Considering how very easily Africans superficially adopt the religious ideas of alien people with whom they have commercial intercourse, we must presume that the people who imported the art of working in metals into Benin also imported some of their religion. The relics of religion, alien to Fetish, that show in Benin Fetish are undoubtedly Christian. Whether these relics are entirely those of the Portuguese Roman Catholic missions, or are not also relics of some earlier Christian intercourse with Western Soudan Christianised states existing prior to the Mohammedan invasion of Northern Africa, is again a matter on which we require more information. But just as I believe some of the metal articles found in Benin to be things made in Birmingham, some to be old Portuguese, some to be native castings, copies of things imported from that unknown inland state, and some to be the original inland state articles themselves, so do I believe the relics of Christianity in the Fetish to be varied in origin, all alike suffering absorption by the native Fetish.
There is no doubt that up to the last twenty years the three great Fetish kings in Western Africa were those of Ashantee, Dahomey, and Benin. Each of these kings was alike believed by the whole of the people to have great Fetish power in his own locality. In the time of which we have no historical record—prior to the visits of the first white voyagers in the fifteenth century—there is traditional record of the King of Benin fighting with his cousin of Dahomey. Possibly Dahomey beat him badly; anyhow something went seriously wrong with Benin as a territorial kingdom, before its discovery by modern Europe.
I now turn to the Fetish of the Oil Rivers which I have called the Calabar school. The predominance of the belief there in reincarnation seems to me sufficient to separate it from the Gold Coast and Dahomey Fetish. Funeral customs, important in all Negro Fetish, become in the Calabar school exceedingly so. A certain amount of care anywhere is necessary to successfully establish the human soul after death, for the human soul strongly objects to leaving material pleasures and associations and going to, at best, an uninteresting under-world; but when you have not only got to send the soul down, but to bring it back into the human form again, and not any human form at that, but one of its own social status and family, the thing becomes more complicated still; and to do it so engrosses human attention, and so absorbs human wealth, that you do not find under the Calabar school a multitude of priest-served gods as you do in Dahomey and on the Gold Coast. Mind you, so far as I could make out while in the Calabar districts myself, the equivalents of those same gods, were quite believed in; but they were neglected in a way that would have caused them in Dahomey, where they have been taught to fancy themselves to wreck the place. Not only is care taken to send a soul down, but means are taken to see whether or no it has duly returned; for keeping a valuable soul, like that of a great Fetish proficient who could manage outside spirits, or that of a good trader, is a matter of vital importance to the prosperity of the Houses, so when such a soul has left the House in consequence of some sad accident or another, or some vile witchcraft, the babies that arrive to the House are closely watched. Assortments of articles belonging to deceased members of the house are presented to it, and then, according to the one it picks out, it is decided who that baby really is—See, Uncle so-and-so knows his own pipe, &c.—and I have often heard a mother reproaching a child for some fault say, “Oh, we made a big mistake when we thought you were so-and-so.” I must say I think the absence of the idea of the deification of ancestors in West Africa shows up particularly strongly in the Calabar school, for herein you see so clearly that the dead do not pass into a higher, happier state—that the soul separate from the body is only a part of that thing we call a human being, and in West Africa the whole is greater than a part, even in this matter.
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The pathos of the thing, when you have grasped the underlying idea, is so deep that the strangeness of it passes away, and you almost forget to hate the horrors of the slaughter that hang round Oil River funeral customs, or, at any rate, you understand the tenacity you meet with here of the right to carry out killing at funerals, a greater tenacity than confronted us in Gold Coast or Dahomey regions, because a different idea is involved in the affair. On the Gold Coast, for example, you can substitute wealth for the actual human victim, because with wealth the dead soul could, after all, make itself comfortable in Srahmandazi, but not so in the Rivers. Without slaves, wives, and funds, how can the dead soul you care for speak with the weight of testimony of men as to its resting place or position? Rolls of velvet or satin, and piles of manillas or doubloons alone cannot speak; besides, they may have been stolen stuff, and the soul you care for may be put down by the authorities as a mere thieving slave, a sort of mere American gold bug trying to pass himself off as a duke—or a descendant of General Washington—which would lead to that soul being disgraced and sent back in a vile form. Think how you yourself, if in comfortable circumstances, belonging to a family possessing wealth and power, would like father, mother, sister, or brother of yours who by this change of death had just left these things, to go down through death, and come back into life in a squalid slum!
We meet in this school, however, with a serious problem—namely, what does become of dead chiefs? It is a point I will not dogmatise on, but it certainly looks as if the Calabar under-world was a most aristocratic spot, peopled entirely by important chiefs and the retinues sent down with them—by no means having the fine mixed society of Srahmandazi.
The Oil River deceased chief is clearly kept as a sort of pensioner. The chief who succeeds him in his headship of the House is given to “making his father” annually. It is not necessarily his real father that he makes, but his predecessor in the headmanship—a slave succeeding to a free man would “make his father” to the dead free man, and so on. This function undoubtedly consists in sending his predecessor a big subsidy for his support, and consolation in the shape of slaves and goods. I may as well own I have long had a dark suspicion regarding this matter—a suspicion as to where those goods went. Their proper destination, of course, should be the under-world. Thither undoubtedly on the Gold Coast they would go; but when sent in the Rivers I do not think they go so far. In fact, to make a clean breast of it, I do not believe big chiefs are properly buried in the Oil Rivers at all. I think they are, for political purposes, kept hanging about outside life, but not inside death, by their diplomatic successors. I feel emboldened to say this by what my friend, Major Leonard, Vice-Consul of the Niger Coast Protectorate, recently told me. When he was appointed Vice-Consul, and was introducing himself to his chiefs in this capacity, one chief he visited went aside to a deserted house, opened the door, and talked to somebody inside; there was not any one in material form inside, only the spirit of his deceased predecessor, and all the things left just as they were when he died; the live chief was telling the dead chief that the new Consul was come, &c.
The reason, that is the excuse, for this seemingly unprincipled conduct in not properly burying the chief, so that he may be reincarnated to a complete human form, lies in the fact that he would be a political nuisance to his successor if he came back promptly; therefore he is kept waiting.