true importance and status of the snake in Dahomey is a thing hard to fix. Personally I believe it to be merely a case of especial development of a local ju-ju. We all know what the snake signifies, and instances of its attaining a local eminence occur elsewhere. At Creek Town, in Calabar, and Brass River it is more than respected. It is an accidental result of some bit of history we have lost, like the worship of the crocodile at Dixcove and in the Lower Congo. Whereas it is clear that the general respect, amounting to seeming worship, of the leopard is another affair altogether, for the leopard is the great thing in all West African forests, and forests and surf are the great things in Western Africa—the lines of perpetual danger to the life of man.
[To face page 141.
But there is a remarkable point that you cannot fail to notice in the Fetish of these three divisions of true Negro Fetish studied by Ellis, namely, that what is one god in Yoruba you get as several gods exercising one particular function in Dahomey, as hundreds of gods on the Gold Coast. Moreover, all these gods in all these districts have regular priests and priestesses in dozens, while below Yoruba regular priests and priestesses are rare. There the officials of the law societies abound, and there are Fetish men, but these are different people to the priests of Bohorwissi and Tando.
I do not know Yoruba land personally, but have had many opportunities of inquiring regarding its Fetish from educated and uneducated natives of that country whom I have met down Coast as traders and artisans. Therefore, having found nothing to militate against Ellis’s statements, I accept them for Yoruba as for Dahomey and the Gold Coast; and my great regret is that his careful researches did not extend down into the district below Yoruba—the district I class under the Calabar school—more particularly so because the districts he worked at are all districts where there has been a great and long-continued infusion of both European and Mohammedan forms of thought, owing to the four-hundred-year-old European intercourse on the seaboard, and the even older and greater Mohammedan influence from the Western Soudan; whereas below these districts you come to a region of pure Negro Fetish that has undergone but little infusion of alien thought.
Whether or no to place Benin with Yoruba or with Calabar is a problem. There is, no doubt, a very close connection between it and Yoruba. There is also no doubt that Benin was in touch, even as late as the seventeenth century, with some kingdom of the higher culture away in the interior. It may have been Abyssinia, or it may have been one of the cultured states that the chaos produced by the Mohammedan invasion of the Soudan destroyed. In our present state of knowledge we can only conjecture, I venture to think, idly, until we know more. The only thing that is certain is that Benin was influenced as is shown by its art development. Benin practically broke up long before Ashantee or Dahomey, for, as Proyart[19] remarks, “many small kingdoms or native states which at the present day share Africa among them were originally provinces dependent on other kingdoms, the particular governors of which usurped the sovereignty.” Benin’s north-western provinces seem to have done this, possibly with the assistance of the Mohammedanised people who came down to the seaboard seeking the advantages of white trade; and Benin became isolated in its forest swamps, cut off from the stimulating influence of successful wars, and out of touch with the expanding influence of commerce, and devoted its attention too much to Fetish matters to be healthy for itself or any one who fell in with it. It is an interesting point in this connection to observe that we do not find in the accounts given by the earlier voyagers to Benin city anything like the enormous sacrifice of human life described by visitors to it of our own time. Other districts round Calabar, Bonny, Opobo, and so on, have human sacrifice as well, but they show no signs of being under Benin in trade matters, in which Benin used to be very strict when it had the chance. In fact, whatever respect they had for Benin was a sentimental one, such as the King of Kongo has, and does not take the practical form of paying taxes.
The extent of the direct influence of Benin away into the forest belt to the east and south I do not think at any time was great. Benin was respected because it was regarded as possessing a big Fetish and great riches. In recent years it was regarded by people discontented with white men as their great hope, from its power to resist these being greater than their own. Nevertheless, the adjacent kingdom of Owarie (Warri), even in the sixteenth century, was an independent kingdom. So different was its Fetish from that of Benin that Warri had not then, and has not to this day, human sacrifice in its religious observances, only judicial and funeral killings.